Despite the severe
limitations religion placed upon the development of scientific
enquiry, the Middle Ages did not produce a collection of notable
and original thinkers who contributed to a gradual reawakening of
rationality. Together, these men led the way to the
Renaissance and the full flowering of innovative science that
followed.
Still wrapped up in
the need to marry natural philosophy with theology, the thinkers of
this period - who became known as the Scholastics, the most famous
of whom were St Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus - stuck to the
traditional Aristotelian line, shunning experiment. However, they
did champion the search for truth outside the limited realm of pure
theology. Although they maintained a firm belief that man was the
central object of Creation and that the universe was designed for
man by God, they had progressed to the idea that the study of
Nature and the physical world could lead to greater theological
enlightenment. It was not until the deaths of Aquinas and Albertus
Magnus (towards the end of the thirteenth century, some
seventy-five years after Aristotle had been reintroduced into
Europe) that the work of the great Oxford scholar Roger Bacon began
to erode the restrictions of Scholasticism.
In some ways Bacon
was a man born ahead of his time. Although he subscribed to many
traditional beliefs of the Scholastics, he was the first to see the
usefulness of experiment and he composed three far-sighted tracts -
Opus Majus, Opus Minor and Opus Tertium - which outline his
philosophy and his experimental techniques in a range of
disciplines. This effort established Bacon's reputation for
posterity, but did little for him during his lifetime. Viewing his
work as anti-Establishment and its anti-Aristotelian elements as
subversive, Jerome of Ascoli, General of the Franciscans (later
Pope Nicholas IV), imprisoned him for life as a
heretic.
