Abstract

Unlike his younger contemporaries, Aquinas and Bonaventure, Roger Bacon (c. 1214–1292) did not write a treatise on the existence and nature of God, nor did he leave us a series of Questiones on topics related to the philosophy of religion. Moreover, he does not fit neatly into a modern ‘analytic’ understanding of philosophy of religion where the latter is often understood to be a justification of religion before the bar of argument alone. It is not that argument is lacking in Bacon’s account, but that argument occupies a place that is clearly subordinate in Bacon to experience and to revelation. Bacon presents a view of a universal revelation of all knowledge beginning with the Hebrews and continued by the Greeks, Romans, Islam and Christianity that was to be common teaching until the European Enlightenment. This entails a universal revelation of all knowledge, both sacred and secular.