Prose, Science, and Scripture: Francis Bacon's Sacred Texts

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/14444127/WORKINGFOLDER/POOLE/9781108419635C10.3D 7:49PM 153 [153–168] 30.8.2018 chapter 10 Prose, Science, and Scripture: Francis Bacon’s Sacred Texts Katherine Bootle Attié A conservative revolutionary if ever there was one, Francis Bacon strategically designed and promoted his new science within a normative rhetorical framework of old metaphors. Focusing on one of these master tropes, the book of nature, this chapter argues that Bacon styled his oeuvre as an improved translation of God’s works – “a kind of second Scripture” – in order to align his interest in natural philosophy with Protestant emphasis on biblical exegesis. More specifically, Bacon sought to appeal to King James I, to whom he dedicated The Advancement of Learning (1605), by establishing continuity and complementarity between his plan for a new “natural history” and the crown’s ambitious plan for a new English Bible, conceived at the Hampton Court Conference the year before. Tracing the nuances of the book of nature trope across Bacon’s philosophical writings, I show how he used the metaphor in an attempt to unite seemingly conflicted, contradictory ends. On the one hand, Bacon the progressive idealist desired to help more people “read” God’s creation accurately for themselves; on the other hand, Bacon the pragmatic royalist needed to assure James that the precious secrets of God and king would remain hidden safely away from “vulgar” understandings. It is no coincidence that Bacon’s conception of his natural philosophic project sounds like the conception of the King James Bible: a vast labor whose fruits would benefit all, but whose work of translation would remain the province of a wise elect. In what follows, I explain the reciprocity between the Baconian program of scientific reform and the Jacobean program of scriptural reform. By focusing on how Bacon relates the metaphorical book of nature to the literal book of Scripture, I illustrate how metaphor worked to negotiate the ideological and political tensions that made innovation difficult in seventeenth-century England.1 153 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/14444127/WORKINGFOLDER/POOLE/9781108419635C10.3D 7:49PM 154 154 [153–168] 30.8.2018 katherine bootle attié Translating God’s Books Bacon was not the only innovator in early modern England who faced the challenge of making change acceptable to a society comforted by continuity. Conservative revolutionaries in their own right, the translators of the King James Bible anticipated a skeptical readership and justified the new as a recovery of the old. In their original Preface to the Reader (1611), the translators begin with the proclamation that they were moved to this historic enterprise by “Zeale to promote the common good.”2 Although such a benevolent goal “deserveth certainly much respect and esteeme,” it is met all too often with “cold intertainment in the world” on account of men’s fear of innovation. “For, was there ever any thing projected,” the translators complain, “that savoured any way of newnesse or renewing, but the same endured many a storme of gaine-saying, or opposition?” Leaving it to posterity to judge their work, they will risk their reputations in the short term by shaking off the fetters of habitual hermeneutics and walking a different way: as “sonnes of the Trueth, we must consider what it speaketh, and trample upon our owne credit, yea, and upon other mens too, if either be any way an hinderance to it.”3 Their purpose in identifying the obfuscations of the present is to recover the light of the past. Like many early moderns who promoted change in a change-averse society, the translators strategically sought to represent their innovation as the restoration of ancient wisdom in its purest form. This paradoxical spirit of conservative innovation led them to credit the Hebrew Old Testament over “the Latine translations [which] were too many to be all good, for they were . . . not out of the Hebrew fountaine . . . but out of the Greeke streame, therefore the Greeke being not altogether cleare, the Latine derived from it must needs be muddie.”4 Moreover, they have sacrificed the convenience of verbal consistency and translated the same word differently in different places to convey the original sense as exactly as possible: “wee have not tyed our selves to an uniformitie of phrasing, or to an identitie of words, as some peradventure would wish that we had done, because they observe, that some learned men some where, have beene as exact as they could that way.”5 The Jacobean translators insist they have given themselves flexibility not because they like making changes for change’s sake, but because they give words less weight than matter: “For is the kingdome of God become words or syllables? why should wee be in bondage to them if we may be free?”6 To worship the words of a sacred text is to make a graven image, to privilege the letter over the spirit. C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/14444127/WORKINGFOLDER/POOLE/9781108419635C10.3D 7:49PM 155 [153–168] 30.8.2018 Prose, Science, and Scripture: Francis Bacon’s Sacred Texts 155 The translators have heeded the calling of a higher voice: “we cannot follow a better patterne for elocution than God himselfe.”7 The pattern of elocution for this preface, however, would appear to be not God, but Bacon. Like the translators and their humanitarian justification for a reformed Scripture, Bacon justified the need for a reformed science as being “to the benefite and use of men” (31).8 In keeping with that goal, he wrote The Advancement of Learning in the vernacular in order to make his work accessible to the English reading public. To avoid appearing too bold an innovator, he strategically promoted the new philosophy as a conservative return to the pure fountain of natural knowledge. Before the Bible translators warned in their preface “that nicenesse in wordes was always counted the next step to trifling,” Bacon’s Advancement had identified as “the first distemper of learning, when men studie words, and not matter,” while warning that “to fall in love with [words], is all one, as to fall in love with a Picture” (AL 23). The study of the natural world, Bacon suggests, is the ideal antidote to linguistic superfluity: “the wit and minde of man, if it worke upon matter, which is the contemplation of the creatures of God worketh according to the stuffe, and is limited thereby” (AL 24). Like the Jacobean Bible translators, Bacon and his fellow “sonnes of the Trueth” are interested in substance more than style, in matter more than words.9 It is a characteristic irony that Bacon chose to represent the creaturely world of matter through a textual metaphor: the book of nature. Like other Baconian master tropes, the book of nature authorized the new emphasis on empirical observation by representing it in culturally normative terms.10 Essentially analyzing his own rhetorical strategy of introducing the new via the old, Bacon in The Advancement is quite explicit about the pedagogical and persuasive necessity of delivering “newe and forreine” knowledge in a form “that is agreeable and familiar” (AL 125). Innovative thinkers like himself, “whose Conceits are beyonde popular opinions . . . [must] have recourse to similitudes, and translations, to expresse themselves” (AL 125). By “similitudes and translations,” Bacon means analogies and metaphors.11 His master tropes function as “translations” in their own right by putting foreign notions into familiar language. Bacon, as I will be arguing, used the book of nature metaphor as a strategic means of aligning biblical exegesis and natural philosophy in order to promote the latter. As we will see, it is a fine example of Baconian logic that he intended this textual metaphor to help him move beyond metaphor toward the material text that he had in mind: a natural and experimental history – a literal book of nature. C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/14444127/WORKINGFOLDER/POOLE/9781108419635C10.3D 7:49PM 156 156 [153–168] 30.8.2018 katherine bootle attié In relying on metaphor, Bacon proves a Renaissance thinker with an ingrained attachment to early modern correspondence theory, in which metaphor was not merely a figure of speech but a mode of thought. Granted, Bacon is not primarily remembered as champion of the Renaissance worldview grounded on neo-Platonic tropologies. More Aristotle’s heir than Plato’s, Bacon is rightly remembered as an early modern theorist of scientific objectivity, proponent of an inductive method whereby the mind could learn to separate itself from the objects of its inquiry. Impeding the collection of particular observations on nature that were to become the foundation of a reformed philosophy, men of learning, Bacon complains, have long been deceived by “the unequall mirrour of their owne minds” (AL 25), have jumped prematurely to conclusive generalities, and have imposed onto the natural world imagined correspondences. As he writes in the Novum Organum, “The human intellect is constitutionally prone to supposing that there is more order and equality in things than it actually finds. For though there are many things monadic in nature and quite unlike anything else, the intellect nevertheless counterfeits parallels, correspondences and relatives which do not exist” (83).12 However, this is not to rule out all such correspondence. By helping scientific inquirers disentangle their own nature from the nature of things, Bacon’s method will enable the discovery of those true and truly wonderful correspondences such as he names with unrepressed glee in Book 2 of The Advancement: Is not the de-light of the Quavering uppon a stoppe in Musicke, the same with the playing of Light uppon the water? Are not the Organs of the sences of one kinde with the Organs of Reflexion, the Eye with a glasse, the Eare with a Cave or Straight determined and bounded? Neither are these onely similitudes, as men of narrowe observation may conceyve them to bee; but the same footesteppes of Nature, treading or printing uppon severall subjects or Matters. (AL 78) Supposedly these correspondences are not (or not merely) metaphors, yet Bacon cannot help but define them by a metaphor, the “footsteps of nature,” because a more literal definition would be reductive. And if “printing” suggests not only footprints, but also typesetting, this adduces to the especially unifying metaphor of the book of nature – “several subjects or matters” printed and bound together by the divine author. In a meta-textual sense, Bacon’s reformist agenda was a call for a better, more accurate translation of nature’s language into an actual book of C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/14444127/WORKINGFOLDER/POOLE/9781108419635C10.3D 7:49PM 157 [153–168] 30.8.2018 Prose, Science, and Scripture: Francis Bacon’s Sacred Texts 157 natural and experimental history that would in turn become the foundation of the new science. And this book would undoubtedly include correspondences. The work of “looking deeply into nature,” he maintains, must needs “investigate and record the resemblances and analogies of things, both in whole bodies and in their parts. For these things unify nature, and start to set up the sciences” (NO 295). For Bacon, then, metaphor in general conveyed the shared essence of apparently dissimilar things across the pattern of creation. The language and logic of correspondence proved essential to Bacon’s agenda not only philosophically but also politically. As languishing metaphors are reinvigorated by Bacon’s usage, the new philosophy is made acceptable to the old establishment by corroborating the self-justifying discourse of monarchical power. Addressed to King James, The Advancement was published at a time when the monarch seemed especially interested in securing textual monuments. In 1604, the Hampton Court Conference gave rise to an ambitious plan for a new English translation of the Bible, and translation committees were appointed within five months of the conference.13 Although Bacon did not attend, he certainly would have known what transpired there. Bacon had been made King’s Learned Counsel in 1604, and he evidently advised James on ecclesiastical policy; when the new king argued with his bishops at Hampton Court, he took the position of moderation outlined by Bacon in his polemical tract, Certain Considerations Touching the Better Pacification and Edification of the Church of England (1603).14 I want to venture that Bacon not only knew of the planned Bible, but also used that knowledge in shaping how he presented The Advancement to James. We might consider, for instance, Bacon’s phrasing of the dedication. As James miraculously combines “the power and fortune of a King; the knowledge and illumination of a Priest; and the learning and universalitie of a Philosopher,” he deserves “some solide worke, fixed memoriall, and immortall monument, bearing a Character or signature, both of the power of a king, and the difference and perfection of such a king” (AL 5). Bacon offers to James “some treatise tending to that end” (AL 5) in the form of The Advancement of Learning, but the build-up sounds like, and may well have put the king in mind of, the Bible that would bear his name. Just as the new translation of the book of Scripture would be authorized by the highest earthly power, Bacon wanted the new translation of the book of nature to bear that same authorizing “signature” and benefit from the same royal support. C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/14444127/WORKINGFOLDER/POOLE/9781108419635C10.3D 7:49PM 158 158 [153–168] 30.8.2018 katherine bootle attié Across his philosophical writings, Bacon exploits “the intimate connection between interpretation of Scripture and interpretation of nature” as a means of extending biblical authority to natural philosophy.15 Although nature had been represented not simply as a book but as a sacred text since late antiquity, the book of nature metaphor took on greater cultural relevance with the Protestant Reformation and the consequent rise of the Bible as sole authority in matters of Christian faith and practice.16 As Peter Harrison has argued, early modern science also reinvigorated the tired textual metaphor, as the notion of “reading” nature helped empiricists like Bacon “demonstrate that their enterprises were not merely manifestations of vain curiosity and uncritical ‘eye service,’” which smacked of idolatry and undue faith in the sensory realm.17 Instead, Bacon would align the redemptive return to “the Oracle of Gods works” in a reformed natural philosophy with the redemptive return to “the Oracle of Gods word” in the Reformed Church (AL 25).18 The first years of the Jacobean regime gave Bacon the opportunity to capitalize on the king’s evident commitment to biblical revision: Bacon could represent, however implicitly, his new approach to the “text” of nature as a fitting counterpart to the new translation of the Bible that had been recently proposed and royally sanctioned. And when that translation appeared, the rhetoric of its preface would testify to Bacon’s cultural currency in the early seventeenth century. His philosophy influenced the translation of the Bible even as the prospect of a new biblical translation influenced his philosophy. Interpreting God’s Books Anachronistically backreading into Bacon the modern convention of a thoroughly secularized science (and perhaps also resisting, consciously or not, any philosophy that prefigures the creationist empiricism of “intelligent design”), scholars have stressed those moments in Bacon’s writing when he attempts to separate science and religion. But those moments are few and far between compared to others that suggest their interconnection. Despite his caveat that men take care not to “unwisely mingle or confound these learnings together” (AL 9), Bacon nonetheless practiced some “mingling” of his own in demonstrating the complementarity of natural philosophy and theology. On one level, this demonstration was an exercise in rhetorical prudence given that, as Kevin Sharpe reminds us, it was “essential to claim Biblical endorsement for almost any action in early modern England.”19 But the Baconian alliance between science and theology cannot simply be reduced to rhetorical prudence. To dismiss Bacon’s C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/14444127/WORKINGFOLDER/POOLE/9781108419635C10.3D 7:49PM 159 [153–168] 30.8.2018 Prose, Science, and Scripture: Francis Bacon’s Sacred Texts 159 comparison between divinity and natural philosophy as “merely a simile” is to disregard the interconnectedness of the branches of knowledge in his philosophia prima – “first philosophy,” or universal philosophy.20 He describes the different realms of inquiry as twin oracles, “branches of a tree, that meete in a stemme” (AL 76), or a pair of streams flowing from the same inexhaustible source. Even when ostensibly distinguishing between them – “let no man . . . thinke or maintaine, that a man can search too farre, or bee too well studied in the Booke of Gods word, or in the Booke of Gods workes” (AL 9, emphasis added) – Bacon’s habit of parallel phrasing, and the alliterative pairing of “word” and “works,” invokes the power of the correspondence between actual and metaphorical books. Through the book-of-nature trope especially, Bacon reassures his readers that natural philosophy, serving as a “preservative against unbeleefe and error” (AL 37), will complement and illuminate rather than contradict or obfuscate the lessons of Scripture: For our Saviour saith, You erre not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God: laying before us two Bookes or volumes to studie, if we will be secured from errour: first the scriptures, revealing the will of God; and then the creatures expressing his power; whereof the later [sic] is a key unto the former; not onely opening our understanding to conceive the true sence of the scriptures, by the generall notions of reason and rules of speech; but chiefely opening our beleefe, in drawing us into a due meditation of the omnipotencie of God, which is chiefely signed and ingraven uppon his workes. (AL 37–38) As Richard Serjeantson has argued, it is highly probable that Bacon’s sense of the concord between God’s “two Bookes” derives in part from Raymond Sebond’s Theologia naturalis, written in the mid-1430s but frequently republished and translated (by Michel de Montaigne among others) throughout the sixteenth century.21 Sebond gives the book of nature a certain priority, as it “speaks to us (dicere) of what we ought to believe about God in himself prior to any other kind of proof.”22 The created world testifies to divine power, wisdom, and goodness in a phenomenological way that the Bible cannot. Some natural philosophers and natural historians approached the book of nature as a clearer alternative to the book of Scripture “because it was not written in a verbal language. Thus, the ambiguities of Scripture interpretation encouraged people to look towards nature as a less ambiguous source for the knowledge of God.”23 But this does not seem to have been Bacon’s view. Bacon instead emphasizes the need to interpret nature’s book as an obscure or difficult text.24 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/14444127/WORKINGFOLDER/POOLE/9781108419635C10.3D 7:49PM 160 160 [153–168] 30.8.2018 katherine bootle attié For all his nuanced attention to the various meanings that “interpretation” might have held for Bacon, Serjeantson is too quick to dismiss a possible connection between interpretation and translation. After noting that the terms were sometimes synonymous in Renaissance usage, he brushes their interrelationship aside: “Is Bacon’s idea of interpretatio naturae one that involves translation? Evidently it is not. None of the procedures that Bacon elaborates in the Novum Organum or its precursors implies an analogy with the act of linguistic translation.”25 For Bacon, the interpretation of nature may not have been equivalent to translation, but I think it most likely did involve translation. Translation makes interpretation possible. According to seventeenth-century language theories, interpretation is necessary because of man’s fallen state. Since the Fall, man could no longer “read” the book of nature in perfect, unmediated fashion as Adam did when he named the creatures “according unto their proprieties” (AL 6); the natural world now had to be translated into imperfect human language before it could be interpreted. Bacon intended his natural and experimental history to be the translation (still imperfect, but a vast improvement over previous attempts to record the facts of nature) through which the interpretation of nature could transpire. In Parasceve ad historiam naturalem (1620), Bacon goes out of his way to distinguish between the work of compiling a natural history and that of interpreting nature, as the former is prior to and a prerequisite of the latter: “we should always remind ourselves that what is being prepared is a granary and storehouse of things, not comfortable for staying or living in, but a place we go down to when we need to fetch out something useful for the work of the Interpreter, which comes next” (459).26 Here again, Bacon gives metaphor a definitive role; by representing the natural historic tome as nature’s granary or storehouse, he conveys as precisely as possible the humble, practical, useful quality of the things contained therein. It has been argued that Bacon encouraged the brutal conquest or “rape” of nature.27 But such a reading runs counter to Bacon’s belief that nature, a humble yet holy text, deserves reverence and respect, and that use is not synonymous with abuse. In a worshipful summons, he calls on the natural philosopher with humility and veneration to unroll the volume of Creation, to linger and meditate therein, and with minds washed clean from opinions to study it in purity and integrity. For this is that sound and language which went forth into all lands, and did not incur the confusion of Babel; this should men study to be perfect in, and becoming again as little children condescend C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/14444127/WORKINGFOLDER/POOLE/9781108419635C10.3D 7:49PM 161 [153–168] 30.8.2018 Prose, Science, and Scripture: Francis Bacon’s Sacred Texts 161 to take the alphabet of it into their hands, and spare no pains to search and unravel the interpretation thereof, but pursue it strenuously and persevere even unto the death.28 Echoing Jesus’s promise, “Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (KJV Matt. 18.3), Bacon puts into biblical terms the scientific paradox of conquering nature by obeying her. If men of learning will become again as little children, set aside their preconceived notions, and relearn the alphabet of nature, they may eventually be able to recover some knowledge of divine signatures. These were “natural symbols that bore a real resemblance to what they signified” and “were thus unlike human words which since Babel had been arbitrary tokens of what they were meant to represent.”29 With the Fall and consequent expulsion from Eden, man fell away from nature, and nature became distant, obscure, and in need of interpretation. Losing the mastery of nature meant losing Adam’s perfect ability to comprehend the visual language of signatures that marked natural objects and “provided an indication of their use . . . The walnut, to take a stock example, bore the signature of the brain, and was thus prescribed for ‘ills of the head.’”30 As an epistemological hybrid between correspondence theory and empirical observation, the doctrine of signatures strikingly manifests scientific thought in transition. At once ontological and teleological, creationist and empiricist, divine signatures were believed to ordain and to justify man’s use of nature for his own benefit. In this respect, they strengthened the religious underpinnings of Bacon’s utilitarian science. Bacon’s interest in the related doctrines of divine signatures and Adamic language further complicates his ostensible privileging of things over words. He suggests not only that the interpretation of nature and of Scripture correspond, but also that the former can and should inform the latter. Learning how “to spell, and so by degrees to read in the volume of Gods works” (AL 30), Bacon avers, will make men better readers of his word. They will be able “to conceive the true sence of the Scriptures, by the generall notions of reason and rules of speech” (AL 38) that once governed Adamic language, and which might henceforward enable a more accurate translation of divine dictum. According to Serjeantson, “Renaissance philosophers did not often confuse the interpretation of words (verba) with the investigation of things in themselves (res ipsae) . . . If one believed, as almost all philosophers at this point did, that the relationship between words and things was conventional rather than natural, then there is no C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/14444127/WORKINGFOLDER/POOLE/9781108419635C10.3D 7:49PM 162 162 [153–168] 30.8.2018 katherine bootle attié reason to suppose that the same principles should apply in investigating human or divine words, on the one hand, and natural things, on the other.”31 Bacon, on the contrary, must suppose that at least some of the same principles apply in the interpretation of words and things; how else could God’s creatures be expected to reveal anything about “the generall notions of reason and rules of speech”? The implication here (not exactly “Baconian” in the usual sense) is that the principles governing language are themselves divinely given and are therefore potentially among the laws of creation pursued by natural philosophy. In representing his empiricist program as learning a new alphabet (or relearning a forgotten one) with which to rewrite the book of nature, and in making his discourse of natural philosophy echo the discourse of divinely appointed authority, Bacon further spiritualizes and politicizes his case for philosophic reform. Styling God’s Books Knowing that James liked to be compared to that biblical archetype of royal wisdom, King Solomon, the translators in their preface liken the King James Bible to Solomon’s Temple, another monument to kingly power, wisdom, and magnificence. For his part, Bacon had even greater need for Solomonic lore, as he hoped that James would also sponsor an ambitious natural history such as Solomon himself was said to have compiled. As Bacon puts it, the Judaic king’s love of knowledge inspired him “not onely to write those excellent Parables, or Aphorismes concerning divine and morall Philosophie; but also to compile a naturall Historie of all verdor, from the Cedar upon the Mountaine, to the mosse uppon the wall . . . and also of all things, that breath or moove” (AL 35–36). Bacon alludes here to 1 Kings 4:33, which in most translations, including the Geneva and Authorized versions, speaks not of moss but of hyssop. According to Brian Vickers, “Bacon’s idiosyncratic use of ‘moss’ follows ‘the rendering of Junius and Tremellius.’”32 But I think Bacon may have been following a source closer to home. Seeking to ennoble botany as a study that has drawn “many excellent wits . . . to the contemplation of the divine wisedome,” John Gerard duly invokes Solomon’s botanical bent in his dedication of The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes (1597) to William Cecil: “the example of Salomon is before the rest and greater, whose wisdom and knowledge was such, that he was able to set out the nature of all plantes, from the highest Cedar to the lowest Mosse.”33 Anticipating Bacon, Gerard emphasizes Solomon’s attention to the humble and the lowly in representing the biblical monarch as a political, C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/14444127/WORKINGFOLDER/POOLE/9781108419635C10.3D 7:49PM 163 [153–168] 30.8.2018 Prose, Science, and Scripture: Francis Bacon’s Sacred Texts 163 scientific, and spiritual role model for the British monarch. In one of the prefatory poems to The Herball, Gerard emerges as an English Adam whose naming of flora is flawless and whose contemplation of plants is a pre-Miltonic exercise in everyday piety more profitable than meddling in higher things “where distance maketh dout”: A lowly course more fitter for his looke Doth please him better, than these loftie showes: The fruitfull earth he makes his daily booke, And turnes such leaves as all his senses knowes.34 If “the fruitfull earth” is Gerard’s Scripture, then Baconian empiricism is his mode of reading, indeed of translating the terrestrial into the textual. Written in English, with plant names given in English as well as in Latin, the Herball serves the common good by making the book of nature legible to the common reader. In the Epistle Dedicatory to the Instauratio magna, Bacon proffers his highest hope for the reign of James: “that as you stand comparison with Solomon in many things . . . you would rival that same king by putting in hand the collecting and perfecting of a true and rigorous natural and experimental history which . . . may be designed for the building up of philosophy.”35 Since the natural history of Solomon exists only in legend, Bacon represents this project as an opportunity for James to recover the lost wisdom of his intellectual forefather, thereby gloriously manifesting the essential correspondence between the Solomonic and Jacobean reigns. James corresponds most closely to Solomon by embracing an even greater correspondence, that between the kingdom of nature and the kingdom of man: “there is a great affinity and consent between the rules of nature, and the true rules of policy: the one being nothing else but an order in the government of the world, and the other an order in the government of an estate.”36 For both governments to be just, the humblest members must receive their due attention. Just as Solomon imparted dignity and worth to “the lowest moss” by including it in his natural history, so too must a good king deign to care for his lowest subjects. James describes his prerogative in terms of Christian paradox, asserting that kings “have power to exalt low things, and abase high things.”37 Bacon ascribes a similar power and responsibility to the natural historian who must engage the humble facts of nature in his search for higher truths: Concerning the superior pride that deprives natural history of things vulgar, vile, or very subtle and at the outset of no utility, the reply of the weak woman to the puffed up prince who cast aside her petition as something C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/14444127/WORKINGFOLDER/POOLE/9781108419635C10.3D 7:49PM 164 164 [153–168] 30.8.2018 katherine bootle attié unworthy and beneath his royal dignity, may stand as an oracle: Then give up being king. For it is quite certain that you cannot gain or govern an empire over nature if you are not ready to give things of this kind their due just because they are extremely insignificant and petty. (NO 183) Thus presenting the imperial/empirical “conquest” of nature as concerned with common, ordinary, everyday matters, Bacon further makes his brand of innovation seem less foreign, less threatening, and less revolutionary. The Jacobean translators adopted a similar strategy when they cast their work, and themselves, in humble, artisanal terms. With the stroke of a metaphor, translators become tradesmen, biblical blacksmiths who are not above reworking the same material and seeking help in order to improve it: “neither did we disdaine to revise that which we had done, and to bring backe to the anvill that which we had hammered: but having and using as great helpes as were needfull . . . we have at the length, through the good hand of the Lord upon us, brought the worke to that passe that you see.”38 Not driven by vain desire for wealth or fame, the translators remind us that they have worked selflessly and tirelessly for the reader’s spiritual benefit: “Ye are brought unto fountaines of living water which ye digged not . . . Others have laboured, and you may enter into their labours.”39 Their work, however, has been not a burden but a privilege; while all are called to read and contemplate the text of God’s Word, only the select few are called to translate it. The same holds true for the text of God’s works. Like the King James translation, Bacon’s proposed natural history would benefit the common good, but the actual work of translating the book of nature was to remain the province of a wise elect. Although the fruits of the inductive method will be widely enjoyed, the method itself “does not descend to vulgar understanding except in its utility and effects” (NO 57). Representing his own scientific role in clerical terms, Bacon strategically aligns empiricism, episcopacy, and exegesis: “I present myself as high priest of the sense . . . and learned interpreter of its oracles” (NO 35). In a Christian context, the plural “oracles” often referred to the sacred Scriptures (OED II.3), so the textual trope may be resonant here. For Bacon, it is only the “oracles of the sense” that allow the book of nature to be known; it is only the oracles of the sense that arrange “for the light of nature, for generating and letting it in” (NO 35). The translation of Scripture is described in the King James preface with the same familiar trope: “Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light.”40 And where the translation makes the meaning lucid, there will be less need for interpretation in the sense of explication or commentary. C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/14444127/WORKINGFOLDER/POOLE/9781108419635C10.3D 7:49PM 165 [153–168] 30.8.2018 Prose, Science, and Scripture: Francis Bacon’s Sacred Texts 165 Even in matters of style, Bacon and the translators evince their reciprocity. In the case of the Geneva Bible, according to the Jacobean translators, the Puritan pursuit of “every-where-plainnesse” backfired, as it led to even more words – an opinionated pile-up of explanatory notes that, instead of providing clarity, provoked controversy.41 By contrast, the Jacobean translation committees cultivated a style that was not so much plain as precise and laconic, emulating divine dictum as closely as possible by conveying more matter with less art. And where the meaning seemed obscure, hidden, or cryptic, the translators respected the divine purpose of those difficulties without trying to explain them away in the margins: “For as it is a fault of incredulitie, to doubt of those things that are evident: so to determine of such things as the Spirit of God hath left (even in the judgment of the judicious) questionable, can be no lesse then presumption.”42 Here the translators, consciously or not, have adopted Bacon’s skeptical mandate that the contemplative should be content to abide in doubt and should not “hast to assertion without due and mature suspension of judgement” (AL 31). And where the translators did decide to provide marginal notes, their rationale again sounds resoundingly Baconian: “doeth not a margine do well to admonish the Reader to seeke further, and not to conclude or dogmatize upon this or that peremptorily?”43 Their notes, in other words, are precisely intended to guard against “the over-early and peremptorie reduction of knowledge into Arts and Methodes” (AL 29), one of Bacon’s “peccant humors” (AL 28) of learning. Ever conscious of the king’s preference for a middle way in spiritual matters, the translators rejected the two extremes of copious marginalia and no marginalia whatsoever. The King James Bible would be minimally annotated, with none of the Geneva Bible’s excessive glosses, which James disliked and which would seem to exhibit the Baconian distemper of valuing words more than matter: “as in nature, the more you remove your selfe from particulars, the greater peril of Error you doe incur: So, much more in Divinitie, the more you recede from the Scriptures by inferences and consequences, the more weake and dilute are your positions” (AL 187). As with God’s works, so too with his Word: the more the seeker becomes entangled in the webs of commentary that are spun out of men’s minds, the more he is removed from the substantive matter that he seeks. For his part, Bacon preferred that biblical commentary take a particular form, one that strikingly resembles his proposed mode of recording empirical observations on nature: “that forme of writing in Divinitie, which in my Judgement is of all others most rich and precious; is positive [precise] Divinitie collected upon particular Texts of Scriptures C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/14444127/WORKINGFOLDER/POOLE/9781108419635C10.3D 7:49PM 166 166 [153–168] 30.8.2018 katherine bootle attié in briefe observations, not dilated into common places: not chaseing after controversies, not reduced into Methode of Art” (AL 190). Bacon’s exegetical method turns words into things: the textual particulars subject to theological inquiry are analogous to the material particulars subject to Baconian inquiry. Describing what amounts to an inductive approach to Holy Scripture, Bacon makes his scientific method germane to biblical hermeneutics. Like the natural philosopher, the theologian stays nearest the divine source by observing particular texts, collecting apothegms, and deferring certainty en route to useful knowledge. Coda Just as “the Scriptures have infinite Mysteries” (AL 34), some of which God intends to remain concealed, so too does nature abound in divine secrets. Bacon never claims that the book of God’s works is meant to be entirely open; “we doe not presume by the contemplation of Nature, to attaine to the misteries of God” (AL 7). Furthermore, the revelation and dissemination of those secrets that do become known must be subject to social and political restrictions. The elitist component of Bacon’s scientific program in part defers to royal readership; when Bacon assures James from the outset that he does not presume to pry into the king’s mind and heart in order “to discover that which the Scripture telleth me is inscrutable” (AL 3), he again demonstrates rhetorical prudence and pragmatism. Because, as Debora Shuger has observed, “under the Stuarts a concerted effort was made to ‘remystify’ church, state, and the social order,” Bacon took pains to suggest that his natural philosophic program, ostensibly designed to demystify nature, would not challenge but rather complement the Stuart agenda of remystification.44 Bacon maintains that just as “the government of God over the world is hidden; insomuch as it seemeth to participate of much irregularitie and confusion,” the government of men likewise, and naturally, engages in practices that are “obscure and invisible” (AL 179). Paraphrasing Proverbs 25:2, Bacon caters to the king by playing down the potentially egalitarian accessibility of his intellectual program and instead represents the pursuit of natural knowledge as a kind of royal prerogative: For so [Solomon] sayth expressely: The glorie of God is to conceale a thing, But the glorie of the King is to find it out, as if according to the innocent play of Children the divine Majestie tooke delight to hide his workes, to the end to have them found out, and as if Kinges could not obtaine a greater honour, than to bee Gods play-fellowes in that game, considering the great C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/14444127/WORKINGFOLDER/POOLE/9781108419635C10.3D 7:49PM 167 [153–168] 30.8.2018 Prose, Science, and Scripture: Francis Bacon’s Sacred Texts 167 commaundement of wits and meanes, whereby nothing needeth to be hidden from them. (AL 36) Tellingly, Bacon’s gloss of the proverb differs from an earlier version in Valerius Terminus, where he adds, “for in naming the king he intendeth man, taking such a condition of man as hath most excellency and greatest commandment of wits and means.”45 When revising this passage for The Advancement, Bacon omits this reference to mankind’s Adamic sovereignty over the rest of creation, arguably in order to privilege the power of the king whose support he seeks and whose divine-right rhetoric he echoes.46 In the later Parasceve ad historiam naturalem (1620), Bacon makes the carefully calculated move from a metaphorical to a literal book of nature. He calls for a natural and experimental history “to be written up with the most religious care, as if the truth of every single detail had been given under oath, since this is the book of God’s works and (insofar as we can compare the Majesty of divine things and the insignificance of mortal) another kind of Holy Writ” (PAH 469).47 Here, the “book of God’s works” is not, as before, a scriptural metaphor for the created world but a transcription and translation of the created world into legible, literary form – an actual book for which Bacon sought royal support. And like the King James Bible, this sacred work of science “is a thing of exceedingly great mass and could not be accomplished without enormous effort and investment, for it requires an army of workers and is (as I have said elsewhere) a work fit for a king” (PAH 451). Unlike the metaphoric book of nature, written by a single Author, this book of nature would be a collective endeavor. It would do for men’s minds what the Bible did for their souls. It would not interpret truth for them, but would give them truth to interpret. Setting the cornerstone of the scientific reformation, Bacon extends the Protestant motto of sola scriptura to his proposed natural and experimental history: “this alone is the one thing needful for laying the foundations of a true and active philosophy, and men will, as if shaken out of a deep sleep, at once see what the difference is between mere opinion and the fictions of wit and this true and active philosophy, and at last know what it is to consult nature about nature” (PAH 453, emphasis added). The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light. Bacon the scientific prophet came to bear witness to the Light and promised to deliver the Word that saves men from fatal error. He may have deemed himself a “high priest of the sense,” but in privileging the ultimate authority of the text, Francis Bacon was natural philosophy’s Martin Luther. C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/14444127/WORKINGFOLDER/POOLE/9781108419635C10.3D 7:49PM 168 168 [153–168] 30.8.2018 katherine bootle attié Further Reading John C. Briggs, Francis Bacon and the Rhetoric of Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Stephen Matthews, Theology and Science in the Thought of Francis Bacon (Aldershot/Burlington: Ashgate, 2008). Alvin Snider, Origin and Authority in Seventeenth-Century England: Bacon, Milton, Butler (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). Robert E. Stillman, The New Philosophy and Universal Languages in SeventeenthCentury England: Bacon, Hobbes, and Wilkins (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995). Charles Whitney, Francis Bacon and Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).