JOHN of BACONTHORP (BACON). - Carmelite theologian, born in Norfolk county c. 1280, died c. 1348. He studied at Oxford under Robert Walsingham and at Paris under Guido Terrena. At the latter university, in the academic year 1322-23, he obtained the mastership and remained there for the following two years as regent of the Carmelite school. He taught at Cambridge and Oxford. For a time he was provincial of England.
His output is very extensive: In IV Sententiarum (Paris 1484, Milan 1510, Venice 1525, Cremona 1618, Madrid 1754); Quodlibeta, I-III (Venice 1527, Cremona 1618, Madrid 1754). He commented on Holy Scripture (the Gospels and various epistles of St Paul), Aristotle (De Anima, Metaphysica, Ethica) and various works of St Augustine and St Anselm. He also wrote several short treatises on Carmelite spirituality that were published repeatedly.
He was considered the head of the Carmelite school and had many commentators, especially in the 17th-18th centuries. The epithet “prince of the Averroists” was erroneously applied to him, having no other basis than a citation by Agostino Nifo. He had no connection with Latin Averroism; on the contrary, he remained firmly within the bounds of orthodox and realist Scholasticism, opposing the innovations of the terminists. An original thinker, he proposed personal solutions to many philosophical and theological problems: it is not an exaggeration to speak of a “Baconthorpian” Scholastic system. Closing the period of medieval Scholasticism, he appears as a critic who weighs the solutions given from St Thomas Aquinas onward and gathers into a complex synthesis what he considers best thought out.
A characteristic feature is his solution to the problem of universals: their foundation is not a real, rational, or formal composition of the individual, but the capacity of the individual itself to be grasped through a plurality of concepts; hence the intentional distinction (a term used by Henry of Ghent).
In the question of the formal principle of the supposit, to explain how an individuated nature can fail to be a person, he refers to the actuation of created substances and distinguishes a twofold moment: first it is constituted as nature (i.e. as an individual determined substance), then as supposit and person (i.e. as closed in itself). In the Incarnation the Word takes human nature in its first stage of actuation and eminently supplies the second.
Very interesting, though little known, is his
doctrine on the Immaculate Conception. From the very first instant of her conception Mary is placed in a twofold relation: generation links her to Adam from whom she should have inherited original sin, but her predestination as Mother of God links her to Christ from whom she receives grace. Since her predestination as Mother of God dominates her entire being, there is no temporal interval between the two relations to Christ and to Adam; hence original sin could not stain her, because grace prevails in her from the first instant, whereas in us this occurs only with baptism.