This paper examines Francis Bacon's rationale for writing The Advancement of Learning in the context of early seventeenth-century Europe's sweeping intellectual upheaval. Drawing on the Copernican revolution, the Protestant Reformation, and the decline of medieval scholasticism, the paper argues that Bacon's treatise was a modernist manifesto — one that elevated empiricism over reason and repositioned man at the center of inquiry. The analysis traces the philosophical inversions Bacon employed, contrasts his worldview with that of Aquinas and Shakespeare, and demonstrates how his ideas prefigured the thought of Rousseau and the broader Enlightenment project, ultimately reshaping Western intellectual culture.
When one analyzes Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning, one first enters an era primarily dedicated to overthrowing the learning of the past — that is to say, it was an era breaking with the old world and advancing the new. That old world was one of scholasticism, with men like Thomas Aquinas incorporating Aristotelian philosophy into the medieval world and using the pagan to prove the Christian. It was a world where religious truths were accepted on the authority of the Church, and a world where that authority was still in place and still in power.
In the fourteenth century, that authority began to corrupt — with the papacy's removal to Avignon and the natural catastrophe of the Black Plague. These events, though eventually over, left their marks on Europe spiritually, politically, and economically. The Protestant Reformation broke out not long after, thanks in part to the writings of the English priest Wycliffe and his later revolutionary descendant Jan Hus. They were followed by Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and Knox. Their ideas, coupled with wars, an influx of wealth from Renaissance trade, and new models of the universe advanced by Galileo and Copernicus, essentially set the stage for a new philosophy of learning: the old world system was being abandoned all over Christendom — and men like Francis Bacon wanted to have a say in the new. This paper examines Francis Bacon's reasoning behind writing The Advancement of Learning and considers what he expected to achieve from its message.
An inversion took place at the end of the medieval world, and that inversion is best depicted in the heliocentric model of the universe that Galileo advocated in the Starry Messenger in 1610. The work promoted the Copernican idea that the planets revolved around the sun, while smaller bodies — moons — revolved around larger ones in their heliocentric orbits. Galileo's evidence, moreover, was gathered by a new piece of technology, the telescope, thus ushering in an era of knowledge based on science and empiricism rather than on Platonic reason and intellect. Galileo's message was immediately suspicious to churchmen who still possessed a scholastic and medieval mind — like Robert Bellarmine, who wrote:
"But to want to affirm that the sun really is fixed in the center of the heavens and only revolves around itself (i.e., turns upon its axis) without traveling from east to west, and that the earth is situated in the third sphere and revolves with great speed around the sun, is a very dangerous thing, not only by irritating all the philosophers and scholastic theologians, but also by injuring our holy faith and rendering the Holy Scriptures false." ("Robert Bellarmine: Letter on Galileo's Theories, 1615")
Ultimately, however, Galileo's theory — along with the other events unfolding across Europe — helped overthrow the Ptolemaic, geocentric model, in which the universe was hierarchical, with Earth and man at the center and God and Heaven above all. The inversion Galileo introduced was profound: it displaced God from Heaven, made Heaven seem everywhere and nowhere — a medium through which Earth itself flew — and made the sun the new center of the cosmos, destroying the hierarchical structure that had sustained Europe for centuries. Man assumed the throne where God had sat, and could now begin the discussion on just how useful and necessary that God actually was — a debate that Enlightenment thinkers quickly took up.
Francis Bacon, in a sense, helped launch this debate with his Advancement of Learning, which is full of philosophical inversions that would make Hamlet himself cringe: "If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties" (Bacon 1.5).
It is no surprise to find that Bacon's Advancement comes from the same time and place that produced Hamlet — the archetypal modern man. Bacon was advocating this new modern man, despite the fact that Shakespeare considered such a figure a tragedy. The modern man, like Hamlet, would be educated by the new Protestant religion — at Wittenberg, where Hamlet studies and where Luther taught. Bacon praises Luther in The Advancement of Learning: "Martin Luther, conducted no doubt by a higher providence, was enforced to awake antiquity..." (Bacon 1.4). His intellectual loyalty is therefore not to the old world, of which Shakespeare — said to have died a Catholic in Protestant England — was partial. Bacon was for the new man: the doubter, the skeptic, the cynic — the Humean philosopher who would blaze the path to modern thought in the next century. Bacon's Advancement was his modernist manifesto, and advancing the new order — with man in the ascendant and divinity in the descendant — was his reason for writing it.
Of course, such an argument depends on historical subtlety and nuance, on hindsight and revelations unfolded over time. Nonetheless, one can see that Bacon, in the first book of the Advancement, extols the learning of the ancients — not precisely for their wisdom (because that would be too explicit and definite, and the modern world would not have definitions) — but rather for their displays of learning. Thus Bacon can invoke Christ, Trajan, and Elizabeth all in the same breath as exemplars of learning.
But what is the real essence of this learning? It is not grammar, logic, and rhetoric rooted in Platonic rationalism, Aristotelian ethics, Augustinian spirituality, or Thomistic thought: it is rooted in the new science, the new man, the new humanism, the new theology. Bacon was, in essence, the polar opposite of Shakespeare — his contemporary, and a man whose works some scholars imagine Bacon actually wrote. Shakespeare saw the horrors of the new world and longed for the old; Bacon saw the glories of the new and wished to embrace them. Bacon was an advocate of the new method of science, which would itself be named after him — the Baconian method, or the scientific method: an approach that relied more upon empiricism than on reason, in a direct break with the scholarship of the past.
"Bacon's metaphysics as rhetorical flattery and sophistry"
"Intellectual lineage from Bacon to Enlightenment individualism"
All of this finds its origin in Bacon's Advancement of Learning — for it is through this work for the King of England at the beginning of the seventeenth century that Bacon advances the ideology of the modern: adrift from the philosophy of the past, and asserting a new doctrine that resembles haphazard accumulation (empirical, of course) more than it resembles the reasoned, logical, and intellect-based scholarship it replaced.
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