BERNARDO of CHARTRES. — Philosopher, who lived between the end of the 11th century and the beginning of the 12th, for some time erroneously identified, because of the similarity of philosophical ideas and style, with Bernardo di Moëlan and Bernardo Silvestris, his contemporaries. The best and most reliable information about B., Magister Scholae first at Chartres and then at Paris, comes from Giovanni di Salisbury, who studied theology at Paris and Chartres and preserved for us fragments of B.’s lost works. B.’s works are three: a prose treatise, De expositione Porphyrii, in which he set forth his view of matter and the idea; another treatise in verse on the same subject, of which only a few fragments remain; and a lost work in which he attempted to reconcile Aristotle and Plato.
The inspiration of his thought is decidedly Platonic. He distinguishes realities, immobile and invisible, from appearances, temporal, sensible, and mutable. The former include the three principles of things: God, idea, and matter. God, creator of matter, distinguished in three equal and coeternal persons, is the “author” of the idea, which is therefore not coeternal with God, but eternal only. Continuing on this theme, B. shows himself closer to Plato in the question of the relationship between the eternal and immobile idea and the appearances of reality, which are temporal and mobile. B. resolves the problem by admitting a “native form,” a second species of idea which, unlike the first—which God drew directly from himself and keeps within himself as the immobile exemplar of things—is extracted from matter and is a copy of that exemplar; mingled as it is with matter, it constitutes bodies. According to other passages reported by his disciples, it would seem that this Platonism degenerates into pantheism, but in that case the accusation concerns the disciples more than B. himself.