Bradwardine, Thomas

Thomas Bradwardine (1290-1349) was a highly regarded mathematician and theologian, who was, for a very brief period, Archbishop of Canterbury just before his death. Thorwald C. Franke has drawn attention to Bradwardine’s rejection of Plato’s, or more correctly the Egyptian priest’s, apparent claim of a very early date for Atlantis ^[1255.242]. It seems, particularly as a cleric, that he found such a date conflicted with biblical chronology. It seems that in the end, he proposed that Plato’s ‘years’ were lunar cycles.

Similarly, Pierre d’Ailly (1350-1420), a French theologian who became cardinal, arrived at the same conclusion. While discussing Timaeus he realised that Plato’s dates of 8,000 and 9,000 ‘years’ before Solon conflicted with church teaching that the world had only lasted for 6,200 years until the birth of Christ. In order to avoid an accusation of heresy, he used Bradwardine’s explanation that Plato referred to lunar cycles, not solar years.^(a)

It is not unreasonable to deduce from this, that Bradwardine and d’Ailly would not have bothered to offer the ‘lunar cycle’ explanation unless they accepted the reality of Atlantis. It would have been much easier to dismiss the Atlantis story as a fiction.

^(a)  Pierre d’Ailly (1350/1-1420) – Atlantisforschung.de