Bernat Oliver

Bernat Oliver (died 14 July 1348), in Spanish Bernardo Oliver, was a Valencian theologian, diplomat and bishop.

Oliver joined the Augustinian Order before 1310. Educated in theology and philosophy at Paris, he took up a professorship in his native Valencia in 1320. By 1329 he was the senior Augustinian in the Crown of Aragon. From about this time he served successive kings of Aragon as a diplomat to the Holy See and France. He also served several popes as a diplomat, spending much of his time in Avignon. In 1337, he became bishop of Huesca, was transferred to the diocese of Barcelona in 1345 and transferred again to Tortosa in 1346. Although recommended for a cardinalate, he was never appointed. He was a victim of the Black Death.

Oliver left behind a substantial corpus of writings. Some four sermons he preached and several documents associated with his rule as bishop survive. His theological writings, infused with learning, touch on the Jews, the Bible and the decretals, but he is mainly remembered as the most important exponent of Augustinian mysticism in Spain through his Excitatorium mentis ad Deum.

Life Augustinian, teacher, diplomat

Born in the late 13th century to a prominent family in Valencia, Oliver's parents obtained for him an education in grammar and Latin. Sometime before 1310, he became an Augustinian canon at the Church of Saint Augustine in Valencia. He then went to the University of Paris to study theology and philosophy, obtaining his doctorate and subsequently a teaching position.

Oliver returned to Valencia in or shortly before 1320 and received a chair teaching the Sentences of Peter Lombard at the local studium (the forerunner of the University of Valencia). In 1320, he was named prior of the Augustinians of Valencia. (He was never named auxiliary bishop of Valencia, as some authors maintain.)

During his professorship at Valencia in the 1320s, Oliver wrote a commentary on the Sentences in four books. His most famous work, written at an unknown date and location, is Excitatorium mentis ad Deum in the tradition of Christian mysticism. Its model is the Confessions of Augustine of Hippo and it is very unlike his scholastic works. The original Latin, the Catalan translation and a modern Spanish translation have been published.

Besides the three aforementioned sermons, which have been preserved, Oliver wrote several theological, mystical and Biblical treatises, many of them still unpublished: Contra perfidiam Iudeorum Super caput cum Marthe de celebratione missarum Quaestiones quodlibetales De divinis officiis Diatriba contra iudeos Contiones ad populum valentinum Speculum animae

Tractatus contra antichristum Tractatus de inquisitione Antichristi, the attribution of this work is suspect Concordantiae decretorum cum Biblia, "a concordance of the Decretum with biblical passages" Expositio Canonis Missae Expositio in capitulum cum Marthae de celebratione Missarum Sermo qui legit, intellegat Espertamiento de la voluntad de Dios, a text which only survives in a Spanishs translation made by Diego Ordóñez and known from a single manuscript in the Escorial dated 1478