Pranger, M.Burcht. Bernard of Clairvaux and the Shape of Monastic Thought: Broken Dreams.
Leiden: Brill, 1994.
BERNARD SILVESTRIS
(d. ca. 1159). Bernard probably taught in the cathedral school at Tours in the second third
of the 12th century, where one of his students was Matthieu de Vendôme. The dedication
of his longest and most important work, the Cosmographia, to Thierry of Chartres, has
led some scholars to confuse him with John of Salisbury’s beloved teacher Bernard of
Chartres, who would have been a generation older than Silvestris. If, as seems likely,
Bernard was also trained at Tours, he would have studied under Hildebert of Lavardin.
Bernard’s earliest works are a commentary on the first six books of Virgil’s Aeneid
and another, incomplete, on Martianus Capella. The commentary on Plato’s Timaeus
mentioned in the Martianus commentary has not been identified. In his elegiac poem
Mathematicus, Bernard discusses destiny and necessity in mathematical terms. Also at
least partly his is the Experimentarius, a work taken from Arabic sources on
cosmography. Two short opuscules derived from problems in Quintilian and Seneca are
also usually attributed to him: respectively, De gemellis and De paupere ingrato.
The Cosmographia (ca. 1147–48) has two parts, Megacosmos and Microcosmos. In
the first part, Nature approaches Nous, the personification of the divine eternal mind of
God, whom she begs to improve the physical universe. Nous separates the four elements,
gives matter form from divine ideas, and shapes the world soul. The new universe is
described in detail. Microcosmos depicts the formation of humankind. Nature encounters
Genius, and they set out to seek Urania and Physis, who will guide them through the
heavens to find man’s soul and bring it back to earth. The title is explained: man is the
world in little.
Though the work has multiple sources, including Boethius, Martianus Capella, and
ancient and Arabic scientific sources, the basic concept is apparently original with
Bernard. His poem circulated widely—over fifty copies survive in European libraries—
and influenced the two most widely read 12th-century allegorical visions of nature, the
world, and humanity: Alain de Lille’s De planctu Naturae and Anticlaudianus. In the
rhetorical work of Matthieu de Vendôme, he is frequently cited for his excellence of
style.
Jeanne E.Krochalis
[See also: ALAIN DE LILLE; HILDEBERT OF LAVARDIN; THIERRY OF
CHARTRES]
Bernard Silvestris. Cosmographia, ed. Peter Dronke. Leiden: Brill, 1978.
——. The Commentary on the First Six Books of the Aeneid of Vergil Commonly Attributed to
Bernardus Silvestris, ed. Julian Ward Jones and Elizabeth Francis Jones. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1977.
——. “Il ‘Dictamen’ di Bernardo Silvestre,” ed. M.Brini Savorelli. Rivista critica di storia della
filosofia 20(1965): 182–230.
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