Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
religious authority would be capable of providing the vital checks on tem-
poral power that the medieval church had formerly instituted.
23
The uni-
fied technical class he would later describe in his
Nouveau Christianisme
was
destined to become this new Roman Curia, a spiritual buffer against the
destructive tendencies of political ambition in the emerging secular state.
In its earliest incarnation, this was to be a “council of Newton” explicitly
modeled after the scientific theocracy of Bacon's
New Atlantis
.
24
In it, the
role played in the old Europe by the Catholic Church was to be filled by a
parliamentary body of scientific priests—with mathematicians holding the
highest ecclesiastical rank.
25
Seen now from our more distant perspective, Saint-Simon's preoccu-
pation with religion might seem to signal only the nostalgia of a thinker
disposed to venerate the ways of an older culture from which he did not
have the emotional fortitude to break free. But we dare not lose sight of the
fact that this religious enthusiasm was also thought to have a religious basis.
It signaled the author's conviction that the scientific explanation of history
he had discovered also demonstrated an evolutionary linkage between sci-
ence and the older faith. So long as positivism seemed to descend from
religion, it would also seem to retain religious meanings that it might have
formally denied. This evolutionary thesis was first formulated by the ideo-
logue Charles Dupuis (1742-1809) in his
De l'origine de tous les cultes ou reli-
gion universelle
(
The Origin of All Religious Worship, or Universal Religion
) (1795).
Dupuis contended that the religious conceptions of past ages represented
scientific thought in an immature phase of its development.
26
What religion
had conceptualized through the dark glass of anthropomorphism were in
fact positive truths that modernity was now beginning to look in the face
and to render in mathematical language.
27
Regarded in any straightforward
manner, Dupuis' explanation was merely reductive, one that evaporated the
essence of religious thought and experience into merely sociological mists.
But to the extent that Saint-Simon's incorporation of this thesis into his
own vision of history continued to involve the nonreductive element of dis-
placement (as signaled by its explicit modeling after Bacon's
New Atlantis
),
it also retained traditional elements of religious meaning. No less than the
Enlightenment philosophers whose work he carried forward, Saint-Simon
was still transposing, as Voegelin describes this, the story of scientific prog-
ress onto a preexistent narrative of providence.
28
Whatever the sociologi-
cal merits of this new explanation of religion, it was being advanced in
company with notions of religion's historical role that it did not theorize so
much as imitate.
