Medieval Philosophy

by Peter S. Adamson

Bernard Silvestris was not quite so shy. For him, the pagan philosophers were simply expressing the ideas of Christian theology in different terms. Where Christians speak of the divine Son, the philosophers say “intellect”; where Christians talk of a Holy Spirit, the philosophers say “World Soul.”11 Though this is often thought of as a distinctively “Chartrian” position, it was in fact never taught by the one thinker we know to have been based primarily at Chartres: the earlier Bernard. He never proposed identifying Plato’s cosmic soul with a divine Person. In general, Bernard of Chartres was careful not to let Platonic metaphysics infringe on the unchallenged transcendence of God. We can see this from his handling of the Platonic “Forms” or “Ideas.”12 Bernard was wholeheartedly committed to this theory, but stopped short of the traditional identification of the transcendent Forms with God’s Wisdom and the second Person of the Trinity. Because the Forms are created, they must be inferior or posterior to God Himself, something Bernard expressed by saying that while the Forms are eternal, they are not co-eternal with the Holy Trinity.