The Friar and the Cipher

by Lawrence Goldstone

  Either Raymond delivered the message incorrectly or it was wrongly interpreted by Foulques, but the cardinal came away with the notion that the writing had already been put to paper. He sent a return message indicating that he was extremely interested in what Bacon wished to send him and urged him to transmit the material as soon as possible. Aware of the political delicacy of soliciting unapproved work from a member of the Friars Minor after the Constitutions of Narbonne, he charged Bacon to communicate in secrecy.

  It is easy to imagine Bacon's frenzied reaction. After decades of work, he now had an opportunity to have his views heard by a man close to the pope but no immediate means to take advantage of it. It took money to produce a manuscript, and Bacon was now an impoverished friar. He could not, of course, openly petition his order for writing materials and the services of scribes to copy texts. If he wanted to obtain the wherewithal, he would have to do so privately, and so, to that end, he wrote to his brother in England, asking for funds. But his brother's fortunes had been wiped out in the civil war and he could not help.

  Family assistance out of the question, Bacon proceeded to quietly scrounge about among his acquaintances, borrowing wherever he could. He seems to have done so a little at a time, eventually working his way up to the sixty pounds that it would take to finish the task. During this time, he was doubtless working on his treatise, but just how much of it was completed in the next year or two is unclear.

  Then, on February 5, 1265, an unthinkable stroke of good fortune came Bacon's way. In the most unlikely of selections, to succeed Urban an astonished Cardinal Foulques was elected pope and was crowned on February 22, taking the name Clement IV.

  THE NEW POPE WAS UNIQUE in having neither a theological degree nor an ecclesiastic pedigree. Cardinal Foulques was chosen because he was French and had a history in Louis's court, and Louis was now the key player in Rome's efforts to repel the Hohenstaufens. After his elevation, the new pope immediately, if somewhat reluctantly, concluded the alliance with Charles of Anjou, whom he needed politically but distrusted, even detested, personally. Charles was crowned the king of Naples and Sicily in a ceremony in Rome by a delegation of cardinals, but not Clement, who remained in Viterbo. (Clement IV was never even to set foot in Rome.)

  The new king took his army to meet Manfred at Benevento, two hundred miles south of Rome. Manfred's Saracen archers gained an early advantage, but Charles's cavalry eventually turned the tide. When all was lost, Manfred, insisting on dying with honor, rode into the thick of the battle and was cut down. His own soldiers wept at the sight of his body, and afterward the French soldiers laid stones upon his grave, creating an enormous monument on the spot. After Benevento, only Frederick's twelve-year-old grandson, Conradin, remained, living with his mother in Germany.

  At about the same time, the English monarchy was restored when Henry's son, the future warrior king Edward I, “Longshanks,” rescued his father, defeating—and beheading—Simon de Montfort at the Battle of Evesham. In early 1266, the reinstated Henry sent an emissary to Viterbo to reaffirm his loyalty to the pope. When the emissary, Sir William Bonecor, passed through Paris on the way to Italy, he stopped to visit Roger Bacon. While there is no way to know for sure, it is possible that Bonecor was acting on Clement's instructions and that the meeting was either clandestine or disguised as a courtesy call to an old Oxford master. In any event, Bacon gave Bonecor a new letter for the pope, in which he explained that the writings he had promised two years before were not yet ready, not because of Bonaventura's prohibition but because he had had trouble raising the money.

  Bacon's detractors have painted him as a solitary crank, ensconced in Paris and having little effect on anyone save the few students that he taught privately. If this was so, it is hard to imagine a king's—or pope's—envoy going out of his way to meet a mere friar and then carrying a secret message to the pope on his behalf.

  Clement replied to Bacon in a letter dated June 1266, once again expressing a high degree of interest in what he had to say. He must even have had some idea of the subject, since one of the things that Clement stressed was that he was anxious to see Bacon's proposals to correct the evils in the Church. To add even more urgency, Clement, now the highest official in Christendom, restated his directive that Bacon transmit his writing in secret, and to do so regardless of any rule to the contrary by his order.

  Bacon set furiously to work. He was under pressure not simply to produce material quickly for Clement, but also to counter the influence of Aquinas. Thomas, who had been regent master in Rome since 1265, had just been appointed as the senior scriptural authority at Viterbo, where he seemed certain to have the new pope's ear.

  Bacon's ultimate plan was to produce a Scriptum Principali, essentially a vast encyclopedia, but that was too ambitious for the moment. Purely as a stopgap, he produced what he called the Opus Majus (Major Work). The urgency, the desperation that Bacon felt, the knowledge that he had only this one throw of the dice, is evident on his very first page, where he wrote, “I shall try and present to your Holiness . . . a plea that will win your support until my fuller and more definitive statement is completed.”

  The Opus Majus, which ran to more than eight hundred pages, is one of the most remarkable scientific documents ever written. Bacon presented a way of thinking, of approaching science, that is virtually unsurpassed in the thousand years since its creation. It was the most complete and incisive rendering of scientific method and philosophy since Aristotle, touching on almost every subject important in the Middle Ages—language, mathematics, philosophy, theology, health, natural science—all produced by a man forbidden to travel, working in a tiny cell eighteen hours a day. Because it was written not for a scholarly audience but to persuade a pope—Bacon scholar Jeremiah Hackett calls it “a grant application,” but “white paper” is probably more apt—the Opus Majus has the further advantage for modern readers of being laid out in language that is surprisingly accessible. In addition, the tone of the writing provides insight into the character of this pious, impassioned, stubborn, and fractious man.

  To stem what Bacon considered the cataclysmic shift in scholastic education toward legalism and sophistry as practiced by scholars like Aquinas, he proposed nothing less than an overhaul of the medieval curriculum. Specifically, he advocated substituting an objective, empirical curriculum, heavily weighted toward the study of languages and mathematics, for the rhetoric, pointless parsing, and formless logic currently in fashion. Most radically, Bacon emphasized the practical application of knowledge across all fields. “A thorough consideration of knowledge consists of two things,” his opening line began, “perception of what is necessary to obtain it, and the method of applying it to all matters that they may be directed by its means in the proper way” (italics added).

  To make his point, Bacon began the Opus Majus with an attack on the current method of scholarship. There were four causes of error, he asserted, “obstacles to grasping truth.” These were “submission to faulty or unworthy authority; influence of custom; popular prejudice; and, concealment of our own ignorance accompanied by an ostentatious display of our knowledge.” Of these, Bacon wrote, the last was by far the most pernicious.

  For no one is so learned in nature that he knows how to be certain in regard to all the truths involved in the nature and properties of a single fly, nor does he know how to give the particular reasons for its color and explain why it has so many feet, neither more nor less, nor can he give a reason for its members and properties . . . And since in comparison with what a man knows those things of which he is ignorant are infinite, and without comparison greater and better and more beautiful, he is out of his mind who extols himself in regard to his own knowledge.

  Those afflicted with this fourth error were not to be trusted, regardless of how sincere they seemed, since they themselves might be unaware of their condition. “Men blinded in the fog of these four errors do not perceive their own ignorance, but with every precaution cloak and defend it so a
s not to find a remedy; and, worst of all, although they are in the densest shadows of error, they think they are in the full light of truth.”

  Regardless of how receptive he thought Clement might be, Bacon was taking an enormous risk in beginning the work with an attack on a status quo that represented a thousand years of evolution of Christian doctrine. Such a gamble was surely motivated in part by desperation, but it would be a mistake to underestimate the passion Bacon felt for his point of view. In 1876, an English philosophy professor wrote, “It was the assertion of freedom of thought, of the claim of science to push forward to its conclusions, regardless of fancied consequences, with implicit trust in the grand law that all truth is ultimately harmonious.”

  Bacon's four causes of error are as valid today as they were in 1265. If the Opus Majus was limited to this section alone, it would retain immense value and could well serve as the beginnings of a code of scientific ethics.

  AFTER SUCH AN OPENING, Bacon must have felt the need to reassure Clement both of his own piety and that what he was proposing was every bit as orthodox and within acceptable Church boundaries as anything that Albert or Thomas might assert. Section Two (“of this plea,” as he phrased it) was entitled “Philosophy” but was actually an affirmation that ultimate truth was found only in scripture and that the revealed word represented the highest knowledge of all. But science, observation, and experiment were not enemies of faith, forces to be controlled lest the power of the religion be undermined. Quite the contrary. It was the very pursuit of knowledge that led inexorably to God. “The end of all true philosophy,” he wrote, “is to arrive at a knowledge of the Creator through knowledge of the created world.”

  Preliminaries thus dispensed with, Bacon turned to specifics. The third section, “Study of Tongues,” was the first of four that specifically laid out his plan for educational reform. In this section was an entreaty that the study of Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic be added to the trivium; this was possibly the first time that a Christian scholar had advocated the formal study of comparative languages.

  In Bacon's time, translation was the primary means of acquiring base knowledge, both in the sciences and in the newly resurrected philosophical works. The accuracy of any deduction or experiment proceeding from that knowledge depended largely on the quality of translation used. One of Bacon's key complaints against Aquinas and Albert, neither of whom had learned Greek, was that they proceeded from grossly flawed translations, especially of Aristotle. He considered William of Moerbeke particularly incompetent, although William's translations turned out to be a good deal better than Bacon thought. (That he commented on William at all, of course, confirms that he was aware of Aquinas's work on Aristotle.)

  Bacon's advocacy of the study of language was not to ensure the accurate representation of Aristotle and the Arab commentators alone, however. Intimacy with other languages had practical applications, such as facilitating commerce across the Mediterranean. In theology, Bacon insisted that Hebrew and Greek were necessary for a full understanding of the Old and New Testaments. Lacking this, “theologians” had substituted The Sentences for direct study of the scriptures, and in so doing had created what Bacon considered a false theology. The Sentences would not provide “a thirtieth” of the knowledge as could be had through study of the scriptures themselves; yet in Paris, Bacon asserted, that was precisely the way theology was then taught.

  Although Bacon included the beginnings of Greek and Hebrew grammars in the Opus Majus, he did not hold himself up as a supreme linguist—there is no evidence that he had any serious knowledge of Arabic, for example, nor did he claim it. He was merely asserting that the results of a deductive or experimental process could be considered accurate only if the assumptions or source material underlying that process were accurate as well, an element of scientific methodology centuries ahead of its time.

  THE FOURTH SECTION, and by far the longest in the work, is entitled “Mathematics” and was, with the fifth section, “Optics,” the core of Bacon's program of education. Mathematics, as Bacon used the term, was far more than simply a means of determining quantity, position, or movement through the use of arithmetic, geometry, algebra, or trigonometry. It was a philosophic base, the discipline from which all others sprang. He called mathematics “the gate and the key” to knowledge “and all things of this world” and included in this section such unlikely subheadings as “Grammar” and “Philosophy.” “All categories,” he wrote, “depend on a knowledge of quantity, which mathematics treats, and therefore the whole excellence of logic depends on mathematics.” (This definition is not Platonic, as some have asserted. Bacon is speaking quite clearly of Aristotelian reasoning, not geometric elegance.)

  It is easy to see how mathematics, when interpreted in this way, could oversee virtually all the other sciences—astronomy, anatomy, biology, geography, physics, chemistry, optics, agronomy, alchemy, and astrology. All the means of commerce, travel, growing food, and tending herds would also fall under the mathematical umbrella, as would the arts—painting, sculpture, poetry, and music. Seen in this light, mathematics was, Bacon believed, the greatest gift God ever gave to man.

  But things had gone horribly wrong. “Neglect of this branch now for thirty or forty years has destroyed the whole system of study of the Latins,” he told the pope. This was as close as Bacon came to an outright denunciation of Albert, Thomas, and the legalists. “What is worse,” he added, invoking his fourth cause of error, “men ignorant of this do not perceive their own ignorance, and therefore do not seek a remedy.”

  Much of the underlying theory in Bacon's mathematics and optics sections and a good deal of the specifics came from Grosseteste's research, which was in turn derived from theories first stated by the Greeks and the Arabs. “Very illustrious men like Robert, Bishop of Lincoln,” Bacon wrote, “and Friar Adam de Marisco [Adam Marsh] who by the power of mathematics have learned to explain the causes of all things . . . moreover, the sure proof of this matter is found in the writing of those men, as for example on impressions such as the rainbow, comets, generation of heat, investigation of localities on earth and other matters of which both theology and philosophy make use.”

  The absence of original data, however, does not take away from Bacon's analyses. It was the ways in which Bacon proposed to use the data that was groundbreaking. He was not interested in theory for its own sake—that was the crime of which he was accusing the Dominicans. Bacon wanted science applied. He consolidated and synthesized available material more clearly and completely than had ever been done previously, in order to use it. The Opus Majus was filled with practical applications of mathematical science, some, such as the reform of the calendar, based on sound footing, others, such as the means to ward off old age, easy to discredit (although even this was based in a homeopathic approach not all that different from health food applications of the present day).

  In optics, for example, he noted the possible usefulness of lenses “to old people and people with weak eyes, for they can see any letter however small if magnified enough.” Along with the written material, he sent Clement a lens to allow the pope to conduct some small experiments of his own. About twenty years after Bacon sent the Opus Majus to Viterbo, eyeglasses came into use in Italy.

  Bacon cast his mathematical net everywhere, sometimes with great effect and insight, nowhere more than in his section on geography. Although wider travel and increased commerce had caused something of a renaissance in geography by the thirteenth century, the most important work ever written on the subject, Ptolemy's Geography, would remain lost to European scholars for another two centuries. Ptolemy's other great work, the Almagest, on astronomy, was available, at least in part. From this and the work of Aristotle and others, Bacon derived a brilliant overall construct.

  He postulated a spherical earth through which, for geometric orientation, he drew three mutually perpendicular lines meeting at the center, thus creating x, y, and z axes. For geographic division, he divided the sphere into qu
arters with two circumferences, one around what later became the equator, and another through the poles. He then assumed that every place on earth was the apex of a cone, and used coordinates of objects in the heavens to project these apexes onto the earth, a theoretical navigator plotting by the stars. He thus became the first man since Ptolemy (although he did not know it) to advocate the use of coordinates to identify cities, rivers, mountains, and boundaries.

  Bacon went further, producing a large map on which were plotted the coordinates of many of the cities of Europe. He used Toledo as a base and then created a grid to show relative distance and location of much of the known world. That does not mean he was always right. As to the unknown world, Bacon ascribed to Aristotle's erroneous assertion that “the sea between the west of Spain and the eastern edge of India is of no great extent.”

  The original of Bacon's map does not survive, but a plagiarized version may have changed the course of history. Bacon's geographic theories found their way, almost verbatim—and without attribution—into a treatise entitled Imago Mundi by one Cardinal Pierre D'Ailly. D'Ailly's work, which was written in the early 1400s but not published until the 1480s, contained a large map exactly like the one Bacon had described in the Opus Majus. Sometime in the late 1480s, the Imago Mundi was read with great interest by an obscure Italian navigator named Christopher Columbus, who made almost nine hundred handwritten notations in the margins. The great nineteenth-century geographer Alexander von Humboldt believed that Bacon's passages about the size of the Atlantic Ocean were key to Columbus's undertaking his journey west. (There are those who claim that Columbus might not have read the work until 1494. If so, it seems odd that Columbus would take such interest in a theoretical document the veracity of which he had already tested.)