Medieval Nature Class 3: Alain of Lille’s Complaint of Nature

“I am afraid that we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.”
– Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols^[1]

What is the relationship of the human to nature? What should our relationship to nature be? A simple ecological response would insist that we should be connected to nature or that we should at least recognize ourselves as connected. Disentanglement – as the common metaphor goes – is the sin that’s killing the world.^[2]

If we want an apparently straightforward example of this lament for separation, we can revisit last week’s readings. Alexander the Great obviously represents the conqueror at odds with nature, the one who believes himself to be a subject among a world of mere objects, while Dindimus and his people, living naked in caves, without ornament or cosmetics, live the life connected.

But you’ll remember, too, how each side accuses the other of not living up to their species-specific existence: Alexander, Dindimus says, is a polytheist incapable of experiencing his body as an organic unity; Dindimus, per Alexander, arrogantly refuses the gifts of nature, living not like a human but like a wolf (97). We’ll note how Alexander is driven ceaselessly over the surface of the earth by his desire, but we’ll also note how Dindimus has no desire except to leave this world, untouched – that is, having neither touched or having been touched by it.^[3] Which of these men is most natural? Which most human? Negative dialetics always find them out. None of the divisions work as they want to, and no wonder, as this is not, finally, a treatise, but a rhetorical contest.

We can go at some of these contradictions like so. Humans are cultural animals. Culture is typically understood as a site of freedom and variation in relation to the otherwise mechanical cause and effect of natural systems. The thirteenth-century theologian and natural scientist Albert the Great echoes common wisdom when he insists that although spiders spin and swallows build nests, neither is truly a weaver or carpenter, neither an artisan, because all members of the species build in exactly the same way: lacking reason, brute animals can act only from nature. But human habitations differ, just as human cultures differ, and they differ because we are naturally unnatural. For, as Pico della Mirandola’s late fifteenth-century oration On the Dignity of Man^[4] held, “the root of man’s excellence and dignity lies in the fact that man is maker of his own nature.” We are “by nature diverse, multiform, and inconstant,” or, more tautly, a “chameleon.” We are beings just to the side of being, da-sein; we are nothing in particular. Therefore, whatever we do, especially the more outlandish it appears, is at once an expression of culture and an expression of our natural being as beings without an inherent being. In sum, to take us as naturally cultural means, in essence, to authorize anything we do as an expression of our particular nature as humans. If we were all the same, that would be unnatural. Some perversion required.

The Complaint of Nature of Alain of Lille (d. 1202, Citeaux) gets into similar difficulties. From my limited foray into the criticism, my sense is that it is almost expected now to say that Alan trips over his shoelaces in trying to have Nature set down a normative model for human behavior. I don’t disagree.^[5] Humans, Alan tells us often, have done violence to nature. His material on human vice is, for the most part, standard: gluttony leads to sexual excess, greed makes us miserable, and so forth. His treatment of same-sex sexual acts between men is among the places where he innovates, and where he cannot help but go wrong.

The problem here is that Latin doesn’t work as he needs it to work. Nature wants to reproduce, and has delegated Venus to help her do this. Reproduction happens only by yoking difference. Active has to be joined to passive. Men are active; women are passive. Men are the hammer; women are the anvil. Latin, though, just doesn’t work neatly enough for his purposes. It offers him only more opportunities to play with his metaphor than to clarify it.

We can observe, for example, how he pretends to have it out for grammatical outliers: “Certain men, as though of a heteroclite gender, are declined irregularly, in the feminine during winter and in the masculine during summer.”^[6] Rollo’s note identifies this passage as condemning “bisexuality”; François*e Charmaille roots the passage instead in “trans climatology,” not a fixed sexuality, but a mobile gender.^[7] Regardless of who or what is being accused, we observe, first, that Alain’s intention is to condemn irregularity, especially irregularity across gender expression, and second, that the example hardly works once we push the metaphor away from its tenor and back towards its vehicle. For a heteroclite word of exactly the sort that Alain uses to concretize his beef is the noun domus, home, whose conjugation combines features of both second and fourth declensions. What could be more intimately ours than home itself? If home in itself is irregular, where are we supposed to be? Likewise, his beef with deponent verbs – active in meaning, but passive in conjugation (144, 10.6) – catches up in his dragnet words like patior, to suffer, from which we get the word passion, not insignificant for the Christian story, or loquor, speech itself. Alain’s scheme turns against itself more and more furiously the more we try to fill out its analogies with examples from grammar itself.

And what might Alain have said had he been pressured to fit predicate nominatives into his scheme? A sentence like “Socrates est mortalis” or “Homo est mortalis” have both subject and adjective in the same case, because they are joined with the copulative is. The same holds for a sentence like “Socrates est homo,” Socrates is a man. No further conjugation required. All these are foundational sentences for training in elementary logic. Would Alain say that logic itself suffers from elementary narcissism?

And what can Alain do with the very arbitrariness of grammatical gender? As I often observe to my undergraduates, why is a table a girl in Spanish and French – la mesa or la table — and a man – der Tisch — in German? It’s a nonsensical question, surely, and one to which we might add a Latin word like “nauta,” sailor, grammatically masculine, but with what looks like a feminine ending. Nonsense, surely, but a crucial matter to Alain’s Nature.

It is too easy, of course, to accuse Alain of not getting things right, and somehow too easy too to praise Alain for deliberately concocting, as a kind of samizdat, a faulty metaphor to somehow champion male homosexuality. We can observe that he’s playful, that he’s committed to a bit, and that language, as it always does all of us, escapes him. We can observe too that Alain, and that the Complaint of Nature, written at the latest in the 1160s, just predates the likely dates of the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, and likely postdates Béroul’s Tristan. Western Romantic love, as has been said, was being invented. Love and desire were anything but regulatory principles here, anything but reproductive. Socially disruptive and therefore engines of narrative, love and the works of Venus were too shifty, too dedicated to the delight of social drama, to found a regularity principle for language, gender, and the universe as a whole.

With all that in mind, I’m hoping we can spend some particular time on:

And, just as the army of the planets militates against the established revolution of the heavens by moving in the opposite direction, so too in man is ceaseless hostility found between sensuality and reason. The movement of reason, arising from a celestial origin and passing through the fallen condition of earthly things, turns back to heaven in its meditations.^[8] (123, 6.7)

From my How Not to Make a Human (105): “The border between immanence and transcendence must be understood as grammatical, per Nietzsche’s famous critique in Twilight of the Idols of “the metaphysics of language,” which, he argues, persists in differentiating between a “doer and doing” and asserting some “will as the cause” or, more simply, classifying things into clear subjects and predicates, between a matter that needs something or someone to make it happen and matter whose operations cannot be neatly sorted into effect and external cause, object and external subject. The end of Nietzsche’s critique is well known: “I am afraid that we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” ↑
See my near co-eval and fellow intellectual from the working classes, Paul Kingsnorth, apparently. Alexander Nazaryan, “Paul Kingsnorth Wants Us to Worship Nature, Culture and God, Not Technology” New York Times Sept 27 2025 (here). Kingsnorth has a special fascination for the Middle Ages, going so far to write his novel The Wake, set in the eleventh century, in a quasi-Middle English. He’s since become opposed to Covid 19 vaccines, gender transition (because of his opposition to “technology”), and rootlessness: from the Nazaryan article, “If we don’t have a connection to nature, we don’t have some kind of connection to culture — and it might not be the culture we’re from — then we’re just rootless people. We’re just consumers.” He dates this state of rootless cosmopolitanism – a phrase I use deliberately, and here I would direct you to Peter Trawney’s Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy – to about 200 years ago, I suppose, to what he supposes is the real explosion of industrialism lamented inter alia in Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much With Us.” ↑
“We do not live in this world as though we are to be here for ever. Rather we are pilgrims in this world since we die and make our way to our fathers’ dwelling-places.” (99). ↑
Pico never gave the work a title. It could just as well be called his Oration in Praise of Philosophy or An Oration in the Roman Assembly. ↑
Jan Ziolkowski, Alan of Lille’s Grammar of Sex: The Meaning of Grammar to a Twelfth-Century Intellectual (The Medieval Academy of America, 1985); Larry Scanlon, “Unspeakable Pleasures: Alain de Lille, Sexual Regulation and the Priesthood of Genius,” Romanic Review 86 (1995): 213–42; Noah Guynn, Allegory and Sexual Ethics in the High Middle Ages (Springer, 2007); Winthrop. Wetherbee, “Alan of Lille, De planctu Naturae: The Fall of Nature and the Survival of Poetry,” The Journal of Medieval Latin 21 (2011): 223-252; David Rollo, Kiss my Relics: Hermaphroditic Fictions of the Middle Ages (University of Chicago Press, 2011), and long before that, the deconstructive Alexandre Leupin, “Écriture naturelle et écriture hermaphrodite: Le De planctu naturae d’Alain de Lille, un art poétique du XII^e siècle,” Diagraphe 9 (1976): 119–30. There’s more out there than just these. The habit of literary critics is often to trouble the smooth, but Alain’s metaphor really is a tangle. ↑
“Quidam vero, quasi etehrocliti genere, per hyemem in feminino, per aestatem in masculine genere irregulariter declinantur” (8.11, 96), citations of the Latin from Wetherbee edition and translation for Dumberton Oaks (2013). English translation from David Rollo, Medieval Writings on Sex between Men: Peter Damian’s The Book of Gomorrah and Alain de Lille’s The Plaint of Nature (Brill, 2022). ↑
“Trans Climates of the European Middle Ages, 500–1300,” Speculum 98.3 (2023): 695-726. ↑
Wetherbee, “But in a contrary manner the planetlike movements of sensuality, opposing the firmament of reason, sink downward to the dark end of earthly things. These draw the human mind into the sunset of vice that it may die. The other summons it into the sunrise of virtue that it may be renewed.” ↑