Abstract
Although the term natural theology was probably introduced no earlier than the mid-fourteenth century, it has been an abiding practice and presence throughout much of the history of Western civilization. In the Judeo-Christian strand of Western culture, it dates back to the Old Testament and has a presence in the New Testament as well, in these two instances being described respectively as a process of revealing the concealed or of making the invisible visible.1 In the classical strand of Western culture, natural theology dates back to the pre-Socratics and has a presence in Roman thought as well.2 And natural theology was an abiding concern of the Church Fathers—most particularly, Augustine.3
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Notes
See John J. Collins, “The Biblical Precedent for Natural Theology,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 45, no. 1 (March 1977): 70. Collins ties Old Testament natural theology to the wisdom tradition, generally, and to the wisdom tradition as exemplified by Solomon, in particular.
Steven Matthews, Theology and Science (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008)
Steven A. McKnight, The Religious Foundations of Francis Bacon’s Thought (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 26–29, note that Bacon viewed Solomon as a model for the sort of natural philosophers and natural theologians presented in The New Atlantis (1618?). A key biblical text for Bacon’s view is Proverbs 25:2. “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter.”
See also John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 191. Brooke notes John Wesley’s tacit appropriation of Romans 1:20, which Brooke describes as “a text commonly used by Christian writers who saw religious utility in popularizing the sciences,” in describing the purpose of his A Survey of Wisdom of God in the Creation, or a Compendium of Natural Philosophy (1763) as being, in part, “to display the invisible things of God, his Power, Wisdom, and Goodness.” The verse reads as follows: “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even by his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.”
See Lloyd P. Gerson, God and Greek Philosophy: Studies in the Early History of Natural Theology (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 1–32. Gerson goes on to discuss natural theology in Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Plotinus.
See also M. D. Eddy, “The Rhetoric and Science of William Paley’s Natural Theology” Literature and Theology 18, no. 1 (March 2004): 1–22. Eddy argues that Paley appropriated the mode of natural theology as panegyric, exemplified by the rhetoric of Cicero’s De Natura Deorum to his own purposes in Natural Theology.
See also Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Natura Deorum, trans. Harris H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), 2.2:124. Surveying the scene before him, Balbus exclaims, “can there be any person…who can consider the regular movements of the heavenly bodies, the prescribed courses of the stars, and see how all is linked and bound into a single system, and then deny that there is any conscious purpose in this, and say that it is the work of chance?”
See Peter Harrison, “Reinterpreting Nature in Early Modern Europe: Natural Philosophy, Biblical Exegesis and the Contemplative Life,” in The Word and the World: Biblical Exegesis and Early Modern Science, ed. Kevin Killeen and Peter J. Forshaw (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 25–44, esp. 33–35. Speaking of Augustine, Harrison observes, “in essence, the contemplation of the creatures referred to by the words of scripture led to a contemplation of higher theological truths, and ultimately to contemplation of God. The creatures thus had a use in the practice of contemplation.”
See also Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Christianity in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).
See Hugo Friedrich, Montaigne, 2nd ed. (Bern and Munich: A. Francke, 1967), 94–6. The title of the first printed edition (Lyon, 1484), was Liber creaturarum seu naturae seu liber de homine propter quern sunt creaturae aliae. By 1496, the Martin Flach edition, printed in Strasbourg, bore the short title Theologia naturalis, followed by Liber creaturarum.
Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge, 1998), 3.
See also Norman Kretzmann, The Metaphysics of Creation: Aquinas’s Natural Theology in Summa Contra Gentiles II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
See also Alexander W. Hall, Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus: Natural Theology in the High Middle Ages (New York: Continuum, 2007).
See Matthews, Theolojjy and Science, 14–17, 88. Matthews argues that Renaissance humanists such as Erasmus, no less than “mainstream Protestants” such as Bacon, shared an abiding concern to set aside “all the errors of medieval Scholasticism, and the papacy generally,” in order to recover and “return to the true vetus theologia” of the early Church Fathers. Commenting on Novum Organum, Book 1, Aphorism 78 (Bacon, Works, 3:77), Matthews observes, “the problem with the Scholastics is nothing other than the sin of pride, which caused them to depart from God’s two books—the book of scripture and the book of nature.” However, it is important to distinguish pride from curiosity. See Peter Harrison, “Curiosity, Forbidden Knowledge, and the Reformation of Natural Philosophy in Early Modern England,” Isis 92 (2001), 265–90. Harrison argues persuasively that curiosity, “regarded as an intellectual vice” for the twelve or thirteen centuries “from the patristic period to the beginning of the seventeenth century,” when it became an integral part of Bacon’s project for “the instauration of knowledge … underwent a remarkable transformation.”
J. H. Kurtz, History of the Christian Church to the Reformation, ed. Alfred Edersheim (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1860), 469.
Kurtz cites Franciscus Holberg, De theologia naturalis raimundi de sabunde (1843);
David Matzke, Die natürliche Theologie des Raymundus von Sabunde (1846);
Max Hüttler, Die Religionsphilosophie des Raimund von Sabunde (1851). Kurtz groups Raymond with Nicholas of Lyra (ca. 1270–1349) and Thomas Bradwardine (ca. 1290–1349) as “the principal OPPONENTS, or rather reformers of Scholasticism.”
Philip Smith, The History of the Christian Church during the Middle Ages: With a Summary of the Reformation, Centuries XI to XVI (New York: Harper & Bros., 1885), 568.
J. Warshaw, “Spanish Scholarship and Science,” Hispania 9, no. 2 (March 1926): 69–85, esp. 74. Andrée Comparot, Amour et Verité: Sebon, Vivès, et Michel de Montaigne (Paris: Klincksieck, 1983), 160, argues that Raymond’s anti-Aristotelianism influenced Ludovico Vivès, who in his turn influenced Bacon and Ramus, “who took some of his ideas without acknowledging their source.”
L’Abbé D. Reulet, Un Inconnu Célèbre: Recherches sur Raymond de Sebonde (Paris: Victor Palmé, 1875), 162, notes suggestively in discussing its prologue that Raymond’s Liber Creaturarum brings forward “a novum organum, an instrument with the aid of which one will be able ‘in less than a month and without being a cleric,’ to acquire ‘all sciences,’ ‘to unmask all error and resolve infallibly all questions touching God and man.’”
See Brian W. Ogilvie, “Natural History, Ethics, and Physico-Theology,” in Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, ed. Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2005), 75–103, esp. 93–94. See also note 2 above. Surveying the scene before him in De Natura Deorum, Cicero’s Balbus exclaims, “can there be any person…who can consider the regular movements of the heavenly bodies, the prescribed courses of the stars, and see how all is linked and bound into a single system, and then deny that there is any conscious purpose in this, and say that it is the work of chance?”
See La Théologie Naturelle de Raymond Sebon, Traduicte nouvellement en Francois par Messire Michel, Seigneur de Montaigne, 2 vols. (1569; Paris: Louis Conard, 1932–35), 1:ix–x; my translation. See also Jaume de Puig, Les Sources de la Pensée Philosophique de Raimond Sebond (Ramon Sibiuda) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1994), 64–65. Raymond was on theological thin ice regarding his views on the Book of Nature. theologia Naturalis—Puig uses the short form of the manuscript title, Liber Creaturarum—was condemned and placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1558. This action was taken ostensibly because of the preface, since in 1564 the condemnation was restricted to the preface. For a broader discussion of the two books, see also Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and… Natural Science, 1. The notion of the book of nature was not original with Raymond, having appeared some three centuries earlier in the De Tribus Diebus of Hugh of St Victor (1096–1141–42).
See also Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York: Pantheon, 1953), 319–26,
Robert Markley, Fallen Languages: The Crisis of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660–1740 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 39–45.
Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart, Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon 1998 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1999), 39–66.
See Kenneth Alan Hovey, “‘Mountaigny Saith Prettily’: Bacon’s French and the Essay,” PMLA, 106, no. 1 (January 1991), 71–82, esp. 72–73. Hovey argues that Montaigne exerted a negative influence on Bacon, especially as viewed in the 1625 edition of the latter’s Essays.
The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans Donald Frame (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University, 1948), 371–75. See also Pierre Villey, Montaigne et François Bacon (1913; rpt. Geneva: Slatkine, 1973), 82, 89–90, 101, 104.
See Hovey, “‘Mountaigny Saith Prettily,” 75–77. See also Francis Bacon, The Essays or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 8–9 (Bacon’s italics). As Hovey notes, in “Of Truth” Bacon assumes “the role of severe inquisitor rather than wandering inquirer” and damns Montaigne’s comments on the virtues of truthfulness with faint praise that drips with sarcasm and concludes with an allusion to Luke 18:8, a verse that looks forward to the ultimate justice of the Second Coming. Kiernan’s edition of “Of Truth” reads thusly.
Brian Vickers, “The Authenticity of Bacon’s Earliest Writings,” Studies in Philology 94, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 248–96, esp. 248.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60:507–09. William Aldis Wright, M. A. (1831–1914), became vice-master of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1888. He was also a prodigious editor, serving as one of the founding editors of the Journal of Philology (1868), an editor of three editions of Shakespeare, and editor of both a facsimile edition and an annotated edition of Milton.
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. William Aldis Wright (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1869), 150–51, 298.
Works of Michael de Montaigne: Comprising His Essays, Journey into Italy, and Letters, with Notes from All the Commentators, Biographical and Bibliographical Notices, etc, 4 vols., ed. William Hazlitt, rev. Owen Williams Wight (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1859), 2:149–50. I used the Hazlitt edition because it is roughly contemporary with the Wright edition of the Advancement. The same passage may be found in Michel de Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond, trans. Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2003), 25.
Charles Whitney, Francis Bacon and Modernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 65.
On Bacon and the prisca sapientia, see John C. Briggs, Francis Bacon and the Rhetoric of Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 59–67. Matthews, Theology and Science, 88–90, notes and discusses Bacon’s investment in identifying and recovering ancient texts as the antidote to centuries of corruption and misleading commentary, most commonly by the post-Patristic church. See also McKnight, Religious Foundations, 103–50.
Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 10.
See Zahi Zalloua, “Montaigne, Skepticism, and Immortality,” Philosophy and Literature 27, no. 1 (April 2003): 40–61, esp. 44, remarking the abstruseness of its argumentation, refers to “the daunting ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond.’”
See also Catherine Demure, “The Paradox and the Miracle-Structure and Meaning of ‘The Apology for Raymond Sebond,’” trans. Dianne Sears, Yale French Studies 64 (1983), 188–208, esp. 189, notes that “the coherence of Montaigne’s thought appears here in the rigor of a maintained contradiction: the model of the paradox, which makes up the very heart of the text, is constituted by the status of theology, a knowledge which is both necessary and impossible.”
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Peterfreund, S. (2012). Introduction: Natural Theology, Leading up to Bacon. In: Turning Points in Natural Theology from Bacon to Darwin. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137015273_1
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