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reformers had done much the same when confronted by a similar need to
validate a new historical beginning, and for this reason their example pro-
vided a compelling precedent for Bacon. The success of Protestant leaders
in portraying their movement as the “new Jerusalem” of John's Apocalypse
(Revelation 21:2) made it that much easier for Bacon to use a conjugate
term, “Bensalem” or “son of Salem,” to name the holy city of his scientific
millennium. Like the other prophets who had announced new dispensa-
tions in Scripture, Bacon was anchoring the new scientific age in the ortho-
doxies of the past, and this was precisely how he purchased the liberty to
call for something radically new. When he aligned his new age of science
with the beginning of church history in Christ's Great Commission, he
enabled what he was envisioning to appeal to conservatives and radicals
alike. Once having identified the advent of science with the advent of the
gospel, science was assured of finding favor with the guardians of tradition.
But by also insinuating that this new Great Commission represented the
millennial fulfillment that, like every past moment of prophetic disclosure,
necessitated the rewriting of historical understanding, the same principle
of interpretation that made this narrative conservative also lent itself to the
historical radicalism that was destined to infuse modernism.
t he R evolt of i magination as l eaRneD f oRgetfulness
The religious features of Bacon's New Atlantis are unmistakable. Still, it is
not at all uncommon for interpreters to pay them little mind. To our eyes, as
I believe the bulk of Bacon scholarship bears witness, this historical vision
may seem thoroughly modern, but this is because we selectively attend only
to those symbolic road signs that point forward into a seemingly secular-
ized future and just as selectively overlook the ones that point back into the
Christian past. In large part this interpretive habit is a product of Bacon's
own legacy. The millenarian turn that we find in his writing, despite its
obvious religiosity, puts into play the learned forgetfulness that is so char-
acteristic of modernism even now. Although millenarian rhetoric is tied to
the past by prophetic authority, it also liberates itself from tradition by locat-
ing the principle of historical interpretation in the future. Scholars who
pass over the religious language in Bacon's writing conform their thinking
to a secular variation of the same logic. They are inclined to suppose that
his ubiquitous religious references have no particular importance because
their interpretations operate out of a conception of history that is grounded
in their own time rather than the author's.
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