Roger Bacon

This Franciscan friar and priest was born in in Ilchester in Somerset, England (1214-1292). Bacon became a master at Oxford, lecturing on Aristotle, and by the 1230s had been invited to teach at the University of Paris.  While there, he lectured on Latin grammar, Aristotelian logic, arithmetic, geometry, and the mathematical aspects of astronomy and music. He left Paris in 1247 and spent the next ten years studying optics. In 1256-57, he became a friar in the Franciscan Order in either Paris or Oxford. By the mid-1260s, he was undertaking a search for patrons who could secure permission and funding for his return to Oxford. He struck up a friendship with Guy de Foulques, bishop of Narbonne, cardinal of Sabina, and papal legate, the man who would eventually be elected Pope Clement IV. Clement’s patronage permitted Bacon to engage in a wide-ranging consideration of the state of knowledge in his era.

In 1267-68, Bacon sent the Pope his Opus Majus, which presented his views on how to incorporate Aristotelian logic and science into a new theology, supporting Grosseteste’s text-based approach. In Part IV of the Opus Majus, Bacon proposed a calendrical reform similar to the later system introduced in 1582 under Pope Gregory XIII. Bacon also sent his Opus Minus, De Multiplicatione Specierum, De Speculis Comburentibus, an optical lens, and possibly other works on alchemy and astrology. The entire process has been called “one of the most remarkable single efforts of literary productivity” in history, with Bacon composing referenced works of around a million words in about a year. Sometime after 1278, Bacon returned to the Franciscan House at Oxford, where he continued his studies and is presumed to have spent most of the remainder of his life. His last dateable writing—the Compendium Studii Theologiae—was completed in 1292. He died shortly afterwards and was buried at Oxford.

Bacon was the first European to describe in detail the process of making gunpowder, and he proposed flying machines and motorized ships and carriages. He called for theological reforms, arguing that theologians should focus their attention primarily on the Bible itself, learning the languages of its original sources thoroughly. He was fluent in several of these languages and was able to note and bemoan several corruptions of scripture, and of the works of the Greek philosophers that had been mistranslated or misinterpreted by scholars working in Latin. He also argued for the education of theologians in science (“natural philosophy”) and for a complete reform of the university, adding subjects in astronomy, weights, agriculture, medicine, mechanics, and experimental science, because, as he asserted, “Without experiment, nothing can be adequately known.” As a result, he was partially responsible for a revision of the medieval university curriculum, which saw the addition of optics to the traditional quadrivium.

As a man well aware of Grosseteste’s work, Bacon contributed to Grosseteste’s vision of microscopes, telescopes, flight, and likewise championed the importance of mathematics to scientific study. He saw how experimental science could lead people away from the errors of superstition and magic by demonstrating how the world really works. In order to think along these lines, clearly Roger Bacon had to have a Christian world view that nature was rational and obeyed natural laws.  Roger Bacon is rightly honored as being one of the fathers of the scientific method, fully 300 years before it became popular. A crater on the moon is named in Roger Bacon’s honor.