The Natural World as Book (Mis)Read by Paris Theologians and Competing Faiths

Despite reservations about the usages of the newly translated Aristotelian Libri naturales, Paris masters nonetheless viewed them as a potentially useful weapon in debates with heretics and Muslims. If violence against heretics and Saracens were to be justified and crusaders to be persuaded to take the cross, preachers had to walk a fine line. While lamenting the word as a sea of sin, they also pointed, in a very Augustinian fashion, to nature as a book which illustrated that God was a benign creator of and regular intervener in the material world (in contravention to perceived heretical dualism). This meant that despite the ravages of original sin, the mirror of creation (animals, the elements, landscapes, the miraculous) could, like that of the revealed word (the Bible), if properly interpreted, provide moral and spiritual lessons to Christians and fodder for persuading (or condemning) individuals of divergent faiths. The result was a boom in encyclopedias, distinctiones and exempla, debate treatises, and sermons featuring the natural and supernatural world, intended to counter the perceived attractions of heresy (and Islam) and recruit crusaders.