Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
My own position is that these religious features still matter because they
continue to be present in evolutionism through its grammatical descent.
Rhetorical Darwinists still suppose that the revelations of science ought
to define historical understanding. They may be oblivious to the religious
ancestry of this idea, but theirs nevertheless is a form of historical conscious-
ness that derives from the same millenarian logic that Bacon appropriated
from Christianity. Our interest in looking at Bacon's historical vision as an
antecedent to evolutionism stems from the supposition that it will uncover
some clues that may explain how and why such religious patterns of signi-
fication continue to abide. The question driving this analysis, therefore, is
why those patterns would be able to persist even while modernist ideologies
such as evolutionism deny their validity. From whence comes the learned
forgetfulness that enables evolutionism to sustain a religious view of history
even while defending scientism and naturalism?
The basis of my answer can be found simply by considering how rheto-
ric works in its longitudinal aspect. The enduring effects of old messages
are the end products of specific acts of mediation, each having occurred
in accordance with the circumstances of its own successive moment and
audience. Contemporary messages will seem to have no relationship to the
counterpart ones of centuries past until we take into consideration the suc-
cession of mediating messages that lead from one antipode of cultural evolu-
tion to another. This is because change and conservation work dialectically.
The chain of thought that links Bacon's messages to the scientific rhetoric
of today would have been broken if seventeenth-century audiences had not
been able to reconcile such novelties with the established truths of their
own time. The same principle carries down to the present. Any novelty
that arises within such a larger historical continuum must be capable of
being integrated with the established truths of its own milieu. The needs
of conservation that arise at each juncture in this process ensure that some
abiding continuity of meaning will persist even over the long term.
The principle of language that accounts for the operation of this dialec-
tic of change and conservation is narrative form. Northrop Frye's theory of
displacement, which will become the driving force of this argument in my
next chapter, supposes that narrative plot structures or forms (which I will
apply to historical accounts as well as fictional ones) are vehicles capable of
mediating an enduring thematic substance in messages that will otherwise
seem quite different. Form and substance, this is to say, are somewhat inter-
changeable. What this means in practical terms is that when a narrative
form that originally expressed religious meaning becomes detached from
