Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
the Baptist, thus assuring that the earlier period of revelation could be fully
brought into accordance with the master revelation of Christ.
It was by appealing to this periodizing consciousness that Bacon had
been able to identify the coming age of science with a millenarian epoch
already anticipated in the Christian historical consciousness. The general
assumption that providence extended beyond the pages of the Bible created
the expectation that new revelations might require new interpretations of
past and future periods. Novelty could have a culturally sanctioned value
for serious Protestant thinkers so long as they could assure themselves that
it was anchored in eternal truths. Writing for such an audience, it is hard
to imagine how Bacon could have differently imagined a future dominated
by science.
Having displaced God into nature, Condorcet was confronted with an
analogous problem—how to explain the late arrival of a scientific millen-
nium destined by reason and nature. In part, at least, Condorcet accounts
for the apparent novelty of science's late coming on evolutionary grounds.
Knowledge could only unfold through an ordered series of steps. Certain
kinds of advancement would have been impossible prior to the invention
of phonetic writing or the development of moveable type. But the full blos-
soming of science was still, in principle, too slow. Condorcet accounts for
this problem, much as Bacon had done, by constructing a historical peri-
odization which supposed that the natural progress of learning had been
derailed by something like a scientific fall. Like the Catholic priests, who
Protestants blamed for forestalling providence by refusing to obey the pro-
phetic knowledge entrusted to them, Condorcet's history follows from an
analogous assumption applied to priestcraft more generally. The emergence
of priestcraft in antiquity
was
the unfolding of natural reason working out
its historical destiny. Reason had always been present and moving along its
destined scientific course, but the learned priests who had come to under-
stand its ways had perverted them. What made priestcraft evil was not
ignorance. To deny that they possessed the full powers of reason would be
to deny the fundamental premise of historical providence that Condorcet
wished to preserve (now as progress). Priestcraft, instead, was an idolatry of
reason—reason that had become an instrument of personal advancement
and power rather than truth.
Since Condorcet was now working within a displaced narrative in which
the counterpart to the biblical fall was the exile of natural reason, he no lon-
ger needed to work within the parameters of Christian history. But a similar
periodic contrast remained. Thus his dark age begins, not with the Catholic
