Erasing Theology: A Rough-Draft Excerpt From My Book Project

[Below is a short excerpt from a book I am working on. It is from a chapter tentatively entitled "Erasing Theology"]

In 1881, when the London Natural History Museum in South Kensington opened, it was not only one of the pinnacles of the Gothic revival in the Victorian period. It also encapsulated the newly minted Victorian spirit of scientific investigation. Though the concept of a “scientist” as we now know it is so familiar it may appear ageless in its self-evidence, William Whewell coined the term in 1830’s.[1] To be sure, the Latin term scientia is quite old. It signified, however, any area of knowledge that could admit of some type of systematic investigation appropriate to its object of inquiry. The term, moreover, indicated a type of habitual virtue taking root in the individual. It was a form of mind, a mode of knowledge, indeed one could even call it a way of life.[2]  The term “scientist” supposedly inaugurated something quite new, especially in Anglophone circles.[3] This term was meant to delimit its object of inquiry from theology, metaphysics, aesthetics, natural philosophy, and other matters (including what was to many at the time the annoying social prestige of the Victorian cleric). Regardless, at the inception of the Natural History Museum, outside the walls of this house of wisdom, sitting at the apex of its highest gable resided a terracotta statue of the Biblical first man, Adam.[4]

This was no aberration, some vestigial holdover from an atavistic religious or theological past that had yet to be removed, now juxtaposed awkwardly with the newly won vistas of legitimate human knowledge. Just as the grand Cathedrals of old (in whose style the museum itself was crafted), “The Natural Museum in Kensington … encouraged its visitors to view it as a temple of science.” Indeed, one commentator even remarked that as visitors came to this “animal’s Westminster abbey” with its “stained glass windows, and church-like atmosphere,” were known to “respectfully remove their hats as they entered the building.”[5]

Gazing down from his parapet, Adam represented the interlocked worlds of science and theology. As Peter Harrison records, many at the time saw the figure of Adam as the prototypical investigator of nature. “Much as [Adam] surveyed the creation, named and classified the creatures, and bent them to his ends, those who now labored within the confines of the museum also sought to bring order to the unruly diversity of nature and to organize the whole of the living world into a kind of material encyclopaedia.”[6] Knowledge was, as Harrison demonstrates, seen in all its variety as restoring the primal wisdom Adam lost in the Fall. Far from some enterprise justified in terms of “knowledge for knowledge’s sake,” the rapidity of scientific advance, and indeed the unity of a bewildering variety of new disciplines were all justified and circulated in explicitly theological terms.

Beyond Harrison’s meticulous and wide-ranging study, for example, it has also been demonstrated that interpreting the meaning of the figure of Adam instigated what Umberto Eco has termed the “search for the perfect language,” that Adam supposedly once possessed in his pre-lapsarian state. Such a language would allow us once again to gaze clearly and transparently into the inner secret essences of a world rendered opaque to us after our collective fall from grace.[7] Such language would, indeed, pierce what was often in mythological terms deemed the “Veil of Isis,” and peer into the inner-storerooms of a nature that (as the philosopher Heraclitus supposedly put it millennia ago) “loves to hide” its wares from humankind, but which would now be laid bare for us.[8]

Francis Bacon, who is often named as the “Father of Modern Science,” explicitly formulated his recommendations for scientific method in such theological terms, based on what was needed to overcome what he understood to be the frailness of human reasoning and senses after Adam was cast, with Eve, eastward from Eden. Unlike the rationalism of René Descartes, who prized human reflection as effective apart from investigation of the empirical world, believing it could achieve not only clarity, but also certainty—Bacon saw this avenue as forever closed. What was needed instead was a hard-nosed and meticulous empirical investigation to guard against and weed out our many proclivities for being deceived, or reaching false conclusions.[9] And yet Descartes’ rosier view of the possibility of human reason was not born from ignoring the Fall, but by interpreting it (and indeed God) in terms that reflected his Catholic heritage, with Bacon’s epistemology sorting itself out to be more in line with Protestant theological sensibilities. This is the case to such a general extent that the story of Modernity as one in which thinkers “turned to epistemology” divided (problematically) into lines of “empiricists” and “rationalists” in fact “[largely] mirrors [traditional] confessional allegiances.”[10]

This search for the Adamic language, along with appropriate methods to compensate for what was lost in Adam’s transgression, spanned semiotics, hermeneutics, epistemology, anthropology, magical theory, all the way to mathematics, physics, astronomy, and even to inquiring upon the very way knowledge was best organized and displayed (perhaps as an encyclopedia, or in a museum; as a story; or an internally self-discontinuous deconstruction). This theological quest found itself an unlikely ally in the rise of hermeticism, as the search for the supposedly ancient wisdom of Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes the Thrice-Great) was seen by mystics, theosophists, alchemists, and others as a recovery of Adam’s original superknowledge, mediated in secret codes through the law of Moses and the lost pillars of Seth (mentioned by Josephus in his Antiquities bk. 1 ch. 2). As we will speak about at length momentarily, there was a sea change in the historiography of science in the mid-twentieth century as many realized the strange and pivotal roles played by theology, alchemy, and occult study. The most famous example of this turn in scholarship might well be Lynn Thorndike’s massive eight-volume A History of Magic and Experimental Science, which really started historian’s fascination with the topic. More accessible on this score would be the seminal work of Frances Yates’ Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition,[11] while other notables include Charles Webster’s From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science[12] which argues convincingly that the first conflict of the scientific revolution (if we are to stick with that designator for a moment) was not between Copernican and Ptolemaic cosmology, but between the medical theory of Galen and the Christian-hermetic research of Paracelsus.

As Roland Boer and Christina Petterson argue, theorizing on theological anthropology and human knowledge by interpreting the story of Adam and Eve also spread to the early economic and political theory in figures like Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith, and Thomas Malthus.[13] Beyond even these figures, Robert H. Nelson argues that modern economic theory itself is a parody of Christian salvation, a secularized theology,[14] while William Cavanaugh argues much the same in regards to the modern state.[15] Even the very notion of a primordial “fall” of one sort or another that needs to be diagnosed in order to be redeemed became a key structural motif among numerous philosophers. Despite the variety of differences not only from Christianity, but amongst themselves, their basic view of the world parodies the Christian logic they are often trying to overcome.[16]

And, as David Livingstone explores at length, the notion of pre-Adamic races living before and alongside the biblical proto-patriarch were abloom in the time just preceding Darwin’s publication of the first edition of the Origin of Species. Indeed, this was culled from questions the Biblical text seems to pose regarding the origins of humanity and the world (where did all of the people populating the cities feared by a newly exiled Cain come from, one wonders?). These topics, which can be counted as an age-old favorite object of speculation among the Rabbis and early Church Fathers,[17] ultimately gave impetus to late-19^th century questions that pontificated upon the “genetic” relation of all humanity (to put it anachronistically).[18]

And yet, visitors to the Natural History Museum in Kensington will not today come upon the terracotta Adam, gazing down as a unique symbol unifying the variety of disciplines, discoveries, and data held within the towering spires and dizzying hallways yawning beneath Gothic archway stones. “Intentional or not,” writes Harrison, “some time after the end of World War II [the Adam statue] was toppled from its commanding position.” This, in turn, serves as a powerful metaphor for our theme:

This particular fall of Adam might also be vested with symbolic significance, for the twentieth century witnessed the final stages of the secularization of scientific knowledge along with the development of a degree of historical amnesia about the role of religion in its early modern origins.[19]

Adam is newly fallen, and with him a forgetfulness also fell and perpetuated itself among historians of science, philosophy, and indeed often even the theologians themselves. This is a forgetfulness that nevertheless appears as a memory, encoded into textbooks and popular accounts. To take four individuals upon whom we will spend much more attention shortly, for example: René Descartes’ theology was distorted, deemphasized, and in some instances purely stripped away to create a figure worthy of being christened “The Father of Philosophical [and perhaps Scientific] Modernity.” This thus ignored the fact that Descartes is (despite his own protestations to the contrary) thought of as one of the last scholastics.[20] Though Galileo’s life and trial have gone through an innumerable succession of interpretations and reception as Maurice Finocchiaro masterfully details,[21] most recently the historiography of the positivist Ernst Mach has reigned supreme.[22] Mach presented Galileo as a pure empiricist, severing him from his scholastic and Jesuit sources,[23] his theological commitments[24] and metaphysical background,[25] as well as underplaying the developments and contributions of the church in the areas of astronomical observation and mathematics in particular[26] which, as Cohen notes, “was a conception that has continued to fit in well with the prejudices of many philosophically and historically untrained scientists regarding the nature of their craft.”[27] A while back the philosopher and historian Dudley Shapere collected a large number of textbook accounts of Galileo that were, in their essence, little more than a repetition of Mach’s trimmed-down caricature of Galileo as path-breaking empiricist.[28] Perhaps the most telling is its cameo in Bertrand Russell’s bestselling A History of Western Philosophy. Yet, where Mach at least made an argument, Russell introduces this picture of Galileo with the phrase "as everyone knows." Historiography has here been reborn as a truism passed down to posterity.

Isaac Newton’s work and life have been narrated and re-narrated so many times that his theology and alchemical oddities were parsed away by this scholarly slight of hand. In fact these narrations were such a trend that the genre of “meta-biography” was essentially invented to take an inventory and sort through the mess of sketches and caricature.[29] It wasn’t really until P.M. Rattansi and J.E. McGuire’s seminal 1966 paper “Newton and the ‘Pipes of Pan’” that Newton’s deep concern with biblical interpretation, alchemy, and the so-called prisca theologia were no longer just that awkward hobby he would put away when polite company came over. They were rather a core feature of his entire life’s work and even drove his physical and mathematical theory.[30] Indeed both these and his alchemy were considered by Newton to be “a study of the modes of divine activity in the world.”[31]

The interpretation and reception of Darwin (again, as we shall turn to momentarily) has likewise been filtered to both eliminate its theological and religious contexts as Dov Ospovat demonstrated,[32] as well as exaggerate features of the theory that appear to maximize its antagonism to religion in general and Christianity in particular, such as the claim that Darwinian evolution must reduce all altruism to a deeper abiding current of selfishness, or that evolution must be fundamentally non-teleological. Design theory for example—especially that of William Paley or associated with the “Bridgewater Treatises”—is often mistakenly equated with notions of teleology traditionally held by theologians such as Thomas Aquinas (it isn’t),[33] or that the function of “proofs for God” and “natural theology” remained constant in the modern period and in fundamental continuity with traditional uses (they aren’t). All the while at the same time the extensive teleological language and reason utilized by Darwin himself is ignored.[34] The outcome, as we will see, was the widely held opinion that Darwin eliminated theological arguments for teleology, while at the same time setting the ground for a purely naturalistic view of the world.

Much of this is an illusion wrought by historians. In particular, through the tireless efforts of “Darwin’s Bulldog” T.H. Huxley, whose major plan was, as Matthew Stanley has eloquently demonstrated, to “reinterpret the history of science and erase its theistic past,” making “methodological naturalism” appear as solely the province of the naturalist.[35] This despite the fact Huxley shared nearly identical scientific and philosophical values and procedures to theistic scientists contemporary to him, most notably James Clerk Maxwell.[36] As a matter of course, Darwin’s theory of evolution was widely accepted by a huge array of individuals who nonetheless easily assimilated it into categories that allowed (and even demanded) progress, teleology, and an array of other “theologically loaded” concepts.[37] Because of this the Origin of Species has been remarked to itself be the last example of Victorian natural theology.[38]

Not only has theology been subsumed in many of its historical details—but indeed just as (if not more) importantly entire epochs have been crafted upon this erasure. As Thomas Albert Howard puts it in his recent work Religion and the Rise of Historicism, Jacob Burckhardt—who wrote one of the first and most influential accounts detailing the essence of “the Renaissance”—secularizes the Adamic “fall and redemption” narrative as he periodizes history, separating “the Renaissance” from the “Dark Ages” which he argues preceded it.[39] Despite the lingering undertones of theology saturating Burckhardt’s historical work, his real influence comes by way of the fact that when he first published The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy in 1860, he was the first to present and popularize the very notion of “the Renaissance” as a period marked by the implosion of theology, and the rise of humanism and the “modern man” by way of humankind turning from God, the church hierarchy, and feudalism to finally focus on itself and its own individual capabilities.[40]

In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness … lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. … It is in Italy that this veil first melted into the air; an objective treatment [emphasis added] and consideration of the State and of all the things of this world became possible… Man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such.[41]

Despite the fact that Burckhardt acknowledged his was not the only possible interpretation given the vast wealth and complexity of the material,[42] it was eagerly picked up and disseminated by those who discerned in it the philosophical roots of secular humanism. “When once the veil of illusion was torn asunder,” he wrote “when once the dread of nature and the slavery to books and tradition were overcome, countless problems lay before [Renaissance thinkers] for solution.”[43]

As we mentioned above, even the theologians began to take this epochal notion painted by Burckhardt as a starting point. For example, the wildly influential Christian apologist Francis Schaeffer invokes a very Burckhardt-esque portrait of the Renaissance as a time of godlessness and the rising, boundlessly narcissistic and secular self importance of mankind in his classic How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture.[44] In a more sophisticated way, the Dutch Calvinist and philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd’s Roots of Western Culture: Pagan, Secular, and Christian Options does this as well.[45] Both Schaeffer and Dooyeweerd accept a characterization like Burckhardt’s, only instead of lauding it, they lament it as a fundamental epochal moment when “everything went wrong” so to speak. It is hard to overstate how influential Schaefer in particular has been on evangelical views of theological and philosophical history.[46]

Burckhardt’s beautiful prose and commanding vision held sway among countless other influential figures, and so the notion that the transition out of the “Dark Ages” (or, perhaps, a theological “Golden Age” depending on who the narrator was) had only been achieved when an anti-theological secular humanism slithered its way deep into the roots of the subsequent mountains of scholarship. Though Burckhardt did not coin the term “Renaissance” (we most likely owe this to the French historian Jules Michelet), the essential notion of what constituted its vital character was Burckhardt’s baby. Jason Josephson-Storm summarizes it well:

We can see Burckhardt’s influence on [innumerable other historians such as] Wilhelm Windelband, who in 1878 first tried to popularize the idea of … [the Enlightenment] as a periodization; he did so in a volume that addressed Burckhardt’s version of the Renaissance. Furthermore, [Martin] Heidegger and Wilhelm Nestle—two of the most significant thinkers … were [also] readers of Burckhardt. Later, another reader of Burckhardt, Alexandre Koyré, would popularize the ‘scientific revolution’ as a periodization in part to steal the Renaissance’s thunder. Max Weber … read Burckhardt, and did so before writing The Protestant Ethic. … Burckhardt’s portrayal of the Renaissance as a complete period was a prototype for a host of later narrative tropes we now associate with not just the Renaissance, but classical Greece, the Enlightenment, the Protestant Reformation, and, of course, other vaguer descriptions of the birth of modernity. To exaggerate slightly: Burckhardt was one of the authors of modernity as a literary device [emphasis added]. … Burckhardt asked the historian’s question: When did the modern age begin? His answer was that ‘modern man’ was born in the Renaissance, and while others would transpose this periodization into other epochs, the disenchantment narrative had found its coroner [emphasis added].[47]

The absence of “Adam” is now, paradoxically, the new “perfect language”—that is, a language purged of God, detoxed from its theological hangovers. The role of religion and theology in the formation of the sciences, its place among particular thinkers, its presence (for good or ill) among the many fascinating twists and turns of discovery, has been lost, erased, rewritten as little more than a restless foe of scientific progress, or otherwise ignored as irrelevant to such an extent that it is no exaggeration to speak (without necessarily invoking an intentionally networked conspiracy) of the systematic deformation and deletion of theology in the historical record. It is to this story and its origins that we now turn.

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[1] See: Sydney Ross, “Scientist: The Story of a Word,” Annals of Science, 18 no.2 (1962): 66-67; H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 27-39.

[2] Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 1-21.

[3] Donald R. Kelley, History and the Disciplines: The Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (New York: University of Rochester, 1997).

[4] Carla Yanni, Nature’s Museums: Victorian Architecture and the Culture of Display (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005), 142f.

[5] David N. Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 39, picture caption 9.

[6] Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 245.

[7] Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997).

[8] Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay On The History of The Idea of Nature trans. by Michael Chase (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2008).

[9] Harrison, The Fall of Man, 187.

[10] Ibid., 8.

[11] Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

[12] Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

[13] Roland Boer and Christina Petterson, The Idols of Nations: Biblical Myth at the Origins of Capitalism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014).

[14] Robert H. Nelson, Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1993).

[15] William Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination: Christian Practices of Space and Time (New York: T&T Clark, 2002), esp. 9-53.

[16] Stephen Mulhall, Philosophical Myths of the Fall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

[17] See, for example, John Walton, The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 And the Human Origins Debate (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2015), 53-190; and for the multiple creation accounts within scripture, see: William P. Brown, The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

[18] David Livingstone, Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins (New York: John Hopkins University Press, 2008).

[19] Harrison, Fall of Man, 245.

[20] In particular see the work of Jorge Secada, Cartesian Metaphysics: The Scholastic Origins of Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Roger Ariew, Descartes and the Last Scholastics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Idem., Descartes and the First Cartesians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

[21] Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Retrying Galileo 1633-1992 (California: University of California Press, 2007)

[22] H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 39-45 on Mach’s interpretation of Galileo.

[23] William Wallace, Causality and Scientific Explanation: Volume 1 – Medieval and Early Classical Science

[24] Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination From The Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986), esp. 117-202.

[25] Ibid., 41: “What was new about Mach’s book was that it purported to discuss the entire science of mechanics from a historical point of view … Galileo was now, in a seemingly well-documented manner, made the central focus of the first stage of the new physics.”

[26] J.L. Heilbron, The Sun In The Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

[27] Cohen, The Scientific Revolution, 41.

[28] Dudley Shapere, Galileo: A Philosophical Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 3-8.

[29] Rebekah Higgit, Recreating Newton: Newtonian Biography and the Making of Nineteenth-Century History of Science (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007).

[30] P.M. Rattansi and J.E. McGuire “Newton and the ‘Pipes of Pan,’” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 21 (1966): 108-143.

[31] Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Janus Face of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 13; Rob Iliffe, Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

[32] Dov Ospovat, The Development of Darwin’s Theory: Natural History, Natural Theology, and Natural Selection, 1838-1859 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

[33] Edward Feser, Neo-scholastic Essays

[34] Robert J. Richards, The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin’s Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993).

[35] Matthew Stanley, Huxley’s Church and Maxwell’s Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 8.

[36] See in particular Ibid., 34-119.

[37] See: James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms With Darwin in Great Britain and America 1870-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 217-346.

[38] John Durant, ed., Darwinism and Divinity: Essays on Evolution and Religious Belief (London: Blackwell Publishing, 1986).

[39] Thomas Albert Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W.M.L. de Wette, Jacob Burckhardt, and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2006), 157-170.

[40] Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy: An Essay (New York: Penguin Books, 1990).

[41] Ibid., 98.

[42] Ibid., 3.

[43] Ibid., 187-188.

[44] Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (New Jersey: Revell Press, 1976).

[45] Herman Dooyeweerd, Roots of Western Culture: Pagan, Secular, and Christian Options (Toronto: Wedge Publishing, 1979), 149-150; see also his In the Twilight of Christian Thought: Studies in the Pretended Autonomy of Philosophical Thought (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed Press, 1960), 46-47.

[46] Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), esp. 209-219.

[47] Jason Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 91-93.