Roger Bacon by Brian Clegg

Author:Brian Clegg
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472112125
Publisher: Constable & Robinson

Looking at Bacon’s plight through modern eyes, it can be difficult to understand why his work was so disliked. We have seen that the man himself, like many other obsessives, could be abrasive and somewhat blinkered, but this hardly accounts for the weight of religious law that was brought to bear upon him. If his punishment was in part for his scientific views, his enthusiasm for personal inquiry rather than passive acceptance, it seems grossly unfair. How can it have been a crime to be curious?

The answer is to be found in the religious mood of the time, captured perfectly in the writings of St Augustine, one of the most powerful minds in the early Church, whose ideas were still held in respect in Bacon’s day. Augustine was born in 354 in Tagaste, in modern Algeria. He was not without humour, famously remarking in his Confessions that he had prayed as a young man, ‘Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.’104 But he also wrote, ‘Nothing is to be accepted except on the authority of scripture, since that authority is greater than all the powers of the human mind.’105 To be ignorant was not just bliss, but expressed a pious acceptance of the ultimate superiority of God.

A contemporary of Bacon’s, Bishop Ambrose of Milan, adapted this guiding principle of Augustine’s to the study of nature: ‘To discuss the nature and position of the Earth does not help us in our hope of the life to come.’106 Bacon’s approach, as he made clear in the Opus majus, was that ‘The result of all true philosophy is to arrive at a knowledge of the Creator through knowledge of the created world.’107 Bacon was not dismissing the importance of scripture, or saying that the authorities were wrong, but pointing out that it should also be possible to gain knowledge of God by understanding his creation – the natural world itself. But in putting the power of investigation above the authority of scripture, he seemed in danger of putting man above God. Bacon must have been aware of what he was doing, and the reaction of the Church authorities should have come as no surprise to him. The light of the truth as he saw it must have been so blinding that he was prepared to risk anything to share it with others.

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