ALANO DI LILLA (Alanus ab Insulis, Alain de l'Isle, A. van Ryssel). — Theologian and philosopher, scholar and poet, born in Lilla between 1115 and 1128, died at the abbey of Cîteaux in 1202 or 1203 (not to be confused with A. di Fiandra or di Lilla, a Cistercian of Clairvaux, later abbot of L'Arrivour and bishop of Auxerre, who died in 1185 or 1186).
Only a few certain facts have come down to us concerning his life: he taught in Paris and Montpellier as one of the most celebrated professors of his time, and shortly before his death entered the Cistercian Order as a lay brother. Posterity honored him with the titles of Doctor universalis and A. Magnus; in the Compendium sanctorum Ord. cistercensis (Dijon 1491) he is listed among the blessed. As a philosopher, A. does not belong to any particular school, but he was undoubtedly influenced by the School of Chartres, especially by Gilberto Porretano, whom he also resembles in his doctrine of universals. In its essential features, A. is a representative of the characteristic Platonism of the twelfth century, based on the Timaeus and on the writings of pseudo-Apuleius, Macrobius, and Boethius; alongside this are found Neo-Pythagorean and Hermetic ideas and, above all, Aristotelian elements. Yet A.’s knowledge of Aristotelian philosophy, insofar as it goes beyond logic, is drawn solely from Boethius. The current of thought coming from Spain and destined to bring the new Aristotle (libri naturales, metaphysics, ethics, etc.) and Arab philosophy into the Latin world had scarcely touched him: apart from certain astronomical treatises translated from Arabic, he knew only the pseudo-Aristotelian Liber de Causis, which he cites (apparently for the first time). In general, A. was a more receptive than productive thinker. His philosophical writings present a mosaic of the various doctrines of early scholasticism, without any attempt at a systematic synthesis: A. contributed almost nothing new or original. From a methodological standpoint, his Regulae de sacra theologia exerted a certain influence; in them, following the model of Boethius, a series of theological maxims or axioms is set forth. But in this work too A. is heavily dependent on Gilberto Porretano (Chenu, V. BIBLICA.). It was certainly not A. who, as was long supposed, introduced the mathematical-deductive method into theology: the treatise Ars catholicae fidei (PL 210), in which this method is developed, is not his, but Nicola di Amiens’s. As a theologian, A. placed his extensive learning principally at the service of apologetics, especially in his work Contra haereticos, in four books directed against the Albigensians, the Waldensians, the Jews, and the Arabs. In this work A. makes extensive use of dialectical method and rational demonstration, but he always observes a fundamental distinction between faith and knowledge, and it is difficult to associate him with the rationalism of an Abelard. In certain writings on pastoral and biblical theology (Summa de arte praedicatoria, Distinctiones dictionum theologicarum) he approaches Pietro Cantore and his school.
Other theological works include Elucidatio in Cantica canticorum, in which A. upholds the thesis of Mary’s Immaculate Conception; a short mystical treatise, De sex alis Cherubim; De vitiis et virtutibus (edited by Huizinga, V. BIBLICA.); and, finally, a more extensive work, published only in part, of canonical content, the Liber poenitentialis. His poetic works exerted the greatest influence on posterity: the Doctrinale minus or Liber parabolarum was widely read in the Middle Ages and later repeatedly printed; the Anticlaudianus (an opposite counterpart to Claudius Claudianus’s In Rufinum), a kind of encyclopedia of the learning of the time composed in hexameters, was commented on several times in the thirteenth century (for example, by Rodolfo di Longo Campo and Guglielmo di Auxerre) and perhaps influenced Dante; finally, the Liber de Planctu naturae, an allegorical satire partly in prose and partly in verse, in which virtues and vices appear as personifications, inspired the poets of the Roman de la Rose, certainly in a sense entirely opposed to A.’s intentions.
Mededecliu- gen der k. akademie van wetenschappen, ser. B., vol. 74, no. 6, Amsterdam 1932, with an edition of De vitiis et virtutibus; M. De Wulf, Hist. de la phil. médiév., I, 6th ed., Louvain 1934, pp. 237–32. (New Italian version by V. Miano, Florence 1944, pp. 219–23); M. D. Chenu, Un essai de méthode théologique au XIIe siècle, in Revue des sciences phil. et théol., 24 (1935), pp. 258–67; J. M. Canivez, Alain de Lille, in DSp, I, cols. 270–72.