Cosmographia (Bernard Silvestris) - Platonic Background

Platonic Background

The ultimate source for much of Bernard's allegory is the account of creation in Plato's Timaeus, as transmitted in the incomplete Latin translation, with lengthy commentary, by Calcidius. This was the only work of Plato's that was widely known in western Europe during the Middle Ages, and it was central to the renewed interest in natural science among the philosophers associated with the school of Chartres:

Chartres … would long remain the fertile soil in which this conception would grow, and this the more as the Timaeus, itself constructed upon the parallelism between microcosm and macrocosm, became a central preoccupation of teaching at Chartres. This was the first age, the golden age, of Platonism as such in the West, an age which found in the Timaeus an entire physics, an anthropology, a metaphysics, and even a lofty spiritual teaching.

From the Timaeus Bernard and the Chartrian thinkers, such as Thierry of Chartres and William of Conches, adopted three fundamental assumptions: "that the visible universe is a unified whole, a 'cosmos'; that it is the copy of an ideal exemplar; and that its creation was the expression of the goodness of its creator". Thierry had written a Tractatus de sex dierum operibus, in which he had essayed to elucidate the biblical account of creation "iuxta physicas rationes tantum" ("purely in terms of physical causes"); and this perhaps accounts for Bernard's dedication of the Cosmographia to Thierry.

Along with the Timaeus and Calcidius's commentary, Bernard's work also draws on Platonic themes diffused throughout a variety of works of late antiquity, such as Apuleius's philosophical treatises, Macrobius's commentary on Cicero's Dream of Scipio, the Hermetic Asclepius, the De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii of Martianus Capella, and Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. In addition to their Platonic elements, the latter two works would have provided models of the prosimetrum form; and Macrobius's commentary had authorized the use of allegorical (fabulosa) methods in philosophers' treatment of certain subjects, since "sciunt inimicam esse naturae apertam nudamque expositionem sui" ("they realize that a frank, open exposition of herself is distasteful to Nature").