The Friar and the Cipher

by Lawrence Goldstone

  Even at this point in his life, still a young man, Bacon was already exhibiting the self-assurance, the conviction in the power of his own ideas, and the utter lack of political acumen that marked him as an outsider in an age of conformity. This willingness to trust in what he believed instead of what he was told or what everyone else was doing would define his life and his legacy. So instead of toiling away meaninglessly just to guarantee safe, respected professional advancement, he became a master of arts. Not only would this allow him to continue scientific research independently, but he could freely instruct others in that which he had studied himself.

  There are those who claim that he later regretted this decision, that it caused him to become a bitter and brittle man. The argument goes that he threw himself into the study of science only for personal recognition and realized too late that fame could not be achieved without a theological degree. His whole idea of studying mathematics and the natural sciences through experimentation was just his way of becoming “a theologian by the back door,” as one Bacon biographer, Stewart C. Easton, put it.

  The rejection of the theological degree was not the great mistake of Bacon's life, however, but the making of it. Without the constricting rigor of the Sentences, he came at theology from a different perspective and saw that science was no threat to faith. Although he suffered for his nonconformity during his lifetime, he created a unique intellectual legacy, one that continues to resonate more than seven centuries later.

  In 1237, now in his early twenties, Bacon began teaching Aristotle at Oxford. He might have stayed there in perpetuity, had the University of Paris not suddenly found itself in need of a master of arts to teach the libri naturales.

  THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS HAD REOPENED when Pope Gregory IX issued a new bull, Parens scientiarum, a charter of liberties that made clear the masters' privileges. The masters had accordingly returned to Paris, and the university once again opened its doors to students. But though the pope had made clear the masters' rights to decide what students could and could not wear, when landlords were charging too much for lodgings, and just how long the long vacation should be, he did not lift the ban on Aristotle. The arts masters chafed at the continued restriction; how could Paris be the leading academic institution in Europe and not teach Aristotle and the related Arabic commentaries? What was more, the libri naturales were still being read surreptitiously.

  Gregory backed down and appointed a three-man committee to go through the libri naturales line by line, expunging any suspicious material. It was a huge job, and the three aging appointees—one died almost immediately—were not remotely up to it. Not a single page of the new sanitized Aristotle was ever issued. In the meantime, the unauthorized versions continued to make inroads, even into the theological faculty. Sometime in the late 1230s, the arts faculty felt sufficiently emboldened to send a request to Oxford for a master to teach Aristotle openly at the school.

  This position was an enormous opportunity for whichever Oxford master was chosen. Whoever went would have the chance to make a name for himself at the most prestigious institution of learning in Christendom. It was also an opportunity for Oxford to establish its credentials as an elite center of learning. The authorities at the school knew to send their best young master.

  They sent Roger Bacon.

  Of his stay in Paris, Bacon would write later, “I composed many things for the elementary instruction of youths.” He was not much older than many of his students when he first arrived and was evidently very popular. Twelve of his lectures were published and have survived, and they describe lively class discussions with even some good-natured byplay between the students and the teacher. Master Bacon's charm was that of any good professor: he was approachable, enthusiastic, and engaging, a man who took his class members' arguments seriously and wasn't above admitting a mistake or learning from a discussion. His knowledge of Aristotle was superior but not infallible; he tells the story of mispronouncing a word that he thought was Arabic. “This word [was] not the scientific one but colloquial Spanish,” he wrote. “After being laughed at by my Spanish students, familiar as they were with the words of their own language, when I did not understand what I was reading, I at length learned from them the meaning of this word and of many more besides.”

  Bacon lectured on everything from light and the nature of the universe to the descriptive qualities of the souls of vegetables. His geometry problems were the bane of his students' existence—he took great pride that not even the other arts professors could solve them. In class, he used the scholastic method, of course: a thesis would be posited from a work of Aristotle, to which an objection would be raised and answered, followed by another and another and another until one side convinced the other or a compromise solution was imposed by the master. For example, in a lecture on the philosophy of plants, the question was raised on what happens to the soul of a plant when it is grafted onto another. (This was evidently a tricky one. Bacon was forced to resort to compromise: unless the result of the graft was a new species, each plant retained its original soul inside the grafted plant.)

  Perhaps the most difficult problem for Bacon was Aristotle's notion of the eternity of time and therefore of the world, which violated the scriptural provision that God created the world—and therefore time itself—in a finite moment. Because Bacon was a deeply religious man, there is almost a desperation in his attempts to reconcile Aristotle to Christianity without corrupting the Philosopher's words. “It is seen that he [Aristotle] has suggested nothing against the faith. For he says there will have been no motion when there was no time; so he only meant that motion did not begin in time, which is true. Aristotle argues elsewhere that there must be a first of everything or there would be no later things, so why not a beginning of the world?”

  The genuineness of Bacon's give-and-take with his students forced him to refine his own thinking every bit as much as his students', and even to reconsider some of his solutions. The more Bacon studied, the more he saw how much there was to learn. Like present-day physicists searching for “the theory of everything,” he decided that there must be one unifying science above the others, one grand concept that would reconcile nature, the scriptures, the universe, and the soul. And so by degrees there came over him what today would be considered a laughable idea.

  He would learn everything there was to learn. He would master every science. And because he had now seen firsthand the advantages of understanding different languages, so as to read a text uncorrupted by a faulty translation, he enlarged his goal beyond the sciences. He would master the languages of Greek and Hebrew as well.

  Bacon's decision to learn all that was knowable was not as unique or fanciful as it might seem. A Dominican who had recently arrived at the University of Paris was apparently already doing it.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Science Goes Mainstream:

  The Rise of Albertus Magnus

  • • •

  HISTORY HAS ALMOST ALWAYS RESERVED the epithet “the great” for a king or conqueror. For Albertus Magnus that conquest was not of territory, riches, or rival princes, but rather of natural science. During the thirteenth century and long after, Albertus Magnus was considered perhaps the most accomplished scholar who had ever lived.

  Albert was born in the town of Lauingen in Germany sometime around 1200—as with Bacon, there are no surviving records. The men in Albert's family had, for successive generations, been knights in the service of the Hohenstaufen emperor. His father had served Frederick II's father, Henry VI; his grandfather, Barbarossa. It was no doubt with the idea of perpetuating the family tradition that Albert was sent to Padua to live with his rich, well-connected uncle and to study arts at the new university there.

  The University of Padua was founded by some wandering law professors and seems to have offered a basic arts curriculum and little else. Theology would not be taught at Padua until the fourteenth century, and there was no tradition of scientific inquiry as there was at Oxford. Even the study of c
anon law was neglected. Moreover, Albert's tenure as a student predated the distribution of the new translations of Aristotle, so he would have been limited to the standard logic texts. He did, however, display an acute interest in nature and medicine, which in those days revolved largely around the study of plants.

  Then, in 1223, while he was still young enough to be under the supervision of his uncle, the Dominicans came to Padua.

  It was the early days of the Friars Preachers, and there was a heady aura of piety, mystery, and commitment surrounding the order. The friars made no secret of their pursuit of educated recruits. Jordan of Saxony, the immediate successor to Dominic himself, came to entice members of the student body at Padua into the order. Jordan already had a reputation for charismatic preaching: “It is said of him that he drew out of the stormy sea of the world, with the net of the Divine Word, and clothed with the white tunic of his newly born Order, more than a thousand young men belonging to the Universities of Paris and Bologna,” wrote a medieval chronicler. After hearing him speak, ten Padua students joined on the spot, “among them the sons of two great German lords; one was a provost-marshal, loaded with many honors and possessed of great riches; the other has resigned rich benefices and is truly noble in mind and body,” Jordan later boasted. This second reference was to Albert.

  By all accounts the family was appalled; the uncle intervened, claiming that his nephew was too young to commit to the order, and dragged him home. It did not work; by Easter, Albert had shaved his tonsure and donned the traditional coarse clothing of the Friars Preachers. Some twenty years later, a young Thomas Aquinas would be recruited to the Dominican order while studying at the University of Naples in much the same way—and also to the dismay of his family—prompting Roger Bacon to later write derisively, “These are the boys among the students of the two orders like Albert and Thomas, and others, who entered the orders when for the most part they are twenty years of age and less.”

  Soon after converting, Albert was sent to the Dominican priory at Cologne to study the Bible. They'd never had anyone like him there before—in 1225 he began studying theology with the approved lector, and by 1228 he was the approved lector. These years in Cologne were crucial to Albert's development. He was at the height of his energy and intellectual powers, and the administrative and political duties that would claim so much of his attention in later life were relatively light. He could therefore devote himself to his reading and especially his study of nature.

  Although he was eventually to write and lecture on nearly every conceivable subject in the medieval curriculum—alchemy, astronomy, astrology, math, theology—Albert was primarily a naturalist. He learned the names and characteristics of hundreds of plants and minerals. It was while stationed at Cologne that he would go miles out of his way to visit mining towns in order to locate precious metals and rock specimens. In his leisure hours he stared up at the sky and once was rewarded by the appearance of a comet.

  With the conversion of Albert, the Dominicans had acquired an asset far beyond their expectations. Albert's devotion to learning was matched only by his devotion to his order. He was to win a public recognition that not only reflected favorably upon the Friars Preachers but could be translated into tangible political gains. All his life, as he tramped from city to city at the behest of first his superiors in the order and later the pope (for Albert walked everywhere, even in old age, although he had a donkey for his precious books), he indulged his passion for study. “It was his custom while traveling . . . first to visit the chapel of the religious house where he intended to stay the night, to thank God for the safe journey, then immediately to visit the library to see whether there were any books that he had not yet seen,” reported the Dominican scholar James Weisheipl. Over the years, he was sent all over Europe and had the chance to observe and learn in many different environments. As a result, he accumulated knowledge that for the time approached the encyclopedic, earning him the nickname Doctor Universalis.

  But although his scientific learning was prodigious, Albert's theological training was virtually nonexistent. As a naturalist, he identified with Aristotle, or at any rate with whatever Aristotle he had managed to pick up along the way. But of the new translations circulating in places like Oxford and Paris, he was ignorant. Books like Michael Scot's simply didn't reach towns like Cologne in the 1230s. Neither did Albert have the advantage of disputing or conversing with other scholars—in Cologne, he was the scholar. Accordingly, when it came to theology, Albert was almost completely self-taught.

  Nonetheless, word of his superior intellect and knowledge spread through the order. When the opportunity arose for a Dominican friar to become a master of theology at the University of Paris in 1244, the master general selected the supremely unqualified Albert for the job. Nothing bespeaks the rising power of the mendicant orders in the first half of the thirteenth century better than their success in muscling a brother with no training into the theological faculty at Paris. The implications went far beyond the simple question of who would teach whom. There were vast political stakes as well. Control of the theological faculty at Paris, with its unique role of training future bishops, cardinals, and even popes, might easily be translated into control of the Church.

  THE TWO ORDERS FIRST CAME TO PARIS specifically to recruit learned members. The friars had no students in the undergraduate arts courses; mendicants were forbidden from attending secular arts schools. Instead, they had set up their own undergraduate schools to teach what they thought was appropriate. Needless to say, Aristotle and the new translations were not part of the curriculum.

  In theology, however, even the friars recognized that the faculty of the University of Paris was so far advanced that there was no choice but to take advantage of its teaching. Accordingly, both the Dominicans and Franciscans selected some of their more promising members to study theology there. By good luck (or calculation, as was later accused), the first of the mendicants to qualify as a theology master, a Dominican by the name of Roland of Cremona, did so just before the university disbanded in 1229.

  Roland, being a friar, did not consider himself bound by his degree to act in concert with the other theological masters, so he stayed in Paris with his order to teach the brothers what he himself had just learned. When word spread that there was a master teaching at the Dominican school, a number of theological students who had declined to follow their masters out of town asked if they could listen in.

  For the Dominicans, this was a chance to insinuate themselves even further into their surroundings, to show off the advantages of the order and maybe induce a few more young men to join. Roland of Cremona was allowed to open his classes to secular students.

  Rarely has such a simple act had such far-reaching repercussions. Roland was evidently a popular teacher, so that when the University of Paris reconvened in 1231, these new students stuck with him. The theological faculty was faced with a fait accompli: a Dominican now seemed to hold one of the all-important chairs in theology. The secular masters were still fuming about this when two of their own, John of St. Giles, the master who had taught Roland, and Alexander of Hales, possibly the most important master on the entire faculty, also converted. John went to the Dominicans and Alexander to the Franciscans. Suddenly, the mendicant orders held three of the twelve theological chairs at the University of Paris.

  The secular masters, lay professors who viewed the university as a place of lifetime employment and who had no other means of earning their livelihoods except by collecting fees from students, were furious. It was dangerous, they said. There was no way of controlling what was being taught in other places once the mendicants left. To make it worse, the mendicants were extremely popular teachers, using poverty and piety to lure students away from the secular professors. Losing students meant losing income, which to the seculars, who were not supported by an organization, was a matter of survival.

  Until the friars came into the picture, no one who was granted a chair in theology would thin
k of leaving the university. It was a theology master's job to stay on in Paris to teach and help run the school. But the mendicant masters had no allegiance whatever to the university and so stayed only a short time—some for less than two years—before reassignment to a Franciscan or Dominican school in another country to spread the learning. A new candidate would then take the place of the friar who was leaving. And since once acquired a chair held by a Dominican or Franciscan would be passed on to a Dominican or Franciscan, with just twelve chairs at stake, each became a symbol and measure of growing—or declining—political power.

  Moreover, in their rush to push people through, the orders took shortcuts. Those applying for the Franciscan or Dominican chairs were in their forties and fifties, men who had held positions of authority within their orders before coming to Paris. Surely, claimed the mendicants, men like these should not have to spend additional years of their lives reading and lecturing on Peter Lombard's Sentences the way a twenty- or thirty-year-old did? After all, they had already lectured on the Bible to members of their own orders. The friars were thus able to reduce the requirement for a chair in theology from an average of thirteen years to sometimes as little as two or three.

  Thus was Albertus Magnus granted a chair in theology in Paris after just two years of study. He arrived at the university in 1243, was incepted as a master in 1245, and then relinquished his chair in 1248 to the next Dominican.