Fr. Roger Bacon: A Franciscan and the forefather of the scientific method
The intellectual tradition of the West consists in the study of philosophy and sacred scripture. The two building blocks of our civilization that forms the basis of our intellectual, cultural and spiritual foundation, that makes us who we are as a culture. This ongoing tradition is at the heart of the West’s greatness that transcends every aspect of our civilization from the fine arts, music, classical architecture, great literature, science, mathematics, scholastic philosophy and theology.
It is of the highest importance that these treasures that we have inherited from our ancestors be preserved, protected and furthered in the academic, religious and monastic wings of the Church. It is more important that young Catholics today study, protect and further these great works produced by our forefathers, who dedicated their lives to our Holy Mother Church, and upheld law, order and civilization from the ignorance and crimes of evil men.
Science and the Catholic Church
In our academic tradition, the study of science is one of the pioneering cornerstones for the intellectual formation of students and a means to advance our culture. The scientific method is the tool as to how we come to know and understand the truth of the natural world. The scientific method as the bedrock for all sciences, was developed by members of Catholic religious orders particularly the Franciscans, the Dominicans and the Benedictines who were at the forefront of extraordinary scholastic and scientific achievements that took place in Paris, Padua, Cologne, Oxford and Bologna during the 12th and 13th Century.
These religious and monastic communities pioneered the development of a wide variety of scientific instrumentation and technologies in agriculture, medicine and biology. Their leadership helped advanced our understanding of the atom, cellular biology, chemistry, astronomy, optics and physics. One of the pioneers of the scientific method was a British Franciscan named Fr. Roger Bacon, OFM.
Born in the early 1200s in Ilchester, England who was in many ways the 13th Century equivalent of Michelangelo. Fr. Bacon much like the great men of his era, saw the University, Religious Life and the Catholic Church as the means of elevating culture, saving man from himself and transforming the lives of those people around him. Fr. Bacon as a student mastered a wide variety of subjects from mathematics, astronomy, optics, chemistry and semitic languages. He was the first European to experimentally make gunpowder and conjecture the development of machines for flight, ocean exploration and personal transport in the 13th century. Ideas that only came into fruition several centuries later.
Such a high pedigree of scientific and technological expertise have largely been ignored and considered irrelevant in the way we teach science and history to students today. Fr. Bacon developed the scientific method based on logic and objective Truth, an achievement that cannot go unnoticed. The scientific method begins from First Principles (a self-evident proposition) and coming to a grounded conclusion rooted in Truth and self-evidence.
This objective understanding of reality is the basis of all scientific inquiry that is structured, understandable and sensible. This depth of academic and scholastic formation is sadly non existent today in the way we teach or practice science. Despite the fact that we live in an age of science, the teleological end of science is divorced from its authentic essence in the way we engage with science today.
A sensible understanding of scientific inquiry must have a teleological end, however, this is no longer considered relevant in a post modern age.
Science and Youth Culture Today
Over the past few centuries since the Reformation and the Enlightenment, there have been two movements have greatly undermined the very notion that there is an absolute Truth and that one must to be obedient to it.
The mission of the reformation and the enlightenment, if one were to read the texts of Martin Luther, John Locke and their contemporaries, was to throw out this very principle of objective Truth out of the window. This has done grave damage to the fields of medicine, scientific research and environmental science.
In order for us to return to the roots of authentic scientific achievement, real science and Catholic leadership in the world, it is important that we order our souls to the virtues and sacraments of the Church. To live a way life that demands a death to one’s self and a looking for union with eternity-God and His Church.
It is of the highest importance that young Catholics today reject the empty promises and addicting selfish pleasures of the world in order to be liberated and freed from the chains of sin and death to live the examined life, to grow one’s soul in truth and goodness, and be a witness to those around them.
Fr. Roger Bacon and his contemporaries such as Duns Scotus, Thomas Aquinas, Albert Magnus and many others were pioneers in the fields of scholastic philosophy, theology, epistemology and science, precisely due to the fact that they chose God and Our Lady over themselves.
All of these great men were great priests who were deeply in love with the Church and built an academic tradition that till this day is the greatest period of intellectual and scientific development. It is time for this tradition to return to an age that is lost and divorced from reality. We desperately need such men and women to break the chains of a world addicted to the sin of ignorance.
References
The Lives of the Brethren: The early years of the Order of Preachers, Fr. Gerard de Frachet, OP
In Sinu Jesu: When heart speaks to heart — the journal of a priest at prayer
