Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 02.djvu/392

Baconthorpe glory of the Carmelites, adding that no one has ever known the mind of Averroes better than he; and that by following his footsteps a man would become a second Aristotle. The same verses represent him as demolishing the 'footprints of the cloudy Scot,' Duns Scotus, the almost contemporary pride of the Franciscans. When summoned to Rome, Baconthorpe ceased to be the English provincial, in order that he might have more leisure for preaching and the study of the Scriptures (, Heliad. i. 28). It was probably on his return from Rome that Baconthorpe took part in the general chapter held at Nimes or Narbonne in 1333. The 'Bibliotheca Carmelitana, basing the statement apparently upon John Baptist de Lezana's 'Annales Sacri' (iv. 555), asserts that he was the leader of the Parisian Carmelites in their opposition to the heretical views of John XXII concerning the state of the dead; and, indeed, Baconthorpe does seem to have written two of his works, the 'De Beatorum Visione' and the 'Quod sit laus vocalis,' directly against the peculiar tenets held by this pope (Bibl. Carm. i. 748; . Bibl. Lat. 162). If Lezana is to be depended on, this incident would fit in very well with the last days of John XXII (ob. 1334), when the question was most exercising men's minds, and with Baconthorpe's return journey from Rome and Nimes. He is said to have returned to England, where he died in 1346, and was buried in the Carmelite church at London. Leland, however, assures us that he had searched for his tomb there vainly. Other accounts give Blakeney and Norwich as his place of sepulture.

Baconthorpe was a man of extremely small stature, a very Zacchæus, as Pits phrases it, whose body could never have supported the weight of the huge volumes his intellect produced without being crushed to death. Fuller adds that his pen, penknife, inkhorn, one sheet of paper, and one of his works, would together have made up his height. He was also a most voluminous writer. Zedler reckons the number of his books at over 120, and Alegre de Casanate has preserved a legend that on one occasion Baconthorpe's pupils buried their master twice over while standing upright in his own works, and even then had had a large number to spare (. Paradisus Carm. dec. 294).

Besides dealing with the subjects mentioned earlier in this article, Baconthorpe wrote commentaries on the Old and New Testament, on the Apocrypha, on Aristotle's 'Ethics,' 'Metaphysics,' and ' Politics,' treatises upon Anselm's 'Cur Verbum sit homo,' and Augustine's 'City of God;' diatribes against the Jews, idolaters (by this meaning in all probability Mahometans), and magicians; and a work dealing with a topic thoroughly typical of the scholastic mind, 'Quod in coelo sit laus vocalis.' Bale, who was himself originally an East-Anglian and a Carmelite, speaks of him in the highest terms: 'I have found in his writings weightier thoughts than in those of any other author of his time.' In fact, Bale made a collection of these gems, which, however, he tells us, perished when he was in Ireland.

Nearly three centuries after his death Baconthorpe was still read in the university of Padua, where the Averroist doctrines lingered on long after they had died out in the rest of Europe. He was, according to M. Renan, the classic author of this school of thought; and also as pre-eminently the doctor of the Carmelite order, as Aquinas was of the Dominicans, or Duns Scotus of the Franciscans, Zabarelli, who was a professor at Padua only a few years before Galileo was appointed to the chair of mathematics at the same university, was an eager student of Baconthorpe, and his name reappears at the beginning of the seventeenth century in connection with the memorable name of Lucilius Julius Cæsar Vaninus. Though Baconthorpe had been dead nearly two hundred and fifty years before Vaninus's birth, yet this unfortunate philosopher claimed to have had the great Averroist for his teacher, and professed to be following the example of his master in putting no other works than those of Averroes into his pupils' hands (, Averroes, 421; but compare Vaninus' own works in the references at the end of the article). With regard to the great battle-field of scholastic champions M. Hauréau sums up Baconthorpe's position in the words: 'He is a capitulating realist, who entangles himself in nominalism as little as possible.'

There are many theories advanced to account for Baconthorpe's epithet of the 'resolute doctor.' Pits seems very plausibly to imply that he owes it to the tenacity with which he maintained his Averroist principles. Others have explained it by his readiness in deciding all cases brought before him; but for this his conduct at Rome does not seem to prove him to have been remarkable. He then appears to have retracted his opinions before leaving the city.

No complete edition of Baconthorpe's writings has been published, though his works began to issue from the press several years before the close of the fifteenth century, with his 'Commentaries on the Master of the Sentences,' printed at Paris in the year 1484. Continental students have, however, been