Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
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My interest in the Protestant narrative that structures Bacon's tale is tied up
with the same interest of many others in deciphering how his
New Atlantis
foreshadows modernist culture. What makes my approach different (though
certainly not unique) is my presumption that such influences need to be
understood in their immediate religious context before their long-term pro-
genitive role can be understood. In other words, unless we first understand
what Bacon was preserving, we cannot understand the changes he made
possible. But when Bacon is presented to us now in various retrospectives
on the origins of modernism, we typically get depictions of his futuristic
prognostications that have been divorced from the religious context that
shaped their original meaning.
43
These religious meanings seem to have no
place in the rhetorical progeny of modernism, and so they are passed over in
this parent discourse as well. For instance, Margarita Mathiopoulos in her
topic
History and Progress
gives this characteristic summation:
The idea of a total mastery of nature by the human being and science as
one of the modern principles of secularized change of the world in the
sense of a forward-moving linear improvement, was first propounded by
Francis Bacon in his utopian essay “Nova Atlantis” (1627) and remained
influential well into the second half of the twentieth century.
44
Certainly the notion that Bacon envisioned progress as an enterprise
empowered by technical rationality is consistent in a loose sort of way with
what one finds in his
New Atlantis
, and I also agree that Baconian rhetoric
was a vital precursor to the Enlightenment view of science's historical role—
and thus to such visions of historical progress as predominate now. But it is
not the “newness” of modernism that one finds in Bacon's discourses. Since
the theological backdrop to his argument for the “newness” of science is
“instauration”—God's work to restore a fallen nature through an obedient
remnant of humanity—it is implausible to say that he envisioned a “total
mastery of nature by the human being and science.” Human action in the
historical vision promulgated by Bacon is always God's action.
The impossibility of finding in
New Atlantis
anything exactly resembling
contemporary notions of technical rationality can be put down to inviolable
principles of audience adaptation. The fact that the persuasiveness of these
messages for seventeenth-century readers depended upon their theological
coherency would require that they at least be perceived as religiously sin-
cere. To the extent that Bacon worked in a cultural milieu preoccupied with
