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 and explain how it encroached on the holy alliance between scripture and nature to the point of...