Bacon was condemned by a court of his peers and sentenced to confinement within the walls of that Paris convent which, in his Compendium, he had denounces as the very centre of corruption. Orders were given to all the brethren that “none should hold his doctrine, but avoid it as reprobated”. Bacon’s imprisonment was less severe than that suffered by Spirituals elsewhere. He was kept on scanty rations, but was not chained, and was allowed to participate in the Sacraments. More wearing upon him than his physical hardships were his mental sufferings. No longer able to teach or study, his activities limited to prayer and brooding, he aged quickly. The years passed and his bitterness mellowed into melancholy.

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For 14 years, Bacon’s world was his cell in the Paris convent. Then, slowly, the wheel of fate turned once more. Jerome d’Ascoli relinquished the leadership of the Franciscans to assume the papal tiara as Nicholas IV. The office of Minister General fell, in 1289, to Raymond de Gaufredi, who was sympathetic to the beliefs of the Spirituals. When the anti-Joachist efforts of Nicholas were cut short by his death in 1292, Brother Raymond proceeded to release those members of the Order who had been imprisoned for their views. Among those whom he set free was now the aged and pale Bacon.

Brother Roger was now nearly 80 years old, no longer their energetic man whose venomous pen had angered the authorities of his day. The time for innovation had passed and he recognised this. “Since theological disputes are solved by means of authorities and arguments,” he stated in his last work, the Compendium Studii Theologiae, “I will conform.” Begun shortly after his release in 1292, the Theologiae was never completed, cut short by either exhaustion or death. He had returned once again to Oxford and there he went to his rest, tradition setting this date on 11th June.

Bacons’ vision of a Science serving Christian Theology was not to be; even during his lifetime the two disciplines assumed opposing rather than supportive positions, one towards the other. Scholasticism of the later Middle Ages was dominated by the assertion that man could never understand God’s Creation. Rather than stimulating scientific thought, Aristotelian philosophy proved a stifling influence which was not cast off by European thinkers until the 16th Century. Bacon himself was not remembered by later generations as a publicist for Science, the fame which he had so much coveted. Rather, he was pictured as a wizard who received prophecies from a “brazen head” and who held the secret to transmutation of lead into gold. Many magical handbooks were erroneously ascribed to his authorship, including the Mirror of Alchemy. The frustrated experimentalist, the sensitive mystic embittered by the corruptions of his world, the idealist dreaming of a better day for Science: this was the Roger Bacon who was forgotten by history.

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