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The Information of Alan of Lille's ‘Anticlaudianus’: A Preposterous Interpretation
Abstract
For the Methode of a Poet historical is not such, as of an Historiographer. For an Historiographer discourseth of affayres orderly as they were donne … but a Poet thrusteth into the middest, euen where it most concerneth him, and there recoursing to the thinges forepaste, and diuining of thinges to come, maketh a pleasing Analysis of all.
Spenser, The Faerie Queene
Letter of the Authors.
In his account of twelfth-century ‘cosmologists,’ Winthrop Wetherbee has pointed to an essential problem in the interpretation of Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus (1182–1183). He argues that the major theme of the poem is ‘the working out of the relation of the Arts to Theology that culminates in Prudentia's vision of God’; given this, Wetherbee argues that there is ‘something gratuitous and anticlimactic about the ensuing psychomachia and the new earthly order to which it leads,’ especially when the ‘virtues associated with the New Man are largely secular.’ The conclusion to which these observations lead is ineluctable: ‘Whatever its significance, the idealism of the “triumph of Nature,” as Alan calls it, is difficult to reconcile with the radical subordination of earthly knowledge in the central books of the poem.’
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This is the first comprehensive study of the philosophical achievements of twelfth-century Western Europe. It is the collaboration of fifteen scholars whose detailed survey makes accessible the intellectual preoccupations of the period, with all texts cited in English translation throughout. After a discussion of the cultural context of twelfth-century speculation, and some of the main streams of thought - Platonic, Stoic, and Arabic - that quickened it, comes a characterisation of the new problems and perspectives of the period, in scientific inquiry, speculative grammar, and logic. This is followed by a closer examination of the distinctive features of some of the most innovative thinkers of the time, from Anselm and Abelard to the School of Chartres. A final section shows the impact of newly recovered works of Aristotle in the twelfth-century West.
Let them be forbidden access to this work, wrote Alan of Lille in his
Anticlaudianus
, who would only look for the image of sensuality and not the truth of reason . . . Do not allow those tasteless men, who cannot take their studies beyond the bounds of the senses, to impose their own interpretations on this book . . . lest the majesty of its secret meanings be profaned, like pearls cast before swine, when divulged to the unworthy. But what is this majestic secret significance which Alan wished to keep hidden from people so lacking in good taste as to want to probe it and misunderstand it? On the surface the
Anticlaudianus
, Alan’s most famous work, is an epic romance about a celestial journey and a great battle which is clearly being used as a moral treatise, a
summa de virtutibus et vitiis
. His long poem tells the story of how the goddess Nature, in council with the Virtues, seeks to make a new type of person, the
homo perfectus.
They realise that such a divine being cannot be created unless a soul is brought from God, whereupon Phronesis, the searcher after truth to whom the secrets of God are revealed, undertakes a journey to heaven in a chariot constructed by the seven liberal arts and drawn by the five senses. With the aid of Theology and Faith, Phronesis meets the heavenly host, the Virgin Mary, and eventually God himself, who has a soul made for her. She brings this soul, carefully sealed to keep it fresh, back to the waiting body, and the novus homo is complete. He then has to prove himself in a great pitched battle between the virtues and the vices.
4 above) is in fact more categorical in his negation: ‘Or, pour nôtre propos, il importe seulement de retenir que le char allégorique d'Alain de Lille n'est pas un char de l’âme. Comment pourrait-il l’être, s'il doit précisément faire l'ascension du ciel pour y aller querir une âme?
- Études Jung
1 above) 170 seems to suggest that Prudentia/Fronesis represents a Cardinal Virtue in the endowment of Book VII; surely Ratio better fits the definitions of Prudentia as a Cardinal Virtue
- Studien Ochsenbein
Louvain-Gembloux 1960) VI. 45-92, caput I, art. 1, p. 47. My whole account of Alan's concept of virtue is indebted to Delhaye P
- O Lottin
For the Aristotelian division of the sciences, see Mari J. étan, Le Problème de la classification des sciences d'Aristote à saint Thomas
- L Baur
De virtutibus (n. 29 above) caput I, art
- Lottin
Les Arts poétiques lines 87-100
- Faral
Commentary on Martianus Capella's “De Nuptiis”
- Westra
De virtutibus caput I, art. 1
- Lottin
Die Rezeption des Anticlaudianus Alans von Lille in Textkommentierung und Illustration
- Longo Radulphus De
- Campo
La Somme “Quoniam homines” d'Alain de Lille
- Ed Glorieux
Regulae caelestis iuris
- N M Häring
Alan's use of the concept ‘political’ virtue may have its origin in Macrobius
- De Lottin
- I Virtutibus Caput
29 above) caput I, art. 3, p. 59. For Alan's understanding of the difference between natural and informed virtues, see Delhaye, ‘La virtue et les vices
- De Lottin
- Virtutibus
Philosophy, Cosmology, and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance' (n. 1 above) 52-53, it would seem implicit that for him Fronesis is the heroine of the poem, as it would seem implicit in the argument of Green
- Études Jung
- J J Sheridan
See also Rule 36, p. 149, and the references in nn
- Ibid
La classification des puissances de l’âme au xiie siècle,
- Michaud-Quantin
La “Theologia apothetica” di Alano di Lilla,
- Vasoli
1 above) 173-74 and Georgi A. , Das lateinische und deutsche Preisgedicht des Mittelalters
- Studien Ochsenbein
Poetria nova is often found in manuscripts where we also find the Anticlaudianus; there are, for example, 29 MSS containing the Anticlaudianus in British libraries. Of these, no fewer than 6 also contain the Poetria nova
- N F Palmer
La Somme “Quoniam hominess” ’ (n. 21 above) Liber I.2
- Glorieux
where Genius's right hand paints human ideals, while his left is responsible for figures of vice (Häring, De planctu naturae XVIII, lines 64-91
- See
- De Planctu Naturae
Wege der epischen Dichtung im Mittelalter,
- Brinkmann