BACONE (BACON, BACHON), RUGGERO. – Doctor mirabilis, Franciscan, a complex figure of English philosopher, philologist, and scientist, born at Ilchester in the county of Somerset in 1214, the date accepted by the Oxford committee for the commemoration of the seventh centenary of his birth. At Oxford he was a pupil of R. Grosseteste, whom B. praises as a man more learned than any other in the sciences, and particularly in mathematics and knowledge of Greek. The scientific activity of this great master awakened in his pupil’s mind an interest in scientific research and the study of languages. Having obtained the degree of bachelor of arts, B. went to Paris around 1235. After a probable return to his homeland, he is found once again at the University of Paris, between 1245 and 1255, intent on attending the lectures of the magistri novi who had brought Greek-Arabic philosophy and science there. During this sojourn in France he met
Pietro di Maricourt, who initiated him into the knowledge of many secrets of nature, and Guglielmo Alverniate, whose doctrine of divine illumination must have left a profound mark on his mind.
To this period of his life belong, together with several short treatises on special subjects, the commentaries on Aristotelian works, certainly dictated 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 twofold series of Quaestiones supra libros Primae Philosophiae, the Quaestiones on the Liber de plantis, on the De causis, and on the De sensu et sensato, the Summa de sophismatibus et distinctionibus, the Summa Grammaticae, the Summulae dialecticae, the treatise 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 in Paris against the mendicant Orders. As Fr. Delorme holds with considerable probability, St. Bonaventure’s letter ad magistrum innominatum must have been addressed to B.; in it the Seraphic Doctor demonstrates the calumnious nature of the accusations leveled against the Mendicants. After spending the first six or seven years following his conversion in England, B. returned to Paris in 1262, although his scientific activity could not yet manifest itself because of obstacles imposed by earlier provisions of the Order. The election of Clement IV, whom he had known as papal legate in England, removed these difficulties. On 22 June 1266, the new pope urged him from Viterbo not to abandon his investigations 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 pontiff’s wish, he composed with feverish diligence the Opus maius and, immediately afterward, the Opus minus, followed shortly by the Opus tertium and a treatise De radiis (now lost), all four intended for the Pope, although the latter’s death, which occurred on 29 November 1268, prevented the author from sending them all. This is attested by B. himself (Op. tert., ed. Brewer, chap. 17), who, in preparing these four works in great haste, had in mind that large-scale work, or Scriptum principale, of which the writings addressed to the pontiff were to be merely a specimen.
Even after losing so great a protector, B. continued his scientific activity and, during the pontificate of Gregory X (1271–76), composed the Compendium studii philosophiae, and together with it, in the following years, the Communia naturalia (in which the plan of the Scriptura principalis is explicitly mentioned; it was to comprise, in four volumes, grammar and logic; mathematics; optics together with natural philosophy 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), the Tractatus brevis in Secretum secretorum, and other minor works. His final undertaking was the Compendium studii theologiae, composed, apparently, in 1292, shortly before his death, which probably occurred a couple of years later.
On the basis of the late testimony of the Chronica XXIV generalium (in Anal. francisc., III, Quaracchi 1897, p. 360), the account has been disseminated of the condemnation of the doctrine of Brother R. B., for «sospette novità», by the Order’s minister general, Fra Girolamo d’Ascoli, who is also said to have had him imprisoned and ordered that no one follow his disapproved teachings. There is no trace of any of this in the archives of the Order, nor in the papal archives, nor even in contemporary writers.
To find a justification for the account in the Chronica, Mandonnet supposed that the Speculum astronomiae, printed among the works of Albert the Great, should be attributed to B., and that precisely because of this writing—which the Dominican historian considers to have been composed in 1277, at the time of the condemnation of Averroism—the author was censured and imprisoned. Yet this ingenious hypothesis proves unfounded, both because the Speculum contains no doctrine deserving of censure and because it accords more with Albert’s character than with B.’s, unless it is to be attributed to Master Filippo, chancellor of the University of Paris, to whom some attributed it, according to Ambrosian Codex I, 65 inf., fol. 82ʳ.
Two tendencies that at first sight might seem opposed conflict in B.’s thought: a pronounced interest in experimental science, and an equally pronounced need for a higher truth rooted in divine Revelation. In the first tendency, he is the pupil of Grosseteste and Pietro di Maricourt; in the second, instead, he is the confrère of the Franciscan masters, from Adamo Marsh to Ruggero Marston.
From the first tendency he is led to direct his attention to every branch of human knowledge, to search through every corner of nature, to scrutinize the movement of the stars, the life of terrestrial organisms, and the combinations of the elements, and to probe the occult in order to compel it by art to reveal its secrets. In this encyclopedic character no one resembles him more than Albert the Great; but whereas the knowledge of the Dominican of Cologne is largely a miscellany and often excessively cumbersome, the science of the English Franciscan is instead marked by frequent original observations and felicitous intuitions that always aroused the liveliest interest. Alberto, moreover, was far more credulous toward all marvelous stories, although it must be acknowledged that B. too did not succeed in freeing himself from the most common prejudices of his time. The considerable sum that he 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 made to acquire a more solid certainty than that offered by current opinions. Experience and mathematics were necessary for attaining this certainty. Thus he recalls with honor Roberto Grosseteste and friar Adamo 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 ordinary observation, which stops at the surface and at sensible appearance, but insists on methodical experience, assisted by suitable instruments, and on experiment, which verifies and establishes the facts under observation (v. in this regard R. Carton, op. cit. in the bibliography). Once the facts have been established through experience, it is permissible to complete them through mathematical reasoning, ascending to their causes and, from these inductively established causes, descending again by deduction to their effects. Thus experience and mathematical reasoning assist one another and constitute the two moments of the scientific method. Common opinion, and often even that of learned men, when it has not been verified by experience and mathematical reasoning, is more an obstacle than an aid to attaining the truth. In this way, without attributing to B. knowledge much more extensive than that possessed by his contemporaries, it may be said that no one mastered the science of his time more fully than he did, nor did anyone establish its proper method with clearer awareness, even though, as would later happen to his compatriot Francesco Bacone, he did not always succeed in applying it and more than once was himself the victim of not a few idola fori e theatri, such as judicial astrology and the efficacy of incantations.
The uncertainties and obscurities of the Aristotelian text in those Latin translations that he considered deserving of being put to the flames, and perhaps also an acute desire to know better the science of the Greeks and to penetrate the Arab and Jewish world, in order to wrest from it the treasures still concealed from the West, stimulated him to learn Greek and to venture into the study of the Eastern languages. The study of Greek and Hebrew must have appeared to him of capital importance when he became aware of the serious difficulties involved in interpreting the Bible in the Latin Vulgate.
But if, on the one hand, B. presents the renewal of experimental science, to the point of having been considered the medieval precursor of Galileo, Francesco Bacone, and Cartesio, there is another aspect of his complex personality that brings him closer to Biagio Pascal. Just as his encounter with the Jansenists awakened in Pascal—who was wholly absorbed in his interest in physical and mathematical research—an acute need for faith to supplement the deficiencies of discursive reason, and led him back to drink from the great source of Augustinian thought, so his encounter with Franciscanism revealed to B. a higher truth than that of physical experience, and toward it he directed his restless soul. Like Pascal, B. too saw that man can know very few things by his own powers alone, without the aid of divine teaching. Mystery surrounds on every side the brief horizon of mortal vision. 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 within us the light of reason, as friar Adamo Marsh had taught him when he stated 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 fellow Franciscans, the Englishman Ruggero Marston, would also think; before all of them, Guglielmo Alverniste had maintained this view. Divine, likewise, are those inspirations that continually illumine our inner experience, of which he distinguishes seven degrees, from the illuminaciones pure scientiales all the way up to ecstatic rapture. And divine above all is the Revelation that God granted to the first men, of whatever was necessary to satisfy the human desire for knowledge. This primordial divine Revelation, without which the solution of the most arduous philosophical problems is impossible, was transmitted in summary form to humanity by the patriarchs and prophets of the Jewish people through Sacred Scripture; among other peoples, by contrast, it was obscured by innumerable errors. The purpose of philosophy is precisely to trace, through the study of the ancient philosophers, the dispersed and fragmentary truths of that first revealed wisdom. Philosophy, therefore, just as it proceeds from Revelation, is ordered toward the recovery of the first integral Revelation through theology. The historical progress of humanity is a return and a rediscovery.
But theology, as it was studied in his time, seemed to B. tainted by seven vices, from which he would have liked to see it cleansed (Op. minus, ed. Brewer, p. 322 ff.). These vices may be reduced to the incompetence of the masters of theology when treating scientific and philosophical matters of which they reveal themselves ignorant, whenever they happen to make incursions into an unfamiliar field; to the undeserved authority enjoyed by certain of these masters; to the preference given to Pietro Lombardo’s Liber sententiarum over Sacred Scripture; and to the errors of the Vulgate and the false interpretations of the sacred text. The study of Greek and Hebrew, as well as that of the sciences and mathematics, was intended, in the program pursued by B., to prepare theologians to read the Bible in the original text and to interpret the divine word correctly.
Just as the « esprit de finesse » reveals to Pascal what the « esprit géométrique » fails to discern,
Thus, interior experience, in the mystical contact with the divine light that shines in the innermost recesses of consciousness, completes, in B.’s thought, physical experience and corrects its illusions. Against the Averroists, who seemed to oppose the truths of reason to the truths of faith, he was not content merely to subordinate philosophy, in Thomistic fashion, to Revelation, 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 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. Ideas concerning the imminent coming of the Antichrist and the necessity of a reform of the Church inspire in him vehement expressions, invectives such as would shortly resound in Dante’s verse, and prophetic attitudes that contrast strangely with the mathematician’s habit.
It is precisely because of these striking contrasts that the figure of B. is eminently representative of the historical period to which it is bound, and in which fruitful germs of new life were germinating beneath the crust—already beginning to crack—of inveterate prejudices.
Editions: Fr. R. B. Opera quaedam hactenus inedita, ed. J. S. Brewer, London 1859 (contains the Op. tert., the Op. minus, and the Compendium philosophiae, all three fragmentary, and, in an appendix, the epistola 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 publishing the Opera hactenus inedita R. B. in Oxford in 1905; publication is still in progress. The following fascicles have appeared thus far: 1. Metaphysica and De vitiis contractis in studio theologiae; 2–4. the first and second books 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 disputed) and other brief works 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 (edited by the same), there 1614.