This updated blog is posted again today to provide a resource for this year's celebration of Grosseteste's Feast Day on Friday (October 9th) October 9th is the Feast Day of a medieval Bishop who also has a serious claim to be the first “modern physicist”, Robert Grosseteste, who was Bishop of Lincoln from 1235 to 1253. He was born in Suffolk circa 1175 and his early education and clerical service were in Hereford where Bishop William de Vere was encouraging the newly transmitted Aristotelian scientific learning from the Arabic world to take root, extending the study of the liberal arts to include physics and observational astronomy. There Grosseteste began to write on the liberal arts and especially the scientific subjects of the "quadrivium", composing treatises on light and sound for instance, as well as being active in teaching the clergy in pastoral care. From Hereford Grosseteste moved to the benefice of Abbotsley in Lincoln diocese, also holding the archdeaconry of Leicester for a while, but then focusing his energy in Oxford where he taught the Franciscans and became the Master of Students for the emergent University, leanrnig and teaching theology alongside his interest in the arts. Despite his advancing years he was then the surprise candidate to be the next bishop of Lincoln, and proved a most active one, remaining in post for 18 years until his death, raising standards, challenging the Pope on bad practices, and after his death being seen as saint, although formal canonisation was blocked by the papal court he had confronted. As a bishop Grosseteste remained an active author in both theology and science, in both cases drawing on new texts from the east in Greek and from the Islamicate. His importance as a pioneer of modern scientific thinking is now being recognised as a collaboration of mediaevalists, scientists and even theologians (even me!) in the prize-winning Ordered Universe Project toward to produce a new edition of his treatises (first volume now out by OUP), using all their skills together in a sort of academic archaeology to unearth the real meaning and message of his work. It’s a most exciting adventure, and you can follow its progress at https://ordered-universe.com/. At the heart of Grosseteste’s integration as a Christian bishop of faith and science is the belief that the universe was called into being by God in a wonderfully ordered way – an order that we can still see and measure and wonder at in both scientific and spiritual ways, but an order too that has been broken as creation has turned away from its maker, most particularly by the wrong use of human free will. But his Christian faith teaches him that the same God who made the world in love also entered that world in love to begin a new work of restoration and redemption, in which we humans are invited to join. For Grosseteste joining in that work or restoration took many inter-linked forms: personal prayer of course, and the liturgy and good ordering of the church, but also and importantly education, training our understanding to see again the good order of God’s world and our desires to work towards it (aspect and affect as he would have called them). So the liberal arts and new sciences are very much part of our total work of becoming fully and properly human, as we were intended to be, and restoring the created world too to its proper order and balance. This is a vision that we can whole-heartedly affirm today as educationalists, environmentalists and believers alike. So don’t let October 9th pass by without remembering the bishop who was perhaps our first modern scientist, and whose thinking still has the power to inspire us today. To help in his remembrances I have gathered together a selection of prayers and readings and other liturgical material, which you will find beneath the fold. Read more of this post David Thomson | October 7, 2020 at 5:58 pm | Categories: Uncategorized | URL: https://wp.me/poSLL-3Tm |