The Friar and the Cipher

by Lawrence Goldstone

  The logical elegance of Thomism proved inexorable, forever changing the manner in which the Church promulgated doctrine. Over the next few decades, the work of Augustine—and Plato—slipped away in theology and even more so in science, and Aristotle reigned supreme for the next six centuries. Although Neoplatonism popped up every now and again and Plato remained a force in philosophy, it simply became axiomatic that objective classification arrived at through logical analysis led to scientific truth. There would not be a significant scientific thinker who did not use the fundamental Aristotelian method. Newton was an Aristotelian, as were Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Vesalius, Liebniz, Benjamin Franklin, and Charles Darwin. Even Francis Bacon, who was to pick up his namesake's mantle three centuries later, and who denounced Aristotle in the most vitriolic terms, was himself unmistakably Aristotelian.

  Then, in 1905, Einstein came along and proved to a stunned and disbelieving world that it was Plato who had been right all along.

  ROGER BACON, whose order was all too happy to be rid of him, received far different treatment. For him, the combination of Tempier's condemnation, the steady stream of popes who were members or sympathizers of the orders, and the Franciscan-Dominican treaty turned out to be disastrous.

  It seems likely that he returned to Oxford after publishing the Compendia Studii Philosophii. The vast majority of Bacon's manuscripts have been found in England, which tells against his having spent the rest of his life in Paris. But Oxford could not—or would not—protect him from the repressive policies of Jerome of Ascoli.

  According to a 1370 Franciscan record, Chronicle of the Twenty-Four Generals (of the Order of Friars Minor), this is what happened to Roger Bacon around the year 1278:

  This Minister General brother Jerome by the advice of many friars condemned and reprobated the teaching of Friar Roger Bacon of England, master of sacred theology, as containing some suspected novelties, on account of which the same Roger was condemned to prison,—commanding all the friars that none of them should maintain this teaching but should avoid it as reprobated by the Order. On this matter he wrote also to Pope Nicholas (III) in order that by his authority that dangerous teaching might be completely suppressed.

  Although the Chronicle of the Twenty-Four Generals is considered suspect by some, most of the information contained in the record has proven to be reliable. What we do know is that, for the next fourteen years, the prolific writer wrote no books, the famed teacher taught no one, and the notorious church gadfly irritated not a soul.

  If as is likely he did go to prison, the circumstances are unknown. Most of the Spirituales punished by the order during Jerome's reign were sent to a prison in Ancona, Italy, where they were kept in chains, forbidden contact with anyone including their jailers, and deprived of the sacraments, even on their deathbeds. Those who sympathized with these convicted heretics were also treated severely. According to an eyewitness, a friar who spoke out against the cruelty of those imprisoned was himself jailed and subjected to such harsh treatment that he died within months, his body discarded at the side of the road without burial.

  Some scholars have hypothesized that Bacon's imprisonment would not have been so severe—that it would have been merely a form of house arrest. Even the mildest sentence, however, would have denied him outside contact and the ability to work, which, for an active, questing mind like Bacon's, would have been the worst punishment of all.

  In 1288, Jerome of Ascoli was raised to the papacy, taking the name Nicholas IV. This left a vacancy at the top of the Franciscan order, and the next year, despite opposition from Nicholas, the Friars Minor elected Raymond of Gaufredi as minister general. Raymond was a much more tolerant leader, sympathetic to the Spirituales and their desire to maintain the simplicity and piety of St. Francis. Among his first acts of office was a review of the sentences of those condemned under Jerome. He visited Ancona, witnessed the horrors of the institution firsthand, then immediately commuted the sentences of all of the condemned friars.

  It may be just coincidence, of course, but two years later Roger Bacon resurfaced back in England with his final work, Compendium Studii Theologiae (Compendium of Theology). He began by noting that until recently he had been prevented from publishing, “as is known to many.”

  Bacon was seventy-eight years old. This Compendium is a sad, confused, and tired work, written by an old man. The fire is gone from the pages. There are rambling passages that discuss his earlier work and life, but sometimes he gets his dates wrong. There are regrets about a number of experiments that he had never had the chance to make, and a passage in which he acknowledges that “the principal occupation of theologians is concerned with questions . . . and theological disputes [that] are settled by means of authorities and arguments”—in other words, that his insistence on using experiment in order to be certain has been passed by.

  Bacon never finished this last work. According to a fifteenth-century Warwickshire chronicler, “The noble doctor Roger Bacon died A.D. 1292 on the Feast of Saint Barnabas the Apostle [June 11] and was buried in the Grey Friars church in Oxford.” A sixteenth-century Oxford historian recorded in a royal manuscript that, after his death, all of Bacon's works that were on hand at the monastery in Oxford were nailed to the walls by the friars and left there to rot.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Enigmas and Espionage:

  The Strange Journey of Dr. Dee

  • • •

  IN THE 250 YEARS SUBSEQUENT TO HIS DEATH, Roger Bacon's work lay in the moldering dank of various English monasteries. Considering the magnitude of the forces acting to eradicate his intellectual legacy—fear, ignorance, plague, scholasticism, neglect, time, decay, and, ultimately, politics—the wonder is not which manuscripts can be credited to Bacon but that any of his work survived at all. That Roger Bacon was rescued from obscurity and even experienced something of a revival can be traced to the efforts of one man, the Elizabethan John Dee, a noted mathematician, astrologer, and geographer who talked to angels.

  History is full of droll characters who exist on the periphery of great events, but even in this category Dee stands out. Born in London in 1527, the son of a well-to-do textile merchant (although Dee would later claim an ancestry stretching back to an ancient Prince of Wales), Dee began his career brilliantly. His father sent him to Cambridge when he was fifteen to study Latin with the reigning English academic, Sir John Cheke. England had broken with the Catholic Church in Rome; the Protestant Reformation was sweeping over Europe. Cambridge was a Protestant center, and Cheke was one of the leaders of the movement. His list of pupils was extensive and illustrious—Cheke trained Roger Ascham, who in turn tutored Edward VI; Cheke himself tutored Queen Elizabeth. Both William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, principal secretary of state under Elizabeth, and Sir Francis Walsingham, who would play a key role in Elizabeth's administration (and this story), studied at Cambridge under Cheke. Cecil even married his sister.

  From his earliest days at Cambridge, Dee developed an obsession with Roger Bacon. Despite—or perhaps because of—the efforts of conservatives within the Church to eradicate his legacy, Bacon's legend had grown over the years, but it was not the legend of a brilliant, persecuted practical scientist. The Roger Bacon of sixteenth-century folklore was a magician and mystic, the Roger Bacon of mysterious explosions in the night, talking brass heads, magic potions, burning lenses, and unbreakable ciphers.

  A driven student fixated on mathematics and its applications, Dee sought the real Bacon, unearthing and then poring over whatever material had survived. He bought up every Bacon manuscript or fragment his father's fortune could afford. He sought to mold himself in Bacon's image, even copying Bacon's punishing schedule of eighteen hours a day of work and only six for meals and sleep. As Roger Bacon was interested in machines, so was Dee. For a prop in a Greek comedy he produced at Cambridge, he built a giant beetle using ropes and pulleys (for the hero to ride, instead of Pegasus). It actually seemed to fly around the stage, to the astonishment of his si
xteenth-century audience.

  After Cambridge, he went to the University of Louvain, where he studied trigonometry, a subject not yet taught in England, toyed with Copernican astronomy, and made the acquaintance of one of the most famous cartographers in history, Gerard Mercator. Dee and Mercator became inseparable: “It was the custom of our mutual friendship and intimacy that, during three whole years, neither of us willingly lacked the other's presence for as much as three whole days,” Dee would later write. From Mercator, Dee picked up a lifelong interest in exploration, geography, and astronomy. While in Brussels, he also tutored the English ambassador Sir William Pickering (another Cheke protégé) in mathematics and the use of the astrolabe and turned down a position in Charles V's court as the emperor's personal philosopher.

  From Brussels he went to Paris to lecture on Euclid, “a thing never done publicly in any University of Christendom,” and had the satisfaction, at twenty-four, of causing such a sensation that students and masters hung out of the school windows in order to catch his words. “A greater wonder arose among the beholders, than of my Aristophanes Scarabeus [the mechanical flying beetle] mounting up to the top of Trinity Hall in Cambridge,” he recalled later. After Paris, he returned to England, where Henry VIII's only son, Edward VI, now ruled. He got a position tutoring the sons of the Duke of Northumberland, head of Edward's Privy Council. (One of Dee's charges was the future Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth's suitor Sir Robert Dudley.) In addition, Sir John Cheke personally introduced him to his brother-in-law William Cecil, who in turn presented Dee to King Edward.

  Everywhere he went, Dee bought old books and manuscripts focusing on science and mathematics—particularly by Roger Bacon, if he could find them. He had also developed a taste for the occult—even at this early date, Dee's mathematics was veering off uncomfortably toward numerology and mysticism. “By Numbers, a way is had, to the searchyng out, and understandyng of every thing hable to be known [sic],” he wrote in his “Mathematicall Praeface” to Euclid's Elements. Unfortunately, Dee's championship of mathematics had as much to do with conjuring as computation—his definition of “hable to be known” focused on the shadowy world of angels and demons. When Dee spoke of charting the heavens, he meant it literally. When he and Mercator drew up a series of Copernican models of the heavens, Dee added a couple of rings for spirits and angels.

  He also believed in what was then called “judicial astrology,” that the position of the stars affected life on earth. He cast horoscopes for many people, including King Edward and the Princess Elizabeth—he made something of a living at it, later on—but his philosophy went further even than this. According to Dee, everything in heaven and earth had a number assigned to it. Determine the number and you could control events: “Easy it is to be gathered, that Number hath a treble state: One, in the Creator: an other in every Creature (in respect of his complete constitution): and the third, in Spirituall and Angelicall Myndes, and in the Soule of man,” he asserted. For these views, he was dubbed “the Great Conjuror.”

  In July 1553, Edward VI died, his half sister Mary succeeded him, and Dee's comfortable sinecure abruptly disintegrated. The queen who became known as “Bloody Mary” had been forced to secure her throne by successfully fighting off a Protestant scheme by Dee's old employer, the Duke of Northumberland, to crown Lady Jane Grey in her place. When the plot ultimately failed, the Protestant English nobility fled the country—a prudent idea, as Mary, in an attempt to reintroduce Catholic ritual, took to burning heretics. She managed to execute about five hundred in all during her five-year reign. Those she did not execute were thrown in the Tower or ruined.

  Dee, while not specifically Protestant himself (mystical mathematics defied religious classification), was almost certainly a Protestant sympathizer. His father, Roland, was known to have been associated with the Northumberland scheme and was among the first arrested by the new queen. But Dee did not flee the country. He did not have the means to do so. Although his father was released from prison after only a month's stay, he was ruined financially, and with him, his son. “[My father] was disabled for leaving unto me due maintenance,” Dee explained tactfully in a letter to William Cecil, asking for a loan—one of the first of many such supplications.

  Dee was himself arrested for treason and heresy by Mary's government in 1555. Although the civil charges were dropped for lack of evidence, he was handed over to the ferocious anti-Protestant bishop Edmund Bonner for religious examination. Bonner, the bishop of London, was conducting his own inquisition, condemning fellow clergymen for failing to conduct Mass, singling out heretics for execution. But it seems that in Dee's case Bonner made an exception and befriended the younger man, ordaining him and making him his chaplain. Dee even lived in Bonner's house for a time. Whether Dee himself participated in Bonner's interrogations and condemnations is an open question. Perhaps he was only teaching the bishop mathematics.

  There is no question, however, that Dee was able to maneuver around the issue of religion and survive—and even prosper—during the years of Mary's reign. By January 1556, he felt secure enough to pen a request to the queen for a new project, “Supplication to Q. Mary . . . for the recovery and preservation of ancient writers and monuments.” Dee was referring to the state of books and manuscripts in England, which were in danger of being lost forever.

  In 1536, on the advice of his closest advisor, Thomas Cromwell, who wanted to reform the bureaucracy and limit the power of the Church, Henry VIII had begun closing down monasteries and appropriating their revenues for the Crown. This policy plumped up the royal coffers so well that within four years all monastic property had ceded to the king. Henry used most of the money to finance the army and navy, but some went to reward supporters and some just got lost in the confusion—or stolen. Since the monasteries had been the repository of the country's books, these suffered the same fate as the rest of the goods. As a result, Dee wrote to Mary in his supplication, England was in grave danger of losing its intellectual heritage:

  Among the exceeding many most lamentable displeasures, that have of late happened unto this realm, through the subverting of religious houses, and the dissolution of other assemblies of godly and learned men, it has been, and for ever, among all learned students, shall be judged, not for the last calamity, the spoile and destruction of so many and so notable libraries, wherein lay the treasures of all Antiquity, and the everlasting seeds of continual excellency in this your Grace's realm.

  Dee then proposed that he go around the countryside, buying up books on the queen's behalf in order to start a “Library Royal.”

  John Dee in a copy of a seventeenth-century painting EDGAR FAHS SMITH COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA LIBRARY

  Mary, who was much more interested in burning those books that spread Protestant doctrine than saving any that might be used to promote scientific research, declined Dee's request. Undaunted, he went ahead and started collecting books on his own. He poked into every corner of England in his pursuit of manuscripts. In his zeal to scoop up ancient texts he often neglected to pay for the books, preferring to borrow them from other collections and then conveniently forgetting to return them. Sometimes he borrowed books without bothering to inform the legitimate owner that he was doing so. He wasn't above taking advantage of his friends' predicaments, either. Some of Sir John Cheke's books ended up in Dee's library while Cheke was off in Antwerp hiding from Mary's agents.

  As a result of all of this frenetic book buying and stealing, John Dee accumulated the largest private library in England. By his own count, he had “in all neere 4,000” volumes. By comparison, his alma mater, Cambridge University, had 451 books and manuscripts, and Oxford had even fewer. “No one student, nor any one college, hath a half a dozen of those excellent jewells [books], but the whole stock and store thereof is drawing nigh to utter destruction and extinguishing,” Dee lamented. Dee's library continued to be heavily weighted to science, mathematics, and philosophy. He acquired the works of Aristotle, Avicenna, Al
bertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Robert Grosseteste, Euclid, Ptolemy, and St. Augustine. Also Galen, Hippocrates, Maimonides, Boethius, Alhazen, Plato, and Cicero. He even had the prophesies of Joachim the abbot.

  But the cornerstone of his collection was the work of Roger Bacon. Dee saw himself as Bacon's spiritual and intellectual disciple. He had original copies of Bacon's Parisian lectures, his essays on the soul, on animals, and on improving health. He had manuscripts of the Opus Majus, the Opus Tertium, the Compendia Studii Philosophii, a tract on alchemy, another on metals, yet another on codes. He had Bacon's work on perspectiva and the calendar, his annotated version of the Secret of Secrets, his letter on the power of art and nature and the nullity of magic, another on the utility of arithmetic. Of the 107 works of Roger Bacon now known to have existed during Dee's lifetime—including individual pages and fragments—Dee owned 37. He also owned numerous manuscripts from Bacon's own library.

  But Dee did more than collect Bacon. He aggressively promoted Bacon's work and what he saw as Bacon's legacy. Dee annotated the earlier scientist's writings, wrote appreciatively about his methods and ideas, and introduced his work to his friends in the English aristocracy and abroad. At one point, Dee even tried to convince Elizabeth that he was Bacon's direct descendant.

  The Roger Bacon whom Dee admired was both scientist and magus. Bacon's emphasis on the primacy of mathematics and its advantage in the field of mechanics bolstered Dee's own theories. There were other similarities: Dee would later undertake Bacon's plan to revise the calendar at the request of Elizabeth's government. Bacon's plea for the study of antique languages in order to be able to read a manuscript void of translation errors made a great deal of sense to Dee, who was teaching himself Hebrew for the purpose of reading the Kaballah.