The theme of the funeral lament has also been studied in its occurrences in narrative
verse, both epic and romance.
William D.Paden
[See also: HÉLINANT DE FROIDMONT; PRAYERS AND DEVOTIONAL
MATERIALS]
Schulze-Busacker, Elisabeth. “Étude typologique de la complainte des morts dans le roman
arthurien en vers du 12e au 14e siècle.” In An Arthurian Tapestry: Essays in Memory of Lewis
Thorpe, ed. Kenneth Varty. Glasgow: French Department of the University of Glasgow, 1981,
pp. 54–68.
Stäblein, Patricia H. “New Views on an Old Problem: The Dynamics of Death in the Planh.”
Romance Philology 35 (1981):223–34.
Thiry, Claude. “De la mort marâtre à la mort vaincue: attitudes devant la mort dans la déploration
funèbre française.” In Death in the Middle Ages, ed. Herman Braet and Werner Verbeke.
Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1983, pp. 239–57.
——. La plainte funèbre. Turnhout: Brepols, 1978.
PLATO, INFLUENCE OF
. The Athenian philosopher Plato (427–347 B.C.), pupil of Socrates and teacher of
Aristotle, is undoubtedly the most influential non-Christian thinker in the history of
Christian philosophy. Although Plato’s own works were not well known—by the 13th
century, only his Timaeus (translated by Calcidius) and Phaedo and Meno (both
translated by Aristippus) were available in Latin—Platonic ideas and style were endemic
in all learned minds, made known by Calcidius’s Commentary on the Timaeus,
Apuleius’s Golden Ass, Macrobius’s commentary on the Somnium Scipionis, and the
works of Boethius, especially his De consolatione Philosophiae.
Two early Christian authors in particular, Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius the
Areopagite, were highly influenced by Platonist thinkers, especially Plotinus (Enneads),
Porphyry (Isagoge), and Proclus. Plotinus (ca. A.D. 205–270) was responsible for a
development of Plato’s ideas in specifically religious, although non-Christian, terms, and
it is his system, known as Neoplatonism, that spread Platonic ideas throughout
Christianity. Neoplatonism held there to be a dualism between thought and reality, which
could only be unified in God, who is One, a being with its center everywhere and its
circumference nowhere. This being could be known by mystical experience.
Augustine’s work is suffused with Neoplatonic ideas. His early Manichaean beliefs,
with their emphasis on the division of body and spirit, light and darkness, are Platonic in
content as well as tone, as is Pseudo-Dionysius’s Celestial Hierarchy. In this Christian
Platonism, Creation is seen as patterned after the Ideas in the mind of God. Their earthly
forms are mere shadows of their real selves, existing in the divine intellect.
The largest single outcrop of Neoplatonism is usually said to have occurred in the
works of the scholars of Chartres, in the 12th century; but the ideas had been kept alive in
the Carolingian renaissance, especially by Johannes Scottus Eriugena, whose use of
Maximus the Confessor and the Celestial Hierarchy created a somewhat singular and
unorthodox Christian cosmology and anthropology. The Chartrians are usually said to
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