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out of the very thing it rejected? The answer to this question, again, lies in
an appreciation of the evolutionary gradualism by which cultural variations
unfold. Although Bacon's ideology of science was clearly rooted in tradi-
tional Christian ideas, his two topics doctrine had already conceded some
autonomy to natural revelation. Once enlarged by Enlightenment writers,
this liberty would eventually enable natural revelation to compete with and
even supersede special revelation as a basis for cultural authority. Bacon had
sanctioned natural inquiry by accentuating its status as a parallel revelation,
but he had also created a historical rationale for its rising importance by
linking it to the millenarian reasoning that was sustaining the historical
novelty of the Reformation. The reformers' compelling need to justify a
new beginning for Christian history provided the same potent formula for
rejecting tradition that Bacon so clearly exploited in his
New Atlantis
. This
millenarian shift anticipates the doctrine of progress and modernism more
generally in its tendency to value the concrete realities of the present as
the privileged vantage point for historical thinking. All that was needed
to transform Bacon's providential vision of the history of learning into a
progressivist one would be an expurgation of its apparent ties to traditional
religious thought.
P
RoviDence
anD
P
RogRess
in
the
f
Rench
e
nlightenment
The continuing separation by which progress eventually became distinct from
the idea of providence occurred along a fault line stretching from Edinburgh
down through London and across the English Channel toward its Parisian
epicenter. Certainly this process could be productively studied by examin-
ing the spiritual tremors that were shaking Great Britain in the eighteenth
century, just as it could by following the branch of this fault line that turned
eastward toward Königsberg. But it was at its Parisian epicenter that the pres-
sures building up as reason pushed against revelation produced the most vio-
lent cataclysms. For this reason, the rhetoric of the French Enlightenment
provides the best opportunity for considering how the idea of progress began
to become viable apart from the idea of providence.
I believe that the rhetorical mechanism that accounts for cultural evolu-
tion of this kind is the process of displacement that I briefly introduced in
the last chapter. As applied to expressions of the progress doctrine, Frye's
theory presupposes that similarities of narrative form are analogous to what
comparative anatomists call “homologies,” formal and functional similari-
ties that signal common descent. As such, the detection of displacement
