The Friar and the Cipher (10 page)

These days of gunpowder and lenses and thought experiments were probably the happiest of Bacon's life. That he had the wherewithal to spend so much on materials and the freedom to conduct his researches at Oxford was due in no small part to the prosperity that his family enjoyed under Henry III. But Henry had grown into an utterly ineffectual king whose ineptitudes were about to catch up with him. England would once more begin the descent into civil war, causing the Bacon family's wealth to be destroyed and precipitating radical and unfortunate changes in Bacon's life.

HENRY HAD INHERITED NEITHER JOHN'S VICIOUSNESS
nor his cunning, and he bungled through a reign that would last over fifty years. An indecisive ruler and poor administrator, Henry had little taste for court intrigue. A pious man interested in art and architecture, his most noteworthy achievement in his half century as king was the decision to rebuild Westminster Abbey. But grand architecture costs money, as does the upkeep of a court, and without conquest, the only way to raise this money was through taxes. Just as Bacon was refining his science, Henry's barons were growing increasingly restive.

It was one of these barons, Henry's brother-in-law, Simon de Montfort, who was to prove the king's nemesis. The son of the Simon de Montfort who had led the French crusade against the Albigensians, this Simon was brave, handsome, and intelligent, a warrior-crusader like his father. He was highly educated and on intimate terms with both Grosseteste and Adam Marsh, and he used the Oxford faculty as a sort of political think tank. He was also an extremely capable leader—much more so than Henry—and both of them knew it. Simon had once told the king that “he deserved to be shut up like Charles the Simple.” By the early 1250s, Simon had begun to think that he would do a far better job of running the country than Henry. Many of the other barons agreed with him, but overthrowing a king was an extreme act. That all changed when Henry committed his greatest blunder of all. He decided to have his second son, Edmund, receive the crown of the suddenly vacant kingdom of Sicily.

FREDERICK II'S FINAL BATTLE WITH THE CHURCH
had been ugly and futile. Although he had succeeded in chasing Innocent IV out of Rome and into France, the pope had initiated several assassination attempts. While able to thwart them all, Frederick, now in his fifties, had descended into paranoia and tyranny. He knew that Innocent was buying informants and allies, and fomenting rebellion all over Italy. “Anyone who showed letters from the Pope lost hands and feet,” reports Ernst Kantorowicz. “The Emperor recognised rebels only, not enemies; hence every non-imperialist found armed was hanged.” The repression only encouraged defections; people grew afraid of Frederick's moods and turned to the pope as the more stable alternative.

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 have 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.