The Calendar Read Free Page A

long). These tinkerers included the great Indian astronomer Aryabhata (476-550); the mathematician Mohammed Ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (c. 780-850) and others in the Islamic world; and a progression of mostly obscure monks and scholars in the West, the best-known being the Venerable Bede (673-735) of Britain. Using a sundial in a Northumbrian monastery, Bede suspected that the solar year was slightly off from the calendar but did not know by how much. In part this was because Europeans after the collapse of Rome either ignored or did not understand complex fractions. They tended to round off anything but a simple fraction such as one quarter or one half.
    Other monks who tried, and failed, to calculate the true solar year include Notker the Stammerer, a Swiss priest-scholar who challenged the accuracy of certain saints’ days in a treatise written in about 896; the French ecclesiastic Hermann the Lame, who dared to suggest in 1042 that the Church-approved calendar might be misaligned with the heavens; and Reiner of Paderborn, who made his attempt in the 1100s. But none of these computists dared challenge the Church on a matter so fundamental as measuring time.
    Then came Roger Bacon, who seized the opening offered him by Clement to plunge into this ancient puzzle. Dismissing with a wave of his quill centuries of reticence by fearful astronomers, Bacon declared that anyone who rejected the truth offered by science was a fool.
    Clement’s reaction to Bacon’s pronouncements and appeals is unknown. On 29 November 1268, the pope suddenly died, probably before he had a chance to read Bacon’s just completed opus.
    Nothing could have been more disastrous for the friar, who had just accused the Church of ignorance and wrongheadedness and demanded reforms that Vatican officials less sympathetic than Clement might have condemned as heresy. Instead the Holy See did something far more damning: they ignored him. Clement’s successor, Gregory X, never mentions Bacon or his books; nor does anyone else at St Peter’s.
    But Bacon continued to speak his mind. In 1272 he penned a blistering attack on academics and what he considered the abysmal state of learning. It spared no one, including universities, kings and princes, lawyers and the papal court. He also began applying his standards for truth and objectivity to the practice of Christianity, joining a small but vibrant movement of monks scattered across Europe who believed that the Church had strayed from the original dictates of Christ by acquiring too much worldly wealth and power.
    Ultimately Bacon’s radical talk landed him back in serious trouble. In 1277 he was denounced again by his own religious order, which charged him with espousing ‘suspected novelties’. This time they did not merely cloister him: they sent him to prison. According to Franciscan records of his trial, their high council ‘condemned and reprobated the teaching of Friar Roger Bacon of England’, forbidding anyone from studying his work. They also requested that Pope Nicholas III issue a decree commanding that the friar’s ‘dangerous teaching might be completely suppressed’.
    For the next decade and a half Roger Bacon disappeared. Then in 1292 the elderly friar, now in his late seventies and apparently out of prison, emerged once more to pen yet another firebrand essay--his last. By then, however, the name Roger Bacon was so obscure that this unfinished and unpublished manuscript was noticed by no one. Nor did anyone bother to record the exact date of his death, possibly in that same year.
    But Bacon’s passion for the truth endured. Centuries later Roger Bacon became a posthumous hero of late Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers, who were astonished by the modernity of his ideas.
     
    It took another three centuries before Bacon’s demands for calendar reform were heeded, when Pope Gregory XIII (1502-1585) finally fixed the calendar in 1582. By then scientists had been openly clamouring for a