The Friar and the Cipher (12 page)

To prove the existence of God, for example, Aquinas began by paraphrasing Aristotle's theory of the Prime Mover:

Everything that is in motion is put and kept in motion by some other thing . . . That mover therefore either is itself in motion or not. If it is not in motion . . . we must posit something which moves other things without being itself in motion, and this we call God. But if the mover is itself in motion, then it is moved by some other mover. Either then we have to go on to infinity, or we must come to some mover which is motionless; but it is impossible to go on to infinity, therefore we must posit some motionless prime mover . . . The Philosopher also goes about in another way to show that it is impossible to proceed to infinity in the series of efficient causes, but we must come to one first cause, and this we call God.

The vulnerability of this argument, and one that should have bedeviled the incisive logical mind of Aquinas, is that, while the Prime Mover might demonstrate the existence of
a
god, it did not necessarily prove the existence of
the
God. There is absolutely nothing in the logical implications of the Prime Mover that led to the Christian conception of God. Rather than confront the issue, Aquinas end-ran it.

After showing that there is a First Being, whom we call God, we must inquire into the conditions of His existence. We must use the method of negative differentiation, particularly in the consideration of the divine substance. For the divine substance, by its immensity, transcends every form that our intellect can realize; and thus we cannot apprehend it by knowing what it is, but we have some sort of knowledge of it by knowing what it is not.

This inquiring Aquinas proceeded to do in a series of chapters entitled “That in God there is no Passive Potentiality,” “That in God there is no Composition,” “That God is Incorporeal,” “That God is His own Essence,” “That in God Existence and Essence are the same,” “That in God there is no Accident,” “That the Existence of God cannot be characterized by the addition of any Substantial Differentia,” “That God is not in any Genus,” “That God is not the Formal or Abstract Being of all things,” and “That God is Universal Perfection.”

Even if each of these arguments held up under logical scrutiny, in order to differentiate the scriptural God from just any god at some point Aquinas had to shift from what God was not to what God was. In a chapter entitled “How Likeness to God may be found in Creatures,” he made his leap:

Effects disproportionate to their causes do not agree with them in name and essence. And yet some likeness must be found between such effects and their causes: for it is of the nature of an agent to do something like itself. Thus also God gives to creatures all their perfections; and thereby He has with all creatures a likeness, and an unlikeness at the same time. For this point of likeness, however, it is more proper to say that the creature is like God than that God is like the creature . . . thus the creature has what belongs to God, and is rightly said to be like to God: but it cannot be said that God has what belongs to the creature.

In other words, just as it says in Genesis, God
must
have created man in his own image, albeit an image that is an imperfect representation. When Aquinas stated, “it is of the nature of an agent to do something like itself”—a questionable premise to begin with—he once again ascribed to God dicta that should not bind the entity that he had spent all this time describing. By what reasoning should God be bound to do something like Himself? God might have created creatures with no likeness to Himself at all if He so chose. To return to his proof in
De Aeternitate Mundi
, the only things that God was powerless to do were those that were self-contradictory—“p and not p.” There was nothing at all self-contradictory about God, as defined in the Aquinas proofs, creating life that was in no way like Himself.

But who could say so? To deny the conclusion, or even to raise an eyebrow as to the logical progression if it called the conclusion into question, was heresy. The only way to attack Aquinas was within the accepted bounds of scholasticism—that is, to quibble over points of logic—and in this Aquinas was without peer. Other scholastics might parse him, Bonaventura might chide him for his affinity for pagan philosophers, and some of his anti-Augustinian conclusions might even be condemned—as they would be in 1277—but the fact remained that unless a critic was willing to challenge Aquinas's acceptance and manipulation of scriptural premises, his work was unassailable.

Roger Bacon would have one opportunity and one opportunity only to refute Aquinas and make the case for the pursuit of science, and it would come, fittingly, from the legacy of Frederick II.

SOON AFTER FREDERICK'S DEATH,
his son Conrad had indeed raised an army and swept into Italy. The pope had immediately turned to Henry III to demand that he honor his pledge to send both money and troops to defend Sicily. Before Henry had a chance to try to beg off, Conrad, unused to the warm weather, died of fever in 1254.

That did not end the Hohenstaufen threat, however, as the Antichrist's illegitimate son Manfred, a far more serious contender, took up the fight. Manfred, whose mother was probably an Arab, was brave, intelligent, and charismatic. He was also a poet, warrior, and scholar, and enjoyed a fierce loyalty among his followers. He made significant gains in battle, moving up the Italian peninsula toward Rome.

The pope then tried to force Henry to live up to his deal by threatening him with excommunication and interdict. When Henry tried to raise the money and the army from his barons, they rebelled and in 1259 set up a council to run the country. The council could not get past its own petty bickering, however, and Simon de Montfort began to seize power, moving England toward civil war.

In 1261, Manfred remained unchecked and a new pope, Urban IV, son of a French cobbler, gave up on England entirely and turned to the much more powerful France. He opened negotiations with Louis IX, suggesting that perhaps Louis's brother, the ferocious Charles of Anjou, might be the perfect king for Sicily. Charles had already turned down the honor once, so to help Louis in his deliberations Urban promoted a number of French clerics to high positions in the Church, especially those who had been in favor with the king.

So it came about that an obscure knight-turned-lawyer-turned-cardinal named Guy de Foulques was appointed papal legate to England, an act that was to change the course of both Roger Bacon's life and scientific history.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Great Work

•   •   •

ORIGINALLY KNOWN AS GUY LE GROS
(“Fat Guy”), Guy de Foulques was the son of a knight who had entered a monastery after the death of his wife. He grew to manhood, married, and, at first, like his father, chose the warrior life. Soon, however, Foulques discovered that he would rather persuade than slaughter and undertook the study of law. He became a noted advocate in the court of Louis IX, was appointed to the king's cabinet, and was soon a trusted councilor. When his wife died, Foulques, again like his father, abandoned the secular life and entered the Church, although not through one of the mendicant orders.

He rose in the Church as quickly as he had under Louis. Renowned for honesty, piety, and moral incorruptibility, he was appointed bishop in 1256, archbishop in 1259, and cardinal in 1261. After Urban named him papal legate, he made a number of visits to England. In late 1264, Urban once again sent him to England, where Simon de Montfort had now assumed almost dictatorial powers after defeating the hapless Henry and taking him prisoner at the Battle of Lewes the previous May.

Montfort denied passage across the Channel to Cardinal Foulques, suspecting, not without justification, that the papacy sought the return of Henry to the throne as a means of ensuring that Church authority—and property—in England would remain undisturbed. Foulques responded by excommunicating Montfort's barons and instituting a boycott on trade with England in wheat, commodities, and wine. As wine prices tripled, many English were far more sober than they wished to be, and grumbling about Simon de Montfort's government increased. Cardinal Foulques was still in northern France awaiting clearance to enter England when Urban IV died.

The year before, just as Aquinas was putting the finishing touches on
Summa Contra Gentiles,
Roger Bacon had sent a secret message from Paris, probably in cipher, to Cardinal Foulques. It was delivered through an emissary named Raymond of Laon, a member of the cardinal's staff. It is not clear how Bacon and the cardinal came to know each other, whether this message was written or verbal, or even whether it was Bacon or Foulques who initiated the correspondence. In the message, Bacon proposed forwarding to the cardinal some “writing that [he was] ready to compose, but that [was] not yet written.”

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 as 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.