Saviour Bernard

Beginnings

Bernard was born at Valletta, Malta, on November 29, 1724, from French parents. His family seems to have been well-off, enough, at least, to give Bernard a good initial formation, one which was probably better than that of his peers.

At the young age of nineteen, in 1743, Bernard was sent to the south of France, at Aix-en-Provence, to study medicine and surgery at the University of Aix-en-Provence there. He graduated in June 1749, at the age of twenty-four.

Professional career

It was during that same year that Bernard, then already back in Malta, published in Sicily what turned out to be his life’s major work, entitled Trattato Filosofico-Medico dell’Uomo (See below: Magnum opus).

In 1752, Bernard was appointed the principal officer of public health by the Grand Master of the Knights Hospitallers, Manuel Pinto da Fonseca. He was also appointed medical superintendent of two major hospitals of the Knights Hospitallers, Santo Spirito, at Rabat, and Lazzaretto, on Manoel Island.

At the end of the 18th century, Bernard worked hard to cure the diseased stricken by the epidemic influenza. On this occasion he is said to have showed outstanding proficiency and resourcefulness.

Retirement and death

During the very last years of the Knights Hospitallers’ rule, when Bernard was in his late seventies, the Grand Master Ferdinand von Hompesch zu Bolheim graciously granted the aged doctor and philosopher a pension equal to his salary, something which was not normal practice in those days. In return, Bernard continued to provide his services whenever asked for as long as his health held out. He finally retired in 1801, at the age of seventy-seven, when by then the Knights Hospitallers had long been expelled from Malta.

Bernard died at Rabat, Malta at the age of eighty-two on March 7, 1806.

Magnum opus

The book, which is composed of 111 pages, opens with a dedicatory letter and a table of contents. Then it is divided in eight chapters. In his opening letter, Bernard goes at some length to justify the significance of his work despite is relatively young age (of just twenty-four). The chapters respectively deal with (1) the nature of human beings, (2) their bodily functions, (3) their sensitive faculties, (4) their intellectual faculties, (5) the relation between their sensitive and intellectual faculties, (6) the dependence of bodily movements upon the intellect, (7) the effect of the intellect upon bodily movements, and finally (8) the nature of the ‘internal life’ of the intellect.

Quotes

These are a few quotations from Bernard’s Trattato:

Other works of philosophical interest

Both of the following works contain interesting reflections which might interest philosophy. The second one especially. It is written in a curious style, its theme is rather intriguing, and the philosophical arguments brought forth are quite interesting.

Other manuscripts

The following three tracts, all unpublished, are not of any philosophical interest. They might, however, be interesting and valuable from a medical point of view.

Political views

Bernard lived during the turbulent times when the Knights Hospitallers were ousted from the Maltese islands by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798. Despite the fact that the French, in turn, were overthrown by the Maltese, and later driven out in 1800 by the British, the Knights Hospitallers were not reinstated. Bernard lived his last years during the ‘temporary’ rule of the British.

These developments must not have been to Bernard’s liking. He was very proud of his Christian faith and also very fond of the Knights Hospitallers. To see them reduced to a nonentity must have been difficult for him to acknowledge.

Philosophy

In terms of his philosophical positions, Bernard must be considered to be a modern philosopher. He wrote in the pre-Kantian period of modern philosophy when two main schools of thought, namely rationalism and empiricism, opposed each other despite their common inheritance of the characteristic Cartesian prejudice of the whole of modern philosophy – viz. that what man knows directly and immediately are not things themselves but his own ‘ideas’.

Bernard was not a rationalist in the sense that he adopts the ‘geometrical method’ which characterised the writings of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. Nor is Bernard a rationalist in the sense of excluding supernatural faith. While Descartes in the Discourse on Method attempts to construct knowledge entirely on reason and not on dogma or faith, Bernard takes the existence of God for granted and accepts the immortality of the soul on the basis of faith. Bernard can be labelled a rationalist only in a very wide sense; only in so far as he highly values the rational qualities of man (bequeathed upon him by God). His emphasis on man as a rational animal, and his discourse in the preface to his Trattato concerning the spirit of his attempt to illumine the minds of men, are grounds for considering his work to be part and parcel of the enlightenment culture of the 18th century.

In any stricter (epistemological) sense of the word ‘rationalist’, Bernard should rather be considered as adhering to the opposite camp. He takes sensorial experience as the point of departure for the acquisition of knowledge. He criticises the theory of innate ideas – characteristic of the rationalist stream of thought in modern philosophy – and points out that the mind is at birth a tabula rasa or rather a blank slate awaiting ideas from experience. He thinks that ideas are derived from experience, and this is highly reminiscent of the empiricism of Locke. However, he does seem to have the greatest sympathy for Malebranche (who belongs, in the epistemological sense of the word, to the rationalist school) out of all philosophers, except on this basic issue of the origin of ‘ideas’.

There is hardly any indication whatsoever of indebtedness to Thomistic philosophy in Bernard’s work despite his repeated professions of deference to the Catholic Church. His tacit rejection, rather than explicit opposition, to the central features of the anthropology of Aquinas, notably its anti-dualism, is, however, not surprising and possibly unintended.

Appreciation

In academic circles, Bernard is revered more as a philosopher than as a medical doctor. This might be because his major writing, even if written in his youth, is more of a philosophical nature than anything else. It might be also due to the fact that Bernard is generally eclipsed by his more well-known contemporary, Joseph Demarco.

In any case, since 1995, when Bernard’s Trattato was presented to the public as a work worthy of philosophical consideration, more and more attention was given to the work by philosophers. Unfortunately, Claude Falzon's excellent translation of it, made in 1998, is still to be published. Falzon’s work also includes a philosophical study of Bernard’s book as an introduction. Nevertheless, further investigations would certainly be more than fitting, especially to amplify the biographical data concerning Bernard’s life, times and also his professional and academic activities.