Roger Bacon · Science
The most famous Bacon: the passages foreseeing self-moving ships, cars, and flying machines; his call to correct the Julian calendar three centuries before Gregory; his early notice of gunpowder’s force - and the honest task of separating the real, bold friar from the later legend of Bacon the wizard with his talking brazen head.
In a short work known as the Epistola de secretis operibus artis et naturae - the Letter on the Secret Works of Art and Nature - Bacon set out to show that the true marvels of the world are produced not by magic but by art (that is, technology) and nature, and that far greater marvels are possible. In its most celebrated passage he lets his imagination run down the centuries. Ships, he writes, might be built to move without rowers, guided by a single man yet faster than if crowded with oarsmen; carriages might move with unbelievable force and no animals to draw them; and machines might be made to fly, with a man seated at the centre turning an engine that beats artificial wings upon the air like a bird. Diving-suits to walk on the sea floor, bridges without supports, and devices to lift great weights round out the vision. Bacon insists these are not sorcery but the lawful works of art - and that a wiser age will achieve them.
Bacon’s boldness was not confined to dreams of machines; he trained it on a scandal hiding in plain sight - the calendar. The Julian calendar, inherited from Rome, assumed a year very slightly too long, so that over the centuries the calendar had drifted out of step with the sun and the true dates of the equinoxes and solstices. By Bacon’s reckoning the error had already grown to some nine or more days since the Council of Nicaea in 325, throwing off the calculation of Easter itself. In Part IV of the Opus Majus he laid the problem before the Pope in blunt mathematical detail and demanded reform, calling the state of the calendar intolerable, horrible, and laughable - a thing that made Christian learning a mockery before Muslim and Jewish astronomers who kept better time. He was right, and centuries early: the correction he urged was not made until the Gregorian reform of 1582, more than three hundred years later.
Within a century of his death, Roger Bacon the reforming friar had been half-buried under Roger Bacon the sorcerer. The real man was a Franciscan scholar (later nicknamed Doctor Mirabilis, the Wonderful Teacher) who championed languages, mathematics, optics, and experiment, and whose sharp tongue and interest in secret and prophetic matters made him enemies. A traditional story, recorded only long after his death, holds that his order confined him for a time on account of certain ‘suspected novelties’; modern scholars treat this with caution, and where they credit it at all they tie it less to any scientific heresy - his views were mostly unremarkable for the day - than to his combative character, his sympathies for a radical wing of the Franciscans, and his taste for apocalyptic prophecy. What is certain is that his advanced ideas and his air of secrecy fed a legend. The talking head, the pact with dark powers, the alchemist conjuring wonders: these are the accretions of folklore and Elizabethan drama, not the record of the man who begged a Pope to found learning on mathematics and experiment.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Bacon foresaw self-powered ships, cars, and flying machines in the Epistola de secretis operibus , called for reform of the erring Julian calendar centuries before Gregory, gave an early notice of gunpowder, and that the ‘wizard’ with the brazen head is later legend. Explain what Bacon actually claime…
Leads to Galileo Galilei.
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