BACON (BACON, BACHON), ROGER. - Doctor mirabilis, Franciscan, a complex figure of an English philosopher, philologist and scientist, b. at Ilchester in the county of Somerset, in 1214, a date accepted by the Oxford committee for the commemoration of the seventh centenary of his birth. At Oxford he was a disciple of R. Grosseteste, of whom B. sings the praises as a man more versed than any other in the sciences and particularly in mathematics and in the knowledge of Greek. The scientific activity of this great master awakened in the spirit of the pupil an interest in scientific research and in the study of languages. Having obtained the title of bachelor in the arts, B. went to Paris, around 1235. After a probable return to his homeland, he is found again in the University of Paris, between 1245 and 1255, intent on following the lectures of the magistri novi who had brought there Greco-Arabic philosophy and science. During this stay in France he came to know
Peter of Maricourt, who initiated him into the knowledge of many secrets of nature, and William of Auvergne, whose doctrine on divine illumination must have left a deep trace in his soul.
To this period of his life belong, together with some short treatises on special subjects, the commentaries on Aristotelian works, certainly delivered from the chair as magister artium. They are: the commentary on the Metaphysics, the Quaestiones supra XI Primae Philosophiae, the Quaestiones supra libros quatuor Physicorum, the Quaestiones supra libros octo Physicorum, the double series of Quaestiones supra libros Primae Philosophiae, the Quaestiones on the Liber de plantis, on the De causis, on the De sensu et sensato, the Summa de sophismatibus et distinctionibus, the Summa Grammaticae, the Summulae dialecticae, the little work De rebus medicinalibus, and perhaps the Epistola de secretis operibus naturae.
In 1255, or a few months later, following the example of other English masters, he entered the Franciscan Order, notwithstanding the violent campaign that the secular masters of the faculty of theology had unleashed against the Mendicant Orders in Paris. To B., as Fr. Delorme very plausibly holds, there must have been directed the letter of St. Bonaventure ad magistrum innominatum, in which the Seraphic Doctor shows the accusations brought against the Mendicants to be slanderous. Having spent in England the first six or seven years after his conversion, B. returned in 1262 to Paris, without, however, his scientific activity being able to manifest itself, owing to difficulties interposed by earlier dispositions of the Order. But the election of Clement IV, whom he had known as papal legate in England, removed these difficulties. The new pope, on 22 June 1266, urged him from Viterbo not to neglect his researches and to send him as soon as possible the work on which he was engaged, «non obstante praeccepto praelati cuiuscunque contrario, vel tui ordinis constitutione quacunque».
To satisfy the desire of the pontiff, he composed with feverish alacrity the Opus maius and, immediately afterwards, the Opus minus, which was followed at a short distance by the Opus tertium and a treatise De radiis (now lost), all four destined for the Pope, although the latter's death, which occurred on 29 Nov. 1268, did not allow the author to send them all. This is attested by B. himself (Op. tert., ed. Brewer, ch. 17), who in hastily preparing these four works was thinking of that work of great effort, or Scriptum principale, of which the writings addressed to the pontiff were to be only a sample.
Even after the loss of so great a protector, B. continued his scientific activity and composed, during the pontificate of Gregory X (1271-76), the Compendium studii philosophiae, and together with this, in the following years, the Communia naturalia (in which there is an explicit allusion to the plan of the Scriptura principalis, which was to comprise, in four volumes, grammar and logic, mathematics, perspective together with the philosophy of nature and the experimental sciences, and finally metaphysics and morals), the De multiplicatione specierum, the De coelestibus, the Greek and Hebrew grammars (of which only fragments have been published) and the Tractatus brevis in Secretum secretorum and other minor works. His last labor was the Compendium studii theologiae, composed, it seems, in 1292, shortly before his death, which occurred probably a couple of years later.
On the late attestation of the Chronica XXIV generalium (in Anal. francisc., III, Quaracchi 1897, p. 360), the story has been spread of the condemnation of the doctrine of Friar R. B., for «suspected novelties», on the part of the general of the Order, Friar Jerome of Ascoli, who would also have had him imprisoned, ordering that no one should follow his reproved teachings. Of all this there is no trace in the archives of the Order, nor in the papal ones, and not even in contemporary writers.
To find a justification for the account of the Chronica, Mandonnet has supposed that the Speculum astronomiae, printed among the works of Albert the Great, is to be attributed to B., and that precisely for this writing, which the Dominican historian holds to have been composed in 1277, at the moment of the condemnation of Averroism, the author was censured and imprisoned. But the ingenious hypothesis proves unfounded, both because the Speculum contains no doctrine worthy of censure, and because it suits the character of Albert more than that of B., if indeed it is not to be attributed to master Philip, chancellor of the University of Paris, to whom it was attributed by some, according to the Ambrosian codex I, 65 inf., f. 82ʳ.
In B.'s thought two tendencies contrast which, at first sight, would appear opposed: a marked interest in experimental science, and the no less pronounced need for a higher truth that has its roots in divine Revelation. By the first tendency, he is the pupil of Grosseteste and of Peter of Maricourt; by the second, instead, he is the confrere of the Franciscan masters, from Adam Marsh to Roger Marston.
From the first tendency he is led to turn his attention to all the branches of human knowledge, to rummage in every corner of nature, to scrutinize the motion of the stars, the life of terrestrial organisms, the combinations of the elements, to attempt the occult in order to compel it by art to reveal its secrets. For this encyclopedic character no one resembles him more than Albert the Great; but while the knowledge of the Dominican of Cologne is in large part scraped together and often muddled, the science of the English Franciscan is instead set in motion by frequent original observations and by happy intuitions that always arouse the liveliest interest. Far greater, moreover, is Albert's credulity toward all marvelous tales, even though he acknowledges that B. too did not succeed in freeing himself from the most common prejudices of his time. The considerable sum that the latter says he spent (Opus tertium, ed. Brewer, p. 58) "propter libros secretos, et experientes varias, et lingua, et instrumenta, et tabulas, et alia," demonstrates the effort he sustained to acquire a certainty more solid than the opinions in circulation. For the attainment of this certainty, experience and mathematics are necessary. Therefore he recalls with honor Robert Grosseteste and Friar Adam Marsh, together with many others, "qui per potestatem mathematicae sciverunt causas omnium explicare" (Opus maius, ed. Bridges, I, p. 108). As for experience, he is not content with vulgar observation, which stops at the surface and at sensible appearance, but insists on methodical experience, aided by suitable instruments, and on the experiment that verifies and ascertains the facts taken under observation (v. on this point R. Carton, op. cit. in the bibliography). Once the facts have been ascertained by means of experience, it is permitted to complete them with mathematical reasoning, ascending to the causes, and from these, inductively established, descending, by way of deduction, to the effects. Thus experience and mathematical reasoning help each other and constitute the two moments of the scientific method. Vulgar opinion, and often also that of the learned, when it is not verified by experience and mathematical reasoning, constitutes an obstacle rather than an aid to attaining the truth. In this way, without attributing to B. a knowledge much more extensive than that possessed by his contemporaries, it may be said that no one more than he mastered the science of his time, no one established its sound method with clearer awareness, even if, as would later happen to his countryman Francis Bacon, he did not always succeed in applying it and more than once was himself the victim of not a few idola fori and theatri, such as judicial astrology and the efficacy of incantations.
The uncertainties and obscurities of the Aristotelian text in those Latin translations that he judged worthy of being consigned to the flames, and perhaps also an acute need to know better the science of the Greeks and to penetrate into the Arab and Jewish world, in order to steal from it the treasures still hidden from the West, spurred him to learn Greek and to grapple with the Oriental languages. The study of Greek and Hebrew must have appeared to him of capital importance when he became aware of the grave difficulties that the interpretation of the Bible in the Latin Vulgate presented.
But if on the one hand B. makes the renewal of experimental science present itself, so as to have been considered the medieval precursor of Galileo, of Francis Bacon and of Descartes, there is another aspect of his complex personality that brings him closer to Blaise Pascal. As the encounter with the Jansenists awakened in Pascal's soul, wholly taken up with the interest for physical and mathematical research, an acute need for faith that would supply the deficiencies of reasoning reason and led him back to drink at the great source of Augustinian thought, so the encounter with Franciscanism revealed to B. a higher truth than that of physical experience, and to it he turned his restless soul. Like Pascal, B. too saw that man can know very few things by his own powers alone, without the help of divine teaching. Mystery envelops on every side the brief horizon of mortal sight. Without the continual illumination of the divine light, the eye of the human mind would remain buried in darkness. Divine is the light that kindles in us the lamp of reason, as Friar Adam Marsh had taught him, when he affirmed that Aristotle's agent intellect is the raven of Elijah "volens per hoc dicere quod fuit Deus vel Angelus" (Op. tert., pp. 74-75), and as another of his confreres, an Englishman like himself, Roger Marston, would also think, and, before all of these, William of Auvergne had maintained. Divine likewise are those inspirations that continually stir our inner experience, and of which he distinguishes seven degrees, from the illuminationes pure scientiales, up and up to ecstatic rapture. And divine above all is the Revelation that God granted to the first men, of as much as was needed to satisfy the human desire to know. This primordial divine Revelation, without which the solution of the most arduous philosophical problems is impossible, was transmitted in summary to humanity by the patriarchs and prophets of the Hebrew people, by means of Sacred Scripture; among the other peoples, instead, it was obscured by innumerable errors. The purpose of philosophy is precisely that of tracing, through the study of the ancient philosophers, the dispersed and fragmentary truths of that first revealed wisdom. Philosophy therefore, as it moves from Revelation, is thus ordered to the reconquest of the first integral Revelation by means of theology. The historical progress of humanity is a return and a rediscovery.
But theology, as it was studied in his times, seemed to B. stained by seven vices, from which he would have wished to see it purged (Op. minus, ed. Brewer, p. 322 ff.). These vices can be reduced to the incompetence of the masters of theology in treating of scientific and philosophical matters of which they show themselves ignorant, when it happens that they make incursions into an unknown field; to the undeserved authority enjoyed by certain of these masters; to the preference accorded to Peter Lombard's Liber sententiarum over Sacred Scripture, to the errors of the Vulgate and to false interpretations of the sacred text. The study of Greek and Hebrew, like that of the sciences and of mathematics, should have served, in the intent pursued by B., to prepare theologians for the reading of the Bible in the original text, and for a right interpretation of the divine word.
As the "esprit de finesse" reveals to Pascal what the "esprit géométrique" fails to discern,
Thus interior experience, in the mystic contact with the divine light that shines in the innermost recesses of consciousness, completes in B.'s thought the physical experience and corrects its illusions. Against the Averroists, who seemed to set the truths of reason against the truths of faith, he was not content to subordinate philosophy to Revelation in the Thomistic manner, but affirmed that inseparable unity which is characteristic of Augustinian thought. And just as there is no truth outside divine Revelation, so the Christian Church, guardian and interpreter of the divine word, has the mission of leading humanity to salvation through Christ, who is the very Wisdom of God. Christ and the Church are therefore the center of human history. From this concept B. deduces a kind of religious imperialism, likewise typically Augustinian in inspiration, but which is at the same time colored by the theocratic doctrine of Innocent IV and by reflections of the apocalyptic theories that had begun to spread among the Franciscans. The ideas about the imminent coming of the Antichrist and about the necessity of a reform of the Church inspire in him vehement expressions, invectives such as would soon resound in Dante's poem, and prophetic attitudes that contrast strangely with the garb of the mathematician.
It is precisely because of these strong contrasts that the figure of B. is eminently representative of the historical period to which he is bound and in which fertile seeds of new life lay brooding beneath the crust, already cracking, of inveterate prejudices.
Editions: Fr. R. B. Opera quaedam hactenus inedita, ed. J. S. Brewer, London 1859 (contains the Op. tert., the Op. minus, the Compendium philosophiae, all three fragmentary, and, in an appendix, the epistle De secretis operibus artis et naturae et de nullitate magiae); J. H. Bridges, The Opus maius of R. B., 3 vols., Oxford 1897-1900 (the dedicatory letter was found and published by F. A. Gasquet, An unpublished fragment of a work of R. B., in The engl. hist. Review, 12 [1897], pp. 494-517); P. Duhem, Un fragment inédit de l'Opus tertium de R. B., Quaracchi 1909; A. G. Little, Part of the Op. tert. of R. B. (British Society of Franciscan Studies, 4), Aberdeen 1912. R. Steele began at Oxford, in 1905, the publication of the Opera hactenus inedita R. B., still in progress; the following fascicles have appeared so far: 1. Metaphysica and De vitiis contractis in studio theologiae; 2-4. the first and second book of the Communia naturalia and the De caelestibus; 5. Tractatus brevis in Secretum secretorum; 6. the Compotus (which, however, does not seem to belong to B.); 7. Qq. supra undecimum Primae philos.; 8. Qq. Supra libros quatuor physicorum; 9. De retardat. accidentium senectutis (whose attribution is contested) and other opuscules De rebus medicinalibus; 10. Qq. supra libros Primae philos.; 11. Qq. alterae supra libros Primae philos.; Qq. supra librum de Plantis; Metaphysica vetus Aristotelis; 12. Qq. supra librum de causis; 13. Qq. supra libros octo Physicorum; 14. Qq. supra librum de sensu et sensato, Summa de sophismatibus et distinctionibus, Summa grammaticae; 15. Summulae dialectices. Compendium studii theologiae, ed. H. Rashdall (Brit. Soc. of Franciscan Studies, 3), Aberdeen 1911. - The greek grammar of R. B. and a fragment of his hebrew grammar, ed. E. Nolan and S. Hirsch, Cambridge 1902; Specula mathematica, De speculis, ed. J. Combach, Frankfurt 1614; Perspectiva (published by the same), ibid. 1614.