The Friar and the Cipher

by Lawrence Goldstone

  As late as 1997, Jeremiah Hackett, in the introduction to his otherwise excellent Roger Bacon and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, wrote that Bacon “is known to modern readers in the profile which was constructed by popular writers on science in the 19th century . . . The image of Bacon as the Romantic hero of science who six hundred years before the Modern Scientific Revolution had anticipated that revolution continued into popular imagination in the 20th century.”

  But to which modern readers is Hackett referring? Bacon ceased being a “Romantic hero” to the general public seventy years before. As for the academic community, the only serious study of Bacon's life since Thorndike was Stewart Easton's Roger Bacon and His Search for a Universal Science. Easton, while assuring the reader that he had “tried to keep from any bias for or against” Bacon, went on to say, “I have worked on the assumption that he cannot have been unique, and that his originality, as, indeed, all human originality, has rested on his treatment of materials familiar to large numbers of people in his time.” Would Easton have taken the same approach if he were writing about Newton or Einstein? As it was, through the filter of that assumption, Easton came to the conclusion, not surprisingly, that little that Bacon did was original (or unique).

  There has been a good deal of recent scholarly work on specific areas of Bacon's studies, such as perspectiva, geography, mathematics, and experimentation. The goal in each case has been to determine whether Bacon's achievements qualify as science ahead of its time. Rarely does it stand up to this test.

  As it stands, since Manly disemboweled Newbold in 1931, no one has been willing to say that Roger Bacon was prophetic, not because of any of his particular theories or experiments but simply because of the manner in which he viewed scientific inquiry. Lacking this designation, Bacon has now been relegated to the second tier—bright, perhaps, but ultimately of little importance in relation to the progression of human thought.

  IN TODAY'S WORLD OF MODERN CONVENIENCES, of cell phones and pagers, stealth fighters, nuclear submarines, electron microscopes and radio telescopes, it is sometimes easy to forget that the ability to pursue science unimpeded, to let imagination wander where inquiry leads, to investigate and reach beyond ourselves, is not an entitlement but a right that was fought for, as were other rights fought for, sometimes to the death. This struggle has shaped our history and our souls. In it are the seeds that define us as a species. It was curiosity, not Eve, that tempted Adam.

  Justifiably, we reserve our highest esteem for those who championed the way, who braved the crevice that snaked through superstition and fear on one side and repression and orthodoxy on the other. This task required not just intelligence but the commitment and moral courage that served as inspiration for others.

  Thomas Aquinas was an honorable, pious, utterly sincere man. There is not a shred of evidence that he ever acted out of malice or spite or for personal advancement. There is no record of his showing anger or behaving with anything but charity toward his enemies. He worked solely for the glory of a God and a religion that he believed in deeply and fully. And, unlike many who claim to speak for God, Aquinas lived the values that he demanded of others. Even his adversaries acknowledged his personal goodness. There can be no more comprehensive a definition for a saint.

  Roger Bacon, while also honorable, pious, and sincere, had a far less congenial personality. He was capable of temper, supreme impatience, resentment, and professional malice. He most surely limited his effectiveness by his unwillingness to moderate either his views or his approach.

  Still, for all that, Thomas Aquinas narrowed the boundaries of curiosity—the very essence of human progress—and Roger Bacon sought to expand them. His failure to convince others of his century who were not yet ready to follow in no way lessens his achievement.

  Roger Bacon is one of the most significant and irreplaceable figures in the history of science. His approach to knowledge and experiment is now the fundamental basis of scientific inquiry. Whether or not he actually produced the incredible inventions with which he is sometimes credited is unimportant. What he undoubtedly did produce was the method for creating them.

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  1* Alchemy, although now discredited as fakery performed by would-be sorcerers wearing cone hats embellished with stars and crescents while trying to change base metals into gold, was actually a legitimate and clever means of explaining the natural world. Alchemists simply stated that all matter was made up of like material in varying densities and proportions, and it was therefore possible to change one form of matter into another. Modern scientists do just that with atomic fission.

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  2* Translated by Marion E. Markley from the French poem of Rutebeuf, written in octosyllabic couplets, about the middle of the thirteenth century.

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  3* To quote Singh, “Technically, a code is defined as substitution at the level of words or phrases, whereas a cipher is defined as substitution at the level of letters.” Both fall under the larger heading of cryptography, which is to hide the meaning of a message, and which, in turn, is a subset of steganographics, which is to hide its very existence. Obviously, any code or cipher that succeeded in obscuring the very existence of a hidden message would be far more effective than one in which the existence of something secret was obvious.

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  4*A rainbow is actually created by a process of refraction-reflection-refraction. If sunlight enters a raindrop at an angle of 42° or less to the perpendicular of the tangent of the back of the drop (thus establishing Bacon's 42° maximum height), it is refracted on the way in, breaking into component colors corresponding to the famous acronym ROY G BIV (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet). It is then reflected off the back of the drop and refracted once more on the way out, increasing the color separation further. Shorter wavelengths (blues) bend the most; longer wavelengths (reds) the least. If the angle is more than 42°, the light simply passes on through. As the refracted light moves back to the observer, it separates even more, so that only one color is observed from each drop. Therefore, as Bacon assumed, it takes a huge number of raindrops to create a rainbow. The conical structure is correct as well, since without the horizon to interfere, the rainbow would form a full circle.

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  5* Bacon's cryptology is a major factor in the “Shakespeare controversy.” According to proponents, what appear to be plays by the illiterate actor William Shakespeare were actually the work of Francis Bacon. Bacon is known to have created what he called the “biliteral cipher,” whose key is based on the use of two different typefaces, what are today called “fonts.” By varying combinations of the two typefaces, words in the text of any printed work (one of Shakespeare's plays, for instance) could be used to embed secret messages and cipher signatures. The cipher works by assigning every letter of the alphabet (the plaintext) a unique combination of typefaces “a” and “b”—say, italics and Roman—in groups of five letters. To decrypt the cipher, the recipient would simply note the order in which the typefaces appear. So, a “d” in plaintext would be represented by a group of letters with typefaces in an arrangement of “aaabb,” or “italics, italics, italics, Roman, Roman,” as in “hello.” It doesn't matter what the letters are in the text, only in which typeface they appear. It doesn't take much to see that this can lead to some highly subjective decryptions. While there are some diehards even today who cling to the belief that Francis Bacon actually wrote Shakespeare's plays, the notion was effectively demolished in 1957 by two brilliant cryptanalysts who will later play a significant role in this story.

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  6* They are live, evil, vile, veil, and Levi.

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  7* The hoax hypothesis has recently been rekindled by Gordon Rugg, a British computer scientist. He claims that an examination of pattern and frequency of symbols reveals that the text might have been created by
Edward Kelley, using one of his favorite enciphering techniques. Kelley, says Rugg, would have filled out a grid 40 by 39 with the ideographic symbols, then overlaid it with another piece of paper with three diagonal squares cut out. By moving the top grille over the bottom grid, a ciphertext can be created. Even if true, this would not account for the detail in the illustrations and the length and intricacy of the manuscript. Kelley seems sure to have lacked the patience for such an undertaking.

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  8* Named after Harvard linguistic professor George Kingsley Zipf, this is a tool to determine the degree of repetition of words or symbols and therefore to measure entropy in language. Strictly stated, it is “the frequency of occurrence of some event (P)—such as words or symbols—as a function of the rank (i) when the rank is determined by the above frequency of occurrence, is a power-law function Pi ~1/ia with the exponent a close to unity.” Here again, mathematical precision has only served to confirm what Friedman saw by instinct.

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  9† Curators at the Beinecke claim that even if it was discovered that the manuscript was written on thirteenth-century paper, it does not necessarily mean that it was written by a thirteenth-century author. Anyone wishing to make the manuscript seem to have been completed in the thirteenth century might have used older paper to help perpetuate the illusion. If, on the other hand, the paper is sixteenth-century, it could have simply been a copy of an earlier work. Ink dating, they say, is not sufficiently reliable to be definitive.

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  BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTES

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  ANY EXAMINATION OF THE LIFE AND WORK of Roger Bacon necessarily begins with a study of the man's own words. This is no hardship, as Bacon was a lucid and passionate writer, and his work makes for compelling reading. Happily, many of Bacon's manuscripts have been ably translated into English from the original Latin, so we encourage anyone wishing to go further into this subject to seek out copies of his major works. The definitive Opus Majus is the two-volume 1928 edition, translated by Robert Belle Burke. The Opus Tertium and Compendia Studii Philosophii, edited by James S. Brewer, with extensive commentary, is available in Latin in an outstanding 1859 edition. Roger Bacon's Letter Concerning the Marvelous Power of Art and Nature and Concerning the Nullity of Magic is also available in translation by Tenney L. Davis. David S. Lindberg has recently published the first-rate Roger Bacon's Philosophy of Nature: A Critical Edition of De multiplicatione specierum and De speculis comburentibus.

  The body of secondary literature, as may be expected, separates pretty evenly between early admiration and later skepticism, with Lynn Thorndike's formidable but deeply flawed series A History of Magic and Experimental Science as the dividing line. Of the earlier works, A. G. Little's 1914 Commemorative Essays and John Henry Bridges's The Life and Work of Roger Bacon: An Introduction to the Opus Majus are the most useful. But there is no shortage of contemporary scholarship focusing on Bacon's life and work. Lindberg's work and Roger Bacon & the Sciences: Commemorative Essays edited by Jeremiah Hackett are as scrupulous renditions of Bacon's work as have ever been produced. Unfortunately, each of these scholars, particularly Hackett, by restricting themselves to a study of Bacon's specific achievements, repeats Thorndike's error of missing that the ultimate value of Bacon's work was in approach and point of view.

  By far the best work on Grosseteste, Bacon, and the Oxford school is the incisive and eminently readable Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science, 1100–1700 by A. C. Crombie. What sets Crombie apart from other contemporary Bacon researchers, such as Hackett, is evenhanded treatment. Richard W. Southern's Robert Grosseteste: The Growth of an English Mind in Medieval Europe is another excellent discussion of Grosseteste's intellectual odyssey and his effect on everyone that followed.

  While virtually all of St. Thomas's immense volume of work is readily available, there is no worthwhile critical biography of Aquinas. The work that is considered definitive, Friar Thomas D'Aquino, was written by James Weisheipl, himself a Dominican, who accepts even the stories of Thomas's visions without a trace of skepticism. (Jeremiah Hackett is a Weisheipl protégé.) Equally, Thomist logic is almost never subjected to critical analysis and dissection as was Bacon's. Ralph McInerny, a professor at Notre Dame University (and the author of the Father Dowling mysteries), has written extensively on both St. Thomas's life and works but, like his subject, always seems intent on proving that about which he has already made up his mind.

  Weisheipl is also the best source for the life and career of Albertus Magnus. Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, 1980, which Weisheipl edited, is particularly useful in gaining perspective on the incredible range of Albert's work. Another helpful if somewhat reverential biography is Albert the Great, by another Dominican, the aptly named S. M. Albert.

  For a tapestry of thirteenth-century life, there is no better place to look than to the works of the chroniclers of the period, particularly Matthew Paris and Thomas of Eccleston. Their writings are rich, written with sweep and wit, and filled with anecdotes that bring the period to life. Gordon Leff's Medieval Thought is an excellent source for the intellectual trends of the period, and Norman F. Cantor is always useful for a general backdrop. Volume IV of Will Durant's epic Story of Civilization, The Age of Faith, and The Catholic Encyclopedia, are both excellent sources as well. For the development of the universities, Stephen Ferruolo's The Origins of the University is a layered and detailed study, as is Leff's Paris and Oxford Universities in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. Rosalind Brooke's Early Franciscan Government: Elias to Bonaventure paints a helpful picture of the development and political intrigues of the Friars Minor.

  There are a number of excellent studies of Avicenna and Averroës, including Roger Arnaldaz's Averroës: A Rationalist in Islam, and The Philosophy of Avicenna and Its Influences on Medieval Europe by A. M. Goichon, and especially Majid Fakhry's excellent monograph Averroës, Aquinas and the Rediscovery of Aristotle in Western Europe. For Frederick, one need look no further than Frederick the Second, 1194–1250, Ernst Kantorowicz's brilliant and exhaustive study. Emperor Frederick II by David Geinstein is also useful.

  For both John Dee and Francis Bacon, their own work provides not simply a professional record but also insights into the personalities of these two Elizabethan giants. Dee's diary is perhaps the best vehicle with which to appreciate the split of Roger Bacon's reputation into the dual streams of scientist and mystic. Biographical accounts of the two men, particularly of Bacon, are less helpful and in general tend to be surprisingly one-sided.

  As for the study of codes, code breaking, and the history of steganographics, there are no greater sources than The Code Book by Simon Singh and David Kahn's epic The Codebreakers. For an unusual and charming take, a reader will be well served to pick up In Code by a remarkable seventeen-year-old prodigy named Sarah Flannery. To learn about Walsingham, Dee, and Elizabethan intrigue, the best source is Richard Deacon's History of the British Secret Service, with Conyers Read's Mr. Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth a close second. Although it is often considered dated, we found The Follies of Science at the Court of Rudolph II, 1576–1612 by Henry Carrington Bolton profitable, as were Hans Holzer's The Alchemist: The Secret Magical Life of Rudolf von Habsburg and R. J. W. Evans's Rudolph II and His World: A Study in Intellectual History, 1576–1612.

  Although there is no shortage of written material on the Voynich manuscript, Robert Brumbaugh's The Most Mysterious Manuscript and Mary D'Imperio's Elegant Enigma being both the most prominent and most useful, the best place to learn about the manuscript is on the Internet. There are dozens of Web sites devoted to the manuscript, from the dense and scholarly to the New Agey and fanciful. Though it is fun to come across a theory that the manuscript is an extraterrestrial artifact, the most useful Web sites are those of the international Voynich study group that was created in the early 1990s. Anyone who is interested should begin with
René Zandbergen's site, www.voynich.nu, and go from there. The Beinecke has posted images of some of the pages from the manuscript, at http://highway49.library.yale.edu/photonegatives (cookies required—enter “Voynich” in search box).

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  • • •

  Albert, S. M., O. P. Albert the Great. Oxford: Blackfriars Publications, 1948.

  Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa Contra Gentiles. Edited by A. C. Pegis, et al. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1957–59.

  ———. Summa Theologica. 2nd edition. Edited by Father Laurence Shapcote. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1990.

  Aristotle. The Complete Works: The Oxford Translation. Translated by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

  Arnaldaz, Roger. Averroës: A Rationalist in Islam. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000.

  Bacon, Francis. The Advancement of Learning and Novum Organum. London: Colonial Press, 1906.

  ———. The Major Works. Edited by Brian Vickers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

  Bacon, Roger. Opera quaedam hactenus inedita. Edited by James. S. Brewer. London: Longman, 1859.

  ———. The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon. Translated by Robert Belle Burke. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1928.

  ———. Part of the Opus Tertium of Roger Bacon. Edited by A. G. Little. Aberdeen: University Press, 1912.

  ———. Roger Bacon's Letter Concerning the Marvelous Power of Art and of Nature and Concerning the Nullity of Magic. Edited by Tenney L. Davis. Kila, Mont.: Kessinger, 1997.