Alan of Lille | Willemien Otten (essay date 1995)
Willemien Otten (essay date 1995)
SOURCE: Otten, Willemien. “Nature and Scripture: Demise of a Medieval Analogy—Exegetical Nature-Poetry in Alan of Lille.” Harvard Theological Review 88, no. 2 (1995): 277-82.
[In the following excerpt, Otten argues that, in The Complaint of Nature, Alan endows Nature with the ability and authority to approach a knowledge of God which had hitherto only been granted to Scripture.]
Soon after Thierry [of Chartres' comparative exegeses of the accounts of the creation in Plato's Timaeus and in Genesis], comparisons between the [Platonic] World Soul and the [Christian] Holy Spirit were no longer deemed appropriate. While the World Soul controversy reflects the competitive nature of twelfth-century theology, it also indicates a growing difficulty on the part of the Chartrians to keep scripture and nature connected through a transparent use of integumentum. To illustrate this difficulty...
[The entire page is 2931 words long]
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