Note 399 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

He was in fact, with all his dogmatic orthodoxy, too essentially in advance of his age to be otherwise than suspect to the typical ecclesiastics of any time. The marvel is that with his radical skepticism as to all forms of human knowledge; his intense perception of the fatality of alternate credulity and indifference which kept most men in a state of positive or negative error on every theme; his insatiable thirst for knowledge; his invincible repugnance to all acknowledgment of authority,399 and his insistence on an ethical end, he should have been able to rest as he did in the assumption of a divine infallibility vested in what he knew to be a corruptible text. It was doubtless defect of strictly philosophic thought, as distinguished from practical critical faculty, that enabled him to remain orthodox in theology while anti-authoritarian in everything else. As it was, his recalcitrance to authority in such an age sufficed to make his life a warfare upon earth. And it is not surprising that, even as his Franciscan predecessor Robert Grosstête, bishop of Lincoln, came to be reputed a sorcerer on the strength of having written many treatises on scientific questions—as well as on witchcraft—Roger Bacon became a wizard in popular legend, and a scandal in the eyes of his immediate superiors, for a zest of secular curiosity no less uncommon and unpriestlike.400 “It is sometimes impossible to avoid smiling,” says one philosophic historian of him, “when one sees how artfully this personified thirst for knowledge seeks to persuade himself, or his readers, that knowledge interests him only for ecclesiastical ends. No one has believed it: neither posterity ... nor his contemporaries, who distrusted him as worldly-minded.”401