Alanus de Insulis was a man of renown in his life-time, and after his death won the title of Doctor Universalis. Although the fame of scholar, philosopher, theologian, poet, may have uplifted him during his years of strength, he died a monk at Citeaux, in the year 1202. Fame came justly to him, for he was learned in the antique literature, and a gifted Latin poet, while as thinker and theologian he made skilful and catholic use of his thorough knowledge of whatever the first half of the twelfth century had achieved in thought and system. Elsewhere he has been considered as a poet;[519] here we merely observe his position and accomplishment in matters of salvation and philosophy.[520]
Alanus possessed imagination, language, and a faculty of acute exposition. His sentences, especially his definitions, are pithy, suggestive, and vivid. He projected much thought as well as fantasy into his poem, Anticlaudianus, and his cantafable, De planctu naturae. He showed himself a man of might, and insight too, in his Contra haereticos. His suggestive pithiness of diction lends interest to his encyclopaedia of definitions, Distinctiones dictionum theologicalium; and his keen power of reasoning succinctly from axiomatic premises is evinced in his De arte fidei catholicae.
The intellectual activities of Alanus fell in the latter decades of the twelfth century, when mediaeval thought seemed for the moment to be mending its nets, and preparing for a further cast in the new waters of Aristotelianism. Alanus is busy with what has already been won; he is unconscious of the new greater knowledge, which was preparing its revelations. He is not even a man of the transition from the lesser to the greater intellectual estate; but is rather a final compendium of the lesser. Himself no epoch-making reasoner, he uses the achievements of Abaelard and Hugo, of Gilbert de la Porrée and William of Conches, and others. Neither do his works unify and systematize the results of his studies. He is rather a re-phraser. Yet his refashioning is not a mere thing of words; it proceeds with the vitalizing power of the man’s plastic and creative temperament. One may speak of him as keen and acquisitive intellectually, and creative through his temperament.
Alanus shows a catholic receptivity for all the mingled strains of thought, Platonic, Aristotelian, Neo-Platonic and Pythagorean, which fed the labours of his predecessors. He has studied the older sources, the Timaeus fragment, also Apuleius and Boëthius of course. His chief blunder is his misconception of Aristotle as a logician and confuser of words (verborum turbator)—a phrase, perhaps, consciously used with poetic license. For he has made use of much that came originally from the Stagirite. Within his range of opportunity, Alanus was a universal reader, and his writings discover traces of the men of importance from Pseudo-Dionysius and Eriugena down to John of Salisbury and Gundissalinus.
These remarks may take the place of any specific presentation of Alanus’s work in logic, of his view of universals, of his notions of physics, of nature, of matter and form, of man’s mind and body, and of the Triune Godhead.[521] In his cosmology, however, we may note his imaginatively original employment of the conception or personification of Nature. God is the Creator, and Nature is His creature, and His vice-regent or vicarious maker, working the generation and decay of things material and changeable.[522] This thought, imaginatively treated, makes a good part of the poetry of the De planctu and the Anticlaudianus. The conception with him is full of charming fantasy, and we look back through Bernardus Silvestris and other writers to Plato’s divine fooling in the Timaeus, not as the specific, but generic, origin of such imaginative views of the contents and generation of the world. Such imaginings were as fantasy to science, when compared with the solid and comprehensive consideration of the material world which was to come a few years after Alanus’s death through the encyclopaedic Aristotelian knowledge presented in the works of Alexander of Hales and Albertus Magnus.
CHAPTER XXXVII
THE UNIVERSITIES, ARISTOTLE, AND THE MENDICANTS
Intellectually, the thirteenth century in western Europe is marked by three closely connected phenomena: the growth of Universities, the discovery and appropriation of Aristotle, and the activities of Dominicans and Franciscans. These movements were universal, in that the range of none of them was limited by racial or provincial boundaries. Yet a line may still be drawn between Italy, where law and medicine were cultivated, and the North, where theology with logic and metaphysics were supreme. Absorption in these subjects produced a common likeness in the intellectual processes of men in France, England, and Germany, whose writings were to be no longer markedly affected by racial idiosyncrasies. This was true of the logical controversy regarding universals, so prominent in the first part of the twelfth century. It was very true of the great intellectual movement of the later twelfth and the thirteenth centuries, to wit, the coming of Aristotle to dominance, in spite of the counter-currents of Platonic Augustinianism.