Bernard of Le Treille (Trilia)

(b. near what is now Nîmes, France, ca. 1240; d. Avignon, France, 4 August 1292)

astronomy, philosophy.

As a youth Bernard entered the Dominican Order in the province of Provence, possibly at Montpellier. Early catalogs of the order list him as a Spaniard; Quétif and Échard explain this by the supposition that Montpellier and Nîmes fell at the time under the king of Aragon, or had done so earlier under James I. Sometime between 1260 and 1265 Bernard was sent to Paris to study, and subsequently he taught at Montpellier (1266, 1268), Avignon (1267, 1274), Bordeaux (1271), Marseilles (1272), and Toulouse(1273, 1276). He returned to the priory of St.-Jacques in Paris to lecture on the Sentences in 1279, then continued teaching there as a bachelor (1282–1284) and as a master of theology (1284–1287). From 1288 until his death be held various administrative posts in his order in Provence.

Bernard is described by Duhem as a disciple of Albertus Magnus, and is thought by some to have attended the lectures of Thomas Aquinas. While he was undoubtedly well acquainted with the teachings of these fellow Dominicans, the chronology of his education rules out the possibility of his having studied under either. Bernard is the earliest known French Dominican to be identified as a Thomist, however, and his philosophical and theological writings—which constitute the bulk of his literary output—bear out this identification. He consistently explained and defended Aquinas’ teachings on the real distinction between essence and existence, on the pure potentiality of primary matter, and on the unicity of substantial form. The last two points are of some importance in the history of medieval science, since they committed Bernard to a rejection of the forma corporeitatis, or “form of corporeity” (a teaching of Avicenna that led some later Scholastics to a mathematicist view of nature), and to an acceptance and elucidation of Thomas’ distinctive thesis on the virtual presence of elements in compounds.

Bernard’s principal interest in the history of science, however, derives from his having composed a series of questions (Quaestiones)on the Sphere of John of Sacrobosco, of which only two fourteenth-century manuscripts are known: one is in the municipal library at Laon, the other in St. Mark’s in Venice. Early catalogs of the Dominican Order mention a treatise Super totam astrologiam (“On All of Astronomy”), which might be another variant of these same Quaestiones; more probably it is an erroneous listing of a work with the same title by the Franciscan Bernard of Verdun. Thorndike dates the work between 1263 and 1266, holding that it was composed at Nîmes for the instruction of young Dominicans there; the dating seems some what early in light of the chronology of Bernard’s studies and teaching given above. The treatise, however, does bear the mark of classroom origin, being divided into lectiones, or lectures, and providing a rather philosophical commentary on Sacrobosco’s work. Duhem furnishes some twenty pages of French translation of its text, dealing mainly with the concepts of epicycle and eccentric and with explanations of the movement of the fixed stars. They show Bernard favoring the Ptolemaic system of the universe over the stricter geocentric theories of more conservative Aristotelians, and attempting to reconcile the Hipparchian theory of continuous’ precession of the equinoxes with Thãbit’s erroneous theory of trepidation along lines suggested by Albertus Magnus, whom Bernard appears to have studied closely.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Bernard’s major work is Bernardi Triliae Quaestiones de cognitione animae separatae a corpore, Stuart Martin, ed., Vol. XI in the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies’ series Studies and Texts (Toronto, 1965), a critical edition of the Latin text” with an introduction and notes. Frederick J. Roensch, Early Thomistic School (Dubuque, Iowa, 1964), pp. 84–88, 289–296, contains a complete listing of Bernard’s other works, with a guide to sources and literature, and a summary of his philosophical teachings.

II. Secondary Literature. Works on Bernard are Pierre Duhem, Le système du monde, III (Paris, 1915; repr. 1958), 363–383, 391, 417; Jacques Quétif and Jacques Échard, Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum, I (Paris, 1719; repr. New York, 1959), 432–434; Lynn Thorndike, The Sphere of Sacrobosco and Its Commentators (Chicago, 1949), pp. 23–26, 29, 49–51, 54; and George Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, II, part 2 (Baltimore, 1931), 749, 758, 989.

William A. Wallace, O.P.