LAMBERT OF SAINT-BERTIN. - Benedictine, b. around 1061, d. June 22, 1125 at St-Bertin.
He entered (1070-72) the monastery of St-Bertin, where he later taught grammar, music, philosophy, and theology. First prior, then (1095) abbot, he worked for the financial and disciplinary reform of the monastery, later extended amid manifold difficulties to other convents (MGH, Script., XIII, p. 648 ff.).
Some letters of L. survive; those to St. Anselm, his friend, are notable (PL 158, 1083). Of his works only fragments remain. The Tractatus de moribus Lamberti abbatis (MGH, Script., XV, pp. 946-53), written by a pupil, recalls: Sermones de Vet. Testamento; Disputationes on free will, on foreknowledge and predestination, on Grace, on original sin; Quaestiones on natural sciences ("proponebat quaestiones de natura et de qualitatibus naturae"). If the naturalistic questions reflect the knowledge and errors of the time ("... intellectus in fronte, memoria in cerebro, ira in felle, avaritia in iecore, timor in corde, anhela in pulmone, laeticia in splene, cogitatio in renibus, sanguia in corpore, anima in sanguine..." (MGH, Script., XV, p. 948), the treatment of philosophical and theological principles is, by contrast, perspicacious.
Although Duchesne, Delisle, and Manitius deny it, many, among them Taillar (PL 163, 1005, note 7), Tessier, and Celler, hold that L. of St-Bertin and Lambert of St-Omer are the same person, and that therefore the Liber Floridus, written between 1090 and 1120 (Ghent Univ. Libr., ms. 92), a sort of encyclopedia comprising theological and philosophical questions, biblical chronography, natural sciences, astronomy, and geography, should be attributed to L.
Bibliography4 works
Michelangelo Alessandri