cans about 1257, he was accused of indiscipline and confined under arrest in
their house in Paris for perhaps as long as twenty years. But to see this as the
story of a lonely rebel against authority is to miss the structure which consti-
tuted Bacon’s originality and his fame. He was far from isolated, and indeed
put himself at the center of the major networks at a time when the realigning
blocs were opening up possibilities of creativity in many directions. Bacon’s
friendship with the scholar Guy Foulques, who became Pope Clement IV in
1265–1268, provided both the immediate instigation of his major writings and
their dissemination. Bacon achieved nothing substantive in his program. His
creativity was to push his network relationships as antagonistically as possible
and to formulate a doctrine from this opposition.The Friars’ Movement: Monks outside the Monastery
Another structural feature of this period was a new line of organizational
rivalry superimposed on the rest. Grosseteste and William of Auvergne were
virtually the last important philosophers for a century who were ordinary
clergy; most of the rest were either Franciscans or Dominicans. There was a
flood of enthusiasm for these movements which brought even the most hard-
core academics and intellectuals into their ranks. We have seen the trouble
his membership made for Bacon, but his act of joining was not idiosyn-
cratic. Alexander of Hales, well established as a theologian in Paris, joined
the Franciscans late in life, and was rewarded with their theology chair at the
university in 1231. Albert of Bollstadt was recruited by the head of the
Dominicans himself, an associate of Saint Dominic, while at the schools in
Italy.
The structural rivalry between Franciscans and Dominicans existed from
the outset. Saint Francis and Saint Dominic were contemporaries, and their
orders were given papal sanction around 1220, within a few years of each
other (Brooke, 1959; Mandonnet, 1937; Bennett, 1971). On the surface there
is a sharp contrast: the gentle Francis preaching to the birds and humbly
visiting the poor; Saint Dominic combating heresy amid the Albigensian Cru-
sade in Languedoc. Together they constitute the second great wave of the
expanding monasticism, following the first wave of economically successful
monasteries epitomized by Saint Bernard’s Cistercians a century before. Chris-
tendom was acquiring a unifying organizational core. The papacy was becom-
ing a state above the feudal states, and the universities were growing with
the spread of church bureaucracy. The new monastic movements, oriented
toward activism in the world, were part of a growing mood of victorious
Christianization of the social order. The status order was changing, and a sense
of enthusiasm spread among the population, which now had the possibility472 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths