Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
upon this scientific paradise are symbolically returning to the original order
of the creation before its fall.
The notion that science participates in God's redemptive work was
already implicit in Bacon's two topic doctrine. Because science represented
obedience to a parallel revelation, Bacon wrote in his
Instauratio Magna
,
it was “content to wait upon nature instead of vainly affecting to overrule
her” and thus enacted the most fundamental condition of salvation. It was
an effort to return the creation, “to its perfect and original condition” and
therefore participated in God's most essential and eternal work.
20
Science
was a means by which to regain paradise, to reenact the pursuit of pure and
uncorrupted natural knowledge that Adam first undertook when he “gave
names to the creatures according to their property” (Gen 2:19-20). In the pri-
mordial disaster, as Bacon explains in his
Novum Organum
,
Adam had fallen
“from his state of innocency,” but also from his “dominion over creation,”
but God's creative purposes were not to be forever frustrated. Both of these
consequences of original sin could “even in this life be in some part repaired;
the former by religion and faith, the latter by arts and science.”
21
Human
beings were God's instruments of creation; and though temporarily exiled,
they were destined to enter an Eden they would participate in remaking.
As Bacon's mariners enter Bensalem, this theme finds expression in the
story's various allusions to the creation and its undoing in the great flood.
Just as the fallen condition symbolized by the impending death of Bacon's
mariners had called to mind the collapse of cosmos back into chaos that
one finds in the primordial flood, their return to the dry land anticipates
the reversal of this fall, the restoration of creation, and by extension, sci-
ence's creative participation in this millennial task. The undoing of God's
work that had occurred in the deluge was brought about by human disobe-
dience, and so the sailors' initial plight underlines, in its negative aspect, the
natural destructiveness of human evil. All sin, we might say, is a rejection of
God's creative work, but this also implies that science is sin's inverse. Conse-
quently, the resurgent chaos in which Bacon's protagonists are trapped sym-
bolizes both the religious apostasy of the European culture they represent
and the scientific inadequacy that follows from such spiritual defects. For
this same reason, it follows that the dry land upon which they have now set
their feet should also be a place of science. Just as both Noah and Jonah are
returned to the cosmos of the dry land in response to their obedience, thus
causing these stories to recapitulate the creation narrative, the landing of
Bacon's Europeans upon Bensalem represents a third such cycle of human
reform, one now having to do with science explicitly.
