While God is always a more or less hidden presence in monotheistic traditions, nevertheless in a Christian context it is fundamental that the incarnation of Christ mediates this hiddenness. Both figuring and operating God's intent for humanity, Christ is God made visible. The body of Christ is memorialized in the Eucharist and the events of his human life structure the main feast days of the Church – events that help to keep God present in the lives of practicing Christians, despite the ongoing hiddenness of God's true nature (understood as a product of the embodied human separation from the divine).

It thus creates a particularly interesting enigma when, in a work designed to shadow the Christian dispensation, it is Christ himself that goes missing. My analysis here will concern the manner in which God's body is hidden in just such a work: a twelfth-century Latin cosmological fable, the Anticlaudianus of Alan of Lille, alternately titled The Good and Perfect Man. Written in the 1180s, the Anticlaudianus in some respects seems to be a repositioning of an ethical system, suitable for the fallen world, on top of the Neoplatonic cosmology which everywhere imbues Alan's writing. The story of the Anticlaudianus is clearly redemptive. Yet the idea of redemption is complicated by the fact that, although the action clearly takes place after Christ's incarnation, the agent of redemption does not appear to be Christ himself (who is mentioned only in passing), but instead another man, a New Man, whose creation is a project instigated by Nature.