Death Comes to the Archbishop by Norman F. Cantor

Unlike  Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus and William of Occam. Thomas Bradwardine  (c. 1300 – 26 August 1349) was not a Franciscan friar, a member of a religious order. He was an ordinary secular cleric, which gave him great intellectual freedom if at the same time denying him the protection and financial aid the Order of Friars Minor provided its intellectuals. Bradwardine had to make his way as a student, without special group supports. This perhaps drove h his precocity, although William of Occam was similarly an adolescent prodigy who stated teaching at Oxford when he was barely twenty.

Bardwardine was intellectually a free agent. He did not necessarily agree with the Oxford Franciscan tradition in all its doctrines and assumptions. But he was a product of the great Oxford intellectual renaissance of 1240-1380 -  not to be seen at the old English university again until the 19^th century- and worked within the Oxford intellectual tradition as compared to the very different perspective of Thomas Aquinas in Paris.

The Black Death helped make it apparent that Thomism was an intellectual dead end. If failed to perceive the necessary quantification in determining natural processes. It ha no inkling of the crucial importance of experimentation. It was burdened with a strictly observational and rhetorical approach to science and furthermore remained specifically committed to Aristotle’s error-driven physics.

Thomism looked liberal on the outside, a progressive philosophy that imagined a rationally constructed world. But Bradwardine knew the  world was not rational. I was governed by an incomprehensible and awful deity whose actions such as the Black Death, made no sense to humans.

The way forward to modern science and the medicine that finally conquered the plague was to accept emotionally, on faith, a fearsome and unpredictable deity of absolute power, who ruled this and possibly other worlds and spaces. Scientists then progressed through experimentation and quantification to the understanding of immediately complex, natural processes in very small segments.

This was the route advocated by Bradwardine, Occam, and the Oxford school. It led over a longtime to modern biochemically grounded medicine. Thomism, ordained in the 16th century as the official philosophy of the Catholic Church, led to liberal dogmas, happy dispositions, and intellectual nullity.

Thomas Aquinas was as learned and intellectual, as powerful a thinker and writer as existed in the medieval world. One segment of his doctrine, on the philosophy of law, endures today in what is called natural law theory and is still embraced by many liberal-minded professors in the better American law schools.

The intellectual road Thomas pursued – inaugurated by the Jewish thinker Maimonides in the 12th century- seemed attractive and compelling at the time, but it did not lead to modern science. It did all the wrong things if that goal- which in the end distinguished Western European civilization from other cultures – was to be gained. It sought close compatibility between biblical faith and secular learning. It aimed at synthesis (‘summa’) of all important knowledge, while Galileo, Newton, and above all Einstein knew that the truth was in the details, that knowledge of nature was gained by the closest possible scrutiny of very small segments of natural processes.

Instead, Thomas decided that Aristotle was right abut most things, including natural science. But Aristotle was wrong about many scientific things, as became evident in the late 13th and 14th centuries, especially but not exclusively at Oxford University.

Bradwardine and his Oxford colleagues did not quite make the breakthrough to modern science. The quest had to be restarted in the 17th century, when algebra and scientific equipment were much more developed and the cultural ambience and academic reward system more propitious. But the archbishop knew the way to go, as Thomas did not: focus on details, use quantification, do not try to force synthesis between science and theology. If the Black Death had not struck down the new archbishop, would the outcome have been different? Would the history of modern science in England date from the 14th century Oxford rather than from late-17^th –century Cambridge?  The biographies of Sir Isaac Newton an Albert Einstein prove that a single great mind in a position of power and academic leadership can create an intellectual revolution.