BRADWARDINE (Bragwardin, Bredwardin, Bradvardinus), Thomas. - English theologian, philosopher, scientist and mathematician, b. in the diocese of Chichester ca. 1290, d. at Lambeth (London) on 26 Aug. 1349. He accompanied Edward III on his expedition to the Rhine in 1338, and was again 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 set out at once for Canterbury, but had scarcely landed when he fell ill and died on the journey, before he had reached his archiepiscopal see.
B.'s principal work is the Summa de causa Dei contra Pelagium (London 1618), which he dedicated to his colleagues and pupils of Merton College (ad suos Mertonenses, as the title reads). It is a defense of the "cause of God," written with warm and profound conviction, against certain tendencies of the theology and philosophy of the time that aimed at almost completely suppressing the divine foreknowledge of future contingents in order to save human free will. In his zeal B. falls into the opposite extreme and professes a determinism that leaves very little room for human freedom.
B.'s influence was important especially in the field of moral theology and in that of the mathematical natural sciences. With his Tractatus de proportionibus motuum (Paris 1495, Venice 1505, Vienna 1515), B. became the founder of the new dynamics of the 14th century. His commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard appears to be lost. Other works: Arithmetica speculativa (Paris 1495 and 1530); Geometria speculativa (ibid. 1495 and 1516); Ars memorativa (unpublished); De futuris contingentibus (partly edited by B. M. Xiberta, in Aus der Geisteswelt des Mittelalters, II, Münster 1935, pp. 1169-80). Even his contemporaries honored B. with the title of Doctor profundus.
Bibliography2 works
Dict. of national biography, II, pp. 1096-98; J. F. Laun, T. von B., der Schüler Augustins und Lehrer Wiclifs, in Zeitschr. f. Kirchengesch., 47 (1928), pp. 333-56; Überweg, II, pp. 619, 622-23, 788 (bibl.); K. Michalski, Le problème de la volonté d'Oxford et à Paris au XIVe siècle, Leopoli 1937, passim; I. J. Churchill, B., in DHG, X, coll. 345-46 (bibl.); A. Maier, Der Funktionsbegriff in der Physik des 14. Jahrh., in Divus Thomas, 24 (1946), pp. 147-65; id., Die Vorläufer Galileis im 14. Jahrh., Roma 1949, cap. 5.
Anneliese Maier