PATRONES EDUCACIONALES EN LA FAMILIA

Alain de Lille ( 1128?-1203) was very close in his ideas to the school of Chartres, even though he did not belong to it. Nevertheless, his esoterically colored naturalism remains on the fringe of official teaching. Besides, it is less in the Chartrains themselves than in the popular magical tradition that one sees it integrated, in, for example, the Roman de la Rose. Generally, it is physicians who read the signatures; only secondarily is it scholastics. In his masterpiece, De planctu naturae, the "universal doctor" represents Nature as a young virgin bearing a diadem decorated with twelve precious gems representing the twelve signs of the zodiac, and seven stones symbolizing the sun and planets. She wears a coat embroidered with every kind of being, the animals being divided into three groups. It is a representation connected to the human being as microcosm, formed from the same parts of nature. Reason is within us like the movement of the sphere of fixed stars, and our emotions, so subject to change, are like the complex

movements of the planets. Reason in the head is analogous to God and to heaven; emotion and feelings in the heart to the angels; and the lower part situated in the loins, home of the instincts, is analogous to humanity and the earth as well as to different minerals. The relationship between

God and nature is more or less borrowed from Proclus, and he draws from the Monologium of Anselm the method of returning to the nature of God using his different attributes as stages, that is, his "Names" as Pseudo-Dionysius understood it. Alain de Lille mentions several times, with commentaries, the image of the sphere of the "Intellect," whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere, and he becomes the exegete of the iconographic symbolism of the period, especially when he describes the unicorn (calidissima natura) calmed by the maiden (frigida et humida). With Alain de

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Lille we can truly speak of esotericism, but it is perhaps even more true for Hildegard and Honorius.

Saint Hildegard of Bingen ( 1099-1180), author of Scivias and of Liber divinorum operum simplicis hominis, developed ideas in many ways similar to the above. She insisted, for example, on the analogy existing between the roundness of the head and the firmament. She was certainly not the only one to do so, but her originality was in presenting a vast and coherent work in which inner and mainly cosmic visions played a large part. This visionary integrated revelations she had into an inspired whole, even to the point where it could be called theosophy, or, more precisely, cosmosophy. Thus the second vision of Scivias recounts the harmony of the four elements before the fall of Lucifer. Elsewhere she speaks of the disturbing effect on nature of Adam's sin (elementa humanis iniquitatibus subvertuntur), a theme that would be one of the leitmotifs of Western theosophy. Hildegard even goes to the point of saying that the blood of Abel blemished the sun, thus causing pernicious humors to flow out from which venomous snakes were born.

The symbolic cosmos of the twelfth century, the direct ancestor of the many esoteric

cosmological representations of the Renaissance, is remarkably illustrated, both philosophically and iconographically, in the Clavis physicae of Honorius Augustodunensis. Honorius probably studied in Canterbury under Anselm before retiring to the Irish Benedictine community of Saint James at Regensburg. He left a great number of works. The Clavis physicae is "probably one of the most perfect expressions of imaginative activity of 12th-century man, while at the same time being a faithful translation of a representation of the world linked to the system of Plato as interpreted by the Greek fathers and their disciple of the 12th century, Johannes Scotus" ( M. T. d'Alverny). This little work is called Key to Nature because it claims to reveal nature's secrets. It takes up the idea of Maximus and Johannes Scotus of the human being conceived as

creaturarum omnium officina, or the organ of all created beings who gathered in himself all creation. Several drawings, and especially a beautiful painting, illustrate the text. In it one sees God descending into the primordial Causes (the intermediaries between God and created being), then into their effects, and manifesting himself in his theophanies, even including inert bodies. A magnificent drawing, rich in symbolic connotations, represents the World Soul seen in light of the cosmobiological tradition of the Stoics as interpreted by Johannes Scotus. Another writing of Honorius, the Elucidarium, a kind of catechistic, pedagogic summary, emphasizes a number of symbolic correspondences. This treatise was used for three centuries as a foundation for the education of the clergy and the faithful. In it the author

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develops, in particular, a definition of the human as microcosm, an idea that had been commonplace for a long time; and his long and detailed list of correspondences between the

parts of the human body and the constituent elements of the world has perhaps no antecedent in Western literature (for example, the bones, nails, hair, and senses are related to stones, trees, plants, and animals, which seems to echo Judeo-Hellenistic and Alexandrian thinking). These conceptions are found again in other texts of Honorius such as Sacramentarium and De imagine mundi. Clavis physicae was the subject of a remarkable study in French by M. T. d'Alverny, who equally studied a curious little anonymous treatise in the form of a sermon, the Peregrinations of the Soul in the Other World, a bearer of Avicennian and gnostic influences.