DOCTOR MIRABILIS

{Why Roger Bacon?--Easy!--In the nineteenth century he was proclaimed the first experimental scientist of the modern era--- a distinction to reckon with. His legend was rather overblown, but that should not be our reason to cut him down beneath his actual size, and the fact that he was a towering historical figure cannot be diminished by exaggerated claims of superstardom.

In fact, he was indeed a bona fide scientist. He was also a passionate critic of the special brand of “cultural illiteracy” of his age, which consisted in linguistic deficiency of the Biblical and Aristotelian scholars who all knew Latin, of course, but only a tiny handful could understand the Greek of Plato and Aristotle and of the New Testament, or the Hebrew and Aramaic of the Bible, or the Arabic of Avicenna and Averroes, for that matter, which was inevitably leading to gross mistranslations, misinterpretations, and other grotesque deficiencies of his contemporary scholarship, all of which he was eager to expose, for which he had proper credentials, being fluent in several languages.

He was equally appalled by the scientific illiteracy of most churchmen and tried to encourage the inclusion of science in educational curricula. In matters theological, he suggested paying less attention to miniscule, unimportant details, which had been the predominant bones of contention before and in his time, and more attention to a serious study of the Bible, envisaging in this view the revolutionary theological reorientation of the Reformation. Generally speaking, he was never trying to set up science in opposition to religion, as some of his “hagiographers” would claim, but explicitly promoted the need to incorporate philosophy and science into the super-discipline of theology, which he never intended to disparage, but always considered to be paramount.

…Why Roger Bacon?--Ask no more.}

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Proceeding from teacher to student, from Albertus to Thomas would have been the most natural transition, except that a foreign body has inserted itself into the normal course, by virtue of formal chronology. There is a span of thirty-two years between those two, and now a third party born after one, but before the other is calling for an intermission in the Scholastic saga, so that it can be heard in procedural order. I have called him a foreign body because, whereas there is a continuity and similarity between the said Scholastics, this new subject of ours shows a distinctly different frame of mind from any regular thinker’s, in the emerging Thomistic tradition.

Doctor Mirabilis, such was the nickname of the Englishman Roger Bacon, never to be confused with his latter-day countryman Francis Bacon, whom we shall visit in a later entry. Roger Bacon (1212-1292) was particularly famous for the reverential legend, which grew around his name in the nineteenth century, not unlike the story of Doctor Albertus Magnus and the Philosopher’s Stone, which credits him with being an empirical genius, a modern-type scientist several centuries ahead of his time, who ceaselessly struggled to promote scientific experimentation against the forces of darkness, which vowed to stop scientific progress, in the name of religion. There is a lot of truth in this legend, as Roger Bacon was, indeed, a scientific and philosophical genius, keen on experimentation, and in some of his experiments coming close to presaging Newton and other scientists of modern history. The legend, however, does him a disservice by overstating his wild unorthodoxy and anti-scholastic combativeness, as well as understating the Church’s receptivity to scientific progress, which was definitely much greater than the way in which it has been caricatured.

This is why a more balanced view of Roger Bacon and his empiricist emphasis has been bound to emerge. Bacon’s powerful positives must not be diminished by jumping into the opposite extreme of calling him a standard thinker of his time. In many ways he was ahead, and, very importantly, he was not a scholastic in the sense prevailing to describe those times. But he was not an uncompromising rebel either. It is true that on several occasions he was censured for his views, and even imprisoned, but never for lengthy periods of time, and he was never harshly persecuted either. That he managed not to cross the line of martyrdom is a testimony both to his own prudence and also to the fact that the Church of that time was not as bigoted as customarily portrayed and almost universally believed.