Pieces of Interest in the latest New Atlantis

Francis Bacon's God by Stephen A. McKnight. I had received a rather negative impression of Bacon. Perhaps Thomas Molnar's declamations against the perennial heresy of utopia had prejudiced me against him, or perhaps I had read Eric Voegelin describing him as gnostic. I definitely read Paul Rahe's quite Straussian depiction of the Baconian project as a clandestine effort to rework religion for secular benefit, the taming of the poets by the philosophers.

Apparently Rahe's view derives from the first major twentieth century study of Bacon, Howard B. White's Peace among the Willows, and McKnight delivers significant evidence against this opinion. Bacon's scientific project, it seems, was a fundamentally Christian one. Though one could at first sight catalogue Bacon's friendly attitude towards the hidden knowledge of the ancients as semi-gnostic, his deprecatory attitude towards impure forms of Christianity indicates a more typical Protestant complaint about ecclesial corruption. The wise man of Bensalem, knowing the secrets of the ancients, emphasizes that his people's study is "motivated by piety," holding that "the ability to discover useful information is dependent on reverence and charity."

Try saying that in a contemporary academic department. It's a nice contrast to certain depictions of him which present him as a simple iconoclast dedicated to tearing down what had come before for being idols of the tribe.

Also of interest, a reflection on the greatest myth of the scientific age after Prometheus, good old Frankenstein:

Why does he[Dr. Frankenstein] go on to claim: “No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs”? Hitherto, every father has had to share the glory of human creation with a mother, whose role in bringing the child into existence was at least as great, if not greater. One can see Shelley thinking as a woman in this passage, and calling into question the masculine pride of the scientific creator. Frankenstein acts out a kind of male fantasy—to skip over any natural means of reproduction, to be solely responsible for the creation of his offspring, and thus to be able to claim its total gratitude. In her deepest insight into scientific creativity, Shelley sees its link to a will to power, and a desire to go beyond all conventional and natural limits on human aspiration.

The Scientist and the Poet, Paul A. Cantor