Anglican Commemoration
Bishop of Lincoln & Scholar
October 9 · d. 1253
also known as Grosseteste, Robert of Lincoln
Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, was the greatest English scholar of the thirteenth century and one of the fathers of natural science. A poor boy from Suffolk who rose to rule the largest diocese in England, he studied light as the first form of creation, taught the first Oxford Franciscans, reformed his clergy parish by parish, and stood against a pope who would sell the care of souls. He died in his see in 1253. His feast is October 9.
Robert Grosseteste was born to a poor family at Stradbroke, a village in Suffolk in the east of England, about the year 1170. There was no money behind him and no name; everything he became, he became by his mind. He made his way to Oxford, and by the time he was done he was the master of the whole school there, and one of the most learned men in Christendom.
What he loved was light. Long before anyone spoke of physics, Grosseteste believed that light was the first thing God made, the first form of the created world, and that from a single point of light the whole universe had been drawn out into its three dimensions. He wrote a little book about it, De Luce, "On Light," and other books on the rainbow and the stars and the nature of colour. He ground lenses and set up mirrors and watched how a beam bent as it passed through a globe of water, because he believed a thing was not truly known until it had been tested. He reckoned the error hidden in the old calendar and proposed a fix for it three hundred years before the church at last made one. He learned Greek, which almost no one in England could read, and gave the Latin West its first full translation of Aristotle's Ethics and fresh renderings of the ancient Christian fathers. A younger man who watched him work, Roger Bacon, would call him simply the one man who really knew the sciences.
When the grey friars, the followers of Francis, came to Oxford, it was Grosseteste they asked to teach them, and he became their first lecturer and their lifelong friend. Then, in 1235, he was made bishop of Lincoln, and the scholar became a shepherd. His diocese was the largest in England, stretching across nine counties, and he rode the whole of it. He went from parish to parish, church to church, examining the clergy, removing the idle and the corrupt, insisting that every flock have a resident priest who would actually care for it. He was hard on great abbots and small vicars alike, because he believed a bishop answered to God for every soul in his charge.
That same conviction set him at last against the pope. Rome had a custom of handing English church offices, and the incomes attached to them, to Italian favourites who would never see the parish or serve the people. When the pope commanded Grosseteste to install his own young nephew in a post at Lincoln, the old bishop refused. He did not deny that the pope was Christ's vicar; he wrote back that precisely because he loved and honoured that office, he would not obey a command that wounded the souls it was meant to feed. The letter was famous across Europe, and Rome, for all its power, did not dare to break him.
He was ill by the summer of 1253, and he died that October at his manor of Buckden, an old man who had spent himself on his diocese to the end. They buried him in his own cathedral at Lincoln, and pilgrims soon came to his tomb. He had begun with nothing but the gift of his mind, and he had given it all away, to the students he taught, to the friars he loved, to the poorest parish in his care. The light he had studied his whole life he now saw without a glass.
How we know Robert Grosseteste is unusually well: he is one of the best-documented Englishmen of his century, chiefly through his own enormous output and the chroniclers who watched his public life. He left more than three hundred sermons, over sixty treatises, a great body of letters, translations from the Greek, and scientific and theological works, so that on most points we can hear the man himself. His public quarrels were recorded by Matthew Paris, the monk of St Albans whose Chronica Majora, written within Grosseteste's own lifetime and just after, is the principal narrative source for English affairs of the period. The birth year is uncertain, given variously between about 1168 and 1175, and the tradition that he studied theology at Paris is inferred rather than firmly documented; but his poor Suffolk origins, his mastery at Oxford, his long episcopate from 1235, and his death on 9 October 1253 are secure.
His standing in the history of science is not a modern invention read back onto him. In his commentary on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, and in the treatises De Luce (On Light), De Iride (On the Rainbow), and the Compotus, Grosseteste worked out an account of knowledge that gave a central place to mathematics and to the testing of theories against experience, and a cosmology in which light is the first corporeal form of creation. His Compotus calculated the accumulating error in the Julian calendar and proposed a correction, anticipating by three centuries the reform finally carried out under Gregory XIII in 1582. Historians of science from the twentieth century onward have credited him, with his pupil Roger Bacon, as a founder of the experimental tradition at Oxford; Bacon's own tribute, in E. F. M. Benecke's rendering of the Opus Tertium as quoted in the Catholic Encyclopedia, is that "no one really knew the sciences, except the Lord Robert, Bishop of Lincoln, by reason of his length of life and experience, as well as of his studiousness and zeal."
The most celebrated episode of his last year is his refusal of a papal provision. In 1253 the Holy See conferred a vacant canonry at Lincoln on Frederick di Lavagna, a nephew of Innocent IV, with a threat of excommunication against any who resisted. Grosseteste refused. In the letter that carried his refusal, as translated in the Catholic Encyclopedia, he wrote that he obeyed apostolic commands "with filial affection, and all devotion and reverence," but that against commands opposed to the good of souls, "in a filial and obedient spirit I disobey, I refuse, I rebel." He never denied the pope's authority as Christ's vicar; his argument was that a power given for edification could not rightly be used for destruction. The text as it survives in Matthew Paris and the Burton Annals may have been sharpened by a later hand less careful of the papacy than Grosseteste himself, and that caution belongs in any honest account of the words. But the stand is not in doubt, and Rome did not proceed against him.
Grosseteste is commemorated on October 9, the day of his death, in the Church of England and across the Anglican Communion, where he is honoured as bishop and scholar. He is remembered above all for two things held together: the reforming pastor who rode his vast diocese to see that every parish had a shepherd, and the pioneer of natural science whose study of light, optics, and method stands near the head of the experimental tradition at Oxford. His name is borne today by a university at Lincoln, the city of his cathedral, where he was buried in the south transept and where pilgrims once sought his tomb.
De Luce (On Light)(Latin, c. 1215-1220)
His most famous scientific work, arguing that light is the first corporeal form of creation, drawn out from a single point into the three dimensions of the world; the seed of his metaphysics of light.
Public domain: The Ordered Universe project
Compotus (Compotus correctorius)(Latin, 1220s)
His treatise on time-reckoning and the calendar, calculating the error in the Julian reckoning of Easter and proposing a correction three centuries before the Gregorian reform.
Public domain: C. Philipp E. Nothaft translation (The Ordered Universe project)
Letters (Epistolae), on the refusal of the papal provision(Latin, 1253)
The correspondence of his episcopate, including the 1253 letter refusing to install the pope's nephew in a Lincoln canonry; the source of his famous refusal, "I disobey, I refuse, I rebel."
Public domain: Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), Wikisource
Chronica Majora, on Grosseteste and the papacy(Latin, mid-13th century)
The near-contemporary St Albans chronicle, the principal narrative source for Grosseteste's public quarrels, his stand against papal provisions, and the memory of his sanctity.
Public domain: Matthew Paris's English History, 1235 to 1273, tr. J. A. Giles, at the Internet Archive
Robert Grosseteste(English, 2000)
The standard readable modern life, sympathetic to the man's faith and lucid on both his science and his theology; the best single volume for a serious general reader.
Robert Grosseteste: The Growth of an English Mind in Medieval Europe(English, 1986)
The great interpretive study of Grosseteste's intellectual formation, tracing how a poor Englishman became one of Europe's foremost thinkers; for the reader who wants to go deeper after McEvoy.
Public domain: Borrowable at the Internet Archive
Primary sources. Grosseteste's own works are the first witness to his mind: De Luce (On Light), the treatise in which light is the first form of creation; the scientific opuscula including De Iride (On the Rainbow) and the Compotus on the calendar; his commentaries on Aristotle, especially the Posterior Analytics; the Hexaëmeron, his great commentary on the six days of creation; and his voluminous Letters, which carry the refusal of the papal provision. Many are available in Latin editions and, increasingly, in modern English translation through the Ordered Universe project.
Principal study. For the public life and its documentary frame, Matthew Paris's Chronica Majora (mid-thirteenth century) is the indispensable near-contemporary narrative; it preserves the story of the papal confrontation and the memory of his sanctity. The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia article gives a compact, well-sourced life and is freely readable at Wikisource.
Recommended modern biography. James McEvoy's Robert Grosseteste (Oxford, 2000) is the standard readable life for a serious general reader, sympathetic to the man and his faith and lucid on both the science and the theology. For the fuller intellectual world, R. W. Southern's Robert Grosseteste: The Growth of an English Mind in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1986) is the great interpretive study, tracing how a poor Englishman became one of Europe's foremost thinkers.
Further reading. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on Grosseteste surveys his philosophy and science with care and full references. Alfred Lohr and C. Philipp E. Nothaft's critical edition and translation of the Compotus (Oxford, 2019) is the scholarly gateway to his calendar work.
Online resources. The Catholic Encyclopedia article (Wikisource, public domain), the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, and the Ordered Universe project's translations and essays are the best free starting points.
Around that stand a further tradition grew. The church long remembered Grosseteste as a saint; miracles were reported at his tomb in Lincoln Cathedral, and King Edward I, Oxford University, and successive bishops petitioned for his canonization, though it was never granted. Matthew Paris and later writers even carried a story that the bishop's spirit appeared to Innocent IV and struck him a mortal blow. That tale is a chronicler's embellishment, first attaching to the pope's death and repeated into the sixteenth century, and it should be read as the measure of how deeply the confrontation lodged in England's memory rather than as record of fact. The reverence was real, and it is itself part of his history: the poor Suffolk scholar who had faced down Rome was held, for centuries and by his own countrymen, very nearly a saint.
Almighty God, you gave your servant Robert Grosseteste special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Grosseteste /ˈɡrɒs.tɛst/; Pseudo-Dionysius /ˌsuːdoʊ ˌdaɪəˈnɪʃəs/
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52