patterns of conversion in francis bacon's new atlantis

This article was downloaded by: [Northeastern University]On: 14 November 2014, At: 23:05Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

Lit: Literature InterpretationTheoryPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/glit20

Patterns of Conversion inFrancis Bacon's New AtlantisJosé María Rodríguez GarcíaPublished online: 16 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: José María Rodríguez García (2006) Patterns of Conversion inFrancis Bacon's New Atlantis , Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 17:2, 179-211,DOI: 10.1080/10436920600666731

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10436920600666731

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all theinformation (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness,or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and viewsexpressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, andare not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of theContent should not be relied upon and should be independently verified withprimary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for anylosses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages,and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly orindirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of theContent.

http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/glit20

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080/10436920600666731

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10436920600666731

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan,sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone isexpressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014

http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Literature Interpretation Theory, 17: 179–211, 2006Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1043-6928 print/1545-5866 onlineDOI: 10.1080/10436920600666731

José María Rodríguez García teaches the history of Spanish and Inter-American poetry at Cornell University. His many essays on early modern culture have appeared in such journals as Explorations in Renaissance Culture, Comparative Literature Studies, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and Romance Notes, among others. He has recently edited a special issue of Diacritics on the topic “Literary into Cultural Translation” and is now completing a book-length manuscript on interartistic discourses in modern Spanish poetry.

PATTERNS OF CONVERSION IN FRANCIS BACON’S NEW ATLANTIS

José María Rodríguez García

1. CONVERSION AS PATTERN AND THE PATTERN OF CONVERSION

The years stretching from the Elizabethan period to the later seventeenth century witnessed a revolution in both religious and scientific practices. If the Protestant Reformation in England was fraught with contradictions and compromises, on account of which the Calvinists grew ever more vigilant to prevent their own moral relaxation, the concomitant rise of experimental science demanded a similarly disciplined practitioner. In the mind of religious dissenters, Nature could thus function as a hypos-tatization of God and vice versa, experimentalism and theology becom-ing alternately or even jointly the ultimate horizon of interpretation for the inquiring subject. 1 Nevertheless, experimentalist philosophies had to legitimate themselves against the legacies of scholastic Aristotelianism, which favored the internal logic of magisterial expositions over an active, instrumentalist model of knowledge. They also had to negotiate a place between Romanist and Protestant traditions for interpreting and authen-ticating natural and supernatural events. Moreover, science was expected to explain the new role that individuated wills and identities could now play in the greater scheme of Nature and God. This traffic of signs was to be administered by a versatile epistemocrat who acted as intermediary between, on the one hand, the more rigid institutions of the monarchy and

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014

180 J. M. Rodríguez García

the State, and, on the other, the polymorphous intellectual life that devel-oped outside these bastions of orthodoxy. 2

As both the function of religion and the function of natural philoso-phy were in constant flux in Tudor-Stuart England, the latter discipline borrowed strategies of legitimation from the former. In other words, the ongoing changes in the construction of religious authority profoundly affected the ways in which experimental science could be advocated. Conversion often became a very powerful figure in this negotiation, authorizing, in the work of Francis Bacon, the rhetorical convertibility of one epistemology into the other. The English philosopher could thus iron out further conflicts and discontinuities between different realms of experience, which were made to resemble one another, as if there were an internal correspondence between them ready to be apprehended by the subject. This is what Timothy Reiss calls the “discourse of patterning” and Raymond Williams calls “patterns.” 3 Reiss credits Bacon with having elevated science from the discourse of patterning, glossed as a “discursive exchange within the world,” to a new semiotic order called “analytico-referentiality,” described as a “reasoning practice upon the world” in which direct observation, experimentation, and inductive reasoning replace the inner correspondences among pre-existing semiotic systems (30). Yet, Bacon’s New Atlantis (ca. 1623; pub. posthumously in 1627) could per-haps be more accurately described as an analytical nucleus, constituted by the discourses that circulate within the research institution of Salomon’s House, in which experimentalism exists undisturbed by the interference of patterning. But as experimentalism ventures out of Salomon’s House, named thus after both the Bensalemite king Solamona and the Biblical Solomon, it becomes just another patterning element. Furthermore, in the New Atlantis the protagonist’s pattern of conversion is deployed as a movement away from his own disabling habits of thought (or “Idols,” as Bacon called them [ Works 6.66–67]), which in turn allows him to embrace a stronger identity as both a Christian and a natural philosopher.

Before I proceed to discuss the rhetoric of conversion in the New Atlantis , a few words about the ubiquitous presence of Solomon in Bacon’s writ-ings seem in order. No sooner did James VI of Scotland become James Iof England than Bacon began to represent him as the auctor (inspirer) and artifex (builder) of his projected institutions of scientific research. In the dedication part of The Advancement of Learning (1605), James is referred to as the English Solomon on the basis of his triple anointment as “king,” “priest,” and “philosopher” ( Works 3.88, 90). Bacon repeat-edly hails James as the agent of a Great (Solomonic) Instauration of the sciences—a quintessential opus basilicum —in all three capacities ( Works 6.24; 1.198). He also wished for the king to read the New Atlantis as a set of instructions on how to fulfill another Solomonic destiny to which the

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014

Patterns of Conversion 181

latter felt called: that of proverbial Rex pacificus of the Protestant world. 4 Regrettably for Bacon, James seems to have compared the experience of reading his Lord Chancellor’s most ambitious exposition of his pro-gram for the reform of knowledge, The New organon ( Novum Organum [1620]), to an ineffable wonder. 5

The New Atlantis is a conversion narrative and a historicist artifact whose structural correspondences and discontinuities delineate a pattern of ideal reader responses to the new experimental philosophy. Bacon was the first English thinker and statesman to envision and theorize the need for reforming the institutions of learning and research according to a utili-tarian design. He proposed a method for the study of Nature that departed from the Aristotelian dialecticians’ orderly expositions of a subject matter that had long been standardized in a number of authoritative commentaries. In these works, logical and rhetorical questions usually overshadow the findings of direct observation of natural phenomena. 6 Bacon’s impatience with this type of meta-commentary prompted him to exclaim in his long introduction to the Great Instauration conventionally cited as Parasceve (1620): “[A]way with antiquities, and citations or testimonies of authors; also with disputes and controversies and differing opinions; everything in short which is philological” ( Works 8.359; 2.48–49). 7 Reacting against the discursive hegemony of scholastic Aristotelianism, Bacon shifted the focus of natural philosophy from the representation and imitation of Nature to the subjection of Nature to human control. For him, any phe-nomenon that a scientist could understand as taking place naturally in the outside world could potentially be reproduced and altered in a laboratory under different conditions and on any material substance susceptible of manifesting and supporting it ( Works 8.168–76; 1.342–52).

This goal of going beyond Nature’s own workings would in turn dictate the choice of method: “For the end rules the method” [ Finis enim regit modum ] ( Works 8.358; 2.48). Both the instrumental or operational goal and the choice of induction as the general method of research remained a constant of Bacon’s philosophical writing. What changed over the years were the rhetorical strategies employed to lend them legitimacy—his rhet-oric of legitimation—particularly when he was in need of addressing an audience either averse or indifferent to the experimental study of Nature. By legitimation, I mean the gradual use of certain practices and ideas in the public domain without their being perceived as disturbing of the larger social order. 8 The most characteristic example of Bacon’s legitimating strategies is his constant use of a religious idiom, in the writings addressed directly to King James, to make his scientific inquiry look like a comple-mentary form of Christian worship: “the last or furthest end of knowl-edge” is to build “a rich storehouse, for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate” ( The Advancement of Learning [ Works 6.134]).

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


Although utopian fictions often evince imperialist overtones, in his posthumously published work, Valerius Terminus of the Interpretation of Nature (1603; pub. 1734), Bacon explicitly disassociated his enterprise from the arguments in favor of colonialist exploitation that were being debated in his time:

And if the ordinary ambitions of men lead them to seek the amplifica-tion of their own power in their countries, and a better ambition than that hath moved men to seek the amplification of the power of their own countries amongst other nations, better again and more worthy must that aspiring be which seeketh the amplification of the power and the kingdom of mankind over the world; the rather because the other two prosecutions are ever culpable of much perturbation and injustice; but this is a work truly divine, which cometh in aura leni without noise or observation. ( Works 6.36) 9

In a passage right before this long quotation, Bacon describes his project, inrelation to the myth of Adam’s Fall that he also discusses in extenso in the book, as “a restitution and reinvesting (in great part) of man to the sovereignty and power (for whensoever he shall be able to call the creatures by their true names he shall again command them) which he had in his first state of creation” ( Works 6.34). This is the same context in which his mention, in the New Atlantis , of the word “empire” should be read, as a reference to the divine promise made to “man” of “domin-ion” over all creatures (Gen. 1:26). 10 It occurs in the second part of the narrative, where a high-ranking Father of Salomon’s House explains to the narrator that the goal of their research institute is to pursue “the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible” ( Works 5.398). 11

Being Bacon’s last work, the New Atlantis employs several legitimat-ing devices or “patterns” characteristic of his earlier writings. The most prominent among these are as follows: first, the psychosocial event of conversion, which he had used in the earlier The Masculine Birth of Time ( Temporis partus masculus [1603; pub. 1653]); second, the pragmatic situ-ation of prophetic oratory and the inclusion of multiple narrators, which he first used in The Refutation of Philosophies ( Redargutio philosophiarum [1608; pub. 1734]); and third, the representation of rites of institutional delegation and investiture, which he first enacted in the dedications of the treatises addressed to James I— The Advancement of Learning (1605) and The New Organon ( Novum organum [1620]). The combination of all such devices in a multi-layered time-scheme makes Bacon’s only considerable fiction a highly self-reflexive text, comparable in the use

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


of formal complexities (if not in scope) to Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote (1605, 1615), a much longer fiction whose Part One Bacon could have known as early as 1608. 12

In the New Atlantis, we find two patterns of conversion, one informing the external history of the kingdom of Bensalem, and the other inform-ing the external narrator’s perception of the new world on which he has accidentally landed. Taking as my cue the reading strategies laid out by Williams, which anticipate some of Pierre Bourdieu’s own insights into the functioning of utopian and prophetic discourse, I will argue that the New Atlantis ’ underlying pattern of religious conversion can be used and interpreted in at least two conflicting ways. While this pattern could in principle seem foreign to a discourse on science that seeks to vindi-cate experimental research and instrumental reason (e.g., Bacon’s own Masculine Birth and the Refutation ), in the New Atlantis it works as a structural analogue of the ritual act of institution by which a pagan ruler, King Solamona, created an order of secular reason that closely resembles the structure of a traditional monastic institution. Once the narrator inter-nalizes this analogy, he is ready to listen to the history of Bensalem’s collective conversion to Christianity and to undergo himself a conversion to Bensalemite Christian science. Conversion in the New Atlantis thus appears as an enabling strategy to endow with rhetorical continuity and political legitimacy an otherwise unrepresentable process—the autono-mous functioning of a discourse of science and its institutions—as yet lacking a place and a poetics in Jacobean England. Suffice it to say, for now, that Bacon resorts to religious epistemologies throughout his entire writing career, notably in the paratexts of his main scientific treatises written between 1603 and 1620.

According to Michel de Certeau, the discourse of science has been articulated historically, at least since the early Renaissance, through a series of gestures aimed to repress or erase the text of religion, which would then operate as the “other” of science (214–21). However, this assessment betrays a twentieth-century bias, one which disregards the fact that God could be studied in the Scripture and in the Book of Nature, and that a host of notoriously pagan authors (Aristotle, Galen, Ptolemy, and even the mythographer Ovid) had achieved canonical status after their forced Christianization since the later Middle Ages. At the same time, the flagrant contradictions that regularly arose between Christian doc-trine and empirical observation (e.g., the Ptolemaic cosmogony vis-à-vis Copernicus’s heliocentric theories) were often construed as mere para-doxes (a rhetorical trope) rather than heresies (a subversion of religious dogma). 13 As the seventeenth century went on, science progressively became an autonomous realm of discourse, mindful of not interfering with revealed truth.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


Bacon was deeply troubled by these conflicts in interpretation, to which he devoted the first chapter of his earliest English-language treatise: Valerius Terminus of the Interpretation of Nature . Here, the reconcili-ation of the two epistemologies—science and religion—was predicated on the assumption that Adam’s lapse, as presented in Genesis, should be interpreted literally, as an attempt by humankind to attain absolute, unme-diated moral knowledge—an illicit pursuit, Bacon hastened to add. But this taboo, he went on, was not incompatible with the legitimate attempt to attain absolute, unmediated knowledge of Nature as a physical entity. The passage in question ends with a frequently quoted aphorism in support of utilitarian science: “That all knowledge is to be limited by religion, and to be referred to use and action” ( Works 6.28). 14 This interdiction becomes more explicit in The Advancement of Learning , where the author explains that in the investigation of Nature church doctors concern themselves only with the knowledge of “first causes” while natural scientists need not do that, since a knowledge of “second causes” is sufficient to achieve complete control over Nature: “For certain it is that God worketh noth-ing in nature but by second causes” ( Works 6.96). Only five years later, in Of the Wisdom of the Ancients ( De sapientia veterum [1609]), he will read several ancient Greek fables (especially those involving Prometheus, Orpheus, and Proteus) as a series of failed attempts at articulating an inductive method. In sum, Bacon often transforms the conventional mean-ing of Scripture into an allegory of science, thus turning the tradition of allegorical interpretation on its head. This is why a detailed narratological reading of the New Atlantis should shed light on the transfers of mean-ing that take place between the legitimating techniques used in narratives of scientific and geographical discovery and those used in narratives of religious conversion.

Religious intertexts abound especially in the paratexts and external diegetic levels of Bacon’s prose works, including his one utopian fic-tion. In other words, as he frames his accounts of scientific exploration, he also frames his readers (albeit unwittingly) in such a way that they must project themselves onto a speaker who is undergoing a divinely ordained spiritual and intellectual crisis. To be sure, we find similar narrative strategies in numerous early modern Puritan autobiographies, including John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666). Although Bacon’s main interest, in the New Atlantis , is in rehearsing the historical and epistemic breaks that will authorize the rise of experimental science, the focus of the narrative will often still be on the emotional life of various characters. For example, the protagonist’s conversion to a hybrid composite of experimental science and Biblical exegesis allows for the reader’s internalization of cataclysmic history as a spiritual journey, as an autobiography of sorts. Yet, I must quickly add, Bacon is not trying

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


to convince anyone to be a Christian. The ultimately higher valorization of religion in seventeenth-century England makes him search for ways in which the threat to religious orthodoxies posed by experimentalism can be sublimated into an extension of religious zeal. In his role as principal narrator, the European mariner administers the exchanges and negotiations between competing epistemologies. Accordingly, I will proceed with a discussion of the New Atlantis ’ external frame, specifically with the all-important first and last paragraphs of this work.

2. THE EXTERNAL PATTERN OF CONVERSION

The New Atlantis comprises two plotlines: an anonymous European mariner’s first-person account of how he arrived on the utopian island of Bensalem and was subsequently converted to an empirically based utilitarian ideology; and the Governor of the Strangers’ House’s historical account of the institutional changes undergone by Bensalem since ancient times. 15 Through a series of collective acts of investiture and conversion, Bensalem evolved from a pagan martial empire to a meritocratic isola-tionist nation of experimental philosophers and mechanical workers. This nation would soon embrace Christianity. At the moment of the mariner’s arrival, around the year 1600, Bensalem (which in Hebrew means “Son of Peace”) appears ready to share charitably both its history and its science with the European powers. In Bensalem, there is no apparent contradic-tion between a belated religious epistemology sustained by blind faith and a precocious scientific one sustained by empirical works. Bacon’s argu-ment for the compatibility of science with religion is enacted narratively in the microhistory of how Bensalem’s enlightened despot, Solamona, established by royal decree a college for empirical research, Salomon’s House, to whose members he delegated his executive political power. Although a monarch and a royal court still exist on the island, they do not come into contact with the European visitors.

Bensalem makes itself deserving of the miracle that initiates its conver-sion to Christianity by following in its own pagan manner the utilitarian and charitable ends outlined in the Old Testament by the proto-materialist Solomon. If we were to gloss this narrative in the spirit of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire , we could say that the history of Bensalem conceals a characteristic longue durée of the early modern period: the conflict between the “revolutionary discovery of the plane of immanence” (experimental science/secular humanism) and the “reaction against these immanent forces” (inquisitorial censorship), which in the Enlightenment would be resolved through the relativization of the “absolute knowledge”derived from individual experience (70). In the Enlightenment, the

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


sovereign State power and the institutions overseen by it (the school, the family, the police, and so on) enforce a number of reflective “mediations” that subordinate the multifarious individual experiences to the “preconstitutedorder” of the multitude (Hardt and Negri 78–79).

The mediations between the formerly sovereign subject and its envi-ronment can take different forms. Perhaps the quintessential mediating instrument in Bacon’s works is his scientific method. Let us examine briefly the functioning in the New Atlantis of the historiographic opera-tion—“experientia literata”—embedded into Bacon’s inductive method—the “Interpretation of Nature”—an initial stage of inquiry which mixes the performing of experiments with the recording of the information derived from those same experiments. 16 In Bensalem, an order of monastic scien-tists—the Fathers of Salomon’s House—lives focused on the research of the natural world and the education of their meritocratic disciples—their metaphorical Sons. The Fathers’ method of research involves the collec-tive participation of at least eighteen scientists who, working interactively in groups of three, perform different yet mutually complementary func-tions. The data gathered by the three scientists who perform any given experiment are passed on to another group of three that arranges them dis-cursively, and on to a third group that compares them with the results of previous experiments. Then new experiments are conducted, thus initiating another cycle of the Interpretation of Nature ( Works 5.409–11). 17 Since each group corrects the work done by the other groups, the Interpretation of Nature has no end; it unfolds in a perpetual process of amplification and self-correction. The structure of this collaborative work ensures that no individual scientist can gain absolute control over the process of gener-ating new knowledge. In a sense, each and every Baconian Father remains alienated from the ultimate sources of knowledge because of his special-ized function in a carefully designed chain of production.

To the extent that the scientists are indeed deprived of an external per-spective on the process of production, one could add that a strict policy ensuring the division of intellectual labor is in place in Bensalem at the moment of the mariner’s arrival on the island. Bacon thus provides an early example of the type of social structure that “reduce[s] history to a process without a subject , simply replacing the creative subject of subjec-tivism with an automaton driven by the dead laws of a history of nature” (Bourdieu, Logic 41). Along similar lines, Hardt and Negri have argued that the early modern subject’s emancipation from religious transcen-dence was quickly averted, beginning with Descartes’s cogito , by the implementation of other mediations such as the “ the reflection of the intel-lect ” and the “ schematism of reason ,” which in the Enlightenment became institutionalized through the school, the party system, and other forms of social ordering. The institutions that enforce the division of intellectual

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


labor in Salomon’s House suggest that the subject of science is every-where and nowhere—it has indeed become what Hardt and Negri call a “transcendental apparatus” (78–79).

We find in the New Atlantis other divisions on the level of discourse. Bacon splits the figure of the ideal new scientist into two complementary subject-positions 18 : the subject of conversion who doubles as first narra-tor (the European mariner) and the subject-of-an-institution (Salomon’s House, as it appears embodied in the character of the high-ranking Father). The two subject-positions merge into one in the final scene of the New Atlantis , which signals the conclusion of the dual pattern of con-version. The mariner’s progress throughout his narrative in fact provides an instance of what A. D. Nock calls “creedal conversion,” namely, “the orientation of the soul of an individual, his deliberate turning from indif-ference to or from an earlier form of piety to another, a turning which implies a consciousness that a great change is involved, that the old was wrong and the new is right” (7). 19 Let us add for the moment that while the mariner’s conversion from scholasticism (the dominant philosophy in sixteenth-century universities) to a Christianized version of empiricism takes the form of “a quiet, cold intellectual modification of ideas,” that of the Bensalemite people from paganism to Christianity takes the form of “an explosive evangelical sensation” (Questier 58).

Early modern Protestant conversion could also be of two kinds depending on whether the convert was already a Christian who had lapsed into sinfulness or else a non-Protestant. By means of numer-ous Old Testament references, the narrative lays great emphasis on the physical and spiritual exhaustion of the European mariners, as does another contemporary work that also takes the figure of Solomon as its occasion for writing: John Dove’s The Conversion of Salomon ( 1613 ). Dove, who was a Doctor of Divinity and dedicated his work to Thomas Lord Ellesmere, the officer who preceded Bacon in the Chancellorship of England, offers in his book a running commentary on the Songs of Solomon. The main text of The Conversion of Salomon is introduced by a shorter piece that underlines the Hebrew king’s longstanding condition as one of the faithful: unlike the apostate Julian, he never questioned the power of the Lord (i.e., he did not sin against the Holy Ghost), but simply “forsooke his religion,” succumbing to “the pride and vanity of life, the lusts of the flesh, and concupiscence of the eye” (3). In short, according to Dove, Solomon “was converted long before he wrote his Songs.” Conversion is for him

of two sorts in the Booke of God; Either it signifieth regeneration when a man is effectually called and converted to the faith, as where it is writ-ten, that Paul and Barnabas were sent by the Church, to pass through

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


Phoenicia and Samaria, declaring the conversion of the Gentils, that is, how the Gentils they were made Christians; Or else it signifieth the repentance of them which have fallen away from the truth of Religion and Heresie, or Idolatrie, or from virtue to sinne, and afterward turn back againe into God….And such was Salomon his conversion, who is the subject of this discourse. (3)

So in the case of Solomon, as in that of the European mariner, conver-sion is a form of regeneration of the faithful who have strayed from their God-appointed path, either through personal weakness (Solomon) or through ignorance (the European mariner). 20 In the remainder of this sec-tion, I will explore the European narrator’s turning away from what is “wrong” (European science) and his ensuing embrace of what is “right” (Bensalemite science). This movement is conveyed in a thoroughly Christian idiom. Accordingly, the New Atlantis begins with a prayer and ends with an ordination, but neither speech act functions as a confirmation of a certain status quo; rather, they both announce that something must and will be changed. Although the narrator is himself a university-edu-cated seaman, and so seems to share in the scientific culture of his time, his evolution throughout the narrative highlights his initial abject help-lessness over against the near-omnipotence of an experimental science filtered through near-omnipotence primitive Christianity.

I now turn my attention to the prayer and how it marks the beginning of the pattern of conversion in the New Atlantis . The narrative begins in medias res , with a complex syntactic order based on the use of analep-sis and the alternation of the definite and the continuous forms of the past: “We sailed from Peru, (where we had continued by the space of one whole year,) for China and Japan, by the South Sea; taking with us victuals for twelve months; and had good winds from the east, though soft and weak, for five months’ space and more” ( Works 5.359). The second sentence contains a brief synopsis of the crew’s efforts to overcome the lack of favorable winds and its tenuous “purpose to turn back,” which is immediately abandoned as soon as the sailing conditions change once again ( Works 5.359). This hesitant navigational course is analogous to the crew’s hesitant dealings with natural phenomena, since its members appear unable to predict, much less control, the shifting winds and storms. We thus have here a further indication of the crisis of agency induced by the discontinuity between the knowledge that the Europeans may claim to master and the actual control that they have over their destiny and their environment. 21

The European crew is stereotypically cast in the role of an agonistic subject going through the Exodus-like crossing of a wilderness. This is made explicit in the third and fourth sentences:

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


So that finding ourselves in the midst of the greatest wilderness of waters in the world, without victual, we gave ourselves for lost men, and prepared for death. Yet we did lift up our hearts and voices to God above, who showeth his wonders in the deep; beseeching him of his mercy, that as in the beginning he discovered the face of the deep, and brought forth dry land, so he would now discover land to us, that we might not perish. ( Works 5.359–60)

In this initial paragraph, Scriptural references already begin to surface. The italicized relative clause, “ who showeth his wonders in the deep ,” comes from Psalms 107:4, and the phrase that follows it is an adaptation from Genesis (also known as “The First Book of Moses”): “And God said, ‘Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear’” (Gen. 1:9). Moses reappears shortly afterwards, when the Bensalemites identify themselves as Christians by sending aboard the European ship a delegation that hands to the crew a scroll with a cautious offer of hospitality. The narrator explains that “this scroll was signed with a stamp of cherubins’ [sic] wings, not spread but hanging downwards, and by them a cross” ( Works 5.361). The reference is to Exodus and to 1 Kings, where Moses is instructed to build both an ark and a temple, each bearing the emblem of the cherubim spreading their wings in a foretelling gesture of mercy (Exod. 25:20, 37:9; 1 Kgs. 6:27). Bensalem’s cherubim stand by the cross with their wings folded, as if to signify that the Old Testament prophecy of arrival at an earthly paradise has finally occurred on the island.

The intertextual appearance of Exodus, Genesis, and 1 Kings suggests both an impending experience of conversion (of the Mosaic type) and the passage from prophetic aperture (the waters of creation) to institu-tional closure (the building of the temple). The Mosaic pattern of conver-sion, as was frequently used by early modern authors, from Christopher Columbus to William Bradford, to represent psychological, epistemic, or political changes in a recognizable and acceptable language, convention-ally involves the crossing of either a wasteland or a wilderness. 22 For the Europeans, this pattern achieves closure when they arrive in Bensalem, the site of Salomon’s House, since it is only there that Solomon’s engage-ments with natural philosophy have been consecrated in the stone walls of a research institute. In other words, in Bensalem the Old Testament promise of a golden age of material comfort has been realized.

The Europeans’ awareness of their own limited capabilities sets the stage for their extended learning experience in Bensalem. After their initial failure to deal with the Bensalemites (both the “servant” and the Governor in separate instances refuse to accept the gift of the pistolets [ Works 5.361–62, 363–64]), the mariners succeed in improvising a feasible

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


course of action. As Howard White remarks, “the chief protagonist, the island of Bensalem, is hardly affected by what the travelers do, but the travelers, in the course of the narrative, undergo great changes” (140). Bacon devotes a long paragraph to recapitulating the process of initiation successfully completed by all of the seamen. The narrator tells us that what the crew experienced was “enough to make us forget all that was dear to us in our own countries: and continually we met with many things right worthy of observation and relation; as indeed, if there be a mirror in the world worthy to hold men’s eyes, it is that country” ( Works 5.385). The emphasis throughout this passage and the preceding lines falls on the repetition and expansion of the subjects’ experiences of “observ[ing]” and “relat[ing].” It follows the mariners’ centrifugal movement of “going abroad” to the “places adjacent” (where they “continually” encounter extraordinary people and things) and ends with their assessment of those same experiences ( Works 5.385).

Although all of the crew members seem to have been exposed to this improvising and initiating process, only the college-educated narrator undergoes the ego-shattering experience of conversion. This psychoso-cial event occurs in the final stages of his own conversion narrative, when one of Bensalem’s Fathers of Science addresses him as “son” with these words: “I will impart unto thee, for the love of God and men, a relation of the true state of Salomon’s House” ( Works 5.398). The “relation” includes the “employments” of the Fathers as well as the “rites” they perform. The last paragraph of the New Atlantis features the Father performing one such rite, the investiture of the mariner as Merchant of Light (see below), an employment consisting in going abroad to collect foreign books and experiments:

And when he had said this, he stood up; and I, as I had been taught, kneeled down; and he laid his right hand upon my head, and said; “God bless thee, my son, and God bless this relation which I have made. I give thee leave to publish it for the good of other nations; for we here are in God’s bosom, a land unknown.” And so he left me; having assigned a value of about two thousand ducats, for a bounty to me and my fellows. For they give great largesses where they come upon all occasions.

[THE REST WAS NOT PERFECTED] ( Works 5.413)

In this concluding paragraph, which in the manner of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596) and of numerous picaresque novels (them-selves conversion narratives of a different kind) provides no true conclu-sion, the mariner becomes the recipient of three mercies that the Father of Salomon’s House confers upon him: the “relation” of the places, persons,

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


and experiments that Salomon’s House encloses within its walls; per-mission to “publish [the relation] for the good of other nations”; and a monetary reward for his cooperation in publicizing Bensalemite science among a European audience. The reward is consistent with the mariner’s own self-transformation into a member of Salomon’s House. This act of investiture takes the form of a ritual conversion in which the Father ordains the mariner (who kneels down before him in the position of obe-dient son) as Merchant of Light. Yet the mariner’s conversion (in Nock’s aforementioned sense of a “cold, intellectual modification of ideas”) is to the empirically based type of science practiced in Bensalem. His investi-ture by the Father indicates that, for Bacon, the end result of conversion is not just the fashioning of a spiritual figure, but also of a utilitarian technocrat. 23 In this latter capacity, the mariner is generously rewarded, an event that echoes Bacon’s plea in The Advancement of Learning for professionalizing both the administrative and the intellectual aspects of research ( Works 6.173–74).

3. THE INTERNAL PATTERN OF CONVERSION AND THE PATTERN OF REPRESSION IN RENFUSA

The New Atlantis features a seventeenth-century non-European society and culture whose history has not intersected with that of the West since antiquity. The people of Bensalem have lived outside Western conscious-ness for almost two thousand years: although they have kept up with the main historical events and developments taking place in Europe, they have remained detached observers of the European world. That being so, the Bensalemites have looked at Europe’s history as one of several alter-native paths that they could have followed had they not been converted first to experimental science, and later to Christianity. In the course of the New Atlantis , Bensalem makes its secret history and institutions known to Europe by allowing a stranded European mariner to listen to several accounts of Bensalem’s social, political, and scientific development, and entrusting him to write about this discovery for a European audience. As a historicist narrative, the New Atlantis argues for the future convergence of the worlds of Western religion and non-Western science, of Europe and Bensalem, and of tradition and innovation.

Bacon resorts to an external first-person narrator—the stranded European mariner—in his attempt to resolve rhetorically the perceived opposition of religion and science into self-identity, and the preliminary dispersal of meaning caused by the use of multiple narrators into a unifying perspective. This is the reason why the mariner self-consciously represents himself in the act of writing an account of his journey, and within it, an account also

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


of the history of Bensalem as he learns it from different sources. What makes this synthetic operation look credible is the careful ordering of events in a linear sequence with a clear purpose—Europe’s eventual adop-tion of Bensalemite science—and its continual retelling through a network of narrators who do not allow the reader immediate access to the practical, day-to-day aspects of these encounters between cultures. 24 In other words, the external first-person narrator of the New Atlantis provides an illus-tration of what political anthropologists call the “sovereign viewpoint,” an outside perspective by means of which the contradictions and fric-tions inherent in any social environment are circumvented on the level of representation by substituting “the observer’s relation to practice for the practical relation to practice” (Bourdieu, Logic 27, 34). 25

The New Atlantis is a highly self-reflexive text: through a complex array of narrative devices, it draws attention to the way in which it should be read and interpreted, to the means of writing and symbolic representation,and above all, to the role of the intellectuals in charge of administering this economy of signs, rituals, and texts. 26 Bacon’s main concern, in the New Atlantis and elsewhere, is with finding the adequate channels of commu-nication for his ideas on science and the State. In his best-known English treatise, The Advancement of Learning , he tried to persuade his apostro-phized addressee, King James I, that among the most urgent “works or acts of merit towards learning” was the “designation” of what he called “the persons of the learned” or scholars employed by the State who work out of “places of learning” conducting experimental research and writing “books of learning” ( Works 6.173–74). These reformed “places of learn-ing” would produce and manage a type of scientific knowledge which is understood only by a small number of society’s members—the so-called experts and technocrats. As much recent work in political sociology has shown, in technologically advanced societies with minimally participa-tory regimes, these experts keep their control over the processes of deci-sion and policy making for as long as they also succeed in increasing the comfort levels in the lives of the non-experts. 27 The experts can in time achieve the prestige of a “priestly order,” becoming progressively less accountable to the laypersons as their scientific knowledge becomes more complex and their technological productions more relevant to the peace-ful growth of the community (Ross 180–81). The practice of Baconian science would thus become, in Charles Whitney’s apt phrase, “a force for social stability rather than change” (260).

How did Bensalem arrive at this stage of maximal spiritual and material happiness? In ancient times, the enlightened King Solamona (whose name links him to Solomon, the Old Testament prophet-scientist-king) became weary of continually fighting wars against the neighboring nations. To ensure the peaceful condition and material progress of his realm, he promulgated

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


an isolationist policy and delegated his power to a class of experimental scientists, Bensalem’s Fathers of Science, who carried on their labors out of a self-governed research institution called Salomon’s House. In about the year 53 A.D., as Bensalem was enjoying a sort of scientific Golden Age, a miracle took place in the smaller city of Renfusa which caused Bensalem’s collective conversion to Christianity. 28 The miracle and ensuing conversion marked the conciliation of two epistemologies, experimental science and revealed religion, which for the first time in Bensalem’s history are said to emanate from the same authority. As the mariner gives this information to the reader, one of Bensalem’s highest-ranking Fathers of Science asked him to write down an account of his journey, inserting in it the Governor’s own account of Bensalem’s history. As I pointed out above, this request takes place during a rite of investiture, with the mariner kneeling down before the Father, who pronounces the customary ritual words ( Works 5.413). The mariner is here being transformed into an adopted “son” of the Fathers of Salomon’s House. Part of the information contained in the Father’s “rela-tion” concerns the offices implemented in their places of learning to divide their scientific projects into manual and intellectual tasks.

The mariner is invested with an office reminiscent of the Merchant of Light: he who travels incognito to far-away nations in search of unknown scientific books and inventions so that Bensalem’s Fathers can learn from them ( Works 5.409–10). Yet, the appointment of the mariner as Merchant of Light entails an important inversion in the nature of this office. Instead of bringing European scientific discoveries back to Bensalem, he will preach Bensalemite science in Europe. The scene of the mariner’s ordina-tion resembles the religious consecration of an aspiring priest by a bishop who invokes the authority and the love of God as the justification for this new admission to the ministry. The neophyte’s initiation into experimen-tal science is here being conflated with his re-initiation into a familiar religious worship. Since the mariner was already a Christian, what he undergoes is also a “reconversion” in the sense Charles Lloyd Cohen assigns to this term, as a Solomonic “habit” or “way of revitalizing” oneself and “revivif[ying] waning strength,” thus renewing one’s almost forgotten covenants (254), which in the mariner’s case seem to involve a commitment to charity and the improvement of the material conditions of human existence. 29 This analogy reinforces the idea that the purpose of the mariner’s narrative is to convince the European nations of the nobility and inevitability of making secular, utilitarian learning compatible with the existing religious epistemology. The New Atlantis thus ends with the following proposition: if the nation of Bensalem ensured its prosperity by having science embrace Christianity, why should Christian Europe in turn not embrace science? In either case, a discourse of transcendence—a transcendental apparatus—will remain in place.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


The related acts of listening to the Father’s “relation,” writing down a version of it, and getting other Europeans to read the resulting book are seen as the beginning of a cure or therapy for a European community divided by inner strife and unable to correlate the most recent geographi-cal discoveries with the prospect of accelerated scientific progress. 30 A related reference to the need for a new method which, like a navigational technique, can help the pilot-scientist find a direction across remote seas appears in Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica ( 1646 ). In the letter “To the Reader,” Browne states that, being surrounded by so many erroneous and undiscovered philosophical paths (all interconnected in a “Labyrinth”), he is “oft-times faine to wander in the America and untra-velled parts of Truth.” Furthermore, in Bacon as in Browne, the new philosopher appears as a physician of the mind eager to cure the student-patient of his long separation from truth in Nature. 31

To use a psychoanalytic analogy, it could be argued that Bensalem may help Europe overcome some of its present traumas (religious and dynastic wars, massive poverty, and the plague) by letting the Europeans experience vicariously, through the stranded mariner’s account of his journey, the beneficial effects of a primitive Christianity controlled by science. If the Europeans were to integrate Christianity and experimental science into a single method of interpreting and manipulating the natu-ral world, they would eventually overcome their sense of self-division. Nevertheless, this would also entail the repression of the unpredictable instinctual and irrational impulses characteristic of emergent types ofknowledge and belief. In the New Atlantis , the secrecy and growing specialization of experimental knowledge allows for the coexistence of science and religion in the same limited space.

The self-governed statute of Salomon’s House allows its members to act alternately as experimental scientists (when they work inside the walls of Salomon’s House) and as spiritual gurus (when they venture outside its walls to greet and counsel the common people). The harmonious integra-tion of the two endeavors of science and religion is narratively enacted by the intertextual appearance of such Old Testament books as Genesis, Exodus, and Proverbs. In fact, both the narrative of the European mariner and that of the Governor of Bensalem’s House of Strangers incorporate references to the deeds of Moses, Solomon, David, and Daniel. For Bacon, all four Old Testament seers were prophets of philosophical materialism. They were reputedly as interested in the material comfort of their people as they were in their spiritual salvation. In the New Atlantis , they authorize and legitimate the encounters between different cultures that take place in both the external and the internal narratives—the encounters, that is, between religion and science, between Western metaphysics and non-Western utilitarianism, and between militaristic and pacifistic regimes.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


Although the Fathers of Salomon’s House are capable of predicting and manipulating certain changes in the natural and historical environ-ment surrounding them, it is not without some reservations that we can grant them the condition of prophets . A “prophet” is someone who inter-prets for his people the signs of “otherness,” who goes beyond conven-tional wisdom by renouncing his identity and letting himself be shaken and wounded by the word of God (Tracy 265–68). Prophecies are future-oriented speech acts, as is utopian discourse. Both prophecies and uto-pias feature a witness or seer, someone who can give a complete picture of reality which has not yet come into existence (Bourdieu, Language 128). What is interesting about the New Atlantis is that the prophet who preaches for the first time the Christian faith among a pagan people is a skilled experimental scientist, someone who has been trained both to be skeptical about miracles and to fabricate simulacra of supernatural events—in short, to fake miracles.

The two experiences of conversion narrated in the New Atlantis are carefully plotted by character-narrators who are also well trained in the techniques of interpretation. The European mariner, for one, is said to have known the “collegiate” life of the Old World and accordingly is “chosen by [his] fellows” to have “private conference” with one of the seniors of Salomon’s House who wishes to meet them ( Works 5.366, 397). The Father “imparts” to the mariner a relation of the activities and experiments conducted within the walls of Salomon’s House, ending his exposition with the revelation that the members of this elite group periodi-cally travel across the realm on official “circuits.” In the course of these “visits of divers principal cities of the kingdom,” which bear a striking resemblance to the royal tours that the Elizabethans called “progresses,” the fatherly scientists dispense some of their secret knowledge to the non-scientists in a majestic and ceremonial manner: “‘as it cometh to pass, we do publish such new profitable inventions as we think good. And we do also declare natural divinations of diseases, plagues, swarms of hurt-ful creatures, scarcity, tempests … and divers other things; and we give counsel thereupon what the people shall do for the prevention and remedy of them’” ( Works 5.412–13). Significantly, both the Fathers’ circuits and the European mariner’s account of his conversion experience seem to privilege the epistemological claims of ritual displays to the detriment of cognitive methods based on experimentation. The mariner, in fact, pres-ents a detailed account of his quick embracing of Bensalem’s philosophy in such a way as to invite the reader to reproduce and internalize uncriti-cally this same experience. The two conversions represented in the New Atlantis —Bensalem’s adoption of Christianity and Europe’s adoption of experimental science—are thus analogically intertwined. Since I have already dealt with the pattern of the mariner’s conversion to experimental

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


science, in what remains of the present essay I will focus on the miracle scene leading to Bensalem’s collective “conversion to the [Christian] faith” ( Works 5.370).

This miracle occurs around the year 53 A.D. (“about twenty years after the ascension of our Saviour” [ Works 5.370]) in the city of Renfusa, where a supernatural apparition is called a “sign” and a “wonder.” 32 The people of Bensalem saw “a great pillar of light; not sharp, but in form of a col-umn, or cylinder, rising from the sea a great way up towards heaven: and on the top of it was seen a large cross of light, more bright and resplen-dent than the body of the pillar” ( Works 5.371). The light is described as “so strange a spectacle” and a “marvellous sight,” one which prompts the people of the city “to wonder” from afar, “all as in a theatre, beholding this light as an heavenly sign” ( Works 5.371). The mention of the theater is also significant in that Bacon, like Plato, denigrated all forms of enter-tainment that relied upon illusion to keep the attention of the spectators. During the miracle, all of the citizens of Renfusa are left in the position of witnesses or spectators, and only “one of the wise men” of Salomon’s House, “having a while attentively and devoutly viewed and contemplated this pillar and cross, fell down upon his face” ( Works 5.371). This Father (who, like the European mariner, remains anonymous, thus emphasizing the collective identity of his nation and class) offers an interpretation of what just happened in the form of a prayer. The joint appearance of the pillar of light and the prayer may at first sight seem somewhat paradoxi-cal. The imagery of light is seldom used by Bacon to illustrate a religious experience; rather, it almost always appears as the means to propagate secular reason—the values of the Enlightenment. In his earliest surviving work, the posthumously published The Masculine Birth of Time , Bacon complains of how difficult it is for him to counter one by one the numer-ous errors that he finds in the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle:

Now, you would like for me to confute them individually. But verily that would be to sin on the grand scale against the golden future of the human race, to sacrifice its promise of dominion by turning aside to attack transitory shadows. The need, my sons, is to set up in the midst one bright and radiant light of truth, shedding its beams in all directions and dispelling all errors in a moment. [Unum (fili) in medio ponen-dum est veritatis lumen clarum et radiosum, quod omnia collustret, et errores universos momento dispellat] (Farrington 70; Works 7.29)

To challenge and refute the scores of individual errors committed in the history of Western science is to light up pale candles, whereas to do a practical demonstration is indeed to plant a pillar of light in the middle of the ocean. In this passage, the speaker calls himself a “father,” and

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


addresses his audience as “my sons” (Lat. fili ), implying therefore that a relationship of filial trust has been established between teacher and disciple, and between author and reader. The language used throughout the Masculine Birth is heavily indebted to religious discourse: divine grace appears here in the form of light; errors are equated with sins; the scientific task is figured as an as yet unfulfilled promise of salvation and dominion; and the address takes the shape of a lesson imparted by a father to his son. Similarly, the prayer that one of the Fathers improvises in Renfusa also attests to the performative symbolic power of religion; what is being named for the first time is also being created in a recognizable form by the speaker:

“ ‘Lord God of heaven and earth, thou hast vouchsafed of thy grace to those of our order, to know thy works of creation, and true secrets of them; and to discern (as far as appertaineth to the generations of men) between divine miracles, works of nature, works of art, and impostures and illusions of all sorts. I do here acknowledge and testify before this people, that the thing we now see before our eyes is thy Finger and a true Miracle; and forasmuch as we learn in our books that thou never work-est miracles but to a divine and excellent end, (for the laws of nature are thine own laws, and thou exceedest them not but upon great cause,) we most humbly beseech thee to prosper this great sign, and to give us the interpretation and the use of it in mercy; which thou dost in some part secretly promise by sending it unto us.’ ” ( Works 5.371–72) 33

According to seventeenth-century Protestant doctrine, this quotation features a textbook example of a miraculous occurrence, since it meets the three “evidentiary requirements” of authentication (Daston 113–14). These requirements are public and visible demonstration; inspection for fraud by a group of experts (the members of Salomon’s House); and inter-pretation in light of doctrine delivered on the spot (the Father who asks for further signs immediately receives copies of the Old and New Testaments as well as of the Book of Apocalypse). In other words, a phenomenon which exceeds the scope of experimental science has nevertheless been empirically verified, but in this process of authentication the act of read-ing plays a role as important as the act of sighting. The concatenated acts of sighting and reading, inserted within the historical narrative of which the mariner is the audience, draw attention to Bacon’s underlying meta-phor of “knowledge-as-writing,” as Andrew Barnaby and Lisa Schnell have recently shown (15–22). This historicizing of experience constitutes a fundamental step both in the Baconian Interpretation of Nature (spe-cifically in the analytical operation embedded into that method and called experientia literata ) and in Protestant conversion.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


4. CONCLUSION: NARRATIVE DISTANCE AS NARRATIVE CONCEALMENT

What is then the status of the Father who interprets the miracle in the Renfusa episode? Is this hybrid of a prophet and a physicist arguing for the superiority of revelation over demonstration or the other way around? Let me go back for a moment to the role of intellectuals employed by the State and the way their identity is altered through the evidentiary rituals they perform for the authentication of miracles. Perhaps the most impor-tant question to be asked about their practice is whether experimental scientists can claim any expertise in the interpretation of religious matters, of events that do not stand the test of experience. When the Father says, “Lord … thou hast vouchsafed … to those of our order to know [the] true secrets of thy works,” he is certainly arrogating to himself an authority which he does not yet possess. He is also echoing one of Solomon’s pro-nouncements on secrets and discoveries, as recorded by Bacon in several of his early works: “Nay, the same Salomon the king affirmeth directly that the glory of God is to conceal a thing, but the glory of the king is to find it out, as if according to the innocent play of children the divine Majesty took delight to hide his works, to the end of have them found out; 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 …” ( Valerius Terminus [ Works 6.31]). 34 In both passages, the king (Solomon/Solamona) does not make the discoveries himself, but rather creates the conditions for the “wits” who come after him to explore alter-nately Nature and Scripture. This is precisely what Bacon expected from the English Solomon, King James VI and I.

While some literalistic commentators have taken the conversion scene at face value, an alternative, more disturbing reading would see the fatherly scientists as appropriating for their own purposes the apparent otherness of a religion which had not yet been revealed to them, doing it in the interest of science and the class of scientists. 35 This second reading is supported by several bits of information contained elsewhere in the New Atlantis . For example, the Fathers are said to have developed the capacity to produce all kinds of sounds in what they call “sound-houses” ( Works 5.407). Given these powers, it would therefore be plausible that they had also created visual effects such as the pillar of light. In fact, the scientist who describes the experiments being conducted in the laboratories of Salomon’s House goes out of his way to point out how easy it is for his colleagues to fake a miracle in their “houses of deceits of the senses; where [they] represent … false apparitions, impostures, and illusions”: “‘And surely you will easily believe that we that have so many things truly natural which induce admiration, could in a world of particulars

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


deceive the senses, if we would disguise those things and labour to make them seem more miraculous’” ( Works 5.409).

In an earlier work, The Refutation of Philosophies , Bacon wrote:

The new philosophy cannot be gathered in passing. It does not flatter the mind by fitting in with its preconceptions. It does not sink to the capacity of the vulgar except in so far as it benefits them by its works. Therefore keep your old philosophy. Use it when convenient. Keep one to deal with nature and the other to deal with the populace. Every man of superior understanding in contact with inferiors wears a mask [ personatus est ]. (Farrington 108; Works 7.63)

To be sure, one of the main reasons for the scientists to develop a religious discourse is to establish a common idiom with which they can more easily communicate with the non-scientists while attributing the source of their political power to the dictates of an unreachable higher being. The offices of scientist and priest should then be seen as the two masks alternately worn by a single interpreter of complex natural or supernatural phenom-ena. The Father who comes up with just the right prayer when he is unex-pectedly confronted with a supernatural force is an obvious incarnation of the Janus-faced scientist on which Bacon would like to confer the preroga-tives of both interpretation and executive power. The resemblance between the prayer said in Renfusa and another one which Bacon uses in his earlier Preface to the Great Instauration that introduces The New Organon under-scores the importance that he attributed to the scientists’ ability to disclaim publicly (whenever they think it fit) their otherwise complete control over natural phenomena and historical events, and therefore to excuse as well their own fallibility and the arbitrariness of their methods.

The difference between the aforementioned Preface and the New Atlantis lies in the Preface’s argumentative emphasis on the separation of science and religion: “things human” must be kept apart from “things divine” ( Works 8.35). In both invocations of a divine power, the speaker who pronounces the prayer claims to be renouncing the demands of his ego, speaking only as the delegate of God. However, in so doing, he assumes the authority of God, who of course does not speak for Himself —the spokesperson usurps or appropriates the voice and the person of God. Pierre Bourdieu has coined the felicitous phrases “oracle effect” and “usur-patory ventriloquism” to designate the rhetorical use of the pronoun “I” ( Language 210–13). In the miracle scene, the speaker creates the illusionof an empty marker of discourse through which a “higher,” unquestion-able authority (God, Reason, the King, “We the People,” etc.) claims to be speaking.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


I have examined the prayer in terms of the power dynamics that take place among the characters present on the scene: who speaks and what position this speaker occupies in the social hierarchy of his community; what transfer of power is enacted in the act of prayer and interpretation of the divine signs; and what new distinctions are established between revelation and experimentation, religion and science, and scientists and non-scientists. I want to finish with a few words on the narratological status of the prayer when considered within the larger narrative of the New Atlantis . Bacon devises a complex transmission of the prayer from its fictional delivery at the site of the miracle in the year 53 A.D. to its reception first by the European mariner ca. 1600, and later by any empiri-cal reader beginning in 1627, when the New Atlantis was published. First, note the double quotation marks framing the prayer that begins with the words “‘Lord God of heaven and earth.’” These marks call attention to the removal of the transcribed prayer from the conditions of its original delivery.

The speech act “Lord God of heaven and earth…” is a second-hand, or rather fourth-hand, account or telling of the actual prayer. This act of worship and interpretation took place in 53 A.D. and was subsequently recorded by an unmentioned historian and read ca. 1600 by the Governor, who informs the mariner during the Europeans’ visit. In the present of the discourse, it is the mariner who finally reports the miracle to the reader. Nowhere in the New Atlantis is the European mariner further removed from the presumed original source of his experience of conversion than in this passage. As the original event of the miracle becomes the object of a narrative, it travels across generations and across texts. It also travels across cultures. Each set of quotation marks functions in at least three ways: as a discourse marker pointing to the time and place of the conver-sion; as a way of separating the audience from the unreachable source of authority that gives the text its meaning; and as an indication that each audience can do very little to alter the way in which meaning and author-ity are created. In other words, the function of communication inherent in any narrative act is underwritten by a function of separation. In the New Atlantis all forms of representation and communication, including ritu-als of state and religious worship, are meant to reproduce uncritically a pseudo-truth—a religious revelation—which in the final analysis remains unexamined.

Can the revelation and conversion moments featured in this book be considered as signs of a divinity? On the surface, it would appear that Bacon and the scientists who act as his spokespersons wish that scien-tists and non-scientists may perceive the sovereignty of both experimental science and revealed religion as untranscendable horizons. However, at least from the perspective of my own model of Bourdelian narratology, the

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


episode of the pillar of light works toward suggesting that what we might call an experience of otherness—the unexpected and unsettling encounter between two cultures and two philosophies—can be artificially created and manipulated by human means. The practitioners of an experimentally based epistemology may have acted in this manner to naturalize science: they publicly yet hypocritically renounce their instrumental control of natural forces in favor of an unreachable higher being, God, who could be construed by many as the other of science. It seems beside the point to ask if this reading might be predetermined by the projection of our modern assumptions about science onto a carefully plotted self-reflexive narra-tive that seems to flaunt its own constructedness from beginning to end. Clearly, in Bensalem experimental science became in its earlier stages a secretive endeavor, alternately revealing and effacing itself as the Fathers felt the need to promote other types of knowledge which were more intel-ligible to the uninitiated. That is, in Bacon’s utopian fiction, God at times almost becomes a rhetorical effect by which the scientists of Bensalem seek to increase and perpetuate their dominating position over the non-scientists. Seen in these terms, the religious discourse of the New Atlantis does not differ greatly from the literary manifestations and modes (the-atrical illusion, religious exegesis, and chivalric romance) which Bacon consistently ridicules in his other writings for their incompatibility with modern science. 36

In the New Atlantis , the rites of conversion and investiture, along with the language of prophecy and material comfort appropriated from the Old Testament, endow Bacon’s project of utilitarian reform with a legitimate rhetorical façade. Behind this legitimating rhetoric lies a secular and utili-tarian project, one which posits the test of empirical proof as the higher epistemic authority. Bacon’s utopian fiction ends with the hope that the European narrator, in his newly assumed office of Merchant of Light, will be able to introduce among a European audience this same ideology of reform, which for its own protection appears enveloped in the guise of a narrative—a “pattern” in Williams’s sense—of spiritual conversion. The event of conversion is always accompanied by the practice of conver-sation. In fact, the narrator reports his conversations with, respectively, the Governor of the Strangers’ House, with the paradigm of ethnic toler-ance that is the Jewish character—Joabin—and with the higher-ranking Father. This is so because conversio (the turning away from the wrong path and toward the right one) and conversatio (the willing renunciation of one’s own position of authority) are the two main stages in the process of Christian justification (Questier 58–61).

But while in early modern Romanism conversation referred to the life of prayer and saintly fraternity of those who entered a monastery, in Protestantism it became a duty for all the faithful. At the same time, polite

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


conversation is also the channel used by the gentlemanly researcher (who borrows it from Socratic philosophy through Renaissance humanism) to communicate his findings, thus practicing yet another form of fraternity with his fellow scientists and avoiding polemics with religious authori-ties. 37 The New Atlantis can indeed be read as a series of ongoing conver-sations about science and religion. Presented to the reader as a fragment which “was not perfected” and as a re -conversion, Bacon’s last work has no clear beginning and no conclusion. Also like a conversation, and in keeping with self-reflexive fictions and Bacon’s own experientia literata , it asks of the interlocutors that they prolong the moment of arrival at a final interpretation, just as the college-educated mariner’s return to Europe (unlike Raphael Hythlodaeus’s in Thomas More’s Utopia ) is forever post-poned in the present of the story, or at least withheld from the reader. In this way, neither science nor religion may have the final word in the open-ended process of exegesis that the New Atlantis invites its reader to perform.

NOTES

1. The Calvinist filiation of early modern experimental philosophies, whose emphasis on induction and utilitarianism parallels the doc-trine of libre examen and the mundane dimension of Protestantism, was first advocated by Jones (119–23) and subsequently explored, in much greater detail, by Merton and Hill, among other intellectual historians.

2. The recent book-length study of Bacon that best illustrates the impor-tance of situating his program of reform in the context of his simul-taneous membership in multiple and often contradictory traditions of learning is Solomon’s Objectivity in the Making ( 1998 ).

3. See Reiss 27–54; Williams 41–71. Williams uses the word “patterns” to refer to the contradictions that arise between two modes of know-ing pertaining each to a different area of social experience and to the narrative devices used to render them: “it is with the relationships between patterns, which sometimes reveal unexpected identities and correspondences in hitherto separately considered activities, some-times again reveal discontinuities of an unexpected kind, that general cultural analysis is concerned” (47).

4. James obviously encouraged these flattering comparisons. Not only did he often sign as British Solomon, but he took delight in display-ing his learning (however narrow it was) and assuming the related Solomonic role of British Peacemaker (Kiernan xxxviii–xlii). In a work entitled The Peace-Maker; or Great Brittaines Blessing (1618) and alternately attributed to James, to Thomas Middleton, and to

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


Lancelot Andrewes (a good friend of Bacon), he repeatedly inter-pellates the English nation as Beati pacifici , at the end of numerous paragraphs, to celebrate the new “Spirit of peace” brought about by the forcible pacification of Ireland and the dynastic union of Scotland and England. Inspired by the Old Testament rex pacificus , James himself seems to have expressed the following desideratum: “Let England then, (the seat of our Salomon ) rejoyce in her happy gov-ernment, yea, her government of governments; and she that can set peace with others, let her (at least) enjoy it her selfe, let us love peace, and be at peace in love. We live in Beth-salem the house of Peace, then let us ever sing this song of peace, Beati pacifici .” The funeral sermon preached by Bishop John Williams (Bacon’s successor as Lord Chancellor) upon the king’s death in 1625 was entitled Great Brittains Salomon .

5. According to John Chamberlain’s epistolary report to Sir Dudley Carleton, “and yet for all these speciall favors [i.e., Bacon was created Viscount St. Alban in January of 1621] the King cannot fore-beare sometimes in reading his last booke to say that yt is like the peace of God, that passeth all understanding” (2.339).

6. In The Refutation of Philosophies , which contains an impassioned and adversarial critique of Aristotelian dialectics, Bacon acknowl-edges that Aristotle did engage in the direct observation of Nature, but that this activity was tainted by his own preconceived ideas, which his observations were meant to illustrate, never to correct. Instead of letting their theories emerge from the analysis of data gathered from experience, the Aristotelians have kept experience “captive and bound” (Farrington 129–30; Works 7.90–91).

7. In his early Latin opuscules, Bacon hypostatizes his attacks on exegetical traditions in the person of Aristotle. In The Refutation of Philosophies , the Greek dialectician is called the “Prince of Imposture” [ Princeps Imposturae ] and the “Anti-Christ” [ Antichristus ] because in order to enthrone himself he is said to have destroyed, with his own hands, the works of his Presocratic “Father,” the atomist Democritus (Farrington 113; Works 7.69). In Thoughts and Conclusions , he also writes: “Aristotle, it must be confessed, busied himself, like an Ottoman-Turk, in the slaughter of his brethren, and with success” (Farrington 84; Works 7.117).

8. See Bourdieu, Language 173. Bacon himself meant something differ-ent by “legitimus,” a Latin word which occurs time and again in his works. He uses it primarily in a combined legal and biological sense (in keeping with John Bullokar’s definition of “legitimate” as “law-full, lawfully begotten”), for example when in The Masculine Birth of Time ( Temporis partus masculus ) he writes that the production of

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


utilitarian works is the result of a “chaste and legitimate marriage” [ castum et legitimum connubium ] (Farrington 72; Works 7.31–32). This usage is connected to the well-known Baconian injunction that humankind’s “power and dominion” over Nature is legitimate so long as it is immediately “referred to use and action” rather than “con-templation” ( Valerius Terminus [ Works 6.28–29]). A second usage has to do with Bacon’s desire that his experimental method (itself a “legitima interpretatio naturae”) become an instrument for inducing a “correspondentia ingeniorium et mentium” (Preface for the unwritten De interpretatione naturae [ Works 6.449]) and a “legitimus consen-sus” ( The Refutation of Philosophies [ Works 7.71]), the latter being probably inspired by the post-Reformation ideal of a consensus fide-lium . Farrington translates “verum et legitimum consensum” (in the Latin original the phrase is used in the accusative form) as “genuine agreement” (114).

9. Bacon rephrases and recontextualizes the last part of this quotation in The Advancement of Learning , underlining (as he often does in his rewritings) the religious argument to the detriment of the political ( Works 6.145).

10. Quotations from the Bible are drawn from the 1952 revised text of the King James Version. Farrington further explains that Bacon’s efforts at drawing a new natural philosophy from the teachings of the Old Testament is a direct consequence of his previous rejection of Greek philosophy, specifically of Plato and Aristotle (21–26).

11. For a representative misreading of this statement, see Shapin, Scientific Revolution 129–31. Shapin takes Bacon’s “empire” to mean the sub-jection of several peoples or nations by a single power rather than the emancipation of humankind from physical afflictions and neces-sity, which is what the phrase means in the context of early modern humanitarian science. Whitney offers a presentist reading of the New Atlantis as a “neo-colonial” work in which the information capital of Bensalem, secretly stolen from nations unaware of Bensalem’s own existence, ensures this isolationist kingdom’s scientific advan-tage over Europe. He contends that Bacon “displays a consistently optimistic and peaceful view of colonial possibilities” (262). For his part, Kendrick attempts what he calls a “symptomatic, exploratory” reading of the suppressed commercial and political contexts of the New Atlantis (1031), but cautiously refrains from stating that Bacon’s work propagandizes colonialism. Finally, Knapp, in his authoritative survey of fictions of empire, explains that Bacon’s sparse references to the enterprise of America do not support the view that he was cen-trally concerned with England’s colonial expansion (245–48). The essays “Of Plantations” (which reads more like a detached critique

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


of everything that went awry at Jamestown than a recipe for colonial-ist enterprises), “Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates” (which on p. 183 uses “empire and greatness” to signify the idea of sovereignty ), and “Of Empire” (which also deals with the ideal of a prince’s unencumbered sovereignty or imperium in his own limited realm) provide further evidence of Bacon’s skepticism about impe-rial conquests and policies of transplantation to overseas territories ( Works 12.140–46, 176–88, 194–98). Also worth noting is his lack of interest, in 1619, in supporting Captain John Smith’s projected third expedition to America (Barbour 338–39). The OED lists the Middle English usage of “empire” as “absolute sway, supreme control” and the sixteenth-century denotative meaning as “sovereign state” or “realm.” Bacon’s only colonialist concern, in the modern sense of the political domination of one nation by another through physical coer-cion, focused on Ireland, becoming particularly intense through his involvement with Lord Essex in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign.

12. Bacon may have written The Refutation of Philosophies in aware-ness of Cervantes’s own Prologue to Part 1 of Don Quijote , which he appears to imitate in the “Introductory Narrative.” See Rodríguez García, “Solitude and Procreation” 279, 296 n. 1.

13. I have in mind John Bullokar’s definition of “paradox” as “[a]n opin-ion maintained contrary to the common allowed opinion, as if one affirme that the earth doth not moove round, and the heavens stand still.”

14. For a suggestive brief comment on this chapter in terms of a vin-dication of the ancient, pre-Christian virtue of theoretical curiosi-tas , see Blumenberg 386–87. But in The Advancement of Learning , Bacon also stated that “a natural curiosity and inquisitive spirit” was an instance of “misplacing … the last or furthest end of knowledge.” Instead, he went on to add in a passage already quoted, knowledge of things human and divine should be pursued “for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate” ( Works 6.134).

15. Contrary to Bacon, in the Utopia (1516) Thomas More does not high-light the successive stages through which his imaginary kingdom arrived at its present state, although he mentions its origin by royal conquest. In More’s fiction, the main transitions between disparate cultures and disparate time frames take place in the external narra-tive, as the reader is transported from the European garden scenes in Book I to the imaginary island in Book II. These transitions involve a progressive watering-down of the original encomium of the Utopians. The narrative thus moves from the advance praise of the manuscript in the form of familiar epistles by several hands to the two conversa-tions among friends (in Book I), and on to Raphael Hythlodaeus’s

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


naïve presentation of Utopian institutions (in Book II) and More’s final disavowal (the peroration and conclusion). In my own reading of the Utopia , which of course does not reflect a critical consensus, this two-part disavowal amounts to an ironic recantation of the earlier enthusiasm for the disciplinary world of the Utopians.

16. As Farrington explains, experientia literata or learned experience is “a definite stage in advance beyond the experience implicitly embod-ied in techniques but unrecorded and therefore not available for inde-pendent theoretical development.…It includes (i) the recording of experience and, arising out of that, (ii) the employment of a certain direction and order in experiment. It does not include Bacon’s next step, (iii) the ascent to Axioms or First Principles” attained through the intervention of the rational-empiricist operation of induction that brings the Interpretation of Nature to completion (119). See also Farrington 99; Bacon, Works 7.139.

17. Throughout his writing career, Bacon worked out different theoreti-cal models of the Interpretation of Nature, producing numerous for-mulations, which often contained also a reelaboration of the concept of experientia literata . See in particular the ones set forth in Thoughts and Conclusions (Farrington 98–100; Works 7.138–40), The New Organon ( Works 8.135–39; 1.309–14), De Augmentis Scientiarum ( Works 9.64–83; 2.362–85), and the New Atlantis ( Works 5.409–11). For a devastating critique of some important shortcomings of Bacon’s method that rendered it inadequate to produce a scientific revolu-tion, see Jardine 147–49. On the dissemination of Bacon’s ideas on method among later seventeenth-century philosophers and scientists, who adapted them freely to their own ends (often with utter disre-gard for the overarching Baconian framework for the reformation of science), see Lynch 1–33, 233–43. Bacon favored the words ordo , modus , and the Ciceronian via et ratio , at the expense of methodus , to signify “method” in his Latin works, mainly because he wished to disassociate himself from the traditions of humanist pedagogy and philology.

18. Liu defines the concept of discursive subject-position as the positing of an “ephemeral identity that allows us to narrativize transitional moments in systems of action” (735). For his part, Giddens charac-terizes the subject of day-to-day practice as a “skilled knowledgeable subject, whose activities are geared into the continuities of day-to-day social life, and whose knowledgeability is expressed in practice” rather than in discourse (“Action” 168).

19. For a similar definition, see Cohen 5–6. 20. The locus classicus of Solomon’s excessive love of worldly pleasures

appears in Book III of Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine (97–98).

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


21. Giddens defines “agency” as “a continuous flow of conduct” or “a stream of actual or contemplated causal interventions of corpo-real beings in the ongoing process of events-in-the-world” ( Central Problems 55). Agency involves intentionality, awareness, and plan-ning. As used in this essay, historical agency designates the individ-ual or collective ability to conceive, design, and carry into practice the reform of science.

22. The external pattern of conversion, although laden with Scriptural intertexts, also presents resonant pagan overtones. For example, the Europeans need to undergo a ceremonial cleansing (they are kept away in quarantine because of their “sickness”) and take an oath that they had not shed blood (either lawfully or unlawfully) for forty days, just as in ancient Rome pagans admitted to a Christian temple had to go through a period of “disinfection” ( Works 5.362–63; Nock 216).

23. Sessions is the only previous commentator who has attempted a strong interpretation of the New Atlantis focusing primarily on the external pattern of conversion framed by the opening and concluding paragraphs, but he does not connect this pattern to the internal one (152–54).

24. Fineman has argued that Bacon’s style, at least in the widely circu-lated Essays , challenges teleological narratives (74–76).

25. For a thorough discussion of hierarchizations of power and knowl-edge in Bacon, Foucault, and Bourdieu, which I will not repeat here, see Rodríguez García, “ Scientia Potestas Est .”

26. Boesky draws attention, however timidly, to the status of the New Atlantis as a “prose experiment.” She mentions as the defining fea-tures of this polyphonic narrative its fragmentary nature, the instabil-ity of the represented “positions of subject and object” (who observes whom in Bensalem?), and the situation of endless rewriting that underlies Bensalem’s experimental method and Bacon’s narrative experiment. However, Boesky ultimately fails to produce a far-reaching rhetorical or anthropological interpretation of Bacon’s fiction.

27. For example, Habermas 10, 123 and throughout; Bourdieu, Language 167; Latour 20.

28. The name Renfusa echoes the Latin “re-infusa,” i.e., “the re-infused one” or “the re-vivified one.”

29. On Baconian charity and humanitarianism, see Works 6.97; 8.35–37; White 21; Jones 63–64.

30. This correlation or synchronicity is developed through the figure of Daniel, one of whose prophecies Bacon paraphrases in Valerius Terminus : “ Many shall pass to and fro, and science shall be increased : as if the opening of the world by navigation and commerce and the further discovery of knowledge should meet in one time or age”

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


( Works 6.32; see also Farrington 131–32; Works 7.93). The same paraphrase from Daniel is used in the frontispiece to the Instauratio Magna . The original Old Testament passage is to be found in Dan. 12:4. On the parallel rise of geographical and scientific exploration, see chapter 5 of Grafton, Shelford, and Siraisi (esp. 199–217).

31. Browne begins the first chapter of his work with the following words: “The first and father cause of common Error, is the common infirmity of human nature” (1). For his part, Bacon uses the phrase “human medicine” to designate a set of “receipts and regiments,” including “ custom, exercise, habit, education, example, imitation, emulation, company, friends, praise, reproof, exhortation, fame, laws, books, studies ,” that a “doctor of knowledge” administers to his pupils ( The Advancement of Learning [ Works 6.338, 337]).

32. This passage harks back to yet another Biblical source. The promise of salvation for the people of Israel is recalled in these terms: “It was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attended to us by those who heard him, while God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will” (Heb. 2:3–4).

33. A related performance of a religious discourse, also in the form of a prayer spoken by a scientist, takes place at the end of the “Plan of the Work” for the Great Instauration ( Works 8.53–54).

34. This passage is also inserted in the Preface to the Great Instauration ( Works 8.36). The King James Version reads thus: “It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out. As the heavens for height, and the earth for depth, so the mind of kings is unsearchable” (Prov. 25:2). For an argument for consider-ing the Renaissance discourse on secrecy as a metaphorizing of the abundance of Nature available to both the hunter-king and the hunter-scientist (“Depredator” being one of the offices in Salomon’s House), see Eamon, esp. 269–300. For a different approach to Baconian secrets, filtered through Foucault’s discussion of surveillance as a function of both knowledge and power, see Archer 1–12, 140–51.

35. Among those who have vigorously argued for Bacon’s sincere belief in divine Providence, taking the miracle scene in the New Atlantis as its quintessential expression, are Warhaft (55–56) and Pons (307–08). Estébanez implicitly endorses this view when he writes that Bensalem’s scientists “acepta[n], humildes y agradecidos, la religión cristiana en cuanto les llega la primera noticia” (77). The skeptics include Cioranescu (147), Weinberger (xvii–xviii), Renaker (188–93), and Briggs (192–94). White (163–64) and Innes (16–17) have shown that the Christian god who makes himself known to the Bensalemites in the city of Renfusa is not an angry judge of stubborn

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


pagans (i.e., pagans like the Fathers of Salomon’s House before the miracle), but rather is characterized by his creative powers, which resemble those of the natural scientists.

36. See Rodríguez García, “Solitude and Procreation” 278–81, 287–89. 37. In the Discours de la méthode , which presents itself as a philoso-

pher’s “personal history” [ histoire ] (6) that combines features of the picaresque and the conversion narrative, Descartes also uses the trope of conversation (variously referred to as “conversation,” “converser,” and “discours”) to refer to his strategy for overcoming “les difficultés qui ont coutume d’être disputées entre les doctes” (7, 12, 28, 29).

WORKS CITED

Archer , John Michael . Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in the English Renaissance . Stanford : Stanford UP , 1993 .

[Saint] Augustine . On Christian Doctrine . Trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. Indianapolis : Bobbs-Merrill , 1958 .

Bacon , Francis . The Works of Francis Bacon . 15 vols. Ed. James Spedding , Robert Leslie Ellis , and Douglas Denon Heath . Boston : Brown , 1860–1864 .

Barbour , Philip L. The Three Worlds of Captain John Smith . Boston : Houghton , 1964 . Barnaby , Andrew , and Lisa J. Schnell . Literate Experience: The Work of Knowing in

Seventeenth-Century English Writing . New York : Palgrave Macmillan , 2002 . Blumenberg , Hans . The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. 2nd German ed. , rev., 1976.

Trans. Robert M. Wallace . Cambridge : MIT P , 1983 . Boesky , Amy . “Bacon’s New Atlantis and the Laboratory of Prose.” The Project

of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World . Ed. Elizabeth Fowler and Roland Greene . Cambridge : Cambridge UP , 1997 . 138 – 53 .

Bourdieu , Pierre . Language and Symbolic Power . Trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson . Ed. John B. Thompson . Cambridge : Harvard UP , 1991 .

——— . The Logic of Practice . Trans. Richard Nice . Stanford : Stanford UP , 1990 . Briggs , John Channing . “Bacon’s Science and Religion.” The Cambridge Companion

to Bacon . Ed. Markku Peltonen . Cambridge : Cambridge UP , 1996 . 172 – 99 . Browne , Sir Thomas . Pseudodoxia Epidemica; or, Enquiries into the Very Many

Received Tenents, and Commonly Presumed Truths . London , 1646 . B[ullokar] , J[ohn] . An English Expositor: Teaching the Interpretation of the Hardest

Words Used in Our Language . London , 1616 . Chamberlain , John . The Letters of John Chamberlain . 2 vols. Ed. Norman Egbert

McClure . Philadelphia : American Philosophical Society , 1939 . Cioranescu , Alexandre . L’Avenir du passé. Utopie et littérature . Paris : Gallimard , 1972 . Cohen , Charles Lloyd . God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience .

New York : Oxford UP , 1986 . Daston , Lorraine . “Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern

Europe.” Critical Inquiry 18 ( 1991 ): 93 – 124 . De Certeau , Michel . Heterologies: Discourse on the Other . Trans. Brian Massumi.

Foreword by Wlad Godzich . Minneapolis : U of Minnesota P , 1986 .

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


Descartes , René . Discours de la méthode . Ed. Gilbert Gadoffre . Manchester : Manchester UP , 1941 .

Dove , John . The Conversion of Salomon: A Direction to the Holinesse of Life, Handled by Way of Commentarie upon the Whole Booke of Canticles . London , 1613 .

Eamon , William . Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture . Princeton : Princeton UP , 1994 .

Estébanez , Emilio G. Introducción . Nueva Atlántida . By Francisco [sic] Bacon. Trans. and ed. Emilio G. Estébanez . Madrid : Mondadori , 1988 . 7 – 152 .

Farrington , Benjamin . The Philosophy of Francis Bacon: An Essay on Its Development from 1603 to 1609 with New Translations of Fundamental Texts . Chicago : U of Chicago P , 1966 .

Fineman , Joel . The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the Release of Shakespeare’s Will . Cambridge : MIT P , 1991 .

Giddens , Anthony . “Action, Subjectivity, and the Constitution of Meaning.” The Aims of Representation: Subject, Text, History . Ed. Murray Krieger . 1987 . Stanford : Stanford UP , 1993 . 159 – 74 .

——— . Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis . Berkeley : U of California P , 1979 .

Grafton , Anthony , April Shelford , and Nancy Siraisi . New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery . Cambridge : Belknap P of Harvard UP , 1992 .

Habermas , Jürgen . Legitimation Crisis . Trans. Thomas McCarthy . Boston : Beacon , 1975 .

Hardt , Michael , and Antonio Negri . Empire . Cambridge : Harvard UP , 2000 . Hill , Christopher . Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution . 1965. Rev. ed. Oxford :

Clarendon , 1980 . The Holy Bible. The Oxford Annotated Bible, Based on the King James Version Set

Forth A.D. 1611, rev. 1881–85/1901/1952 . Ed. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger . New York : Oxford UP , 1962 .

Innes , David C . “Bacon’s New Atlantis : The Christian Hope and the Modern Hope.” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 22 ( 1994 ): 3 – 37 .

Jardine , Lisa . Francis Bacon and the Art of Discourse . Cambridge : Cambridge UP , 1974 .

Jones , Richard Foster . Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Background of the Battle of the Books . St. Louis : Washington University Studies , 1936 .

Kendrick , Christopher . “The Imperial Laboratory: Discovering Forms in The New Atlantis .” ELH: A Journal of English Literary History 70 ( 2003 ): 1021 – 42 .

Kiernan , Michael . Introduction . The Advancement of Learning . By Francis Bacon . The Oxford Francis Bacon . Vol. 4 of Oxford : Clarendon , 2000 . xvii – lxxxii .

Knapp , Jeffrey . An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest . Berkeley : U of California P , 1992 .

Latour , Bruno . We Have Never Been Modern . Trans. Catherine Porter . Cambridge : Harvard UP , 1994 .

Liu , Alan . “The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism.” ELH: A Journal of English Literary History 56 ( 1989 ): 721 – 79 .

Lynch , William T. Solomon’s Child: Method in the Early Royal Society of London . Stanford : Stanford UP , 2001 .

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014


Merton , Robert K. Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth-Century England . 1938. Rpt. with a new preface . New York : Howard Fertig , 1970 .

More , Thomas . The Complete Works of St Thomas More , vol. 4 : Utopia . Bilingual ed. Trans. G. S. Richard (1923) . Ed. S. J. Edward Surtz and J. H. Hexter . New Haven : Yale UP , 1965 .

Nock , A. D. Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo . London : Oxford UP , 1933 .

The Peace-Maker; or, Great Brittaines Blessing. Fram’d for the Continuance of that Mightie Happinesse Wherein this Kingdome Excells Manie Empires . London , 1618 .

Pons , Alain . “Science, religion et politique dans la ‘Nouvelle Atlantide’ de Francis Bacon.” L’Art des confins. Mélanges offerts à Maurice de Gandillac . Ed. Annie Cazenave and Jean-François Lyotard . Paris : Presses Universitaires de France , 1985 . 305 – 18 .

Questier , Michael C. Conversion, Politics, and Religion in England, 1580–1625 . Cambridge : Cambridge UP , 1996 .

Reiss , Timothy J. The Discourse of Modernism . Ithaca : Cornell UP , 1982 . Renaker , David . “A Miracle of Engineering: The Conversion of Bensalem in Francis

Bacon’s New Atlantis .” Studies in Philology 87 ( 1990 ): 181 – 93 . Rodríguez García , José María . “ Scientia Potestas Est —Knowledge Is Power: Francis

Bacon to Michel Foucault.” Anglia: Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie 119.1 ( 2001 ): 1 – 19 .

———. “Solitude and Procreation in Francis Bacon’s Scientific Writings—The Spanish Connection.” Comparative Literature Studies 35 ( 1998 ): 278 – 300 .

Ross , Andrew . “Cultural Studies and the Challenge of Science.” Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies . Ed. Cary Nelson and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar . New York : Routledge , 1996 . 171 – 84 .

Sessions , William A. Francis Bacon Revisited . New York : Twayne , 1996 . Shapin , Steven . The Scientific Revolution . Chicago : U of Chicago P , 1996 . Solomon , Julie Robin . Objectivity in the Making: Francis Bacon and the Politics of

Inquiry . Baltimore : Johns Hopkins UP , 1998 . Tracy David . “Mystics, Prophets, Rhetorics: Religion and Psychoanalysis.” The

Trial(s) of Psychoanalysis . Ed. Françoise Meltzer . Chicago : U of Chicago P , 1988 . 259 – 72 .

Warhaft , Sidney . “The Providential Order in Bacon’s New Philosophy.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 4 ( 1971 ): 49 – 64 .

Weinberger , Jerry . Introduction. New Atlantis and The Great Instauration . By Francis Bacon . Ed. Jerry Weinberger . 1980. Rev. ed . Arlington Heights : Harlan , 1989 . vii – xxxiii .

White , Howard B. Peace Among the Willows: The Political Philosophy of Francis Bacon . The Hague : Martinus Nijhoff , 1968 .

Whitney , Charles . “Merchants of Light: Science as Colonization in the New Atlantis .” Francis Bacon’s Legacy of Texts . Ed. William A. Sessions . New York : AMS , 1990 . 255 – 68 .

Williams , Raymond . The Long Revolution . 1961. Rev. ed . New York : Harper , 1966 .

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

23:

05 1

4 N

ovem

ber

2014

patterns of conversion in francis bacon's new atlantis

Documents