The Friar and the Cipher

by Lawrence Goldstone

  In December 1250, Frederick caught a fever while hunting at Foggia. It turned to dysentery, and in three days he was dead. The world had lost one of its great leaders, both intellectual and political. In the end, he did not change the world as he had wanted to, but he had come very, very close.

  To ensure the Holy Roman Empire's irrevocable dissolution, the pope immediately offered the kingdom of Sicily to the highest bidder. There was not a great deal of interest. In addition to paying the purchase price, the new king would also have to fight off Frederick's two sons, Conrad and Manfred, who were not likely to look favorably on an attempt to snatch their birthright.

  Eventually the pope approached Henry and suggested that Sicily would be a perfect realm for his young son Edmund. Although he had no money to pay for the acquisition and was ill equipped to mount a military operation thousands of miles from home, Henry, without consulting his barons, snapped up Innocent's offer. To fund the acquisition, he decided simply to, once more, raise taxes.

  Just as these new taxes were levied, Roger Bacon seems to have run out of money. He did not approach his family, or if he did, funds were not forthcoming. Bacon was now firmly associated with Oxford, and Oxford was, in turn, associated with Simon de Montfort and the barons. When the barons decided to issue a manifesto of grievances against the king, it was the Oxford masters to whom they went to help draw them up. This cannot have pleased Bacon's royalist family.

  But there was another alternative for Bacon to gain the wherewithal to continue his work. By the 1250s, nearly every important medieval scholar had come to be associated with one of the two orders: Albert and Thomas with the Dominicans, and Alexander of Hales, Robert Grosseteste, and Adam Marsh with the Franciscans. Despite the vows of poverty taken by each individual friar that prevented the purchase of scientific materials, each order seemed more than willing to make them available. When Grosseteste died in 1253, he left his entire library—not only his books, but all of his work, including the Greek grammar and the manuscripts on the rainbow—to the Franciscan convent at Oxford. These were now available to any member of the Friars Minor granted access by the order.

  Bacon was a deeply religious man who believed in the simple moral life of St. Francis. Also, given the choice of the order of Albert and Thomas and that of Grosseteste and Adam Marsh, he was unlikely to choose the former. So, sometime around 1255, he followed his mentors, the two men he most admired in the world, renounced worldly possessions, and donned the coarse gray robe of the Friars Minor.

  His timing could not have been worse. Just months after Roger Bacon put his personal and scientific future in the hands of the Franciscans, the long-simmering feud between the theology masters and the mendicants at the University of Paris exploded. To hold on to its gains at the university and control the growing schism within its ranks, the Friars Minor appointed a new leader, an autocrat called, of all things, “Bonaventura” (good luck) who believed that empirical science was a tool of the devil.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Autocracy in the Order

  of St. Francis

  • • •

  BONAVENTURA WAS BORN JOHN OF FIDENZA, in Bagnoregno near Viterbo, Italy, in 1221. According to legend, as an infant he suffered from a serious illness that was cured personally by St. Francis, who exclaimed, “O buono ventura,” upon his recovery. He joined the Franciscans in 1238, at age seventeen, while a student in Paris studying with Alexander of Hales. He stayed on to teach, and in 1248 was granted the chair in theology that Alexander had secured for the Franciscans.

  Bonaventura preached a return to the apostolic poverty espoused by St. Francis, and he lived according to those dictates himself. He revered tradition, distrusted innovation, and moved to codify Christian theology according to previously accepted theories and reasoning. He was not ignorant of Aristotle and the new learning and, in fact, quoted more frequently from Aristotle, albeit often in harsh criticism, than any other theoretician that had come before.

  The crux of Bonaventura's philosophy was that all creation was a reflection of God. No part of the universe, from human beings, to stars, to rocks, to falling raindrops, was to be considered in any way except as a small reflection of God's greatness. The beauty of a flower, the expanse of the heavens—the only truth to be sought from these was God's truth. All knowledge flowed through revelation and was possible only through grace. One did not reason the existence of God—one felt it. This was perhaps the closest anyone had come to St. Francis's original vision of a faith-based, anti-intellectual theology, yet Bonaventura expressed these sentiments in well-written, logical, sophisticated, and elegant prose.

  Not only did this philosophy leave no room for scientific experiment, it completely negated any value of observed phenomena or material experience. And so, with the ascension of Bonaventura to minister general of the Order of the Friars Minor, the spirit of scientific inquiry that had once permeated the order, personified by Robert Grosseteste and Adam Marsh, and which had so appealed to Roger Bacon, became anathema.

  Bonaventura came to power while holding the Franciscan chair of theology in Paris during a time of extreme turmoil for the orders. The cause was familiar; some students were beaten and left for dead in the streets of Paris, and the arts faculty and secular theological masters walked off the job. Once again, the friars continued to teach. But this time, remembering how much money and influence they had lost in 1229, the seculars took action against the friars. They expelled and excommunicated the three mendicant chair holders (as clerics, they had the power to do this) and proclaimed that from then on, each order could have only one chair, and whoever was appointed to fill it had to swear to abide by the university's rule, which meant doing what the seculars told them.

  The second Dominican chair, the one the seculars had just removed, was Albert's old chair, the one that Thomas Aquinas, sitting in Paris, was waiting to fill.

  The friars protested to Innocent IV, who rescinded the excommunication and ordered the seculars to readmit the three friars. The seculars refused and instead drafted a petition to be delivered to the pope by a highly respected secular theology master named William of St. Amour. William's travel expenses were paid by donations taken among all of the secular faculties.

  In Rome, William dredged up every abuse by the friars that could be found—and he did not have to look far. These were not poor beggars, he argued, simple men who wanted nothing more than to preach God's word, but rather two organized and ambitious cabals populated by overfed, greedy hypocrites, perhaps even heretics, whose sole aim was to seize power and control the Church. In the apocalyptic mood of the day, William even claimed the mendicants were the forerunners of the Antichrist. (That the Antichrist had died four years before did not faze William. There was evidently always another Antichrist just over the horizon.)

  William convinced Innocent, and in November 1254 the pope severely curtailed the activities of both orders. But if Innocent was with William, fortune was not. Twelve days later, before the edict could be enforced, Innocent died.

  In the quickest papal election in memory, with both orders throwing their influence behind him, a new pope, the aging Alexander IV, was elected unanimously two weeks later. Alexander, who had been a cardinal protector of the Franciscans, was one of the staunchest supporters the friars had in the curia. In his second day as pope, Alexander overturned his predecessor's ruling and restored all rights to the friars in Paris.

  But William enjoyed widespread support, not just among the secular theological faculty, but also among other churchmen who had grown to detest the friars' power, gained, they felt, more by intrigue than piety. The seculars ignored the pope's ruling. Both Dominicans and Franciscans were jeered at in the streets of Paris, and they feared to leave their quarters. Finally, Louis IX was forced to call out the royal archers to protect the friars.

  Louis then tried to play peacemaker. He formed a committee of arbitration, and in early 1256 accepted its recommendations and declared peace. Though the terms might h
ave tilted toward the friars, they did not represent total victory for either side. William was unmoved and, in an utterly featherbrained display of pique, launched a personal attack against the king in a sermon. He implied that Louis had been brainwashed by the friars and that he was a thief and a hypocrite besides. He advised Louis to stop allowing himself to be influenced by false messengers who should be off begging instead of trying to meddle in education or politics.

  William, as a faculty member, enjoyed clerical immunity, but Louis nonetheless might have slaughtered him then and there—summary execution, even of clerics, was not an unknown phenomenon in the thirteenth century. Instead, with the forbearance that would later gain him sainthood, the king merely petitioned Pope Alexander, who was only too happy to condemn William's work and deprive him of office and benefits. Louis then banished William from Paris, Thomas Aquinas got his chair, and Bonaventura was appointed minister general of the Friars Minor.

  When Bonaventura took office he was faced not simply with the threat from the seculars. Internal dissent was threatening to rip the Franciscans apart. On one side were the Spirituales, who were insisting on the literal observance of the original vision of St. Francis, especially the admonitions against material wealth. On the other were the Relaxati, who wished to temper the original rules of the order to adapt to the times. Ordinarily Bonaventura, the simplest and most pious of men, would have favored the Spirituales—as did Bacon—but complicating matters was the extremely mystical turn taken by many of them who had subscribed to the apocalyptic visions of Joachim of Flora.

  If he was going to preserve the order, Bonaventura knew he must act quickly and decisively. He moved to brand some of the Joachimite Spirituales as heretics at an ecclesiastical tribunal, causing two to be condemned to prison for life. He also acted against the Relaxati by advancing a program to regularize rules of the order. What Bonaventura proposed was to erect “an honorable fence [to] surround the mouth and other senses and acts, deeds and morals” of the brothers. It was this “honorable fence” that was to imprison Roger Bacon.

  Bonaventura's program, dubbed the “Constitutions of Narbonne,” was adopted three years later, in 1260. The Order of the Friars Minor, once led merely by force of example by St. Francis, was now to be run according to strict and inflexible rules emanating from the minister general. There were new rules for begging—from whom and under what circumstances—to counter the accusation that the mendicants were simply robbers of the poor. Friars were now responsible for ensuring that money and goods from the rich would end up in the hands of the needy, not in their own pockets. (Bonaventura was not completely successful here.) The Relaxati were not shut out under the new rules, however. The new minister general approved of the order holding property as long as ownership was disguised and administered by a papal trustee.

  For all the rules of public conduct, the cornerstone of enforcement of the new regime was, not surprisingly, censorship.

  Contact with outsiders—and that included other church officials—was now forbidden without prior review from Bonaventura himself. The order was now to speak with one voice, that of the minister general. “Let no brother go to the Court of the Lord Pope or send a brother without permission of the Minister-General. Let them, if they have gone otherwise, to be expelled from the Curia by the procurators of the Order.”

  There were equally restrictive prohibitions on writing.

  We prohibit any new writing from being published outside the Order, unless it shall have first been examined carefully by the Minister-General . . . anyone who contravenes this shall be kept for three days on bread and water and lose his writing . . . Let no brother write books, or cause them to be written for sale, and let the Provisional Minister not dare to have or keep any books without the license of the Minister-General, or let any brothers have or keep them without the permission of the Provincial Ministers.

  Roger Bacon was suddenly cut off, not simply from communicating his ideas to the outside world, but even from furthering them within the order. There was nothing in the forty-year history of the Friars Minor that would have allowed him to anticipate this cataclysmic turn. Unlike the Dominican order, which had been founded specifically to perform an enforcement function for the pope, and where top-down organization was vital to that purpose, St. Francis had founded an order whose very essence was the personal choice to fulfill its founder's vision. The Franciscans had therefore developed as more of a confederation than an oligarchy. The English branch, mostly as a result of the influence of Grosseteste, had evolved very differently from that of the French or the Italian. Now all that was to change.

  SHORTLY AFTER BONAVENTURA PROPOSED HIS REFORMS IN 1257, Roger Bacon was transferred from Oxford to a convent in Paris where he could be more closely watched. His work, his outspoken nature, and his known sympathy for the Spirituales all made him a threat to the new minister general. Adam Marsh had recently died, and Bacon was denied the protection that Aquinas enjoyed with Albert.

  In Paris, Bacon was not allowed to work or study but was instead forced to perform a series of exhausting menial tasks. Although he was apparently permitted to instruct a small group of students without pay, he was denied access to the university or his former colleagues. The order did all it could to shut him off from the outside world. He would write in 1267 that he had “for ten years been exiled from [his] former University fame,” and also, “for my superiors and brothers, disciplining me with hunger, kept me under close guard and would not permit anyone to come to me, fearing that my writings would be divulged to others [rather] than to the chief pontiff and themselves.” This treatment—the enforced fasting, the poverty, the menial labor, the begging—took its toll on a man who was already in his mid-forties. They treated him with “unspeakable violence,” he wrote, and as a result his health broke down and he had the energy to neither teach nor write.

  Over those next few years, into the early 1260s, while the Franciscan Bacon languished in a small cell in Paris, the Dominican Thomas Aquinas, now one of the brightest stars in the Church, returned to Italy.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Theology Becomes a Science:

  The Logic of Thomas Aquinas

  • • •

  AQUINAS HAD LEFT PARIS IN 1259 (giving up his chair to the next Dominican) and went to the priory at Naples, where he had been originally inducted into the order. As the first Italian to earn a chair in theology in Paris (just as Albert had been the first German), he was, according to an early biographer, “the splendor of the Roman province.” He was made a preacher general, which gave him a voice in making policy, and was also allowed a good deal of time to study and work. Almost from the moment he arrived, he was assigned a personal secretary, Reginald of Piperno. Reginald would spend the rest of his life following his master around from place to place, taking notes or dictation and transcribing Aquinas's notoriously difficult-to-read handwriting.

  Since the time of Saint Dominic, the Friars Preachers had sent a representative to the pope, a liaison between the papacy and the order, a position that had evolved into a high-level advisory post on matters of theology. Every pope was required to field questions from all over Europe on Church doctrine, and whoever answered those questions in effect set religious policy. In 1261, the order sent Aquinas to the papal court at Orvieto to become the pope's theologian.

  Intellectually, there could not have been a better man for the job. Unlike his contemporaries who merely read philosophy and applied it—most in something of a slapdash manner—Aquinas was a philosopher, the greatest mind in the Church since Augustine.

  When he assumed his position at the pope's side, theological policy was very much up for grabs. On one side was Bonaventura, the last great Augustinian philosopher, who rejected Aristotle's logic and fought to retain the mystical interpretations that had guided Church doctrine for eight centuries. Although opposition to Aristotle was centered among the Franciscans, fear of the Philosopher was widespread, even among Dominicans. At the other extreme wer
e those who unconditionally embraced Aristotle, or at least the Aristotle of Averroës. Proponents of this view were centered among the arts masters at Paris who were beginning to form themselves into a cohesive movement. These scholars believed not only that reason just might hold primacy over faith, but, even more threatening, that scripture needed a complete overhaul or at least a reinterpretation to bring it into line with the new science.

  Aquinas could now use his position to attempt to negotiate a path through these two seemingly irreconcilable arguments. It was his genius that he understood—as probably did Bacon as well—that the war over theory was already over. It was no longer a question of whether Bonaventura and the Augustinians could hold back the Aristotelian tide, but only in what manner Aristotle was going to be incorporated into dogma.

  During his tenure at Orvieto, Aquinas set himself to obtaining the fullest and most comprehensive translations of Aristotle possible. Not satisfied with the Latin versions rendered in Spain and Sicily, he began to utilize more recent translations, these from William of Moerbeke, a Dominican who would later become bishop of Corinth. It is likely that some of William's later translations were the direct result of entreaties by Aquinas perhaps even at the behest of the pope, but, in any event, Aquinas gobbled them up as quickly as William could turn them out.

  From there, Aquinas began a line-by-line analysis of Aristotle's work, an undertaking not attempted since Averroës. (Albert had merely translated and explained, sometimes creatively, but had not tried to interpret.) To this Aquinas added an equally scrupulous analysis of the Arabic commentaries. This work would occupy him for the rest of his life and, when he was done, he had remade not only Aristotle but the Christian faith as well.

  In one of the most brilliant leaps that any theologian would ever attempt, Aquinas decided that if Christian revelation could not be made to conform to Aristotelian logic, then somehow Aristotelian logic would have to be made to conform to Christian revelation. He met the challenge of scientific inquiry by making theology a theoretical science in itself. He produced scholastic, Aristotelian proofs for every key scriptural assertion, everything from the existence of God to the primacy of revelation, to the pseudo-Christianity of Aristotle. Although the Church did not yet know or appreciate it, Thomas Aquinas almost single-handedly gave Catholicism the tools with which to repel the onrush of empirical science. Because of him, for the next three centuries, the Church would maintain its supremacy as the ultimate authority over matters not only of heaven but of earth as well. So far ahead of any other theological thinker was Aquinas that his time is often referred to as “The Age of Scholasticism,” almost as if the previous seven hundred years had not existed.