Alain of Lille

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A goddess weeps. She has come down through the spheres in a robe woven with the images of every living kind — and the robe is torn, a single rent in the fabric where the picture of man should be. This is the scene with which Alain of Lille opens De planctu Naturae, and it carries the whole of his thought in one image: a cosmos that is legible, ordered, and whole everywhere except at the one creature given the freedom to read it and the freedom to refuse.

An early printed woodcut portrait of Alain of Lille (Alanus de Insulis) — Wellcome Collection, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Alain of Lille — in Latin Alanus ab Insulis, c. 1128 to 1202 (his death is placed between April 1202 and April 1203) — was a French theologian and poet whose two great allegorical poems gave the Middle Ages one of its most influential pictures of the natural order. Born at Lille, he taught in the schools of northern France and at Montpellier in the high noon of twelfth-century learning, was remembered with the honorific Doctor Universalis — a title fixed by later admirers for the sheer breadth of his reading — and ended his life among the Cistercians, dying at the abbey of Cîteaux. The life is thin in documentary record; the work is vast, and it is through the work that he is known. Modern knowledge of his biography rests largely on the patient reconstruction of Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny, who in 1965 edited many of his minor and unpublished texts and stabilized what little can be said with confidence.

The library at Cîteaux Abbey in Burgundy, mother house of the Cistercian order, where Alain of Lille ended his life — photograph by G CHP, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)

The plaint of Nature

His reputation rests above all on two long Latin poems. De planctu Naturae — the Plaint of Nature, most likely composed in the later 1160s — is a prosimetrum, a work of alternating prose and verse in the form Alain inherited from Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and from Martianus Capella. The goddess Nature appears to a dreaming narrator as God’s deputy and vicar — vicaria Dei — the appointed governor of generation and decay, and she weeps because humankind alone has broken the order she maintains everywhere else in the cosmos. The complaint turns on a remarkable conceit: the grammar of sex. Nature, who has set every kind to its proper coupling, indicts those who pervert her syntax — who, in the poem’s language, make the same term both subject and predicate, who decline the active into the passive, who write against the rule. The figure is at once a moral satire on human vice and a cosmological allegory in which the law of nature and the law of grammar are made one law, the disorder of the body legible as a disorder of speech. Its personified Natura would echo through later medieval poetry, not least in the Roman de la Rose of Jean de Meun and in Chaucer, who names Alain directly.

The Anticlaudianus, written around 1182 to 1184, is grander still: a prose prologue followed by more than four thousand lines of dactylic hexameter, its title a riposte to the late-antique poet Claudian, whose invective In Rufinum had drawn the portrait of a wholly corrupt man. Against that, Alain sets out to build the perfect one. Nature, finding her own powers insufficient to the task, resolves to fashion a flawless human being and convenes her sister-powers; but a body is not a soul, and only God can give a soul. So Prudence — Phronesis — is sent on a journey to heaven to ask for one. She rides in a chariot built by the seven liberal arts and drawn by the five senses, with Reason at the reins; when the chariot reaches the threshold of the divine and Reason can go no further, Theology and Faith take her the rest of the way. God forms a perfect soul in his own image through the divine Noys — the Nous, the Mind that is the pattern of all patterns — Nature shapes the body from the elements, and Concord, Music, and Arithmetic bind the two together. The New Man so made then turns and defeats the Vices in a war for the world. The argument is theological as much as poetic: reason guided by prudence can reach, unaided, most of the truths of the physical order, but the knowledge of God lies beyond reason’s last horizon, where it must yield to faith. Both poems set a Christian frame over a cosmos described in the vocabulary of the Platonic schools.

A page from a medieval manuscript of the Anticlaudianus, the poem in which Nature, with the liberal arts and the virtues, sets out to fashion the perfect human being — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Nature, the Timaeus, and the legible world

That vocabulary was not incidental. Alain worked in the wake of the twelfth-century Platonists associated with the cathedral school at Chartres — the milieu whose institutional ground had been laid a century earlier by Fulbert of Chartres, though the speculative cosmology Alain inherited belongs to the later masters and to the poet Bernardus Silvestris, whose Cosmographia gave him his immediate model for a personified Nature and a creating Noys. In that milieu Plato’s Timaeus — the one Platonic dialogue the Latin West then possessed, in the partial version and commentary of Calcidius — was read not as a fable but as a guide to how God had ordered the world, the nearest thing the schools had to a science of the cosmos. Nature, on this reading, is no mere personification but a real intermediary: the executor of the divine plan in the realm of bodies and generation, the deputy through whom the eternal forms descend into matter. The conception is continuous with the broader current of Neoplatonism and its doctrine of emanation, in which the One pours itself down through graded intermediaries toward the world of becoming. Scholarship has long debated how far the Chartrian Natura amounts to a genuine philosophical naturalism and how far it remains a literary device, and the question is not fully settled; the figure of Natura sits exactly on that line, and Alain seems to have wanted her to stand there, neither collapsed into allegory nor freed into autonomy.

Behind the figure lies the deeper conviction that animates everything Alain wrote: that the created world is a book. The poem long ascribed to him opens with the line that every creature of the world is for us as a book and a picture and a mirror — omnis mundi creatura quasi liber et pictura — and the metaphor is not decoration but method. If the world is a text, it has a grammar; if it has a grammar, it can be read and it can be violated, which is precisely the charge Nature brings in the Plaint. The book of the creatures runs as a continuous thread across the Middle Ages and connects Alain to the wider symbolic theology of his century, including the exegesis of nature in writers such as Hugh of Saint Victor.

Axiomatic theology and the intelligible sphere

Alain was also a working theologian, and his most original methodological move lay in trying to give theology the form of a demonstrative science. His Regulae theologicae — also transmitted as the Regulae caelestis iuris, the Rules of the heavenly law — sets out doctrine as a sequence of axioms or maxims, after the manner of geometry, treating the principles of the faith as self-evident propositions from which the rest may be drawn. It is among the earliest sustained attempts to present orthodox theology more geometrico, and it stands at the seam where the older Augustinian and Neoplatonic inheritance meets the rising rigor of the schools that would harden into scholasticism.

Its seventh rule carries the formula for which Alain is most often quoted: that God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. The phrase was not his coinage. It descends from the Liber XXIV philosophorum — the Book of the Twenty-Four Philosophers, an anonymous twelfth-century compilation of definitions of God ascribed in its own tradition to Hermes Trismegistus and woven from Neoplatonic and pseudo-Hermetic threads of the same family as the Corpus Hermeticum and the Asclepius. There the second definition reads that God is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere; Alain’s contribution was to recast the infinite sphere as an intelligible one, a sphere of mind rather than of extension, and to lodge it inside a theological system. From his hands the image traveled. It passed to Bonaventure and to Meister Eckhart; it reached its most ambitious development in Nicholas of Cusa, who in De docta ignorantia of 1440 dared to apply the figure not only to God but to the universe itself, a cosmos with no fixed center and no edge; and it surfaced again, transposed from theology into a vertigo of scale, in Pascal, for whom the whole visible world had become an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. A single sentence, carried from a Hermetic book of definitions through a twelfth-century rulebook of theology, became one of the durable instruments by which the West tried to think the infinite.

The controversialist

The same encyclopedic confidence that built the chariot of the arts and the geometry of the divine turned, in Alain’s later years, against the enemies of the Church. Against the Cathars, the Waldensians, the Jews, and the Muslims of his day he composed De fide catholica contra haereticos — On the Catholic Faith, Against the Heretics — a treatise in four books, dedicated to William VIII, Count of Montpellier, arguing point by point in the dialectical manner of the schools. The first book answers the Cathar dualists of southern France, who held two eternal principles and read matter itself as the work of an evil power; against them Alain defends the unity of God and the goodness of creation, the same legible and good cosmos his poems had sung. The remaining books take up the Waldensian demands for apostolic poverty and lay preaching, then the Jews, then the Muslims, each met on the ground of reasoned argument rather than force. The book belongs, in its historical setting, to the hardening campaign against the southern heresies that would issue in the inquisitorial machinery of the following century, and Alain’s arguments would be drawn on by those who built it.

What unites the whole body of writing — the weeping goddess, the journey of the virtues, the axioms of theology, the polemic against the dualists — is a single ambition: to hold the whole of knowledge, sacred and secular, cosmological and moral, within one ordered scheme, and to insist that the scheme is no fiction. The heresy Alain fought hardest was the one that broke the world in two; the cosmos he defended was one in which a single order ran from God through Nature down to the least created thing, and could be followed in either direction.

Texts, editions, and scholarship

The modern recovery of Alain rests on a small body of critical work. The Anticlaudianus was edited by R. Bossuat (Anticlaudianus, Paris: Vrin, Textes philosophiques du Moyen Âge 1, 1955) and rendered into English by James J. Sheridan as Anticlaudianus, or The Good and Perfect Man (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1973); Sheridan also translated De planctu Naturae as The Plaint of Nature (1980). The older English version of the Plaint by Douglas M. Moffat, The Complaint of Nature (Yale Studies in English, 1908), is in the public domain and remains the most widely circulated free text. The Regulae caelestis iuris was given its critical edition by Nikolaus M. Häring in the Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 48 (1981), and Häring also edited the De fide catholica. Many of the minor works — sermons, the Distinctiones dictionum theologicalium, the preaching manual Summa de arte praedicatoria, and the poems — were edited or re-established by Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny in Alain de Lille: Textes inédits (Paris: Vrin, 1965), the foundation of all later study.

The cloister gallery of the copyists at Cîteaux, where the cells of the scribes opened — the kind of Cistercian setting in which Alain’s works were copied and transmitted — photograph by G CHP, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)

The literary and philosophical context is set by Winthrop Wetherbee’s Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century: The Literary Influence of the School of Chartres (Princeton, 1972), which reads Alain and Bernardus Silvestris as the poetic culmination of the Chartrian engagement with the Timaeus — a dialogue available in Benjamin Jowett’s translation in the Library. On the Anticlaudianus specifically, the scholarship on Alain’s poetics of language and prophecy is surveyed in studies such as those collected and discussed at Medievalists.net, and his theological method — the axiomatic project and its Trinitarian underpinnings — is the subject of recent doctoral work, including José Osorio’s study of Alan of Lille’s concept of Trinitarian personhood. The text and translation history of the Plaint, with its inheritance from Boethius and its grammar-of-nature conceit, is gathered in the dossier of sources maintained at Dick Wursten’s De planctu page. Across this apparatus the same figure recurs: a poet who thought in cosmology and a theologian who thought in images, with no firm wall between the two.

Later readers drew on him selectively. The vernacular poets took his Nature; the schoolmen took his attempt at axiomatic theology; the line of the intelligible sphere ran on through Cusa and Pascal; the antiheretical work fed the machinery of inquisition. What holds the whole of it together is the conviction that the created world is legible — that nature is a book, and that its grammar can be read.

→ In the library: Plato — Timaeus (Jowett tr.)

→ Related: Pierre D Ailly · Neoplatonism · Middle Ages · Nous · Plato · Boethius · Nicholas Of Cusa · Blaise Pascal · Hermes Trismegistus · Corpus Hermeticum · Geoffrey Chaucer · Catharism · Fulbert Of Chartres · Scholasticism · Hugh Of Saint Victor · Asclepius