Volume 2 / Book 5 — II. His Criticism of and Part in Medieval Learning

Aims and plan of the Opus Maius—Bacon’s theological standpoint—His scholastic side—Attitude to Aristotle and other authorities—Bacon’s critical bent—Criticism easier than construction—Commonplaces of medieval criticism—Debt of Bacon to earlier writers—Limitations of his criticism—Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus—Bacon’s criticism of education applies chiefly to the training of the friars in theology—His other criticisms of contemporary education—His personal motives—Inaccuracy of much of his criticism—Bacon does not regard himself as unique—Instances of ideas which were not new with him—Bacon and the discovery of America—His historical attitude—His “mathematical method”—Its crudity—Its debt to others.

III. His Experimental Science

Has been given undue prominence—“Experimental science” distinct from other natural sciences—As a criterion of truth—Lack of method—Bacon and inventions—Marvelous results expected—Fantastic “experiments”—Credulity essential—Good flying dragons—Experiment and magic.

IV. His Attitude Toward Magic and Astrology

Magic and astrology—Magic in the past—Magicians and their books still prevalent—Magic a delusion—Some truth in magic—Magic and science—His belief in marvelous “extraneous virtues”—Non-magical fascination—The power of words—Magic and science again—The multiplication of species—William of St. Cloud on works of art and nature compared to magic—The two mathematics—Four objections to the forbidden variety—The rule of the stars—Astrological medicine—Influence of the stars upon human conduct—Planetary conjunctions and religious movements—Was Christ born under the stars?—Operative astrology—Unlikelihood that Bacon was condemned for magic or astrology—Error of Charles in thinking that any stigma rested on Bacon’s memory—But his own statements may have given rise to the legend.

V. Conclusion

Characteristics of medieval books—Features of the Opus Maius.

Appendix I. The Study of Roger Bacon.

Lack of early printed editions of his works—His popular reputation as a magician—Jebb’s edition of the Opus Maius—General misestimate of Bacon and of medieval science—Roger Bacon and Francis Bacon—Legend of Roger’s martyrdom for science—Works of Brewer and Charles—Minor studies of the later nineteenth century—Recent editions of Bacon’s works—Continued overestimate of Bacon—Beginnings of adverse criticism—The Commemoration Essays.

Appendix II. Roger Bacon and Gunpowder.

Our method of considering him.

Contemporary with the three learned Dominicans of whom preceding chapters have treated—Albert, Thomas, and Vincent—was the Franciscan friar, Roger Bacon, who in modern times has received so much attention and admiration at the expense of his contemporaries and his age.[2030] Happily in the present volume we are in a better position to estimate him fairly. The best, if not the only way to appreciate him aright is by a detailed study of the writings and doctrines of his predecessors and contemporaries. Roger Bacon has hitherto been studied too much in isolation. He has been regarded as an exceptional individual; his environment has been estimated at his own valuation of it or according to some preconceived idea of his age; and his writings have not been studied in relation to those of his predecessors and contemporaries. Thought of as a precursor of modern science, he has been read to find germs of modern ideas rather than scrutinized with a view to discovering his sources. Yet his constant citing of authorities and the helpful footnotes which Bridges, in his edition of the Opus Maius, gives to explain these allusions to other scientists, point insistently in the latter direction. When one has gone a step further and has read for their own sake the works of men like Adelard of Bath, William of Conches, and Daniel of Morley in the twelfth century, or William of Auvergne, Robert Grosseteste and Albert Magnus in the early and middle thirteenth century, the true position of Roger Bacon in the history of thought grows clearer. One then re-reads his works with a new insight, finds that a different interpretation may be put upon many a passage, and realizes that even in his most boastful moments Roger himself never made such claims to astounding originality as some modern writers have made for him. Conversely, one is impelled to the conclusion that Bacon’s writings, instead of being unpalatable to, neglected by, and far in advance of, his times, give a most valuable picture of medieval thought, summarizing, it is true, its most advanced stages, but also including much that is most characteristic, and even revealing some of its back currents. It is from this standpoint that we shall consider Roger Bacon and endeavor to refute misconceptions that have grown up concerning his life and learning. We shall also, in conformity with our main theme, take particular note of his experimental science, long regarded as the brightest gem in his crown, and of other aspects of his learning which have hitherto not received special or proper treatment, namely, the astrology and magic to which he gives so much space and emphasis and which so seriously affect all his thought, but which probably did not affect his life and the attitude of his age towards him in the way that many have assumed.

I. Life

Birth, family, and early life.

Past estimates of Bacon’s learning have been greatly affected by their holders’ views of his life; but his biography is gradually being shorn of fictions and losing that sensational and exceptional character which gave countenance to the representation of his thought as far in advance of his age. We cannot tell to which of several families of Bacons mentioned in feudal registers and other documents of the times he belonged, and the exact date and place of his birth are uncertain.[2031] But he speaks of England as his native land, and in 1267 looks back upon a past of some forty years of study and twenty years of specialization in his favorite branches of learning.[2032] In another passage he mentions having spent all his spare time for ten years upon the science of perspective.[2033] Also he speaks of one brother as rich, of another as a student, and of his family’s suffering exile for their support of Henry III against the barons.[2034] He implies that up to 1267 he had not been outside France and England,[2035] but he had sent across the seas for material to assist his special investigations and had spent large sums of money.[2036]

The years before 1267.

Before he became a friar he had written text-books for students, and had worked so hard that men wondered that he still lived. When or why he joined the Franciscans we are not informed,[2037] but his doing so is no cause for wonder, for both Orders were rich in learned men, including students of natural science. Bacon tells us that after becoming a friar he was able to study as much as before, but “did not work so much,” probably because he now had less teaching to do. For about ten years before 1267, instead of being imprisoned and ill-treated by his order, as was once believed without foundation, he was, as we now know from his own words discovered in 1897, in poor health and “took no part in the outward affairs of the university.” This abstention caused the report to spread that he was devoting all his time to writing, especially since many were aware that he had long intended to sum up his knowledge in a magnum opus, but he actually “composed nothing except a few chapters, now about one science and now about another, compiled in odd moments at the instance of friends.” At least this is what he told the pope in 1267 when trying to excuse himself for having had no completed work ready to submit to the supreme pontiff.[2038] During these years he seems to have fallen into some obscurity, since in the Opus Tertium he compares his tone in the Opus Minus to that of Cicero, when recalled from exile, in the letter in which he humbled himself and congratulated the Roman senate. So Bacon, describing himself probably with some rhetorical exaggeration as an exile for the past ten years from his former scholastic fame,[2039] recognizes his own littleness and admires the wisdom of the pope, who has deigned to seek works of scholarship “from me, now unheard by anyone and as it were buried in oblivion.”[2040]

Bacon and the mariner’s compass.

R. H. Major’s Prince Henry the Navigator is responsible for the spread of the story that in 1258 Brunetto Latini saw Friar Bacon at the Parliament at Oxford and was shown by him the secret of the magnetic needle, which Roger dared not divulge for fear of being accused of magic. The supposed letter of Brunetto Latini to the poet Guido Cavalcanti, from which these data are drawn, seems to have been a hoax or fanciful production appearing first in 1802 in the Monthly Magazine[2041] among “Extracts from the Portfolio of a Man of Letters,” who is said to have translated them from “the French patois of the Romansch language.” Certainly the mariner’s compass was pretty well known in Bacon’s time, nor are we informed of any case where it involved its possessor in a trial for magic. Bacon says in one passage that if the experiment of the magnet with respect to iron “were not known to the world, it would seem a great miracle.”[2042] In another place he grants that even the common herd of philosophers know of the magnetic needle; he merely criticizes their belief that the needle always turns towards the north star; Roger thinks that it can be made to turn to any other point of the compass if only it has been properly magnetized.[2043] Perhaps the Latini story was suggested by a third passage, where Bacon says, in order to illustrate his statement that philosophers have sometimes resorted to charms and incantations to hide their secrets from the unworthy, “As if, for instance, it were quite unknown that the magnetic needle attracts iron and someone wishing to perform this operation before the people should make characters and utter incantations, so that they might not see that the operation of attraction was entirely natural.”[2044]

The papal mandate.

Bacon’s career centers about a papal mandate which was despatched to him in the summer of 1266. Guy de Foulques, who became Clement IV on February 5, 1265, had at some previous time requested Bacon to send him the scriptum principale or comprehensive work on philosophy which he had been led to think was already written.[2045] On June 22, 1266, he repeated this request in the form of a papal mandate, which is extant.[2046] The former letter is lost, but both Bacon and the pope refer to it.[2047] Somehow writers on Bacon have paid little heed to this first request, have assumed that Bacon wrote his three works to the pope in about a year[2048] despite the “impediments” upon which he dwells, and have therefore been filled with admiration at the superhuman genius which could produce such works at such short notice while laboring under such difficulties.[2049] But this is assuming that Roger had done nothing in the considerable interval between the two mandates. And why does he keep apologizing for “so great delay in this matter,” and “Your Clemency’s impatience at hope deferred.”[2050] Moreover, his excuses do not all apply to the same period, and most of them are excuses for not having composed a full exposition of philosophy rather than for not having composed sooner the Opus Maius, which Roger regarded as a mere preamble to philosophy. One set of excuses explains why he had no comprehensive work ready when the first request arrived.[2051] A second set explains why he had not written it in the interval between the two mandates.[2052] A third set explains why he finally does not write it at all but sends instead an introductory treatise, the Opus Maius, supplemented by two others, the Opus Minus and Opus Tertium. Of course some excuses hold equally good for all three periods. But he states in the third treatise that in writing the second he was free from some of the “impediments” which had hampered his composition of the Opus Maius.[2053] As he also says that one reason for writing the Opus Minus was lest the Opus Maius be lost amid the great dangers of the roads at that time, one infers that the latter work was despatched before the other. Moreover, the Opus Minus opens with a eulogy of the pope which is absent in the Opus Maius,[2054] in which there are very few passages to suggest that it is addressed to the pope, or written later than 1266.[2055]

The composition of the three works.

The Opus Maius, therefore, was practically finished, if not already sent, when the papal mandate of 1266 reached Bacon. When Roger learned that Foulques as pope was still interested in his work, visions of what the apostolic see might do for his programme of learning and himself flashed before his mind, and, after a fresh but vain effort at a scriptum principale, which kept him busy until Epiphany, he composed the supplementary treatise, the Opus Minus, with its adulatory introduction to Clement IV, with its excuses for sending or having sent a preambulatory treatise instead of a complete work of philosophy, with its hints that such a final treatise can be successfully completed only with the financial backing of the unlimited papal resources, with its analysis of the preceding work for the benefit of the busy pope and its suggestions as to what portions of it he might profitably omit, and with its additions of matter which in the Opus Maius Roger had either forgotten or at that time had not been in a position to insert. The third work, Opus Tertium, is of the same sort but apparently more disorderly in arrangement, and looser and more extravagant in its tone. Presumably it was undertaken to remind the pope again of Bacon’s existence and proposals; it is even conceivable that Roger was a little unstrung when he composed it; it has been suggested that it was left unfinished and never sent to the pope, who died in 1268. A part at least of the Opus Tertium was written in 1267.[2056]

The injunction of secrecy.

The extant papal mandate orders Bacon not only to send his book but to state “what remedies you think should be applied in those matters which you recently intimated were of so great importance,” and to “do this without delay as secretly as you can.”[2057] This allusion to matters of importance and this injunction of secrecy have cast a certain veil of mystery over the three works and the relations of Roger and the pope. Observance of secrecy may have been intended to guard against such frauds of copyists as we shall soon hear Bacon describe, or to secure some alchemistic arcana or practical inventions which the pope had been led to expect from him. Indeed, so far as alchemy was concerned, Bacon observed the injunction of secrecy so strictly that he divided his discussion of the subject among four different treatises sent to the pope at different times and by different messengers, so that no outsider might steal the precious truth. It must be added that even after receiving all four instalments, the pope would not have been much nearer the philosopher’s stone than before.[2058]

Roger Bacon and the Franciscans.

Another moot question in Bacon’s biography besides that of the composition of the three works is that of his relations with the Franciscan Order. We have seen that it was natural for him to join it, and that the change, at first at least, seemed one for the better. Bacon, however, found irksome the rule made by the order in 1260, as a consequence of the publication in 1254 of Gerard’s heretical Introductorius in Evangelium Aeternum, that in the future no Franciscan should publish anything without permission.[2059] Roger wished to employ amanuenses even in composing his works, and these men, he tells the pope, would often divulge “the most secret writings,”[2060] and so involve one in unintentional violation of the above rule. “And therefore,” says Bacon, “I did not feel the least bit like writing anything.”[2061] For a man so easily discouraged one cannot feel much sympathy. There is however another important inference from his statement: instead of his writings being neglected by his age, they are so valued that they are pirated before they have been published. Moreover, this rule of his order should not have hampered Bacon much in writing for the pope; indeed, Roger himself implies that he was exempted from this restriction in the earlier request from the cardinal as well as in the later papal mandate. Raymond of Laon, Bacon grants, had correctly informed “Your Magnificence, as both the mandates state,” concerning this regulation, though he had given a wrong impression as to what Bacon already had written.[2062]

We have heard from Bacon’s own mouth that he did little public teaching after becoming a friar, that he had as much time for private study as ever, and that everybody supposed him to be at work at his magnum opus. Yet in the Opus Minus he grumbles that “his prelates were at him every day to do other things”[2063] before he received the first mandate from the cardinal, and that even thereafter he was unable to excuse himself fully from their demands upon his time, “because Your Lordship had ordered me to treat that business secretly, nor had Your Glory given them any instructions.”[2064] In the Opus Tertium he describes the same situation in stronger language: “They pressed me with unspeakable violence to obey their will as others did,” and “I sustained so many and so great setbacks that I cannot tell them.”[2065] On how we interpret a few such passages as these depends our estimate of the attitude of the Franciscan Order before 1267 to Bacon and his ideas and researches. He gives so many other reasons why he has no comprehensive work of philosophy ready for the pope that this attitude of his superiors seems a relatively slight factor. He needed much money, he needed expensive instruments, he needed a large library, he needed “plenty of parchment,” he needed a corps of assistant investigators and another of copyists with skilled superintendents to direct their efforts and insert figures and other delicate details. It was a task beyond the powers of any one man; besides, he was in ill-health, he felt languid, he composed very slowly. Shall we blame his superiors for not providing him with this expensive equipment; and are we surprised, when we remember that the mandates directed him to send a book supposed to be already finished, that his superiors continued to ask of him the performance of his usual duties as a friar? Their attitude can scarcely be regarded as persecution of Bacon or hostility to his science. On the other hand, Clement IV must be given credit for his effort to elicit from Bacon a scriptum principale; and it may well be doubted if Roger would have produced anything equivalent to the Opus Maius, Opus Minus and Opus Tertium without this papal encouragement.

Bacon’s life after 1267.

In 1272 in the Compendium Studii Philosophiae Bacon lays bare the failings of “the two orders” as if he belonged to neither, but he then proceeds to refute indignantly those masters at Paris who have tried to argue that the state of the higher secular clergy, such as bishops, is more perfect than that of the religious.[2066]

His reported condemnation.

In 1277, however, we learn “solely on the very contestable authority of the Chronicle of the XXIV Generals,”[2067] a work written about 1370, although containing earlier matter,[2068] that at the suggestion of many friars the teaching of “Friar Roger Bacon of England, master of sacred theology,” was condemned as containing “some suspected novelties,” that Roger was sentenced to prison, and that the pope was asked to help to suppress the dangerous doctrines in question. It has been a favorite conjecture of students of Bacon that he incurred this condemnation by his leanings toward astrology and magic; but, as we shall see later, his views on these subjects were not novelties. He shared them with Albertus Magnus and other contemporaries, and there seems no good reason why they should have got him into trouble. Suffice it here to note that the wording of the chronicle suggests nothing of the sort, but rather some details of doctrine, whereas had Bacon been charged with magic, we may be pretty sure that so sensational a feature would not have passed unmentioned.

Franciscans and science: John Peckham.

How absurd it is to think that the Franciscan Order was opposed to Bacon’s pursuit of natural and experimental science, or that he was alone among the members of that order in the pursuit of such subjects, may be inferred from a glance at the career of John Peckham who from 1279 to his death in 1292 was archbishop of Canterbury.[2069] According to a letter of Bacon’s favorite, Adam Marsh, Peckham entered the Franciscan Order about 1250. He had been educated in France but about 1270 became lector of his order at Oxford. He also became the ninth provincial minister of the Franciscans in England, and had been called to Rome by the pope to be Lector sacri palatii before his nomination by the pope to the archbishopric of Canterbury. Yet this Franciscan who rose so high in the church was the author of a treatise on Perspective, one of the five subjects which Bacon held could be of such service to the church and yet were being so woefully neglected. In his Perspectiva communis, which was printed at Venice in 1504, Peckham talks of such matters as the reflection of visible rays and experiment. A work on the sphere and a Theory of the Planets which exists only in manuscript are also attributed to him. It has even been suggested that he was the bright lad John whom Bacon sent to explain his work to the pope, but Peckham was evidently too old in 1267 to fill that rôle. Bartholomew of England was another Franciscan interested, as we have seen, both in natural science and astrology, and other Friar Preachers than Albertus Magnus and Aquinas showed the same interest.

Was Bacon still writing in 1292?

This is about all that we know of Bacon’s life except the dates of one or two more of his works. Mr. Little regards it as “certain that Roger’s last dated work was written in 1292.”[2070] This was his treatise on the study of theology, which in one passage gives the year as 1292 and in another speaks of “forty years and more” as having elapsed since 1250.[2071] It is rather surprising to find his literary activity continuing so late, since in 1267 he wrote as if well along in life.