Imagine, if you will, a cramped stone chamber.
It's in the turret of a gatehouse, and it is
the middle of the night. Okay. The only light
is coming from this flickering tallow candle
that smells, you know, faintly of animal fat.
And shadows are dancing across the table that's
just covered in strange instruments, glass lenses,
astrolabes, bubbling flasks of colored liquid.
It sounds like the opening scene of a fantasy
novel. Or maybe a horror movie right before the
monster jumps out. It really does. And in the
center of this room, right in the middle of all
this clutter, sits a head. A life -size human
head, but it's made entirely of brass. Ah. And
the legend says, because we have to start with
the legend, that this head was basically a supercomputer
made of clockwork and magic. The famous brazen
head, of course. Exactly. So the story goes that
the man who built it, a friar, had spent seven
years of his life crafting it. He believed it
could answer any question in the universe. Any
question at all. But he was so exhausted from
the work that he told his assistant, wake me
up if it speaks, and then he just collapsed into
sleep. And naturally, the assistant messes it
up. Of course he does. The head speaks three
times. It says, time is. Then there's a pause.
Then time was. And finally, its last words. Time
is past. And then it self -destructs. With a
deafening crash, the brass head shatters into
a thousand pieces. A tragic loss of data. I mean,
that's the ultimate missed voicemail of the Middle
Ages. If it were true. But that's the thing.
That is the myth of the man we are talking about
today. To the folklore of the 16th century, he
was a wizard, a necromancer, a man who tricked
the devil. Right. But if you open a history of
science textbook today. He is something else
entirely. He's the Dr. Mirabilis, the wonderful
teacher. He's the man who, in the 13th century,
looked at the calendar everyone was using and
said, we are doing this all wrong. He looked
at how universities taught science and said,
stop just reading the books and start actually
looking at the world. And he's the friar who
predicted the automobile, the airplane, and the
submarine, literally hundreds of years before
the engine was even a concept. It's an incredible
contrast. So today, we are unpacking the life
of Roger Bacon. And the mission for this deep
dive is to purse the reality from the myth. We
need to figure out how a devout Franciscan friar,
a man sworn to poverty and obedience, ended up
becoming, well, the friend who reads too much
of the 13th century. It is a fascinating tangle,
you know. You have a man who is... deeply, deeply
religious. Yet he's credited as a pioneer of
the scientific method. Right. He's a friar who
is supposedly humble, but he goes around publicly
insulting the smartest people in Europe. And
he's writing these secret manuscripts for the
pope. completely behind his orders back. The
sources we are diving into today are the heavy
hitters. We've got the historical records of
his life, the history of the Franciscan order,
his massive, massive encyclopedia, the opus made
use, and his frankly desperate letters to Pope
Clement IV. And I think through these documents,
we're going to see a man who wasn't trying to
be a wizard at all. He was trying to save the
world. So let's start at the beginning. Who was
this guy before all the legends took over? Right.
So Roger Bacon was born around 1219, maybe 1220.
We don't have an exact date, do we? Like a birth
certificate or anything? No, nothing like that.
Record keeping back then, well, it wasn't exactly
digital. But we have a clue from Bacon himself.
He wrote something in 1267 that helps us pin
it down. Oh, what does it say? He said, and I'm
paraphrasing a bit, that 40 years have passed
since I first learned the alphabet. The alphabet,
so the alphabet. Learning his ABCs. Well, probably
a bit more than that. It likely refers to the
start of his formal education, you know, the
trivium and quadrivium, the basics of a medieval
university education. And kids started that when?
Like in their teenage years? Yeah, around age
13 was pretty standard. So if you do the math,
1267 minus 40 years minus another 13. You land
right around 1220 for his birth year. It's like
historical detective work. It is. And we know
he was born near Ilchester in Somerset, England.
And this next part is a really crucial detail
that often gets glossed over in the wizard stories.
His family was wealthy. Okay, so he didn't start
out as a poor begging friar. He had something
of a silver spoon. Far from poor, at least in
the beginning. They were well -off landowners.
But the political climate of 13th century England
was... Let's just call it volatile. This was
the era of King Henry III. I remember this vaguely
from history class. Yeah. The Barons' War. The
Second Barons' War, to be precise. Yeah. And
it was a nasty civil conflict. On one side, you
had Simon de Montfort leading the rebel barons.
On the other, you had King Henry III and Bacon's
family. They were royal partisans. They backed
the king. And usually you'd think backing the
king is the safe bet. You'd think so. But in
this case, it was a very, very expensive loyalty.
During the war, the rebels seized the Bacon family's
property. They drove several members of his family
into exile. Wow. So Roger Bacon grows up in a
family that sees its fortune completely collapse
because of war and politics. That context is
absolutely vital for understanding the rest of
his life. Why is it so vital? Because later on,
when he desperately needs money for his research,
you know, for expensive books, for lenses, for
lab equipment, all of it, he can't just write
home to dad for a loan. The bank of mom and dad
has been shuttered by the revolution. He has
the taste and ambition of a wealthy scholar,
but the budget of a pauper. So the family fortune
is gone. He has to turn to the one thing they
can't take away from him. His brain. And he goes
to Oxford. He does. And Oxford in the early 13th
century was an incredibly exciting place. It
was just starting to become a real intellectual
heavyweight in Europe. And the man casting a
long shadow over Oxford at that time was Robert
Grossetest. Grossetest. That's a great name.
It sounds like big head. It roughly translates
to great head. Yes. And he had a great head on
his shoulders. Grossetest was a powerhouse. He
was the Bishop of Lincoln. But before that, he
was a scholar who really, really pushed for using
mathematics to understand the natural world.
So he wasn't just sitting around debating how
many angels can dance on the head of a pan. No,
not at all. He was studying light. He had this
theory that light was the first form of matter.
He used geometry to explain how the world worked.
Now, Bacon probably never studied under Grossetest
directly. Grossetest likely left Oxford before
Bacon arrived. But Bacon definitely attended
lectures by scholars who were deeply influenced
by him. So this idea that math is the language
of nature. gets embedded in Bacon's brain from
very early on. Exactly. It's a foundational concept
for him. And he does very well at Oxford. He
becomes a master. He lectures on the standard
stuff, Aristotle, logic, Latin grammar. But he
also teaches arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy,
the more mathematical arts. He seems to be on
a pretty standard academic track for a brilliant
young man. A very successful one. And then sometime
around 1237, he gets called up to the major leagues.
He accepts an invitation to teach at the University
of Paris. The Sorbonne. That's the Ivy League
of the 13th century. It was the undisputed intellectual
center of Europe. If you wanted to make a name
for yourself, you had to go to Paris. But Bacon?
Well, he didn't exactly fit in with the crowd
there. Why not? Was he too English? Not enough
of a philosopher? He was too. Bacon. He was famously
combative. I mean, you have to understand the
academic culture in Paris at the time was very
focused on. what we call scholasticism, analyzing
texts, debating minute definitions, logical proofs.
And he thought that was a waste of time. He thought
a lot of it was nonsense. He thought they were
intellectually lazy. He constantly criticized
his contemporaries for relying on bad Latin translations
of Aristotle without ever checking the original
Greek or Arabic. He wanted to get back to the
sources. So he was a purist. A very aggressive
one. He famously called the reference for another
incredibly important scholar, Albertus Magnus.
a monstrosity. Ouch. Albertus Magnus was a huge
deal, wasn't he? They called him the universal
doctor. He was probably the most respected intellectual
in Europe at the time. Calling the respect for
him a monstrosity is like a junior physics professor
today saying that respecting Albert Einstein
is a monstrosity. It was just professional suicide.
He had a sharp tongue. He was the guy in the
seminar who would constantly interrupt the professor
to correct his grammar or his translation. We
all know that guy. And nobody invites that guy
to the after party. Exactly. So he was seen as
eccentric, arrogant, difficult. And then in the
late 1250s, around 1256 or 57, he makes a decision
that changes everything. A decision that seems
completely out of character for an arrogant,
independent academic. He joins the Franciscan
order. He becomes a friar. Okay, let's untack
this. The Franciscans. the order of friars minor
these are the followers of st francis of assisi
they are known for absolute poverty for humility
for strict obedience they beg for their food
why would a guy who loves expensive books and
telling everyone they're wrong Join a group like
that. It's the million dollar question, isn't
it? Historians have argued about this for centuries.
Some speculate he did it for purely spiritual
reasons. Maybe he had a genuine midlife crisis
or a deep religious conversion. There was a lot
of religious fervor at the time. Maybe he felt
guilty about his arrogance and wanted to atone
for it. That's certainly possible. Or it could
have been practical. A bit more cynical. How
so? Remember the money problem? His family is
ruined. The life of an independent scholar is
incredibly expensive. You need to buy books,
parchment, pay for lodging. If you're a friar,
you don't have to worry about rent or food. The
order takes care of you. It's a form of institutional
support. But he traded rent for freedom. And
he seems to have made a terrible trade if his
goal was academic freedom. Because shortly after
he joins, the Franciscans undergo a major internal
crackdown. Around the year 1260, the order passed
a statute that explicitly prohibited friars from
publishing books or pamphlets without prior approval
from their superiors. That is a writer's nightmare.
Total censorship. And it gets worse for him personally.
It seems Bacon was, unsurprisingly, a bit of
a troublemaker within the order, too. There's
evidence to suggest he was assigned menial tasks
specifically to keep him humble and limit his
time for contemplation. So they've got this genius
level intellect and they have him scrubbing floors.
Scrubbing floors, peeling vegetables, who knows.
Bacon later described this period of his life
as an enforced absence from scholarly life. He
felt like he was being buried alive. He's surrounded
by people he thinks are intellectually inferior,
and he's forbidden from writing down his groundbreaking
ideas. He must have been absolutely climbing
the walls. Desperate is the word he uses. He
was desperate. But Roger Bacon doesn't give up.
He hatches a plan. He needs a patron. Someone
powerful enough to override his own Franciscan
superiors. And in the medieval world, there is
really only one person who fits that bill. The
Pope. Or in this case, a man who was about to
become the pope. Bacon manages, through a network
of contacts, to get in touch with Cardinal Guy
de Foucault. At the time, Guy was a papal legate,
basically a high -ranking diplomat serving in
England. How does a lowly, floor -scrubbing friar
even get a message to a cardinal? With great
difficulty. And this is where it leads to a complete
comedy of errors. Bacon sends a messenger, a
man named Raymond of Lyon, to speak to Guy de
Foucault on his behalf. But the message gets
completely garbled in translation. The classic
game of telephone. Exactly. Raymond, for whatever
reason, miscommunicates Bacon's proposal. Guy
de Fouque gets the impression that Bacon has
already written a magnificent encyclopedia of
all science. He thinks this great book already
exists, that it's sitting on Bacon's desk, and
that Bacon is just waiting for permission to
send it. But the book doesn't exist. Not even
a first draft. It exists only in Bacon's head.
He was asking for funding to write it. Guy thought
he was being offered a finished product. It's
a huge misunderstanding. And then the stakes
go through the roof. Dramatically. In 1265, Guy
de Fouque is elected pope. He becomes Pope Clement
IV. So now the guy who thinks you have a finished
copy of The Secrets of the Universe is the most
powerful man in the Western world. And he wants
his book. On June 22, 1266, the new pope sends
a letter directly to Bacon. He officially commissions
him to write out his remedies for the current
conditions of the world, for the state of education,
for everything. But there is a catch, a massive
catch. What's the catch? The pope writes that
Bacon must do this in utmost secrecy. And this
is the crucial part. He must not violate any
standing prohibitions of his order. Wait a minute.
So the order says you are forbidden from writing
books. And the pope says, write me a book. But
don't tell the order you're writing it. And also,
don't break the rules of the order. That's impossible.
It's a contradiction. It's a paradox. It put
Bacon in an absolutely terrible bind. If he tells
his superiors, hey, the pope asked me to do this,
he's breaking the pope's direct command for secrecy.
If he writes the book without telling them, he's
disobeying his order's ban on publishing. It's
a catch -22. And we haven't even mentioned the
money problem again. Exactly. Parchment isn't
cheap. ink professional copyists to make a clean
version for the Pope, these things were incredibly
expensive in the 13th century. It's like being
asked to build a rocket ship in your basement
without telling your spouse and with a budget
of zero dollars. So what does he do? Does he
just give up and write back saying, sorry, can't
be done? No. He panics. And then he works harder
than perhaps anyone has ever worked in a single
year. He begs and borrows money from friends.
He finds sympathetic ears. And in about a year,
from 1267 to 1268, Bacon produces a staggering
amount of material. He writes the Opus Majeuse.
the greater work and this isn't some little pamphlet
this is a doorstopper of a book it's around a
million words it's an encyclopedia covering grammar
logic mathematics physics experimental science
optics alchemy and moral philosophy a million
words in a single year by hand with a quill that's
that's insane it's a practically manic level
of production and just in case that one got lost
in the mail because you know the medieval mail
system was about as reliable as a coin toss he
also wrote the opus minus the lesser work, and
the Opus Tertium, the third work, as summaries
and expansions to be sent along with it. He was
hedging his bets, sending backups. It has been
called one of the most remarkable single efforts
of literary productivity in history. He was literally
writing for his life, for his chance to get out
of obscurity. So let's dive into the book itself,
the Opus Majus. What was he actually trying to
say in this million word play? Was it just a
data dump of everything he knew? No, not at all.
It was a manifesto. He called it a persuasive
preamble. Bacon wanted nothing less than to completely
reform the educational system of Christendom.
He believed the church was in danger because
its scholars were intellectually lazy and ignorant.
So it starts with a critique. Start to the bang.
Part one is titled The Causes of Human Ignorance.
I love that. He starts by telling everyone why
they're stupid. It's so perfectly on brand for
Roger Bacon. It is. He identifies four main causes
of error that hold humanity back. The first is
submission to unworthy authority. The second
is the influence of custom. Third is popular
prejudice. And the fourth, which he thinks is
the worst one, is the concealment of our own
ignorance accompanied by an ostentatious display
of our knowledge. Concealment of ignorance with
ostentatious display of knowledge. That sounds
like he predicted social media by about 750 years.
It is a timeless critique, isn't it? He's saying,
we pretend we know everything so we stop actually
learning anything. But The real core of his argument,
the revolutionary part, was about how we learn.
He placed a huge emphasis on what he called,
This is the line that gets him the title of the
first modern scientist, right? It is, but we
have to be very careful with that label. When
Bacon talks about experience, he doesn't just
mean a double -blind lab experiment like we would
today. For him, experience had two parts. One
was sensory experience, observing the world with
your eyes, measuring things. The part we call
science. Yes. But the other part was interior
illumination, a kind of spiritual experience
or divine revelation. So it's a blend of faith
and observation. He's not an atheist scientist
in a lab coat by any stretch. Not at all. He's
a Franciscan friar trying to find God's truth,
which he believes is revealed in two books, the
Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature. But
compared to his peers, who were mostly just arguing
about what Aristotle meant in paragraph 4 of
page 10, Bacon was radical. He said theories
supplied by reason must be verified by sensory
data. You can't just argue about it. You have
to go look. Can you give us a concrete example
of how he applied this? Optics is the absolute
best example. He called it perspectiva. Bacon
was obsessed with light, which ties back to Grossetest.
And he draws heavily and gives credit to the
work of the great Islamic scientist Ibn al -Haytham,
known in the West as al -Hazen. The Islamic Golden
Age was really the source of so much of this
knowledge, wasn't it? Absolutely. And Bacon was
one of the few European scholars of his time
who really recognized and celebrated that fact.
He praised Islamic thinkers constantly. So he
studied the anatomy of the eye, the structure
of the brain, and the properties of light reflection.
And crucially, refraction. Refraction is how
light bends, right? Like when you look at a straw
in a glass of water and it looks broken. Exactly.
Bacon experimented with how light bends when
it passes through glass lenses. And this led
him to a huge insight. He realized that you could
use carefully shaped lenses to make small things
look big or to make distant things look close.
He wrote, and this is an amazing quote, from
an incredible distance, we may read the smallest
letters. He's literally describing the telescope
in the microscope. He's describing the principle,
yes. We have no evidence that he actually built
a working telescope, but he understood exactly
how it would work. He even suggested that lenses
could be used to help old men read. He's describing
reading glasses. And this work was so influential
that he's considered partially responsible for
getting optics added to the medieval university
curriculum. So he's not just a theorist, he's
a curriculum reformer. That was his ultimate
goal. He argued that God created light as the
primary way he acts in the world. So studying
light was, for Bacon, a way of studying God's
divine action. It was a form of worship. And
he applied this same, you know, mathematical
observational rigor to other things too. What
about the calendar? Oh, the calendar was a major
source of frustration for him. He looked at the
Julian calendar, the one everyone in Europe was
using, established by Julius Caesar, and he called
it intolerable, horrible, and laughable. Laughable.
Those are strong words for a calendar. What was
so funny about it to him? The math was wrong.
The Julian calendar assumed that the year was
exactly 365 .25 days long. That's why we have
a leap year every four years. But Bacon, relying
on more precise Arabic astronomical data, realized
the year is slightly less than that. It's about
11 minutes shorter. 11 minutes a year doesn't
seem like a lot. It doesn't, but it adds up.
After 100 years, you're off by almost a day.
After 1 ,000 years, you're off by more than a
week. Bacon calculated that because of this cumulative
error, the spring equinox, and therefore the
date of Easter, had shifted by nine full days
since the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. And for
a medieval Christian, celebrating Easter on the
wrong day is not a minor inconvenience. It's
a huge deal. It's a massive theological problem.
You are missing the holiest appointment of the
entire year. You're fasting when you should be
feasting. You're feasting when you should be
fasting. The entire sacred rhythm is off. So
Bacon proposed a solution. What was it? He said
we should drop one day from the calendar every
125 years to correct the drift and stop relying
on a fixed date for the equinox and instead rely
on actual astronomical observation. That sounds
remarkably accurate. It's extremely accurate.
But did the Pope listen? Let me guess. The proposal
got filed away in a dusty Vatican drawer. While
Pope Clement IV might have listened, he was an
intelligent man. But, spoiler alert, he died
before he could act on it. A reform very, very
similar to Bacon's, the Gregorian calendar, the
one we all use today, wasn't enacted until 1582.
So he was over 300 years ahead of the curve.
Three centuries ahead. It's the tragedy of his
life in a nutshell. He's standing on a rooftop
yelling the right answer, but nobody down on
the street is ready to hear it yet. It's a recurring
theme. But let's move to the stuff that really
cemented his reputation as a wizard. Let's talk
about gunpowder. Yes, the explosions. Bacon is
often cited, correctly, as the first European
to record the formula for gunpowder. He didn't
invent it, right? No, absolutely not. He didn't
invent it. Gunpowder was invented in China centuries
earlier. Knowledge of it had likely traveled
along the Silk Road or via the expanding Mongol
Empire. In fact, Bacon had a friend, a fellow
Franciscan named William of Rubruck, who had
actually traveled to the Mongol court and returned.
So he probably got the intel from a traveler's
tale. It's the most likely source, yes. He heard
about this strange exploding powder from the
east. But Bacon wasn't just a reporter. He was
a scientist. He figured out what it was. In the
Opus Majus and the Opus Tertium, he describes
a mixture of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal.
And he described it as a toy, didn't he? He did.
He says it's a children's toy made in many parts
of the world, about the size of a person's thumb.
He's describing a firecracker. Exactly. He writes
that when it bursts, it makes a horrible sound
and brilliant lightning. He says it exceeds the
roar of strong thunder. He perfectly captures
the experience of a firecracker going off. But
he saw past the Tor aspect of it, didn't he?
He saw the military potential. He absolutely
did. He wrote that if you used a larger quantity
of the powder and enclosed it in a container
made of a solid material, the force would be
devastating. He foresaw the cannon. He realized
that this chemical reaction could destroy entire
armies from a distance. Now, there's a story
I've heard about a secret code that Bacon hid
the true recipe in an anagram or a cryptogram
because it was too dangerous. Ah, the famous
cryptogram. This is a bit of a historical wild
goose chase that really added to the wizard myth.
In the early 20th century, a British artillery
officer named Henry Heim published a book where
he claimed he'd cracked a cipher in one of Bacon's
letters. He said this. Scrambled letters spelled
out the perfect ratio for military -grade gunpowder.
Seven parts saltpeter, five parts charcoal, five
parts sulfur. That makes him sound like a spy,
something out of the Da Vinci Code. It does.
It's a great story. But sadly, it's not true.
Later historians, particularly Lynn Thorndyke
and Joseph Needham, completely tore that theory
apart. They showed that the passage Haim was
decoding wasn't even written by Bacon. It was
a later interpolation added by a copyist. And
the recipe itself? The ratio Haim decoded. It
wouldn't explode properly. It would just make
a lot of smoke and maybe a fizzle. It wasn't
the recipe for high -grade gunpowder. So the
evidence is that Bacon was actually quite open
about the ingredients, but he didn't hide some
secret perfect recipe in a puzzle. That's just
part of the legend. But he did write about some
other crazy machines. Yeah. This is stuff that
sounds like it's straight out of science fiction.
Yes. In a letter called Epistola de Secretus,
his letter on secret works, he really lets his
imagination run wild. He starts predicting technologies
based on his understanding of mechanics. He predicts
cars that can move with inestimable force without
any draft animals pulling them. Self -driving
cars. Yeah. or at the very least, horseless carriages.
He predicts ships that can be steered by a single
man and move faster than a galley full of rowers.
Speedboats. In the 13th century. And, most famously,
flying machines. He describes a machine where
a man sits in the middle, turning some kind of
device or crank that makes artificial wings beat
the air in the manner of a flying bird. An ornithopter.
Just like da Vinci's sketches from centuries
later. And even submarines. He references ancient
stories about Alexander the Great using diving
bells or suits to walk on the ocean floor. And
he argues that such devices are mechanically
possible. Now, to be clear, did he have blueprints
for these? Did he have a secret workshop where
he was building a helicopter prototype? No, not
at all. These were speculative. They were thought
experiments. He was arguing from principle. He
was saying, look. Nature has forces. Art, and
by art he means engineering and technology, can
harness those forces. If we understand the laws
of mechanics, then these things are possible.
That is a huge mental leap, though. Most people
in the 13th century would look at a bird and
say, God made it fly. It's a miracle. Bacon looked
at a bird and said, it's a machine. If I can
build a machine that pushes air the same way,
I can fly too. It's the birth of the mechanical
worldview. He's moving away from explaining things
as just magic and toward explaining them as mechanics.
But he wasn't purely a nuts and bolts guy. We
have to talk about the more esoteric side of
his work. Linguistics and alchemy seem to sit
weirdly next to all this science. And for Bacon,
they weren't weird at all. They were just as
important as the machines, maybe even more so.
Let's look at linguistics first. Bacon was obsessed
with the idea that the Bible and the works of
Aristotle were being corrupted by generations
of bad translations. The classic lost in translation
problem. He believed it was a crisis. He advocated
that theologians and philosophers absolutely
needed to learn the original languages, Hebrew
and Greek for the Bible, and Arabic for the best
scientific and philosophical texts. He even went
so far as to write his own Greek and Hebrew grammars
to help people learn. He wanted scholars to be
able to read the source code, so to speak. That's
a perfect way to put it. And this led him to
this incredible theory about universal grammar.
He said, quote, grammar is one in the same in
all languages, substantially, though it may vary
accidentally. Meaning that deep down, all human
languages share a common DNA, a common structure.
Which is a profoundly modern idea. Noam Chomsky
would be nodding right along with that. Bacon
was trying to find the underlying theoretical
structure of communication itself. Okay, so linguistics
I can see fitting in. Yeah. But what about alchemy?
That feels like it contradicts the science. We
tend to think of alchemy as, you know, greedy
con artists in pointy hats trying to turn lead
into gold. To us, yes. To him, no. For a medieval
thinker like Bacon, alchemy was the pinnacle
of natural science. It was the science of transformation.
He followed the common Arabian theory that all
metals are made of two primary components, mercury
and sulfur, mixed in different proportions and
purities. So gold is just lead, but with a better,
pure balance of ingredients. Exactly. And if
you could figure out how to purify the base ingredients
in lead and rebalance them, you could transmute
it into gold. But for Bacon, this was never just
about getting rich. It was deeply spiritual.
How so? He believed in what he called sepientia
divine wisdom. And he thought that the physical
process of purifying metals in a lab was analogous
to the spiritual process of purifying the human
soul. The alchemist was participating in God's
creative and perfecting work. So the alchemist
is like a priest of nature. In a way, yes. This
all ties into another text he was obsessed with,
a book called The Secret of Secrets. Bacon believed...
it was a lost book written by Aristotle for his
student, Alexander the Great. But it wasn't.
It wasn't. It was actually an Islamic mirror
of princes, a kind of political advice manual
on how to be a good ruler. But because Bacon
thought it was from Aristotle. He took its advice
very seriously, and it influenced his belief
that the state, the church, and the crown should
be using science and alchemy to govern more effectively
and to protect itself. So he writes this massive
work, the Opus Majusis. He pulls it all together.
He sends it off to the pope. He includes the
gunpowder, the optics, the calendar reform, the
grammar, the alchemy. He ships it off to Rome
in 1268. He is betting his entire career, his
entire life on this manuscript. What happens?
Disaster. Absolute disaster. Don't tell me the
ship sank and it's at the bottom of the Mediterranean.
Worse. The book arrived safely, but the Pope
died. Clement IV died in November of 1268, probably
before he ever had a chance to read Bacon's work
in any detail. Oh, that is just heartbreaking
after all that work. It really is. Bacon lost
his only protector, the one man in the world
who had the authority to implement these reforms,
the one man who had authorized Bacon to break
the rules of his order. was gone and bacon is
left completely exposed he's a friar who has
now written forbidden books he's a scholar who
has spent years insulting all of his powerful
colleagues and now he has no patron the political
winds were also changing within the church. Things
were getting more conservative. Yes. In 1277,
the Bishop of Paris issued a famous condemnation
of 219 philosophical and theological propositions.
They were cracking down on certain interpretations
of Aristotle, on deterministic astrology, on
anything that smelled like it was limiting God's
free will. And Bacon's work smelled a lot like
all of those things. He was right in the crosshairs.
And this leads to the next chapter of his life,
or at least the legend of it, his imprisonment.
The traditional narrative, the one you'll read
in older books, is that in the late 1270s, the
minister general of the Franciscans, a man named
Jerome of Ascoli, threw Bacon in jail for suspected
novelties. Suspected novelties. That sounds like
a crime in a dystopian novel. You're accused
of having new ideas. It does. And for a long
time, historians believed he was thrown in a
dungeon and spent over a decade there until Jerome
of Ascoli, who later became Pope Nicholas IV,
died. But modern scholarship has cast a lot of
doubt on this story. Really? So he might not
have been imprisoned at all. Well, the story
might be an exaggeration. The first reference
we have to this imprisonment doesn't appear in
any document until 80 years after Bacon's death.
That's a long time. Many modern scholars think
the imprisonment might have been a less dramatic
form of house arrest or perhaps just a continuation
of the strict restrictions he was already under,
a command for silence. If it wasn't for the science,
why would they target him so severely? It might
have been internal Franciscan politics. There
was a huge, bitter split happening in the order
at the time. One group, the spirituals, believed
in absolute radical poverty, just like St. Francis.
They thought the order was getting too rich and
powerful. The other group, the conventuals, were
more pragmatic and were okay with the order owning
property and buildings. And let me guess where
Bacon stood. Bacon was a radical. He sympathized
strongly with the strict poverty group. It's
very possible he was silenced not because of
his science, but because he was a vocal and troublesome
supporter of a radical faction in the internal
politics of his own order. It was his personality
and his politics, not just his ideas, that got
him into trouble. So what happens in his final
years is he just locked away in silence? The
details are murky, but he seems to have been
allowed to return to Oxford after 1278. He wrote
one last work in 1292, the Compendium Studii
Theologiae. And it's kind of a sad book, really.
It doesn't add much that's new. It's mostly him
complaining about the same old corruptions and
errors that he'd been fighting against his whole
life. He sounds tired. He sounds defeated. He
died sometime around 1292 and was buried at the
Franciscan church in Oxford. But death is really
just the beginning of his second career. His
career is a legend. Precisely. The historical
man dies, but the wizard is born. Why did that
happen? Why did he become a wizard in the public
imagination instead of a failed reformer? Because
the things he did looked like magic to ordinary
people. He was a bit of a recluse. He lived in
what legend called a study on a bridge. It looked
like a tower. He worked with strange instruments,
lenses and mirrors. He knew about explosives.
To the uneducated peasant or even the uneducated
noble of the time, that all looks exactly like
magic. And so the brazen head story takes off.
It becomes his defining myth. By the 16th century,
the playwright Robert Greene writes a very famous
play, The Honorable History of Friar Bacon and
Friar Bungie. And in that play, Bacon is a full
-on necromancer. He conjures devils. He has magic
contests. He tries to build a brass wall around
England to protect it from invaders. It's basically
superhero fan fiction from the 1500s. It is.
But it was incredibly popular and it defined
his public image for centuries. Friar Bacon became
a stock character, the brilliant but foolish
magician who meddles with forces he can't control
and is ultimately humbled. So when did that perception
change? When did he get rehabilitated and become
a scientist again? That really happened in the
19th century during the Victorian era. Scholars
at that time were looking for historical heroes.
They were very invested in the idea that history
was a long... battle between science and religion
conflict thesis exactly and they looked back
at roger bacon and saw a perfect martyr for their
cause they said look he was a man of reason a
true scientist trapped in the superstitious dark
ages he was persecuted by the church for his
genius he predicted the car he invented the scientific
method they turned him into a modern man who
was just wearing the wrong clothes a time traveler
they projected their own values back onto him
they tended to ignore the alchemy the astrology
the deeply held theology, and they just cherry
pick the science bits that look familiar to them.
But the reality, as we've been discussing, is
so much more complicated and interesting than
that. The modern view, the 21st century view
from historians like David Lindbergh, is that
Bacon was thoroughly and completely a man of
the Middle Ages. He wasn't a time traveler. He
believed in the authority of the church. He believed
the Bible was the ultimate source of truth. But
he also believed that understanding the natural
world. was a way to better serve God. Yes. And
here's the part that really blows my mind, the
part that ties it all together. Bacon wasn't
developing gunpowder or predicting flying machines
just to make life easier for people. He wasn't
trying to invent a more convenient commute to
work. No, not at all. He was preparing for war.
He was preparing for the apocalypse. The apocalypse.
He believed, like many in his time, that the
Antichrist was coming and coming soon. He believed
that the enemies of Christendom, the Mongols,
the Saracens, the forces of the Antichrist, would
use advanced knowledge, what he called magic
or advanced mechanics, to try and defeat the
Church. Bacon wanted the church to have those
weapons first. So this is an arms race. It was
a theological arms race. He wanted optics and
astronomy and gunpowder to be used in defense
of the faith. So the flying machines and the
horseless carriages weren't for convenience.
They were tanks and bombers for the armies of
God in the final battle. In a way, yes. He writes
explicitly about how arrays of mirrors could
be used to burn enemy camps from a distance,
like an ancient death ray. He writes about how
explosives could be used to scatter armies and
terrify them. His entire scientific program was,
at its core, a project of Christian apologetics
and defense. That puts a very, very different
spin on the first scientist label. He wasn't
trying to build our modern world. He was trying
to save his medieval one from the end times.
It is the supreme iron. of his life he advocated
for the very tools empirical science technology
a mechanical worldview that would eventually
dismantle the medieval worldview he was so desperately
trying to protect he pushed the snowball down
the hill not knowing it would turn into an avalanche
that would bury his own philosophy That is the
beauty and the tragedy of Roger Bacon. He stands
at a crossroads. He has one foot planted firmly
in the world of saints and demons and divine
revelation, and the other foot is stepping into
the world of engines and telescopes and mathematical
physics. So as we wrap up this deep dive, what
is the key takeaway? Why should we still care?
about a grumpy 13th century friar who failed
to get his book published on time. I think we
care because of his intellectual courage. He
had the courage to say, I need to see it for
myself. In an age of conformity and abuse to
authority, he was a relentless critical thinker.
He challenged the bad translations. He challenged
the broken calendar. He even challenged the physics
of Aristotle when his own experiments showed
different results. And he paid the price for
it. He died in obscurity without glory. He did,
but he also left a profound legacy. He helped
put optics on the map in Europe. He kept the
flame of Greek and Arabic science alive in the
West when many others were ignoring it. And he
dreamt big. He dreamt of a world where humanity
wasn't limited by its own muscles, but could
fly and dive and travel at incredible speeds.
He was a dreamer who did the math. That's a great
way to put it. And here's a provocative thought
to leave you with. Roger Bacon worked himself
to the bone to create a scientific and technological
defense for Christendom against what he believed
was the coming Antichrist. He thought he was
building spiritual armor. But the very things
he championed, gunpowder, mechanics, empirical
science, ended up building the modern, secular,
industrial world that largely left his worldview
behind. The law of unintended consequences on
a civilizational scale. Exactly. So if we look
back at our own scientific pioneers in 700 years,
you know, the people building artificial intelligence
right now or editing genes with CRISPR or trying
to colonize Mars, will we misunderstand their
motivations just as much as Bacon's were misunderstood?
Will future generations turn our scientists into
wizards and magicians with strange myths? Or
will they see them as the high priests of a new
religion we can't even recognize yet? Or will
they realize they were just people like Bacon
trying to save the world from their own version
of the Antichrist and we just didn't understand
the language they were speaking? It's a humbling
thought, isn't it? We are all trapped in our
own context, just like he was.