JOHN OF BACONTHORP (BACONE). - Carmelite theologian, b. in the county of Norfolk ca. 1280, d. ca. 1348. He studied at Oxford under Robert Walsingham and at Paris under Guido Terrena. At this University, in the academic year 1322-23, he obtained the mastership and for the following two years remained there as regent of the Carmelite school. He taught at Cambridge and at Oxford. For some 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 Sacred Scripture (Mt. and several epistles of St. Paul), on Aristotle (De Anima, Metaphysica, Ethica) and on various works of St. Augustine and St. Anselm. He also wrote several opuscules of Carmelite spirituality, published many times.
He was regarded as the head of the Carmelite school and had many commentators, especially in the 17th-18th centuries. He was wrongly given the title of "prince of the Averroists," this having no other foundation than a citation of Agostino Nifo. He had no connection with Latin Averroism; on the contrary, he remained decidedly within the sphere of orthodox and realist Scholasticism, in opposition to the innovations of the terminists. An original thinker, he set forth personal solutions to many philosophical and theological problems: it is not an exaggeration to speak of a Baconian scholastic system. Closing the period of medieval Scholasticism, he appears as the critic who sifts the solutions given from St. Thomas onward and gathers into a complex synthesis what he considers best thought out.
Characteristic is his solution of the problem of universals: their foundation is not a composition of the individual, whether real, or of reason, or formal, 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, in order to explain how an individuated nature can fail to be a person, he has recourse to the actualization of created substances and distinguishes a twofold moment: first it is constituted as nature (that is, as a determined individual substance), then as supposit and person (that is, as closed in itself). In the Incarnation the Word takes the human nature in its first stage of actualization and eminently supplies its second.
Very interesting, as it is little known, is his doctrine on the Immaculate Conception. From the first instant of her conception Mary is placed in a twofold reference: generation links her back to Adam, from whom she ought to draw original guilt, but her predestination to be Mother of God links her back to Christ, from whom she receives Grace. Since the predestination to be Mother of God dominates her whole being, between the two relations to Christ and to Adam there is no interval of time, and therefore original sin could not stain her because Grace prevailed in her from the first instant, whereas in us this comes about only with Baptism.
Bibliography4 works
Bartolomeo Xiberta