Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
the freedom that is afforded once the powers of literary imagination come
into play. In this way his effort to “meld his scientific project with the rein-
terpreted hopes of the religious” also enabled him to put “the fabulous in
the service of worldly progress.”
18
If narrative form is a carrier of religious meaning, what are the theologi-
cal principles that we find in Bacon's
New Atlantis
that we should expect to
endure in its secular displacement? My concern in the remainder of this
chapter will be with three thematic pairings that persist in evolutionism via
displacement: sin and redemption; separation and election; and revelation
and millennium. By considering how these ideas advanced the scientific
cause through this explicitly Christian view of history, we can foresee the
rhetorical attractions that have tended to ensure their enduring presence
in the secular narratives that will be the subject of my remaining chapters.
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eDemPtion
Bacon's determination to set the struggle for science within the moral drama
of the Bible accounts for the novel's long delay in getting to the scientific
subject for which it is most remembered. Thus it is only in the last eleven
pages (out of thirty-seven in the Spedding edition) that Bensalem's scientific
essence comes into focus. The early part needed to bring the Christian
concept of sin into the open, something it does through various biblical and
historical allusions, in order to ensure that readers will recognize science as
one of its correctives. The idea of sin is frequently expressed in the Bible
through metaphors of wandering and lostness, and so the plight of Bacon's
mariners instantly brings the moral deficiencies of their European culture
into play. Allegorically, they are prodigal humanity fleeing from God but
brought to repentance through a life-threatening disaster. The implication
that these travelers are also Catholic (since they communicate with the Ben-
salemites in Spanish) likewise identifies their plight with the “lostness” of
unreformed Christendom. Allegorically we might say that theirs is the mis-
guided voyage of the Catholic Church adrift from Scripture on the chaotic
sea of human opinion and doomed to die of spiritual hunger and thirst.
One biblical type for this kind of religious person is the prophet Jonah,
and so it is no surprise that the first part of Bacon's narrative is rife with
allusions to this character. A figure whose behavior suggests the turbulent
history that Protestants saw in the Catholic Church, Jonah is God's disobe-
dient ambassador. Though commanded to carry God's word eastward to
the lost Ninevites of Assyria, the rebellious prophet has instead set his face
