The papal mandate.
Bacon’s career centers about a papal mandate which was despatched to him in the summer of 1266. Guy de Foulques, who became Clement IV on February 5, 1265, had at some previous time requested Bacon to send him the scriptum principale or comprehensive work on philosophy which he had been led to think was already written.[2045] On June 22, 1266, he repeated this request in the form of a papal mandate, which is extant.[2046] The former letter is lost, but both Bacon and the pope refer to it.[2047] Somehow writers on Bacon have paid little heed to this first request, have assumed that Bacon wrote his three works to the pope in about a year[2048] despite the “impediments” upon which he dwells, and have therefore been filled with admiration at the superhuman genius which could produce such works at such short notice while laboring under such difficulties.[2049] But this is assuming that Roger had done nothing in the considerable interval between the two mandates. And why does he keep apologizing for “so great delay in this matter,” and “Your Clemency’s impatience at hope deferred.”[2050] Moreover, his excuses do not all apply to the same period, and most of them are excuses for not having composed a full exposition of philosophy rather than for not having composed sooner the Opus Maius, which Roger regarded as a mere preamble to philosophy. One set of excuses explains why he had no comprehensive work ready when the first request arrived.[2051] A second set explains why he had not written it in the interval between the two mandates.[2052] A third set explains why he finally does not write it at all but sends instead an introductory treatise, the Opus Maius, supplemented by two others, the Opus Minus and Opus Tertium. Of course some excuses hold equally good for all three periods. But he states in the third treatise that in writing the second he was free from some of the “impediments” which had hampered his composition of the Opus Maius.[2053] As he also says that one reason for writing the Opus Minus was lest the Opus Maius be lost amid the great dangers of the roads at that time, one infers that the latter work was despatched before the other. Moreover, the Opus Minus opens with a eulogy of the pope which is absent in the Opus Maius,[2054] in which there are very few passages to suggest that it is addressed to the pope, or written later than 1266.[2055]
The composition of the three works.
The Opus Maius, therefore, was practically finished, if not already sent, when the papal mandate of 1266 reached Bacon. When Roger learned that Foulques as pope was still interested in his work, visions of what the apostolic see might do for his programme of learning and himself flashed before his mind, and, after a fresh but vain effort at a scriptum principale, which kept him busy until Epiphany, he composed the supplementary treatise, the Opus Minus, with its adulatory introduction to Clement IV, with its excuses for sending or having sent a preambulatory treatise instead of a complete work of philosophy, with its hints that such a final treatise can be successfully completed only with the financial backing of the unlimited papal resources, with its analysis of the preceding work for the benefit of the busy pope and its suggestions as to what portions of it he might profitably omit, and with its additions of matter which in the Opus Maius Roger had either forgotten or at that time had not been in a position to insert. The third work, Opus Tertium, is of the same sort but apparently more disorderly in arrangement, and looser and more extravagant in its tone. Presumably it was undertaken to remind the pope again of Bacon’s existence and proposals; it is even conceivable that Roger was a little unstrung when he composed it; it has been suggested that it was left unfinished and never sent to the pope, who died in 1268. A part at least of the Opus Tertium was written in 1267.[2056]
The injunction of secrecy.
The extant papal mandate orders Bacon not only to send his book but to state “what remedies you think should be applied in those matters which you recently intimated were of so great importance,” and to “do this without delay as secretly as you can.”[2057] This allusion to matters of importance and this injunction of secrecy have cast a certain veil of mystery over the three works and the relations of Roger and the pope. Observance of secrecy may have been intended to guard against such frauds of copyists as we shall soon hear Bacon describe, or to secure some alchemistic arcana or practical inventions which the pope had been led to expect from him. Indeed, so far as alchemy was concerned, Bacon observed the injunction of secrecy so strictly that he divided his discussion of the subject among four different treatises sent to the pope at different times and by different messengers, so that no outsider might steal the precious truth. It must be added that even after receiving all four instalments, the pope would not have been much nearer the philosopher’s stone than before.[2058]
Roger Bacon and the Franciscans.
Another moot question in Bacon’s biography besides that of the composition of the three works is that of his relations with the Franciscan Order. We have seen that it was natural for him to join it, and that the change, at first at least, seemed one for the better. Bacon, however, found irksome the rule made by the order in 1260, as a consequence of the publication in 1254 of Gerard’s heretical Introductorius in Evangelium Aeternum, that in the future no Franciscan should publish anything without permission.[2059] Roger wished to employ amanuenses even in composing his works, and these men, he tells the pope, would often divulge “the most secret writings,”[2060] and so involve one in unintentional violation of the above rule. “And therefore,” says Bacon, “I did not feel the least bit like writing anything.”[2061] For a man so easily discouraged one cannot feel much sympathy. There is however another important inference from his statement: instead of his writings being neglected by his age, they are so valued that they are pirated before they have been published. Moreover, this rule of his order should not have hampered Bacon much in writing for the pope; indeed, Roger himself implies that he was exempted from this restriction in the earlier request from the cardinal as well as in the later papal mandate. Raymond of Laon, Bacon grants, had correctly informed “Your Magnificence, as both the mandates state,” concerning this regulation, though he had given a wrong impression as to what Bacon already had written.[2062]
We have heard from Bacon’s own mouth that he did little public teaching after becoming a friar, that he had as much time for private study as ever, and that everybody supposed him to be at work at his magnum opus. Yet in the Opus Minus he grumbles that “his prelates were at him every day to do other things”[2063] before he received the first mandate from the cardinal, and that even thereafter he was unable to excuse himself fully from their demands upon his time, “because Your Lordship had ordered me to treat that business secretly, nor had Your Glory given them any instructions.”[2064] In the Opus Tertium he describes the same situation in stronger language: “They pressed me with unspeakable violence to obey their will as others did,” and “I sustained so many and so great setbacks that I cannot tell them.”[2065] On how we interpret a few such passages as these depends our estimate of the attitude of the Franciscan Order before 1267 to Bacon and his ideas and researches. He gives so many other reasons why he has no comprehensive work of philosophy ready for the pope that this attitude of his superiors seems a relatively slight factor. He needed much money, he needed expensive instruments, he needed a large library, he needed “plenty of parchment,” he needed a corps of assistant investigators and another of copyists with skilled superintendents to direct their efforts and insert figures and other delicate details. It was a task beyond the powers of any one man; besides, he was in ill-health, he felt languid, he composed very slowly. Shall we blame his superiors for not providing him with this expensive equipment; and are we surprised, when we remember that the mandates directed him to send a book supposed to be already finished, that his superiors continued to ask of him the performance of his usual duties as a friar? Their attitude can scarcely be regarded as persecution of Bacon or hostility to his science. On the other hand, Clement IV must be given credit for his effort to elicit from Bacon a scriptum principale; and it may well be doubted if Roger would have produced anything equivalent to the Opus Maius, Opus Minus and Opus Tertium without this papal encouragement.
Bacon’s life after 1267.