Bradwardine, Thomas

Thomas Bradwardine, (born c. 1290—died Aug. 26, 1349, London), archbishop of Canterbury, theologian, and mathematician.

Bradwardine studied at Merton College, Oxford, and became a proctor there. About 1335 he moved to London, and in 1337 he was made chancellor of St. Paul’s Cathedral. He became a royal chaplain and confessor to King Edward III. In 1349 he was made archbishop of Canterbury but died of the plague soon afterward during the Black Death.

Bradwardine’s most famous work in his day was a treatise on grace and free will entitled De causa Dei (1344), in which he so stressed the divine concurrence with all human volition that his followers concluded from it a universal determinism. Bradwardine also wrote works on mathematics. In the treatise De proportionibus velocitatum in motibus (1328), he asserted that an arithmetic increase in velocity corresponds with a geometric increase in the original ratio of force to resistance. This mistaken view held sway in European theories of mechanics for almost a century.