“For now I have laboured from my youth in the sciences and languages, and for the furtherance of study, getting together much that is useful. I sought the friendship of all wise men among the Latins, and caused youth to be instructed in languages, and geometric figures, in numbers and tables and instruments, and many needful matters. I examined everything useful to the purpose, and I know how to proceed, and with what means, and what are the impediments: but I cannot go on for lack of the funds which are needed. Through the twenty years in which I laboured specially in the study of wisdom, careless of the crowd’s opinion, I spent more than two thousand pounds in these pursuits on occult books (libros secretos) and various experiments, and languages and instruments, and tables and other things.”[617]
After his first stay at Paris Bacon returned to Oxford. There he doubtless continued his researches, and divulged them, or taught in some way. For he roused the suspicions of his Order, and in the course of time was sent or conducted back to Paris, where constraint seems to have been put upon his actions and utterances. Like the first, this second, possibly enforced, stay was a long one; he speaks of himself in the first chapter of the Opus tertium as “for ten years an exile.” Yet here as always, one is not quite certain how literally to take Bacon’s personal statements, either touching himself or others.
A short period of elation was at hand. He had evidently been forbidden to write, or spread his ideas; he had been disciplined at times with a diet of bread and water. All this had failed to sweeten his temper, or conform his mind to current views. In 1265, an open-minded man who had been a jurist, a warrior, and the counsellor of a king, before becoming an ecclesiastic, was made Pope Clement IV. While living in Paris he had been interested in Bacon’s work. Soon after the papal election our sore-bestead philosopher managed to communicate with him, as appears by the pope’s reply, written from Viterbo, in July 1266:
“To our beloved son, Brother Roger, called Bacon, of the Order of Brothers Minorites. We have received with pleasure the letter of thy devotion; and we have well considered what our beloved son called Bonecor, Knight, has by word of mouth set forth to us, with fidelity and prudence. So then, that we may understand more clearly what thou purposest, it is our will, and we command thee by our Apostolic mandate that, notwithstanding the prohibition of any prelate, or any constitution of thy Order, thou sendest to us speedily in good script that work which, while we held a minor office, we requested thee to communicate to our beloved son Raymond, of Laudunum. Also, we command thee to set forth in a letter what remedies thou deemest should be applied to those matters which thou didst recently speak of as fraught with such peril. Do this as secretly as possible without delay.”[618]
Poor Bacon! The pope’s letter roused him to ecstasy, then put him in a quandary, and elicited elaborate apologies, and the flood of persuasive exposition which he poured forth with tremulous haste in the eighteen months following. Delight at being solicited by the head of Christendom breaks out in hyperbole, not to be wondered at: he is uplifted and cast prone; that his littleness and multiple ignorance, his tongue-tied mouth and rasping pen, and himself unlistened to by all men, a buried man delivered to oblivion, should be called on by the pope’s wisdom for wisdom’s writings (sapientales scripturas)!
“The Saviour’s vicar, the ruler of the orb, has deigned to solicit me, who am scarcely to be numbered among the particles of the world—inter partes universae! Yet, while my weakness is oppressed with the glory of this mandate, I am raised above my own powers; I feel a fervour of spirit; I rise up in strength. And indeed I ought to overflow with gratitude since your beatitude commands what I have desired, what I have worked out with sweat, and gleaned through great expenditures.”[619]
The word “expenditures” touches one horn of Bacon’s dilemma. He is a Franciscan; therefore penniless; and, besides that, apparently under the restraining ban of his own Order. The pope has enjoined secrecy; therefore Bacon cannot set up the papal mandate against the probable interference of his own superiors. The pope has sent no funds; sitting in culmine mundi he was too busy with high affairs to think of that.[620] And now comes the chief matter for Bacon’s apologies: his Beatitude misapprehends, has been misinformed: the work is not yet written; it is still to be composed.
In spite of these obstacles the friendless but resourceful philosopher somehow obtained opportunity to write, and the means needed for the fair copy. And then in those great eighteen, or perhaps but fifteen, months, what a flood of enlightenment, of reforming criticism, of plans of study and methods of investigation, of examples and sketches of the matter to be prepared or discovered, is poured forth. Four works we know of,[621] and they may have made the greater part of all that Bacon ever actually wrote. With variations of emphasis, of abridgement and elaboration, the four have the one purpose to convince the pope of the enormous value of Bacon’s scheme of useful and saving knowledge. To a great extent they set forth the same matters; indeed the Opus tertium was intended to convey the substance of the Opus majus, should that fail to reach the pope. So there is much repetition and some disorder in these eager, hurried works, defects which emphasise the dramatic situation of the impetuous genius whose pent-up utterance was loosed at last. The Opus minus and the Vatican Fragment are as from a man overpowered by the eagerness to say everything at once, lest the night close in before he have chance of speech. And when the Opus majus was at last sent forth, accompanied by the Opus minus, as a battleship by a light armed cruiser, the Opus tertium was despatched after them, filled with the same militant exposition, for fear the former two should perish en voyage.
Did they ever reach the pope? We may presume so. Did he read any one of them? Here there is no information. Popes were the busiest men in Europe, and death was so apt to cut short their industry. Clement died the next year, and so far as known, no syllable of acknowledgement from him ever reached the feverishly expectant philosopher.
A few words will tell the rest. In 1271, apparently, Bacon wrote his Compendium studii philosophiae, taking the occasion to denounce the corruptions of Church and society in unmeasured terms. He rarely measured his vituperation! His life was setting on toward its long last trial. In 1277, Jerome of Ascoli, the General of the Franciscan Order, held a Chapter at Paris, and Bacon was condemned to imprisonment (carceri condempnatus) because of his teachings, which contained aliquas novitates suspectas.[622] Jerome became Pope Nicholas IV. At a Chapter of the Order held in Paris in 1292, just after his death, certain prisoners condemned in 1277, were set free. Roger Bacon probably was among the number. If so, it was in the year of his liberation that he wrote a tract entitled Compendium theologiae; for that was written in 1292. This is the last we hear of him. But as he must now have been hard on to eighty, probably he did not live much longer.