In Our Time - Roger Bacon

Episode Date: April 20, 2017

The 13th-century English philosopher Roger Bacon is perhaps best known for his major work the Opus Maius. Commissioned by Pope Clement IV, this extensive text covered a multitude of topics from mathematics and optics to religion and moral philosophy. He is also regarded by some as an early pioneer of the modern scientific method. Bacon's erudition was so highly regarded that he came to be known as 'Doctor Mirabilis' or 'wonderful doctor'. However, he is a man shrouded in mystery. Little is known about much of his life and he became the subject of a number of strange legends, including one in which he allegedly constructed a mechanical brazen head that would predict the future. With:Jack Cunningham Academic Coordinator for Theology at Bishop Grosseteste University, LincolnAmanda Power Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Oxford Elly Truitt Associate Professor of Medieval History at Bryn Mawr CollegeProducer: Victoria Brignell.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, Dr. Mirabilis, or Wonderful Doctor, was the nickname given to the medieval English scholar Roger Bacon. Born in the early 13th century, much of his life is obscure,

but what is beyond doubt is the vast breadth of his learning. His epic work, the Opus Mayas, comprised seven, books and dealt with science, mathematics, optics, geography, religion, moral philosophy and rhetoric. He was determined to improve the quality of education in the West, arguing that this was necessary to reduce the amount of sin. Some historians regard him as one of the earliest European promoters of the modern scientific method, but he also acquired a reputation as a magician, and over time various legends grew up about him. According to the most famous story, he said have created a mechanical talking head to foretell the fate of the kingdom.

With me to discuss Roger Bacon are Amanda Power, Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Oxford. Eddie Truitt, Associate Professor of Medieval History in Brinmore College, and Jack Cunningham, academic coordinator for theology at Bishop Gristestest University, Lincoln. Amanda Power, what do we know about Roger Bacon's family background? Well, we don't know a great deal, as is common with most medieval figures. What we do know comes from a couple of passages in his writings, which are not intended to tell us biographical information.

So the first of them talks about how he has been, this was written in 1267, how he's been constantly in study for the last 40 years ever since he learnt the alphabet. The other piece of information that we have that relates to his family background comes later when he's talking about his family's background in English politics,

and he talks about how he has a brother who's a knight who fights on the side of the king during the Civil War later in the century, and he has another brother who is a scholar. And from all this and also the means, the financial means that he appears to have to devote to studies, we assume that he is a member of the lesser nobility. His family has proved impossible to track down in any of the records that we have precisely, but there are a lot of bacon's in prominent positions in this period.

But we do know that at the customary for those people from that background at that time, at a young age you went to Oxford? Yes. So we think probably he would have gone to Oxford at about the age of 13. We don't know precisely what he studied, except that in Oxford at this time, there was a greater emphasis on natural sciences than perhaps in some of the other universities in Europe. But you'd set at the classics, first of all, wouldn't he? As a child, as a child.

He said that he studied Seneca in infancy, which possibly means before the age of eight. I see, take a deep breath here. But did you study theology at Oxford? He was customary to study theology after you had a preparation in philosophy, particularly in the arts. And we don't know for certain that he ever studied theology. But you've got to get all this learning somewhere. So he's at Oxford learning a lot of stuff. And then he moves to Paris.

Do you any idea why? This is all very unclear, but we think this is most of what we know is on the basis of what he said, the people he said he'd talk to. So we're just sort of, we try and work it out on the basis of who was where, when. So on that rather tenuous basis, it looks as if he probably completed his studies and graduated as Master of Arts from Oxford when he was about 21. Then he moved to Paris as a teacher. In the notes that I got from through, he distinguished himself there by teaching Aristotle. Yes.

Could you develop that? Yes. This is a very interesting period. This is the very beginning of the universities as institutionalised systems of learning in Europe at the time. And previously there had been monastery schools and private schools run by particular masters. but this is a time where learning's beginning to be one of the main tools that the church is using to establish orthodox theological belief and also orthodox opinion. So it's seen as the university particularly in Paris is seen as important in the fight against heresy, which was seen as one of the great threats of the period.

So there was a great care taken to make sure that learning in Paris especially was Orthodox. And Aristotle at this point was new and controversial. Many of the texts had only recently been discovered. but they were suggesting a quite different way of looking at the world. And I suppose traditionally it had been felt that this is sort of Augustinian idea, that the soul and the mind was where proper and trustworthy knowledge resided and the senses were unreliable. And so your sense perceptions about the world weren't reliable.

Aristotle has the opposite perspective. Aristotle feels that the mind is an unreliable area and what you need is direct observation and sense observation. And so this is a time where ways of knowing are transforming. and so Aristotle had been banned in Paris and the ban was lifted about the time that Bacon arrived and so he came from Oxford knowing his Aristotle into an environment where it had been banned until very recently.

This is partly because Aristotle's a pagan and partly because his logic challenges the Bible. Both of those are problems in slightly different ways. Editorate, why did he withdraw, as far as we know, I think we're getting on slightly steadier ground here, although we've been well-guided through treacherous territory. Why did he withdraw from his universal role and become an independent scholar.

That betokened some private wealth, doesn't it? Yes, so first of all, he withdrew because he could. That is, and again, as Amanda has pointed out, we know this from his somewhat later writings about this period. He talks about how he spent 2,000 pounds, so an extraordinary sum of money. In those days. In those days, even now, perhaps.

on books, on assistants, on instruments, and of course on just supporting himself. And in part, one of the things that he talks about is that he had grown to realize that some of the translations that he was using and others were using in Paris of these Greek texts or Arabic texts that had been translated into Latin were perhaps unreliated. And so one of the things that he wanted to do was to study foreign languages. And so he spent some time studying Greek. He studied some Arabic and some Hebrew. And also, he, picking up Amanda's point about sense perception,

Paris in the sort of 1240s and 1250s was a place where there was a lot of intellectual interest in observation, in directly experiencing natural knowledge and sort of trying to understand the natural world that way. To go back to Amanda's point about sense perception, they're worried because there are a lot of visions being had and say, well, how do you know it's a vision and how you know you didn't just have a fit? That is a big problem.

And so, right, intellectually, the problem is, how do you distinguish from an identical effect what the proper cause of it is? And so bacon, it seems, really took up that interest and pursued it on his own, as it wasn't part of the curriculum at Paris the time. And this, the Arab texts, the great Arab texts, Al-Kindy and so on, are coming in and being translated, and he welcomes them.

And can you tell us which he particularly welcomes? So I would choose, I think three to just focus on. So Al-Kindi, who in Latin is known as Al-Kindis, wrote a very influential, treatise called on rays, which explains and rationalizes how planetary or celestial bodies emit rays of influence that penetrate things on Earth. And this text provided a rational explanation for how everything above the moon in the celestial spheres influences everything on Earth, including human bodies, but also plants, animals, weather, etc.

Another text was, and another writer was Ibn al-Heitham, who was slightly later than Al-Kindy from really the sort of early 11th century. And he wrote several important texts on optics or prospectiva. And one was translated into Latin around 1,200, where it was known but perhaps not taken up. very enthusiastically. And that, it seems also was very influential for bacon. And Al-Hitham, one of the most important aspects of that text is that Al-Hitham challenged the existing

Ptolemaic view of vision, of how we perceive things. So Ptolemy, in the sort of second century, suggested that we see things because we emit rays from our eyes. That is a theory of extramission. And Al-Hitham suggested that, in fact, we perceive things via vision because things emit rays into our eyes. And he also had a very elaborate geometric set of proofs and calculations for how you could measure angles, rays, and perceptions. And then finally, the secret of secrets, which is a text that was attributed to Aristotle in this period and believed to be a text that Aristotle had written to Alexander the Great, which provided to Alexander the important knowledge that a canny

and just and wise ruler would need in order to rule a great empire. That was contested later, wasn't it? And in fact, even at the time, it wasn't universally believed to be Aristotelian. Jack Cunningham One of the key figures in Bacon's life was the scholar Robert Grosteus He was the first Chancellor of Oxford University To understand right

Who Could you tell us more about him And what support Grosestest gave to Bacon? Yeah Grosstess is monumentally important in Bacon's life But Bacon later on describes

Grostestess and his most closest associate Adam de Marisco He calls them Perfect in Divine Wisdom They really, really are inspiration to him. Robert Grostest was the Bishop of Lincoln from 1235 to 1253. And he starts off from a very low back, lowly background in Suffolk. The story is, and semi-legendary, is that he makes his way to Lincoln, and there he enters the house of St. Hugh of Lincoln, the great St. Hugh of Lincoln, and this is

his first school. So, this great polymouth bacon, what did he find to admire? What was he looking for? There must have been an intellectual magnetism about this man. Yeah, there was. There was an intellectual magnetism about him because one of the things that Grosteus does, he's probably the most learned man of his generation in the new learning that's arriving in Europe, Aristotle and also the Arabs.

He is also absolutely adamant, along with Aristotle, that observation is terribly important to our learning, and that's absolutely crucial. But he goes beyond Aristotle on that. The Scientia Experimentalist is very, very good, and it's as good as science can get. But he goes beyond him by saying, after that we have to apply mathematics to it.

And these two things really, really inspire Bacon's method. So when we discussed how did he help Bacon, there was very, very little contact between them. Bacon arrives in Oxford shortly after Grosteus leaves and goes to Lincoln. So there's little contact, but the contact is the inspiration, the methodology that he leaves behind. There's the school of optics. Grostis thinks that optics is an incredibly important science, underpinning the meaning of the universe, really. And Bacon arrives in Oxford, and he is immersed in all of this with the experimental method, the optics, the mathematics being absolutely crucial.

and these are really things that Bacon carries with them throughout his life. At some point Bacon joins the Franciscans. Do we know why? That is a really, really interesting point. The Franciscans start in the early 13th century. And they start because Francis turns his back on his rather advantaged background and he becomes what we know as a mendicant. In fact, this is a new phenomenon in the church. And a mendicant is different to a monk.

monks take three vows. Monks take the vow of celibacy and poverty, but then they take a vow of permanence, which means they immerse themselves in a convent or monastery. Now, a mendergant friar, is different to that. They only take two vows. They take a vow of poverty and chastity, but no permanence. And this means that they are free to wander the world and get out into society. And they take their monasticism, and it is a form of monasticism, out into the community. And this is a form of monasticism out into the community. and this is, I think, important to bacon. The controversy about bacon and the fries is that he doesn't appear to us to embody the ideals of St. Francis. He isn't bathing lepers. He isn't walking about the world and trying to create a better church. And therefore, he also grumbles about his superiors.

And this leads us to think, well, he's not a very good Franciscan, is he? And even to the extent that some people have said, well, he joined the Franciscans because this allows him to pursue his scientific. career. But I disagree with that. I think that he shares a huge ideal with the Franciscans. One of the first symbolic acts that Francis does, well, it's more than symbolic. He goes and mends a broken church next to Assisi. Now, this becomes a metaphor for what the Franciscans are doing. They really want to mend this broken and endangered church. And I think that's what motivates Bacon as well. He joins the Franciscans because that's his big intellectual desire as well. he wants to rebuild christenedom.

He wants to do it intellectually. This is the way he does his, he practices his vocation. He doesn't bathe lepers because he's an intellectual. Amanda, now we can be put you back on firmer ground. You did all the groundbreaking stuff. Hard soil as well, some of it. Bacon became, I'm acquainted with a senior church figure,

Gide Foucault, who became Pope Clement the fourth. and then they had a correspondence, which can you develop that place? Well, Bacon had for the first 10 years or so after joining the Franciscan order apparently not done much writing. It's a little unclear how this happened, but he seems to have had the opportunity to approach Guy de Fuco when he was sent as a papal legate to England. I've alluded before to the problems in England in the 13th century from Magna Carta onwards.

Things had reached a pitch where a papal legate had been sent in order to try and settle things down and basically condemn the people who are rebelling against the king. Now Bacon, it's possible that the reason that Bacon came in contact with him, apart from geographical proximity, he was basically sitting in France, trying to come across to England to make the condemnation and no one was letting him. Bacon's family was supporting the king. The Papal Leggett was there to condemn everyone rebelling against the king.

Bacon's family apparently had lost a lot in serving the king. So these were things that may have recommended him to the Pope. But what Bacon seems to have done is got in touch with, sorry, with the Papal Leggett, seems to have got in touch to the Papal Leggett and warned him that there was a disastrous state of affairs in the world at large, particularly in the Latin West, and said that he had the solution and that he would explain to the Pope

what the remedies were for these great dangers, as he put it. And what did he provide as a solution? Well, after some towing and froing, he wrote extensive works for the Pope about a thousand pages, perhaps in modern printed texts, in trying circumstances, which set out first. the problems that he thought were causing this state of great danger.

And then the solutions. The problems were an enormous mix of things, particularly how people were approaching learning, a deference to false authorities and an unwillingness to admit to ignorance and ignoring a lot of the new learning that was coming in. That was part of the problem. But it was a sort of existential situation. Bacon was an apocalyptic thinker like many in his period.

Antichrist was imminent. He says at the times of Antichrist press hard, against the West. And so this meant that enemies of the church, Muslims in particular because of the Crusades, but also the Mongol Empire was on the rise and had devastated the Eastern Christian kingdoms a couple of decades earlier.

And it wasn't clear whether they were coming back. The world was full of a kind of sinfulness that was making it possible, impossible for people to see clearly and to understand. And we have to understand that for bacon or knowledge comes from God. And the more sinful you are the less, you can comprehend that because it's a sort of moral, you need a moral cleanliness to be able to understand learning.

So this whole situation was a sort of perfect storm of evil. And so, Ellie, Eleit, he wrote a major work, both three works. Opus Mayas is the biggest. He developed the idea of, can you tell us what he did in that? So in the Opus Mayas, which he intended to be this, as Amanda said, kind of overhaul of educational reform. So he sets out a number of... This is sent to the Pope. This, yes, which he sent to the Pope.

Which we have a very reason to be called to the Pope took notice of. Yes, I think there's this and then definitely the second text that he sent as well. It's not clear, I think, about the third. Let's stick with the first, right? You send to the Pope, the Pope, reads it, right? And what's he saying that's important for the Pope? So one of the things he's talking about is how, so, as Amanda says, he lays out the sort of causes of human error and how we, and ignorance. And then he lays out a system of reform.

So he says, we need to actually reform how people know things and reform the kind of system of knowledge in the universities so that people are actually spending more time studying foreign languages, which, as I said earlier, he had thought were incredibly important to actually understanding the texts that were available. grammar as well because then you can understand knowledge and language appropriately. And then also this idea that Jack brought up earlier of Scantia Experimentalus, which is knowledge gained through direct experience and observation, which he says is necessary to both confirm the kind of knowledge that you could get otherwise through rational, or rational argument and rationality, but also it can provide new knowledge about the world.

And then this all leads up to the most important aspect, which is, as Amanda pointed out, the kind of moral cleanliness aspect that retraining your mind allows you to be, to approach learning in this state of moral cleanliness so that you can actually know God better, which was the whole point for bacon. And then the next one developed, we haven't got, and that's the big one. That's huge, huge. And then he said the second one and then the third. The second one is quite important.

So the second one, the opus minus, he sort of recapitulates a number of points made in the opus myus. But I actually think Amanda is more appropriately, she's more familiar with the opus minus. than I am. Do you want to say a few words about Airbus Minas and a minor? Well, I suppose that each of them is partly a precaution, so he's not sure whether the text will reach the paper or curious. So they do

restate the ideas, but one of the things that he tries to develop through them is his writing about alchemy. He's very concerned he believes in alchemy. He thinks that you can use alchemy to make potions that will prolong human life and can make infinite amounts of gold which will give the Latin West advantage in war. And so

what he tries to do is divide up this isoteric material between the three text so that they're not, so that if anyone falls into the hands of the wrong person, they can't do alchemy. Yeah, Conningham, did Grosse Test take up this idea of alchemy and magic together with Bacon? No, and this is really, really quite unusual, actually, because Bacon takes so much from gross test. And in Grosse Test, we can see kind of a journey in his early works.

He writes one about the impressions of the errs. And he does dabble in a bit of prediction there, and he predicts that in 1247, there will be on the 15th of April, 1247, there will be a, he predicts the weather, and he also predicts a bad wine harvest in another year in the future. And then after that, we get a silence on it. And in his sermons, he talks about these things being a false art. And eventually, in his late work, the hexamaran, he's really against these things and doesn't,

more or less says that they're anti-Christian. And that's unusual because bacon is often a mirror to gross test saw, but not in this instance. What more specifically was Groste's influence on Bacon? Robert Grosteustace had a very, very interesting idea and a very important idea, I think. He said that the fundamental reality of everything, the thing that underscores everything,

even in its multiple changing, is light. That informs and causes everything in the universe. Now, if we can study light with optics and with optics, we can, this is the best bit, we can express optics in mathematics. Now, what we're doing there is expressing things, we're putting things in this world, which are finite, we're expressing them in infinite language, which is mathematics. And this is terribly important because with this, by this process, by mathematical certainty, we can unravel the secrets of the universe.

The secrets of the universe are light, it's optics. We can unravel that by mathematics. We can know the doings of God, what underscores the doings of God. And I think that this is terribly important to Bacon. I think that he gets his certainty that mathematics is absolutely vital to scientific knowledge from Grosteth. All science is subsumed to mathematics. And they get this from Aristotle because there is a hierarchy in knowledge and science. So when you're studying optics or astronomy, you have to have geometry.

And when you study music, you have to have arithmetic. Because this is a higher knowledge. and they kind of have to draw on these things. And so if you take that from Aristotle, and if Grostest says it and Bacon takes it from Grosse test, really mathematics is underpinning absolutely everything, all science. And that's an interesting advancement, I think.

Amanda, can I come back to you on this great Opus-Meyas Bacon? Can you give us some idea, which you haven't discussed so far, really, about the range of this man, Roger Bacon's learning and knowledge because it's demonstrated in that work. Can you range over it what he knows a lot about this is

in the 13th century? To be a polymath in this period is less unusual than it has become. Bacon was remarkable because he knew the curriculum of course that was taught in the universities but a lot of the material that we're talking about is beyond the curriculum either slightly or far beyond the curriculum.

And also a lot of his interest in this particular text was practical, and so he wanted to understand how you could apply subjects practically, which sort of opened up a whole set of other lines of inquiry. So he talks about language. He's very interested in precise use of language, but also in understanding texts in their proper languages that they were written in, so you'd learn Arabic and Greek and Hebrew.

He thought it was important to know language for preaching. His book on mathematics covers a whole range of topics from geography. He made a map of the world that it wasn't quite longitude and latitude, but it was certainly set out in a way that enabled you to know mathematically where things were insofar as was possible at the time. He was extremely interested in astronomy and astrology and in things that we would now call magic. There's a book on mathematics that contains all these different elements. There's a book on optics and perspective.

There's a book on the science of experience, Zientiore Experimentalis, which contains a vast array of material, a lot of it, which is sort of based on observation as well as mathematics. And then the final section of the Opus Mayas is about moral philosophy. And again, that covers an enormous territory. And it's a book that's often neglected when people are talking about baking because it's not part of the history of science, really. But a lot of it is moral thought and an appropriate moral behavior.

There are huge slabs of quotation from Seneca's moral works, which were not at the time known well. And it's a sort of mirror for princes. It's about conduct, how you should behave. And particularly he's very keen that people should be moderate. And like the Stoics, they should contain their anger and be. reasonable. And then in the same book following from the same sort of lines of thinking, he has material about all the different religions of the world. He's in touch with travellers who've recently come back from the Mongol Empire, particularly William of Ruebrook, first reports of

Buddhism. And so he's able to assess the six religions, what he sees is the six main religions of the world, which include the Mongol religion and Buddhism and paganism and Islam and Judaism and Christianity. And he compares them and sort of makes a scheme of which ones are best in their knowledge of God and their understanding of how things really are. And then he comes to, and he sees this as useful knowledge for converting the people from those religions. Then finally he comes to how one should support Christians in their faith and how to demonstrate the efficacy of the Eucharist and how one should use rhetoric. So there's a whole section on classical rhetoric about how you might use that to preach and convert people both

internally and externally. And then it breaks off. But... Well, that'll do. Annie, Trude. one aspect that Bacon's work that caught the imagination of later readers was his speculation about what were then thought as fantastical machines, machines that would go underwater, machines that would fly in the air, and he's supposed to have created a bronze head which could tell the future, talk the future. Can you give us a bit more about that? Sure. So, as I said earlier, one of the works that was very influential for Bacon was the Secretum Secretorum, in which, is this text that was believed to be written by Aristotle to Alexander. And in it, that text contains a number of examples of kind of interesting and strange machines and other texts from antiquity.

So one of the things that's interesting about Bacon's fantastical machines, which range from flying machines, submarines, as you said, conveyances that can move incredibly fast, independent of animal power, is that many of the ideas for them actually come from antiquity. He says, we know these things must exist and be able to exist because they used to exist. And then he also... Where does he find evidence that they used to exist? So in, for example, either in works like the Secretum Secretorum, some of the optical devices,

like the ones that Jack mentioned, there are ancient texts on things like burning mirrors and optics and things you can use to make optical devices that allow you to extend human vision significantly or make illusions appear that would frighten an army, et cetera. So some of those are from ancient texts. And then other things are things that he, it seems, suggests, must be possible given what we know of nature and what is possible. with kind of human ingenuity, we just don't quite know how to do them yet.

So, for example, things having to do with magnets. He thought that it would be possible to combine a magnet and a kind of spherical astrolabe, which Ptolemy had set out, but that in combining them in a particular way, you might be able to make a machine that was a combination of a perpetual motion machine and an incredibly accurate clock.

So he has a kind of wide array of those. And those really, for him, are examples of what is possible to make using this notion of scantia experimentalist, this idea that through observation and through instruments, you could actually uncover, you could build instruments and then uncover more about the world. And they really caught the imagination of later, later scholars and later writers.

Jack, can you develop this idea? He used the two terms he used were experimentum and argumentum. Can you just develop that a little? Yeah, and I think what's being talked about there is induction and deduction. Am I right on that? That's this in my interpretation.

There's a better way of understanding it, although it's probably a later kind of interpretation. But in induction, you look at things and look at causes and you build up a theory, from that. So a typical one for Robert Grosteus, for example, would be the rainbow. And he sees that light passing through translucent things creates a rainbow. So he looks at it in water and in water wheels and he squirts water out his mouth. But then he looks at it in prisms as well and and on ducks feathers. And he can so he can say then that the light rainbows are created by

light passing through translucent objects. That happens by refraction. And he can test that then. And that is the process of deduction. So you have your theory, light and translucent objects or materials create the rainbow. Now we can test that by looking at, does this happen elsewhere? To build up

a theory on that and that's kind of the experimental method. And then he can make other conclusions that the light in the duck's feather, the rainbow in the duck's feather is actually not refraction at all. It is reflection. And And then he works out because he's doing these experiments down here, he knows how the rainbows created.

Robert Grostis is the first person to know that the rainbow is created by refraction. And he said this is because the cloud is a big lens in the sky casting its rainbow onto another cloud as a screen. And that's how the rainbows created. Yeah, I think just to pick up on what Jack was saying, I think that to think about it, and this gets in with what Bacon talks about with Scantia Experimentalus, there's things that we know through argumentum, through a syllogism that deals with a universal. Can you give some example of a syllogism? Sure.

You, So, Socrates, by all mean. Yeah. Everybody else does. So a syllogism is a tool for logical reasoning, and it comprises two propositions and a conclusion, and it goes from the universal to the specific. So all men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

So Bacon talks about how there are kinds of things that you know through argumentum, through rationality, like all fire burns. That object is engulfed in flames, therefore it will be burnt. But he says you need experimentum, you need direct experience to fully appreciate that. So unless you actually burn your own hand in a flame or you see something destroyed by fire, you won't fully. understand the sort of what fire does or what it is. And I think that's how he, how Bacon kind of meshes those two ways of knowing together and says that in fact, it's not that one is more important than another, but that they can be used together to achieve greater certainty. Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, in 2017-Owen, Bacon produced the compendium of the study philosophy.

And then he seems to have stopped writing for quite a while. Do we know why? We don't really. We're also not completely sure that he stopped writing. We wonder whether he perhaps worked on additions of things or redrafted things. We don't have any kind of major creative works that we know can securely be dated to this period. It has long been thought that during this period, Bacon was condemned by his order and imprisoned. And this comes from a 14th century chronicle of possibly dubious authenticity. But historians of Bacon for centuries, I mean, really since the 14th century. 14th century have assumed that this drastic and awful thing happened and that his work was condemned and that he was silenced and persecuted by his order and by the church. And he may have had a period of some considerable time of imprisonment after which he was released and then he wrote his final work, the companion with the study of theology, which is usually dated to about 1292, so some time after this. I myself, I'm not terribly convinced by the idea of the condemnation.

Jack Cunning, what were his views then on the... relationship between religion and science if he had been condemned, let's say it wasn't, but even if he was, what were his views? Yeah, it's absolutely crucial that we understand that religion for him science fed in and was meshed with. There was no dichotomy between scientific endeavor

and religious endeavor. He is very important to him is the recovery of the purity of knowledge that we had before the fall. And that's possible. We can pursue this knowledge. We have kind of become degraded as human beings since that fall, but with study,

with scientific knowledge, with acquiring great scientific knowledge, we can restore to us to the condition that humanity experienced in the Garden of Eden. And that's a big claim. And once again, I think Grostest is related here. Grosstest goes even further and says that we can, he talks about deification,

Knowledge will bring you deification. You will become like God. Not this side of the, of paradise, but you can make your great progress there through science, which is very important. Another aspect which is very, very important, as well is divine illumination. And this, again, Groste says there's a difference between our intellectus and our intelligentsia. And intellectus is what we will gather knowledge by studying and by experience and all of these things. But it isn't as good as, um, intelligentia and this will happen with divine illumination. We will get this. This will come from God. It's got nothing to do with the soul or the capacity of the mind. It just happens. And this is very, very important because if you're feeling queasy at this stage about people saying you can acquire science and knowledge through the senses, because the senses are part of our fallen condition, we can't trust them. Well, don't worry because while we're saying they're good and you can use them, they're not as good as the intelligentsia, which is divine wisdom. And that calms people's nerves, I think, about the whole process of scientific inquiry. Do you want to take that up?

I just wanted to say that I think getting back to what Amanda was saying earlier, that for Bacon, he was profoundly concerned with the state of Christendom and the threats, both internal and external to it. And so he saw, I mean, and for the individual as well. as all of Christendom. And so he saw science or natural inquiry into nature as a critical way of helping to, you know, make people less sinful and help make Christendom stronger and more resilient to the forces of the Antichrist. Amanda, there are many legends in such a legend about Roger Beggen. One of them is this idea of the bronze mechanical head which did what? The bronze mechanical head was supposed to give them access to knowledge that they just couldn't work out for themselves.

It was possibly a demonic force, but it was one that you could harness. In the stories about this, what Bacon wants to do is to build a wall of brass around the Kingdom of England in order to protect it from the rest of the world. And in order to do so, he felt that he needed to create this brazen head that would speak through some extraordinary external power. Where did this arise? The first time we come across this is William of Monsbury's History of the Kings of England and this is, I think there's an interesting kind of detail in that story because Monsbury tells us that Pope Sylvester goes to Arab Spain and he gets a secret book and after that secret book he can construct a head that will give him answers.

Now I think that the Arab connection is very, very important because in the 13th century then, People who are reading Arab text, like Grosteast's and like Bacon, both have this myth surrounding them that they have got these mechanical head that spews forth great truths. And I think that Arab connection, the reading of Arab text, has got a very important part to play in this brazen head story. Amanda, do we have any idea of what he would like, the people he knew.

Gros Tess is scarcely met. He corresponding with Clement the fourth, He met him once or twice. Do we have any other biographical details which would flesh him out of it? Well, Bacon has a reputation for being an angry and bitter man. He was certainly extremely critical of many of his contemporaries, although very enthusiastic about a handful of them. It's a time of enormous polemic,

and if you read what everyone else is saying at the time, everyone else is angry. And, you know, people speak in the most extreme terms, and people accuse the Pope of being the Antichrist, the Pope accuses them of being the Antichrist. I mean, this is a time of, you know, the thunderstorms in language. that people are using.

And Bacon doesn't really stand out in that context. But if you read him in the history of science, where everyone's kind of calmly explaining scientific principles, of course he looks a bit agitated. And we're in your idea, Jack, have the influence that Bacon had over the next century or so. Hmm. Now, that's a really difficult one.

And it's difficult because I think it's hard to separate him from the legend. And when we get to the 17th century, and he has been using, magic and there is no different differentiation between natural magic, which bacon is, it's bacon's understanding. This is a perfectly legitimate branch of science. And when we get to the early modern period, there's no differentiation. That's magic. That's demonic work. And so that's the first big reputation of bacon, post-Bacon, is this idea of this magician. And then he is defended by people like John D. and Anthony Ward who's saying, oh, this is a great scientist.

and in order to defend and they make great claims that actually he's the modern scientist in the medieval period and we're kind of stuck with both of them, I think. I am a bit concerned about the idea of and being a great modern scientist in the medieval period because I think it does a disservice to the period that he lived in. I think that this was great... There are agreeing nods from you, my now.

Yes, well, I agree. I think in a sense what he's doing is so interesting it's a disservice to it to see it as just part of a trajectory towards what we're doing. His way of seeing the world is enormously connected. It's full of this kind of vitality. All matter has force and potential. The heavens are influencing things.

The heavens are influencing everything. People are influencing each other. It's a very connected sort of way of seeing the world. It's quite different from ours. And I think to separate out small bits of it and see this is leading towards our present is really to misunderstand the whole force of what he's thinking in a very selective way.

Finally? I was just going to say, I think, that one of the things that's interesting, as Amanda's mentioned, his alchemical writing, but in fact, within alchemy, he wasn't a very influential alchemist in terms of the development of alchemy in this period or in those sort of immediate later centuries. But there's a proliferation of texts that are alchemical texts that become attributed to him throughout the 14th, 15th,

and even 16th centuries. which I think demonstrates that he has this incredible reputation as a man of enormous learning and ability and access to knowledge that's not available to the multitudes. Well, thank you very much. You've made it available to multitudes. In this program, thanks to Amanda Power at it, Stuart and Jack Cunningham. Next week we'll be discussing the ancient Egyptian book of the dead. Thanks for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now. with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. So what did we miss out? We missed out a lot. I think one of the things we missed out was just what magic meant to people in the 13th century. It's a very, very interesting development at this period, and so it lets us know what Bacon's version of magic is. And what happened is we get right up until the 13th century.

The consensus comes from Augustine that magic is a deception. The devil's a great deceiver. magicians can deceive us. And that changes in the 13th century. And we get in 1233 a decree from the papacy, which is called Voxen Rama, which says it isn't a deception. It's real. It's demonic worship.

And sorcerers worship the devil, and it's a heresy. And ironically, at the same time, you get great minds, great scholastics like William of Avern, who is the Bishop of Paris, saying, no, no, look, this is not, there is a demonic magic, but there's a natural magic as well. He's getting this from Al-Kindi, and he says that this is just tapping into the forces of nature. We can use these forces, and magic is a branch of science,

and this is Bacon's understanding. It's probable he comes to magic through William of Avern, and this is his understanding. It's another form of nature where we can co-op the forces of nature and understand the forces of nature and produce marvelous things. And that's his magic, and that's what I was talking, about before about the legacy later on in the 17th century they'd lose that that magic's magic and steam and that's

I wish we had that in the program, it's very clear. And he also writes, Bacon also writes a text, a sort of later text called a sort of short pamphlet letter on the hidden powers of nature and art and the invalidity of magic in which he says that there are right, there are magicians who are out to trick people and that's he's absolutely against that. But that Many things that are taken to be magic are in fact naturally occurring, sort of natural marvels that are also melded to the kind of power of human art or ingenuity

and the ability to make interesting and amazing things. Doesn't he do one experiment mumbling with a magnet, mumbling, not mumbling, that's a bit, saying magic words. And then he does another one without saying the magic words and the results are the same. Exactly. And he writes about that. says, you know, this is one of, that the magician will try and trick you and make it seem like the power of the magnet is inherent in the magician by saying these words and this knowledge,

but in fact, it's inherent in the magnet itself. It's a naturally occurring power or, you know, ability, some kind of virtue in the object itself. Yeah. Any other areas? I have a slightly different area that I feel is worth mentioning. Because Bacon's usually belongs to historians of science and philosophy, his work tends to be studied in a sort of intellectual trajectory of ideas across time. What's incredibly interesting about Bacon is just how he fits into a very particular society and what he tells us about that society. So this is a time when the church is trying to achieve very particular set of goals in society. This is around the time that Bacon was born. There's an enormous church.

council where what you're supposed to believe was established and also what was supposed to happen to those who didn't believe it. So punishment of heresy, this is the era of inquisition. But it's also a massive program of pastoral care where the entire population of Europe was supposed to interact with priests and talk about their sins and be taught how to think what they're meant to think and behave as they're meant to behave. And this is part of a whole sort of strategy to bring, to strengthen the church against its enemies. It's as, you know, widely seen as the end of the world where there's a sort of enormity of sin to be dealt with. And popes are sort of constantly making statements about what needs to be done

and the problems that the church is facing. And Bacon is incredibly responsive to these. So this whole program is very tightly designed to address very imaginatively a whole range of problems in a time where you're trying to inculcate the tenets of the faith into the population more securely so that they're going to be saved rather than maybe not being saved. And so that you can deal with an array of threats from beyond Europe as well. and also kind of create and I think we're possibly talking about bacon

in very benign ways but I mean he is interested in creating an elite group of men who are chased who therefore have nothing to do with women and women's worlds and knowledge who hold the power and one of his justifications for all this magic being okay is Franciscans do it, Dominicans do it, men who are sworn an oath to the church

who have no family commitments who are sort of operating free from society in a very disembodied way these are the people who can do this sort of thing. No one else should go anywhere near it. And so it is setting up a very particular sort of society. I think that's an interesting thing about this program that often, Bacon's program that often gets lost.

And I think also this point about that Bacon, that he tells us more about his own moment, right, reflects also this idea of how he is taken up in the history of science, which is that when he's taken up, you know, by scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries who see him as this sort of proto-modern figure, locked in this period of sort of anti-modernity, the Middle Ages, really what that tells us is about those scholars of the 19th and 20th century and what their concerns were, which was establishing this kind of lineage of modernity that was available

only to people, you know, who were, you know, English men of science, you know, educated in universities, then that that becomes sort of what Bacon's role is in this sort of longer trajectory. So it really, he gets used to sort of justify their concerns or their agendas as opposed to, right, his seeing him as somebody who's, you know, interested in what the concerns of the church were of his own moment in the 13th century. And he, in the early modern period in England, especially, he becomes a reformation figure because he is. somebody who, the Pope in prisons, clearly. He argues with his own order, the Franciscans,

who were real enemies of the Reformation. He's a nationalist. And so all of these things are projected back to him as well. And indeed, they were to Grosteustace as well. The story goes, the Grosteus killed the Pope. He appeared to him as a ghost and hit him with his staff and killed him. That's amazing. But you don't believe, huh?

And there you are. We've got a good old fact, defending the rights of the English. church against the papacy in the 13th century. This is all music to English Reformationeers and it's again as part of that projection. Thank you all very much. I hope you enjoyed it. It's great. Thank you so much. There are many more history and discussion programmes from Radio 4

to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.com.com.uk slash radio 4. Hi, I'm Rihanna Dillon and I wanted to let you know about another podcast from the BBC that I think you might like. It's called Seriously, and we've got a very special guest. My name is Solange-Nallis-Fergison. I first read Soura Nile Hurston's work in my early 20s. Musician Solange joins us to talk about a woman whose work was totally inspirational to her.

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