Alain of Lille

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Alain of Lille — in Latin Alanus ab Insulis, c. 1128–1202 — 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. He taught in the schools of northern France in the high noon of twelfth-century learning, was remembered with the honorific Doctor Universalis for the breadth of his reading, and ended his life among the Cistercians, dying at the abbey of Cîteaux.

His reputation rests above all on two long Latin poems. In De planctu Naturae — the Plaint of Nature — the goddess Nature appears as God’s deputy and vicar, weeping that humankind alone has broken the order she maintains everywhere else in the cosmos; the poem is at once a cosmological allegory and a moral complaint, and its personified Natura would echo through later medieval poetry, not least in the Roman de la Rose and in Chaucer. The Anticlaudianus is grander still: an epic-scale allegory in which Nature, finding her own powers insufficient, resolves to fashion a perfect man, and the virtues mount a chariot through the heavens to petition God for a soul to complete him. Both poems set a Christian frame over a cosmos described in the vocabulary of the Platonic schools.

That vocabulary was not incidental. Alain worked in the orbit of the so-called School of Chartres, where Plato’s Timaeus — the one Platonic dialogue the Latin West then possessed — was read as a guide to how God had ordered the world, and where Nature was treated as a real intermediary, the executor of the divine plan in the realm of bodies and generation. Scholarship has long debated how far this amounts to a genuine philosophical naturalism and how far it remains a literary device; the figure of Natura sits exactly on that line, and Alain seems to have wanted her to.

He was also a working theologian and controversialist. His Regulae theologicae attempted to set out theology as a sequence of axioms, after the manner of geometry, opening with the much-quoted maxim that God is an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere — a formula he transmitted rather than coined, and which later writers from the Hermetic tradition to Pascal would repeat. Against the Cathars, Waldensians, Jews, and Muslims of his day he composed a treatise on the catholic faith, arguing point by point. The encyclopedic ambition is consistent across the poetry and the prose: a wish to hold the whole of knowledge, sacred and secular, within a single ordered scheme.

Later readers drew on Alain selectively. The medieval poets took his Nature; the schoolmen took his attempt at axiomatic theology; the antiheretical work fed the machinery of inquisition. What unites the body of writing is the conviction that the created world is legible — that nature is a book, and that its grammar can be read.

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