The Philosophical School of Chartres in the 12th Century: Bernard of Chartres (1)

A kind of philosophical theology developed, on the contrary, in the School of Chartres. Nothing is more moving than the efforts made at that time in the Chartres milieu to extend the intellectual horizon beyond Boethius, Isidore and the Fathers. Among the initiators, we must first mention Constantine Africanus and Adelard of Bath, precious witnesses of the relations that were beginning to be established between the East and the West. From the end of the 11th century, Constantine, born in Carthage, travelled throughout the East; he translated, in addition to medical books by the Arabs and Jews, the Aphorisms of Hippocrates with the Commentary of Galen, and two treatises by Galen. It is from these translations that we draw, as we will soon see, the knowledge of Democritus’ corpuscular physics.

Adelard of Bath, who, at the beginning of the 12th century, travelled in Greece and in the Arab countries, brought back mainly translations of mathematical works. He translated Euclid’s Elements from Arabic, and made known, in addition to astronomical works, the arithmetic of Alchwarismi. This significantly increased the quadrivium. At the same time as a mathematician, Adelard was a Platonist by tendency; and his Platonism comes, not from Saint Augustine, but directly from the Timaeus, Chalcidius and Macrobius. He wrote his little treatise De Eodem et Diverso to justify philosophy; we see there, according to the cliché of Boethius and Marcianus Capella, Philosophia, accompanied by the seven arts, arguing against Philocalia. Now, the theory of knowledge which is expounded there supposes the whole Platonic myth of the psyche: intelligence, in a state of purity, knows things and their causes; “in the prison of the body”, this knowledge is partly lost; “then it seeks what it has lost and, its memory failing, it resorts to opinion”; “the tumult of the senses” (cf. Timaeus, 44 a), which leaves us ignorant of “very small and very large things”, prevents rational knowledge (the minima are probably the atoms, whose existence Adelard accepted). It follows that Aristotle is right when he says that we cannot currently know without the help of imagination; but Plato is also right in affirming that perfect knowledge is the knowledge of the archetypal forms of things, such as they are in the divine understanding, before passing into bodies; there is only the reverse process: Plato starts from the principles, Aristotle from sensible and composite things.

Hence his solution of the problem of universals: the distinction between genus, species and individual, for example between animal, man and Socrates, has meaning only in sensible things; these words designate the same essence under a different relation. “In considering species, we do not suppress individual forms, but we forget them because they are not posited by the name of the species.” It is the same for genus in relation to species. But we must be careful not to confuse these universals, named by language, with the archetypal forms as they are in the divine intelligence; universals are, according to Aristotle, only sensible things themselves, although considered with more penetration; the forms are no longer either the genus or the species which can only be conceived in their relation to individuals; but “they are conceived and exist outside sensible things, in the divine mind.” And this is not a knowledge comparable to the beatific vision, but rather a human and normal knowledge, since the aim of dialectics is to contemplate ideas.