Biology Reference
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of Jonah's sin. Jonah's return to his prophetic calling is carried over into
New Atlantis
in the Protestant restoration that Bacon's Bensalem envisions.
Just as Jonah's spiritual repentance led to his physical resurrection, the peni-
tence of Bacon's voyagers likewise leads to their physical restoration as they
are integrated into this new Christendom.
This interpretation of Bacon's creative intent finds support in the fact
that it so clearly comports with his theory of feigned history. The theologi-
cal sanction that Bacon ascribed to such exercises of historical imagination
came from their power to make God's providential orchestrations of history
visible. Imagination enabled the believer to see through the dark cloud of
sin behind which providence was veiled in real history. However, such exer-
cises could only reveal this higher truth if they also conformed to the matter
of providence as it was already revealed—that is to say, in the Bible. Bacon
could not make plausible the public expectation that the future Christen-
dom was destined to be dominated by science without also showing that his
narrative was consistent with Scripture, and it was this need that made the
story of Jonah's rebellion and restoration such an attractive model. The sto-
ry's two phases—the prophet's initial rejection of his sacred calling followed
by his subsequent obedience—made it useful as a biblical example capable
of authorizing the Protestant supposition that the Reformation now car-
ried forward the gospel mission formerly abdicated by the Catholic Church.
Moreover, the natural symbolism that coincides with these two phases—the
prophet's descent into the chaos of the sea and his restoration to the dry
land—also gave plausibility to Bacon's effort to imagine the reform of sci-
ence as one realization of this rediscovered election.
These scientific implications find an even deeper biblical resonance in
Bacon's similar allusions to the flood narrative, since the Noah story follows
so closely upon the primordial story of creation in Genesis. While Noah's
saving work presages all those other acts of prophetic intercession in the
Bible that became models for Christian ministry, symbolically it is more
closely aligned with God's first work of creation than is any subsequent
recursion of this narrative cycle. Thus, as we find the ark that Noah has
fashioned floating between the waters pouring up from “the fountains of
the great deep” and those descending from “the windows of heaven” (Gen
7:11), we are witness to what is recognizably a recapitulation of God's sepa-
ration of the waters on the second day of creation (Gen 1:6-8). Noah per-
forms the work of a prophet when he saves a remnant of life, but his role in
perpetuating life is also the work of scientific invention. In this post-Edenic
world, human culture (represented especially by Noah's technical labor in
