BRADWARDINE (BRAGWARDIN, BREDWARDIN, BRADVARDINUS), THOMAS. - Theologian, philosopher, scientist, and English mathematician, born in the diocese of Chichester c. 1290, died at Lambeth (London) on 26 Aug. 1349. He accompanied Edward III on his expedition on the Rhine in 1338, and was still part of the king’s retinue when the latter landed in France in 1346. In 1348 B. was elected archbishop of Canterbury and received episcopal consecration at Avignon in July 1348. Despite the plague then raging in England, he hastened to Canterbury, but fell ill on landing and died en route before reaching his archiepiscopal see.
His principal work is the Summa de causa Dei contra Pelagium (London 1618), dedicated to his colleagues and pupils at Merton College (as the title reads, ad suos Mertonenses). It is a defense of the cause of God, written with warm and profound conviction, against certain tendencies in the theology and philosophy of the day that aimed almost entirely to suppress the divine foreknowledge of future contingents in order to safeguard human free will. In his zeal B. fell into the opposite extreme and professed a determinism that left little room for human freedom.
B.’s influence was especially important in the fields of moral theology and of the mathematical natural sciences. With his Tractatus de proportionibus velocitatum in motibus (Paris 1495, Venice 1505, Vienna 1515), B. became the founder of the new dynamics of the fourteenth century. His commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences appears to be lost. Other works: Arithmetica speculativa (Paris 1495 and 1530); Geometria speculativa (ibid. 1495 and 1516); Ars memorativa (unpublished); De futuris contingentibus (partially edited by B. M. Xiberta, in Aus der Geisteswelt des Mittelalters, II, Münster 1935, pp. 1169-80). His contemporaries already honored B. with the title Doctor profundus.