Literature and Natural Theology in Early Modern England 1009415263, 9781009415262

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title page
Imprints page
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Defining ''Literature'' and ''Natural Theology''
Natural Theology in the Scientific Revolution
The Book of Nature in Historiography and Literary Criticism
Literature and Natural Theology in Seventeenth-Century England
Part I Metaphysical Poets
Chapter 1 A ''Metaphorical God'' and the Book of Nature: John Donne on Natural Theology
Natural Theology in Renaissance Europe
Bacon on Natural Theology
Body as Book: Apprehension of the Divine through the Sensible in Donne's Lyric Poems
Donne on Natural Theology
Donne and the Natural World
Metaphorical Nature, Metaphorical God
Chapter 2 ''I Summon'd Nature'': George Herbert and Henry Vaughan on Science and Nature
Science
Nature
Chapter 3 ''Mutters of Assent'' or ''Lectures for the Eye'': Natural Theology in the Devotional Lyrics of Herbert and Vaughan
Conclusion
Part II Imagined Worlds
Chapter 4 ''Architect of Wonders'': Creation in Cavendish, Du Bartas, Hutchinson, Denham, and Marvell
Analogy of Being and Natural Theology
Equivocal Metaphysics in Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World
Univocal and Analogical Metaphysics in Seventeenth-Century Biblical Epic
Divine and Human Design in Local Poetry
Conclusion
Chapter 5 ''His Footstep Trace'': The Natural Theology of Paradise Lost
Milton among the Natural Theologians
Natural Theology and Paradise Lost
Unfallen Natural Theology in Paradise Lost
Fallen Reason and Natural Theology
Chapter 6 The Misunderstood Spider: John Bunyan Reads the Book of Nature
Bunyan, Puritans, and Natural Theology
Robert Boyle and the Occasional Meditation
The Book of Nature in The Pilgrim's Progress
Conclusion: Bunyan's Book for Boys and Girls
Epilogue: Literature and Natural Theology at the Dawn of the Boyle Lectures
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

LITERATURE AND NATURAL THEOLOGY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Guiding readers through the diverse forms of natural theology expressed in seventeenth-century English literature, Katherine Calloway reveals how, in ways that have not yet been fully recognized, authors such as Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Cavendish, Hutchinson, Milton, Marvell, and Bunyan describe, promote, challenge, and even practice natural theology in their poetic works. She simultaneously improves our understanding of an important and still-influential intellectual movement and deepens our appreciation of multiple major literary works. “Natural theology,” as it was popularly understood, changed dramatically in England over the seventeenth century, from the application of natural light to divine things to a newer, more brittle, understanding of the enterprise as the exclusive use of reason and observation to prove theological conclusions outside of any context of faith. These poets profoundly complicate the story, collectively demonstrating that some forms of natural theology lend themselves to poetry or imaginative literature rather than prose.   is Assistant Professor of English at Baylor University. She has written extensively on early modern English literature as it intersects with science and theology. Her first book, Natural Theology in the Scientific Revolution, was published in .

LITERATURE AND NATURAL THEOLOGY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND KATHERINE CALLOWAY Baylor University

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge  , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York,  , USA  Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne,  , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India  Penang Road, #–/, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore  Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ :./ © Katherine Calloway  This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published  A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data : Calloway, Katherine, author. : Literature and natural theology in early modern England / Katherine Calloway. : Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, . | Includes bibliographical references and index. :   (print) |   (ebook) |   (hardback) |   (paperback) |   (epub) : : English literature–Early modern, -–History and criticism. | Natural theology in literature. | Natural theology–History of doctrines. | Great Britain–Intellectual life–th century. :  .  theol (print) |  . (ebook) |  ./–dc LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/  ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Jeffrey and Daniel

Contents

List of Figures Preface Acknowledgments

page viii ix x 

Introduction      A “Metaphorical God” and the Book of Nature: John Donne on Natural Theology



 “I Summon’d Nature”: George Herbert and Henry Vaughan on Science and Nature



 “Mutters of Assent” or “Lectures for the Eye”: Natural Theology in the Devotional Lyrics of Herbert and Vaughan



     “Architect of Wonders”: Creation in Cavendish, Du Bartas, Hutchinson, Denham, and Marvell



 “His Footstep Trace”: The Natural Theology of Paradise Lost



 The Misunderstood Spider: John Bunyan Reads the Book of Nature



Epilogue: Literature and Natural Theology at the Dawn of the Boyle Lectures

  

Works Cited Index vii

Figures

. Title page and first page from John Ray’s Wisdom of God () . Title page and “Corona Dedicatoria” from Josuah Sylvester’s Divine Weekes and Works () . A comparison of three creation epics

viii

page   

Preface

When I first began work on my previous book, Natural Theology in the Scientific Revolution (), I intended to write literary criticism drawing together early modern English science, theology, and imaginative literature. In the end there proved to be so much to say about natural theology itself that I wrote intellectual history instead, exploring diverse and lively prose works of natural theology penned during the century that gave rise to the modern design argument. In the introduction to that book, I wrote that the metaphysical questions those natural theologians confronted “might prove to be best answered not in prose, but in poetry,” adding that other writers with whom natural theologians were in conversation were trying that experiment. In this book, I come to consider the contribution of poets to this important chapter in the story of natural theology. Like the prose authors I considered in my earlier book, they are a lively and diverse group, with much to say about how the natural world can shed light on its maker. Unlike (most of ) those prose authors, these poets are still widely anthologized, taught in undergraduate classrooms, and – in my experience – even more fun to read.

ix

Acknowledgments

Getting to the point where I had something to say about authors spanning the seventeenth century was a group effort: kind colleagues offered feedback on various chapters at various stages of composition. Chapter  appeared in an earlier form in Studies in Philology , no.  (), pp. –, and Chapter  in Milton Studies  (), pp. –. I would like to thank both these journals, as well as Cambridge University Press, for allowing me to publish revised versions of the aforementioned articles in this book. I am also very grateful to the two anonymous readers who gave generous and insightful feedback on the entire book, and to the anonymous readers at Studies in Philology and Milton Studies for their judicious comments on the earlier versions of Chapters  and . Beyond these anonymous readers, I want to thank the colleagues whose names I know: Paul Stanwood, Maurice Hunt, Richard Strier, Dennis Danielson, the late Roger Pooley, and the several members of a departmental writing group at Baylor. This book is much better for their constructive criticism, and any shortcomings that remain are in spite of their help. I am grateful to Baylor University for supporting my work with research leave in the fall of , and to Emily Hockley and George Paul Laver at Cambridge University Press and my indexer, Susan Penny, for their indispensable help at the later stages of the project. My cover image was made available by the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and the facsimile pages appearing in the text are reproduced with the kind permission of the British Library. Finally, I want to acknowledge my husband, Shinjiro Sueda. Shin contributed his expertise to this book’s cover and its single bar graph, but that contribution is a small fraction of his gracious and unfailing support of my work.

x

Introduction

Thou art a figurative, a metaphorical God . . . Neither art thou thus a figurative, a metaphorical God in thy word only, but in thy works too. John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions ()

Here will be the point of Debate; Whether this acknowledged Fitness of Humane Bodies must be attributed, as we say, to a wise and good God; or, as the Atheist averr, to dead senseless Matter. I hope to make it appear, that here, as indeed every where, but here certainly, in the great Dramatick Poem of Nature, is a necessity of introducing a God. Richard Bentley, The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism ()

John Donne and Richard Bentley both portray nature as a poem authored by God, tapping into a long Christian tradition holding that the “book of nature,” like the book of scripture, should be read for divine meaning. More distinctively, both of these authors identify the book of nature as poetry rather than prose: Donne rhapsodizes about how God’s works are metaphorical, and Bentley refers to nature as a “great, dramatic poem.” Beyond these significant similarities, however, the two men’s conceptions of the theological import of nature could not be more different. Donne writes as a poet himself and at a time when the scientific reforms called for by Francis Bacon had yet to take a firm hold in English intellectual culture. For Donne, God speaks metaphorically in nature as well as scripture, piling up meaning in the creatures. Bentley, by contrast, approaches the book of nature with the eyes of an exacting textual critic and at a time when the new sciences of experimentation and Newtonian physics were quickly gaining ground. For him, the fitness and order of nature – as comprehensively explained by natural philosophers – proves the existence of a providential designer but offers little or no insight beyond that. This book tells the story of how the book of nature got from A to B in the English imagination, considering for the first time the important role that 



Introduction

authors of imaginative literature, human poets, played in this shifting conception of the divine poet. This book thus adds to our understanding of an important and stillinfluential intellectual movement while deepening our appreciation of major literary works by seventeenth-century English authors such as John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and John Bunyan. In ways that have not yet been fully recognized, these authors describe, promote, challenge, and even practice natural theology in their poetic works. These works in turn played a key role in determining what scientific methods and ideas were considered theologically licit, and in parsing to what extent science could be expected to shed light on religious matters at all. Working through the seventeenth century, I begin with early engagements of Francis Bacon’s revolutionary ideas about natural theology and end in the years of the inaugural Boyle Lectures, when many hoped that scientific learning would soon put an end to religious doubt and disputes. Alongside a growing number of natural philosophers and scientific virtuosi, literary authors explored the theological implications of new ideas, providing trenchant checks and cautions in an intellectual culture becoming increasingly enamored with rational demonstrations of religion. Before considering their contributions in the succeeding chapters, this introduction offers some broader definitions and historical contexts and surveys the most relevant scholarly conversations to date.

Defining “Literature” and “Natural Theology” Already in the title of this book, the slipperiness of its key terms is on view. “Literature” currently designates writing that is uniquely creative and distinguished from descriptive, expository, or argumentative writing – areas now covered by academic departments such as history, philosophy, and STEM and found in other sections of the bookstore than the “Literature” section. The term that came closest to covering the same ground in  was “poesy” or poetry, and its most famous theorist was Sir Philip Sidney (–). In his Defence of Poesie, published posthumously in  and reprinted throughout the seventeenth century, Sidney defended poetry against charges that it had deleterious effects on readers, along the way defining the genre. All other arts, Sidney writes, have “the works of nature” as their “principall object”; these include astronomy, geometry and arithmetic, music, natural and moral philosophy, history,

Introduction



rhetoric and logic, physics and metaphysics. “Only the Poet,” Sidney continues, disdeining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his owne invention, doth grow in effect another nature: in making things either better then nature bringeth foorth, or quite new, forms such as never were in nature: as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chymeras, Furies, and such like; so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely raunging within the Zodiack of his owne wit.

Poetry was uniquely the product of human creation; poesis in Greek simply meant “making,” and a poet was a “maker” in a way that other writers and scholars were not. Poetry thus overlaps with the current definition of “fiction,” but there are important differences that make “fiction” a misleading term for the works considered in this book. For one thing, poetry in the broad Renaissance sense includes lyric verse as well as drama, epic, and myths, whether in verse or not. Today, lyric poetry is typically distinguished from fiction, which normally designates only prose. At a deeper level, despite the association of poetry with fables and fancy in Sidney’s time, there arises some difficulty in using the modern term “fiction” as a synonym for “poetry” in the early modern English context. Some writers of a Platonic bent understood poetry as mimetically participating in reality, for instance. The literary critic Harry Berger identifies a difference between “the norms of Neoplatonic idealism and poetry (fiction)”: Fiction is etymologically and semantically related to terms meaning invention, creation, construction and to terms meaning illusion; it suggests both something made and something made up. Where the idealist tends to minimize the second term in each set, the true poet makes the most of it . . . Thus Sidney, in what is perhaps the locus classicus of the true poet’s credo in his Apology for Poetry: “The poet . . . nothing affirmes, and therefore never lyeth.”

Not all seventeenth-century authors would agree with Sidney’s contention that a true poet makes no truth claims. To name a prominent example, the Cambridge philosopher Henry More produced in the s a lengthy   

Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poesie (London, ). This edition has no page numbers. On the complexities of defining poetic mimesis in the Renaissance, see Baxter Hathaway, The Age of Criticism: The Late Renaissance in Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), . Harry Berger, Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, ), .



Introduction

Ψυχωδια [Psychodia] Platonica: or, a Platonicall Song of the Soul, comprising , Spenserian stanzas of allegorical treatment of spiritual affairs resembling not only The Faerie Queene (, ) but also in some respects Bunyan’s later Pilgrim’s Progress (). Treating spiritual realities he considered more substantial and consequential than matter, More viewed his poetic effort as “making” rather than “making up.” Paradoxically, the same could be said of Margaret Cavendish’s  Blazing World, discussed in Chapter . Diametrically opposed to More’s Platonism, Cavendish saw her authorship as a literal process of creation due to her vitalist belief that anything a human imagines is de facto given material being because no other kind of being is possible; authors cannot “make up” but can only “make.” Today we still have not reached consensus on the ontological questions that More and Cavendish faced, but people generally mean by fiction something “made up” rather than something real, whether spiritual or material. Seventeenth-century English authors and readers were generally more conscious of the etymological sense of poesy, and in this book I will use “poetry” and “poetic” in the older, capacious sense of something made by human imagination. Conveniently, as mentioned, this definition also includes “poetry” in the current sense of lyric verse, which is the subject of the first half of this book. No less than authors of longer narrative works – such as the biblical epic and prose fiction considered in the second half – authors of lyric poetry ranged in the zodiac of their own wit rather than being fettered to the works of nature. In this way, slippery though the category of “literature/poetry” was and is, it can still be distinguished from many kinds of expository prose. Sidney lists a number of non-poetic subjects, including philosophy, mathematics, and history. Had he been writing a century later, he might also have included the prose works of natural theology that became a notable feature of the intellectual landscape in seventeenth-century England. And what, exactly, is natural theology? Like “poetry,” the term means something different now than it did in , with the older sense being broader than the newer one, although this narrowing has started to reverse 



In its materialism, Blazing World follows a tradition laid down by the first-century  Roman poet Lucretius, whose verse epic De Rerum Natura was highly influential in early modern Europe and similarly (as its title suggests) does not fit Sidney’s definition of poetry as ranging freely from nature and affirming nothing. This poem instead set forth Epicurean materialist philosophy. Here I mean in common parlance and not in literary theory, where these questions continue to be posed. Like Cavendish, for instance, poststructuralist critics tend to oppose platonic theories of knowledge and representation.

Introduction



in response to recent work by philosophers, historians, and even natural scientists. The newer and narrower definition was most memorably stated by William P. Alston in : “the enterprise of providing support for religious beliefs by starting from premises that neither are nor presuppose any religious beliefs.” Conspicuous examples of natural theology in English under this definition can be found among the Boyle Lectures (–present), in William Paley’s Natural Theology with its analogy of the watch and watchmaker (), the Bridgewater Treatises (–), and the twentieth-century theories of the anthropic principle and Intelligent Design. Authors in this tradition see themselves as intentionally setting aside any religious presuppositions and using only their own reason and scientific observation to draw conclusions about God’s existence and attributes. This enterprise has often been viewed by Christians as a means of engaging with people outside their religious tradition – often atheists, but early on, Muslims and Jews as well. Often the stated goal was to refute or convert those people; sometimes it might be to shore up the beliefs of Christians against doubt or arguments from unbelievers. In the scheme of Jewish and Christian history, this combative and scientific conception of natural theology is relatively short-lived, cropping up in the late seventeenth century. Despite ongoing efforts to prove religion rationally, many would say that “natural theology” is also long dead, its logic having been defeated by David Hume’s  Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion or else by Darwin’s naturalistic explanation of design in nature. The older and broader version of natural theology is harder to kill. In his magisterial  Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon divides philosophy into three parts: divine, natural, and humane, the first of 

 

A key example is John Hedley Brooke, Russell Re Manning, and Fraser Watts (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), which features a wide array of articles on various historical and philosophical aspects of natural theology and explicitly sets out to explode narrow and misleading definitions of natural theology. An example of this kind of work being done for a broad audience is scientist-turned-rector John Polkinghorne’s  lecture in Carlisle Cathedral entitled “Where Is Natural Theology Today?,” Science & Christian Belief , no.  (): –. William P. Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), . Older works reasoning about God(s) without recourse to scripture exist but are not seen as defining a genre in this way. Cicero’s first-century  De Natura Deorum, situated outside Judaism and Christianity, is an example, as is Anselm’s notorious ontological argument for God’s existence in his eleventh-century Proslogion. See Alvin Plantinga, “God, Arguments for the Existence of,” in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. Craig (New York: Routledge, ), www.rep.routledge .com/articles/thematic/god-arguments-for-the-existence-of/v-.



Introduction

these being his other name for natural theology. Concerning “DIVINE PHILOSOPHIE or NATURALL THEOLOGIE,” he writes, “It is that knowledge or Rudiment of knowledge concerning GOD, which may be obtained by the contemplation of his Creatures which knowledge may be truely tearmed Divine, in respect of the object; and Naturall in respect of the Light.” For Bacon, natural theology was what happened when “natural light” was applied to a divine object: this includes natural theology under Alston’s definition, but no stipulation is made that theological presuppositions be set aside. Natural theology in this view is simply a different mode of knowing (or knowing about) God that might exist alongside religious faith. Natural theology meant exercising human faculties of reasoning and knowing in addition to believing religious truths supernaturally revealed, for instance through the Bible or a mystical experience. Understood in this way, natural theology appears in the Bible itself, and this was recognized by early modern English Christians. Psalm . was often cited, which in Authorized Version reads, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork”; another popular reference was Romans .: “For the invisible things of [God] from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead.” Bible passages might not weigh with the “notorious infidels” against whom the Boyle Lectures were later deployed, but they clearly weighed with seventeenth-century English readers of natural theology. As with “poetry,” then, in this book I use “natural theology” in the older and broader sense: the enterprise of using reason and observation to arrive at truths about God and God’s attributes in a wide array of contexts, within and outside of the Christian faith. Natural theology in this conception may have a goal of engaging with atheists or infidels, or it may not. Moreover, besides resolving the doubts of believers, it can also function as a positive spiritual exercise. The natural historian John Ray, who has been called the founding father of English natural theology, declared in his seminal Wisdom of God Manifiested in the Works of Creation: It may be (as some Divines have thought) part of our business and employment in Eternity to contemplate the Works of God, and give him the Glory of his Wisdom, Power and Goodness manifested in the Creation 

Francis Bacon, The Oxford Francis Bacon, Vol. IV: The Advancement of Learning, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –.

Introduction



of them. I am sure it is part of the business of a Sabbath-day, and the Sabbath is a Type of that eternal Rest.

Here natural theology is cast not as an argumentative exercise but a spiritual discipline; the assumption is that it is undertaken by people who already believe the Bible, and the hope is that it will still be undertaken in heaven. As was the case with the broad definition of poetry, though, there are still some things that this older type of natural theology is not: these authors are contemplating God’s works in nature, the “book of the Creatures,” and not God’s special revelation, for instance in the Bible. Bacon distinguishes natural theology from “DIVINITIE, or INSPIRED THEOLOGIE,” which he calls “the Haven and Sabbath of all Mans contemplations.” The book of the creatures, these writers were aware, included themselves as well; their own rational faculties, innate ideas, and bodies might be brought forward as shedding light on their creator.

Natural Theology in the Scientific Revolution Just above, Francis Bacon served as the source of a capacious definition of natural theology he inherited from his forebears. This gives a fairly good idea of natural theology at the time but paints a misleading picture of Bacon, sometimes hailed as the father of modern science. Among his other accomplishments, Bacon can be partially credited with the narrowing of natural theology’s scope and aims over the course of the seventeenth century, and not just indirectly through his hoped-for program of scientific observation and experimentation. Having defined natural theology in Advancement of Learning, Bacon immediately downplays it as worthy of natural philosophers’ time. “The boundes of this knowledge,” he continues, are that it sufficeth to convince atheism, but not to informe Religion . . . For as all works do shewe forth the power and skill of the workeman, and not his Image: So it is of the works of God; which shew the Omnipotencie and wisedome of the Maker, but not his Image . . . Wherefore by the contemplation of Nature, to induce and inforce the acknowledgement of God, and to demonstrate his power, providence, and goodnesse, is an excellent argument, and hath beene excellently handled by diverse.

 

John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (London, ), . This book was based on a series of lectures delivered at Cambridge decades earlier.  Bacon, The Oxford Francis Bacon, ed. Graham Rees et al., iv:. Ibid., iv:.



Introduction

This passage signals a seismic shift in natural theology going forward, a shift this book will explore through the lens of imaginative literature. In its immediate context in the Advancement, however, it functions chiefly to dismiss natural theology. Now that this endeavor has been “excellently handled,” Bacon goes on to outline his hopes that his countrymen will focus on various understudied branches of natural philosophy, avoiding any prideful effort to find theological content in nature beyond the already well-established truths of God’s existence and providence. Whether or not Bacon should be given the credit, many of his dreams of reforming scientific inquiry were progressively realized over the course of the seventeenth century. These reforms were not as sudden and monolithic as the term “scientific revolution” might suggest, but there were several recognizable and directed tendencies, including () Copernican astronomy (further developed by figures such as Galileo and Johannes Kepler); () atomic or corpuscularian theories of matter (associated with the revival of interest in Epicureanism, especially as presented in Lucretius’s De rerum natura, and championed by Thomas Hobbes); () an emphasis on observation, experimentation, and collaboration as the best method for advancing knowledge (set forth, for example, in Bacon’s Advancement); and () an aim of marshalling natural knowledge for the glory of God and the benefit of humankind, as in the charter of the Royal Society of London. Unfolding in a Christian context, these developments raised questions about the theological appropriateness of new scientific endeavors, and initially Christianity was used to justify scientific efforts more than the other way around. However, as various scientific 





In this book I use “science” and “scientific” in the broad older sense of “pertaining to natural knowledge.” “Science” in the modern sense of empirical observation and experimentation corresponds most closely to the early modern category of “natural philosophy,” though the two are not synonymous. When I refer to “scientific reform,” I mean along the lines described here, and particularly the reforms inspired by Bacon. For an overview of scientific developments in early modern Europe, see John Henry, The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science (London: Palgrave Macmillan, ) and Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). See Peter Harrison, “Religion and the Early Royal Society,” Science & Christian Belief , no.  (): – and “Physico-theology and the Mixed Sciences: The Role of Theology in Early Modern Natural Philosophy,” in Peter R. Anstey and John A. Schuster (eds.), The Science of Nature in the Seventeenth Century: Patterns of Change in Early Modern Natural Philosophy (New York: Springer, ), –. A foundational study of the confluence of science and theology in seventeenth-century England is Amos Funkenstein’s Theology and the Scientific Imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ). Harrison argues similarly that the moral (not just religious) value of the new sciences was initially urged by scientific reformers in “The Fashioned Image of Poetry or the Regular Instruction of Philosophy? Truth, Utility, and the Natural Sciences in Early Modern England,” in David Burchell

Introduction



reforms gained traction over the century – Charles II’s chartering the Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge in  was a major coup – proponents of new sciences such as John Wilkins, Robert Boyle, and John Ray began to position themselves as uniquely able to promote religion in turn. Pace Bacon, these men held that natural theology had not yet been “excellently handled,” that there was more science could do in the service of theology now that science was being advanced along sounder lines. Despite Bacon’s lack of interest in propagating natural theology, his own words were used to justify a new type of natural theology that arose in this intellectual climate. “Physico-theology,” first used as a noun in , developed in seventeenth-century England out of older types of natural theology but paid more attention to – and put more argumentative weight on – the physical phenomena being uncovered by natural history, experimentation, and Newtonian physics. Seventeenth-century authors of natural theology repeatedly quoted Bacon’s assertion that “God never wrought miracle to convince atheism, because his ordinary works convince it.” God’s “ordinary works,” these authors wanted to show, are remarkable in their quantity, beauty, order, and fitness to their many roles in the magnificent whole of creation. Physico-theology did not have to be construed as setting aside religious presuppositions and combatting atheists and infidels, but as atheism appeared to be gaining ground, the effort was increasingly framed that way. When in  Robert Boyle’s will provided for the endowment of a lecture series in natural theology, for instance, the brief was that a minister should be paid to “preach Eight Sermons in the Year, for proving the Christian Religion against notorious Infidels, viz. Atheists, Deists, Pagans, Jews and Mahometans.” A nineteenth-century historian would observe of Richard Bentley’s inaugural Boyle Lectures that, although delivered from the pulpit, these “sermons” were not in fact







and Juliet Cummins, eds. Science, Literature, and Rhetoric in Early Modern England (London: Ashgate, ), –. For a helpful introduction to physico-theology from a number of angles, see Ann Blair and Kaspar von Greyerz (eds.), Physico-theology: Religion and Science in Europe, – (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ) and especially the chapters by Scott Mandelbrote, John Hedley Brooke, and Peter Harrison. See also Scott Mandelbrote, “The Uses of Natural Theology in Seventeenth-Century England,” Science in Context , no.  (): –. Bacon made this claim in his  essay “Of Atheisme” as well as The Advancement of Learning (): see Oxford Francis Bacon, iv:  and xv: . This claim of Bacon’s was quoted in works of natural theology such as Richard Baxter’s Reasons of the Christian Religion (London, ),  and John Wilkins’s The Principles and Duties of Natural Religion (London, ), . Richard Bentley, The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism (London, ), dedication. This section has no page numbers.



Introduction

“the instructions of the Sabbath, but popular lectures, of which the doctrines of revealed religion formed no part.” Subsequent Boyle lecturers followed suit. While a number of seventeenth-century authors thus ignored Bacon’s call to focus exclusively on natural philosophy, others did not, driving a wedge between science and theology that is still visible today. Some advocates for educational reform (notably John Webster and Samuel Dell) called for an end to the prideful intermingling of human philosophy and divinity in university curricula, for instance, and members of the nascent Royal Society debated whether metaphysical topics such as final causes should come within their purview. Authors’ varying views of the usefulness of natural theology also reflect the religious diversity of early modern England: critics of natural theology were often of a more theologically reformed bent, stressing God’s freedom to act in unintelligible ways. Authors who continued to promote or practice natural theology, conversely, tended to be less theologically reformed and friendlier to the state church; later in the century, several notable proponents of natural theology (John Wilkins, Edward Stillingfleet, John Tillotson) were bishops. Increasingly, too, those who continued to see value in natural theology stayed within the bounds Bacon set in the Advancement of Learning. The older idea of a “book of nature” in which humans could read divinely inscribed spiritual meanings gave way to logic inferring a powerful and providential creator from the evidence of the bounty, order, and fitness of creation. Bacon did not explicitly attack the notion of a book of nature, choosing instead in the Advancement to attack the idea that God’s “image” is found in nonhuman creation, an idea he points out is not found in the Bible but in heathen traditions. But the heart of the notion of a book of nature is gone in Bacon’s writings. By “interpretation of nature,” for  

 

James Henry Monk, The Life of Richard Bentley, D.D. (London: J.G.&F. Rivington, ), . Mandelbrote, “The Uses of Natural Theology,” –; Katherine Calloway, “Owen and Scientific Reform” in Crawford Gribben and John Tweeddale (eds.), The T&T Clark Handbook of John Owen (London: T&T Clark, ), –. On final causes, see for instance Elliot Rossiter, “From Experimental Natural Philosophy to Natural Religion: Action and Contemplation in the Early Royal Society,” in Alberto Vanzo and Peter R. Anstey (eds.), Experiment, Speculation and Religion in Early Modern Philosophy (London: Routledge, ), pp. –. On the medieval concept of the book of nature, see Kellie Robertson, Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), –. See below, pp. –, for a more detailed survey of Bacon’s views on natural theology. Katherine Attie has shown in how Bacon strategically deploys the trope of a book of nature in order to pitch his scientific instauration to James I; this is not to say, however, that Bacon himself approached nature emblematically. See Katherine Attie, “Prose, Science, and Scripture: Francis Bacon’s Sacred

Introduction



instance, Bacon does not mean that he is reading divine truths in nature, but rather probing nature in a way that is quite original and most similar to legal inquisition. This approach to nature ultimately took hold in the Royal Society, which was after all modelled on the scientific society in Bacon’s  New Atlantis. In sum, “natural theology” (as it was popularly understood) changed dramatically in England over the seventeenth century, from the application of natural light to divine things to a newer, more brittle, understanding of the enterprise as the exclusive use of reason and observation to prove theological conclusions outside of any context of faith. As this book will explore in some detail, this shift also entailed a move away from the idea of nature as a book replete with divinely intended meaning and toward viewing creation plainly as works of God rather than signifying words. However, seventeenth-century prose natural theologies – and even early physico-theologies – could still buck these narrowing and calcifying trends. What is more, prose expository works were not the only places where authors and readers applied reason to theological matters. Far from being mere diversion or entertainment, lyric poetry and imaginative literature continued to offer a variety of ways of reasoning about God and creation over and against this constriction in the genre labeled “natural theology.”

The Book of Nature in Historiography and Literary Criticism For some time now, intellectual historians have argued the importance of the “book of nature” trope in understanding the historical relationship between religion and science in early modern Europe. With his much-read  The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Modern Science, Peter Harrison brought God’s “two books” of scripture and nature to the center of a long-standing discussion of a possible correlation between the

 

Texts,” in Stephen Dobranski and Lauren Shohet (eds.), Gathering Force: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Richard Serjeantson, “Francis Bacon and the ‘Interpretation of Nature’ in the Late Renaissance,” Isis , no.  (): –. See Katherine Calloway, Natural Theology in the Scientific Revolution: God’s Scientists (London: Pickering & Chatto, ), particularly the chapters on John Wilkins, Richard Baxter, and John Ray, and “‘Rather Theological than Philosophical’: John Ray’s Seminal Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation,” in Blair and von Greyerz (eds.), Physico-theology, –.



Introduction

Protestant reformation and the scientific revolution. Harrison offered a plausible mechanism for such a correlation: having started to read the Bible differently between  and , Europeans started “reading” nature differently as well. “The modern approach to text,” as he puts it, “driven by the agenda of the Reformers and disseminated through Protestant religious practices, created conditions which made possible the emergence of modern science” (). Because of the importance of what has been dubbed “Harrison’s hypothesis” to this study, here I will briefly review the medieval “before” and modern “after” of the story, recognizing that since  Harrison’s hypothesis has been challenged on various fronts and further clarified and defended, including by Harrison himself. In medieval Christian theology, a tradition developed viewing both scripture and nature as books authored by God – both of them polysemous. The African bishop St. Augustine argued in his highly influential On Christian Doctrine (c. ) that unlike humans, who could only signify with words, God could signify through things as well. This meant that human and natural history – especially the human history recorded in the Bible – had divinely intended meanings. In this view, besides having occurred at a literal level (with “literal” meaning something somewhat different than it often does today), events recorded in the Old Testament also have a moral sense telling readers how to behave in the present, an allegorical sense pointing to the story of redemption through Christ, and







The best-known (if often mischaracterized) argument for a correlation is the “Merton Thesis,” put forward by Robert K. Merton in ; a series of articles by Michael Beresford Foster arguing a correlation between theological voluntarism and modern science was also very influential in historical circles. See Steven Shapin, “Understanding the Merton Thesis,” Isis , no.  (): – and John Henry, “Voluntarist Theology at the Origins of Modern Science,” History of Science , no.  (): –. Objections to aspects of Harrison’s argument have been raised in Jitse van der Meer and Richard J. Oosterhoff, “God, Scripture, and the Rise of Modern Science (–): Notes in the Margin of Harrison’s Hypothesis,” in Jitse M. van der Meer and Scott Mandelbrote (eds.), Nature and Scripture in the Abrahamic Religions: Up to  (Leiden: Brill, ); Scott Mandelbrote, “Early Modern Biblical Interpretation and the Emergence of Science,” Science & Christian Belief , no.  (): –; and Serjeantson, “Francis Bacon and the ‘Interpretation of Nature’.” Harrison’s hypothesis remains highly influential: John Henry concludes that the “voluntarism and science thesis should stand shoulder to shoulder alongside Harrison’s thesis” in the Protestantism-andscience discussion in his “Voluntarist theology at the origins of modern science,” . Harrison reasserts his position in “Religion and the Early Royal Society,” Science & Christian Belief  (): –. For Augustine, “literal” does not mean “conforming to empirical observation” but rather, as Donne puts it, “the principal intention of the Holy Ghost” in a passage – this move does away with some Protestant bugbears such as the need for a literal six-day creation.

Introduction



often an anagogical sense pointing to the eschaton or end of time. The book of nature or “book of the creatures,” too, contained divine meaning. Drawing on a range of patristic and medieval texts, Harrison makes the case that The legacy of Augustine to the medieval world was a systematic hermeneutical method which attempted to balance the demands of literal and spiritual readings, but which ultimately gave precedence to the latter. Literal meaning was important, but subservient to spiritual meaning. The natural world, for its part, was reduced to a catalogue of naked signs, the true meaning of which was provided by scripture, reference of which lay beyond the physical world. ()

Nature in this view was chiefly a collection of divinely authored signs pointing to eternal realities. This all changed with the Protestant reformation, which emphasized the literal sense of the Bible over its spiritual senses. This emphasis on the literal spilled over to the book of nature as well. “By promoting the culture of the literal word,” Harrison explains, the Reformation “effected a dramatic contraction of the sphere of the sacred, forcibly stripping objects, natural and artificial, of the roles they had once played as bearers of meaning” (). In this intellectual climate, the sometime book of nature became instead a collection of empirically observable objects whose horizontal relationships with each other – not their vertical signification of eternal things – could be studied, and possibly mastered for human benefit. This shift in perspective enabled modern natural science to blossom: no longer so concerned about the meaning of things, natural philosophers could devote themselves to learning their physical properties and potential uses. In tandem with this stripping of meanings from nature, a number of scientific reformers grew interested in reforming language itself, toward clarity and away from polysemeity. Thus arose the mid-century effort to develop a “perfect language“ (or “philosophical language” or “universal character”). Earlier theorized by Bacon, such a language might be able to reverse the deleterious effects of the tower of Babel and transcend the many 

This part of the story is not original to Harrison. See Henri De Lubac’s Medieval Exegesis (–), trans. E. M. Macierovski and Mark Sebanc (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans and T&T Clark, ) and David Lyle Jeffrey’s People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ), –. For a spirited contrarian view of levels of meaning in medieval exegesis, see Roche, “Typology, Allegory, and Protestant Poetics,” George Herbert Journal , no.  (): –. Accommodating Roche, I speak here of “senses” rather than “levels.”



Introduction

frailties to which individual languages are heir. Free from such “discouraging” and time-wasting features as anomalous forms, idiomatic constructions, variable word order, and indefinite articles, this language would “admit easie and quick entrance to the things themselves,” not drawing attention to itself or requiring the reader to pause to determine what is signified, according to Francis Lodwick in his  Ground-Work for the Framing of a New Perfect Language (). For many scientific reformers, in sum, a multiplicity of meanings in nature or in language (biblical or otherwise) could be seen as an impediment to the pursuit of truth. Since Harrison first published his hypothesis, some scholars have reasonably questioned the idea that Protestant reformers jettisoned all nonliteral senses of scripture or that Francis Bacon viewed his project as doing the same thing to nature. The broad contours of the foregoing beforeand-after narrative remain compelling, however: my own account just above of the shifting understanding of “natural theology,” which I will elaborate over the succeeding chapters, accords with it. Nor is all of this story original to Harrison. As my footnotes have shown, other scholars have considered the medieval Christian semiotics in which the natural world is pointing to the divine, for instance, as well as the seventeenthcentury phenomenon of artificial languages. The old “book of nature” trope has likewise received attention from numerous intellectual historians. This book therefore sets out assuming that early modern England 



 

Harrison, The Bible, –; see also Rhodri Lewis. Language, Mind, and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ) and Katherine Calloway, “Imagining the Scientific Revolution in England,” in Stephen B. Dobranski (ed.), Political Turmoil: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Other linguistic reformers included John Wilkins and Samuel Hartlib, both founding members of the Royal Society. Even the natural historian John Ray assisted his friend Wilkins with his “universal character” project, but Ray does not seem to have been enthusiastic about artificial languages himself: see Calloway, Natural Theology, – and . See n.  above. See for instance Alexander W. Hall, “Natural Theology in the Middle Ages,” in Brooke, Manning, and Watts (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology, –; William B. Ashworth, Jr., “Natural History and the Emblematic World View,” in David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (eds.), Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –; James J. Bono, “Science, Discourse, and Literature: The Role/Rule of Metaphor in Science,” in Stuart Peterfreund (ed.), Literature and Science: Theory and Practice (Boston: Northeastern University Press, ), –; Kevin Killeen and Peter J. Forshaw (eds.), The Word and the World: Biblical Exegesis and Early Modern Science (London: Palgrave Macmillan, ); van der Meer and Mandelbrote, Nature and Scripture in the Abrahamic Traditions; and Kathleen Crowther, “The Lutheran Book of Nature,” in David Hawkes and Richard G. Newhauser (eds.), The Book of Nature and Humanity in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, ), –.

Introduction



did in fact see coordinated assault on the polysemeity of words and things, whether conscious and fully realized or not. In such circumstances, poets, who worked in words, might well take a keen interest in the manner and progress of scientific reform. This book thus considers seventeenth-century English poets’ engagement with the book of nature, exploring how they questioned, challenged, or (perhaps paradoxically) supported scientific reform through both the form and content of their works. Literature and Natural Theology in Early Modern England is therefore literary criticism more than historiography, though it has much to say to historians of science and religion, who generally focus on expository prose rather than imaginative literature and lyric poetry in characterizing the thought of the period. Of course, evolving conceptions of the relationships between words, things, and truth are of interest to literary critics. First and foremost, this book shows how seventeenth-century English literary authors were defining, challenging, and practicing natural theology at a time when natural theology was developing spectacularly. To date, critics have occasionally noted passages that indicate an author’s interest in natural theology, but none have sustainedly studied this aspect of seventeenth-century English literature. Before doing this work in the following chapters, here I will briefly mention some broader ways in which literary critics, professing readers of poetry, have approached the book of nature, and then extract from this discourse some of the key questions my book will ask of seventeenth-century English texts. Broadly, the most relevant literary-critical discussions center around “emblem,” “allegory,” “typology,” and (later) “ecology.” The first three of these terms have to do with texts’ pointing to nonliteral meanings – just 





Historians working on early modern science and religion do occasionally refer to literary texts: Harrison repeatedly mentions George Herbert, for instance (The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Modern Science, , , –, , and ), and Scott Mandelbrote brings up Bunyan (“Early Modern Biblical Interpretation and the Emergence of Science,” ). Herbert seems to have particular cross-disciplinary appeal: the theologian/historian Alister McGrath recently published “The Famous Stone: The Alchemical Tropes of George Herbert’s ‘The Elixir’ in Their Late Renaissance Context,” George Herbert Journal , nos. & (/): –, and Herbert appears repeatedly in Oliver O’Donovan’s three-volume Ethics as Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, –). Relevant studies will be cited in the following body chapters, but see for instance commentaries: on Vaughan, Alan Rudrum’s The Complete Poems (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), ; Nigel Smith, The Poems of Andrew Marvell (London: Routledge, ), , ; and Helen Wilcox, The English Poems of George Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . Rebecca Davis does something similar with a medieval literary text with her Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), and Colin Jager considers the state of the book of nature in the Romantic period in his The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ).



Introduction

as the book of nature was once thought to do – rather than straightforwardly representing material reality. And just like the book of nature, literary texts’ allegorical potential was exploited less and less in the transition from medieval to modern: such thoroughly and unapologetically allegorical works as morality plays Piers Plowman and the Fairie Queene gave way to the novel, and “allegorical” even came to be an insult of sorts in popular culture. Unsurprisingly given these trends, scholars working on medieval and early modern literature have been the most tuned in to the idea of nature as a book. E. R. Curtius, for instance, devoted a section of his magisterial Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter () to the idea of the book of nature up through Donne, and the best-known Chaucer scholar of the twentieth century, D. W. Robertson, observed that to Augustine’s mind “creatures are, in a way, the voice of God.” Henri De Lubac’s four-volume Exégèse médiévale (–), the most thorough exposition of the medieval quadriga or fourfold exegesis of scripture, also repeatedly recurs to this tradition of creatures as significant of eternal truth. Entire literary studies in the middle of the twentieth century were devoted to the iconic, emblematic, or allegorical in English or European literature; these considered how literary texts might adumbrate eternal realities through pictorial or textual “emblems” or allegorical narratives. Though most concerned with literal books, these critics consistently observe that natural objects too might also be viewed as pointing to eternal realities in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. To a person they discuss Augustine, and several view Bunyan (with whom I conclude this 



 

Two examples: in a  episode of Murder, She Wrote titled “Fixer Upper” (season , episode ), Jessica Fletcher is horrified to discover a play she is about to attend is an allegory. In the  film A Knight’s Tale, when the character Geoffrey Chaucer says he has written something allegorical, his friends assure him, “We won’t hold that against you.” Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ), –; D.W. Robertson Jr., A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ), . De Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, e.g. i:– and ; ii:. See Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books (London: Chatto & Windus, ), –; Bernard F. Huppé, Doctrine and Poetry: Augustine’s Influence on Old English Poetry (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, ), –; William Madsen, From Shadowy Types to Truth: Studies in Milton’s Symbolism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), –; and Peter M. Daly, Literature in the Light of the Emblem [], second edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), e.g. , –, –, , . Though not dealing with the “book of nature” trope, Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s The Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the Effect of the “New Science” upon Seventeenth-Century Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, ) also deserves mention here for her sustained attention to the metaphor of sublunar microcosm to eternal realities in seventeenth-century English authors such as Donne and Vaughan.

Introduction



book) as an end or turning point in the emblematic or allegorical tradition. This broad scholarly interest in allegory and the “books” of scripture and nature has carried on, with a notable recent contribution bringing the literary career of allegory directly into conversation with the lively interdisciplinary inquiry into “secularization” in which Peter Harrison participates. In his  Allegory & Enchantment: An Early Modern Poetics, Jason Crawford considers allegory in the English literary tradition from Piers Plowman (c. ) to Pilgrim’s Progress (), showing how these texts evince a “disenchantment” of the natural world, as theorized by the sociologist Max Weber and philosopher Charles Taylor. Arriving at last at Bunyan, Crawford argues that Pilgrim’s Progress is “an experiment in removing the sacred from the material realm” and relocating it instead in the self. Though allegorical itself, the work points to the demise of an allegorical understanding of nature. Whether best viewed as a scientific revolution, a disenchantment, or a new hermeneutic of the book of nature, changes in how humans viewed the natural world between  and  now frequently interest literary critics because these changes appear highly problematic from our standpoint. Particularly since Carolyn Merchant’s foundational Death of Nature appeared in , “green” literary critics have explored how authors engaged with the nonhuman world, frequently (and viably) casting Francis Bacon as a villain who sanctioned human violation of a feminized Nature. Against this grim backdrop, many seventeenth-century poets appear as heroes who saw the danger early and sounded the alarm: poets such as John Donne, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, Andrew Marvell, 



 

E.g. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski’s influential theorization of a typological “Protestant poetics” in early modern England in Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ) and David Jeffrey’s use of medieval exegesis to speak back to the poststructural literary theory in People of the Book, xi–. Along with Harrison’s thesis about a “contraction in the realm of the sacred,” in The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Modern Science, notable works on secularization include Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press at Harvard, ), Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), David A. Hollinger’s “Christianity and Its American Fate: Where History Interrogates Secularization Theory,” in Joel Isaac, et al. (eds.), The Worlds of American Intellectual History (New York: Oxford University Press, ), and a volume edited by Harrison, Narratives of Secularization (London: Routledge, ). Jason Crawford, Allegory and Enchantment: An Early Modern Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . For a consideration of the disenchantment of nature in this period from an ecocritical standpoint, see Todd Borlik, Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature: Green Pastures (London: Routledge, ), –; for an ecocritical study sensitive to the analogy between nature and physical texts, see Joshua Calhoun, The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ).



Introduction

and Henry Vaughan, these critics have argued, offer helpful challenges and alternatives to Bacon’s domineering view of nature. Into this theological discourse, Robert N. Watson has brought theology with his  Back to Nature, a sweeping study of efforts by European authors and artists to “re-immerse [themselves] in the natural order” between  and . Watson aligns with Peter Harrison and other historians in highlighting the synergy between religious and Baconian scientific reform, at least early on, arguing that Protestantism can be viewed as “a prophecy of a future in which the word would declare itself independent and self-sufficient, pushing aside the material connections of the traditional Christian belief system and eventually establishing its autonomous state.” Against this subjectivizing and dissociation, authors such as Shakespeare and the Cavalier poets worked to preserve the traditional, integrative world-picture, in which nature pointed to eternal truth. Conversely, in Watson’s view, Donne’s conceits are acts of “cognitive aggression” that parallel rather than oppose Baconian reform. He argues that metaphysical poetry “expresses a radical Protestant faith in the revolutionary power of self and word.” In these revolutionary, newly subjective circumstances, Watson recognizes the difficulty of truly “seeing” nature without doing violence, hitting a natural-theological note as he summarizes the problem: “to see without prejudice and subjectivity is to have no self; to look upon God is to die . . . and there is no way to look on anything piously without seeing (through however dark a glass) the face of God.” Early modern authors thus faced the difficulty of seeing God in nature in a context rife with new ways to deface and misinterpret nature. This book is focused on natural theology rather than ecology: the ultimate aim of natural theology is seeing the face of God – gaining knowledge of God through creation – rather than the flourishing of that creation. However, one contention of this book is that the latter can become a subordinate goal of these early modern authors, some of whom 





These studies will come up when relevant in the following chapters, but to name some critics who have written in this vein: Anthony J. Funari, Catherine Gimelli Martin, Desiree Hellegers, Alan Rudrum, Diane Kelsey McColley, and Ken Hiltner. This is not to say that literary critics are always reactionaries and cast poets as reactionaries too; there is also a burgeoning literature showing ways in which early modern English poets were in sympathy with aspects of the new science and helped advance (at least some of ) its aims: for instance, books and articles by Karen Edwards, John Rogers, Catherine Gimelli Martin, Joanna Picciotto, Angelica Duran, Dennis Danielson, Stephen M. Fallon, Katherine Attie, and Martin Dzelainis. Robert N. Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), ; he explicitly asserts an alliance between empiricism and Protestantism on –.  Ibid., , . Ibid., .

Introduction



come to reject the nature-despising aspect of Calvinist theology in their quest to “know God aright,” as Milton puts it. This book thus complements the important work of early modern ecocritics, adding different authors and considering in more depth the theological aspect of these poets’ engagement with nature and experimental science. In some cases (Cavendish and Marvell, namely), the notable insight is how little theology enters into the picture. Many of these authors, however, were highly motivated by their theological commitments. For instance, one question this book will keep in view concerns the theological status of nonhuman creation: Do nonhuman creatures, such as plants and beasts, have a place in eternity? A seventeenth-century English Calvinist orthodoxy has been identified wherein nonhuman creation is viewed as belonging only to a temporal order that will pass away, lowering the stakes involved in caring for the earth and its nonhuman inhabitants. Some authors dissented from this “orthodoxy,” however, and I will show that they often did this from within the Christian faith rather than without, agreeing with John Ray that the contemplation of God’s creatures will be one of humans’ activities in heaven. Even more surprisingly, some authors appear to have changed their views on this question over their poetic careers, coming to view nonhuman creation as ultimately bound for renewal rather than annihilation. The theological status of humans relative to other creatures was similarly contested in seventeenth-century England, and poets are well situated to explore this topic. Francis Bacon pointed out that only humans are said in the Bible to bear God’s image. What does this mean? Are we alone able to perceive and worship the divine, a kind of “world’s high priest,” as George Herbert put it? Or do we share this ability with other creatures, though perhaps in a different mode? What might be our responsibility to those creatures? Is it our job to care for them, for instance, or to leave them alone – or do they simply exist for our benefit? What would it be like to be a nonhuman creature? For that matter, what would it be like to be God? 



See Alan Rudrum, “Henry Vaughan, the Liberation of the Creatures, and Seventeenth-Century English Calvinism,” The Seventeenth Century , no.  (): – and “For then the Earth shall be all Paradise: Milton, Vaughan and the Neo-Calvinists on the Ecology of the Hereafter,” Scintilla  (): –. Diane McColley refers to “a Calvinist theology holding that the natural world was made exclusively for the sustenance of the human soul,” in “Milton and Ecology,” in Thomas N. Corns (ed.), A New Companion to Milton (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, ), . Such questions are at the forefront of ecotheology; see e.g. Celia Deane-Drummond and David Clough (eds.), Creaturely Theology: On God, Humans and Other Animals (London: SCM Press, ) and Norman Wirzba, From Nature to Creation: A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, ).



Introduction

As world-builders, poets are uniquely able to consider divine creation from this angle, theorizing about the relationship between creature and creator and the ways that created things might point to (or hide) truths about who made them. Unsurprisingly, seventeenth-century English poets return to these questions again and again, sometimes challenging the views of natural philosophers, who for their part increasingly claimed a special ability to access divine truth in nature as scientific reforms took hold in the culture. For if philosophers were better able to discern divine design in the order and fitness of nature, there were other ways in which poets might have the advantage: By nature of its form, poetry might be able to access insights and audiences simply out of the reach of expository prose. Literary authors can imaginatively set features of the book of nature in front of readers, and they can model, praise, and blame what they view as appropriate and inappropriate ways of reading it – showing rather than telling how nature points to theological truth. Poets also have a special purchase on the aesthetic, a dimension of nature that authors of natural theology discussed, but stiltingly, sometimes resorting to quoting poets. How might beauty function in the human apprehension of truth through nature? Where does it fit in the project of natural theology? Finally, while many scientific reformers were doing away with the polysemeity of words and things, poets often reveled in metaphorical possibilities. Without contradicting new discoveries in the physical realm, these authors suggested that physical mechanism and eternal meaning might be a “both/and” rather than an “either/or.”

Literature and Natural Theology in Seventeenth-Century England This book is divided into two parts: “Metaphysical Poets” and “Imagined Worlds.” Lyric poetry, the emphasis of the first part, typically engages more directly with the natural world authored by God. These authors place features of that world in front of readers for theological contemplation. Three poets that have often been called “metaphysical” offer especially rich examples for considering how poetry can speak to naturaltheological concerns: Though differing from each other in many respects, John Donne, George Herbert, and Henry Vaughan are united by an intense interest in the theological import of nature, including their own nature. Chapter  focuses on Donne, considering natural theology in his secular poetry as well as his Anniversaries, Essayes in Divinity, sermons, and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. Considering Donne biographically,

Introduction



while he shows a commitment to reading the book of nature throughout his career, a skeptical and noncommittal attitude toward apprehension of the divine in the sensible world apparent in the Songs and Sonnets is replaced by a clearer and more hopeful tone in the Essayes, with Donne further developing his theological insights about the book of nature in his sermons and the Devotions. Donne provides a lively poetic alternative to the way of reading the book of nature concurrently developed by Bacon and deserves to be included in the historical study of natural theology at the dawn of the design argument. Chapters  and  then turn to George Herbert and Henry Vaughan, devotional lyric poets who consciously followed in Donne’s footsteps in the intellectually and politically chaotic years following his death. A friend of Francis Bacon who self-professedly knew “the ways of learning,” Herbert regularly draws the attention of scholars interested in his views on Baconian experimentalism in particular and the advancement of learning in general, but no one has yet explored Herbert’s treatment of natural theology, even though he remarks on the capacity of nature to “speak” God in his earliest extant poetry. Herbert’s relative suspicion of nature shows clearly when one turns from his devotional lyrics to those of his nature-loving literary disciple Vaughan. Chapter  considers these two poets’ foundational views of science and nature in their widely read devotional lyrics, showing how Vaughan consciously reverses Herbert’s more Baconian construal of the relationships between humans, nature, and God. While Herbert tended to view nonhuman creation as merely temporal and bound for conflagration, Vaughan instead cast nonhumans as having a place in eternity and bound for regeneration. Chapter  then focuses more specifically on Herbert and Vaughan’s treatment of natural theology. Ultimately, Herbert and Vaughan do not just hint at what kind of natural theology might be possible or edifying given their respective understandings of science and nature. Both authors practice natural theology as well. Herbert views natural theology along the lines his friend Bacon had laid down, anticipating – and even influencing – the early physico-theology of Henry More and John Ray. Though he explicitly rejected Bacon’s bracketing of natural theology, Herbert increasingly dispensed with the trope of the book of nature in preference of a Baconian “household” or “cabinet” of nature, full of things subject to human ingenuity and use. Vaughan, by contrast, recovers the older notion that more theological insight is available in nature than just the facts of God’s existence and providence. Vaughan accordingly makes less of a distinction than had Herbert between nature and scripture, portraying



Introduction

natural theology as a collaborative endeavor undertaken by God, humans, and nonhuman creation together. Both poets ultimately agree, however, that creation should be a source of theological insight for humans. The second part of the monograph, “Imagined Worlds,” turns to consider how longer works such as biblical epic and allegory create their own worlds, and then explore the possibilities for natural theology inside of those. As creations themselves, these works encourage readers to think analogically about the process and products of divine creation while continuing to take up the questions about nature and the divine that faced the lyric poets. To start, Chapter  will explore an array of poetic works in several genres before the final two chapters of the book focus, respectively, on Milton and Bunyan. Chapter  raises the question, How well can God’s “design” in creation be understood through the lens of human creativity? This question gained in urgency as natural philosophers began to argue for the existence and power of God based on observable evidence of design in the natural world, a line of reasoning that assumed humans and God can “design” in similar ways. Here I consider several poetic works that have much to say about divine and human creation: Margaret Cavendish’s genre-defying Blazing World, biblical epics by Guillaume du Bartas and Lucy Hutchinson, and “local poetry” by John Denham and Andrew Marvell. These works evince a range of views regarding the relationship between divine and human creation, with more reformed authors emphasizing the difference between divine and human creation and less reformed ones (such as Du Bartas and Denham) emphasizing their similarity. An author may view divine activity as so detached from human language and knowledge that any comparison or discussion of divine creativity is meaningless. This group includes Cavendish and possibly Marvell. In contrast with this position, which precludes natural theology, Hutchinson retains the medieval view that there is an analogical relationship between God and humans, making natural theology worthwhile but not logically compelling. Chapter  then turns from a broader consideration of a variety of poetic works to the most influential biblical epic in English: Milton’s Paradise Lost. Recent work on Milton has shown harmony between the content and form of Paradise Lost and the methods and aims of modern science. However, an underappreciated strand of scientific reform still needs to be integrated into our understanding of Milton’s relationship to science: a Baconian marginalization of natural theology. By working against this trend, Milton aligns himself instead with those scientific reformers who

Introduction



promoted natural theology, providing in Paradise Lost a rubric for applying human science to theological understanding while resisting the anthropocentrism and modern notion of reason that undergirded many contemporary prose works of natural theology. In contrast with contemporaries who emphasized the evidence of divine power in nature, Milton insists that love is the divine attribute most visible in creation, even outside of Eden. A natural theology that discerns divine love is more at home in Milton’s poetic world than in the increasingly reductive material reality on which works of physico-theology drew. Continuing the theme of imagined worlds, Chapter  will explore how natural theology worked itself out in the imagination of John Bunyan, whose allegory has arguably been as influential in the Protestant world as physico-theology itself. Like proponents of natural theology such as Robert Boyle and John Ray, Bunyan saw consideration of nature as a means of gaining theological understanding: Bunyan’s appreciation of the natural world grew, in fact, between publication of the first part of Pilgrim’s Progress () and the second part () and his Book for Boys and Girls (). But Bunyan differed consistently from the physicotheologians in his understanding of nature’s ideal audience and how far nature could bring people toward salvation. Unlike some contemporary natural philosophers, Bunyan held that no special training was required to derive theological truth nature. In fact, women and children could do this. To derive any benefit from nature, however, a person’s conscience needed to have been “awakened” to faith. Bunyan’s treatment of nature differs, on the one hand, from earlier emblem texts in which images were printed in the book – requiring no direct experience of the natural world – and, on the other, from physico-theology, which increasingly required an expert’s understanding of that world. Considering within his imagined worlds many of the same creatures as proponents of physico-theology, Bunyan takes the stance of a childlike pupil of nature rather than a master extorting information. Bunyan is the final literary author considered in Part II of Literature and Natural Theology in Early Modern England. An epilogue will then cast an eye over the foregoing century and assess how things had changed by its end. “Natural theology” now looked very different: compendious readings of the book of nature gave way to physico-theology with its agenda of proving God’s existence by an appeal to design in the details of nature as uncovered by natural science. Literature looked different too, as authors of fiction similarly set increasingly higher premiums on detail and realism. These parallel developments crystallized in Richard Bentley, who gave the



Introduction

inaugural Boyle Lectures in natural theology in . Bentley aimed to prove the truth of Christianity based on Newtonian physics. Like the texts he studied as a philologist, he saw the book of nature as a puzzle to be comprehended and solved. But Bentley’s example is not the only way literature and natural theology could be brought together. The Reformation’s emphasis on the letter of nature, the composition and operations of material phenomena, allowed imaginative authors to reconsider creatures as God’s good creation in themselves and not mere symbols. What is more, poetry could go places prose scientific and natural theological treatises could not reach: Poets were free to continue finding spiritual truth in nature even as they accepted and incorporated new scientific knowledge into their works. They could do this because they viewed God’s book of nature not as a flat prose treatise with a single and unchanging set of spiritual referents, but as a great, dramatic poem.

 

Metaphysical Poets

 

A “Metaphorical God” and the Book of Nature John Donne on Natural Theology

God shows this inconsiderate man, his book of Creatures, which he may run and reade; that is, he may go forward in his vocation, and yet see that every creature calls him to a consideration of God. Every Ant that he sees, askes him, Where had I this providence, and industry? Every flower that he sees, asks him, where had I this beauty, this fragrancy, this medicinall virtue in me? Every creature calls him to consider, what great things God hath done in little subjects.

Sermon Preached upon Whitsunday

In , perhaps a little earlier, the soon-to-be ordained John Donne wrote an extended commentary on Genesis and Exodus that would be published after his death under the title Essayes in Divinity. The precise genre of the work has proven difficult to establish: Are these “essays” in the sense in which Michel de Montaigne and Sir Francis Bacon had used the word, or in the bare sense of attempts – in this case, Donne’s attempts to prepare himself to be a divine by undertaking more sustained and systematic engagement with scripture than he had yet done? Whatever the work may be, Donne takes time in his introductory reflections to contrast the Bible with God’s two other “books”: the mysterious “register of his Elect” and “another book subordinate to [scripture], which is liber creaturarum.” Citing the Theologia Naturalis sive Liber Creaturarum of the fifteenthcentury monk Raymond of Sebond, Donne comments on the relative accessibility of this “book”: And so much is this book available to the other, that Sebund, when he had digested this book into a written book, durst pronounce, that it was an Art, which teaches al things, presupposes no other, is soon learned, cannot be



John Donne, The Sermons of John Donne,  vols., ed. George Potter and Evelyn Simpson (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, –), ix:–.





Metaphysical Poets forgotten, needs no witnesses, and in this, is safer than the Bible it self, that it cannot be falsified by Hereticks.

As a propaedeutic to a series of considered reflections on the Bible, itself likely conducted in preparation for his religious vocation, Donne tackles the subject of natural theology. This is by no means the only time he does so – in poetry or prose – but this subject has not received sustained critical attention. In focusing our attention on Donne’s view of natural theology, especially from  onward, I wish to stress two convictions. First, considering Donne biographically, I argue that while there is important continuity in Donne’s career (insofar as he engages with the book of nature throughout), his vocational turn in the years – refocuses, reshapes, and intensifies that engagement: the skeptical and noncommittal attitude toward apprehension of the divine in the sensible world that can be traced in the Songs and Sonnets is replaced by a clearer and altogether more hopeful tone in the Essayes, with Donne further developing his insights about the book of nature in his sermons and the Devotions. Second, I argue that Donne’s insights deserve to be included in historical studies of natural theology in early modern England and that his exclusion has been partly facilitated by scholarly emphasis on his earlier work, although this is changing. An understanding of Donne’s engagement with natural theology helps to illuminate his fascinating relationship with the “new philosophy” in general and Bacon in particular. Scholarship on the Anniversaries – poems that present the world as in as state of decay and human knowledge as feeble – puts Donne directly into conversation with Bacon, contrasting 





John Donne, Essayes in Divinity, ed. Anthony Raspa (Montreal: McGill–Queens University Press, ), –. Raspa seems to suggest in his introduction (xxxiii) that Sebond popularized the “three books” found in Donne’s Essayes, but Sebond mentions only two: “Duo sunt libri, nobis dati a Deo.” In Raimondus Sabundus, Theologia Naturalis seu Liber Creaturarum (Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, ), . The change is evident in other ways in the appearance of new scholarly editions of Donne’s prose and later works. Besides Raspa’s  edition of the Essayes – which he sees as a step toward correcting the twentieth-century preoccupation with “the witticism of [Donne’s] verse” – Oxford University Press is now issuing new volumes of Donne’s sermons; there is also a new edition of Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions () in John Donne, ed. Janel M. Mueller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. In tandem with these editions, a number of recent critics are more focused on Donne’s intellectual context and contributions than were earlier generations and take up his later works. His most famous pronouncements about natural philosophy appear in the Anniversaries (–), though the Essayes and Ignatius his Conclave both deal with the topic as well. On Ignatius his Conclave, see n.  below.

A “Metaphorical God” and the Book of Nature



Bacon’s empirical (and monarchical) optimism with Donne’s relatively sober views. Donne’s view of the natural world, how well it can be known, how it is best studied, and why it is to be studied at all, is bound up with his view of natural theology, an enterprise that in early seventeenth-century England was poised for a spectacular transformation and meteoric rise in popularity. As my Introduction outlined, the new species of natural theology that developed in this climate (and which owed something to Bacon) would capitalize on the findings of empirical science in order to “demonstrate” the factuality of Christianity. In this chapter, I place Donne’s natural theology in its late Renaissance context before comparing his views with those of Bacon, tracing how Donne provides an alternative vision for the apprehension of God through creation. This alternative natural theology rests on Donne’s understanding of the relationships between God, nature, and the human inquirer, in which he differs fundamentally from Bacon. The creator that emerges in Donne’s writings is not an arbitrary lawgiver whose existence and power can be inferred from scrutiny and dissection of the created world; instead, Donne’s creator is a poet, and the natural world is a divine poem in which his wit and wisdom can be discerned by the willing and wondering reader.

Natural Theology in Renaissance Europe Just as writers in Renaissance Europe held a variety of views on the book of scripture – who could read and interpret it, and what kind of authority it possessed – they also held a variety of views on how and to whom the natural world might reveal theological truth. Before turning to Donne on the topic of natural theology, it is helpful to consider some of the major positions through which he was sifting in the years prior to his ordination: in particular, those of Sebond, Montaigne, Calvin, and Bacon. These 

Catherine Gimelli Martin argues that Donne sought to counter the optimistic program of empirical learning outlined in Bacon’s Advancement by affirming the widely accepted contemptus mundi tradition, and Desiree Hellegers yokes that program with Bacon’s monarchical absolutism, giving Donne (she argues) yet more reason to challenge Baconian thought in his elegy. See Martin, “The Advancement of Learning and the Decay of the World: A New Reading of Donne’s First Anniversary,” John Donne Journal  (): –; and Hellegers, Handmaid to Divinity: Natural Philosophy, Poetry, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century England (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, ), –. Since this body of work appeared, Ryan Netzley has argued in “Learning from Anniversaries: Progress, Particularity, and Radical Empiricism in John Donne’s The Second Anniversarie,” Connotations , no.  (/): –, that the Second Anniversarie (unlike the First Anniversarie) argues for a “more radical empiricism” than Bacon’s in challenging universals. Such a program would also undercut Baconian science by denying the reproducibility of the results of experimentation. On this tension in Bacon, see p. .



Metaphysical Poets

writers held a variety of views on the central questions of natural theology: () To what extent can knowledge of God be gained by means other than special revelation, and (crucially) can this knowledge precede saving faith, or is it available only to those with faith? () How is that knowledge best acquired: through deduction from first principles (or a sensus divinitatis) or induction from external observation? And () if the natural world is to be “read” for knowledge of its creator, how should this reading be conducted? As explained in the Introduction, at this time an older, allegorical understanding of nature’s relationship to the divine was gradually giving way to a view of nature as a web of causal relations generally evincing divine power and providence. Donne was among the earliest and most notable figures to consider the implications of this shift, already evident in the writings of Bacon. Given the tendency of Reformation thinking to question human rational faculties as well as human agency, it is not surprising that the most ambitious recent work of natural theology known to Donne was written instead by a Catholic. Sebond (or Raimundo Sibiunda or Sebundus, d. ) was a learned Catalan monk whose Liber naturae sive creaturarum or Theologia Naturalis first appeared in print in . The book exerted a significant influence on Renaissance Catholics and popularized the term “theologia naturalis” as denoting theology carried out by means other than special revelation. In it Sebond made the strikingly optimistic claim that all necessary tenets of Christian faith could be inferred from the book of creatures alone: This science teaches all men really to know without effort or difficulty all necessary truths concerning mankind: concerning both man and God and everything which is necessary to man for his health and flourishing, and in order that he may enter into eternal life.

The book purports not only to prove infallibly God’s existence and perfection but also to demonstrate the Trinity without recourse to special revelation, making it among the most ambitious works of natural theology in Christian history. The book “contained all the key features of medieval natural theology,” reprising both scholastic arguments deducing God’s  

Thomas Woolford, “Natural Theology in the Late Renaissance” (PhD Diss., University of Cambridge, ), –. Sebundus, Theologia Naturalis, Prologus : “Ista scientia docet omnem hominem cognoscere realiter sine difficultate et labore omnem veritatem homini necessariam tam de homine quam de deo et omnia quae sunt necessaria homini ad salutem et suam perfectionem et ut perueniat ad vitam aeternam.” Translations of Sebond are mine.

A “Metaphorical God” and the Book of Nature



existence and more inductive consideration of the external world. Another key feature of the Theologia Naturalis is the special precedence it gives to humans, as the image of God and the microcosm of the universe and therefore as the appropriate starting point for reasoning about the divine: “for man proves all things by himself.” Though it rehearses medieval arguments, the book was at home – and frequently read – in the Renaissance. Sebond’s work is now best known through Montaigne’s Apologie de Raymond Sebond, published in the  edition of his Essays, but Donne had at least some direct experience with Sebond’s original. Montaigne wrote the Apologie after translating Theologia Naturalis for his father, emending parts of the introduction to make it less liable to the sanctions occasionally imposed on it by the Catholic Church. His most famous emendation of Sebond is in writing that the book of creatures teaches “almost everything” where Sebond had emphatically claimed that it teaches “all things.” When Donne considers the book of creatures in opening his Essayes in Divinity, he quotes Sebond as claiming that it “teaches al things,” and he further cites a passage from chapter  (on the sufficiency of natural theology for salvation), before evaluating this claim. Donne was thus familiar with Sebond’s original argument and not only the mitigated version found in Montaigne’s translation and his Apologie. Montaigne’s own attitude toward natural theology, and indeed all human knowledge, was famously skeptical, and his influence on Donne – especially early in his life – is well documented. Montaigne has been called “the most apologetic of apologists,” and arguably his essay on Sebond does more to undermine natural theology than to promote it. Nonetheless, Montaigne affirms that God can be seen in creation, asserting that “it is not credible that this whole machine should not have on it some      



Woolford, “Natural Theology in the Late Renaissance,” . Ibid., ; Woolford notes that the Latin text of the (originally Catalan-Latin) book was published at least four times by  and at least thirteen times by . Ibid., . The book was censored not for intellectual presumption but for Sebond’s claim that the consummation of revelation was in scripture, which might undermine papal authority. M. A. Screech, “Introduction,” in The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, ed. M. A. Screech (London: Allen Lane, ), xxiii–xxiv, lv, emphasis mine. Donne, Essayes in Divinity, . See for instance Robert Ornstein, “Donne, Montaigne, and Natural Law,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology , no.  (): –; John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –; and Harold Skulsky, review of John Donne: Body and Soul, by Ramie Targoff, Modern Philology , no.  (): –. Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne, ed. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ), –.

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marks imprinted by the hand of this great architect . . . He says himself, that his invisible operations he manifests to us by the visible.” While not as sanguine as Sebond, Montaigne affirms that natural theology might function as a propaedeutic to faith if not a substitute for it: Faith, coming to color and illumine Sebond’s arguments, makes them firm and solid; they are capable of serving as a start and a first guide to an apprentice to set him on the road to this knowledge; they fashion him to some extent and make him capable of the grace of God, by means of which our belief is afterward completed and perfected.

If Montaigne spends the bulk of his Apologie attacking human knowledge and presumption, an attack that culminates in his famous Que scay-je? (What do I know?), this cannot safely be taken as canceling those earlier claims; rather, in the tradition of Pyhrronian skepticism, Montaigne advances competing claims and refuses to resolve the tension in one direction or another. Perhaps surprisingly, Calvin’s treatment of natural theology can be seen in a similar light. Calvin considers natural theology most systematically in the opening sections of the Institutes of the Christian Religion (–), though he takes up the subject in commentaries and sermons as well. Because of Calvin’s emphasis on the disastrous effects of sin on human reason as well as external nature, the question for him is not whether natural knowledge can give sufficient knowledge of the divine, or even whether it might lead one to faith, but whether natural knowledge has any theological worth at all – for instance, as edifying believers. Given this soteriological pessimism, the stress Calvin lays on natural theology, and the time he spends unfolding its operations, is intriguing. He asserts emphatically, first, that all humans have a sensus divinitatis, an innate sense of God’s existence and sovereignty, citing the most depraved atheists’ fear of the divine as evidence for this. (Notably, in the sections of the Institutes treating natural theology, ..–.., Calvin draws evidence from extrabiblical sources, mirroring natural theological reasoning.) Second, besides having “sowed in men’s minds that seed of religion,” God has also “revealed himself and daily discloses himself in the whole workmanship

 

 Montaigne, The Complete Essays, . Ibid., . See for instance Calvin’s commentary on Psalm : (“The heavens declare the glory of God”) and sermon on Job :– in John Calvin, Sermons on Job (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, ), –.

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of the universe.” Like Sebond, Calvin gives centrality of place in this general revelation to man, “not ineptly called . . . a microcosm because he is a rare example of God’s power, goodness, and wisdom.” The man who is “loath to descend within himself to find God” is therefore especially undeserving of pardon (..). Throughout Calvin stresses the ubiquity of God’s natural revelation. Morally depraved people cannot quash their inner sense of a divine creator; nor can intellectually deficient people fail to see God in creation, for “men cannot open their eyes without being compelled to see him.” Although those with training in “astronomy, medicine, and all natural science” can “penetrate with their aid far more deeply into the secrets of divine wisdom,” God’s self-revelation in creation is such that all can see it: “Upon his individual works he has engraved unmistakable marks of his glory,” Calvin declares, “that even unlettered and stupid folk cannot plead the excuse of ignorance” (..). The division Calvin makes between virtuosi and the uneducated is interesting and would remain an important distinction in seventeenth-century natural theology. Clearly he would side with those who held that God’s wisdom, power, and goodness are visible enough to all regardless of scientific acumen. There is a clear echo here of Romans .: “For [God’s] invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” But Calvin seems to undercut all the force of this claim in the Institutes when he goes on (as Paul had done in Romans) to describe the debilitating effects of sin, which obscures both the inner sensus divinitatis and the human capacity to infer God’s existence and attributes form external creation. Immediately after discussing the sensus divinitatis in ., he titles ., “This knowledge is either smothered or corrupted, partly by ignorance, partly by malice.” Due to these forces, the knowledge planted in the 

 

Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, ), –. Henceforth quotations from the Institutes will be cited parenthetically within the text by book, chapter, and section. For a discussion of Calvin’s engagement with natural philosophy, see Davis A. Young, John Calvin and the Natural World (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, ). For instance, as will be discussed in Chapter , Robert Boyle would claim that to read the book of nature for theological meaning requires “something of Dexterousness and Sagacity that is not very ordinary” (Occasional Reflections upon several subjects [London, ], ). By contrast, John Ray would claim in the preface to his influential The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (London, ) that arguments for God drawn from “effects and operations, exposed to every Mans view” are not only “convictive of the greatest and subtlest Adversaries, but intelligible also to the meanest capacities.”

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human mind brings forth fruit in none (..). Similarly, the knowledge of God that all humans should infer from the created world, and especially from their very selves, is “buried” by depraved humans, who “substitute nature for God” (..). (Interestingly, in the course of this discussion Calvin avers that it is not, strictly speaking, wrong to say that nature is God, but that this is a harmful thing to say, because it “involve[s] God confusedly in the inferior course of his works [...].”) Adducing examples of “filthy” human speculation on the origins of the universe, motivated by the desire to “suppress God’s name,” Calvin concludes: “Although the Lord represents both himself and his everlasting Kingdom in the mirror [speculo] of his works with very great clarity, such is our stupidity that we grow increasingly dull toward so manifest testimonies, and they flow away without profiting us” (..). In referring to the natural world as a “mirror” – an image that recurs in his oeuvre and which Donne would also use – Calvin alludes to  Corinthians .: “For now we see in a mirror darkly.” The emphasis for Calvin falls on the darkness. In sum, Calvin builds a mounting sense of the tantalizing availability, even copiousness, of natural knowledge of the Creator and, at the same time, of how such knowledge is utterly useless to humans because of sin. This approach has been seen as a “complexio oppositorum . . . absolutely constitutive as a formal determination for Calvin’s theology,” that is, a dialectical antithesis in which both components still ultimately stand. This strategy clearly shares some ground with Montaigne’s skeptical approach; but, in contrast with Montaigne’s negative emphasis on ignorance as the human condition, Calvin emphasizes humankind’s positive, willful burying of plain truth that ought to be easy to grasp. Both accounts of natural knowledge of the divine stand in stark opposition to the optimistic project of Raymond of Sebond, however, and their pessimism can be seen in Bacon’s treatment of natural theology early in the seventeenth century. Bacon introduces new threads into this old conversation, making it necessary to consider what he has to say about natural theology at some length. As he was an intellectual contemporary of Donne, Bacon has been compared and contrasted to Donne by a number of scholars, particularly on the topic of natural philosophy. It is also crucial – both  

John Newton Thomas, “The Place of Natural Theology in the Thought of John Calvin,” The Journal of Religious Thought , no.  (): . See n.  above, as well as Robert Ellrodt, “Scientific Curiosity and Metaphysical Poetry in the Seventeenth Century,” Modern Philology , no.  (): –; and Anthony J. Funari, Francis Bacon and Seventeenth-Century Intellectual Discourse (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), –.

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for understanding Donne and for understanding the interplay between natural philosophy and theology at this important historical moment – to compare the two men’s views on natural theology.

Bacon on Natural Theology Bacon deals with natural theology both explicitly and implicitly. The topic recurs explicitly throughout his writing career, from Valerius Terminus () and The Advancement of Learning () through the second edition of his Essays () to the translated and expanded version of the Advancement, De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum (), whose ninth and last book takes up “the Legitimate Use of the Human Reason in Divine Subjects.” Also pertinent are Bacon’s views on the relationships between God, nature, and humankind, expressed in these works as well as the De Sapientia Veterum () and the Novum Organum, published with Bacon’s “Plan” for his Instauratio Magna (). If one believes that God has instituted an intelligible natural law, for instance, natural theology will proceed along different lines than if one believes natural phenomena to be God’s arbitrary and wondrous works. And because natural theology involves humans asking nature to testify about the creator, it is similarly important whether nature lies passive and open to human investigation and manipulation or whether it (or she) has some revelatory – or obfuscating – agency in the process of human inquiry. These are topics on which both Bacon and Donne developed nuanced, and often diametrically opposed, positions. I focus here primarily on the views Bacon articulated before Donne pronounced on natural theology in his Essayes in Divinity, but because Donne also dealt with these topics in his poetry and other prose – particularly his sermons and the Devotions – I will not exclude Bacon’s later works. Like Montaigne and Calvin, Bacon places strict limits on natural theology in his explicit discussion of the topic. Unlike them, he does so largely to mark out territory for natural philosophy. In The Advancement of Learning, Bacon’s first systematic taxonomy of human knowledge, he defines natural theology as “that knowledge or Rudiment of knowledge concerning GOD, which may be obtained by the contemplation of his Creatures” and declares that it “sufficeth to convince Atheisme; but not to inform Religion.” This is why miracles are effective to correct superstitious people, but not to convince atheists, for the ordinary works of nature should be enough to prove that God exists. Crucially, nature cannot give

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positive information about God’s nature or will; it can only demonstrate God’s power and wisdom by the fact of its continued orderly existence and maintenance: For [heathens] supposed the world to bee the Image of God, & Man to be an extract or compendious Image of the world: But the Scriptures neuer vouch-safe to attribute to the world that honour as to bee the Image of God: but onely The worke of his hands.

Thus Bacon distances himself from the idea of an analogical relationship between God and his works and from the macrocosm/microcosm idea that had still appealed to Calvin. Bacon issues two further cautions: First, aspiring as it does to divine things, natural theology is “not safe,” for humans should give to faith those things that are faith’s, and second, the enterprise has long since been “excellently handled by diverse.” Human scientific industry had much better be directed toward natural philosophy than toward such dangerously high aspirations, for “we ought not to attempt to draw down or submit the mysteries of God to our reason; but contrariwise to raise and advance our reason to the divine truth.” Seven years later, Bacon returns to the topic of natural theology in his essay “Of Atheism” () and makes similar claims to those in the Advancement: again he asserts that the “order and beauty” of God’s works are sufficient proof of God’s existence, and he further affirms that “depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.” Thus he leaves more room than does Calvin for natural theology to be of some use to those without Christian faith, but without the optimism of Sebond, and without any interest in seeing the undertaking drawn out further. 





Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, in The Oxford Francis Bacon, iv:–. Besides this passage in The Advancement of Learning, see Valerius Terminus, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath,  vols. (London, –), iii:: “If any man shall think by view and inquiry into these sensible and material things, to attain to any light for the revealing of the nature or will of God, he shall dangerously abuse himself.” Bacon reiterates this notion many times, including in the “Plan” of the Instauratio Magna where he decries human presumption and urges empirical rigor in tracing “the Creator’s footprints and impressions upon His creatures” (“vestigiorum & sigillorum Creatoris super Creaturas,” Oxford Francis Bacon, xi:). Bacon, Oxford Francis Bacon, iv:–. Similarly, in De Sapientia Veterum (), he refers to the “crime . . . of trying to bring the divine wisdom itself under the dominion of sense and reason” (Works, vi:–). Bacon, Works, vi:. Though Bacon hoped to dissuade people from writing more works of natural theology, this passage was quoted as justification in works of natural theology written later in the century. See for instance Richard Baxter, Reasons of the Christian Religion, ; and John Wilkins, The Principles and Duties of Natural Religion, .

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Bacon never substantially alters his position on natural theology as an enterprise of august pedigree but limited use, but he further develops his thought on how one might or might not apprehend the divine in nature as he progressively sketches out his program for human science. One relevant aspect of this developing thought is his bracketing of final causes from scientific study, articulated in the Novum Organum () and De Dignitate (). In classical (Aristotelian) philosophy, the final cause of a thing is the end for which it exists; and the presence of final causes in nature implies intelligible purpose rather than sheer mechanical causation. While not denying the doctrine of final causes, Bacon avers that it is wrong to attempt to uncover or study them scientifically, for the handling of final causes in physics has driven away and overthrown the diligent inquiry of physical causes, and made men to stay upon these specious and shadowy causes, without actively pressing the inquiry of those which are really and truly physical; to the great arrest and prejudice of science.

In declaring that final causes cannot by definition be uncovered by natural philosophy, Bacon precludes any natural theology that might proceed by looking for the intelligible purpose of physical phenomena. It is characteristic of Bacon to redirect his reader’s gaze from the spiritual world to the material: while study of the divine is presumptuous, no investigation of the material world is out of bounds. Thus in De Dignitate he promotes science aimed at prolonging earthly life against those who would “make a scruple of it, as if this were a thing belonging to fate and Divine Providence,” and he launches a defense of euthanasia in cases of irremediable disease and frailty that smacks of Epicureanism. In the preface to The Advancement of Learning, he directly addresses religious objections to an ambitious scientific program by challenging one of the most often cited biblical expressions of the limitations of human learning, Ecclesiastes :: “yet cannot man find out the work that God hath wrought from the beginning even to the end.” Questioning the possibly damning implications of this passage for his program of comprehensive learning, Bacon writes, Although he [the Teacher] doth insinuate that the supreme or summary law of Nature, which he calleth, The work which God worketh from the   

Bacon, Works, iv:. See also the Novum Organum (Oxford Francis Bacon, xi:–). See my Natural Theology in the Scientific Revolution, –. Bacon, Works, iv:–. It is telling that, among the ancients, Bacon sees the atomist Democritus as wiser than Plato and Aristotle in not intermixing physics and metaphysics (Works, iv:–).



Metaphysical Poets beginning to the end, is not possible to be found out by Man; yet that doth not derogate from the capacity of the mind; but may bee referred to the impediments as of shortness of life, ill conjunction of labours, ill tradition of knowledge over from hand to hand, and many other Inconveniences, whereunto the condition of Man is subject. For that nothing parcel of the world, is denied to Mans enquirie and invention: hee doth in another place rule over.

We may note that in taking the “work which God worketh” to mean the “law of nature,” Bacon begs an important question that needs to be considered separately. His central point here, however, is that the entire natural world can in fact be comprehended by man. In his view, Solomon did not intend to limit the scientific enterprise in general but to warn individuals that they must carry out this enterprise humbly and collaboratively, over multiple generations. These limitations constitute no “contracting or coarctation, but that [humane knowledge] may comprehend all the universall nature of thinges.” The word “comprehend” carries with it a sense of aggressive grasping and exhaustive thoroughness, and it is a word Bacon liked: the Oxford English Dictionary cites him three times in defining “comprehend” in these senses. Although there is a religious dimension to Bacon’s rhetoric, this is deployed in the service of his program for advancing knowledge. For instance, in differentiating scientific illuminati from those of lower social castes (and anyone still fumbling around with Aristotle), he repeatedly attributes to the natural philosopher a godlike or priestlike ability to read nature. Here Bacon shows affinity with Calvin, who had averred that those trained in natural philosophy will see more deeply into nature than others – but Bacon downplays the theological end of seeing into nature that for Calvin would have justified the exercise. Instead, the mystical and religious-appearing powers possessed by members of Solomon’s House in the New Atlantis () are powers over the natural world, illustrating Bacon’s paradoxical appropriation of religious ritual in the service of his vision for scientific reform, not unlike his paradoxical use of rhetoric itself. This religious rhetoric does not serve any religious or mysterious  

 

 Bacon, Oxford Francis Bacon, iv:–. Ibid., iv:. Bacon’s Advancement is cited in definitions .a: “To grasp with the mind, conceive fully or adequately,” and : “Of a space, period, or amount: To take in, contain, comprise, include,” and his Essays in definition : “To lay hold of all the points of (any thing)”; OED Online, s.v. “comprehend, v.” Hellegers, Handmaid to Divinity, –. On Bacon’s view of rhetoric, see David Parry, “Francis Bacon and the Rhetorical Reordering of Reality,” in Rhetor  (): –.

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interest. It serves instead to motivate and glamorize the quest for comprehensive knowledge of “the universal nature of things,” readily accessible to natural philosophers so long as they work methodically and collaboratively. In its emphasis on an initiated scientific elite, this aspect of Bacon’s rhetoric also serves to promote and preserve social hierarchy, with King James or King Solamona at the top and the benefits of their knowledge filtering down to all humankind. Two further aspects of Bacon’s thought bear directly on natural theology: () his conception of a “supreme or summary law” of nature and, relatedly, () his view of the process by which that law is gradually apprehended through controlled experimentation and observation. Bacon’s idea of natural law is distinguished, on one side, from scholastic notions of an intelligible rational principle immanent in nature and, on the other, from an extreme voluntarist position in which every natural phenomenon is a random act of God, which would make empirical science senseless. For Bacon, as John Gascoigne explains, this law of nature was “imposed by the will of the Creator on the Creation . . . Natural objects form some sort of pattern not because there is an organic bond between them but rather because they are regimented into formation by an outside force.” In De Sapientia Veterum () Bacon asserts that there is doubtless “a single and summary law in which nature centres and which is subject and subordinate to God.” But this law cannot be assumed or derived by the human imagination. Due to its arbitrary nature, humans must humbly observe nature, working slowly upward from those observations by induction toward a grasp of this law – and from there, if necessary, to the conclusion that God exists and is powerful. To overleap this law, reasoning from individual phenomena to God, is sloppy: those who reason thus “ascend by a leap and not by steps” as they would do if they acknowledged and examined the regularity of nature. Bacon adds in his essay on atheism that this reasoning by steps from phenomena to divinity must also be comprehensive in order to be conclusive: “When the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them,” he writes, “and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them, confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity.” It is worth noting “behold” is the English 



John Gascoigne, “The Religious Thought of Francis Bacon,” in Religion and Retributive Logic: Essays in Honor of Professor Garry W. Trompf, ed. Carole M. Cusack and Christopher Hartney (Boston: Brill, ), .  Bacon, Works, vi:. Ibid., vi:.

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cognate of the Latin “comprehend”: it is a type of seeing that carries with it the notion of “grasping” a thing in its totality. The idea of a strictly regimented natural world whose behavior can be known only through observation comes through as well in Bacon’s discussion of natural theology in his essay “Of Atheism,” where he reasons that in these days of a resurgent atomic theory, it is yet more ridiculous than before to be an atheist, for an “army” of atoms could never produce such order and beauty as is seen in the world without a “divine Marshal.” Given the arbitrariness of the relationships between the divine mind, the natural world, and the human mind, humans must study the divinely marshalled world by means of further marshalling. In De Sapientia Veterum, among other places, Bacon explains that matter must be “secured by the hands” and put to extremities in order to be known, for under these conditions it will “turn and transform itself into strange shapes, passing from one change to another till it has gone through the whole circle and finished the period; when, if the force be continued, it returns at last to itself”; and the natural philosopher thus discovers “the conditions, affections, and processes of matter.” (W, :). Bacon’s rhetoric of torture and vexation of nature has recently become one of the more notorious aspects of his thought, and it is one of the clearest places where his vision of human inquiry into the natural world – on the topic of divinity or anything else – differs from Donne’s.

Body as Book: Apprehension of the Divine through the Sensible in Donne’s Lyric Poems While Donne’s most explicit treatment of natural theology appears in Essayes in Divinity, Donne (like Bacon) develops his thought on the relationships between God, nature, and humans in his other works as well, fleshing out a more robust and positive conception of natural theology than is available in that explicit discussion. In what follows I will consider, first, Donne’s ambivalent treatment of apprehension of the divine through the sensible in his lyric poetry and especially the poems that became Songs and Sonnets, a treatment that highlights Donne’s persistent interest in the question of how fallen and embodied humans might best grasp divine truth. Next I will turn to Donne’s increasingly 

Ibid., vi:.



Ibid., vi:.

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explicit – and increasingly hopeful – engagement with the book of nature in the Essayes, Devotions, and sermons. “I am a little world made cunningly,” Donne opens the Holy Sonnet, making clear his commitment (if only at an aesthetic level) to the idea of the person as a microcosm of the universe, the idea that appealed so forcibly to Sebond and Calvin when they took up natural theology. This “little world,” the human body, repeatedly appears in Donne’s poetry as a book in which higher, more spiritual, realities might be read. In his notorious Elegy , for instance, the speaker proclaims that clothed women are “like pictures, or like books’ gay coverings made / For laymen,” while their bodies “are mystic books, which only we / (Whom their imputed grace will dignify) / must see revealed.” As was the case when Calvin considered the book of nature, there is a question here whether the physical “book” is accessible to a lay reader. In this poem, the book is hidden and obscure: the woman’s body is a “revealed” text, accessible only to recipients of grace. But the body need not be a “mystic” book of revelation; it can also figure, more metonymically, the relatively accessible book of nature. Consider the final stanzas of “The Ecstasy,” where the speaker again addresses a lover: To our bodies turn we then, that so Weak men on love revealed may look; Love’s mysteries in souls do grow, But yet the body is his book. (–)

The poem’s speaker gives a surprising reason for the lovers to come together physically: so that an audience of “weak men” might observe them and therefore understand love. This strange but very Donnean exhibitionism again underscores the poet’s preoccupation, even in “secular” erotic verse, with (theological) revelation: how it unfolds, and to 





These poems cannot of course be taken as doctrinal manifestoes. Nonetheless, Donne’s gravitation toward particular metaphors, I contend, suggests certain intellectual preoccupations on his part. Quotations of Donne’s lyric poetry are taken from John T. Shawcross, ed., The Complete Poetry of John Donne (New York: New York University Press, ) and will be cited parenthetically within the text by line number. Donne’s Idios in “Ecclogue. . December ” states that man epitomizes the book of nature: “As man is of the world, the heart of man, / Is an epitome of Gods great booke / Of creatures, and man need no farther looke” (–). Compare the speaker’s emphasis on visible love in “The Ecstacy” with these lines from “A Lecture upon the Shadow”: “That love hath not attain’d the high’st degree, / which is still diligent lest others see” (–).



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whom it is accessible. On this latter question, unlike the mysterious book in Elegy , the lovers’ bodies in “The Ecstasy” are a book in which, as in Sebond’s liber creaturarum, even laypeople can read love’s mysteries. That “love’s mysteries” have a theological dimension is made clear in another poem exploring books and revelation: “A Valediction: Of the Book.” In this poem, the speaker calls for his lover to write “our annals” in order to preserve their love in the face of his necessary departure. The resulting book, written in “cipher . . . or new made idiom,” will not be readily intelligible to everyone, so that it can be saved for those who wish to preserve learning through a potential barbarian invasion. Of this book, the speaker declares: Here Love’s divines (since all divinity Is love or wonder) may find all they seek, Whether abstract spiritual love they like, Their souls exhaled with what they do not see, Or, loth so to amuse Faith’s infirmity, they choose Something which they may see and use; For, though mind be the heaven where love doth sit, Beauty a convenient type may be to figure it. (–)

These lines make an identification between “divinity” and “love” that may help illuminate Donne’s view of natural theology (if not theology in general): To apprehend love, the parenthetical remark suggests, is to apprehend the divine. Here Donne’s speaker avers that readers can gain such apprehension in the book of his own love, in two ways: They might access spiritual love directly, or they may grasp the “divinity” of love through physical beauty, “something which they may see and use.” Given its positioning in the stanza, this latter route to divine knowledge seems to be the more common, perhaps the more appropriate, for humans not wishing to “amuse / faith’s infirmity.” Though in these poems Donne builds up the body as a means of “reading” spiritual truth, in others he maintains the higher and greater value of invisible things, gradually creating his own antithesis between natural and special revelation. The speaker in “The Blossom,” for instance, wryly asserts that “a naked thinking heart, that makes no show” will never move a heartless woman (), placing the blame on the woman who cannot brook bodily absence rather than attempting to accommodate her human frailty. Similarly, in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” bodily absence is memorably belittled:

A “Metaphorical God” and the Book of Nature



Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears, Men reckon what it did and meant, But trepidation of the spheres, Though greater far, is innocent. Dull sublunary lovers’ love (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit Absence, because it doth remove Those things which elemented it. (–)

Far better than sensual sublunary love is a refined, spiritual “inter-assurance” that does not depend on physical sense. If love must be visible for the sake of those who in their infirmity cannot apprehend it in other ways, this does not mean that the body is love’s native soil. Indeed, the quest for what “elements” love – body or spirit – frequently animates Donne’s poetry. The low view of the physical he entertains in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” is replaced in “Love’s Growth” with a more positive assessment of physical love: Love’s not so pure, and abstract, as they use To say, which have no mistress but their Muse, But as all else, being elemented too, Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do. (–)

Here love is not only visible in and expressed through the physical but also “elemented,” a rich word that here means “not so pure, and abstract” as they would say who have never loved bodily. Love, rather than being a spiritual reality merely adumbrated in the book of nature, is fundamentally partly physical. This is not only a witty observation about erotic love but a theological principle that Donne came increasingly to espouse as he slackened his hold on the dualist Greek assumptions of his youth. Especially at their most Gnostic, such dualist views conflict with orthodox Christian theology, in which God was “elemented” in the incarnation, a mystery to which Donne returns repeatedly in both poetry and sermons. And while Protestants debated the extent to which such elementing (re) occurs in the Eucharist, the bread and wine themselves are “elements” in the sense in which Donne uses the word in a  sermon to refer to the “Elements of the Church, water and bloud” that poured out of Christ’s side 

Felecia Wright McDuffie, To Our Bodies Turn We Then: Body as Word and Sacrament in the Works of John Donne (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, ), –.



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at his death, which Donne says are “The Sacraments of Baptisme, and of the Communion of [Christ].” Donne’s increasing emphasis on the elemented nature of the divine has profound implications for his view of natural theology: There is no longer a chasm, as in Platonism, between “natural” and “theology.”

Donne on Natural Theology With these observations on Donne’s more serious engagement of the “elemented” nature of the divine, we turn to his explicit engagement of natural theology in the Essayes and other works written from  onward. In the Essayes and elsewhere, Donne uses the book of nature as a governing metaphor for his discussion of revealed and natural knowledge of God. As discussed in the introduction, this well-known medieval trope casts the natural world as a book written by God, in harmony with scripture and likewise intended to be “read” for divine insights beyond the literal level. This holds for God’s works in scripture-history as well. The trope was central to Christian natural theology through the Renaissance: “Liber Creaturarum” or “Book of [the] Creatures” is the alternate title and a controlling metaphor for Sebond’s Theologia Naturalis, for instance. Bacon refers to the “book of God’s works” as well, though we have seen that in practice he did not generally approach nature looking for divine insights. While the Protestant tendency was to reduce the levels of meaning – often to only two – and to privilege the literal text, Scott Mandelbrote has shown that Protestants might add their own third “book,” the book of conscience, even as they called for increased attention to the literal. Donne shows this Protestant tendency toward reduction when, at the end of his  





Donne, Sermons of John Donne, vi:. For an instructive discussion of these two types of reading God’s works – synchronic and diachronic – see William G. Madsen’s From Shadowy Types to Truth, –. (See also Harrison’s discussion of allegory and typology in The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Modern Science, –.) Though these are clearly different, it is also clear from this passage in the Essayes and another in the Devotions, to be discussed later, that Donne appreciates both ways of “reading” God’s works. Bacon, Works, iv:. A number of Donne’s readers have noticed his use of this trope: see Evelyn M. Simpson, “Introduction,” in Essays in Divinity by John Donne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), xviii–xix and “Donne’s Spanish Authors,” Modern Language Review , no.  (): ; Beatrice Batson, John Bunyan: Allegory and Imagination (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, ), –; Dennis B. Quinn, “Donne’s Principles of Biblical Exegesis,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology , no.  (): ; McDuffie, To Our Bodies Turn We Then, –; and Attie, “Prose, Science, and Scripture: Francis Bacon’s Sacred Texts.” Mandelbrote, “Early Modern Biblical Interpretation and the Emergence of Science,” –.

A “Metaphorical God” and the Book of Nature



discussion of God’s books in the Essayes, he condemns “too Allegoricall and Typick” a reading of scripture (). Generally, however, Donne’s discussion of God’s books is characteristically ecumenical. God has “two books of life,” according to Donne: the “eternall Register of his Elect” mentioned in the biblical book of “Revelation, and else where,” and the Bible itself. The eschatological context of the first of these puts readers in mind of the anagogical level of medieval interpretation, which pertains to last things. But Donne is careful to emphasize the impossibility of reading this book, averring it is “far removed from the search of learning” and explaining that the only way to access this mystical book is when its contents are “insinuated and whisper’d to our hearts . . . which is the Conscience it selfe.” Donne may here anticipate the book of Conscience, by which means later Protestants might set bounds on biblical interpretation without recurring to more suspect authorities. To these two books of life, Donne then adds the subordinate liber creaturarum: – The first book is . . . impossible; the second difficult; but of the third book, the book of Creatures, we will say the th verse [of Is. ], The deaf shall heare the word of this book, and the eyes of the blinde shall see out of obscurity. And so much is this book available to the other, that Sebund, when he had digested this book into a written book, durst pronounce, that it was an Art, which teaches all things, presupposes no other, is soon learned, cannot be forgotten, needs no witnesses, and in this, is safer than the Bible it self, that it cannot be falsified by Hereticks.

Here Donne digests a number of claims from Sebond’s exuberant preface to the Theologia Naturalis and places them in a generally positive light: he concurs with Sebond that nature has broad appeal and is easier to interpret than scripture. He liked the paradox of a book that could be read by the illiterate – and the irony that Sebond had turned it back into a “written book” was clearly not lost on him. It is also noteworthy that Donne contradicts the idea of a scientific elite who are especially good at interpreting nature, put forward by both Calvin and Bacon. Unsurprisingly given his early respect for Montaigne and his increasingly Protestant outlook at this point, Donne will not go so far as Sebond in affirming the efficacy of natural knowledge to arrive at all necessary Christian doctrines. To be sure, the book of nature teaches at least “an Unity in the Godhead” and “is enough to make us inexcusable, if we  

Anthony Raspa discusses this context in his introduction to the Essayes, xxxii–xxxiii. Donne, Essayes, –.



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search not further” (like Calvin, Donne alludes here to Romans .). But the monk was “too abundant in affirming that in libro creatuarum there is enough to teach us all particularities of Christian Religion.” This relative skepticism about natural theology may have motivated Donne’s entry of Sebond into his satirical Catalogus Librorum Aulicorum (c. –), where he irreverently attributes to the monk the imaginary Manipulus quercuum, sive ars comprehendendi transcendentia – A Handful of Oaks, or, the Art of Grasping Divine Things. The sophisticated courtier, Donne hints, too easily believes that knowledge of nature will make him a master of divinity. In opening his Essayes in Divinity, probably several years later, Donne still sets careful bounds on the theological light shed by natural knowledge while affirming an important place for natural theology in the life of faith. He also urges, like Calvin and Sebond, the universal availability of that knowledge. In denying that nature teaches “all particularities of Christian Religion,” Donne leans in Calvin’s direction, but he does not here settle the question of whether natural knowledge might be of use to someone without faith, either as a propaedeutic to faith ultimately found in scripture (as Montaigne had allowed), or yet more optimistically, as a substitute for biblical revelation in certain cases. Donne continues to raise these issues both later in the Essayes and in his sermons. Often, Donne preaches the relatively safer, Calvinist view: in a sermon dated April , , for instance, he says, For first there is in Man a knowledge of God, sine sermone, without his word, in the book of the Creatures . . . and so there is some kind of creation in us, some knowledge of God imprinted, sine sermone, without any relation to his word. But this is a Creation as of heaven and earth, which were dark and empty.

In another given June , , he explains that the “book of Creatures” provides “only such a knowledge of God as Philosophers, moral and natural men may have, and yet be very farre from making this knowledge

 



Ibid., . Donne, The Courtier’s Library, ed. Evelyn Mary Simpson (London: Nonesuch Press, ), . Simpson renders this title A Bundle of Oaks, or, the Art of Understanding Transcendentals; I would argue that Donne’s choice of the word “comprehend,” with its etymological resonance of grasping, is significant and speaks to the “hand” in “manipulum.” John Donne, The Oxford Sermons of John Donne, ed. Peter McCollough, David Colclough et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, –), i:. It is a Protestant move on Donne’s part to stress that the “book of Creatures” is in some important sense not a book at all (“sine sermone”) relative to scripture.

A “Metaphorical God” and the Book of Nature



any means of salvation.” And in another dated Trinity Sunday, , he declares, The voice of the Creature alone, is but a faint voice, a low voice; nor any voice, till the voice of the Word inanimate it; for then when the Word of God hath taught us any mystery of our religion, then the book of Creatures illustrates, and establishes, and cherishes that which we have received by faith.

Interestingly, Donne begins this sentence with the more optimistic view that liber creaturarum is audible but faint; but a few words later he arrives at the more Calvinist position that there is no voice at all until faith is present. Still, he finds much to value in the book of nature: it illustrates, cherishes and establishes the tenets of faith once received. Additionally, his emphases are different from Calvin’s: while Donne’s nature is faint of voice, for Calvin, Nature was practically shouting the message about God, making humans all the guiltier for shutting their ears through sin. Elsewhere Donne leaves this Protestant orthodoxy altogether, though timidly. The first cue that he is open to pre-fideal or extra-fideal natural theology occurs in the Essayes, when he turns to the topic of knowledge of God in his exegesis of Genesis .. In a passage that shares ground with Bacon’s Advancement, Donne relies on a seafaring metaphor to explain the difference between natural and revealed theology: Men which seek God by reason, and natural strength (though we do not deny common notions and general impressions of a sovereign power) are like Mariners which voyaged before the invention of the Compass, [who] unwillingly left the sight of the land. Such are they which would arrive at God by this world, and contemplate him onely in his Creatures, and seeming Demonstration. Certainly, every Creature shewes God, as a glass, but glimmeringly and transitorily, by the frailty both of the receiver, and beholder: Our selves have his Image, as Medals, permanently and preciously delivered. But by these meditations we get no further, then to know what he doth, not what he is.

In suggesting that nonhuman creatures show God in the manner of a mirror rather than a “Medal” – like Calvin, Donne alludes to  Corinthians . – Donne parries the difficult question of whether creation bears God’s image (as in medieval natural philosophy) or simply  

 Donne, Sermons, ii:. Ibid., vi:. Donne, Essayes, . Interestingly, Bacon would use this same seafaring image in the preliminaries to the Instauratio Magna to illustrate the situation of humankind before the advent of scientific method, which frees them to sail to the New World: Bacon, Oxford Francis Bacon, xi:.



Metaphysical Poets

demonstrates God’s power and wisdom, as Bacon claimed in The Advancement of Learning. Donne is leery of the older view, affirming, on the one hand, that humans glean only “what [God] doth, not what he is” from contemplation of themselves and other creatures. On the other hand, the fact that humans cannot see God’s image in creation does not mean it is not there. In any case, however dim and partial this knowledge, Donne’s sailing metaphor in the passage suggests that natural knowledge has at least allowed some to set sail in the first place, and it may even be that some mariners have reached their destination in this way. Donne continues to explain that, just as the compass has enabled men to “dispatch Ulysses’ dangerous ten years’ travel in so many days,” so too “doth Faith, as soon as our hearts are touched by it, direct and inform us in that great search of the discovery of God’s Essence, and the new Hierusalem, which Reason durst not attempt” (Essayes, ). An implication of this analogy is that one might arrive at “God’s Essence” by natural means, just as Odysseus achieved his end after ten years’ sufferings. Such a claim, even implicit, is striking, for even Thomas Aquinas thought that God’s essence was unknowable. Nor is this the only time Donne suggests that those outside the faith might find a way in without recourse to special revelation: in a sermon dated December , , Donne cites Isaiah (as he had in his consideration of the book of creatures in the Essayes) as attributing “the love of god to the gentiles, whoe coolde seeke god no where butt in the booke of Creatures,” affirming that “yet god was found of them.” In a sermon dated June , , after preaching on the difficulty of arriving at salvation by means other than special revelation, Donne allows that God’s heavenly mansion may have “out-houses” for those “out of the Church” to whom nonetheless “salvation comes sometimes” through contemplation of nature. And in one given January , , he posits that nature might be a “competent refection” for “some moral men,” though less liberal than the dinner laid out for Jews and Christians. Here he concludes: To those who do open their eyes to that light of nature, in the best exaltation thereof, God does not hide himself, though he have not manifested to me, by what way he manifests himself to them. For, God disappoints none, and he is The confidence of all the ends of the Earth, and of them who are afar off upon the Sea.  

E.g., Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: Questions on God, ed. Brian Davies and Brian Leftow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .   Donne, Oxford Sermons, i:. Donne, Sermons, ii:. Ibid., vii:–.

A “Metaphorical God” and the Book of Nature



In sum, although often Donne espouses a more Calvinist understanding of natural theology, at times he is no less optimistic about the prospects for those who use natural light wisely than those Catholic forebears who espoused a facere quod in se est doctrine: all who do their best have nothing to fear. A key concern here seems to be the plight of those “far off upon the sea,” away from Christian lands, not unlike the residents of Bensalem in Bacon’s New Atlantis. Rather than insisting, as Bacon would, that such people must still somehow gain access to special revelation, Donne suggests that natural theology might be enough.

Donne and the Natural World If Donne gives greater scope to natural theology than had Bacon – suggesting that people without special revelation might still be saved and leaving open the possibility that God left a direct impression on nature – he gives far less scope to empirical science deployed to non-theological ends. Bacon’s fondness of “comprehension,” and Donne’s profound suspicion of it, epitomizes the difference between the two men. Donne titled his parody of Sebond’s work Manipulus quercuum, sive ars comprehendendi transcendentia, a title that invokes images of manipulating and grasping, and he is known to have punned elsewhere on the “grasping/containing” and “understanding” senses of “comprehend.” In both his prose and poetry, he typically uses the word to emphasize the limits, not the reach, of human knowledge. This relative skepticism is tied to Donne’s view both of human reason and the natural world; as he explains in the Essayes, both the “receiver” (nature) and the “beholder” (man) of God’s self-revelation in the natural world are frail and therefore cannot be expected to bring humans all the way to truth – at least not in the carefully controlled way that Bacon prescribes. Bacon, we have seen, views natural theology as a process of careful induction from the facts of nature gradually upward, toward a “supreme or summary law of nature” that God instituted through an unfettered act of will. The recognition of this divinely marshalled order in the world leads to 



On this doctrine, often associated with Aquinas, see Alister McGrath, Justitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. On Donne’s relationship to Aquinas – a controversial figure in Protestant England – see Katrin Ettenhuber, Donne’s Augustine: Renaissance Cultures of Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), – and –. Annabelle Patterson, “John Donne, Kingsman?,” in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), .



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knowledge of God’s existence and power but is not enough to correct superstition or to convey God’s will. Donne, by contrast, consistently attacks natural law in its various forms: in Biathanatos () he attacks it chiefly as it applies to moral beings, on the grounds that the philosophers cannot agree about its definition, but he also attacks the notion of an “eternal decree for the government of the whole world.” Donne does not claim that there is no such law, but that if there is, it has little relevance for humans, who cannot know it. Along with natural law, Donne also strips away the careful gradations of knowledge so necessary to Bacon’s inductive natural theology. In the Essayes, Donne cautions that knowledge acquired “by degrees” in particular cannot reach divine truth: “God is impartible,” he writes, “and only faith which can receive it all at once, can comprehend him” (). He then undermines the suggestion that God can be “comprehended” at all in the human sense, declaring that nothing positive can be affirmed about God and reminding the reader, as Calvin had in the Institutes, how inaccurate have been all pagan attempts to characterize God by “oppos[ing] reason to reason” (–). When the end of natural knowledge is not at issue, Donne generally opposes Bacon’s natural philosophical method, which involves hounding and vexing nature. For one thing, likely for biographical reasons, Donne and Bacon held opposing views on the subject of literal torture, with Donne questioning whether torture can successfully elicit objective truth from a human victim rather than simply eliciting what the torturer wants to hear. Donne semi-metaphorically extends this critique to torture for purposes of natural knowledge as well: “Racked carcasses make ill anatomies,” reads the final line of “Love’s Exchange.” It is not surprising, therefore, that literary critics have pointed to Donne as a source of “poetic resistance” to the Baconian call for manipulation of a distinctly feminized nature by the elite male experimentalist. Besides Martin’s and Hellegers’s readings of the Anniversaries, Anthony Funari has argued that in the  

 

E.g., John Donne, Biathanatos (New York: Facsimile Text Society, ), , , and . See Ornstein, “Donne, Montaigne, and Natural Law,” –. See Hellegers, Handmaid to Divinity, –: Bacon was one of a very few allowed by the queen to torture prisoners, while Donne likely empathized more with suspected Catholics and conspirators. See also Funari, Francis Bacon, –. Funari, Francis Bacon,  and ; and McDuffie, To Our Bodies Turn We Then, . On Bacon, see Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, ); Brian Easlea, Witch Hunting, Magic and the New Philosophy: An Introduction to Debates of the Scientific Revolution, – (Sussex: Harvester Press, ), –; and Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ). On Donne’s resistance, see Hellegers, Handmaid to Divinity, –; and Funari, Francis Bacon, –.

A “Metaphorical God” and the Book of Nature



Devotions Donne provides an “anti-Baconian narrative” in which he “reimagines the drama being enacted between his physicians and his diseased body as predicated on human submission and Nature’s willingness.” Funari’s emphasis on humans’ relationship to Nature raises the question, central to natural theology, what exactly constitutes “nature”: How do we best understand the day-to-day workings of the material world? Are these operations directly superintended by God or overseen by some agent or law inferior to God? If the latter, is this agent best conceived as a “she” or an “it”? Natural theology will proceed along very different lines depending on the answers to these questions: If every so-called natural phenomenon is in fact a miraculous act of God, natural theology – or any science based on observation of nature – is senseless. If, on the other hand, nature is rather an “it” than a “she,” a summary law arbitrarily instituted by God, Bacon’s method of inquiry is appropriate, and his assertion in The Advancement of Learning that natural theology does no more or less than to demonstrate God’s power in ordaining and maintaining the cosmos is correct. Only when “Nature” becomes something more than a deterministic law and less than a series of inscrutable miracles is there space to understand nature more poetically, as Donne does, and thence to develop a natural theology more poetic than Bacon’s. How does one articulate and engage with a Nature that is separate from God and cannot be reduced to a set of laws? One place where Donne begins provocatively to articulate his theology of nature is in the Anniversaries. For, along with the “new science” and Baconian optimism about human history, these poems implicitly question any straightforward program of natural theology along Baconian lines, suggesting instead that nature has some agency in the process of human reasoning about divine matters. In the First Anniversary, for example, after lamenting the catastrophic epistemological effects of the “new philosophy,” Donne invokes the same image he uses in the Essayes as emblematic of humans without the benefit of revelation:

 

Funari, Francis Bacon, . For a seminal discussion of Natura in antique and medieval thought, see Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, –. Reflecting on the same body of texts, C. S. Lewis once observed that medieval poets believed that Nature “was not everything . . . there were things above her, and things below. It is precisely this limitation and subordination of Nature which sets her free for her triumphant poetical career.” See his The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.



Metaphysical Poets She [Drury] whom wise nature had invented then, When she observed that every sort of men Did in their voyage in this world’s sea stray And needed a new compass for their way;

In the Essayes the anxious sailors are attempting to navigate the world by reason alone, and the as-yet-uninvented compass is faith. Here, instead of being something supernatural, the compass was invented by “wise nature” and is Drury herself. Among her other balming actions, then, Drury helped humans to read the book of nature, or perhaps she was the book, for Donne then asserts that the world is a microcosm of her (). It is only a few lines later that he summarily pronounces that the world is “rotten at the heart,” adding that its beauty – a key component in natural theology according to Bacon’s “Of Atheism” – is “decay’d or gone” (, ). It is not just natural knowledge that has been called into doubt by Drury’s departure and the advent of the new philosophy; the world’s ability to speak of higher things is gone as well. In the Second Anniversary, Donne also calls contemporary iterations of natural theology into question, by attacking self-knowledge. Calvin gave humankind a central place in natural theology in the early chapters of the Institutes, and human self-knowledge is a chief foundation of Sebond’s Theologia Naturalis. Sebond’s subject as articulated in his prologue is “the book of nature: a doctrine concerning man, which is proper to man insofar as he is man, and which is necessary to all men, and both natural and suitable to mankind. Through this doctrine he is enlightened into knowing himself and his condition.” Sebond further insists that this doctrine is infallible because it argues from those things which are verified for all men by experience, that is, by all the creatures, and by the nature of man himself. For man proves all things by himself, and by those things which he knows for certain by experience of the things themselves. For no one knows with more certainty, than by experience, and especially though the examination anyone can conduct of himself. And therefore this doctrine needs no other witness than man himself. 



The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne,  vols., ed. Gary A. Stringer et al., vol. vi, The Anniversaries and the “Epicedes and Obsequies,” ed. Gary A. Stringer and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), lines –. Henceforth all citations are from this edition and will be noted parenthetically within the text by line number. Sebond, Theologia Naturalis, Prologus,  and : “Sequitur scientia libri creaturarum, sive libri naturae, et Scientia de homine, quae est propria homini, in quantum homo est. Quae est necessaria omni homini, et est ei naturalis et conveniens. Per quam ipse illuminatur ad cognoscendum se ipsum et suum conditorem . . . Haec scientia arguit per argumenta infallibilia, quibus nullus potest

A “Metaphorical God” and the Book of Nature



There is a striking discord between Sebond’s optimistic opening attestations about self-knowledge and Donne’s terse claim, opening his own epistemological considerations in the Second Anniversary: “Thou know’st thyself so little” (). It has been pointed out that Donne may mean here to pay tribute to the skeptical Montaigne. In any case, here again Donne calls into question not just knowledge in general but a key source of natural theological knowledge in particular. If the  and  Anniversaries only indicate how nature might once have pointed to truth, a year later Donne more hopefully adds to his picture of a Nature that can be recognized and understood to some extent, and of an inquirer with some ability to recognize and understand her. In the Anniversaries a female nature attempted to supply man with Elizabeth Drury as a “compass” in the world’s sea. In “Good Friday : Riding Westward,” Donne figures nature as God’s lieutenant: What a death were it then to see God dye? It made his owne Lieutenant Nature Shrinke, It made his footstoole crack, and the Sunne winke. (–)

The image of nature as God’s lieutenant is an interesting one, retaining some of the features of the traditional trope of nature as God’s handmaiden: Both images are anthropomorphic, subordinate to God but able to act to some extent in their own right. But “lieutenant” suggests a more willful, powerful agent. Like many others, Donne sometimes uses “God’s lieutenant” to describe human kings and man in general in his capacity as “Vice-gerent over all Creatures.” The image of a lieutenant is also militaristic, suggesting that in serving God’s creative purposes nature must combat antagonizing forces, whether of Satan or of chaos and decay. While



 



contradicere, quoniam arguit per illa, quae sunt certissima cuilibet homini per veram experientiam, scilicet per omnes creaturas et per naturam ipsius hominis. Et per ipsummet hominem omnia probat, et per illa, quae certitudinaliter homo cognoscit de se ipso per experientiam. Nulla autem certior cognitio, quam per experimentiam, et maxime per experientiam cuiuslibet intra se ipsum. Et ideo ista scientia non quaerit alios testes, quam ipsummet hominem.” Donne also suggests, in Sermons, ix:, that even in his unfallen state – “in the time and school of nature” – man “understood himself less than he did other creatures,” being able to name them but not himself. Ramie Targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –. Both Bacon and Boyle would revise the “handmaiden” analogy: Bacon regards science instead as “a Spouse, for generation, fruit, and comfort,” while Boyle more moderately calls her “a Lady of lower Rank” than divinity. See Bacon, Oxford Francis Bacon, iv:; and Boyle, The Excellency of Theology Compare’d with Natural Philosophy (London, ), preface. Donne’s use of a masculine figure is unusual. E.g., Sermons, i:, iv:; and ix:.



Metaphysical Poets

this militaristic understanding harmonizes with Bacon’s description of atoms as needing a “divine marshal” if they are to produce the order and beauty observed in the world, the harmony does not persist. In Bacon’s view, matter is marshaled by an unintelligible (but discoverable) natural law at the whim of the creator. In Donne’s, matter is marshaled by a mediating lieutenant with the will and agency to react unlawfully when Christ is on the cross. Further, and perhaps most obviously, Donne’s lieutenant Nature seems less susceptible to sexualized conquest by the male scientist than Bacon’s hounded Nature with her caves and recesses. If Donne paints nature in the Devotions as a creative power whose complicity is required for the health and knowledge of the body, and in the Anniversaries as a benevolent entity attempting to communicate important truths to humans, in “Good Friday” nature is a more militaristic agent who carries out God’s will in ordering matter and who shrinks in the event of God’s death. All three of these “natures” share an agency and a morality that Bacon’s nature lacks. Regarding the kind of knowledge worth having, too, Donne’s values are the reverse of Bacon’s: Bacon, in cautioning readers of the Advancement against attempting “to fly up to the secrets of the Deity by the waxen wings of the senses,” avers that “the contemplation of God’s creatures and works produceth . . . having regard to God, no perfect knowledge, but wonder, which is broken knowledge.” Such broken knowledge, he suggests, had now better be left alone in favor of the complete knowledge such contemplation produces of the creatures themselves. Donne, while not denying the imperfect nature of wonder as knowledge, would develop a more positive view of wonder, as in a sermon dated Easter : Admiration, wonder, stands as in the midst, between knowledge and faith, and hath an eye towards both. If I know a thing, or believe a thing, I do no longer wonder: but when I find that I have reason to stop upon the consideration of a thing, so, as that I see enough to induce admiration, to make me wonder, I come by that step, and God leads me by that hand, to a

 

 

Bacon, Works, vi:. See n.  above. Bacon, Works, iv:: “For you have but to follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings . . . Neither ought a man to make a scruple of entering and penetrating into these holes and corners.” Bacon again uses imagery of “penetrating into nature,” in The New Atlantis in Works, iii:. Bacon, Oxford Francis Bacon, iv:. Bacon, Works, iv:: “Touching Divine Philosophie: I am so farre from noting any deficience, as I rather note an excesse.”

A “Metaphorical God” and the Book of Nature



knowledge, if it be of a natural or civil thing, or to a faith, if it be of a supernatural, and spiritual thing.

Here again Donne casts the human knowledge-seeker as only one of the actors in a mutual exchange: even with natural things, the wondering human must be taken by the hand and led by God to “a knowledge.” But the other, and it seems loftier, end of wonder is to acquire “a faith,” knowledge’s spiritual counterpart, which also starts with the wondering human mind. Far from being mere “broken knowledge,” then, wonder plays a necessary role in a quest for truth leading both upward to God and downward into nature – but more importantly upward.

Metaphorical Nature, Metaphorical God Donne and Bacon differ, then, regarding humans’ ability to achieve comprehensive knowledge of things and the role that nature plays in this process, as well as differing on why humans would want to acquire such knowledge in the first place. They also differ on the nature of knowledge itself. Not only is Donne’s nature reticent under the methodical torture proposed by Bacon, her secrets are inherently such that they cannot be so extracted. This is because Donne’s natural world, though disconcerted by the Fall, is still the creation of a “metaphorical God,” rife with meanings that dissolve when the scientist begins to dissect it. While Bacon’s natural world is emphatically susceptible to “explanation” in its etymological sense of “smoothing out” or “unfolding,” Donne’s invites instead an older way of reading that has been termed “glossative.” Walter Ong contrasted this older view with the newer world “of ocularly construed ‘evidence,’ which violently contests in theory . . . the principle of fides ex auditu”: a glossative reader of nature instead piles up correspondences and analogies, drawing fide ex auditu on existing works, rather than dissecting nature and laying out her component parts so that all are visible. This metaphor of smoothing out and piling up is useful for understanding how Donne read God in his works: Like a human poet, the divine maker intends the book of nature to be legible, but only to audiences of a certain disposition, and  



Donne, Sermons, vi:; see Dennis Quinn, “Donne and the Wane of Wonder,” ELH , no.  (): –. Stuart Peterfreund, “Imagination at a Distance: Bacon’s Epistemological Double-Bind, Natural Theology, and the Way of Scientific Explanation in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” The Eighteenth Century , no.  (): –. Ibid., –.



Metaphysical Poets

only when received as the poetry it is, with receptive wonder rather than parsing scrutiny. Though more famous for his proclamations of natural death and decay, Donne can take more positive cues from the book of nature, as when he cites “natural story” in his sermons. On such occasions Donne emphasizes creation, new growth, and industry in the natural world rather than their opposites: Just as the banks of the Nile bring forth life when warmed by the sun, so God’s spirit acted on the world at creation; just as certain animals hatch their eggs merely by looking at them, so the visio approbationis of God that approved creation at the beginning can “produce and hatch” good in humans still. When scripture itself appeals to the book of nature, moreover, Donne exerts himself to underscore the harmony between the book of nature and the book of scripture. For instance, he returns repeatedly to biblical references to the turtle-dove, drawing on natural history when he does so: The bird can represent a life of contemplation, he proclaims, for turtle-doves “live solitarily” (the sociable pigeon, by contrast, represents the active life); or the turtle-dove “may be an Embleme of Chaste widowhood; for, I think we find no Bigamy in the Turtle.” Considering Song of Songs .b, “The voice of the turtle is heard in our land,” he asserts that the bird’s groaning (vox turturis; in other sermons, gemitus columbae) is evidence of spring and natural regeneration, as the dove is identified with the holy spirit producing true repentance in humans. Though these insights can be found in patristic and later commentaries, it appears that Donne pursued information about the turtledove beyond these: “We learne by Authors of Naturall Story,” he writes, “and by experience, Turturis gemitus indicium veris, The voice of the turtle is an evidence of the Spring.” He cites Pliny, but this assertion does not appear in Pliny’s Naturalis Historia, which in fact reports a different bird and a different season, and Pliny is therefore not cited on the turtle-dove in any commentaries. Perhaps to bolster what he knew to be a loose paraphrase of ancient “natural story,” Donne adds that the turtle-dove’s behavior should also be  

  Donne, Sermons, ix:. Ibid., vii:. Donne, Oxford Sermons, iii:–. Donne may well have been led to consult Pliny by Cornelius Lapide, who in commenting on the same verse cites book  of Pliny’s Naturalis Historia on viticulture (Commentarii in Canticum Canticorum [Antwerp, ], ): Lapide cites a different chapter, however, and moves to Aristotle in asserting that the cuckoo’s song indicates the beginning of spring. Naturalis Historia ., the chapter cited by Donne, reads in Philemon Holland’s translation (London, ), , “Doe but listen to the groning tune and pitifull mone that the Quoist and Stock-dove makes: and never think that the Sunnestead is past, before she have left singing.”

A “Metaphorical God” and the Book of Nature



known “by experience,” an authority typically given much more weight by Bacon. Such an appeal to the experience of nature is not a unique occurrence in Donne’s sermons, moreover: Considering the famous injunction in Proverbs ., “Go to the ant,” Donne spends significant effort comparing the relative merits of ants and bees, drawing not only on Pliny and various church fathers but also citing a contemporary scientific experiment: For in experience, when some men curious of natural knowledge, have made their Hives of glass, that by that they might see the Bees manner of working, the Bees have made it their first work to line that Glasse-hive, with a crust of Wax, that they might work and not be discerned.

While “it is a blessed sincerity, to work, as the Ant, professedly, openly,” Donne concludes, many times spiritual work needs to be cloaked from the eyes of observers, and this can be seen in the bees. Here Donne goes a step beyond the emblematic tradition in appealing to recently discovered “natural knowledge” in an effort to deepen and broaden the truth that might be gathered from the biblical text. It is telling that in this example the “curious” knowledge-seekers are thwarted (one recalls Donne’s opposition to a Baconian program of forcing nature to give up her secrets); but by this very thwarting nature has provided a spiritual insight. In appealing to “experience” regarding bees and doves to draw out a spiritual truth, Donne anticipates, well in advance, the Occasional Reflections of Robert Boyle, who would make a point that his lessons be drawn from experience rather than from “the Fathers, or the Poets.” Donne of course made no such exclusions and took an altogether more poetic view of creation than would Boyle. Donne occasionally reflects explicitly on God’s poetic activity, both in the words of scripture and in his works in nature, and in particular on the question of whether God speaks literally or metaphorically in these two books. Certainly in scripture God speaks both ways, though Donne’s understanding of “literal” is older and broader than that favored by scientific reformers, in which there is always a simple one-to-one relationship between word and thing. In a sermon preached on Easter , for example, he explains that the “literal sense is not always that, which the very Letter and Grammar of the place presents”; instead, the literal sense is “the principal intention of

 

 Donne, Sermons, iii:. Boyle, Occasional Reflections, preface. Quinn, “Donne’s Principles of Biblical Exegesis,” –.



Metaphysical Poets

the Holy Ghost” in a particular passage. In a similar vein, in terms of reading the natural world, Donne is suspicious of attempts to establish what John Wilkins would later call a “universal character,” to “express natures and essences” of things in naming them. Although this project had not yet been fully articulated when Donne was writing, he was aware of efforts in that direction and may have intended to indict Bacon himself when, in the Essayes, he identifies an “enormous pretending wit” who “undertook to frame such a language, herein exceeding Adam, that whereas he named every thing by the most eminent and virtuall property, our man gave names, by the first naked enuntiation whereof, any understanding should comprehend the essence of the thing, better than by a definition.” Donne’s pessimism here is in line with his general suspicion of scientific efforts aimed at total comprehension: he leaves space instead for polysemeity in the language both of scripture and of the created world. From the recognition that creation is metaphorical arises an opportunity to understand the creator through humans’ own poetic activity. In his Devotions’ “Expostulation ,” Donne celebrates a “metaphorical God,” in whose “words there is such a height of figures, such voyages, such peregrinations to fetch remote and precious metaphors” that “profane” writers crawl in the dust by comparison. “Neither art thou thus a figurative, a metaphorical God in thy word only,” he adds, “but in thy works too. The style of thy works, the phrase of thy actions, is metaphorical.” Donne asserts that God’s actions in human history as well as his works in nature are ripe for reading, but not in the way of Baconian explanation, nor yet in the way dictated by the old doctrine of correspondence. Donne’s natural world is instead a divine conceit, a “remote and precious metaphor,” to be understood only by some and carrying multiple, often surprising, meanings. These metaphysical meanings, rather than being compendiously laid down and known by humans beforehand, are the product of a lively and extemporaneous reason and must be received as such. To be sure, Donne relies heavily on correspondence (and particularly on the doctrine that man is a microcosm of the universe) in both his poetry and his prose, but he 

  

Donne, Sermons, vi:. See also Essayes, –: “That also is not the literal [sense], which the letter seems to present, for so to diverse understandings there might be diverse literal senses; it is called literal, to distinguish it from the Moral, Allegorical, and the other senses; and is that which the Holy Ghost doth in that place principally intend.” Martin, “Advancement and Decay,” , following Evelyn Simpson. John Donne, Selected Prose, ed. Evelyn Simpson, Helen Gardner, and T. S. Healy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . McDuffie, To Our Bodies Turn We Then, –.

A “Metaphorical God” and the Book of Nature



uses the doctrine as an imaginative backdrop for his own poetic and theological reflections rather than asserting it philosophically. In fact, he demonstrates that he realizes the doctrine does not hold at some level when he laments but does not discredit the demise of correspondence (along with the rest of the old science) in the First Anniversary: The new philosophy calls all in doubt; The element of fire is quite put out; The sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit Can well direct him where to look for it. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The art [of astrology] is lost, and correspondence too, For heaven gives little, and the earth takes less, And man least knows their trade and purposes. (–)

In the world of the Anniversaries themselves, Donne acknowledges these scientific changes, for instance, in having Elizabeth Drury’s soul pass through purported location of the “element of fire” too quickly to say whether it was there or not (–). Though a facile reading of Donne’s elegy might give an impression of him as a scientific reactionary, astute readers have recognized in him a sensitivity to new intellectual developments and a poetic elasticity that give the lie to this impression: He proves ready to exploit natural philosophy if it can give him metaphorical or metonymic access to the realities he hopes to convey. And as far as the metaphysical implications of correspondence – that humans might map out eternal realities based on the sensible world – Donne’s view of human reason is too low to accommodate such an ambition. If the cosmos was patterned after the mind of God, that resemblance was obscured in the Fall, and humans’ ability to discern it was impaired. Given that the medieval ways of reading nature were unsatisfactory, the epistemological instability ushered in by the “new philosophy” might prove not a catastrophe but a poetic opportunity. The poet Donne responds to this opportunity in various ways: he celebrates the physical 



Ellrodt, “Scientific Curiosity and Metaphysical Poetry,” –; on Donne’s engagement with the new astronomy in Ignatius His Conclave, see I. Bernard Cohen, The Birth of a New Physics (New York: W.W. Norton, ), – and Joanna Picciotto, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England, –. It is important to recognize that “heaven” in the sense Donne uses the word in the Anniversaries does not refer to the divine or transcendental but to the cosmic heavens, which (he explains in the Devotions) shares a “common center” with the earth, and that center is “decay, ruin”; see Donne, Selected Prose, . So what is lost when in The First Anniversary, “The new philosophy calls all in doubt” is not nearly so great as what has been lost all along ().



Metaphysical Poets

as a means of accessing the divine, explores the extent to which natural means can point to spiritual truth, and even emulates the activity of a metaphorical God with his own “remote and precious metaphor,” the socalled metaphysical conceit. Like the works of such a God, the terms of a conceit cannot be mapped out beforehand, nor can its full meaning survive if the reader attempts to reduce it to a single level. Instead, seemingly disparate things are brought together in ways that lend surprising insight, often with multiple layers of meaning. In this light, rather than “inventing” something in the newer sense of the word, “Copernicus in poetry” was emulating God’s original creative process. From the foregoing survey of Donne’s treatment of natural theology, I hope it is clear that, while sharing in the general natural theological project of moving from sense perception to theological understanding, Donne’s emphases differ strikingly from treatments of natural theology such as Sebond’s, Calvin’s, and Bacon’s, as well as from works produced later in the century such as John Ray’s Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation and Richard Bentley’s Boyle Lectures. The blueprint for a natural theology that emerges in Donne’s writing is both less ambitious and more resilient than the variety that came into prominence after his death and would remain prominent for a century and a half. That type, predicated on a comprehensive program of human learning that Donne believed to be theologically and intellectually misguided, proved incapable of producing a universal, rational consensus on spiritual truth – a result Donne would likely have predicted. But rather than dismissing reason and the natural world as sources of spiritual knowledge and insight, Donne appealed to these with canny wonder, as a reader approaches a poem penned by an especially brilliant, self-revelatory author.

 

“I Summon’d Nature” George Herbert and Henry Vaughan on Science and Nature

I know the ways of learning; both the head And pipes that feed the presse, and make it runne; What reason hath from nature borrowed, Or of it self, like a good huswife, spunne, In laws and policie; what the starres conspire, What willing nature speaks, what forc’d by fire; Both th’old discoveries, and the new-found seas, The stock and surplus, cause and historie: All these stand open, or I have the keyes: Yet I love thee.

Herbert, “The Pearl” ()

I summon’d nature: pierc’d through all her store, Broke up some seales, which none had touch’d before, Her wombe, her bosome, and her head Where all her secrets lay a bed I rifled quite, and having past Through all the Creatures, came at last To search my selfe, where I did find Traces, and sounds of a strange kind.

Vaughan, “Vanity of Spirit” ()

At the age of , John Donne died a much-anticipated death. By that time his work set forth a theology of nature very different from the physicotheology adumbrated by Bacon, a theology that saw God as revealing himself to humans in the natural world with dynamism and poetic creativity. George Herbert (–) would die two years later, having only reached the age of . It is tempting to speculate what sort of theology of nature Herbert might have developed given two more decades. As it is, Herbert’s work evinces deep appreciation for God’s creation in tension with deep suspicion of human effort to turn knowledge of that world to good use. An acquaintance of Francis Bacon who self-professedly knew 

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Metaphysical Poets

“the ways of learning,” Herbert regularly draws the attention of scholars interested in his views on Baconian experimentalism in particular and the advancement of learning in general. Commentators and critics have long noticed, moreover, that Herbert engages natural theology in both The Temple and The Country Parson. Thus far, however, no one has systematically explored Herbert’s treatment of natural theology, even though he remarks on the capacity of nature to “speak” God in his earliest extant poetry. This silence may be partly due to Herbert’s reticence on the value of natural theology compared, for example, with Calvin. This reticence also shows clearly when one turns from Herbert’s devotional lyrics to those of his literary disciple Henry Vaughan. Vaughan (–) shared with Herbert not only a Welsh heritage but also a love for the British church and a deep personal investment in devotional poetry: his Silex Scintillans, published in part in  and expanded in , takes Herbert’s The Temple () as its main source outside of the Bible itself. In this chapter I consider these two devotional poets’ foundational views of science and nature, toward exploring their views of natural theology more specifically in Chapter . How does each poet conceive of the relationships between God, humans, and nature, and does he see human inquiry into nature as leading to theological 





“New Year’s Sonnet” line . It is hard to miss the natural theological content of “Providence,” for instance, and both Hutchinson and Wilcox note a resonance here with Henry More’s seminal Antidote against Atheism (London, ). Wilcox also points out that Herbert’s emphasis on God’s active preservation of the world sets him in opposition to his brother Lord Herbert of Cherbury (see p. ). This same assertion in The Country Parson () has received less comment in terms of natural theology, but Russell Hillier has noted it in “‘Send back thy fire again’: Praise, Music, and Poetry in the Lyrics of George Herbert,” Modern Language Review , no.  (): –, –; Hillier notes as well the natural theological content of “Mattens” (). Besides Hillier’s, other studies to have touched on Herbert and natural theology include Valerie Carnes, “The Unity of George Herbert’s The Temple: A Reconsideration,” ELH, , no.  (), –; Joseph Glaser, “George Herbert’s ‘The Temple’: Learning to Read the Book of Nature,” CLA Journal, , no.  (), –; Martin Elsky, “George Herbert’s Pattern Poems and the Materiality of Language: A New Approach to Renaissance Hieroglyphics,” ELH , no.  (), –; and Richard Todd, The Opacity of Signs: Acts of Interpretation in George Herbert’s The Temple (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, ), –. Carnes makes the insightful claim that Herbert “reads” God’s self-revelation in nature (as well as scripture) and produces The Temple as “living proof . . . of his right reading and interpretation of those visual signs placed on earth for his benefit” () on her way to arguing that “the analogy between man’s religious and aesthetic activity emerges as a predominant theme in The Temple” (). Glaser provides helpful readings of nature imagery in Herbert’s poems but does not explicitly engage natural theology (or historical context) and finally asserts that the poems drive the speaker “to at last accept the mystery of man’s place in creation” (“George Herbert’s ‘The Temple,’” ). Similarly, there is a gap in Vaughan scholarship when it comes to natural theology, though editors of his poetry have recognized that this theme appears in Silex Scintillans: Rudrum directs readers interested in the theological background of “Morning Watch” to C. C. J. Webb’s  Studies in the History of Natural Theology, for instance, in Vaughan, Complete Poems.

“I Summon’d Nature”



insight? Both Herbert and Vaughan engage these questions, though they differ starkly on the answers. Vaughan is less dismissive of human science than is Herbert, for instance. And although both poets share a conviction that the natural world is not as it should be, Herbert sees the world as destined for conflagration while Vaughan’s hope – repeated throughout Silex Scintillans – is instead for regeneration.

Science Both Herbert and Vaughan were highly educated. Herbert excelled at Cambridge and was appointed university orator there in . His brother Edward, famous for his pioneering work in rational religion, was educated at Oxford and was friends with the noted humanist Isaac Casaubon. George Herbert knew Francis Bacon, writing poems and letters to Bacon during his time at Cambridge and helping to translate Bacon’s Advancement of Learning () into Latin, a favor Bacon recompensed by dedicating his own Translation of Certain Psalmes () to Herbert in . Vaughan’s studies at Oxford were interrupted by civil war, but he too had Latin and Greek and was, as Donald Dickson has shown, a scholar of “considerable erudition and critical discernment.” Along with his twin brother Thomas, Henry was a proponent of hermetic philosophy, and both brothers were practicing physicians. The Vaughans’ intellectual commitments aligned them with the scientific reforms initiated by Bacon to the extent that they believed in “experimentall knowledge by the light of Nature” and opposed much of the science that was received from Aristotle. Moreover, later in life Henry took an interest in natural 

  

See for instance Amy M. Charles, A Life of George Herbert (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), , ; Robert Ellrodt, “Scientific Curiosity and Metaphysical Poetry in the Seventeenth Century,” Modern Philology , no.  (): –, ; Helen Wilcox, “Herbert, George,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), online ed., , doi.org/./ref:odnb/; and John Drury, Music at Midnight: The Life & Poetry of George Herbert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –. Donald Dickson, “Henry Vaughan, Scholarly Editor,” Scintilla  (): – and “Henry Vaughan’s Knowledge (and Use) of Greek,” Studies in Philology , no.  (): –. Henry Vaughan, The Works of Henry Vaughan ( vols.), ed. Donald R. Dickson, Alan Rudrum, and Robert Wilcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), xxxii–xxxvi. Vaughan, Works, :. This is from Vaughan’s translation Hermetical Physick (London, ), which took on his own voice through his extensive interpolations and expansions: see Works, . For a helpful discussion of the relationship between hermeticism and alchemy as they pertained to poets, see Rudrum, “Influence of Alchemy,” –; on Henry and Paracelsianism, see Vaughan, Works, –. In general, there was enough affinity between the ancient philosophical tradition of hermeticism, the practice of alchemy, and the (anti-Galenic, medical) works of Paracelsus that these adjectives are often used together or interchangeably.



Metaphysical Poets

history, though his observations of Breconshire plants and animals went unpublished. Notably, both Herbert and Vaughan also translated treatises on human health, evincing a lively interest in the practical application of naturalistic knowledge. Despite this interest, both men evince a suspicion of something that looks very much like science in their devotional poetry. Indeed, in Herbert’s case a growing body of critics have set about to square his apparently positive relationship with Bacon with the anti-Baconian sentiments in poems such as “Vanitie (),” “The Pearl,” “The Agonie,” “Divinitie,” and “The Discharge.” Because Herbert’s view of natural theology is so closely related to his view of human scientific inquiry, I will briefly take a position on this question here. In keeping with others, I read Herbert as sympathetic to Bacon’s critique of both the scholastic and humanist traditions. He has no categorical quarrel with natural knowledge, but he rejects Bacon’s call for a comprehensive godlike knowledge of the natural world. This rejection is clear and outright in poems such as “Vanitie (),” considered below, but it is hinted as well in Herbert’s Latin poems and letters to Bacon. These were written when Bacon was still in power and Herbert still at Cambridge, needing Bacon’s support against those who might drain the fens or impede

  



Vaughan, Works, xxxv–xxxvi. Herbert’s A Treatise of Temperance and Sobrietie was published in ; Vaughan’s Hermetical Physick in . There is a helpful review of this literature in Angela Balla, “Baconian Investigation and Spiritual Standing in Herbert’s The Temple,” George Herbert Journal , nos. – (–), –, n. : Balla categorizes studies of Herbert and Bacon broadly as either drawing direct or indirect connections between their works and argues, for her part, for a “methodological compatibility between natural philosophy and religion in Herbert’s verse” (). Christopher de Warrenne Waller, reviewing some of the same studies, categorizes them instead according to whether they emphasize sympathy or antipathy between the two men and puts forward his own intermediate view that “Herbert’s admiration for learning is strongly qualified by his overriding recourse to strictures against curiosity”: see “The Dangers of Curiosity: George Herbert, an Enemy of Science?,” Etudes Epistémè, vol.  (), . To these can be added the chapter on Bacon in Drury’s  biography of Herbert, which gives a decidedly positive picture of the relationship between the two, harmonizing their common critiques of traditional science, academic divinity, and obfuscating language, and their common emphasis on agape. Interestingly, Drury lands on the same passages from Bacon’s Advancement as had Balla: the claims that wonder is “broken knowledge” and that “if a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties” (–). A final recent study taking up Herbert’s engagement with contemporary science is Alister McGrath’s “The Famous Stone: The Alchemical Tropes of George Herbert’s ‘The Elixir’ in Their Late Renaissance Context.” See pp. –.

“I Summon’d Nature”



the compilation of a decent university library. Here Herbert celebrates unreservedly Bacon’s triumph over a useless academic tradition through his emphasis on induction; he also praises, though more equivocally, Bacon’s present and hoped-for achievements in dissecting and mastering Nature. In the second and more famous of Herbert’s two poems in praise of Bacon, for instance, Herbert heralds Bacon as “Naturae Aruspex intimus,” “deepest diviner of Nature.” In classical usage, “haruspex” was the person who inspected the entrails of a victim to divine the will of the gods, and in Herbert’s poem, the epithet is intended as praise of Bacon for his incisive knowledge of nature. But in early modern England, “haruspex” was generally a negative term, since such efforts at divination were viewed as demonic or simply bupkis. “Aruspex Naturae” is therefore a somewhat unsettling compliment, conjuring up an image of Bacon as an Etruscan soothsayer, cutting Nature open and examining her entrails in order to obtain privileged knowledge. Herbert hits a similarly ambiguous note in closing the second of three extant letters to Bacon, written in late , to thank Bacon for the gift of his Novum Organum to the Cambridge University Library. Herbert praises the book: Bacon deserves more honor than the discoverers of the new world, for they have only discovered “most crass” (crassissimum) land while Bacon has discovered infinite subtleties of arts. (It is only a shame, Herbert adds, that the library at Cambridge is too rude and unpolished to welcome such a “guest.”) In closing, he writes, “May God grant that any success you have achieved in the Sphere of Nature, you also achieve in that of Grace.” This is not an insult, but it brings the “sphere of grace” to the fore over and against the sphere of nature, and what is more, the tentative subjunctive mood highlights the lack of any direct spiritual benefit owing 









On Herbert on draining the fens, Sarah Crover argues in “The Cam as ‘Noble Parent’: Herbert’s Anthropocentrism Reconsidered” that the characterization of Herbert as “‘outrageously anthropocentric’ . . . unfairly flattens out Herbert’s engagement with his world.” Similarly, in a closing epigram in praise of King James in Musae Responsoriae, Herbert describes how the king has split open nature’s viscera with his keen mind (“Nec transire licet quo mentis acumine findis / Viscera naturae”). See Works, . Herbert, The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), . A newer translation has it “Interpreter of innermost nature”; see George Herbert, Alia Poemata Latina, in Catherine Freis and Greg Miller (trans.), George Herbert Journal .& (–), . A treatise printed in , for instance, claims that astrologers should receive the same punishment at witches, citing how “by a decree of Pope Gregory the younger, Astrologers were anathematized under the name of Aruspex.” See John Chamber, A Treatise against judicial astrologie (London, ), . Another printed in  refers to how the Aruspices “gulled” the simple Gentiles: see John Favour, Antiquitie triumphing over noveltie (London, ), . Herbert, Works, : “Faxit Deus ut quos profectus feceris in Sphaera Naturae, facias etiam in Gratiae.” Thanks to Donald Dickson for this translation.



Metaphysical Poets

to Bacon’s scientific advancement. God may grant that Bacon should grow in grace, or God may not. Bacon’s scientific acumen has no bearing on his success in this (more important) sphere. Even at his most conciliatory, in sum, Herbert circumscribes his praise of Bacon’s instauration. In The Temple, the speaker in “Vanitie ()” explores the disjunction between grace and nature in more depth, lamenting how devotion to natural science may actively preclude spiritual growth. Having decried the “fleet astronomer” who “can bore / And thred the spheres with his quick-piercing minde,” he turns to the “subtil Chymick” who can devest And strip the creature naked, till he finde The callow principles within their nest: There he imparts to them his minde, Admitted to their bed-chamber, before They appeare trim and drest To ordinarie suitours at the doore. (–)

While Bacon too criticized contemporary chemists, it was on different – one might say opposite – grounds. The penetration of (a feminine, sexualized) nature by an initiated elite, rather than ‘ordinarie’ inquirers, was precisely what he sought. The problem was that natural philosophers were not doing due diligence, proceeding carefully through “experiments of light” before demanding “fruit” for their labors. Herbert instead figures the successful prosecution of this enterprise as blameworthy sexual behavior and laments that man spends his energy in this way rather than seeking out “his deare God” (). While Herbert agrees, therefore, with Bacon’s criticism in the second book of the Advancement of those who would “attempt to drawe downe or submitte the Mysteries of GOD to our Reason,” like Donne (who also used the image of threading the spheres) he would not endorse Bacon’s succeeding claim that humans should instead “raise and advance our Reason to the Divine Truthe,” which Bacon elsewhere glosses as the ability



On Bacon and the sexual conquest of a feminized nature, see Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature. On “experiments of light,” see Bacon’s preface to the Great Instauration in the Oxford Works, xi:: “And we should not, above all, overlook the fact that all the effort given to trying things out has from the very start inquired into certain works set for it in advance, and has chased after these with premature and untimely zeal; it has looked (I say) for fruit-bearing and not lightbearing experiments.” See also New Organon, Works, xi:.

“I Summon’d Nature”



to “comprehend all the universall nature of thinges.” Bacon raises these issues in dialogue with the book of Ecclesiastes, from the biblical wisdom literature thought to have been authored by the Hebrew king Solomon. It is the same text invoked by the title of “Vanitie ().” The book opens, “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, / vanity of vanities; all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes ., AV), and the Ecclesiast stresses the vanity of human learning in particular, warning his son that “of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh” (.). Bacon’s aim in the opening pages of the Advancement is to answer “that Censure of Salomon concerning the excesse of writing and reading Bookes,” and to make clear that Solomon would have nothing to say against his own method or aims. Indeed, such is the harmony between Bacon and “Salomon” that the elite scientific institution in Bacon’s The New Atlantis () was called “Salomon’s House” in honor of the wisest “King of the Hebrews,” who wrote a work of natural history that has been lost to Europeans. Bacon has reason to distance his program of observation and experimentation from the “making of many books” decried by the Ecclesiast, which looks more like old learning; but in the stanza quoted above, Herbert emphatically places even inductive learning within the category of “vanity” in his poem. The argument of the poem, as Margaret Turnbull concludes, is that “to consume one’s life in an effort to know the creation as God knows it” – exactly Bacon’s aim in the Advancement – “may preclude knowing God himself.” This clearly expressed fear sheds light on Herbert’s wish in his letter that Bacon should grow in grace even as he grows in scientific knowledge, though the wish may well have been sincere. Henry Vaughan, who stood at one remove from Bacon, shared Herbert’s prioritization of the sphere of grace, but his poetry portrays science as less of a threat than had Herbert’s. Vaughan picked up both the title and theme of Herbert’s “Vanitie ()” in his poem “Vanity of Spirit,” which appeared in the  edition of Silex Scintillans. The poem retains Herbert’s sense of the ineffectiveness of human inquiry into nature,   



Bacon, Oxford Francis Bacon, iv:, . Donne writes in The Second Anniversary that Drury speeds “through those spheares, as through the beades, a string” (line ). Ibid., iv:–. Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis [] and The Great Instauration [], ed. Jerry Weinberger (Wheeling, IL: Crofts Classics, ); The New Atlantis [], in Sara H. Mendelson (ed.), The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World [] (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, ), . Margaret Turnbull, “George Herbert and John Jewel: ‘Vanitie (I),’ ‘The Agonie,’ and ‘Divinitie’,” George Herbert Journal , nos. – (–), .



Metaphysical Poets

but Vaughan reconsiders this indictment and adds a theological end to the human search for knowledge, conspicuously absent in “Vanitie ().” From the start, the speaker (here not a third-person “astronomer” or “chymick”) attempts to find the Creator’s “name” by searching the world: Quite spent with thoughts I left my Cell, and lay Where a shrill spring tun’d to the early day. I beg’d here long, and gron’d to know Who gave the Clouds so brave a bow, Who bent the spheres, and circled in Corruption with this glorious Ring, What is his name, and how I might Descry some part of his great light. (–)

This is a markedly natural theological quest; it is worth noting, too, that features of the natural world, such as clouds and heavenly bodies, prompt it. Next, however, the inquiry begins to look (sexually) transgressive, harkening back to the chemist in “Vanitie ()”: I summon’d nature: pierc’d through all her store, Broke up some seales, which none had touch’d before, Her wombe, her bosome, and her head Where all her secrets lay a bed I rifled quite. (–)

Coming next to search himself, the speaker is able to discern “traces,” “Ecchoes,” and “weake beames” of light (–). This light is limited, arising only from the speaker’s self and failing in the end to illuminate “the mystery” for the speaker (–). Before he is able to piece together the meanings of the “hieroglyphics” he has discovered, night falls, and the poem ends with his request for death, the only real means of removing the veil that separates him from God. Nonetheless, even this limited light represents a departure on Vaughan’s part from the invective against knowledge in Herbert’s “Vanitie ().” First, while Herbert distances himself from the natural philosopher, Vaughan identifies himself as the natural philosopher. This is consistent with Vaughan’s self-fashioning as a scholar and physician. Second, while 



Editors note a probable source for this inquiry is St. Bonaventure’s Itinerarium mentis in Deum and are in general agreement that the poem questions the theological value of unaided reason: see Vaughan, Works, iii:. See Dickson, “Henry Vaughan, Scholarly Editor.”

“I Summon’d Nature”



Herbert describes an inverse relationship between scientific and spiritual endeavor, Vaughan assumes from the start that the purpose of his scientific inquiry is to discover God. He does not suggest that such inquiry in fact precludes salvific knowledge of God. Third, as mentioned, in Vaughan’s poem the search is not entirely vain, in that he does find faint beams of truth: the fact that these are found in himself rather than the external world does not relegate them to the realm of revealed theology. Herbert’s speaker, by contrast, stresses that man has not “sought out and found . . . his deare God” because of his other preoccupations; God is the only thing, in fact, that man has not sought out and found (–). Fourth and relatedly, Vaughan’s speaker is in a better spiritual position in the end than the scientific inquirers in Herbert’s poem. Having failed to find God’s “name,” Vaughan’s scientifically inquiring speaker asks for death, expressing a level of confidence he will achieve better knowledge of God (not damnation) in the hereafter. Herbert’s emphatic moral pronouncement against science, both its methods and ends, is therefore muted significantly in Vaughan’s poem. One might be searching for a good end, in a defensible way, and still fail to achieve that end simply because it is impossible to achieve in this life. Because Vaughan was writing in the wake of significant personal and public loss, a longing for the next life is characteristic of the poems in Silex Scintillans: the poems appearing before and after “Vanity of Spirit” conclude much the same way. While still confined to this life, however, Vaughan generally remains more open than was Herbert to the possibility that Nature may have something to say about her creator.

Nature Vaughan is more open to natural theology at least partly because the conception of the natural world in Vaughan’s writings differs fundamentally from that in Herbert’s The Temple. As critics such as Alan Rudrum have shown, because of his inclination toward Hermetic philosophy,   

As discussed earlier, both Calvin and Raymond of Sebond locate self-examination in the realm of natural theology. These are “Thou that know’st for whom I mourne” and “The Retreate.” See for instance Rudrum, “Liberation of the Creatures”; “Henry Vaughan’s ‘The Book’: A Hermetic Poem,” Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association , no.  (): – and “For then the Earth shall be all Paradise”; and Diane Kelsey McColley, “Water, Wood, and Stone: The Living Earth in Poems of Vaughan and Milton,” in Donald R. Dickson and Holly Faith Nelson (eds.), Of Paradise and Light: Essays on Henry Vaughan and John Milton in Honor of Alan Rudrum (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, ), –.



Metaphysical Poets

Vaughan attributes to the natural world a “quickness” that Herbert does not; Vaughan also views humans “as part of nature rather than as standing over and against Nature,” lessening the need to treat human and nonhuman nature separately. The Vaughan that emerges in Silex Scintillans is a monist and a vitalist, denying an essential difference between matter and spirit and attributing life to matter. What’s more, in such poems as “And Do They So?” and “The Book,” Vaughan explicitly challenges a prevailing view – which Rudrum identifies as the English Calvinist view – that nonhuman creatures will not take part in the resurrection, something Herbert does not explicitly do. These diverging conceptions of the spiritual status of nonhuman creatures suggest that the two poets held differing ideas about the theological status of nature. While these are general tendencies rather than mutually exclusive positions, Herbert emphasizes God’s transcendence above nonhuman creation, highlighting nature’s fallenness and temporality, while Vaughan emphasizes God’s immanence in nonhuman creation and highlights nature’s goodness and participation in eternity. A suspicion of “nature” in Herbert is thus softened – intentionally, I would argue – by Vaughan. Vaughan’s greater concern for nonhuman nature partly accounts for the difference: Herbert lays more stress on (fallen) human nature in general. Herbert also asserts the fallenness of the natural world and evinces doubt, consistent with reformed theology, that spiritual good can come from either kind of “nature.” Moreover, for Herbert “nature” of either kind can potentially become an idol, preventing humans from seeking God. Importantly, however, even Herbert stops short of vilifying either nonhuman or human nature in The Temple (), portraying these instead as susceptible either to corruption or redemption, a view held up in The Country Parson (completed ) as well. Vaughan does not raise the question of nature’s agency in this way.  

  

Rudrum, “Henry Vaughan’s ‘The Book,’” –. Alan Rudrum, “Thomas Vaughan Reads God’s Second Book” (Oxford Scholarly Editions Online, May , ), notes that Henry came to “repudiate this interest [in Hermeticism] later in life,” so it may be that Henry’s vitalist convictions declined as well. Rudrum, “Liberation of the Creatures,” –. McColley discusses this Calvinist belief as well as the passage in Romans occasioning Vaughan’s poem in “Milton and Ecology,” –. Herbert does leave this possibility open: see pp. –. In general, though, Herbert upholds this orthodoxy, as in “Virtue,” which contrasts the “sweet and virtuous soul” with the rest of creation. A seminal study of Herbert’s reformed theology is Richard Strier’s Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). On the issue of human reason, Strier writes that “for Herbert, as for Luther, religion exists in a realm inaccessible to reason. In religion, Herbert says, “the well is deep, and we have nothing of our selves to draw with” ().

“I Summon’d Nature”



He retains an awareness that humans are susceptible to corruption or redemption, but does not indict “nature” as corrupt or as a potential hindrance to faith as Herbert does. In exploring Herbert’s view of nature, I do not depart from the critical consensus that Herbert (a) is attuned to the natural world, as evinced by his copious use of nature imagery and (b) sees that world as created good but fallen. I will instead nuance this general sense by closely considering the poem “Nature” in its context both within and outside of The Temple. Critics considering Herbert’s relationship to the natural world tend not to make much of this poem for the understandable reason that it is secondarily (if at all) concerned with the natural world. Perhaps, however, given its content, it is all the more important to consider why Herbert would give the poem that name and not, for instance, “human nature” or “sin nature.” Pronouncing the poem to be about “nature” in general, he invites readers to reconsider what nature is and what spiritual value, positive or negative, nature might have. The poem shows an understanding of nature that differs from the conventional use of the term, which Herbert himself used in his letters and orations: nature divides her gifts; nature loves variety; for London booksellers to put personal gain above public good is most contrary to the laws of nature and men. In these writings, “nature” emerges as a shorthand for the way things are, and indeed the way they ought to be. “Nature” the poem still describes the way things are, but things are not as they ought to be. The poem begins, Full of rebellion, I would die, Or fight, or travel, or denie That thou hast ought to do with me. O tame my heart; It is thy highest art To captivate strong holds to thee.

Wilcox notes here that “nature” has “three interlinked meanings: the created world, human nature, and the nature of God” (). The poem is primarily about the speaker’s nature, focusing on his losing struggle to tame his own heart, which can be accomplished only by God’s “art.” God’s  

Joseph Glaser summarizes this tension in The Temple: “Nature somehow figures forth both sin and God’s love” (“George Herbert’s ‘The Temple,’” ). Herbert, Works,  (divisit Natura suas dotes),  (Amat varietatem Natura omnis),  (Ferunt enim Londinenses Bibliopolas suum potius imolumentum quam publicum spectantes (quae res et naturae legibus et hominum summe contraria est)). Translations mine.



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potential to act through nature is not discussed. The created world is present in the imagery of the poem, however: Herbert figures his soul, God’s “workmanship,” as prone to being turned into “bubbles” by the “venom” of rebellion in the second stanza. The third stanza continues to draw a parallel between the speaker’s situation and decline in the natural world: O smooth my rugged heart, and there Engrave thy rev’rend law and fear; Or make a new one, since the old Is saplesse grown, And a much fitter stone To hide my dust, then thee to hold. (–)

Herbert leverages the language of decline in nonhuman natural phenomena – “rugged,” “sapless,” “stone,” and “dust” – to illustrate how his own “nature” is doomed without divine intervention. The positioning of the poem is also characteristically significant. In the Williams manuscript, “Nature” appeared between “Praise (I)” and “Grace,” prompting the reader to dwell on the relationship between nature and grace explored in the biblical Pauline epistles, an exercise which draws attention to nature’s corruption and need to be rectified by God’s “art.” In the final sequence, “Nature” succeeds “Holy Baptisme (II) and is succeeded by “Sinne (I).” Grace is still in play: the speaker in “H. Baptisme (II)” explores the prevenient grace of baptism and begs that his subsequent growth would not mitigate that grace. But the poem concludes with the more capacious claim that “childhood is health,” setting the reader up for a picture of “nature,” at least at the start, as good. Then, jarringly, “Nature” opens with rebellion and death. The overall effect of the final sequencing is to depict nature as poised between the grace of baptism and the deleterious effects of sin, already in motion. Just as in the Williams text “Grace“ casts light backwards on “Nature,” leading readers to reflect further on need for nature to be redeemed by the divine art of grace, so too does “Sinne (I)” invite readers of the Bodleian text to give “Nature” a second look, zooming in on the venom lurking in the speaker in the second stanza:

 

On Herbert and baptism, see Harold Toliver, George Herbert’s Christian Narrative (State College, PA: Penn State University Press, ), –. This is a theme Vaughan would pick up with gusto: see for example “The Retreate” () and “Childe-Hood” (). In “H. Baptisme (II),” Herbert stresses the inadequacy of that childhood health, comparing his subsequent growth to a “blister” ().

“I Summon’d Nature”



If thou shalt let this venome lurk And in suggestions fume and work, My soul will turn to bubbles straight, And thence by kinde Vanish into a winde, Making thy workmanship deceit.

It is important to ask whether “thy workmanship” here refers only to supernatural grace or also to God’s original creation. I would argue the latter: it has just been asserted that “childhood is health,” and an Augustinian view of evil as privation implicit in the language of “bubbles” and “winde.” While the general thrust of the poem calls into question the goodness of both internal and external nature, then, Herbert notably does not entirely condemn nature. What is actually being condemned is made clear in the next poem, “Sinne (I).” The sonnet “Sinne (I)” has been compared with Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella  on account of their shared poetic catalogues. Sidney’s focus is sleep while Herbert catalogues the measures taken by God to protect humans from sin. There is an even more striking resemblance, I would argue, between “Sinne (I)” and Astrophil and Stella . Compare the volta at the end of Herbert’s sonnet: Blessings beforehand, tyes of gratefulnesse, The sound of glorie ringing in our eares: Without, our shame; within, our consciences; Angels and grace, eternall hopes and fears. Yet all these fences and their whole aray One cunning bosome-sinne blows quite away.

with the end of Sidney’s: And not content to be perfection’s heir Thy self, dost strive all minds that way to move, Who mark in thee what is in thee most fair; So while thy beauty draws the heart to love, As fast thy virtue bends that love to good. But ah, desire still cries, “Give me some food.” 

 

“Workmanship” of course can refer to God’s work of grace in the speaker; the language of ontic privation as evil in this stanza also subtly reminds readers that creation is good. This point is underscored by the first stanza of “Sinne (II),” which ends, “Sinne is flat opposite to th’Almighty, seeing / It wants the good of vertue, and of being.” Christine Pyle Cloud refers to “Sinne (II)” as “a quasi-philosophical musing on sin as nothingness” in “‘Take me by the hand’: Affliction and Liturgical Participation in George Herbert’s The Temple” (PhD Diss., Baylor University, ), . Wilcox, English Poems, . Comparing the startling ends of Astrophil and Stella  and Herbert’s “The Collar,” Strier comments that Herbert “may well have learned this effect from Sidney.” In “Sinne (I)” no new

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Sidney’s professed subject in his sonnet is the capacity of the “fairest book of nature” to lead its reader to virtue. The beloved Stella is a digest of that book, in whose “fair lines” can be seen “true goodness,” leading the viewer to grow in virtue through the “sweetest sovereignty / Of reason.” Thus the sonnet uses the conventions of natural theology to make a wry point about erotic love. In this regard, however paradoxically, Herbert shares yet more ground with Sidney. Not only does Petrarchan love fail Sidney’s speaker; the book of nature fails as well. Both poems spend most of their lines shoring up virtue – in both cases invoking the “rule of reason” – only to blow it all away by unleashing an enemy that was lurking within the speaker all along. Herbert’s poem thus enacts the process he feared in “Nature,” in which a venom inside the speaker transmutes God’s workmanship into deceit. But the workmanship itself, including the conscience within, is good. Herbert walks this line throughout “The Church”: nature is created good, but powerless to save and susceptible either to destruction by sin or redemption by grace. In “Trinity Sunday,” which appears only in the Williams manuscript, he wrote that “Nature & Grace / With Glory may attain thy face,” achieving “some degree” of communion with God (–). In the Bodleian manuscript, he writes in “Faith” that “grace fills up uneven nature” just as When creatures had no reall light Inherent in them, thou didst make the sunne, Impute a lustre, and allow them bright; And in this shew, what Christ hath done. (–)

As in the poem “Nature,” here Herbert is speaking primarily of human nature but using images drawn from external creation to make his point about imputed righteousness. In this case, however, he is further alleging







voice is intruded, but thematically the content is closer. See Richard Strier, “Paleness versus Eloquence: The Ideologies of Style in the English Renaissance,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture . (), , n. . This is a Petrarchan trope; Sidney’s sonnet  is based on Petrarch’s Canzoniere , though Petrarch’s poem makes no reference to the book of nature and does not share Sidney’s cynicism about erotic love and virtue. For a reading of this poem as Herbert’s criticism of rational deduction, consistent with my reading of the poem as part of a conversation about the inadequacy of the “book of Nature,” see Balla, –: “Herbert’s poem compels readers to ask how ‘one cunning bosome-sinne’ affects both the speaker’s perception of God and the speaker’s means of verifying this perception” (). Compare Clay Paul Greene’s assertion that the speaker in “Holy Communion” observes that “flesh is not evil; only sin is” in “The Spirit in the Church Instituting the Holy in George Herbert’s Poetry and Prose” (PhD Diss., University of Alabama, ), .

“I Summon’d Nature”



that God intended this creaturely phenomenon to make this point. Nature’s capacity for corruption and redemption appears again in “Affliction (IV),” in which “the elements” fight and plot to kill both the speaker and themselves, but the solution to this problem is not the obliteration of “those powers, which work for grief,” but rather their redemption (–). “Affliction (IV)” is then followed by “Man,” in which the goodness of creation – with man as its epitome – takes center stage. Tellingly, though, in revising the poem, Herbert slips in a reminder of man’s lost promise in the line “He is a tree, yet bears no fruit.” In “Man’s Medley,” again, the goodness of the created world is assumed, but Herbert stresses the danger that external nature can become an idol, deflecting attention from eternity: Heark, how the birds do sing, And woods do ring. All creatures have their joy: and man hath his. Yet if we rightly measure, Man’s joy and pleasure Rather hereafter, than present, is. (–)

Herbert reiterates in a later stanza that he is not saying man “may not here / Taste of the cheer,” but it is crucial that in doing so he always “think / Of better drink / He may attain to, after he is dead” (–, –). This danger of idolatry arises again in “The Pulley,” when God explains that he has withheld rest lest humans “adore my gifts instead of me, / And rest in Nature, not the God of nature / So both should losers be” (–). “Both” here has been glossed as both “God and humans” and “man and nature”; the latter reading would imply that even nonhuman creation has  



Wilcox notes that “the elements” here are the four bodily humors and their corresponding Aristotelian elements (English Poems, ). Emphasis mine. Wilcox comments, following Hutchinson, “‘There is no greater difficulty in The Temple’ than the crux in line  (Hutchinson ). The sense of lines – would lead us to expect ‘He is a tree, yet bears more fruit,’ as in W [the Williams manuscript] . . . However, there are internal and external reasons for keeping this revision. The context of the succeeding lines suggests that, although ‘man’ is expected to be ‘more’ than the plants and animals, he is in fact not always so” (English Poems, –). See also Strier’s treatment in “Ironic Humanism in The Temple,” in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds.), “Too Rich to Clothe the Sunne”: Essays on George Herbert (Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press, ), –. In line with my reading of “Man’s Medley” is Strier’s summary pronouncement that the poem “is neither balanced nor celebratory” of the world, contrasting Herbert’s position with the more balanced view taken at times by Donne. See Strier, “George Herbert and the World,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies , no.  (), –.



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something at stake in human redemption. In this way, while still far less optimistic about the spiritual status of nonhuman creation than Vaughan would be, Herbert opens the door for an understanding of nonhuman creatures as participating in eternity. Even Herbert’s “Virtue,” which seems at first blush to assert flatly that all of creation apart from the virtuous (human) soul is destined to be destroyed, puts that possible future in the subjunctive: “Though the whole world [should] turn to coal,” the speaker says, then the soul chiefly lives (–). Against a tide of willful exclusion of nonhuman creation from eternity, this speaker appears to recognize that what ultimately happens to the world is up to God. The Country Parson walks this same line between idolatry of the physical world on one side and a (Gnostic) deprecation of it on the other. The parson is to care not only for his parishioners’ souls, but also their bodies, ensuring their access to a doctor and also “attaining such a measure of Physick, as may be of much use to him both for himself, and others.” Such study, Herbert continues, “may be an help, and a recreation to more divine studies, Nature serving Grace both in comfort of diversion, and in the benefit of application.” There follow specific examples of homegrown cures the parson and his wife should prefer before artfully compounded city “drugs,” providing a window into Herbert’s naturalistic knowledge and the appreciation for the natural world evident in “Man” (–). God is the author of human nature as well, having placed “Reason in the soul, and a hand in the Body” from the beginning (). On the other hand, Christianity “contains things above nature” (). As in “The Church,” baptism is a key means by which grace redeems nature: the parson opens a baptism service by thanking God “for calling us to the knowledge of his grace, Baptisme being a blessing, that the world hath not the like” (). Nature, created good, is now always positioned between sin and sanctification, which must come from above. In closing this discussion of Herbert’s view of nature, we may note some points of similarity with Francis Bacon that will influence the kind and 

 

Though “nature” here refers primarily to human nature, Strier points out that since humanity is a microcosm of the external world “it is reasonable (as well as biblical) to see [external] nature’s fate as involved with his [humanity’s]” (“Ironic Humanism,” ; , n. ). McColley, “Milton and Ecology,” –. Evincing similar appreciation for the physical is A Treatise of Temperance and Sobrietie, Herbert’s translation of Luigi Cornaro’s Trattato de la vita sobria (; Latin ), which lays down rules for maintaining health. The treatise was probably composed during his years at Bemerton, possibly earlier, possibly at the request of Bacon. See Charles, A Life of George Herbert, ; Cristina Malcolmson, George Herbert: A Literary Life (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, ),  n. ; Herbert, Works, .

“I Summon’d Nature”



scope of natural theology Herbert might imagine possible. Like Bacon – whose own thought was influenced by Calvin – Herbert evinces general chariness about God’s image or presence in nonhuman creation (with the possible exception of communion) as well as an emphasis on the unintelligibility of the created world. Not only is the natural world subject to corruption and therefore a dubious source for edifying knowledge; the human mind has been corrupted in the Fall and cannot be trusted. In The Country Parson, finally, Herbert even goes so far as to question “nature” as a category, asserting a divine superintendence of all physical phenomena consistent with theological voluntarism and in opposition to the theological intellectualism of his brother, Lord Herbert of Cherbury: By his sustaining power he preserves and actuates every thing in his being; so that the corne doth not grow by any other vertue, then by that which he continually supplyes, as the corn needs it; without which supply the corne would instantly dry up, as a river would if the fountain were stopped. ()

In this view, there is no “nature” in the sense of an ordering principle lower than God; there is only God – working creatively for good – and human sin and decay. Because God does continue to “preserve and actuate every thing,” however, there remains the possibility of inferring God’s wisdom and power from the continued existence and activity of creation. This is the kind of natural theology Bacon sanctioned in The Advancement of Learning, and it would become the major strand of natural theology later in the century. Turning to Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans, we find – unsurprisingly given Vaughan’s devotion to Herbert and their common theology – that there are still categories of sin and grace and that humans are subject to 



On Bacon, see pp. –. The thorny issue of Herbert’s view of communion is outside the scope of this study, but it seems wise to bracket these ‘elements’ as a special case. For a discussion of “The H. Communion” in the context of Herbert’s view of the physical, see Strier, “Herbert and the World,” –. This kind of natural theology, emphasizing wonder rather than natural law, is delineated by Scott Mandelbrote in his “Uses of Natural Theology in Seventeenth-Century England.” Herbert’s view here is consistent with Bacon’s, which John Gascoigne describes: “For [Bacon], the order in nature does not follow from some immanent principle such as the Aristotelian idea of nature being shaped by intelligent causes; true to the voluntarist tradition (which was strong in Calvinism) the laws of nature are seen by Bacon as having been imposed by the will of the Creator on the creation. Natural objects form some sort of pattern not because there is an organic bond between them but rather because they are regimented into formation by an outside force”: see “The Religious Thought of Francis Bacon,” . Gascoigne points out the inherent tension in Bacon between theological voluntarism and the need for nature to be predictable in order for empirical science to be practicable.



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corruption. As many critics have recognized, however, Vaughan attends conspicuously and devotedly to the natural world, elevating its status and placing it in eternity, whether or not he saw himself as departing from Herbert in doing so. This contrast can be overstated: Vaughan is clearly aware of the human fallenness and corruption that Herbert highlights. In fact, Vaughan’s poetry is such that the jacket blurb on an edition of his poetry can call him “less worldly than Donne or Herbert” but also celebrate his “response to nature” that “marks him out from his contemporaries and, in some respects, prefigures nineteenth-century Romanticism.” The poet who gives the world a place in eternity in “And Do They So?” has nothing good to say about the world in his poem by that title. This paradox, though more acutely present in Vaughan’s devotional poetry, is already present in Herbert and in fact goes back to the Bible, particularly the Johannine books, from which Vaughan takes his epigraph for “The World.” In these biblical books, “world” (κοσμος) has two different meanings: first, the created order that God loves and seeks to redeem, as in John .: “For God so loved the world”; second, the human use of elements in that created order to make life manageable without repentance or faith in Christ. This latter is the meaning of “world” in the verse Vaughan uses as an epigraph to “The World,”  John .–: “All that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the Eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the father but is of the world. And the world passeth away.” The question is to which world “nature” belongs. For Herbert, nature is implicated in the negative “world” that will pass away; for Vaughan, who focuses more on the theological status of external nature in the first place, nature belongs to the positive “world” that God loves and redeems. There is therefore an absence in Silex Scintillans of yoking sin with nature or worry that nature will become an idol. Vaughan in fact refers to “nature” less frequently than Herbert, giving no poem that title. Readers interested in Vaughan’s view of nature in Silex Scintillans infer that view instead from his attentive engagement with natural phenomena: a waterfall, a 

   

It is not clear that Vaughan saw himself as departing from Herbert in his conception of nature: see Jonathan Nauman, “Herbert the Hermetist: Vaughan’s Reading of The Temple,” George Herbert Journal , no.  (): –. This is Henry Vaughan: the Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ). Herbert’s poem titled “The World” captures the situation by figuring the world as a “stately house” built by Love, altered and “reformed” by evil forces, but then built again by “Love and Grace.” I am grateful to Phillip Donnelly for this phrasing. Herbert mentions “nature” or “natural” twelve times in The Temple (Bodleian) compared to seven in Silex Scintillans ().

“I Summon’d Nature”



stone, a palm tree, a cock crowing. The reader of Vaughan’s poetry is inundated not only with natural imagery employed metaphorically; creatures themselves are celebrated, their situations lamented, their testimony heard. Silex Scintillans produces an intense sense of God’s work in and through the created world that is absent from, for example, the devotional poetry of Richard Crashaw, another Royalist devotee of Herbert’s writing during the war and Interregnum. In those inclement political circumstances, Crashaw fled to the Catholic church and to the European continent, using poetry to work out his new faith and drawing his imagery primarily from scripture and the church tradition. Vaughan, by contrast, used his poetry to mitigate the effective loss of the Church of England, its buildings, monuments, liturgy, and prayer book, which had been so central to Herbert’s “The Church.” In so doing, Vaughan drew copiously on the book of nature, which remained available to him when the British church was not. Vaughan’s theological appreciation for nature is on view not only in his explicit reflection on the theological status of creatures, but also in his repeated affirmation of the health and purity of young humans and the young earth, before the corrupting influences of age and art intervene. This is the theme of two of Vaughan’s best-known poems: “The Retreate” and “Corruption.” “The Retreate” begins, “Happy those early dayes! When I / Shin’d in my Angell-infancy” and continues, When on some gilded Cloud, or flowre My gazing soul would dwell an houre, And in those weaker glories spy Some shadows of eternity.

(–, –)

Vaughan has here expanded on Herbert’s assertion that “childhood is health” and also removed the emphasis on baptism framing Herbert’s  

Crashaw wrote a volume of devotional poetry titled Steps to the Temple (London, ). Wall, “Henry Vaughan,” ; Smith, “Henry Vaughan and Thomas Vaughan: Welsh Anglicanism, ‘Chymick,’ and the English Revolution,” in Laura Lunger Knoppers (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), : “The poetry that Vaughan produced in these difficult years functioned as a replacement for the banned Book of Common Prayer and indeed for the proscribed Church of England, which had been effectively abolished, its governing bishops imprisoned, outlawed, and in exile. Nature became the source of Vaughan’s sacraments in these circumstances.” See also Summers and Pebworth, “Vaughan’s Temple in Nature.” In a summary introduction to Vaughan, Carol Rumens reports in The Guardian’s “Poem of the week” column for January ,  that “Vaughan’s equivalent of Herbert’s “Temple” is found in the woods, hills and skies of his native countryside.”

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assertion; instead, God’s original creative activity – which made the cloud and the flower as well as the speaker – is sufficient to connect the infant, though tenuously, with eternity. Analogously, in “Corruption” Vaughan suggests that even after the Fall, Adam inhabited a more paradisal world than later humans would: Nor was Heav’n cold unto him; for each day The vally, or the Mountain Afforded visits, and still Paradise lay In some green shade, or fountain. (–)

Though (like Herbert’s) Vaughan’s created world is subject to the effects of sin, Vaughan stresses that nature is not to blame, serving rather as a balm or incentive to worship than as an idol. Nature’s role in worship is a theme of “Religion,” one of the first poems in Silex Scintillans, and a crucial one in terms of Vaughan’s view of religious worship. Like “The Retreate” and “Corruption” (as well as Herbert’s “Decay”), the poem presents a declension narrative, in this case chronicling the decline of religion. Both “Decay” and “Religion” contrast the speaker’s situation with that of biblical patriarchs such as Abraham and Jacob and end with a call for God to mend matters. But Vaughan’s poem,  stanzas longer, differs from Herbert’s in terms of the theological status of nature. (The most obvious difference between the two poems has more to do with the status of the church, with Vaughan making a statement on his ecclesiastically inclement circumstances in England in the s.) Lamenting how “we have no conf’rence [with God] in these daies,” the speaker unfolds a conceit of religion as an underground spring that begins “cordial” but worsens in taste and color as she passes through “the Earths darke veines,” such that when she finally sees the light, she is poison rather than physic (–). Readers have debated the extent of Vaughan’s pessimism and how much blame for this situation should be laid on Puritan reformers. It is also unclear how Vaughan understands the supposed superiority of the Old Covenant, which Herbert may have asserted only ironically in “Decay.” Does Vaughan, too, recognize that 



For a summary of readings of Vaughan’s “Religion,” see the Oxford Works, iii:–. There is agreement among these differing readers that Vaughan is lamenting the plight of the English church. Glaser, “George Herbert’s ‘The Temple,’” : “What the speaker [in ‘Decay’] does not see, although Herbert and the reader do, is that he is rejecting the special burdens of life under the New Covenant in favor of the clear-cut but immeasurably lesser advantages of the Old.” Critics differ regarding why Herbert – a supersessionist – would describe the shift from Old to New

“I Summon’d Nature”



his speaker should not be longing for a restoration of those old affairs but for the consummation of history? Yes and no. This question of God’s “conf’rence” with man is linked in Herbert’s “Decay” and Vaughan’s “Religion” not only with the Old Covenant, but also with nature, a theological resource available not only to Abraham and his descendants but also to those outside that covenant altogether. On this topic Vaughan’s poem differs not only from Herbert’s but also from comparable passages in Donne’s Anniversaries as well as contemporary biblical epic, though here I will focus only on Herbert. In “Decay,” Herbert’s speaker laments the passing of those times when One might have sought and found thee presently At some fair oak, or bush, or well: Is my God this way? No they would reply: He is to Sinai gone, as we heard tell: List, ye may heare great Aarons bell.

The first two lines of this stanza sketch out a priscan religion available to all, before quickly shifting to God’s special covenant with Israel with a caesura followed by “No”: God is now removed to Sinai, and the “one” originally seeking God in nature is now a plural “ye” who hear the priest’s bell at a distance. From Sinai, God then further retreats in the third stanza to some one corner of a feeble heart Where yet both Sinne and Satan, thy old foes, Do pinch and straiten thee, and use much art To gain thy thirds and little part. (–)

Outside of this “third” of the believer’s heart, the natural world in “Decay” is bereft of God’s presence, subject only to decay.





Covenant in terms of decay in this poem, which does not intrinsically compel an ironic reading. See also Wilcox, English Poems, . Space does not permit me to explore this rich web of connections here, but such an exploration would surely consider Donne’s First Anniversary, –, which attributes to Elizabeth Drury the virtue of seeing God in “any natural stone or tree, / Better than when in images they be”; Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder .–, in which Abram sets aside groves as hallowed without building temples or becoming superstitiously devoted to place; Herbert’s “Decay”; Vaughan’s “Religion,” “Retreat,” “Corruption,” “The Search,” and “Ascension-Day” (the last of which brings the speaker’s thoughts to “move in this fair place, / And the last steps of my Milde Master trace”); and Milton’s Paradise Lost .–, in which Adam’s lament for the ability to trace God’s footsteps in Eden is corrected by Michael: “Adam, thou knowest Heaven his, and all the earth; Not this rock only; his Omnipresence fills / Land, sea, and air, and every kind that lives.” For a reading of Herbert’s “Aaron” as similarly highlighting the inferiority of the old covenant (contrasting Aaron with Melchizedek), see Roche, “Typology, Allegory, and Protestant Poetics,” –.



Metaphysical Poets

Vaughan’s representation of the Old Testament reverses this idea of a withdrawal of God from nature in Old Testament times. Walking among the pages of scripture – “those groves, / And leaves thy spirit still doth fan” – the speaker in “Religion” sees angels encountering humans under junipers, myrtles, and oaks, mentioning Jacob, Elijah, and Abram. He then doubles back: Nay thou thy selfe, my God, in fire, Whirle-winds, and Clouds, and the soft voice Speakst there so much, that I admire We have no Conf’rence in these daies; (–)

In Vaughan’s picture of the Old Testament, God’s presence in nature coincides with the history of God’s encounters with Abraham, Moses, and the prophets. Notable, too, is Vaughan’s inclusion of “a Raven” among his list of angels or divine messengers who communed with Old Testament figures (). God’s feeding Elijah through the ravens highlights nature’s active involvement in those “conferences.” By contrast, nature is not conspicuously involved in Herbert’s list in the first stanza of “Decay”: “when thou didst lodge with Lot, / Struggle with Jacob, sit with Gideon, / Advise with Abraham” (–). In this way Vaughan reinvests nature in “Religion” with the divine presence that Herbert described as withdrawing from nature in “Decay.” Vaughan pointedly reasserts this presence with a “Nay,” declaring God himself (not only angels) to be not “at” but “in” the fire, wind, and cloud. Vaughan’s image of restoration at the end of his poem differs from Herbert’s as well. Herbert’s poem ends, I see the world grows old, when as the heat Of thy great love, once spread, as in an urn Doth closet up it self, and still retreat, Cold Sinne still forcing it, till it return, And calling Justice, all things burn. (–)

Vaughan invokes instead both Old and New Testament miracles: Heal then these waters, Lord; or bring thy flock, Since these are troubled, to the springing rock, Look downe great Master of the feast; O shine, And turn once more our Water into Wine! (–)

“I Summon’d Nature”



There is a shared sense that things are not as they should be, but Vaughan’s hope – repeated throughout Silex Scintillans – is framed in terms of regeneration, not conflagration. Thus at the beginning of Silex I () Vaughan calls for regeneration, and at the end of Silex II (), he prays: O knowing, glorious spirit! when Thou shalt restore trees, beasts, and men, When thou shalt make all new again, Destroying onely death and pain, Give him amongst thy works a place, Who in them lov’d and sought thy face!

(“The Book,” –)

Where Herbert invoked a love that would “all things burn” in the end, Vaughan pointedly asserts that only death and pain will be destroyed; all creation will be made new. To be sure, it would be a mistake to conflate conflagration with total destruction even in Herbert’s poetry: Herbert recognized that God could burn without consuming and famously compared the everlasting virtuous soul to “season’d timber.” But water, not fire, was Vaughan’s favorite element. In the end, Vaughan’s speaker even declines to make a distinction between himself and nonhuman creation, asking only that God give him a place “amongst thy works.” Why does he hope for this? He continues that this is because he has loved and sought God’s face in nature; that is, he has practiced natural theology. The next chapter explores how these two poets viewed the natural world as revealing divine truth.

 

“Mutters of Assent” or “Lectures for the Eye” Natural Theology in the Devotional Lyrics of Herbert and Vaughan

Each cloud distills thy praise, and doth forbid Poets to turn it to another use. Roses and Lillies speak thee; and to make A pair of cheeks of them, is thy abuse.

George Herbert, “New Year Sonnet” ()

Man is the worlds high Priest: he doth present The sacrifice for all; while they below Unto the service mutter an assent, Such as springs use that fall, and windes that blow.

George Herbert, “Providence” ()

O that man would do so! that he would hear The world read to him! all the vast expanse In the Creation shed, and slaved to sense Makes up but lectures for his eye, and ear.

Henry Vaughan, “The Tempest” ()

In the previous chapter, I considered how George Herbert and Henry Vaughan generally viewed nature and human science. In this chapter, I focus more specifically on how Herbert and Vaughan depict the natural world as capable of revealing theological truth – and humans as capable of receiving that truth – in their widely read devotional lyrics, while occasionally drawing in other works by the two men. As was the case with Donne, both poets are aware of the long tradition of reading the book of nature and face the challenge of reading that book in a context in which human inquiry into (and understanding of ) nature was changing 

I will focus predominantly on Herbert’s The Temple (paying attention to the differences between the – “Williams” and  “Bodleian” manuscripts) and Vaughan’s  and  Silex Scintillans, though occasionally I will consider other works, such as Herbert’s earlier “Walton Sonnets” () and The Country Parson (), and Vaughan’s later Thalia Rediviva ().



“Mutters of Assent” or “Lectures for the Eye”



dramatically, giving rise to a new kind of natural theology that inferred God’s existence and power from the order and fitness of the created world. This physico-theology, I have argued, owes something not only to Bacon’s call for scientific advancement but also to his pronouncement that “God never wrought miracle to convince atheism, because his ordinary works convince it.” Devotional poetry shares ground with natural theology broadly conceived: the devotional poet hopes to gain greater access and insight into God, whether by drawing on nature or scripture. What ground might this influential devotional poetry share with the nascent physico-theology? Ultimately, Herbert and Vaughan do not just hint at what kind of natural theology might be possible or edifying given their respective understandings of science and nature. Both authors practice natural theology in their devotional poetry. Because the two poets differ on the value of human science and the theological status of nature, however, they differ markedly on how and when natural theology may usefully be practiced. Herbert views natural theology along the lines Bacon laid down in his Essays and Advancement of Learning, anticipating – and probably even influencing – the physico-theology of John Ray later in the century. As explained in the Introduction, in this view humans are alone responsible for inferring what theological truth is available in the created world, namely, that God exists and has provided admirably for his creation and particularly for humans. Herbert increasingly conceives of nature more as a household full of useful things than a book inscribed with meaning. Vaughan, by contrast, retains the older view that more theological insight is available in nature than just the facts of God’s existence and providence, making less of a distinction than Herbert between nature and scripture. Vaughan accordingly portrays natural theology as a collaborative endeavor undertaken by God, man, and nonhuman creation together. Both poets illustrate well how devotional poetry could draw theological insights from nature no less than the prose sermons that would develop into physico-theology. What is more, Herbert’s poetry likely influenced this development.  

Bacon, Essays (London, ), “Of Atheism.” See p. . See Udo Krolzik’s summary of physico-theology in “Physicotheologie” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie ( vols.), ed. Gerhard Mu¨ller, Horst Balz, and Gerhard Krause (Berlin: De Gruyter, ), xxvi:: “Obgleich die physikotheologischen Arbeiten apologetishe und erbauliche Zu¨ge aufweisen un auch in diesem Sinne genutzt wurden, sind sie weder Apologien noch Erbauungsbu¨cher. [Although works of physico-theology have apologetic and devotional characteristics – and were also used in this way – they are neither apologetic nor devotional works.]”



Metaphysical Poets

Herbert’s clearest prose statement about natural theology appears in Chapter  of The Country Parson: “The Parson’s Dexterity in applying of Remedies.” Herbert speaks of parishioners who think “that there is none that can or will look after things, but all goes by chance, or wit.” If the Parson suspects this, Without opposing them directly (for disputation is no cure for Atheisme) he scatters in his discourse three sorts of arguments; the first taken from Nature, the second from the Law, the third from Grace. For Nature, he sees not how a house could be either built without a builder or kept in repaire without a house-keeper. He conceives not possibly, how the windes should blow so much as they can, and the sea rage so much as it can, and all things do what they can, and all, not only without dissolution of the whole, but also of any part, by taking away so much as the usuall seasons of summer and winter, earing and harvest . . . He conceives not possibly, how he that would believe a Divinity, if he had been at the Creation of all things, should lesse believe it, seeing the Preservation of all things; For Preservation is a Creation, and more, it is a continued Creation, and a creation every moment. ()

Already in the title of the section it is evident that Herbert views natural theology as a practical remedy to be applied to ailing souls. If the parson discerns that a parishioner is struggling with – probably not reveling in – doubts about God’s existence and providence, he is to “scatter in his discourse” how impossible it is to conceive of the world as created and preserved by any other than a divine “house-keeper.” Like Bacon’s “divine marshall,” such a housekeeper is necessary every moment to keep a raging, otherwise chaotic world from dissolving in every part. Notably, Herbert’s pastoral aim of helping people work through their doubts is the same object Richard Baxter would have in view when he set about to write natural theology decades later (in one case in response to Edward Herbert’s De Veritate). Prefixed to Baxter’s More Reasons of the Christian Religion () is a dedication to Sir Henry Herbert, chosen as dedicatee partly for being “the Brother of so excellently holy as well as learned and ingenious a person, as Mr. George Herbert, Orator to the University of Cambridge and a faithful Pastor in the English Church.” Baxter trades on George Herbert’s intellectual and spiritual credentials in   

See p. . Calloway, Natural Theology, –. Like Herbert with “The Church,” Baxter wrote first for his own spiritual edification and then published for the benefit of others. Baxter, “To the Right Worshipfull Sir Henry Herbert.”

“Mutters of Assent” or “Lectures for the Eye”



establishing the legitimacy of his similarly practical and pastoral natural theology. On the other hand, at points Baxter’s natural theology becomes far more “disputational” than the kind Herbert counsels, which comprises logically loose pronouncements that the parson “conceives not possibly” how there can be a creation without a creator, scattered about with other “arguments” drawn from grace, that is, arising from the Bible itself. If Herbert’s stated goal for natural theology would resonate with Baxter’s, his mode of “argumentation” is more similar to that taken up by John Ray in his popular Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation, first delivered as sermons in the s at Trinity College, George Herbert’s college at Cambridge. Ray would write in the preface to the  print edition of Wisdom, Psalm .. When I considered the Heavens the Work of thy Fingers, the Moon and the Stars which thou hast ordained; What is man that thou are mindful of him, or the Son of man that thou visitest him? And to these purposes the Holy Psalmist is very frequent in the Enumeration and Consideration of these Works, which may warrant me doing the like, and justifie the denominating such Discourse as this, rather Theological than Philosophical.

Accordingly, Ray foregoes philosophical disputation and instead catalogues the wonders of creation, pausing periodically to exclaim on God’s “wonderful Art and Providence,” concluding repeatedly that “we must needs be mad or sottish if we can conceive any other than an infinitely good and wise God” as the world’s author. Such scattered arguments, begging the question of God’s existence, wisdom, and power, appear as well in the poems in The Temple – alongside material drawn from scripture and from the speaker’s own experience. Herbert aimed his work at Christians looking to deepen or buttress their faith: He famously directed Nicholas Ferrar to publish The Temple posthumously “if he can think it may turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul.” 



  

“Argument” could in the seventeenth century mean “subject matter” (OED ), as is the case with the “Arguments” opening books of Paradise Lost, and Herbert appears to lean in that direction here since he distinguishes these arguments from “disputations.” His “argument from the Law” observes that the Jewish people still exist, scattered among the nations, with their law, as chronicled in the Bible: see Herbert, Works, –. Interestingly, both Ray and Herbert compiled collections of proverbs, with Ray explicitly crediting Herbert as his main source. On how this project is analogous to Ray’s logically loose collection of wonders in Wisdom of God, see Calloway, Natural Theology, . Ray, Wisdom of God, , ; see also e.g. , , , , . Calloway, “Rather Theological than Philosophical.” Walton, The Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr. Richard Hooker, Mr. George Herbert (London, ), .



Metaphysical Poets

In the previous chapter I noted that Herbert fears a misdirection of finite human resources of energy and attention toward scientific inquiry and away from growth in grace. This concern arises not only in “Vanitie (I)” and “The Pulley,” but also in “Mattens,” a poem that explicitly addresses the topic of natural theology. In setting up an opposition in the penultimate stanza between studying “heav’n and earth” and studying “him by whom they be” (–), Herbert endorses the (Calvinist) view that “the general revelation of God through nature is insufficient of itself,” as Daniel Doerksen points out. Here we note a stark disagreement with Bacon’s flat pronouncement in the Advancement of Learning (which Herbert helped translate into Latin) that natural knowledge “sufficeth to convince atheisme.” Within fideal bounds, however, “Mattens” ultimately presents a hopeful view of natural theology. The poem takes its cue from Psalm , the same text Ray cites as generically defining The Wisdom of God. In the final stanza of the poem, Herbert prays that knowledge of creation and creator might grow together: Teach me thy love to know; That this new light, which now I see, May both the work and workman show: Then by a sunne-beam I will climbe to thee. (–)

The “new light” the speaker hopes will enable him to see both the work and the workman is both the morning light – which will be the occasion as well for Vaughan’s “Morning Watch” – and an agreement between himself and God, a “match,” that has been punningly made in the first stanza. This poem, already present in the Williams manuscript, opens up the possibility for natural theology, but within narrow bounds: the works do not here illuminate the workman but are seen at the same time. Herbert also stresses the need for a “new light” in order to take in the work and workman together. Unlike the “inner light” that other Cambridge men would discuss in later decades, this new light is not present in all humans but is identified with the special revelation available in Christ, the “sunne” that allows the speaker to climb to God. Though in agreement with    

Daniel Doerksen, “George Herbert, Calvinism, and Reading ‘Mattens’,” Christianity and Literature , no.  (): . Bacon, Oxford Francis Bacon, iv:–. Bacon makes the same claim in the essay “Of Atheisme.” Wilcox, English Poems, . On this topic see Robert A. Greene, “Whichcote, the Candle of the Lord, and Synderesis,” Journal of the History of Ideas , no.  (): – and Charles Taliaferro and Alison J. Teply, Cambridge Platonist Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, ), –.

“Mutters of Assent” or “Lectures for the Eye”



reformed theologians who saw natural theology as having only post-fideal and post-scriptural applications, Herbert does not pit knowledge of God and knowledge of God’s works against each other in “Mattens” as a zerosum game as he did in “Vanitie (I).” The two are instead yoked together. This is the case as well in “The Elixer,” a poem rich in scientific references in which the speaker prays, “Teach me, my God and King, / In all things thee to see” and adds (referencing I Corinthians ) that A man that looks on glasse, On it may stay his eye; Or if he pleaseth, through it passe, And then the heav’n espie.

(–, –)

If by “glasse” Herbert meant an aid such as a telescope, here he goes so far as to cast God’s works as helping the man to see God rather than merely not hindering him or coming into view at the same time. If Herbert places empirical knowledge categorically below the sphere of grace, conveyed through scripture and the sacraments, he is even more chary about old ways of interpreting the book of nature. These include the ontological and cosmological arguments derived from Greek philosophy as well as the allegorical understanding of nature associated with the medieval period. Like Bacon, Herbert largely rejected old learning, under which heading can be placed such syllogistic derivations of God’s being and attributes as those propounded by Anselm and Aquinas and (later) Raymond of Sebond and Descartes. Such application of the intellect to divine things, which can lead to human dictation of what God can and cannot be and do, runs counter to the reformed view of God’s sovereignty evident in, for example, “Divinitie,” in which Herbert roundly criticizes those who would subject “Divinities transcendent skie” to the same violent “carving” they have performed on the stars with their presumptuous science. The speaker insists instead that true Christian doctrine is “seamless,” clear, and bright, if inaccessible to human ratio; for God can “Bid what he please” without explanation (, –). Herbert’s view that religious revelation supersedes (Greek) reason is evident too in The Church Militant, where he  



Woolford, “Natural Theology in the Late Renaissance,” –. Wilcox suggests that Herbert may have had stained glass in mind here (English Poems, ), which would give the lines slightly different natural theological import. On the scientific language of this poem, see McGrath, “The Alchemical Tropes of George Herbert’s ‘The Elixir’ in Their Late Renaissance Context.” Wilcox also addresses the natural theological import of “The Elixer” in “A Garden in a Paradise: The Eloquence of Place in Herbert’s Temple.” On this danger, see Henry, “Voluntarist Theology at the Origins of Modern Science,” –.



Metaphysical Poets

chronicles the move of religion westward from her birth among the biblical patriarchs to Egypt and then “Greece, where arts / Gave her the highest place in all mens hearts.” The “arts” were not equal to religion, however: Learning was pos’d, Philosophie was set, Sophisters taken in a fishers net. Plato and Aristotle were at a losse, And wheel’d about again to spell Christ-Crosse. Prayers chas’d syllogismes into their den, And Ergo was transform’d into Amen. (–)

With their message of Christ’s cross, fishermen from Galilee have vanquished not only the slippery sophisters, but also the highest that classical learning has to offer in Plato and Aristotle. If nature is to shed light on theological truth, there are more productive ways than syllogisms. Herbert likewise evinces suspicion of the medieval allegorical understanding of nature wherein – because God speaks through the things of nature as well as the words of scripture – one can infer particular theological meanings from particular natural phenomena. Given that Herbert is known to be an “emblematic” poet and that in “Longing” he asserts, “Indeed, the world’s thy book” (), this may seem an odd claim. Before qualifying Herbert’s “emblematic” approach to nature, I will briefly clarify that Herbert (like Bacon) does not explicitly attack the idea of nature as a book; but neither does he make much of the metaphor. At this point in “Longing,” for instance, Herbert’s speaker is not talking about the theological import of nature but hoping for some space for himself in God’s world: although the “book” is already full, with all things having their assigned “leaf,” still a “meek look” could see the speaker inserted between the lines (–). There is no discussion of reading God’s book, and the mutability Herbert ascribes to it works against the sense that it can be straightforwardly read for divine intentions. In a similar vein, when Herbert writes “I trust / my bodie to this school,” he is referring not to the “school” of the natural world (as Du Bartas had done, for instance) but to church monuments. Over and again, Herbert forebears to read nature for theological insights where he might do so. 



In connection with this line, Wilcox cites Thomas Browne’s claim that nature is a “universall and public Manuscript, that lies expans’d unto the eyes of all” (); I argue that Herbert was less optimistic about the prospect of interpreting nature than was Browne. Josuah Sylvester (trans.), The Divine Weeks and Works of Guillaume de Saluste, Sieur du Bartas, ed. Susan Snyder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), ...

“Mutters of Assent” or “Lectures for the Eye”



The medieval idea of nature as a book, we have seen, shares ground with a later “emblematic” tradition in which Herbert has been implicated. Rosamund Tuve once pronounced that Herbert “writes in symbols because he thus sees the world.” It is worth pointing out, first, that the emblembook tradition is not coterminous with the nature-as-book tradition. While it was possible to assert the “truth” of an emblem, Elizabethan English emblems were viewed more as an exercise of human wit than a reading of God’s eternal meaning in nature. An emblem might, moreover, be or involve an artificial element (such as a pulley) rather than only natural things such as a whales or pelicans. Herbert’s investment even in this later and more artificial tradition may perhaps have waned over time. Although he continued to employ images from nature metaphorically in order to illustrate theological realities, he tellingly struck the only use of the actual word “emblem” from the Williams manuscript of The Temple. This instance was in The Church Militant, where Herbert originally wrote, Spices come from the East; so did thy Spouse, Trimme as the light, sweet as the laden boughs Of Noahs shadie vine, chaste as the dove; All, Emblems, which thy darling doth improve. (–)

The last line of the revised version reads, “Prepar’d and fitted to receive thy love.” Wilcox notes that “The earlier version more explicitly highlights H’s chosen ‘emblems’ of the church, particularly the flourishing vine of Sion, which anticipates Christ” (). In fact, the earlier version may be doing something rather different from the final version. While there is still a metaphorical relationship between the church and the natural phenomena – light, vine, and dove – these need not now be “emblems” in the traditional sense, in which the focus is on the speaker’s ability to read the spiritual meaning latent in natural images. Gone too is the related notion that the church “improves” these emblems, fulfilling them as a New Testament antitype fulfills an Old Testament   

Rosamund Tuve, A Reading of George Herbert (Chicago: Faber & Faber, ), . Freeman, English Emblem Books, –. Brendan O’Hehir argues in Expans’d Hieroglyphicks: A Critical Edition of Sir John Denham’s Coopers Hill [ and ] (Los Angeles: University of California Press, ), for instance, that “[Ben] Jonson insists on the truth of what might be taken for a metaphor” in lines figuring the sea around Britain as a wedding ring uniting England and Scotland (). On the other hand, regarding the tradition of emblem books on which Herbert drew, “What was primarily emphasized in the emblem fashion by those who defended it was its ‘wit’,” as Rosemary Freeman pointed out in her  English Emblem Books ().



Metaphysical Poets

type. Instead of intruding the language of emblems here, Herbert now maintains his focus on an unfolding narrative of the progress of the church, using the metaphors more broadly to emphasize the church’s trimness, sweetness, and chastity, which make her a fit bride for Christ. The result is to take the deep significatory weight off of the vine and the dove, and this appears to have been a meditated change on Herbert’s part. How then is the natural world able to shed light on theological matters, in Herbert’s view? He writes in The Country Parson that nature can serve grace “by way of illustration, even as our Saviour made plants and seeds to teach the people: for he was the true householder, who bringeth out of his treasure things new of old; the old things of Philosophy, and the new of Grace; and maketh the one to serve the others” (). Two related aspects of Herbert’s natural theology are on view here: (a) Herbert views natural theology in domestic terms and (b) he lays stress on human agency, derived from Christ’s more ultimate agency, which contrives to make “new” theological insight from “old” natural material. Richard Todd has noted how “for Herbert, interpretation of the book of nature is clearly related to domestic figures having to do with housekeeping,” pointing to Herbert’s use of “cabinet” in “Man“ and “Ungratefulnesse.” I would argue that these housekeeping figures go deeper: a controlling metaphor of a “householder” managing a “house” of nature in fact begins to supplant the metaphor of a “reader” reading a “book” of nature in Herbert’s later poetry. Todd further argues, drawing on Tuve’s application of Augustine’s distinction between “use” and “enjoyment” in Herbert, that Herbert sees humans as responsible to consume or “use” creation – not in the sense of “abuse,” but in the sense of employing nonhuman creatures toward learning about God rather than merely for physical self-preservation. “Using” is different from “reading”: it suggests something more practical and active, and (in keeping with Herbert’s increasing wariness of emblems) it places less semantic weight on natural phenomena. Even in a poem as early as Herbert’s second “New Year Sonnet,” this language of use and abuse is present: 

 

In this way of reading, the church might be viewed as the antitype of the Old Testament tabernacle that housed the displaced Hebrews, as in a sermon by John Doughty: “As in the structure of the old tabernacle, by loopes & taches were the curtaines aptly conjoined: so in the antitype, namely the Church, doth this spirit of Unity diffusing it selfe throughtout the parts, knit them up into an entire frame” (Two New Sermons [London, ], ). Todd, Opacity of Signs, –; Rosamund Tuve, “George Herbert and Caritas,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes , no. / (): –. In moving away from the old conception of the book of nature, Herbert shares ground with Bacon. Bacon did refer to the “book of nature,” but his interpretatio naturae was new and possibly unique,

“Mutters of Assent” or “Lectures for the Eye”



Each cloud distills thy praise, and doth forbid Poets to turn it to another use. Roses and Lillies speak thee; and to make A pair of cheeks of them, is thy abuse. (–)

The notion that a poet should “use” nature in praise of God, as had the Psalmist, runs through The Temple. The idea in this early sonnet that natural phenomena “speak” God becomes more muted in Herbert’s later poetry, as he repeatedly asserts the natural world’s impotence when it comes to revealing divine truth. For instance, when the speaker in “The Altar” references Jesus’s claim in Luke . that “stones will cry out” in praise if the people are silent, he reconstrues the “stones” as his own heart and the words of the poem, excluding the external natural world from this religious activity. In “The Search,” the speaker imagines that nonhuman creation has access to God, but Herbert is careful to keep this fantasy counterfactual: Yet can I mark how herbs below Grow green and gay, As if to meet thee they did know, While I decay. Yet can I mark how stares above Simper and shine As having keyes unto thy love, While poor I pine. (–)

To the speaker it feels as though plants and stars have some access to God that he lacks, but this is not the case. Herbert is even more explicit on this point in “Miserie”: The bird that sees a daintie bowre Made in the tree, where she was wont to sit, Wonders and sings, but not his power Who made the arbour: this exceeds her wit. But Man doth know The spring, whence all things flow: (–) denoting the process of “fetching up axioms from experience” and “drawing down new experiments from axioms” (Serjeantson, “Francis Bacon and ‘Interpretation of Nature’,” ). Herbert may have keyed into this in calling Bacon “aruspex Naturae.”



Metaphysical Poets

These poems narrate the grief and struggle of a speaker whose communion with God is not as he would wish: he pans across the natural world, noticing how other creatures appear to be realizing some capacity to praise or commune with God that he is not. Even in using this conceit, however, Herbert reiterates humans’ unique place among earthly creatures as alone capable of knowing and speaking theologically. Nowhere in Herbert’s poetry is man’s unique ability to use nature for purposes of worship more clearly on display than in “Providence,” a poem I argue has a place in the prehistory of physico-theology. First appearing in the Bodleian manuscript, “Providence” is the second longest poem in “The Church” and is Herbert’s “most complete version of the Davidic Creation psalm,” as Russell Hillier notes. It is also a tour de force of the kind of natural theology Herbert felt compelled to practice, using the things of nature to illustrate God’s wisdom, power, and providence. After a stanza of invocation, Herbert begins: Of all the creatures both in sea and land Only to Man thou hast made known thy ways, And put the pen alone into his hand, And made him Secretary of thy praise. Beasts fain would sing; birds ditty to their notes; Trees would be tuning on their native lute To thy renown: but all their hands and throats Are brought to Man, while they are lame and mute. Man is the world’s high Priest: he doth present The sacrifice for all; while they below Unto the service mutter an assent, Such as springs use that fall, and winds that blow. (–)

As was the case in “The Search” and “Miserie,” these stanzas draw a sharp distinction between human and nonhuman creation, with humans alone having access to theological truth. Richard Todd has argued that “Providence” constitutes an interpretation of the book of nature and has asserted a difference in “overall tone and effect” between the poem and the 

Hillier, “Send back thy fire,” , summarizes the poem’s importance within The Temple: “Herbert describes the poem as his hymn of hymns, a statement which, as Edmund Miller notes, demonstrates that The Temple’s lyrics ‘are all necessarily and fundamentally celebrations of God’.” Michael McCanles observes in Dialectical Criticism and Renaissance Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, ) that “‘Providence’ is, in a sense, the kind of poem that the persona of The Temple aspired to write all the time.”

“Mutters of Assent” or “Lectures for the Eye”



biblical Psalm on which it is based, “where Providence is seen as an expression of God’s power, unsearchable and unknowable by man.” Herbert’s poem, in Todd’s view, instead shows how “creaturely noises do in fact constitute a ‘language’ addressed to the divine Creator” and further suggests that “the creatures may only be ‘dumb’ insofar as they are incomprehensible” to humans. Todd also suggests that the poem shows a “mutual interdependence of the creatures with each other and with [the speaker]” not evident in Psalm . While the poem certainly portrays nonhuman creatures in a positive light, the idea of a book of nature must be imposed on the poem, because it is found nowhere in the poem. It also seems a stretch to say that nonhuman creatures are depicted as having a language of praise that humanity cannot understand, or that the relationship between human and nonhuman creatures is “mutual.” This reading minimizes Herbert’s emphasis in the second stanza on human uniqueness, seen in “only,” “alone,” and even “secretary,” and on the repeated subjunctive “would” in the third stanza: beasts fain would sing (but they do not); birds would ditty (but they do not). The notion of a high priest in the following stanza also highlights the passive and highly mediated position of nonhuman creatures with respect to God, given that Herbert privileges the new covenant over the old. Man as the “world’s high priest” is a striking metaphor, and it was picked up by Henry More in his  work of natural theology, An Antidote against Atheism, the main source for Ray’s Wisdom of God. The only indicative active verb allowed to the creatures in Herbert’s poem is an underwhelming “mutter,” and this is not even an original mutter but rather an “assent” to the sacrifice of praise offered by man. There is therefore less distance between Herbert’s “Providence” and Psalm  than Todd has argued. The heading of the Psalm in the Authorized Version, as Hutchinson noted, is “A Meditation upon the mighty power and wonderfull providence of God,” and the summary verse is : “O LORD, how manifold are thy works! In wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches.” The psalm catalogues natural phenomena with a view to illustrating God’s power and providence: God    

Todd, Opacity of Signs, , . Wilcox, English Poems, : “The original meaning of ‘secretary’, one entrusted with secret matters (OED ), is also implied.” Roche, “Typology, Allegory, and Protestant Poetics,” –. On Herbert and More, see Wilcox, English Poems, ; on More and Ray, see Calloway, “Rather Theological than Philosophical,” –.



Metaphysical Poets

provides springs for beasts of the field and wild asses (v. ); he provides grass for cattle, herbs for people, and meat for lions (v. , ); for shelter he provides trees for birds, hills for goats, and rocks for conies (v. –). Not only are these creatures wisely provided for, but God’s works are “manifold” or numerous: there are innumerable creatures in the sea (v. ). Further, God is not only creator but also sustainer, as Herbert insists in The Country Parson. The Psalmist continues: That thou givest them they gather: thou openest thy hand, they are filled with good. Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled; thou takest away their breath; they die, and return to dust. Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created.

(vv. –a)

In “Providence,” Herbert expansively makes the same points as the psalmist about God’s providence, using the domestic metaphor that Todd and others have noted: “Thy cupboard serves the world: the meat is set,” he writes, “that all may reach” (–). Besides providing food, God has given each creature “wisdome for his own good,” as is the case with pigeons’ knowing when to stop feeding their young in order to “teach them flying” (, ). Every earthly good is preserved in this economy: Bees make honey for humans without bruising flowers; sheep “eat the grasse, and dung the ground for more”; and “Springs vent their streams, and by expense get store” (, ). And, as in the psalm, men have the use of herbs (–). Herbert spends more time than the psalmist on the notion, expressed by Donne as a question, that men are “by all things waited on,” although Herbert never says “all” or “always.” He portrays from an anthropocentric standpoint God’s provident hiding of metals and stones deep in the earth, away from humans (–) and the way in which the sea and wind “serve [the mariner’s] trade.” Similarly, the coconut or “Indian nut” is “clothing, meat and trencher, drink and kan, / Boat, cable, sail and needle, all in one” (–). This point about the coconut deserves a moment’s attention because it was subsequently picked up by the physico-theologians. Herbert’s reference to the coconut has been linked with an ancient 



Wilcox, English Poems, : “In H’s treatment, providence has three prominent features: . . . (.) Good housekeeping (‘the wonderfull providence and thrift of the great householder of the world’ (Priest x)).” The psalmist too never asserts that all nonhuman creatures must always be referred to humanity’s benefit. John Ray will explicitly reject this anthropocentric view; see John Hedley Brooke, “‘Wise Men Nowadays Think Otherwise’: John Ray, Natural Theology, and the Meanings of Anthropocentrism,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society , no.  (): –.

“Mutters of Assent” or “Lectures for the Eye”



Sophist paradoxical tradition of praising humble nuts, in the way Erasmus would later praise folly. Recognizing that Herbert is not being paradoxical in that way, Rosalie Colie pronounced memorably that “the coconut has never been so dignified as in this image for the providential God”; she also offhandedly refers to “Herbert’s likeness of . . . God to a coconut.” Certainly the coconut comes off well in the poem; but the coconut is not an image for God. Rather than functioning as a sign, image, or emblem of God (or of anything else), in Herbert’s poem, the coconut’s utility to humans is evidence of God’s providence, following the logic of the physico-theology that would blossom in England decades later. Here again, Herbert conceives of nature as a household full of useful things rather than a book full of meanings. In fact, Hutchinson long ago noted in this place that the “Indian nut” appears in Henry More’s fairly anthropocentric work of proto-physicotheology, An Antidote against Atheism (), the same work that takes up Herbert’s metaphor of man as the “world’s high priest.” The resemblance in the coconut passage is indeed striking. I would argue on the basis of this resemblance as well as More’s reference to the “world’s high priest” that this poem of Herbert’s influenced More’s book. More calls attention to “the famous Indian Nut-tree, which at once almost affords all the Necessaries of life,” like Herbert mentioning meat, drink, cups, needles, and boats, cables, and sails (–). More’s Antidote also forms another node of connection between Herbert’s The Temple and John Ray’s seminal work of physicotheology, Wisdom of God, which (as mentioned) began as a series of sermons delivered at Herbert’s former college in the s and which unfolds along lines Herbert laid down for natural theology in A Country Parson. More was also a Cambridge man, and his Antidote was the most quoted source in Ray’s seminal Wisdom of God outside the Bible. For Herbert as well as More, God’s providence extends to all creatures, but there is a special place for man as a beneficiary; thus it is appropriate for man alone to pay the “rent” of praise (“Providence” –). Notable too in Herbert’s poem is the way in which products of human artifice, such as ships and ropes, are seamlessly brought into the economy of providence, as is also the case in More’s Antidote. Here again, Herbert takes his cue from Psalm , which continues, “The earth is full of thy riches . . . So is the great and wide 



Rosalie Littell Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ), , . This is setting aside the question of whether that tradition ever refers to the coconut or even nuts in general, which are not mentioned in the  article (by Arthur Stanley Pease) Colie cites. See Calloway, Natural Theology, –: More mentions ropes and ships specifically.



Metaphysical Poets

Figure . Title page and first page from John Ray’s Wisdom of God ().

sea . . . There go the ships: there is that Leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein” (vv. –). Human trade and the sea-monster’s “play” are alike maintained by God’s providence. Indeed, “play” – betokening wonder, variety, and curiosity – is a feature of nature in Psalm , in Herbert’s poem, and in John Ray’s Wisdom, which takes its title from this very psalm (see Fig. .). This emphasis on play distances these works from More’s Antidote, conceived as a philosophically compulsive repudiation of atheist’s arguments. (Both Herbert and Ray, tellingly, produced collections of proverbs, which celebrate the variety of ways people see the world rather than pursuing an organized logical argument.) Picking up on Bacon’s language of a “divine marshall,” Herbert adores God’s “curious art in marshalling all thy goods” (). 

Compare Bacon’s essay “Of Atheism,” in which he speaks of God as a “divine Marshal” (Bacon, Works, vi:).

“Mutters of Assent” or “Lectures for the Eye”



Similarly, Ray’s Wisdom has been distinguished from other seventeenthcentury English works of natural theology by its emphasis on wonder. Ray would have agreed, for instance, with Herbert’s declaration to God, “Thou art not bound, as if thy lot / Were worse than ours” (–). Herbert then gives examples: Sometimes thou shiftest hands. Most things move th’under-jaw; the Crocodile not. Most things sleep lying; th’Elephant leans or stands. (–)

Ray likewise never presumes to be able to predict what God will do. The only way to know that, he insists, is to study what God has actually done. His physico-theology was more poetic than that of many of his successors, avoiding compulsive logical proof and reveling in the wonder and variety of creation, just as Herbert had done in “Providence.” For Ray, humans’ responsibility is to praise God for the wisdom and providence evident in nature, and when natural phenomena come to light that have no obvious use, these still “may be some way or other useful to us, at least to exercise our Wits and Understandings, in considering and contemplating of them, and so afford us Subject of Admiring and Glorifying their and our Maker.” This is the note on which “Providence” ends: praise to the one God for the multiplicity of creation. Ray would explicitly expand on the first part of Psalm . by celebrating the sheer number of creatures in the world; Herbert returns throughout his poem to the idea of multiplicity, praising the God who is “In all things one; in each thing many” (). As he draws the poem to a close, Herbert exclaims, But who hath praise enough? Nay who hath any? None can expresse thy works, but he that knows them; And none can know thy works, which are so many, And so complete, but onely he that owes them. (–)

Here Herbert explicitly follows (pace Bacon) Ecclesiastes .: “No man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.” Ray would cite this same verse in the preface to Wisdom. In a final tribute to the multiplicity of creation, Herbert doubles his final stanza of praise:   

Mandelbrote, “Uses of Natural Theology.” Calloway, “Rather Theological than Philosophical”; I note an affinity between Ray and Bacon on this point. Ray, Wisdom of God, .



Metaphysical Poets All things that are, though they have sev’rall ways, Yet in their being joyn with one advise To honor thee: and so I give thee praise In all my other hymnes, but in this twice. Each thing that is, although in use and name It go for one, hath many ways in store To honour thee; and so eache hymne thy fame Extolleth many ways, yet this one more. (–)

Hutchinson suggested that these two stanzas are alternate endings, of which only one should stay. Wilcox notes, however, that there is no textual evidence to support this view. Taking into account as well the psalmist’s summary pronouncement about God’s “manifold” works and the recurrence of multiplicity in the poem, this doubling seems both intentional and reasonable: Herbert will give praise “twice” in this poem, as opposed to all the others. Like each thing God has made, Herbert hopes his poems can be used to extoll God in myriad ways. In sum, while in the last chapter we saw that Herbert rejected Bacon’s sanguine hopes for human science, the natural theology Herbert lays down and practices proceeds along Baconian lines and lived on in the physicotheology that came into being later in the century. Gradually dispensing with the older idea of a book of nature in which things signified meanings intended by God, Herbert views nature instead as a “household” full of things subject to human ingenuity and use, above all the “use” of praise as modeled in Psalm . Herbert consistently highlights a categorical difference between humans and the rest of creation, casting humans as the world’s high priest and other creatures as mute and likely (though not certainly) passing away. Nonetheless, Herbert views natural theology as a worthwhile, perhaps even a necessary, human endeavor and influentially models how it might be practiced in “Providence.” While Herbert figures natural theology in The Temple in terms of housekeeping, encouraging humans to “use” creatures to glorify God, Henry Vaughan brings the book of nature back to the fore in Silex Scintillans, even as he echoes Herbert’s poetry over and over. If Herbert’s most natural theological poem is “Providence,” Vaughan’s is perhaps “Morning Watch,” whose diurnal occasion recalls Herbert’s “Mattens” as well as its matching poem “Even-Song.” The poem opens,  

Wilcox, English Poems, . On the connection between the two poems in The Temple, see Doerksen, “George Herbert, Calvinism and Reading ‘Mattens’,”  and Cloud, “Take me by the hand,” .

“Mutters of Assent” or “Lectures for the Eye”



O Joyes! Infinite sweetnes! with what flowres, And shoots of glory, my soul breaks, and buds! All the long hours Of night, and Rest Through the still shrouds Of sleep, and Clouds, This Dew fell on my Breast; O how it Blouds, And Spirits all my earth! (–)

In his extended study of this poem, E. C. Pettet highlights a number of allusions to Herbert, all tending to reverse Herbert’s emphasis on humanity’s unique capacity to know and praise God. The first line is an allusion to Herbert’s “The H. Scriptures I,” for instance, which begins, “O book! Infinite sweetness.” Pettet observes how “We have an instance here of deliberate exploitation and adaptation of a borrowing: [Vaughan] is using Herbert’s phrase – and probably its context – for the implied assertion that the ‘Book of Nature’ is truly comparable with the Book of the Scriptures for the divine lessons that it contains.” Not only does Vaughan restore a metaphor that Herbert has spurned; he suggests that the book of nature is on a par with holy scripture, which Herbert viewed as categorically superior and belonging to the sphere of grace. In fact, Vaughan viewed the natural world not as a separate but equally valid medium of divine revelation, but as itself belonging to the sphere of grace. While I will continue to use the terms “nature” and “natural theology” in analyzing Vaughan’s poetry, it is somewhat misleading to speak of “natural theology” in that poetry, because of the extent to which Vaughan sees the divine as permeating the created order. For him, there is only theology, with God’s self-revelation being as “special” in a cock crowing as it is in the Bible. Related to this view of divine immanence in the world is Vaughan’s diminution of the hierarchy between human and nonhuman creation. In the passage above, Vaughan’s “how it blouds, / And spirits all my earth,” recalls Herbert’s “the soul’s blood” in “Prayer (I),” with a difference: Vaughan’s speaker is an “earth” that is “blooded” by the same shoots of glory that quicken everything else.



E.C. Pettet, Of Paradise and Light: A Study of Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .



Metaphysical Poets

This diminution – not erasure – of the hierarchy between humanity and the rest of the created order is on display as well in the next section of “The Morning Watch”: Heark! In what Rings, And Hymning Circulations the quick world Awakes, and sings; The rising winds, And falling springs, Birds, beasts, all things Adore him in their kinds. (–)

Although Vaughan does qualify this adoration as “in their kinds,” this is nonetheless a more hopeful presentation of nonhuman theological activity than appears in Herbert’s poetry. Pettet argues that Vaughan must here have had the lines from Herbert’s “Providence” in mind in which, after man offers praise on behalf of the world, the creatures “mutter an assent / Such as springs use that fall, and winds that blow.” Pettet sees Vaughan’s recollection of “Providence” here as “pointed . . . by his exclusion of man from the Creation’s hymn of praise,” a hymn man alone could offer in “Providence.” As Vaughan’s speaker in “Morning Watch” continues, he again invests nature with more spiritual purchase than Herbert allowed: Thus all is hurl’d In sacred Hymnes, and Order, the great Chime And Symphony of nature. Prayer is The world in tune, A spirit-voyce, And vocall joyes Whose Eccho is heavn’s blisse. (–)

These lines call back Herbert’s description of prayer in “Prayer ()” as “a kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear.” Pettet thought this recollection was “purely subconscious.” I would argue instead that Vaughan is consciously in dialogue with Herbert about the “quick world’s” inclusion as participating in the consort of praise – not merely muttering assent. Next, in the final movement of the poem, the speaker looks forward toward night, praying, 

Ibid., –.

“Mutters of Assent” or “Lectures for the Eye”



O let me climbe When I lye down! The Pious soul by night Is like a clouded starre, whose beames though sed To shed their light Under some Cloud Yet are above, And shine, and move Beyond that mistie shrowd. So in my Bed That Curtain’d grave, though sleep, like ashes, hide My lamp, and life, both shall in thee abide. (–)

The poem is chiastic, bringing back night with the “clouds” and “shrouds” mentioned in reverse order at the beginning. These final lines display the unworldly Vaughan whose eyes are on eternity rather than the “world” in the negative sense, but they do nothing to negate the symphony of nature that reverberates throughout the poem. As the focus returns to the speaker, moreover, the emphasis lands on his capacity for natural theology, figured by a lamp. To Pettet this image presented “some difficulty of interpretation.” He tentatively suggests, “possibly by ‘lamp’ Vaughan means the rational part of the soul that deliberately searches for God.” There is plenty of reason to see the “lamp” in this way. Harking back to Proverbs . – “The Spirit of Man is the candle of the Lord” – the “candle of the Lord” came in seventeenth-century England (particularly at Cambridge) to be seen as a trope representing humans’ natural God-seeking faculties. Meanwhile at Oxford, Vaughan’s twin brother Thomas brought out a prose treatise entitled Lumen de Lumine in , in which he averred that “A lamp . . . typifies the Light of Nature.” He continues: This is the secret Candle of God, which he hath tinn’d in the Elements, it burns and is not seen, for it shines in a dark place . . . The Effects of this light are apparent in all things . . . The great world hath the Sun for his Life and Candle; according to the Absence or presence of this fire, all things in the world flourish or wither.

George Herbert would never locate such a lamp in “the Elements,” in nonhuman creation, but Henry Vaughan would.  

 Ibid., . Greene, “Whichcote, the Candle of the Lord, and Synderesis,” . Thomas Vaughan, Lumen de Lumine, or, A new magicall light discovered and communicated to the world by Eugenius Philalethes (London, ), .



Metaphysical Poets

Indeed, this is what Henry Vaughan does in “Cock-Crowing,” a poem belonging to the  edition of Silex Scintillans. The poem opens, Father of lights! What Sunnie seed, What glance of day hast thou confin’d Into this bird? To all the breed This busie Ray thou hast assign’d; Their magnetism works all night, And dreams of Paradise and Light. (–)

Continuing to use similar language to that in Thomas Vaughan’s treatise, the speaker reiterates that “it seems their candle, howe’r done / Was tinn’d and lighted at the sunne” (–). The “sunnie seed” possessed by the bird differs in quantity from the light vouchsafed to humans, but it is not clear that there is any categorical difference. The speaker goes on to ask rhetorically, If such a tincture, such a touch, So firm a longing can impowre Shall thy own image think it much To watch for thy appearing hour? (–)

The bird does not possess God’s image in the way humans do, but he nonetheless has a “tincture” of divine light and is using it appropriately; it would be shameful for the speaker not to do the same. This fear of shame is on view as well in “The Stone,” where nonhuman creatures are said to keep “busy commerce” with God, such that human sin never goes unseen. Though stones and bushes are called “dumb” in this poem, the speaker nonetheless says “They hear, see, speak” (, ), a paradox he reprises in “The Day of Judgment“ () in calling for Christ’s return: “My fellowcreatures too say, Come! / And stones, though speechless, are not dumb.” These are literal stones, not the metaphorical stones representing the speaker’s heart in Herbert’s “The Altar.” Vaughan’s speaker is not standing alone as he praises God and longs for union with God in eternity; he is joined (and rebuked, and challenged) by “fellow-creatures.” Throughout, then, Silex Scintillans portrays nonhuman creation as actively praising God, or else revealing God to the human speaker. Where Herbert wrote in “Providence” that “beasts fain would sing; birds dittie to their notes . . . but all their hands and throats / Are brought to 

This connection is made as well in Vaughan, Works, .

“Mutters of Assent” or “Lectures for the Eye”



man” (, –), Vaughan writes in “The Bird,” “Thy little heart in early hymns doth sing / Unto that Providence . . . All things that be, praise him; and had / Their lesson taught them when first made.” In “The Tempest,” a poem with much to say about natural theology, Vaughan again transposes Herbert’s subjunctive into the indicative: Herbert in “The Search” had counterfactually imagined creation “as having keyes” (emphasis mine) to God, but Vaughan positively asserts that “All [things] have their keyes, and set ascents” (; emphasis Vaughan’s). “Keyes” and “ascents” here refer not only to musical scales but also to a means of access to something above, for Vaughan’s speaker proceeds to lament, but man Though he knows these, and hath more of his own, sleeps at the ladders foot; alas! What can These new discoveries do, except they drown? (–)

What are these “new discoveries,” supposed to help man, which instead drown him? They are observations of nonhuman creatures’ behavior (lines –), which should lend insights about ascending to heaven. Here again, Vaughan does draw a distinction between human and nonhuman creation. Man is all the more culpable for failing so to ascend because he has more keys and ascents than do nonhuman creatures (), and the picture Vaughan paints of natural theology in “The Tempest” accords to an extent with the anthropocentrism of Herbert’s “Providence”: O that man would do so! that he would hear The world read to him! all the vast expence In the Creation shed, and slav’d to sence Makes up but lectures for his eie, and ear. Sure, mighty love foreseeing the discent Of this poor Creature, by a gracious art Hid in these low things snares to gain his heart, And layd surprizes in each Element. (–)

With the words “slav’d,” “but [only],” and “low,” the speaker gestures toward limitations on “low things” of the kind Herbert asserts repeatedly. Even here, however, there are differences. For one thing, “slav’d” suggests an undesirable condition. It is also a condition from which these creatures 

Lines –, –; emphasis mine. Marvell too reverses Herbert’s claim about birds, in “Upon Appleton House,” though not to theological ends; see p. .



Metaphysical Poets

may one day be emancipated, as Vaughan envisions explicitly in poems such as “Religion,” “Palm-Sunday,” “And Do They So?,” and “L’Envoy.” Next, the book of nature is back as a controlling metaphor, with “lectures” here meaning such oral readings as would take place at a medieval university. Noteworthy, too, is Vaughan’s elision of mere nature as a category, mentioned above, evident in the assertion that God’s art has endowed “low things” and “each Element” with salvific surprises. And finally, there is a diminution of human agency and expansion of nonhuman agency in Vaughan’s “The Tempest,” as man is cast as the (inattentive) audience of the lecture rather than a high priest offering a sacrifice for all. Rather than muttering an assent after the sacrifice of praise, the creatures already contain the “surprises” God has laid in them. The human thus does not even actively read God’s truth in nature but is passively snared by it. The author of the lecture is God. It is unclear who “reads” these lectures to man, though in this instance the entire poem is structured as such a “lecture.” There is spiritual truth in Nature’s procuring of the needed tempest: When nature on her bosome saw Her infants die, And all her flowres wither’d to straw, Her brests grown dry; She made the Earth their nurse, & tomb, Sigh to the sky, ‘Til to those sighes fetch’d from her womb Rain did reply. (–)

Notably, the logic here is not the logic of physico-theology, which would use this natural economy as evidence of divine design. Instead, the natural phenomenon prompts the speaker to exclaim in the next lines, “O that man could do so! That he would hear / the world read to him” (–). “Do so” must refer to Nature’s activity as described in the preceding passage, since no other active agent appears before that line in the poem. (The “do so” in “And Do They So?” likewise references nonhuman creatures.) “Read,” interestingly, could be active or passive: Is the world  



See Rudrum, “Liberation of the Creatures.” Vaughan, Works, , on “lectures” in line : “Martz (, ) glosses this as ‘lectures in the old medieval sense, readings of the book [here, the ‘world’ () or the Book of Nature], with commentary and elucidation’.” Vaughan, Works, : “West (, ) comments that the poem ‘has just as many lines as an hour has minutes’ and that Vaughan, giving a lecture like nature, is observing the convention that a lecture took one hour’.”

“Mutters of Assent” or “Lectures for the Eye”



reading, or being read? Vaughan knew Greek. Perhaps “read” here hovers in the middle. In any event, man is not being asked to offer a sacrifice on behalf of a mute nature, but to emulate nature in her ability to “read” herself and make the appropriate appeal to God. As was the case in “Morning Watch,” the creatures who are lecturing humans about heaven in “The Tempest” are distinguished from the “world” in the negative sense, which the speaker as ever hopes to escape as quickly as possible. Indeed (like Marvell’s “On a Drop of Dew”), the poem paints a picture of creation itself trying to make such an escape: All things here show him heaven; Waters that fall Chide, and fly up; Mists of corruptest fome Quit their first beds & mount; trees, herbs, flowres, all Strive upwards stil, and point him the way home. (–)

The next two stanzas unfold how elements and plants “strive upwards,” these phenomena being the “new discoveries” meant to help humans ascend the heavenly ladder. In light of the creatures’ efforts to reach heaven, and to show man that he should be doing the same, humans’ “grossness” () is all the more blameworthy. This blameworthiness in on view in Herbert’s devotional poetry – “Miserie” in particular serves as a source for Vaughan’s “The Tempest” – but with the added element of the creatures’ witting exemplarity. When Vaughan goes on to chide, for instance, “Oh foolish man! How hast thou lost thy sight? / How is it that the Sun to thee alone / Is grown thick darkness” (–), he has pointedly made man alone incapable of seeing the sun, which was objectively “dead with eclipses” in “Miserie” (). The natural theology in Silex Scintillans, in sum, allows more theological agency to nonhuman creatures; and even when these are objects rather than agents of natural theological activity, they are “read” rather than “used” (as in Herbert). Vaughan’s poetry thus does not harmonize particularly well with the nascent physico-theology developed at Cambridge in the s by Henry More and John Ray. This is not to say that Vaughan would have denied the evidence of divine wisdom and providence in the order and function of the world – he makes that (biblical) point more than once. But Vaughan does not emphasize this argument to the exclusion of older and more capacious ways of reading the book of nature, as Herbert increasingly did, nor does he multiply examples of God’s providence from 

E.g. “Rules and Lessons,” –; “Psalm ” (the source of Herbert’s “Providence”); “Psalm ,” –.



Metaphysical Poets

natural history, as Herbert does in “Providence.” The central theological message humans read in nature in Silex Scintillans is not that things are wonderfully made by a powerful God. Perhaps surprisingly, though, neither is Vaughan centrally concerned with giving a compendious reading of the meaning latent in each natural thing, though such matter frequently arises in the poems. Vaughan’s central concern is to find hope for all of God’s creation, himself included, in a temporal world that militates against their eternal flourishing. And he concludes that there is hope, both for himself and for other creatures. His own poem entitled “Providence” () differs in illuminating ways from Herbert’s poem of that title: Gone are the lengthy physico-theological descriptions of the multitude, variety, and fitness of plants and animals for use by humans. Vaughan’s “Providence” opens instead with the image of God’s supernaturally providing Hagar and Ishmael with water out in the desert, a place outside the covenant with Israel but not outside God’s care. Nonhuman creation in this poem actively serves the speaker rather than being used by him as evidence of design: a “mystick Cloud” conveys him food and money; bees provide him honey (though humans thanklessly kill them); a fish will pay tribute on his behalf; a raven will bring him meat. Further, the birds “sing” doctrine of regeneration and hope, and herbs “praise” God’s bounteousness (–). None of these phenomena is merely natural, and all of the speaker’s assertions about nonhuman theological activity are in the indicative. He is not alone in praising God for his providence. A similarly hopeful message about the created world is on view in the  edition of Silex Scintillans, in the interaction between “The Search,” which appears early in the collection, and “I walkt the other day, to spend my hour,” its penultimate poem. The speaker in “The Search” seems to suggest that much of the natural world might be “the world” in the negative sense: 

Compare for instance “The Search”: I’le to the Wilderness, and can Find beasts more mercifull than man. He liv’d there safe, twas his retreat From the fierce Jew, and Herods heat, ... He heav’nd their walks, and with his eyes Made those wild shades a Paradise, Thus was the desert sanctified To be the refuge of his bride. (–, –)

“Mutters of Assent” or “Lectures for the Eye”



The skinne, and shell of things Though faire, are not Thy wish, nor Pray’r, but got By meere Despaire of wings. To rack old Elements Or Dust; and say Sure here he must needs stay Is not the way, nor Just Search well another world; who studies this Travels in clouds, seekes Manna, where none is. (–)

Just what is included in “this,” the bankrupt world that contains no manna? Vaughan revisits his search more conclusively in “I walkt the other day.” He opens the second stanza, “Yet I whose search lov’d not to peep and peer / I’th’ face of things,” recalling the earlier poem. Finding in the ground a “fresh and green” root, the speaker asks, “Many a question intricate and rare” of the root, extorting only the answer that he now Did there repair Such losses as befell him in this air And would ere long Come forth most fair and young. (–)

Baconian extortion is of some value here, establishing that this root is part of the quick, living divine order and not “this world” in the negative sense. The speaker then reflects on humans’ general lack of insight into nature: And yet, how few believe such doctrine springs From a poor root Which all winter sleeps here under foot And hath no wings To raise it to the truth and light of things, But is still trod By ev’ry wandering clod. (–)



Metaphysical Poets

Among other things, Vaughan is making clear here that the activity decried at the end of “The Search” – fruitless study of “this” world – should be distinguished from the search that finds theological truth in a poor root. Despite its lack of wings, the root will rise to “the truth and light of things,” for it belongs not to this world, but to eternity. Set alongside Herbert’s “Easter Wings,” whose speaker also longs for wings and flight, “I walk’t the other day (to spend my hour)” shows a striking increase in attention to the spiritual status of nonhuman creation: No attention is paid to nonhuman creation in “Easter Wings.” In the next two stanzas of “I walkt the other day,” Vaughan reiterates his sense of divine immanence in nature. The lines are structured as a Collect, a set form of prayer that held an important place in Church of England services, which suggests that “my hour” is Vaughan’s substitute for such a service. The speaker prays, O thou! whose spirit did at first inflame And warm the dead, And by a sacred Incubation fed With life this frame Which once had neither being, forme, nor name, Grant that I may so Thy steps track here below, That in these Masques and shadows I may see Thy sacred way, And by those hid ascents climb to that day Which breaks from thee Who art in all things, though invisibly. (–)

Vaughan asks that God, who from the first invested with life both the “frame” of the world and his own human frame, would enable him to discern God’s vestigia in the created world. By this means, he may ascend to the God who is still invisibly present in all things.

Conclusion If Vaughan’s natural world stands in more hope than does Herbert’s, the two poets nonetheless shared a vision of the telos of natural theology as far as humans are concerned: communion with God. In “Mattens” Herbert prays “That this new light, which now I see,/ May both the work and workman show” so that “by a sunne-beam I will climbe to thee” (–). In “I walk’t the other day,” Vaughan prays that he might through

“Mutters of Assent” or “Lectures for the Eye”



contemplation of nature “climb to that day / which breaks from thee” (–). Vaughan is joined by nonhuman companions on his climb, and he has a much stronger sense than Herbert of divine immanence in nature. Herbert nonetheless demonstrates an equally strong sense of God’s original creation of nature and continued superintendence and preservation of it, over and against the proto-deist views of his brother Edward. What is more, the two poets’ shared conviction that human engagement with nature and devotion to God are deeply intertwined distances them both from Francis Bacon, who urged scientists to bracket theological concerns and to focus more exclusively on the study of nature. Of this ambitious program, Herbert and Vaughan together would say that theological insight is the best and only reason to engage with nature in the first place. In this respect their lyric poetry, aimed at tracking God’s steps here below, joins longer poetic works being penned by Vaughan’s contemporaries.

 

Imagined Worlds

 

“Architect of Wonders” Creation in Cavendish, Du Bartas, Hutchinson, Denham, and Marvell

Can human acts of creation be compared with God’s? This chapter brings that question front and center, considering several seventeenth-century English works that imaginatively create, and then explore, their own landscapes and worlds. Authors of physico-theology beg this question about divine and human creation, reasoning that if an orderly, functional watch must have an intelligent watch-maker, then an orderly, functional world must have an intelligent world-maker. It was at this point that David Hume would attack the logic of physico-theology in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion of . What grounds do we have to believe that God is in any way like a human watch-maker, Hume would ask, and that we can make inferences about divine activity from our own acts of creation? In this chapter, I consider seventeenth-century poetic works that take various positions, implicitly or explicitly, on the question of the relationship between human and divine creation: Margaret Cavendish’s prose fiction Blazing World, biblical creation epics by Guillaume Du Bartas and Lucy Hutchinson, and topographical poems by Sir John Denham and Andrew Marvell. By panning across works in a variety of poetic genres by several authors, we can see the range of possible positions an author might take on this question. This exercise will show how authors who imagine worlds can fall into one of three classical categories regarding the relationship between humanity and the divine, laid out just below: equivocal, univocal, and analogical. Cavendish and (less clearly) Marvell represent the first group and implicitly agree with Hume: both poets suggest that it is prideful and misleading to assume that humans can discover truth about divine creation by natural means. On the other side, Du Bartas and Denham tend to collapse the distance between humans and God, frequently casting God as an “architect” or other type of human creator, making numerous inferences about God’s attributes and activities from human creation, and viewing human creation as similar to God’s. These authors do not, however, go so far as to 



Imagined Worlds

assert that human and divine activity are identical, as some seventeenthcentury works of natural theology assume. Situated between these two groups is Hutchinson, who believes we can gain insights into God’s ways by looking at our own – but these insights are only ever shadowy and partial and frequently need to be supplemented by divine revelation. The position an author takes on this question in turn dictates whether natural theology is possible, and how far it can go.

Analogy of Being and Natural Theology Ancient and medieval philosophers were keenly aware of the need to characterize the relationship between physical being and any metaphysical reality there might be, in order to talk meaningfully about that reality – or else to establish that this is impossible. Aristotle theorized three basic ways to define this relationship. These categories were later picked up by Thomas Aquinas and then became widely known and used in logic, theology, and metaphysics up through the early modern period. If the relationship between physical and metaphysical (or temporal and eternal, or human and divine) is equivocal, first of all, then David Hume is correct: the metaphysical realm is so wholly different from our own that we have no intellectual access to it, and as a result we cannot speak meaningfully about divine things. Thinkers who adopt an equivocal metaphysics can still believe in the divine, but they are necessarily fideistic: We cannot rationally know anything about God, but only believe things about God as a result of direct revelation or else whimsy. An equivocal metaphysics underlies not only Hume’s attack on natural theology (and indeed, natural theology is impossible in this view) but also the later theologian Karl Barth’s assertion that God is der ganz andere, “wholly other,” from humans. In seventeenth-century England, the “antinomianism” at the extreme end of the reformed spectrum, with its emphasis on religious enthusiasm over reason, also coheres with equivocal metaphysics. Though early modern authors did not have Hume and Barth as illustrative examples of equivocal metaphysics, they did not need examples as much as a twenty-first century audience might, because the category was long established and well known. 



For a helpful primer on medieval theories of analogy, including discussion of equivocity and univocity, see Ashworth, E. Jennifer, “Medieval Theories of Analogy,” in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/%fall/ entries/analogy-medieval/. Gregory, Unintended Reformation, .

“Architect of Wonders”



Directly opposing equivocity of being is the view that the relationship between divine and human being is univocal. If this is the case, divine activity is not just similar to, but essentially the same as, human activity. Humans can thus speak and reason about God’s activity just as effectively as about our own, making logical inferences without having to account for any ontological difference between humans and God. In this view, natural theology is not only possible but logically compelling: reasoning carefully enough, humans should be able to arrive at accurate, incontrovertible conclusions about God’s existence and activities. This is precisely the position taken by Henry More in his  Antidote Against Atheism, which maintains an identity between human and divine reason in arguing that every aspect of the world is exactly as a rational human would have designed it. “The productions of things,” More declares, “are such as our own Reason cannot but approve to bee best, or as wee our selves would have design’d them.” More also speaks of human creation as of a piece with God’s: if an aspect of the world does not appear perfectly fitted or necessary to some use, that is because God left the rest of the work for humans to do. More confidently concludes that with this work he has “no lesse then demonstrated that there is a God” and that an objection to his theological arguments is “no more possible, then that the clearest Mathematicall evidence may be false.” Besides highly intellectualist theists such as More, any reductive materialist who does not believe in the supernatural would also implicitly affirm univocity of being, in that there is no “up there” to talk about. In this way, there arises a horseshoe effect whereby a univocal atheist might look like a fideistic theist who affirms equivocity of being: both agree that it is impossible to say rational things about God. Reading an author such as Cavendish or even Marvell, it can be difficult or impossible to tell the difference, an effect they might have intended. Between these two positions is analogia entis or analogy of being, a position robustly developed by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century and subsequently accepted by most medieval theologians and philosophers. In this view, God is essentially different from humans, but humans nonetheless bear an analogical relationship to the divine. Natural theology is therefore possible, but humans can only partly apprehend God through reason, leaving a major role for faith without being full-blown fideism.   

More, Antidote against Atheism, preface. For examples, see Calloway, Natural Theology in the Scientific Revolution, –. More, Antidote against Atheism, preface, .



Imagined Worlds

With a logical analogy, two things (two lovers and the legs of a compass, for instance) are compared as similar in certain key ways, but we know that they are not the same. With analogy of being, humans and God are similar in important ways – such as an ability to create and reason – but not essentially the same. Analogia entis was dealt a blow in the Reformation, though a working assumption of analogy of being can underlie Christian writing in the early modern period and beyond. Outside of philosophical circles, explicit recognition of these categories has now faded, and along with it, the recognition that equivocal and univocal understandings of being are also possible – and that these different assumptions can have farreaching poetic and theological consequences. Poetry, itself an act of human creation, is uniquely situated to articulate and enact various understandings of the relationship between divine and human creation. Surveying a variety of well-known seventeenth-century imagined worlds, I will ask in this chapter, What relationship between divine and human creation is assumed or made explicit in a given work? And correspondingly, What kinds of natural theology might be opened up or precluded in that text? I will work through these texts by genre, first considering Margaret Cavendish’s (and, to a lesser extent, Francis Bacon’s) prose fiction, then two biblical epics, and finally two works of local poetry. This approach allows the authors’ different metaphysical assumptions to show up clearly against other works of the same genre. All of these texts are ultimately comparable, however, in that they share a common task of world-building, and they all measure the process and products of human poesis against God’s – or, in this first case, explicitly refuse to do so.

Equivocal Metaphysics in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (–), brought together poetry and philosophy in remarkable ways, even by seventeenth-century standards. Like Marvell, she links the first half of this book to this second one: she was heavily influenced by Donne and 

Victoria Silver writes that Hobbes “follows Luther and Calvin in rejecting the analogia entis (‘analogy of being’) that served as the ontological ground for the medieval synthesis of philosophy and theology, whose metaphysical project Leviathan would explode” in “‘Mr. Bayes in Mr. Bayes’: The Art of Personation in Hobbes, Parker, and Marvell,” in The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell, ed. Martin Dzelzainis and Edward Holberton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . Brad Gregory has argued relatedly that the encroachment of a univocal metaphysics, now largely unrecognized as such, is linked with secularization in Europe. See The Unintended Reformation, e.g. –.

“Architect of Wonders”



regularly grappled with questions that could be called metaphysical in her lyric poetry. Cavendish was well acquainted with the scientific thinking of her mid-century times: moving in noble and educated circles, she engaged with such thinkers as René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, and Robert Boyle, and she famously became the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society of London in . She was not permitted to attend a university due to her gender, however, and as a committed royalist, she faced hardships during the interregnum that often made writing her most reliable way of engaging with new ideas. Born Margaret Lucas, she followed Queen Henrietta Maria into exile in France in , where she married the widowed William Cavendish in . Margaret was never able to have children, and her husband’s estates were seized during the war, leading her to spend much of her energy from the s onwards trying to regain his lost land and possessions. Throughout these tumultuous years, she nonetheless published works in a variety of genres under her own name, something unusual for a woman to do. Poems and Fancies, a collection of lyric verse, appeared in , followed quickly that same year by the prose Philosophical Fancies. Cavendish then brought out The World’s Olio and Philosophical and Physical Opinions in . In all of these works, verse and prose, Cavendish works out her position on current debates in natural philosophy, particularly regarding elementary physics. After her husband’s financial situation improved and the couple was able to live in England again, Cavendish’s more mature philosophy began to appear, first in her disputational Philosophical Letters () and then Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (), which contained The Description of a New Blazing World, a work of prose fiction she also published on its own. The genre of The Blazing World is difficult to name. Cavendish herself said it was one part “Romancical,” one part philosophical, and one part “meerly Fancy” (). Today, it is often referred to as science fiction. Cavendish’s mature natural philosophy is vitalist: she rejected dualist notions of animating ideas and spirits and insisted instead that matter is self-moving. In The Blazing World, she bodies forth this philosophy by inventing a world “composed of sensitive and rational 

On Donne’s influence on the Cavendishes and the metaphysical nature of their poetry, see Lara Dodds, The Literary Invention of Margaret Cavendish (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, ), –. Marvellians tend to reject the label “metaphysical” on the grounds that it paints a misleading picture of uniformity among very disparate authors; this was the subject of a short, lively discussion at the meeting of the Andrew Marvell Society in Austin on  April . In this chapter I focus my discussion of Marvell on the possibilities for natural theology suggested in Upon Appleton House.



Imagined Worlds

self-moving Matter” (). She is also a textbook case of a thinker who views the relationship between humans and God as equivocal. Her philosophical writing is shot through with assertions – aimed pointedly at natural theologians such as More – that God can only be worshipped, not understood. In her cageyness about God, Cavendish illustrates the horseshoe effect existing between univocity and equivocity of being: scholars who know her work well characterize her variously as a freethinking atheist or a pious Christian who subscribes to apophatic theology. Cavendish’s poetic Blazing World, too, espouses equivocity of being, though in this case she can more imaginatively work out the consequences of this view, asking what science and religion might look like in a world where those in power understood that God cannot be known rationally. In this perennially fascinating work, Cavendish spins off female main characters that bear a striking resemblance to herself and then gives those characters the power to rule, create, or destroy worlds, explicitly commenting on her own authorial power in the process. In her romancical “blazingworld” (so named because of its many blazing stars), a Cavendish-like empress converses with members of her newly founded scientific societies, passing judgement on the value of their various disciplines. Over the course of this part of the work, the empress reorganizes these societies – for example demoting those who use microscopes and questioning empirical learning generally – only to change her mind and put things back the way they were at the end, implicitly condemning male philosophers Cavendish viewed as too “wedded to their opinions.” Paradoxically, with 







See Lisa Sarasohn, “Fideism, Negative Theology, and Christianity in the Thought of Margaret Cavendish,” in Brandie R. Siegfried and Lisa T. Sarasohn (eds.), God and Nature in the Thought of Margaret Cavendish (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, ), – and Sara Mendelson, “The God of Nature and the Nature of God” in the same anthology, –. Cavendish attacks not only the rational theology of More but also the more empirically informed natural theology favored by Newton and Hooke. On her atheism, see Hilda L. Smith, “Claims to Orthodoxy: How Far Can We Trust Margaret Cavendish’s Autobiography?,” – and Joanne H. Wright, “Darkness, Death, and Precarious Life in Cavendish’s Sociable Letters and Orations,” –; on her theism, see Mendelson, “God of Nature” and Brandie R. Siegfried, “God and the Question of Sense Perception in the Works of Margaret Cavendish,” –. All of these essays appear in God and Nature, whose editors (Siegfried and Sarasohn) intentionally present them together. Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World [], ed. Sara H. Mendelson (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, ), –; see Todd Andrew Borlik, “The Whale under the Microscope: Technology and Objectivity in Two Renaissance Utopias,” in Claus Zittel et al. (eds.), Philosophies of Technology: Francis Bacon and His Contemporaries (Boston: Brill, ), –. Cavendish makes a case for philosophical open-mindedness in her prefatory note to the reader; in the narrative, she proclaims Aristotle, Pythagoras, Plato, and Epicurus to have been too “wedded to their own opinions” to listen to hers; in the next breath she names Galileo, Gassendi, DesCartes,

“Architect of Wonders”



her capriciousness, Cavendish’s empress mirrors not only a whimsical and creative Nature but also the voluntarist deity necessitated by equivocity of being: The one thing Cavendish affirms about God’s activities is that they are unintelligible and therefore unpredictable – much the way readers cannot predict the actions of her avatar in the blazing world. On the topic of theology, there appears to be no need for the empress to alter anything. As soon as her interlocutors explain God’s equivocal being to her, she sees the truth of the claim and never departs from it. Inquiring whether there is “Divine Reason, as well as there is Natural?” she is told, “No . . . for there is but a Divine Faith, and as for Reason it is only natural.” Regarding God, they go on to explain that God is “beyond the conception of any Creature” and that Faith proceeds onely from Divine Saving Grace, which is a peculiar Gift of God. But, proceeded the Emperess, How are you sure that God cannot be known? The several opinions you Mortals have of God, answered they, are sufficient witnesses thereof. (–)

With a summary “Well then,” the empress here leaves off further discussion of God. In her belief in God’s utter unknowability, Cavendish was more extreme even than Bacon, who was himself far less sanguine about rational apprehension of God than Cambridge Platonists such as More and Ralph Cudworth would be. Setting The Blazing World alongside the imagined world of Bacon’s New Atlantis (as Sara Mendelson does in the Broadview edition), a reader will find that Cavendish shoves God to the side. Where the men of Bacon’s Salomon’s House are “dedicated to the study of the works and creatures of God” and affirm that “the LORD God of heaven and earth” has vouchsafed to them “to know [His] works of Creation,” Cavendish’s empress instead observes that “Nature was infinitely various in her works” and learns “by my own Contemplation, and the Observations which I have made by my rational & sensitive perception upon Nature, and her works . . . that Nature is but one Infinite Selfmoving Body.” Where Bacon avers in the Advancement of Learning that particular humans cannot “find out the work which God worketh from beginning to end,” referencing the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, Cavendish repeats twice that the empress “knew that Nature’s Works are so various



Van Helmont, Hobbes, and More as “self-conceited” (Blazing World, ). Cavendish returns to the problem of philosophers too “wedded to their own opinions” in the scene where the Empress decides to “perceive her own errors” and alter her decrees (Blazing World, ).  See pp. –. Bacon, New Atlantis, , ; Cavendish, Blazing World, , .



Imagined Worlds

and wonderful, that no particular Creature is able to trace her ways.” In this passage she erases God from an allusion both to Bacon and to the Bible itself. Like her materialist forebear Lucretius, then, Cavendish uses poetry to explore the works of a feminine Nature, omitting even to mention God. This effectively frees Cavendish to be God in her imagined world, beholden to no prior constraints in form or content. Where Lucretius had used this freedom to imagine a world without religion, Cavendish’s empress instead institutes a unified state church in her blazing world, nurturing faith and love in her subjects via the “gentle persuasions” of her own sermons, delivered in two shining chapels that served respectively as “emblems” of heaven and hell. But there is reason to suspect Cavendish (like Lucretius) wanted her readers to think past heaven and hell: unlike the empress’s subjects, readers are not given the content of these sermons but Cavendish’s own metaphysics. Even the theological voluntarism necessitated by her metaphysics is probed in the work, as the “merely fanciful” final section narrates the empress’s sudden, violent, and unrelenting military domination of yet another world. Some critics view this section as satire rather than sanction of such violence, with Cavendish calling into question the arbitrary exercise of absolute power, whether her own, a Machiavellian ruler’s, or God’s. However one reads this surprising section, its presence suggests how even Cavendish’s most tightly held convictions might be loosened; she does not want to be too wedded to her own opinions.

Univocal and Analogical Metaphysics in Seventeenth-Century Biblical Epic Among the poetic genres in vogue when Cavendish was writing, biblical epic was perhaps the least congenial to her philosophy, pitched as it was to let an author think God’s thoughts after Him (to use Johann Kepler’s memorable phrase). These works recast stories from the Bible as classical epics, framing characters from those stories as classical heroes and applying the classical “epic question” about the gods’ ways to the Christian God. A Christian author willing to re-author God’s book of scripture is  

Bacon, Oxford Francis Bacon, iv:–; Cavendish, Blazing World, , . On the puzzle of this final section, see Mendelson “Introduction,” – and –. The late Brandie Siegfried remarked in conversation at the South Central Renaissance Conference in Lubbock, TX in  that she views this section as satirical.

“Architect of Wonders”



necessarily assuming some degree of mutual intelligibility between divine and human creation. Within these parameters, however, an author can take a variety of positions on the question of how closely human poesis resembles God’s, and accordingly on how much natural access humans have to divine truth. Here I will briefly show how two authors’ rhetorical choices betray differing views of the likeness of divine and human creation in their biblical creation epics. Josuah Sylvester affirms some degree of difference between divine and human creation in his highly influential Divine Weekes and Workes, but he regularly employs language of human artifice to describe divine creation and speculates about divine activities not recorded in the Bible, suggesting a close correlation between human and divine reason and possibly a univocal understanding of being. Lucy Hutchinson, by contrast, uses more organic language and fewer comparisons with human artifice in her description of God’s creation in her Order and Disorder, suggesting an analogical understanding of being. Hutchinson therefore sets strict limits on the scope and effectiveness of natural theology, but she still leaves room for the enterprise, and her natural theology is less susceptible than many contemporary prose works to later attacks such as Hume’s. The earlier of these works is a translation of the unfinished Semaines of Guillaume de Saluste, Sieur du Bartas (–). The Semaines comprises over twenty-five thousand alexandrine lines: La sepmaine ou creation du Monde narrates God’s six-day creation of the world and day of rest, and La seconde sepmaine then proceeds through succeeding biblical history up through the Jews’ Babylonian captivity. The epic was exceedingly popular in early modern Europe: after the work appeared piecemeal between  and , dozens more editions followed in numerous languages, including several partial translations in English – one by James VI and I himself. Today, it is known mostly because of this influence, and particularly the obvious debt Milton’s Paradise Lost owes to it. It is worth noting here, though, that this biblical epic also influenced the nascent Protestant genre of occasional meditation, which belongs to the broad category of natural theology and which I will discuss further in connection with Bunyan. Among English translations, Josuah Sylvester’s complete Divine Weekes and Workes () was especially influential, and here  

Peter Auger, “Printed Marginalia, Extractive Reading, and Josuah Sylvester’s Divine Weekes (),” Modern Philology , no.  (): –. Peter Auger, Du Bartas’ Legacy in England and Scotland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –.



Figure .

Imagined Worlds

Title page and “Corona Dedicatoria” from Josuah Sylvester’s Divine Weekes and Works ().

I discuss Sylvester’s translation (on occasion supplying the original French when the language is especially illuminating). Although authored by a Huguenot who might be expected to emphasize God’s sovereignty and lack of intelligibility, the work shows marked willingness to consider what it was like to be God before, during, and after the creation of our world. Here I will consider some examples before turning to Hutchinson’s more reformed authorial choices. Before reading a single word of Sylvester’s Divine Weekes, a reader can see that this is a poem about God as architect, a poem that frames poetry itself as architecture as well. The book opens with a title page depicting worlds atop Corinthian columns, followed by a twelve-page poetic “Corona Dedicatoria” to James I in the shape of twelve columns (Fig. .). The body text then begins with a summary invocation to God added by Sylvester, asking the “Architect of Wonders” to enrich his poetic work with “learned Art” and to grant him “such Judgement, Grace, and Eloquence” that he can inherit, Elisha-like, the inspiration originally granted to Du Bartas (–). With “Architect of Wonders,” Sylvester keys in to Du Bartas’s controlling metaphor: throughout the poem, God’s

“Architect of Wonders”



artifice is emphasized and praised in an explicit comparison with human artifice. As the narrative opens with week one, day one, the narrator muses on what God did in eternity before creation – an inquiry that ranges far afield of scripture and suggests a confident view of humans’ ability to understand God. “Not void of sacred exercise,” he declares, God “did admire his Glorie’s Mysteries” (..–). He goes on to speculate: “It may also be that he meditated / The Worlds Idëa, yer it was Created” (..–). Declining “busily” to explore the Trinity, he then summarizes that God In th’infinite of Nothing, builded all This artificiall, great, rich, glorious Ball, [Dans l’infini d’un fien bastit un edifice, Qui beau, qui grand, qui riche & qui plain d’artifice] Wherein appears ingrav’n on every part The Builder’s beauty, greatnes, wealth, and Arte. (..–)

When he wants to praise God, Sylvester applies the language of human building to God’s creation: this “artificial” world is a mathematically perfect “ball,” “engraven” with its “Builder’s” attributes. Sylvester follows this summary pronouncement with explicit discussion of the ways the world speaks of its creator: “God, of himself incapable to sence,” he writes, “In’s Works reveales him t’our intelligence” (..–). He supplies a litany of metaphors imagining how the world points to its creator, working up to the best-known metaphor of all: The World’s a Schoole, where (in a generall Storie) God always reads dumbe Lectures of his Glorie: A paire of Staires, whereby our mounting Soule Ascends by steps above the Arched Pole: A sumptuous Hall, where God on every side, His wealthy Shop of wonders opens wide: 

On Du Bartas’s fundamental analogy of human and divine artifice, see Emmanuel Buron, “‘Tout une autre nature’: l’artifice chez du Bartas,” in Élisabeth Lavezzi and Timothée Picard (eds.), L’artifice dans les lettres et les arts (Rennes, France: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, ), –. The idea of God as architect appealed to many thinkers: Copernicus spoke of God as Opifex (maker framer, artist, or artisan). See e.g. Dennis Danielson, Paradise Lost and the Cosmological Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), ; Ralph Cudworth calls God an architect and “artificer” repeatedly in his True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, ), e.g. –, , and Milton calls God “the great Architect” in Paradise Lost (.). For an excellent discussion of the juxtaposition of art and nature in seventeenth-century Europe, mentioning the trope of God as architect, see Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, – (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, ), –.



Imagined Worlds A Bridge, whereby we may passe o’re at ease Of sacred Secrets the broad bound-lesse Seas. The World’s a Cloud, through which there shineth cleere, Not faire Latona’s quiv’red Darling deere, But the true Phoebus, whose bright countenance Through thickest vaile of darkest night doth glance. The World’s a Stage, where Gods Omnipotence, His Justice, Knowledge, Love, and Providence, Doo act their parts; contending in their kindes, Above the Heav’ns to ravish dullest minds. The World’s a Booke in Folio, printed all With God’s great Workes in Letters Capitall: [Le Monde est un grand Livre, où, du, souverain Mêtre L’admirable artifice on Lit en grosse lettre.] Each Creature, is a Page, and each effect, A faire caracter, void of all defect. (..–)

Here is an epic whose hero is God the Maker, teaching humans about himself intentionally through creation: natural theology is at the heart of the Divine Weekes. Published the same year as Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, the poem advocates the older, capacious variety of natural theology wherein numerous attributes of God (“Justice, Knowledge, Love, and Providence”) are legible in the book of nature, not just God’s power as evident in the existence and order of creation. So packed with divine meaning is the world, in fact, that Sylvester does not stop with the metaphor of a book but instead must pile up various metaphors, underscoring his conviction that even the “dullest minds” will be ravished above the heavens as soon as they consider creation. Notably, the design argument sits harmoniously alongside this list of ways creation points to God in the epic. Sounding much like Bacon, the narrator proclaims that primordial matter, This dull Heape of undigested stuffe, Had doubtlesse never come to shape or proofe, Had not th’Almighty with his quick’ning breath Blowne life and spirit into this Lump. (..–)



Snyder, Susan, “Introduction,” in Susan Snyder (ed.), The Divine Weeks and Works of Guillaume de Saluste, Sieur du Bartas Translated by Josuah Sylvester ( vols.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), i:.

“Architect of Wonders”



The reader of Divine Weekes is invited to infer God’s power and providence from the existence and order of creation while also looking to the world for deeper and greater theological insights. Throughout day one of creation in the Divine Weekes, Sylvester stresses the similitude of divine to human making, but without completely equating the two. If the world is a hall, a bridge, or a stage, then the God who made the world is intelligible as a human artisan; and indeed, Sylvester repeatedly makes this comparison. God is compared to “carpenters, weavers, and potters” and especially a shipbuilder; he is also repeatedly called an architect or builder generally, and his work referred to as “art.” The assumption is that humans can better understand God’s creation by thinking carefully about our own creative processes: as we may perceave That Hee who meanes to build a warlike Fleet Makes first provision of all matter meet: (As Timber, Iron, Canvasse, Cord, and Pitch) And when all’s readie; then appointeth, which Which peece for Planks, which planke shall line the waste, The Poupe and Prow, which Firre shall make a Mast; As Arte and use directeth heedfully His hand, his toole, his judgement, and his eye: So God, before this frame he fashioned, I wote not what great Word he uttered From’s sacred mouth; which summon’d in a Masse Whatsoever now the Heav’ns wide armes embrace. (..–)

Unlike the voluntarist God of more reformed theology, this God is “directed” by “art and use,” just like a human shipbuilder: as part of this directed process, the narrator reasons, God must have proceeded by gathering materials before building the world. This line of argumentation lands the Divine Weekes in the company of More’s Antidote against Atheism, which rests on the assumption that human and divine making are the same and celebrates man’s “inward abilities of Reason and Artificiall contrivance” (). Like More, Sylvester’s narrator frames human creation as extending God’s: More would argue that God left some materials raw (such as flax, iron ore, and hemp) so that



E.g. .., ., .–, ., ., ., ., ., ., ., ., ., ..



Imagined Worlds

humans could continue his work, for instance making ships and ropes. Du Bartas speaks very similarly of God’s creation of trees on day three: No spooner spoken, but the loftie Pine Distilling pitch, the Larche yeeld-Turpentine, Th’ever-greene Boxe, and gummie Cedar sprout, And th’Airie Mountaines mantle round about: The Mast-full Oake, the use-full Ashe, the Holme, Coate-changing Corke, white Maple, shadie Elme, Through Hill and Plaine ranged their plumed Ranks. (..–)

This is a utilitarian, anthropocentric description of trees. The value of the pine and larch trees lies in their pitch and turpentine, and the oak is there to become a mast. In this passage, the only difference from More’s prosaic explanation of the utility of minerals and plants is afforded by the poetic form of the Divine Weekes, which allows the trees to stand together in their beauty as God successively creates them all. Outside of this utilitarian passage, however, Sylvester sets a number of limits on human understanding of God relative to More’s ambitious Antidote. Above, for instance, the narrator explicitly states he does not know what “Word” God uttered to collect the materials to make the world. Sylvester also names differences between the ways of human makers and the ways of God: Th’admired Authors Fancie, fixed not On some fantastike fore-conceipted plot [C’est admirable ouvrier n’attacha sa pensee Au fantasque dessein d’un oeuvre pourpensee] Much-lesse did he an elder World elect, By forme whereof, he might this Frame erect: As th’Architect [Modeler] that buildeth for a Prince Some stately Pallace. (..–)

The human architect, he explains, builds not only from blueprints, but often from prior models; not so with God. God created the form of the world from scratch – and this is true of its contents as well: 



More, Antidote against Atheism, e.g. – and –. This notion of humans’ continuing God’s work infuses the Baconian project; Bacon discusses Adam in this way in Advancement of Learning (Oxford Francis Bacon, iv:). I am grateful to Joanna Picciotto for pointing out the “mastful oak” in this connection.

“Architect of Wonders”

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But where the Shipwright, for his gainfull trade, Findes all his stuff to’s hand alreadie made, Th’Almighty makes his all and every part Without the helpe of others wit or Arte. (..–)

Human artifice is derivative; God’s is original. We cannot make our own elementary materials, and we work from prior forms and models. Even in making these points about God’s relative freedom and superiority, however, Sylvester relies deeply and sustainedly on the comparability of God and human builders. Just as he sets limits on how far human creation resembles God’s, Sylvester also shies away from Henry More’s highly ambitious view of natural theology as compulsive rational proof. Like Calvin, Sylvester ultimately portrays nature as revealing divine truth only to those who already have faith. He asserts, first of all, the superiority of the Bible over reason (..–). Secondly, while he insists that no particular skill with languages or “Arte” is needed to be able to read the truths about God inscribed in Sylvester’s imagined world, “spectacles of faith” are required. In lines resonating with Milton’s Paradise Lost, Sylvester’s narrator prays that “by Faith’s pure rayes illumined” he will be able to read the “sacred Pandects” of “Th’Orbe from his Birth,” in order better to behold God (..–). This qualification drives a wedge between the human and divine intellect and sharply distinguishes his conception of natural theology from Henry More’s. For More, to be an atheist is an intellectual and even a physical failing: anyone in their right mind must agree with his natural-theological conclusions, and no spectacles of faith are needed. Given Sylvester’s more modest natural-theological aims, the question remains whether he ultimately saw the difference between human and divine “wit and art” as only of degree (univocity of being) or as a fundamental difference in kind (analogy of being). The extent to which he is willing to make inferences about God based on human activities suggests the former, especially when his biblical epic is compared with Hutchinson’s. Still, because the Divine Weekes is a poem and not a  

Sylvester, Divine Weekes ..; la Foi pour Lunetes in the original. In the poignant invocation to book  of Paradise Lost, Milton laments that his blindness has razed the sun’s “piercing ray” and the “book of knowledge fair” from his sight, praying that “Celestial light” would “shine inward, and the mind through all her powers / Irradiate . . . that I may see and tell of things invisible to mortal sight” (., –). This passage also calls to mind Satan’s dissembling request in the same book “to know / The works of God, thereby to glorifie / The great Work-Maister” (.–).



Imagined Worlds

philosophical treatise, these descriptions continue to stand in all their complexity rather than ultimately compelling a particular conclusion about the divine designer. In multiple ways, Lucy Hutchinson (–) explicitly questions the close comparison of human and divine creation seen in Sylvester’s Divine Weekes in her biblical epic, Order and Disorder. The poem’s very publication history is a testament to its lower estimation of human poesis: where Du Bartas’s Semaines was celebrated across Europe, with Sylvester’s translation opening with numerous laudatory poems, it was not known in the seventeenth century that Hutchinson even authored Order and Disorder, and the majority of the epic was not published then either. Instead, its first five cantos, narrating the creation of the world through the Fall, were published anonymously – probably well after they were written – in . The unfinished twenty-canto version was identified as Hutchinson’s by David Norbrook in , and the first complete edition appeared in . The most obvious reasons for this anonymity were Hutchinson’s gender and anti-monarchical political views, but her demureness is also of a piece with her reformed theology. In Hutchinson’s estimation, human wit and art are depraved; and even before the Fall, the human capacity to understand and participate in divine reason was extremely limited. She rejects the ambitiousness of other authors such as Sylvester and, likely, Milton: her epic is less expansive, staying closer to the biblical text in both length and language, and she repeatedly disavows the liberties taken by other authors in these areas. Most tellingly, she makes an explicit distinction in kind between God’s creations and our own. On the other hand, unlike her exact contemporary Margaret Cavendish, Hutchinson still sees creation as pointing to God in meaningful ways. Like Cavendish, Hutchinson was deeply invested in metaphysical questions and repeatedly worked out her philosophy poetically; also like Cavendish, her life was unsettled by the civil war, and large amounts of her energy were spent fighting for her husband’s political and economic interests. Apart from these considerable similarities, the two women were generally opposed to each other: Cavendish was a royalist who favored the 

It is unclear when exactly Order and Disorder and Paradise Lost were written and how early each author might have been able to view the other epic. It seems very likely, though, that Hutchinson read Milton’s epic before her own reached its final form. See David Norbrook, “Introduction,” in Order and Disorder by Lucy Hutchinson (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, ),” xiv–xvii. On Du Bartas’s own rejection of ambition in his biblical epic relative to Milton and Abraham Cowley, see Sarah C. E. Ross, Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –.

“Architect of Wonders”

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state church and opposed inquiry into God’s ways, while Hutchinson was a parliamentarian and (later) a nonconformist, keenly interested in theological inquiry. During the Restoration, when her political and ecclesial hopes had been dashed, Hutchinson became closely acquainted with the work of the Puritan theologian John Owen and even undertook to translate his Θεολογουμενα παντοδαπα () into English. It is unclear when she wrote Order and Disorder, but much of the poem clearly dates to the Restoration. In the preface, she frames the work as redressing the earlier “foolish fancies” that led her to translate Lucretius’s notorious De Rerum Natura into English – the earliest known full translation of that materialist philosophical epic. With Order and Disorder, Hutchinson aims “to wash out all ugly wild impressions” from that endeavor and instead to “fortify my mind with a strong antidote against all the poison of human wit and wisdom that I had been dabbling withal.” Tellingly, unlike Henry More, Hutchinson views “human wit” and not atheism as the poison needing an antidote. That antidote is “never to search after any knowledge of [God] and his productions, but what he himself hath given forth” (). Certainly Hutchinson is referring here to scripture – but examination of Order and Disorder reveals that she (like Calvin) considers God’s book of nature to be revelatory as well. The main indication of Hutchinson’s diminution of human wit in Order and Disorder is what is not there. Promising in her preface to “breathe forth grace cordially rather than words artificially” (), she keeps her word count low. Where Sylvester’s rendering of Genesis – passes , lines, for instance, Hutchinson’s is a mere ,. (Milton clocks in around , lines, as Fig. . shows; he also goes a step further than Sylvester, narrating scenes and dialogue not recorded in the Bible in the indicative rather than merely dilating existing biblical material in the subjunctive.) In Order and Disorder, God is not the “Architect of Wonders” but Elohim, “to say no more, / Whose sacred name we rather must adore / than venture to explain” (.–). Gone is the logic inferring how God must have proceeded making the world based on how human artisans go about building halls and ships; gone is any speculation that in eternity God may have “meditated / The Worlds Idëa, yer it was Created.” In her opening canto, Hutchinson takes a direct shot at such speculations, pronouncing that it would be “presumptuous folly” to inquire “What dark Eternity hath kept concealed / From 

Sylvester, Divine Weekes ..–.



Figure .

Imagined Worlds

A comparison of three creation epics by number of lines dedicated to biblical material.

Mortals’ apprehensions” (.–) and laying out the principle governing her own work: Let’s waive Platonic dreams Of worlds made in Idea, fitter themes For poets’ fancies than the reverent view Of contemplation, fixed on what is true And only certain, kept upon record In the Creator’s own revealèd word.

(.–)

Given her low view of human fancy, the question then arises why Hutchinson would set out to write biblical epic in the first place rather than leaving the “Creator’s own revealèd word” to stand on its own. The answer appears to be that this exercise focuses her “reverent view / Of contemplation,” allowing her to deepen her understanding of what is 

Citing Arnold Williams, Norbrook at this point aligns Hutchinson with Du Bartas, pointing out Du Bartas’s dismissal of the notion God worked from a “fantastike fore-conceipted plot” (Order and Disorder, ). It may be that Sylvester departs from Du Bartas’s intention in speculating earlier that God meditated “the Worlds Idëa” before creating the world; this claim does not appear in the original.

“Architect of Wonders”



revealed in scripture. Another reason, which becomes apparent as the poem progresses, is to show what God has revealed in nature as well. Hutchinson keeps her promise to stick close to the text of the Bible, though her account of creation in Cantos – nonetheless expands considerably on Genesis –. She accomplishes this by drawing copiously on other parts of the Bible as she runs through (for example) God’s character and attributes and the nature of heaven, topics covered in the early pages of Sylvester’s Divine Weekes as well. Unlike in the Divine Weekes, over half the lines in this section of Order and Disorder (.–) are glossed with biblical references, or in a few cases with biblical Hebrew terms. Rather than spinning out her own ideas or philosophers’ opinions, Hutchinson puts the Bible in conversation with itself. As she works through Genesis –, she simply narrates God’s creating rather than comparing God to a human artisan. The action begins, “Time had its birth / in whose Beginning God made Heaven and Earth” – a direct quotation of Genesis .. She narrates the succeeding days of creation straightforwardly over Cantos –. Here are some representative examples: Light first of all its radiant wings displayed, God called forth Light: that Word the creature made. (.–)

... Again spoke God; the trembling waters move. Part fly up thick in thick mists, made the clouds above. (.–)

... Th’inferior globe was fashioned on the third [day], When waters at the all-commanding Word Did hastily into their channels glide, And the uncovered hills as soon were dried. (.–)

... When the Creator first for mute herds calls, And bade the waters bring forth animals. Then was each shell-fish and each scaly race At once produced in their assigned place. (.–) 

On this canto’s function as a Reformed “theological prolegomenon,” see Seth Andrew Wright, “Meditative Poetry, Covenant Theology, and Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder” (PhD Diss., Baylor University, ), –.



Imagined Worlds ... Next the Almighty by his forming word Made the plumy race, and every bird Its proper place assigned. (.–)

... When God commands the teeming earth to bring Forth great and lesser beasts, each reptile thing That on her bosom creeps; the Word obeyed; Immediately were all the creatures made. (.–)

God’s word simply brings things into being – we know not how – as in Genesis  and John .–. The narrative is not completely free of language drawing analogies to human creation, but this happens far less than in the Divine Weekes, and it is never applied to God’s act of creation – only to the created things once they are there. And, again, this language tends to come from the Bible itself. The firmament is an “arch,” for instance, and the sun sits in a “pavilion” as God does in Psalm  in the Geneva Bible. One notable exception to this biblical constraint is Hutchinson’s occasional use of textile imagery, such as “fabric,” “robe,” “vests,” “velvet,” and “embroideries” – these images are not used to describe creation in the Geneva Bible or the Divine Weekes. If God is at all like a human artisan in Order and Disorder, the comparison seems to be with clothes-making. Generally, however, Hutchinson explicitly distances human art from divine creation. For instance, although both God’s material works and those of humans are always disintegrating, “God’s works have roots and seeds, from whence / They spring again in grace and excellence,” whereas “men’s have none” and so “forever pass away” (.–). This distinction between divine and human works chimed with scientific discoveries made since Sylvester’s time: both John Wilkins and John Ray would point out, drawing on Hooke’s  Micrographia, how the microscope was now revealing the “great difference . . . betwixt natural and artificial things.” Wilkins explains that the “inimitable gildings in the smallest Seeds of Plants [or] in the Head or Eye of a small Fly” revealed by the microscope put to shame “the most curious Works of Art,” and “the sharpest and finest Needle doth appear as a blunt rough Bar of Iron” up  

Hutchinson, Order and Disorder .., .. Hutchinson erroneously glosses this as Psalm , a psalm notable for its natural-theological content. Ibid. .., ., ., ., ., and ...

“Architect of Wonders”



close. Even when human contrivance is viewed from a seemly distance, Hutchinson still prefers nature. Where Sylvester praised the natural world by comparing it to a “sumptuous hall,” Hutchinson views this as an insult to the world: Scorn, princes, your embroidered canopies And painted roofs: the poor whom you despise With far more ravishing delight are fed While various clouds sail o’er th’unhousèd head, And their heaved eyes with nobler scenes present Than your poetic courtiers can invent. (.–)

Besides being the kind of passage that could land Hutchinson in trouble with the restored prince, these lines disparage human art as categorically inferior to God’s creation. This preference for what is simple and organic (which we have seen George Herbert shared in his Country Parson) runs through the epic. Adam’s reprobate son Cain builds a city, for instance, while the descendants of his elect son Seth “no cities built” (., ), and the later matriarchs and patriarchs are praised for their home-spun skills and for placing value on livestock rather than useless inorganic riches. In sharply distinguishing between divine and human works, Hutchinson thus distances her epic from Sylvester’s Divine Weekes and even further from More’s natural-theological Antidote against Atheism, which makes no distinction between human reason and God’s. But Hutchinson does not relegate God to an unknowable distance as Cavendish does. Instead, Hutchinson takes an analogical view of being, wherein humans can understand some things about God while being essentially different from God. One piece of evidence for this is her undertaking to write biblical epic. Hutchinson also makes explicit throughout Order and Disorder her view that natural theology is possible and productive though not logically conclusive. She stresses (contra More) that it is impossible for “frail human thought” to reach “the height    

Wilkins, The Principles and Duties of Natural Religion, . Hooke discusses all of these objects at some length.  See p. . E.g. Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, .–, .–. Evan Jay Getz, “Analogy, Causation, and Beauty in the Works of Lucy Hutchinson” (PhD Diss., Baylor University, ), –. Wesley Garey, “‘In every leaf, lectures of Providence’: Lucy Hutchinson, Natural Theology, and the Emblem-Book Tradition,” paper presented at the South Central Renaissance Conference March –, , on Zoom.

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Imagined Worlds

/ of the great God”; nonetheless, she holds that it is still worth applying natural reason to divine things: Yet as a hidden spring appears in streams, The sun is seen in its reflected beams, Whose high-embodied glory is too bright, Too strong an object for weak mortal sight; So in God’s visible productions we What is invisible in some sort see; While we, considering each created thing, Are led up to an uncreated spring, And by gradations of successive time At last unto Eternity do climb; As we in tracks of second causes tread Unto the first uncausèd cause are led. (.–)

That “in some sort” suggests an analogical understanding of being: the world offers not compelling proof of God’s existence and attributes, but a shadowy reflection of eternity. Rather than actively drawing logical conclusions about a designer, humans “are led” upwards as they contemplate creation – Hutchinson repeats this passive verb twice. Ultimately, like Sylvester, Hutchinson views nature as a revelatory book, but one that must be read using “spectacles of faith.” In her “On the Principles of the Christian Religion,” Hutchinson asserts that the creation & our owne frames are like faire volumes . . . where the truths of God are written in legible characters but wee cannot make any sence of them without the helpe of devine illumination, which sacred spectacles once put on makes us read the discoveries of God with holy wonder & delight.

Hutchinson’s biblical epic aims to show how the world looks through those spectacles, focusing Hutchinson’s “reverent view / of contemplation” on the creatures in order to glean insights about God. The grass, herbs, and plants that spring up on the third day, the narrator says, not only feed our senses “but th’understanding too, while we may read / In every leaf, lectures of Providence, / Eternal wisdom, love, omnipotence” (.–). Unlike Sylvester, Hutchinson does not set this older and broader understanding of natural theology alongside logic inferring God’s power from the existence and order of creation, though she does outline a logically vague process by which humans are led to an “uncausèd cause” in the 

Hutchinson, Works, .. See Garey, “In every leaf.”

“Architect of Wonders”



“tracks of second causes.” Her emphasis instead lands on God’s wisdom and love as read in creation through spectacles of faith. In this respect, as the next chapter will show, Order and Disorder is similar to Paradise Lost. Before exploring natural theology in that biblical epic in more detail, however, here I will briefly consider divine and human design in one more type of imagined world.

Divine and Human Design in Local Poetry The final two poems I will consider in this chapter imagine God-authored landscapes alongside works of human artifice and consider the relationship between the two. These are “local poems,” which attend at length to a particular locale, often (but not always) centering around a country house. This type of poem was very popular in early modern England, with Ben Jonson’s To Penhurst and Aemelia Lanyer’s Description of Cooke-ham being notable examples. As was the case with biblical epic, authors in this genre can differ widely on how they portray the relationship between nature and human art and on the degree to which humans can gather theological truth from nature. Like Sylvester’s Divine Weekes, John Denham’s Coopers Hill () depicts God’s works as of a piece with humans’ and takes a high view of what natural theology can accomplish, consistent with univocal metaphysics. Andrew Marvell’s Upon Appleton House () is quite different, questioning the intelligibility of the natural world at every turn. Always a slippery figure, Marvell lands somewhere between Cavendish and Hutchinson in his treatment of natural theology in this poem. The Royalist Sir John Denham (–) is now known primarily for a single “hill poem,” Coopers Hill, which was loved and widely imitated up through the eighteenth century. Though politically and ecclesiastically aligned with Cavendish, Denham was markedly more optimistic about Baconian science and the possibility of theological knowledge than she was. He was a fellow of the Royal Society (though not, apparently, a very dedicated one: he was expelled in  for failing to pay his dues), and 



On the “imagined” nature of Denham’s world, Elizabeth Skerpan observes in “Sir John Denham (– March ),” in M. Thomas Hester (ed.), Seventeenth-Century British Nondramatic Poets: Second Series, vol. cxxvi (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, ), that Coopers Hill “is not merely descriptive, but truly a creation of the poet” (). For an insightful study of the ways the English Reformation shaped and was shaped by the landscape, see Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity & Memory in Early Modern Britain & Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), especially –. Martin Dzelzainis, “Marvell and Science,” in The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell, .

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Imagined Worlds

his “Progress of Learning,” written in the s, laments the “atomization” of truth by religious reformers but celebrates Adamic knowledge and avers that old poets such as Musaeus, Orpheus, and Moses had purchase on theological truth, calling God “the Poet of the world.” Coopers Hill first appeared at the beginning of the civil war in  and was republished, extensively revised, during the interregnum in ; this second version is the better-known one. Critics are often interested in the political implications of the two versions: the former allegorized Charles I as pursuing and shooting a noble stag, for instance, while in the latter, this section is expanded considerably, and Charles I himself becomes the stag. The poem is also notable for its engagement with the natural world. The two most recent critical editions of Coopers Hill both appeared in , one by T. H. Banks and the other by Brendan O’Hehir. Banks asserts that the “nature description” of the poem “is relatively unimportant . . . serving merely as a peg on which to hang ethical and philosophical reflections” (). This statement, according to O’Hehir, “reveals a total failure to apprehend the relationship” between the natural world and its deeper meaning in Denham’s conception (). Far from seeing nature as a mere “peg” in the poem, O’Hehir argues that Denham viewed the natural world as thoroughly significant and locates Coopers Hill within the emblematic tradition. He titles his critical edition of the poem Expans’d Hieroglyphics, a phrase he takes from this passage in Thomas Browne’s  Religio Medici: There are two books from whence I collect my Divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his servant Nature, that universall and public Manuscript, that lies expans’d unto the eyes of all . . . this was the Scripture and Theology of the Heathens . . . surely the Heathens knew better how to joyne and reade these mysticall letters, than wee Christians, who cast a more carelesse eye on those common Hieroglyphicks, and disdain to suck Divinity from the flowers of nature.

This is a very positive view of natural theology, and it agrees with Denham’s celebration of old heathen knowledge of truth in “Progress of Learning.” O’Hehir goes on to declare that this understanding of the book of nature governs Coopers Hill:

 

John Denham, Poems and Translations with the Sophy (London, ), . On the date of composition, see Skerpan, “Sir John Denham,” . Thomas, Religio Medici [], ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Ramie Targoff (New York: New York Review Books, ), ; see O’Hehir, Expans’d Hieroglyphics, .

“Architect of Wonders”



If the heavens, the earth, and every creature in God’s Book of Works is a hieroglyph, it must be possible to read the hieroglyphs “expans’d unto the eyes of all.” And a patriotic Englishman might well feel that few pages of the Book of Works were more crammed with significant hieroglyphs than the Thames Valley between Windsor and London. In brief, what Denham attempts from the summit of Cooper’s Hill is to read the landscape “expans’d” before him. ()

The poem speaks of both natural and artificial features of the landscape as “emblems” of political authority, with the central emblem of the river Thames symbolizing the need for balance and appropriate boundaries on the power of both king and subjects. In this still-trenchant analysis, one question O’Hehir leaves unanswered is what this poem might suggest about natural knowledge of God, the author of the Thames valley. By paying sustained attention to natural features and human-made structures, such as the Thames valley and Windsor Castle overlooking it, Coopers Hill invites questions about the relationship between divine and human artifice. And these structures are not the only human artifacts Denham invites readers to consider. In the  version’s most famous lines, the “Thames couplets,” Denham draws an explicit comparison between the river and his own poesis: O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream My great example, as it is my theme! Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull; Strong without rage, without o’erflowing full. (–)

Denham does not just want to write about the Thames; he wants to write poetry as God “wrote” the Thames. As in Sylvester’s Divine Weeks, the narrator is also willing to reason what it was like to be the maker of the world, though in Coopers Hill Denham uses the term “God” sparingly. In the same section containing the Thames couplets, the speaker wonders whether nature is “more intent to please / Us or herself with strange varieties.” He explains that “things of wonder” give delight to “the wise Maker” no less than to those beholding them, though the Maker values these things as a parent does children, while the beholder sees them as friends. The speaker also makes the message about nature’s wisdom and variety universal and theological rather than merely local and political, declaring of this “Maker”: 

Skerpan, “Sir John Denham,” .



Imagined Worlds Wisely she knew the harmony of things, As well as that of sounds, from discords springs. Such was the discord which did first disperse Form, order, beauty through the universe. (–)

Although the poem is less bold than the Divine Weekes in making pronouncements about God’s activities, the logic is there. What is more, between the two versions, Denham appears to have become more willing to suggest theological conclusions to his poetic reasoning. Between  and , for instance, “Maker” became capitalized, suggesting God (though Denham returns to a female referent later). More tellingly, Denham introduces a design argument into the later version, in a passage that has much to say about divine and human creation. In both versions of the poem, he describes the harmonious relationship between Windsor Castle and the hill on which it stands. In , the passage reads, Nature this mount so fitly did advance, We might conclude, that nothing is by chance, So plac’t, as if she did on purpose raise The Hill, to rob the builder of his praise; For none commends his judgement, that doth chuse That which a blind man onely could refuse. (–)

Already the language of design is visible, with Nature making the mountain so “fitly” that it effectively demands the castle be built there. But the narrator uses the subjunctive to avoid any positive natural-theological claims: we “might” conclude nothing is by chance – or we might not; the mountain is placed “as if” to rob the builder of his praise – but perhaps this is just the impression it gives rather than a reality. In , the passage becomes, When Natures hand this ground did thus advance, ’Twas guided by a wiser power than Chance; Mark’t out for such a use, as if ‘twere meant T’invite the builder, and his choice prevent. Nor can we call it choice, when what we chuse, Folly, or blindness only could refuse. (–)

While the tentative “as if” survives, the narrator has become noticeably more confident, affirming in the indicative that Nature’s hand was guided by a “wiser power than Chance” – presumably God. Between  and

“Architect of Wonders”



, having lost the physical battle against the Parliamentarians, Denham decided to ally himself with the natural theologians waging an intellectual battle against atheistical notions of a world governed by mere chance. In both versions, moreover, one sees a continuity between divine and human creation consistent with a univocal metaphysics and conducive to natural theology. O’Hehir notes that the distinction whether something was made by “God or man” in the poem “is not always either clear or relevant” (), and the relationship between the hill and Windsor Castle is an example. Where Sylvester described a “mastfull oak” intended by God to be made into a ship, here Denham describes a hill “mark’t out” for the “use” of hosting the castle; humans simply continued the work God and nature left undone. The anthropocentrism of Sylvester’s description of trees is admittedly toned down in Coopers Hill: building a castle will not kill the hill the way a tree must be killed to make a mast, and Denham pooh-poohs human ingenuity in this passage rather than celebrating it as Henry More does in An Antidote against Atheism. The designing and building of Windsor Castle is no great feat on the builder’s part, the narrator claims; for who would commend something it would be folly or blindness not to do? Still, in recognizing this intention for the hill, Denham assumes mutual intelligibility between himself and the hill’s author, and in praising the castle and hill together, he foregoes Hutchinson’s derision of human artifice as altogether different from, and worse than, God’s. Much closer to Hutchinson’s general feeling about human art is Andrew Marvell, whose work shows a marked appreciation for the works of nature. Marvell composed Upon Appleton House while residing at Nun Appleton as Mary Fairfax’s tutor from –, a few years after her father and the poem’s dedicatee, Sir Thomas Fairfax, captured John Denham at Dartmouth. In the poem Marvell explores the house and grounds and their history, in the process commenting obliquely on contemporary political and philosophical matters. “Obliquely” was Marvell’s usual way to comment on such matters: as one of the best-known poets of the interregnum and Restoration, he has foiled numerous critical attempts to pin him down politically, and his most recent biography is aptly subtitled The Chameleon. Marvell is just as slippery theologically as he is politically: summing up Marvell’s religion, John Spurr writes of scholars’ “combing his writings for clues to his spiritual allegiances” in a “perhaps questionable attempt to see Marvell ‘whole’ and to establish his religious identity.” 

John Spurr, “The Poet’s Religion,” in Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .



Imagined Worlds

Though opposed to the state church and apparently theologically amenable to the puritan Fairfax family, Marvell’s literary output is not typical of a Reformed puritan. In fact it is possible, based on close familiarity with his work, to characterize him as sympathetic with deists and “neo-atheists” – something no scholar would do with Lucy Hutchinson. Here I will not finally answer the question of Marvell’s views on theology, but his very cageyness on the topic precludes certain positions, so I will give examples of this cageyness regarding natural theology, in particular in Upon Appleton House. Next to the confident exposition of the book of nature – and brief assertion of a design argument – in Coopers Hill, Marvell appears highly suspicious of natural theology, both the old understanding of the book of nature and the newer prospect of an argument from design. Were he not a chameleon, this suspicion might be surprising: Marvell ordinarily sets a high premium on reason and has been compared with contemporary authors who practiced or promoted natural theology such as John Wilkins, Richard Baxter, and Robert Boyle. Marvell’s The Garden, moreover, shows the influence of Nathaniel Culverwell’s naturaltheological Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature (), and Upon Appleton House itself draws on both Denham’s Coopers Hill and Sylvester’s Divine Weekes, whose natural-theological themes I have just surveyed. Like those works, Marvell’s poem is full of topics taken up by natural theologians such as design, art and nature, and fitness and order. Given all of these conducive circumstances, the poem reads as though Marvell is willfully refusing to “suck Divinity from the flowers of nature,” as Thomas Browne put it. Initially, Upon Appleton House strikes a similar natural-theological note to Coopers Hill. Its opening stanzas present an image of contemporary man as designing an “unproportioned dwelling” for himself that is contrasted with the older house at Nun Appleton, which closely follows nature in fitness and contrivance: 





Nigel Smith, “Literary Innovation and Social Transformation in the s,” in Tony Claydon and Thomas N. Corns (eds.), Religion, Culture and National Community in the s (Cardiff, UK: University of Wales Press, ), –. See also Robert D. Hume and Ashley Marshall, “Marvell and the Restoration Wits,” in The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell, –. See Joanna Harris and N. H. Keeble, “Marvell and Nonconformity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell, : “Marvell’s very refusal to discuss theological and ecclesiological particularities evidences a firm religious commitment to reasonableness and moderation.” Harris and Keeble compare him on this score with Baxter and Wilkins. On Boyle, see Dzelzainis, “Marvell and Science.” Joanna Picciotto has also placed Marvell in the context contemporary scientific developments in Labors of Innocence, –. Smith, Poems of Andrew Marvell, , –.

“Architect of Wonders”



The beasts are by their dens expressed: And birds contrive an equal nest; The low-roofed tortoises do dwell In cases fit of tortoise-shell. (–)

Similarly, the narrator continues, the house at Nun Appleton is “composed . . . Like Nature, orderly and near” (–). While it is possible for human artifice to wander astray of natural order, human works can also be “like” nature in their order and nearness. Here is a comparison of human art with God-authored nature and a consideration of fitness of natural phenomena to morally inflected ends, though no purposive agent higher than nature is mentioned. Marvell uses the term “God” only once, but the picture painted of nature in these opening lines is one of intelligibility rather than arbitrary whimsy and variety as in Cavendish’s Blazing World. On the other hand, Marvell avoids suggesting that human and divine creation are the same; the house is only “like” nature, and the land is not portrayed as needing the house in order to be complete as is the case with the hill and Windsor Castle in Coopers Hill. Even the order and nearness of nature, which suggest a providential designer, are unsettled as the poem carries on. After the mowing of the hayfields in stanzas –, for instance, the narrator describes a “new and empty face of things” (). This tabula rasa is “levelled,” “smooth and plain” and calls to his mind not only a blank canvas but also the newly created world: The world when first created sure Was such a table rase and pure. Or rather such is the toril Ere the bulls enter at Madril. (–)

With an unanticipated “or rather,” the speaker intimates that what has unfolded on the blank face of the world has been like the chaos and bloodshed of a bullfight. Indeed, the mowing itself has given the speaker cause to question providence: the violent death of a bird prompts the reflection, “What does it boot / To build below the grass’ root; / When lowness is unsafe as height, / And chance o’ertakes, what ’scapeth spite?” (–). Like Tennyson two hundred years later, the speaker finds the seemingly senseless deaths of creatures to suggest that the world is governed by chance rather than providence.



Imagined Worlds

Furthering the sense of disorder, several flood-filled stanzas later Marvell’s speaker enters the wood, where the vacuum-abhorring “nearness” of nature becomes fragmented and “loose” – suggesting the potentially dangerous theories of contemporary atomists – before Nature recollects herself in the presence of Mary Fairfax. Finally, and perhaps most memorably, the narrator asserts universal chaos in the poem’s penultimate stanza: ’Tis not, what once it was, the world; But a rude heap together hurled; All negligently overthrown, Gulfs, deserts, precipices, stone. (–)

These lines reverse the ordering and enlivening of creation narrated in The Divine Weekes and Order and Disorder and effectively call into question those epics’ shared assertion that God’s providence is evident in nature. Describing primordial chaos, Sylvester’s narrator had explained that “This was not then the world,” but a “dull heape of undigested stuffe.” If the world was given form and order at creation, the fact is becoming less and less discernable, as Marvell’s speaker sees it. In this conviction of the world’s ugliness and decline this speaker is aligned with the message of Donne’s earlier Anniversaries (, ) and also the later Telluris Theoria Sacra of Thomas Burnet (). When Donne was writing, he had cause to expect many readers (including James I) would find congenial his narrative of the world’s decline. By the time Burnet put forth that the earth was an “obscure and sordid particle” and the “excrement and dregs of Nature,” he met with significant resistance, not least from natural theologians. The father of physicotheology, John Ray, attacked Burnet head-on in his seminal Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation () and Miscellaneous  

 

E.g. “Upon Appleton House,” –, –; see Calloway, “Imagining the Scientific Revolution,” –. Sylvester, Divine Weekes .., . This description of the world as a “rude heap” (rudis moles) can be found in Ovid (Smith cites Metamorphoses, I, ll. –); Hutchinson calls primordial chaos a “rude congestion without form or grace,” in Order and Disorder .. See Martin, “Advancement of Learning and Decay of the World,” . Thomas Burnet, Archeologiae Philosophicae (London, ), : “particulam. . . . caecam et sordidam . . . faecem et recrementu naturae”; see Brooke, “Wise Men Nowadays Think Otherwise,”  and P. Rossi, “Nobility of Man and Plurality of Worlds,” in A. G. Debus (ed.), Science, Medicine and Society in the Renaissance, vol. II (New York: Science History Publications, ), . “Earth” is of course just one part of the “world” or universe, but the physicotheologians insisted that even Earth evinces God’s wisdom and providence.

“Architect of Wonders”



Discourses concerning the Dissolution and Changes of the World () and their successive editions. Ray’s works were pitched to counter Burnet’s dour picture, presenting instead a (terrestrial) heaven and earth that were ingeniously and wonderfully designed. Marvell, writing at the middle of the century, pits his speaker in Upon Appleton House against the orderly world of the nascent genre of physico-theology. In keeping with his rejection of crucial assumptions undergirding physico-theology, Marvell’s speaker also implicitly questions the idea that the book of nature can be read productively as expansed hieroglyphics. While in the woods, he twice raises the possibility of nature’s legibility, only to undermine that possibility. First, considering the sounds he is hearing, he turns to consider one of the most traditionally meaningful creatures: The stock-doves, whose fair necks are graced With nuptial rings their ensigns chaste; Yet always for some cause unknown, Sad pair until the elms they moan. O why should such a couple mourn, That in so equal flames do burn! (–)

With “ensigns,” the speaker directly references the book of nature; doves were held to be a divinely inscribed sign of matrimonial fidelity and chastity. Then he turns to the “sadder music” they produce. This he does not understand, given the doves’ strong mutual love. At one level, this is a witty conceit turning on the notion that nuptial love would produce such a sad moan. At another level, the speaker is glibly dismissing a well-known tradition of spiritual interpretation. As discussed in connection with Donne, doves’ mournful groaning, gemitus columbae, was widely viewed as emblematic of natural and spiritual regeneration. By stressing that these doves groan “for some cause unknown” and bluntly asking “why should such a couple mourn?” the speaker seems either strangely oblivious or willfully disdainful of that tradition. 



See for instance Rienk Vermij, “Physico-theology or Biblical Physics? The Biblical Focus of the Early Physico-theologians,” in Blair and von Greyerz (eds.), Physico-theology, – and Simona Boscani Leoni, “A Hybrid Physico-theology: The Case of the Swiss Confederation” in the same volume, –. For evidence of this conflict in the publication history of Paradise Lost, see pp. –. See pp. –.



Imagined Worlds

Following this conspicuous failure to read any meaning in the doves’ groaning, Marvell raises the question of who is reading whom as he works up to an explicit reference to the book of nature. In stanza , the speaker becomes practically indistinguishable from the “fowls” and “plants” that surround him, declaring he might prove to have been an “inverted tree” (, ). He begins to call to the birds “in their most learned original” language: a deflating claim is buried here that beasts have retained their priscan “original” language while we humans have lost ours. Where he lacks this language, the speaker says, “my signs / the bird upon the bough divines” (–). Collapsing the distinction between humans and beasts, these lines are in conflict with Herbert’s notion of man as the world’s “high priest,” communing with God on behalf of dumb creatures. Herbert wrote in “Miserie” that “The bird that sees a daintie bowre” wonders and sings but does not know who made it; this only humanity can do (–). Here it is up to the bird instead to “divine” the speaker’s “signs,” accommodating the speaker’s relative ignorance of its “most learned” language. After thus communing with the birds, Marvell’s speaker immediately turns his gaze toward the leaves: Out of these scattered sibyl’s leaves Strange prophecies my fancy weaves: And in one history consumes, Like Mexique paintings, all the plumes. What Rome, Greece, Palestine, ere said I in this light mosaic read. Thrice happy he who, not mistook, Hath read in Nature’s mystic book. (–)

The tone of the stanza is enthusiastic rather than dour and pessimistic, but there is reason to suspect the speaker’s “fancy”: Marvell himself was suspicious of enthusiasm, and he slips the similar-sounding “mistook” and “mystic” into the couplet about the book of nature. In this view, this book is not plain and open to all (as some natural theologians claimed) but mysterious and often read mistakenly. Even “thrice happy” suggests a lack of confidence about reading the book of nature correctly; a well-known classical phrase, felices ter is a poignant, loaded blessing, often expressing  

For an instance of Marvell’s reworking Herbert in a way that elevates nature’s spiritual status, see Picciotto, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England, . Harris and Keeble, “Marvell and Nonconformity,” .

“Architect of Wonders”



something counterfactual. There is a book of nature, but it is unclear who (if anyone) can productively read it. All this does not add up to the wholesale rejection of natural theology evident in Cavendish’s Blazing World, but Marvell does wage a dogged underground assault on natural theological reasoning in Upon Appleton House. The picture that forms of Marvell’s view of natural theology in the poem is not, in the end, too far from the one developed by Calvin in the Institutes: nature is full of beauty, possibly even meaning, but humans in our depravity tend not to get the message. In addition to having our faculties fogged up by sin (as Calvin declared), humans in Marvell’s telling have also defaced nature and contributed to a universal decline that has made her less legible. We are the ones building unproportioned dwellings, wantonly killing birds as we mow, and generally creating a situation reminiscent of a bullfight in the once-pure world that still has some foothold at Nun Appleton. Unlike in Coopers Hill, no “wiser hand than chance” is asserted as the speaker explores that place, and human activity seems to work against God’s creation rather than extending or completing it. Marvell even shies away from Lucy Hutchinson’s more careful and circumscribed claims about God’s visibility in the natural world, declining (at least in this poem) to take the middle way offered by analogy of being. Much less does he follow Sylvester’s confident practice of drawing numerous conclusions about the “architect of wonders” based on surveying his visible works and musing about his invisible activities.

Conclusion Having briefly surveyed “imagined worlds” developed in varying degrees of detail by their creators, from shorter topographical poetry to Sylvester’s multivolume translation of Du Bartas, we now return to the question with which I began this chapter: can human acts of creation be compared with 

 

E.g. Aeneas’s first speech in the Aeneid: “Felicem terque quaterque beati, / Quis ante ora patrum Troiae sub moenivus altis / contigit oppetere!” [“Three- and four-times happy were those who perished in the sight of their fathers under the lofty walls of Troy!”] Thanks to Alden Smith for insights about the general tone of this phrase. See pp. –. These are notes Marvell hits more than once, and he has accordingly garnered interest from readers with an ecocritical perspective. See for instance Diane Kelsey McColley, Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell (New York: Ashgate, ); Andrew McRae, “The Green Marvell,” in The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell, – and (for a critical look at the tendency to “greenwash” Marvell), Brendan Prawdzik, “Greenwashing Marvell,” Marvell Studies , no.  (): –.



Imagined Worlds

God’s? Cavendish flatly says “no” – God cannot be understood, only worshipped – but her entire prose fiction project in The Blazing World shows a marked interest in the power of a creator, its extent and potential abuses. Marvell never explicitly pronounces natural knowledge of God impossible, but he willfully resists reading the book of nature in Upon Appleton House, letting his emphasis fall instead on the human tendency to deface and misinterpret creation. Denham, by contrast, emphasizes the human capacity to extend and participate in God’s creativity in his Cooper’s Hill, blurring the line between human and divine creation in ways similar to Henry More’s ambitious natural theology. This is the position taken as well by Du Bartas in his Semaines and brought over into Sylvester’s Divine Weeks: God is consistently portrayed as a human maker, and numerous insights are drawn about God’s creation of the world from various types of human making – including poetry. Standing between these optimistic, ambitious creators and the pessimistic Marvell and Cavendish is Lucy Hutchinson, who bothered to write biblical epic despite her puritan misgivings about human knowledge: notwithstanding our frailty and the wide chasm between humans and God, she insisted, we still see God “in some sort” in his visible creations, because this is what God wants. With this wide variety of stances on human and divine creation in mind, we now turn to the biblical epic of Milton, whose Paradise Lost has much to say about “the great Architect.”

 

“His Footstep Trace” The Natural Theology of Paradise Lost

No man ever taught, that Adam’s fall (which was a breach of his religious duty towards God) was a deficiency from the study of Experimental Philosophie: . . . as if Natural and Experimental Philosophie, not Natural Theology, had been the Religion of Paradise. Henry Stubbe, A Censure upon the history of the Royal Society, 

Opening the second week of his English translation of Du Bartas’s Semaines, Josuah Sylvester prayed that his Divine Weekes would “provoke our modern wits” among his countrymen to “advance their wings” up to high and holy things, devising “new Weekes [and] new works” – that is, to write biblical epic indigenous to England. We have already seen that Sylvester’s compatriot Lucy Hutchinson rose to the occasion, though in her lifetime her Order and Disorder was published only partially and anonymously. Hutchinson’s royalist contemporary Abraham Cowley, too, answered Sylvester’s call, but his (incomplete) Davideis narrated King David’s exploits rather than the “weeks” of God’s creation of the world. By far the most resounding response was given by John Milton, whose Paradise Lost remains the best-known Protestant biblical epic. Milton famously wrote in the invocation to Paradise Lost that he intended to outstrip Du Bartas, soaring with “no middle flight” in pursuing “things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme” (., ). Like the Semaines, though, Milton’s project is centered around natural theology, around understanding the Maker. As Milton puts it, his “great argument” in the poem is to “justify the ways of God to men” (.). But to what extent did Milton believe it was possible for fallible, finite humans naturally to understand God’s ways? And how should they best approach this task? This chapter takes up these questions.  

Sylvester, Divine Weekes .., –, . David Lowenstein, “The Seventeenth-Century Protestant English Epic,” in Catherine Bates (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .





Imagined Worlds

Much recent work on John Milton has emphasized the harmony between Paradise Lost and the methods and aims of modern science. These studies have more than corrected the misimpression – imputed to a  book by Kester Svendsen – that Milton was “part of a popular cultural lag, an old order not yet superseded in either common imagination or the literature of science.” Instead, scholars have shown that Milton was aware of contemporary work in natural history, cosmology, and physics; and, what is more, he employed in his own poetic effort the same collaboration-dependent method that was the hallmark of the new science. One or two voices have warned against taking these claims too far, but on the whole the new critical consensus is that Milton, like many early modern Protestants, moved things forward rather than backward, scientifically speaking. Yet while these critics carefully avoid homogenizing the “New Science,” there is still a strand of scientific reform that needs to be extricated and brought into our understanding of Milton’s relationship to science: the Baconian suspicion and marginalization of natural theology. Although Milton was not the reactionary Svendsen argued he was, his epic  



Kester Svendsen, Milton and Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), . Svendsen, Milton and Science, ; Harinder Singh Majara, “Contemplation of Created Things”: Science in “Paradise Lost” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ); John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ); Stephen M. Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in SeventeenthCentury England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ); Karen Edwards, Milton and the Natural World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Catherine Gimelli Martin, “‘What If the Sun Be Centre to the World?’: Milton’s Epistemology, Cosmology, and Paradise of Fools Reconsidered,” Modern Philology , no.  (): – and “Rewriting the Revolution: Milton, Bacon, and the Royal Society Rhetoricians,” in Juliet Cummins and David Burchell (eds.), Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, ), –; John Gillies, “Space and Place in Paradise Lost,” ELH , no.  (): –; Angelica Duran, “The Sexual Mathematics of Paradise Lost,” Milton Quarterly , no.  (): –, The Age of Milton and the Scientific Revolution (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, ), and “Reformed Catechism and Scientific Method in Milton’s Of Education and Paradise Lost,” in Cummins and Burchell (eds.), Science, Literature and Rhetoric, –; Joanna Picciotto, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England, –; Danielson, Paradise Lost and the Cosmological Revolution; and Catherine Gimelli Martin, ed., Milton and the New Scientific Age (London: Routledge, ). Ann Baynes Coiro, “‘To Repair the Ruins of Our First Parents’: Of Education and Fallen Adam,” SEL , no.  (): –; Stanley Fish, “Why We Can’t All Just Get Along,” in The Trouble with Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), –; and William Poole, “Milton and Science: A Caveat,” Milton Quarterly , no.  (): –. Picciotto qualifies Poole’s argument but affirms that Milton was not himself an “aspiring virtuoso” (Labors of Innocence, , n. ). A further cautionary argument is offered by Jennifer Munroe in “First ‘Mother of Science’: Milton’s Eve, Knowledge, and Nature,” in Jennifer Monroe and Rebecca Laroche (eds.), Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, ), –. Monroe argues contra Karen Edwards that “Eve’s problem may not be that she trusts her experience too little but that she trusts it too much.” In this reading, science itself it not the problem, but women “would best leave the real scientific work to men” ().

“His Footstep Trace”



demonstrates an awareness that science could be directed to nontheological ends, a practice that he epideictically decries. Taking instead the view of those scientific reformers who practiced natural theology, Milton works out in his poem a rubric for applying human science to theological understanding while resisting the anthropocentrism and modern notion of reason underlying many contemporary prose works of natural theology.

Milton among the Natural Theologians When Milton wrote in On Christian Doctrine that God “has left so many signs of himself in the human mind, so many traces of his presence through the whole of nature, that no sane person can fail to realize that he exists,” he was rehearsing a commonplace. As we have seen, Christians took the idea of God’s revelation in nature from the Bible itself and practiced a capacious sort of natural theology within a context of faith up through the early modern period. In the seventeenth century, the enterprise began to change in response to new understandings of how human reason best operated: the old ontological and cosmological demonstrations of God’s existence were transformed into the Cambridge Platonists’ mid-century attacks on Hobbesian materialism and the increasingly popular works of physico-theology that proliferated toward the end of the century. Making use of the growing body of discoveries in cosmology, natural history, and physics, authors of physico-theology argued that the world was too intricately designed to be the result of necessity or chance. The movement of the stars, the structure of the human eye, and the generation of a fetus had long been known to be wondrous, but nobody knew how wondrous until natural philosophers had unfolded the process in unprecedented detail. Natural philosophy thus continued to be motivated by the imperative to gain theological insight even as its methods came to rely more and more on phenomenological observation of the natural world. But some scientific reformers were concerned about the legitimacy of inferring theological    

John Milton, On Christian Doctrine, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton,  vols., ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, –), vi:. See pp. –. See, respectively, Bentley, The Folly and unreasonableness of atheism, –; More, An Antidote against Atheisme, –; and Ray, The Wisdom of God, –. Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Modern Science, –. Scott Mandelbrote summarizes a spate of recent arguments that natural theology “granted legitimacy to an emerging scientific culture of ‘modernity’” in “Early Modern Natural Theologies,” in Brooke, Manning, and Watts (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology, .



Imagined Worlds

precepts from their discoveries. Bacon, as I have discussed in Chapter , had a strong distaste for natural theology and urged excluding investigation of final causes from the practice of natural philosophy for pragmatic reasons (a battle that his side eventually won, at least as far as the Royal Society’s provenance was concerned). Bacon insisted that divine things were more important than worldly things, and even asserted that natural theology was useful toward correcting pagan superstition and as “an effectuall inducement to the exaltation of the glory of God,” but he lamented a misallocation of intellectual resources. What natural theology could show – that there is a God and that pagan superstition is wrong – it had already shown, and much labor was being wasted on those arguments, labor that would more profitably be applied to natural philosophy proper. Some later reformers’ objections were more thoroughgoing: human learning could never reach to divine things, they argued, rendering natural theology impossible and its practitioners prideful. Advancement of science and exclusion of the divine from its scope might thus go together, with the charge of pride being leveled against those who wished to apply the nascent sciences to divine things. As Bacon had explained, “That men and Gods were not able to draw Jupiter down to the Earth, but contrariwise, Jupiter was able to draw them up to Heaven, so as wee ought not to attempt to drawe downe or submitte the Mysteries of  to our Reason; but contrarywise, to raise and advance our reason to the Divine Truth.” In other words, the natural philosopher’s inquisitive gaze should be directed downward rather than upward, as he seeks to understand the region that God has given humans. In pursuing a godlike understanding of the world, “Divine Truth,” humans show that they are created in God’s image. To turn that inquisitiveness toward God himself, by contrast, constitutes a presumptuous attempt to “draw Jupiter down to the Earth.” This interpretation of human creation imago dei – humans are intended to take a God’s-eye view of creation, not presuming to apply their science to divine things – was not the only one available to early modern scientists; a competing interpretation was held by scientific reformers who continued to give a legitimate place to natural theology. In their view, human  



Bacon, Oxford Francis Bacon, iv:. Godfrey Goodman, William Dell, and John Webster all argued in this direction. See William Poole, Milton and the Idea of the Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), ; Mandelbrote, “The Uses of Natural Theology in Seventeenth-Century England,” –; and Calloway, “Owen and Scientific Reform,” –. Bacon, Oxford Francis Bacon, iv:.

“His Footstep Trace”



creation in God’s image did entail a godlike ability to perceive and understand the nature of things, an ability evident (among other ways) in Adam’s charge to tend the garden and his naming of the animals. But the end to which knowledge was directed was theological. Far from relegating divine things to the sphere of special revelation, practitioners of natural theology believed that the primary reason to practice science in the first place was for greater knowledge of God. A high-profile advocate of this view is Robert Boyle, who turned his pen to natural theology from time to time and who endowed the famous Boyle Lectures to continue the enterprise after his death. In his  Usefulness of Philosophy, Boyle argued that only through scientific training can one properly read the book of nature for its deeper meaning, rendering science a worthy occupation. Making the converse point was Richard Baxter, who argued in his  Reasons of the Christian Religion that to conduct science without reference to its metaphysical implications is “to gaze on the glass and not see the image in it; or to gaze on the image, and never consider whose it is: or to read the book of the creation, and mark nothing but the words and letters, and never mind the sense and meaning.” For Baxter, not only was it appropriate to draw theological conclusions from scientific observations, but there was no use practicing science to any other end. If two competing interpretations of human creation imago dei among scientific reformers might thus be described as “godlike knowing” and “God-knowing,” the young Milton was on the “God-knowing” side with Boyle and Baxter. As already mentioned, in On Christian Doctrine Milton wrote that no sane person would fail to draw theological conclusions from reason and observation. Further, the vision for human learning Milton lays out in Of Education aligns with that of Baxter. In  Balachandra Rajan compared Milton’s famous claim, The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to

  

Robert Boyle, Some Considerations Touching the Usefulnesse of Experimental Natural Philosophy (London, ), ; see also Mandelbrote, “Uses of Natural Theology,” . Baxter, Reasons of the Christian Religion, . This is not to deny the ecclesiastical and political differences between Milton and Baxter, some of which are surveyed in John Peter Rumrich’s “Uninventing Milton,” Modern Philology , no.  (): . However, the sense Rumrich gives of Baxter’s view of human reason seems more in harmony with the Baxter of The Arrogancy of Reason (London, ) than with the Baxter of The Unreasonableness of Infidelity (London, ), The Reasons of the Christian Religion, and More Reasons of the Christian Religion and No Reason against it (London, ). As Rumrich points out, Baxter is a difficult man to categorize.



Imagined Worlds imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection.

with the following passage from Baxter’s  A Christian Directory: The great means of promoting love of God is duly to behold Him in his appearances to man in the ways of Nature, Grace and Glory. First therefore learn to understand and improve His appearances in Nature, and to see the Creator in all His works, and by the knowledge and love of them, to be raised to the knowledge and love of Him.

Both men insist, explicitly, that gaining knowledge of God is not only a licit end of human science, but its central purpose. We may note in passing that this shared conviction that knowledge of creation is an instrumental good places Baxter and Milton in a medial position when viewed through an ecocritical lens. When he passed away in , Rajan was working on an article taking a gently reactionary view of ecology in Paradise Lost, stressing that the epic subscribes to the doctrine of human dominion over nature: “The core truth of Genesis,” Rajan pronounces, “our de facto dominion over this planet, cannot be unwritten. It can only be softened into humility, the readiness to learn from what we failed to govern.” My subject in this chapter is natural theology rather than ecology: I am asking to what extent Milton agrees with authors such as Boyle and Baxter about what we ought to learn from the world we have failed to govern, and how best to gain that knowledge. It is worth noting, though, that from an ecocritical perspective natural theologians often occupy a middle position like the one Rajan marked out for Paradise Lost: between the anthropocentric, violent instrumentalizing of nature characteristic of some scientific practitioners and the thoroughgoing egalitarianism of many contemporary ecocritics. For natural theologians, 

  

Milton, Complete Prose Works, ii:–. For an explanation of the precedence of this aim over that of fitting “a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and publike of peace and war,” see Stephen Schuler, “Sanctification in Milton’s Academy: Reassessing the Purposes in Of Education and the Pedagogy of Paradise Lost,” Milton Quarterly , no.  (): –. Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory (London, ), . Quoted in Balachandra Rajan, “Simple, Sensuous and Passionate,” Review of English Studies , no.  (): . Balachandra Rajan, review of Ken Hiltner (ed.), Renaissance Ecology: Imagining Eden in Milton’s England, Milton Quarterly , no.  (): –. McColley, “Milton and Ecology,” – provides some gripping examples of this instrumentalism, which overlaps with the Greco-Roman dualist philosophy Hiltner identifies as so destructive in his Milton and Ecology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), e.g. –.

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nonhuman creation is still subordinate to humanity, but creation’s ultimate end is knowledge and worship of God rather than human power over the rest of creation. This leaves room for the conviction that the flourishing of nonhuman creation is a subordinate good to be sought; God may be better discerned in a flourishing world than a carved-up one. Fostering a world that shows God’s glory clearly is especially important if natural theology best proceeds from outward observation rather than inward cogitation, and one of my claims is that Milton takes this view, particularly for postlapsarian humans. Baxter and Milton both trace a course toward knowledge of God from observation of the natural world. Baxter foresees the use of the natural sciences in divinity – “What an excellent book is the visible world for the daily study of a holy soul!” – in terms that anticipate the naturalist John Ray’s heady inferences of God’s wisdom from every bird and flower. Elsewhere, Baxter sets observation over cogitation explicitly: “The Soul in Flesh is so much desirous of a sensitive way of apprehension that we have great need of the clearest evidence, and the most suitable, and the most frequent, that possibly can be given us,” he writes in his  Reasons of the Christian Religion, adding that “it is foolish to reason against sense and experience or to deny that which is, because we think that it should be otherwise.” Likewise, Milton famously argues in Of Education that “our understanding cannot in this body found it selfe but on sensible things, nor arrive so cleerly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature.” In sum, Milton’s theory of learning harmonized in many ways with that of the scientific reformers who emphasized empirical observation. Already in the s, however, he had distinguished himself from those who marginalized final causes, aligning himself instead with practitioners of natural theology who agreed that knowledge of God was the end of human learning. 





John Ray’s  The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation, arguably the most influential work of English physico-theology, was less concerned with providing airtight logical proof than to evince wonder in a believing audience. See Calloway, “Rather Theological than Philosophical.” Baxter, Reasons, , . With the scientific reformers, Baxter held that scholastic philosophizing often obscured the truth rather than illuminating it and insisted that education, the chief Christian occupation, should stay close to sense perception. See also J. I. Packer, The Redemption and Restoration of Man in the Thought of Richard Baxter [] (Vancouver, BC: Regent College Publishing, ), –; N. H. Keeble, Richard Baxter, Puritan Man of Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), , and Mandelbrote, “Uses of Natural Theology,” –. Milton, Complete Prose Works, ii:–

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Imagined Worlds

As we turn to the Milton of the s, it bears remembering that seventeenth-century natural theologians often agreed about little else. As a result, to say that Milton located himself among those who saw value in applying reason to theological ends is still to leave much in question. What types of natural theology might he have sanctioned? Seventeenthcentury specimens include the efforts of Henry More and Ralph Cudworth logically to prove God’s existence against Epicurean materialism by appealing to an idea innate in the human mind, as well as arguments leveled by Newtonians later in the century asserting the staggering improbability that such a perfectly designed cosmos could exist without a perfect designer. They include the celebratory tour through the marvels of natural history found in John Ray’s Wisdom of God as well as the self-scrutinizing arguments of Richard Baxter against the antinomians. Here I examine Paradise Lost alongside contemporary prose works of natural theology, discovering where Milton aligns with and diverges from these works.

Natural Theology and Paradise Lost One piece of evidence that Paradise Lost was in conversation with contemporary works of natural theology is that some early readers saw it that way. For instance, several lines from the epic would appear on the frontispiece of John Wesley’s  A Survey of the Wisdom of God in Creation: “These are thy glorious works, Parent of good / Almighty! Thine this universal frame, / Thus wondrous fair! Thyself how wondrous then!” Already in , Paradise Lost was being brought into the service of physico-theology by a young Richard Bentley. Bentley, whose  “edition” of Paradise Lost is known for its managerial footnotes and rampant emendations, cited the epic alongside contemporary scientific work in his inaugural Boyle Lectures, later published together as The Folly of Atheism. Addressing the objection that a perfect God would have created a perfectly spherical earth rather than one “distinguished with Mountains and Valleys,” he calls readers’ attention to Milton’s Eden and heaven. If the poet cannot “imagine Paradise to be a place of Pleasure, nor Heaven it self to be Heaven” without “Valleys and swelling Ascents,” he argues, then 



Mandelbrote writes summarily that early modern natural theology “was a contested arena, in which a number of different standpoints might be justified on the basis of the history of classical or Christian thought . . . Those different positions reflected in part disagreements about how one should read the evidence of nature, and what weight one should give to the Bible and to reason as lights to guide one in doing so” (“Early Modern Natural Theologies,” ). John Wesley, A Survey of the Wisdom of God in Creation (London, ), frontispiece.

“His Footstep Trace”

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surely the world is better formed with such accents than without them. For Bentley, one way in which Paradise Lost justifies God’s ways is by presenting a world that declares God’s wisdom and providence – not only in its order and functionality, but in its beauty. To make this aesthetic claim, Bentley turned not to a philosopher, but to a poet. But Bentley came to believe the epic needed emendation in order to present such a world. Among other changes in his  edition of Paradise Lost, Bentley took issue with Milton’s cageyness about astronomical questions in book , where the unfallen Adam converses with the angel Raphael about cosmology. Here Bentley works to bring Adam’s conversation with Raphael into line with Newtonian physics. These exertions on Bentley’s part suggest that Paradise Lost sits uneasily with the natural theology of his Boyle lectures demonstrating the unreasonableness of atheism from “the origin and frame of the world.” Bentley’s “astro-theology” in these lectures developed into a full-fledged subgenre of physicotheology in the hands of subsequent Boyle lecturers such as William Whiston and William Derham. Deploying a line of reasoning later used by intelligent design theorists, these men argued from the mathematically predictable behavior of superlunary bodies that there must be a God. They spoke of tiny particles in an immense void and the impossibility that these could coagulate into the present world on their own; they spoke – in line with Isaac Newton’s own views – of the inexplicability of stellar movement except through the “Fiat and Finger of God.” Bentley, in pursuit of the most accurate and authoritative information possible, famously corresponded with Newton while composing his lectures, receiving informal tutoring in mathematics as well as Newton’s blessing on his theological project. If Bentley viewed Paradise Lost as a serious effort to justify God’s 

  



Bentley, Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism, . On the debate about mountains, see Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ). For an incisive exploration of this conversation in the context of contemporary cosmology, see Danielson, Paradise Lost and the Cosmological Revolution. Joseph D. Boocker, “Milton and the Newtonians,” presented at the Ninth International Milton Symposium, July –, , London (Senate House, University of London). Bentley, Folly of Atheism, . On Newton’s view, see e.g. Peter Harrison, “Newtonian Science, Miracles, and the Laws of Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas , no.  ():  and Stephen M. Fallon, “John Milton, Isaac Newton, and the Life of Matter,” in Catherine Gimelli Martin (ed.), Milton and the New Scientific Age: Poetry, Science, Fiction (London: Taylor & Francis, ), . In his first letter to Bentley (Dec. , ), Newton writes, “When I wrote my treatise about our systeme, I had an eye upon such principles as might work with considering men for the beleife of a Deity”; see Correspondence of Richard Bentley, ed. J. H. Monk (London, ), ; see also Henry Guerlac and M. C. Jacob, “Bentley, Newton, and Providence: The Boyle Lectures Once More,” Journal of the History of Ideas , no.  (): .

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Imagined Worlds

ways, his impulse to mend Milton’s cosmos is not surprising. The question is where he went wrong: in straining to harmonize the poem with contemporary science, or in his underlying conviction that Milton’s cosmos should declare a creator. If the latter is the case – if Milton’s cosmos intentionally thwarts human rational effort to arrive at theological conclusions – then the poem aligns at least to some extent with those scientific reformers who were suspicious of a “God-knowing” application of the human rational faculty. Raphael’s chiding Adam for being too scientifically inquisitive at the beginning of book  does suggest a suspicion of knowledge that aims too high, perhaps similar to the prideful attempt to “draw Jupiter down to earth” decried by Bacon. Indeed, one way to read this exchange is to cast Raphael as an advocate of a Baconian “godlike knowing” that brackets natural theological knowledge as inappropriately prideful. Focusing on the harmony between Baconian method and Raphael’s prescription of epistemic humility, John Gillies characterizes Raphael’s speech as “a masterpiece of scientific awareness,” explaining, Raphael begins by applauding the spirit of free inquiry: “To ask or search I blame thee not . . . whether heaven move or earth, / Imports not, if thou reckon right” (., –). What looks like an evasion (it doesn’t matter which cosmological hypothesis is right) is in fact a Baconian regard for methodological rigor (“if thou reckon right”): the answer is less important than the integrity of the question and the methods used to pursue it.

Analysis of this passage by Gillies and others has shown that Raphael sets himself against philosophically conclusive “model-spinning” and advocates instead the more receptive methods of Baconian science: Raphael is thus untroubled by Bentley’s evident need for the universe to turn out to be one way and not another. But this is not because Raphael cares about empirical open-mindedness above all else. In fact, he sets careful bounds for scientific open-mindedness in the lines that Gillies elides: To ask or search I blame thee not, for Heav’n Is as the Book of God before thee set, Wherein to read his wondrous Works, and learne  

Gillies, “Space and Place,” . Duran, Age of Milton, writes, “Raphael’s refusal to affirm a final answer cannot then responsibly be interpreted as curtailing the ‘contemplation of created things’” (). Edwards, Milton and the Natural World, states, “Raphael commends the process of poring over God’s book; he declines to halt the process by providing a solution for Adam” ().

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

His Seasons, Hours, or Dayes, or Months, or Yeares. This to attain, whether Heav’n move or Earth, Imports not, if thou reck’n right, the rest From Man or Angel the great Architect Did wisely to conceal. (PL, .–; emphasis mine)

To “reck’n right,” then, is not just to use a particular methodology, but also to “reckon” to the right end: knowledge of God as revealed in his wondrous works. While God is an “Architect” as in the Divine Weekes, the emphasis here lands not on how humans can intuit God’s creative process, but on the finitude of human and angelic minds alike compared with God. Notable too is the way Raphael does not advocate the new physicotheology but rather the older aim of reading God’s book of nature – the only “book” available to Adam and Eve. Raphael goes on to pronounce that what does not tend toward reading God’s wondrous works, “the rest,” has been concealed from “them who ought / Rather admire” (.–). He therefore asserts that the universe, no matter its precise composition and movement, will always turn out to be one way (evincing God) and not another (evincing chance or necessity). What distinguishes Milton’s reading of the book of nature from Richard Bentley’s – as we shall see more fully in a moment – is Bentley’s concern that a particular cosmology might call God’s existence and providence into question. Instead, Milton begs this question and presumes that all truth comes from God, and that any advancement in knowledge will return humans to God. Raphael explicitly says that God’s glory is the end of human knowledge when he promises to tell Adam – in language reminiscent of the earliest aims of the Royal Society – “what thou canst attain, which best may serve / To glorify thy Maker, and infer / Thee also happier” (.–). The doctrine that all truth originates in God, implicit in Milton’s theology of creation ex deo, is evident in this and other episodes of learning in the poem, to which we now turn. In tracing how and to what end human reason functions in those episodes, I come to three conclusions. First, both before and after the Fall humans are obliged and 

 

John Milton, Paradise Lost [] in The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston: Cengage Learning, ). All subsequent references to Milton’s poetry are from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. See also Maura Brady, “Space and the Persistence of Place in Paradise Lost,” Milton Quarterly  (): –. Angelica Duran notes early Royal Society members’ interest in “the glory of God and the benefit of Mankind” in “Reformed Catechism and Scientific Method in Milton’s Of Education and Paradise Lost,” –, , n. .

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Imagined Worlds

encouraged to apply their reason toward theological ends – that is, to practice natural theology. Second, in both cases reason is not epistemically conclusive and must be supplemented by instruction that originates in God. (The only lesson in the poem not so supplemented is the experiential lesson of God’s ability to suppress rebellion, and it is the self-originating nature of that lesson that leaves the rebels condemned.) This suggests that Milton’s conception of “reason” may differ fundamentally from the conception operating in works purporting to prove God’s existence, whether from an innate idea or from the structure and operations of the natural world. Finally, the poem suggests that fallen humans must rely more heavily than before on sense and revelation over intuition and deduction.

Unfallen Natural Theology in Paradise Lost Unfallen humans show a proclivity for rightly interpreting the data before them. Prelapsarian Adam and Eve are “natural theologians” in the sense that theology comes naturally to them: they use their intellects with great efficiency in drawing accurate conclusions about God. This proclivity is not unlike the “actual knowledge” on which the Cambridge Platonist Henry More rests his influential work of natural theology, An Antidote against Atheism (): Suppose a skilful Musician fallen asleep in the field upon the grasse, . . . but his friend sitting by him that cannot sing at all himself, jogs him and awakes him, and desires him to sing this or the other song, telling him two or three words of the beginning of the song, he presently takes it out of his mouth, and sings the whole song upon so slight and slender intimation: So the Mind of man being jogg’d and awakened by the impulses of outward objects is stirred up into a more full and cleare conception of what was but imperfectly hinted to her from externall occasions; and this faculty I venture to call actuall Knowledge in such a sense as the sleeping Musicians skill might be called actuall skill when he thought nothing of it.

Adam experiences such a “jogging” after he has waked into existence. From the first he knows that he exists “Not of my self; by some great Maker then,” a deduction that Roy Flannagan notes demonstrates his innate rational faculty (PL .). Further, he knows that nothing he sees is that Maker: like Satan on Mount Niphates, he first addresses the sun, but rather than both praising and envying the sun as Satan does, Adam charges 

Henry More, Antidote against Atheism, –. Readers may notice a similarity between More’s theory of potential knowledge here and that found in Aristotle’s De anima.

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the sun to testify along with all created things “how may I know him, how adore, / From whom I have that thus I move and live” (.–). Fresh from the ground, Adam has already outstripped the pagan world in theological understanding. Adam’s dialogue with God further shows him to have the kind of reason More attributes to the considerate natural theologian. More sets out to describe the physical world – stars, earth, plants, animals, humans – in terms that illustrate that “there can be no fitter excogitated.” “Whereas the rude motions of matter a thousand to one might have best cast it otherwise,” More declares, “yet the productions of things as such as our own Reason cannot but approve to bee best, or as wee our selves would have design’d them.” Later, discussing human anatomy, he pronounces, “supposing the same matter that our bodyes are made of, if it had been in our own power to have made our selves, we should have fram’d our selves no otherwise then we are,” adding regarding the eye specifically, “what could [one] have excogitated more accurate?” As I discussed in Chapter , for More human reason is of a piece with God’s, capable of testing and approving the design it finds in the world and would be capable of noticing a deficiency in this design (if there were any). This is precisely what happens once Adam has surveyed all the animals: “In these,” he says, “I found not what me thought I wanted still.” The reader comes to find that in leaving Eve uncreated, God intended to test Adam’s “excogitative” abilities through Socratic interrogation (PL .–, ). Milton’s God does not merely incline unfallen humans to practice natural theology, moreover; he obliges them to do so in a context in which other ways of thinking about creation are possible. In Eve’s dialogue with Adam about the stars, and in Adam’s dialogue with Raphael on the same topic, the possibility of gaining knowledge without reference to God is raised and condemned. Closing a sonnet that ties several features of the natural world to her relationship with Adam, Eve asks, “wherefore all night long shine these, for whom / This glorious sight, when sleep hath shut all eyes?” (PL .–). She does not ask the question of natural  



Ibid., , preface. Ibid., –. The eye has long been a locus of natural-theological debate, with both John Ray and Milton’s Samson wondering why such an important organ was left so vulnerable (years later still, Darwin expressed wonder that the eye could be produced casually). See Ray, Wisdom of God, –. Prelapsarian Adam is not yet vexed by this problem. Duran, “The Sexual Mathematics of Paradise Lost,” –. Sustained discussion of the peculiarities of unfallen feminine natural theology is outside the scope of this study; I wonder, however, whether Eve’s recognition of Adam’s derivative authorship (PL .–) is meant to be metonymic for human recognition of God’s absolute authorship.

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Imagined Worlds

philosophy, “how,” but the questions of natural theology: “wherefore” and “for whom.” But her implicit anthropocentrism – my eyes are shut, so all eyes must be – needs correction. Adam cautions Eve, “Nor think, though men were none / that heav’n would want spectators, God want praise” (.–). Adam realizes that a “glorious sight” could be considered superfluous only if that sight produced no praise of God from any quarter. The problem is not that a creature might be useless to humans, but that a creature might not glorify God. Similarly, when Adam asks Raphael how “wise and frugal” Nature could allot such vast space to less worthy bodies, the angel emphasizes the subordinate nature of humankind. Raphael answers that heavenly motions “speak / The Makers high magnificence,” reminding Adam that “he dwells not in his own” and concluding “Heav’n is for thee too high” (., –, , ). Kester Svendsen has been taken to task by scholars for claiming that Raphael here “dismisses the controversy [over heliocentrism] as insignificant and impertinent to man’s duty to God and to himself.” Yet while Svendsen may indeed be unnecessarily dismissive of science in the poem, Raphael’s admonitory tone nonetheless calls for a more tempered view of Milton’s scientific enthusiasm. One might rewrite Svendsen and summarize Raphael’s view as: scientific inquiry is significant insofar as it is pertinent to humanity’s duty first to God, and derivatively to themselves. While Svendsen’s terse proclamation misses the possibility that natural philosophy may aid humans in praising God, rendering “asking and searching” a highly significant human duty, his modern-day critics may obscure the centrality of God’s glory in the cosmos of Paradise Lost. This conception of natural theology – theocentric rather than anthropocentric – differs fundamentally from Henry More’s but aligns with that of Richard Baxter in his  Reasons of the Christian Religion. The glory and praise of God are conspicuously absent from More’s Antidote against Atheism, which focuses instead on the glory of humankind. Confronted (like Milton’s Adam and Eve) with phenomena of no apparent use to humans, More takes a tack far different from Adam’s. He argues that this lack of usefulness is only apparent: seemingly superfluous or harmful things simply require more human art, skill, and reason to tease out a use (for humans), and the very challenge presented by such things is itself  

Svendsen, Milton and Science, . More, Antidote against Atheism, . More never mentions divine glory and criticizes those who “no more rellish the glory and praise of Men, then if we had done nothing or were naught at all in being.”

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

useful in exercising human intellect. Baxter structures his argument instead around humans’ proprietary right over beasts as metonymic for God’s proprietary right over humans. Baxter argues that man may do with his beasts as he sees fit, adding, “Man is also (subordinately) their Benefactor, and their End: and they are more for Him than for themselves.” He goes on to draw the implication for natural theology: “Therefore Gods Works must be more valued and studied, as they are the Glass representing the Image of his perfections, and shewing us his chief essential amiableness, than as they are beneficial and useful to us, and so shew us only his benignity to us.” Adam, a vegetarian, passes over Baxter’s emphasis on human ownership of beasts, but even Baxter only raises this matter to make a more important theocentric point. This is the same point Adam makes in his answer to Eve’s question about the stars’ shining “unbeheld in deep of night” (PL .): the chief end of all God’s works is not human use or gratification; it is God’s glory. Baxter’s theocentrism also harmonizes with Raphael’s declaration to Adam that all but a “small partition” of the world is “Ordain’d for uses to his Lord best known” (.). In short, whatever answer science might supply for Adam’s question about geocentrism, figuratively, the universe does not revolve around him. Having placed Adam and Eve in a world in which the attempt to practice science – even experimental science – without reference to a higher end is redirected, Milton also addresses whether science alone can achieve that higher end. Although possessing a propensity to reason from “outward objects” and “external occasions” to the knowledge of a creator using something like Henry More’s actual knowledge, Adam’s first few hours of life also argue for the limitations of his reason. Newly created, he ends his monologue with a question rather than an answer, a pattern that will be repeated in Eve’s and his reasoning regarding the stars. Having inferred from the wondrousness of creation that there must be a creator, he  



See, for example, ibid., –, –, esp. : “If human Industry had nothing to conflict and struggle with, the fire of mans Spirit would be half extinguished.” Baxter, Reasons of the Christian Religion, , –. Baxter’s foundational analogy between the propriety rights of humans over animals and that of God over humans lends perspective to Adam’s much-celebrated naming of the animals. Adam’s knowledge of the nature of “numberless” creatures is indeed formidable, especially by the standards of seventeenth-century natural history. Milton’s emphasis of Adam’s command not only highlights prelapsarian knowledge, but also points by analogy to the breadth and depth of divine knowledge. On Milton’s anti-dualist ethic of care and respect for nonhuman creation in Paradise Lost, see Ken Hiltner, Milton and Ecology, – and Diane McColley, Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell, – and “Milton and Ecology,” –.



Imagined Worlds

stops short of knowledge of that creator’s name and character, asking if anyone can tell him these things. He then enters a trance and sees a “Presence Divine,” who declares, “Whom thou soughtst I am” (., ). The presence subsequently explains to Adam his identity and place in the newly created world. The implications of this scene of empirical inquiry and divine revelation for seventeenth-century justification for advancement of knowledge are profound. Even if, as some thought, scientia might restore to humans their unfallen powers of intellect, Milton suggests that they would still require revelation through a divine word to know the things most worth knowing. In limiting the powers of human reason in this way, Milton falls within a range of positions taken by seventeenth-century scientific reformers. Just as his theological justification for natural philosophy resonates with the work of Robert Boyle and Richard Baxter, against those who wished to marginalize natural theology, his emphasis on the limits of reason involves him in a polemic stretching the length of the century, from Francis Bacon to John Ray. Both of these men take up Ecclesiastes :: “Yet cannot man find out the worke which God worketh from the beginning to the end.” Quoting the verse in his  Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation, Ray emphasizes human limitations: “To Trace the Footsteps of his Wisdom in the Composition, Order, Harmony, and Uses of every one of [God’s works],” he declares, “would be a Task far transcending my Skill and Abilities; nay, the joynt Skill and Endeavours of all men now living, or that shall live after a Thousand Ages, should the World last so long.” Bacon, by contrast, explains in The Advancement of Learning that Solomon did not mean here to “derogate from the capacitie of the mind” but to acknowledge the many “Inconveniences” that oblige people to work collaboratively from generation to generation. Human knowledge generally, if not the knowledge of any particular human, “may comprehend all the universall nature of thinges,” Bacon goes on to argue, provided that 





This is Bacon’s phrasing, which closely follows the Geneva Bible. Ray would quote the Authorized Version: “No man can find out the work that God maketh from beginning to end.” As noted in the previous chapter, Cavendish elides God in working this thought into The Blazing World. Ray, Wisdom of God, . For a discussion of Ray’s conversation with Seneca in this quotation, see T. P. Harrison, “Seneca and John Ray,” Arion , no.  (): –. The lines from Ecclesiastes were engraved over old the Cavendish library in central Cambridge. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, preface: “And although hee [Solomon] doth insinuate that the supreame or summarie law of Nature, which he calleth, The worke which God worketh from the beginning to the end, is not possible to be found out by Man; yet that doth not derogate from the capacitie of the minde; but may bee referred to the impediments as of shortnesse of life, ill coniunction of labours, ill tradition of knowledge ouer from hand to hand, and many other Inconueniences, whereunto the condition of Man is subiect.”

“His Footstep Trace”



humans remember their mortality, apply their knowledge for human benefit, and “doe not presume by the contemplation of Nature, to attaine to the misteries of God.” While Raphael would applaud Bacon’s call for humility, prelapsarian Adam famously suggests that the goal of “contemplation of created things” is precisely to “ascend to God” (PL .–), and Raphael does not correct him. In Milton’s Eden, humility arises naturally from humans’ inability to ascend to God all at once, with no help, rather than from a self-imposed bracketing of theological concerns. Moreover, although the question of whether humans could ever “comprehend all the universal nature of things” remains open in Paradise Lost, the view in the poem seems closer to Ray’s than to Bacon’s. In the first place, as already noted, Raphael’s caution in book  sets such an achievement far enough off to be a dim possibility at best. Second, “comprehend,” with its etymological resonance of exhaustive thoroughness, is emphatically bounded or reserved for God the three times the word appears in the poem (see PL ., ., and .) – in this way, Milton aligns with John Donne in censuring Bacon’s repeatedly expressed desire to comprehend things. And finally, there is a fundamental difference between Bacon’s and Ray’s understandings of the relationship between God and nature: Bacon paraphrases the Ecclesiast’s “work which God worketh” strongly as a “supreame or summarie law of Nature,” begging a central theological question; Ray paraphrases the same line, equally tellingly, as “the Footsteps of his Wisdom.” Here, too, Milton’s language is closer to Ray’s: divine footsteps, not natural law. The distance between Milton’s language and the law-infused physical metaphors of modern science suggests that Milton may not merely have been setting limits on the human capacity to measure and master an objective nature (and thence to draw necessary conclusions about the divine). Earlier we saw that Donne not only viewed Baconian science as presumptuous; he also casts Nature as essentially such that she cannot be accurately known through such probing. Similarly, Milton may have understood by “reason” something entirely different from the capacity to measure and master. Phillip Donnelly has highlighted passages in Milton’s prose and poetry that point to a conception of reason as fundamentally relational, a “poetic gift of peaceful difference” subsisting in the ability to  



See p. , n., and p. . This is the question of intellectualism versus theological voluntarism: of whether, as Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, , originally pub. ) once put it, “God cannot work effects contrary to those creatures are able to discern in nature” (). See pp. –.



Imagined Worlds

“participate in the ontic goodness of creation.” Baconian science, by contrast, rests on the notion that matter subsists in a state of chaos, and that an ordered world must have been brought to order by violent coercion. The logic of prose works of natural theology such as More’s and Bentley’s rests on this necessary inference of an ordering principle from the fact that matter has come to be ordered at all. In this view, reason can operate independently of revelation to pronounce on the existence of such a principle. If, however, chaos and violent coercion do not exhaust the possible realities, if reason has an aesthetic dimension and is fundamentally relational, then reason is not simply curtailed in that it cannot unfold apart from conversation; reason consists in conversation. In either case, whether Milton (like John Ray) simply sets bounds on reason defined as the ability to draw logically compulsive conclusions, or whether “reason” for him consists in relational participation in a reality that is neither necessary nor random, even unfallen humans cannot rely on reason alone.

Fallen Reason and Natural Theology If “right reason” in Paradise Lost is theocentric and eminently concerned with final causes, fallen reason jettisons the God hypothesis as a viable way to understand the nature and purpose of the cosmos, replacing it with selfcentered teleology, pagan superstition, and a desire to “discerne / Things in thir Causes” (PL .–). The serpent claims to have this ability as he works on Eve’s reason, for example, concluding: The Gods are first, and that advantage use On our belief, that all from them proceeds; I question it, for this fair Earth I see, Warm’d by the Sun, producing every kind, Them nothing. (.–)

The impious old argument for spontaneous generation, which Richard Bentley would attack in The Folly of Atheism, stands in stark contrast to Adam’s immediate recognition that he and the sun have a greater author.  

Phillip J. Donnelly, Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning: Narrative and Protestant Toleration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . Bentley, Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism, , . Bentley points out the indignity of believing “that men first proceeded, as Vermin are thought to do, by the sole influence of the Sun out of Dirt and Putrefaction” and asks, “Who were there then in the world, to observe the Births of those First Men, and calculate their Nativities, as they sprawl’d out of Ditches?” Bentley’s “sole” pun is either unintentional or marks a departure from his crusade to obliterate double-intending language.

“His Footstep Trace”



Satan’s alternative reading of nature here gives Eve an opportunity to exercise her reason and her “actual knowledge” in defense of God’s wisdom. Eve should recognize a God-free origin hypothesis as diabolical, having heard about Satan’s claim to be “self-begot, self-rais’d / By our own quick’ning power” (.–). Such passages as these have formed a locus of critical discussion about a putative link between Satan’s “Missourism,” as Stanley Fish calls it – “Show me, seeing is believing” – and sin. Karen Edwards argues, contra Fish, that Eve required more, not less, empirical acuity in order to see the serpent’s deception. I would suggest that Fish’s theological point is still worth considering: Perhaps Eve should not have needed to scrutinize the serpent’s vocal chords in order to choose not to violate a direct command from God. On the other hand, Edwards’s observation that such scrutiny would have shown the serpent to be a charlatan highlights an effort on Milton’s part to paint a cosmos that will not unduly try the human capacity to obey. In the end, what undoes Eve is the kind of teleological anthropocentrism underlying much seventeenth-century physico-theology as well as empirical natural philosophy. While Raphael cautions against the assumption that everything exists for the benefit of humankind, Satan makes this very assumption as he approaches the newly created world and its inhabitants: Oh Earth, how like to Heav’n, if not preferr’d More justly, seat worthier of Gods, as built With second thoughts, reforming what was old! For what God, after better, worse would build? Terrestrial Heav’n, danc’t round by other Heav’ns

 



Fish, Trouble with Principle, . Edwards, Milton and the Natural World, . In a way, Fish and Edwards are rehearsing the old debate between Henry Stubbes and Thomas Sprat regarding whether the Fall constituted “a breach of R D towards God” or, as Stubbes puts it, “a deficiency from the study of E P” (cited in Mandelbrote, “Early Modern Natural Theologies,” ); on the debate regarding the provenance of the Royal Society, see also Robert Crocker, Henry More, –: A Biography of the Cambridge Platonist (Boston: Springer, ), –. Jennifer Munroe has also taken issue with Edwards’s argument, in her case arguing that Milton is portraying women’s practice of science as dangerous: see Monroe, “First ‘Mother of Science’,” –. I find Munroe’s argument about women and science compelling, but I would argue that Milton’s disapproval of women in science is tempered by his disapproval of science (whether practiced by men or women) directed to any non-theological end. For the relationship between anthropocentric teleology and early empirical science, see Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Modern Science, –. Book  of More’s Antidote against Atheism is an example of anthropocentric physico-theology; for a discussion of currents counter to this trend, see Brooke, “Wise Men Nowadays Think Otherwise.”



Imagined Worlds That shine, yet bear thir bright officious Lamps, Light above light, for thee alone, as seems In thee concentring all their precious beams Of sacred influence: As God in Heav’n Is center, yet extends to all, so thou Centring receav’st from all those Orbs; in thee, Not in themselves, all thir known virtue appeers Productive in Herb, Plant, and nobler birth Of Creatures animate with gradual life Of Growth, Sense, Reason, all summ’d up in Man.

(PL .–)

These lines, engaging humanity’s “centring” for the third time in the poem, invite close consideration. Much of what Satan says accords with Raphael’s explanation of the relative excellence of heavenly bodies at the beginning of book : the sun does, according to Raphael, exist more for the sake of humans than for itself, enabling the generative processes whereby vegetable, animal, and rational life are sustained on earth. Man’s superiority over the other two types of life, too, is clear and unquestioned both in Raphael’s account here and in the Creator’s words to the newly created Adam. The crucial difference between that view and the one expressed by Satan lies in the relationship between earth and heaven: Satan speaks as though these are realms under separate jurisdictions. In .– Satan hoped that, while God is sovereign in heaven, he himself might “reign secure” in hell. Here in .– he suggests that human beings may likewise reign secure in their “terrestrial heav’n.” The reader has seen, however, that much in this pendant world points to an end besides life on earth: the stars (Satan’s “other . . . officious lamps”) argue “the Maker’s high magnificence” and demonstrate that man “dwells not in his own” (.); they do not exist “for thee alone,” as Satan says to the earth. Richard Baxter had asserted a metonymic relationship between human dominance over the earth and divine dominance over humankind. Instead of a metonym, Satan sees a simile (“As God in heav’n . . . so thou”). He hopes that there is more than one center. And if for Satan earth is a “terrestrial heav’n,” Eve is a “Goddess humane” (.), the center of the world he wants to comprehend without reference to any other heavens or other gods. Her acquiescence to this view after the Fall is evident when she tells Adam that the serpent “Hath eat’n of the fruit, and is become, . . . Endu’d with human voice, and human sense, / Reasoning to admiration” (., –). On the

“His Footstep Trace”



surface, Eve’s remark seems to mean that the serpent’s apparent ability to reason drew her own admiration. The absence of clarifying pronouns, however, opens up another interpretation – especially since Eve was in fact moved by his words of rapturous admiration for herself. For the whole of their existence, the two humans have understood that reasoning naturally leads to admiration in the reasoner: their own reasoning had always led to greater admiration of God. Perhaps Eve appeals to the serpent’s performance of such “reasoning to admiration” as evidence of his credibility. The serpent’s reason, however, did not lead to his admiring God; it led to his admiring Eve, and this redirection should have marked his knowledge as suspect. Adam, likewise admiring Eve rather than God, soon submits to the same perversion. In short, fallen reason in Paradise Lost often co-opts the teleological language used to justify science in Milton’s England, setting up humankind as the end of a self-sustaining order. Having redirected toward themselves the reasoning admiration that properly belongs to God, the sorrowing Adam and Eve question how, if at all, reason might be applied to redress this problem. If human reason is now misdirected in its end, are its power and method also perverted? Or might the rational faculty still be in working order, capable of recovering theological truth, if by grace humans were once again willing to seek it? These questions face not only Adam and Eve in the last three books of the poem but also Milton as well as his contemporaries in the Royal Society. In Paradise Lost the kind of natural theology attempted by Henry More, already dangerously univocal and anthropocentric in its end, becomes less viable in its method after the Fall. The incompatibility is evident on both sides: in An Antidote against Atheism, More omits to mention the Fall, an omission that suggests the “actual knowledge” he attributes to humans could easily be subject to its adverse effects. While it may thus seem prudent, perhaps necessary, to leave human fallenness out of natural theology, many early works of physico-theology tackle the subject unflinchingly. John Wilkins, a founding member of the Royal Society and Bishop of Chester from , refers to the Fall in his  Principles and Duties of Natural Religion and asserts the necessity of revelation to complement his arguments. In the same vein, Bentley’s Boyle Lectures

 

“If death / Consort with thee, death is to me as life” (.–); as noted above, Adam’s fall also marks an experimental “trial” unassisted by instruction from God (.). Wilkins, On the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion, –, –.



Imagined Worlds

begin with an entire sermon on Psalm . (“The fool hath said in his heart, ‘There is no god’”), and he refers later to our participation in “the miseries of Adam’s Fall” and flatly asserting, “We do not contend to have the Earth pass for a Paradise.” When he brings Milton’s imagined world in line with contemporary science, then, Bentley is not trying to prove the optimality of the natural world (as More asserts), but only to make the strongest case allowed by the facts for its “meliority” above what it could be. Nor was this humility confined to physico-theology. Nathaniel Culverwell, often classed as a Cambridge Platonist, makes this apology in his  An Elegant and Learned Discourse on the Light of Nature: Far be it from me to extenuate that great and fatal overthrow, which the sons of men had in their first and original apostasie from their God; . . . but this we are sure, it did not annihilate the soul, it did not destroy the essence, the powers and faculties, nor the operations of the soul; though it did defile them, and disorder them, and every way indispose them . . . The whole head is wounded, and akes, and is there no other way but to cut it off? The Candle of the Lord do’s not shine so clearly as it was wont, must it therfore be extinguisht presently? is it not better to enjoy the faint and languishing light of this Candle of the Lord, rather then to be in palpable and disconsolate darknesse?

Human reason, often figured as “the candle of the Lord” in contrast with the greater light of revelation, has grown yet dimmer since the events of Genesis . The exploration of human reason in the final books of Paradise Lost resonates with Culverwell’s rhetorical questions: “disconsolate” is exactly what Adam and Eve will be without enlightenment from Michael (PL .–). The nature and medium of Michael’s instruction, and Adam’s participation in the lesson, thus help to illuminate the role Milton allowed the “Candle of the Lord,” human knowledge, in fallen human life.

  



See Bentley, Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism, , . Bentley had precedent for framing his argument with Psalm . in Anselm’s Proslogion. Calloway, Natural Theology, , . Culverwell, Elegant and Learned Discourse, –. It was Culverwell’s tempered enthusiasm for reason that first led C. A. Patrides to question whether he fit into the group: see Patrides, The Cambridge Platonists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Since then, A. Rupert Hall, Henry More: Magic, Religion and Experiment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), has helpfully divided the Cambridge Platonists into a philosophical “Christ’s” and a theological “Emmanuel” school; Culverwell belongs in the latter (). Marvell alludes to Culverwell’s Elegant and Learned Discourse in “The Garden”: see p. . On this trope in Vaughan’s poetry, see p. . See also Greene, “Whichcote, the Candle of the Lord, and Synderesis.”

“His Footstep Trace”



The process of fallen learning, of repairing the ruins by regaining to know God aright, begins in book . The trope of lost light appears in the “sole” puns in Adam’s lament when he learns that he and Eve are to be expelled from paradise: The garden was their “onely consolation left / Familiar to our eyes, all places else / . . . desolate” (.–). Adam’s first experience of the sun had led him to the knowledge of “some great Maker” and now he foresees a desolate experience of separation from God – “As from his face I shall be hid” (.). Looking toward the land outside of Eden, Adam puts to Michael the central question of natural theology: “In yonder nether world where shall I seek / His bright appearances, or footstep trace?” (.–). This seems to have been a pertinent question, for Michael offers a consoling answer: Adam, thou know’st Heav’n his, and all the Earth, Not this Rock onely; his Omnipresence fills Land, Sea, and Aire, and every kinde that lives, Fomented by his virtual power and warmd. (.–)

Michael’s speech accomplishes several things. It highlights the smallness and backward-looking nature of Adam’s desire to tie God’s presence to particular sites in Eden. It repudiates Satan’s suggestion that the earth belongs to humanity. And it complements Raphael’s earlier remarks to Adam about the literal sun, whose “virtue on it self workes no effect, / But in the fruitful Earth; there first receavd, / His beams, unactive else, their vigor find” (.–). Raphael needed only to point out that the sun serves the world rather than the other way around. The fallen Adam must further be told that, at a deeper level, it is the Creator’s presence and not the literal sun that sustains creation. Having recalled to Adam God’s presence and activity in the natural world, the angel begins to instruct him in the appropriate way to read that world for God’s presence and activity. In mentioning God’s power, Michael aligns briefly with Francis Bacon, who argued that natural theology should demonstrate God’s existence and power rather than tracing his image in any particular feature of the world. But although the natural theology Michael will model for Adam foregoes the old doctrine of correspondences, it is also far from the broad-ranging, downward-gazing 

Bacon, Oxford Francis Bacon, iv:; see pp. –.



Imagined Worlds

comprehension of “things in their causes” that Bacon advocates in the Advancement of Learning. Calling Earth “no despicable gift,” Michael conveys that it was never God’s intention for Adam to look down (de +specere) on the earth, comprehending it in the detached (one might say “objective”) way available to one standing on Pisgah. Adam then learns from experience how little can be understood from such a vantage point, during the two books he spends on “a Hill / of Paradise the highest” (.–). During this time, he repeatedly misinterprets the data before him and must be corrected by Michael. Adam’s repeated failures in understanding show the insufficiency of human effort generally, a point also made by the sweeping away of “Earths Kingdomes and thir Glory” in favor of “nobler sights” in lines – (see also .). But crucially, while Adam’s vision proves incapable on its own of leading him to truth, he is nonetheless required to look. The first half of Adam’s lesson is conducted by a series of images, which he must attempt to interpret himself before he learns what they signify. By this means Michael combines the book of scripture and the book of nature into one hermeneutic project for Adam. He sees through a glass darkly, but he sees. Eventually, however, Adam’s sight fails. At the end of book , Michael comments that “objects divine / Must needs impaire and wearie human sense” and says he will continue to reveal sacred history orally (PL .–). This movement in the narrative parallels the scene in book  when prelapsarian Adam has exhausted his rational resources and needs a “Presence Divine” to explain the authorship of creation. Here, revelation must supplant visual observation if Adam is to apprehend “objects divine,” the presumed end of his lesson. In a striking moment of metacommentary, Michael correlates Adam with Abraham, the biblical type of faith’s triumph over sight, when he narrates how Abraham was asked to leave his “native Soile,” setting out from Ur “not knowing to what Land, yet firm believes” (.). Michael adds parenthetically, “I see him, but thou canst not,” intimating Adam’s need to receive Michael’s narrative with the same faith with which Abraham received his call (.–). (The injunction also applies to the blind Milton’s audience, as he tells of things 



Satan encountered a similar problem in attempting to understand the earth from on high: approaching the newly created world, he takes in the cosmos in one view (PL ., , ), and the narrator points out that he sees the earth “in breadth” only (.), for only God’s sight is able to discern “abstrusest thoughts” (.). Considering Michael’s postlapsarian pedagogy, Coiro, “To Repair the Ruins,” points out Michael’s relatively subdued tone regarding human achievement. By contrast, Duran, Age of Milton, , sees the dialogic and hopeful nature of books  and .

“His Footstep Trace”



invisible to mortal sight.) This elevation of the aurally received words over images jars with the Royal Society’s motto nullius in verba, “not in words alone.” For Milton, both before and after the Fall, it is reason that cannot stand alone and must be supplemented by a divine word. Still, sight is not denied Adam in the final two books of Paradise Lost: he is to work by candlelight, to use Culverwell’s image, considering how his light is spent. In sum, even after the Fall, humans are obliged to engage in a distinctly sense-based natural theology, reading the world before them – usually from up close – for evidence of the divine presence, but always with the caveat that direct revelation is required to supplement that reading. Already these limitations of fallen learning distance the natural theology of Paradise Lost from some “rational theology” of the Cambridge Platonists and the totalizing astro-theology of Derham and Whiston; but Paradise Lost operates differently even from less ambitious prose works of physicotheology. Those works still follow the general logic: there is a world; therefore, there must be a powerful creator. The world is well designed; therefore, that creator must be wise. Bacon had declared that once these things have been demonstrated, not much remains for natural theology to do – except to add heft to the “well designed” part of the argument. It was on these grounds that physico-theology proliferated (against Bacon’s wishes) later in the century. Though by volume these works spend more time outlining or establishing empirical data than their more deductive predecessors, at their core most are still philosophical arguments. In Paradise Lost, by contrast, the very word “argument” means “narrative,” and the “therefore” drops out – to use George Herbert’s words, Ergo is transformed into Amen. There is a world, the narrator says. There is a powerful and wise creator, and this is how that Creator did it. This removal of the “therefore,” the transmutation of deductive argument into narrative assertion, explains how Milton’s poetic natural theology can be more empirical and scientifically open-minded than its prose counterparts, even as Raphael insists that rational observation will always





We may note in passing that when T. S. Eliot famously accused Milton of having an “auditory imagination abnormally sharpened at the expense of the visual,” he perhaps missed a theological point about human knowledge – as well as, as Picciotto shows in Labors of Innocence, , –, an invitation to readers to labor with Milton in constructing paradise rather than passively receiving a complete picture. T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (New York: Ferrar, Straus, and Giroux, ), . This motto also sits uncomfortably with Jesus’s response to Satan in Paradise Regain’d, another work that highlights Satan’s predilection for surveying things from lofty heights: “Man lives not by Bread only,” Jesus retorts, “but each Word / Proceeding from the mouth of God” (PR .–).



Imagined Worlds

end in admiration of the Creator. Already the physico-theologians took a relatively receptive and humble posture next to the logically compulsive reasoning of philosophers such as Descartes, Cudworth, and More. Milton’s poem embodies this humility and receptivity yet more fully. His theological conclusion does not rest on the particular structure and operations of the natural world, but in the story of human participation in a reality originating in God. The distance between Milton’s more rigorously empirical natural theology and his contemporaries’ more rationalistic arguments is vividly illustrated by the case of Bentley’s Paradise Lost. In a syllogism in which God’s providence is a conclusion, much depends on establishing the premise: the world must be shown to be well designed. Though Bentley admits that earth “need not pass for a Paradise,” it is nonetheless important for him that the world be shown at its best, that Milton’s argument not suffer more than it must because of misinformation. Thus does Bentley fret over lines such as .–: “Beast now with Beast gan war, and Fowle with Fowle, / And Fish with Fish; to graze the Herb all leaving, / Devourd each other.” “Did All leave grazing the Herb?,” Bentley asks in a footnote, “The major part of them, as they do still, kept to their former Food. And then, Devour’d each other? That’s impossible, and nonsense.” He amends the lines to read, “To graze the Herb some leaving, / Devour’d the others.” For the most part, he implies, the world still functions admirably and economically, evincing God’s wisdom and power. Bentley saw what was at stake in the poem, but he located Milton’s great argument in the objective, calculable structure and operations of the natural world rather than in the dynamic interaction between God and humans that forms the substance of Michael’s “argument.” And if the argument’s substance is not syllogistic logic but narrative, its end is not finally to establish God’s power and wisdom but his unfolding “ways” – and the defining characteristic of his ways is love. Raphael had 



 

Donnelly, Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning, –, comments on the importance of “assert” in “assert Eternal Providence,” arguing that this assertion must be accepted before one can engage Milton’s theodicy. See Brooke, “Wise Men Nowadays,” , and Mandelbrote, “Uses of Natural Theology,” –. Perhaps paradoxically given his influence on physico-theology, Henry More belongs with Descartes and Cudworth in terms of asserting a logically airtight argument for God: see Calloway, “Rather Theological than Philosophical,” –. Richard Bentley, ed., Milton’s Paradise Lost: A New Edition by Richard Bentley D.D. (London, ), . On the centrality of love in Michael’s narrative, see Donnelly, Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning, –.

“His Footstep Trace”



counseled Adam to be “lowly wise”; in his summary speech, Michael likewise emphasizes the presence of God’s footsteps in the lowlands: Yet doubt not but in Vallie, and in plaine, God is as here, and will be found alike Present; and of his presence many a signe Still following thee, still compassing thee round With goodness and paternal Love, his Face Express, and of his steps the track Divine.

(PL .–)

Although natural theology in the period typically focused on divine power or wisdom, Richard Baxter emphasized love in his natural theology as in his natural philosophy. Baxter’s theory of natural theology, as we have seen, comes closer to Milton’s own than most prose works, and Baxter pays particular attention to the relationship between knowledge and love in the second part of his  Knowledge and Love Compared, whose first three chapters unfold: “() Knowledge is a means to a higher End, according to which it is to be estimated; () the end of Knowledge is to make us Lovers of God, and so to be known of him, and () therefore Knowledge is to be sought, valued and used as it tendeth to our Love of God.” Milton’s poem artistically represents Baxter’s theoretical explanation, depicting appropriate and inappropriate love of knowledge and even drawing an analogy to appropriate and inappropriate carnal knowledge. Human sexual intercourse and human reason are both relational, and both naturally produce “offspring,” the offspring of reason being admiration and love of the Creator. Both, when redirected toward exclusively self-serving ends, are sinful. But in both cases, it is wrong to defame “as impure what God declares / Pure” (PL .–). Much might be said for understanding Milton’s view of scientia in these terms. From the dialogues between Adam, Eve, and Raphael concerning the stars, the lesson emerges that knowing too much is sinful because – and only because – it is loving too little. Far from decrying knowledge, Adam and Raphael understand knowledge’s instrumentality toward greater love of God and therefore urge a subordinate love of knowledge. Likewise, 



Baxter, Reasons of the Christian Religion, –, acknowledges that God’s love sits above his omniscience and omnipotence. Like Milton in Paradise Lost .–, Baxter observes an analogous placement of will above intellect and entity in humans. On the importance of Tommaso Campanella’s “three primalities of being” – Power, Wisdom, and Love – in Baxter’s physics, see Simon Burton, The Hallowing of Logic: The Trinitarian Method of Richard Baxter’s “Methodus Theologiae” (Boston: Brill, ), –. Richard Baxter, A Treatise of Knowledge and Love Compared (London, ), preface.



Imagined Worlds

rightly conducted, Eve’s “reasoning to admiration” would have led her to greater love of God because of her greater knowledge of him. The Fall marked the first instance of knowledge that did not lead to love of God, and from that moment the rule of love must be applied more rigorously to test whether knowledge has exceeded its bounds. Paradise Lost, perhaps the best-known treatment of amative desire for knowledge in the West since Dante, narrates a spectacular disordering of those two loves, but it also provides examples of proper ordering in prelapsarian Adam, Raphael, and Michael. But though Milton’s poem anticipates Baxter’s treatise on the instrumental value of knowledge toward the intrinsic good of love, the two men differ fundamentally on the nature of the relationship between knowledge and love. Baxter presumes it to be linear. Imagining the comprehensive knowledge toward which science tends, he exclaims, If we had a sight of all the Orbs, both fixed Starrs and Planets, and of their matter, and form, and order, and relation to each other, and their communications and influences on each other, and the cause of all their wonderous motions: If we saw not only the nature of the Elements, especially the active Element, Fire; but also the constitution, magnitude, and use, of all those thousand Suns, and lesser Worlds, which constitute the universal World: And, if they be inhabited, if we knew the Inhabitants of each: Did we know all the Intelligences, blessed Angels, and holy Spirits, which possess the nobler parts of Nature; and the unhappy degenerate Spirits, that have departed from light and joy, into darkness and horrour, by departing from God; yea, if we could see all these comprehensively, at one view; what thoughts should we have of the wisdom of the Creator?

Baxter is not suggesting that humans will ever achieve this comprehensive view, but he rhetorically wishes that we would, assuming that our admiration of God would be greater in proportion to our knowledge. In book  of Paradise Lost, Raphael raises the same hypothetical situation to assert exactly the opposite: If the unfallen Adam could fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, he might yet have no better thoughts of the wisdom of the Creator than he does now (PL .–). In an earlier chapter I pointed out how George Herbert viewed his friend Bacon’s advancement in the “sphere of knowledge” as inferior to, and disjoined from, advancement in the sphere of grace. Here Raphael speaks similarly to Bacon’s intellectual successors in the Royal Society: Knowledge of physics and natural history may increase, Milton suggests, but this does not necessarily mean 

Baxter, Reasons of the Christian Religion, .



See pp. –.

“His Footstep Trace”



knowledge and love of God will increase proportionately. As we have seen, Bacon too held that science could only take humans so far, theologically, but he did not see this as implying a need to rein in scientific endeavor. Michael, by contrast, asserts that other activities should interrupt learning as the humans journey toward knowledge of God slowly and with wandering steps. At the end of the poem, Adam learns that his task is “to love with feare the onely God . . . and on him sole depend” (.–). He acknowledges that God is the author of light and life, and that humans will always uncover divine activity in nature if they reason rightly. In response, Michael repeats Raphael’s assertion of the nonlinear relationship between knowledge and love, adding a final exhortation: This having learnt, thou hast attaind the summe Of wisdome; hope no higher, though all the Starrs Thou knewst by name, and all th’ ethereal Powers, All secrets of the deep, all Natures works, Or works of God in Heav’n, Air, Earth, or Sea, And all the riches of this World enjoydst, And all the rule, one Empire; onely add Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add Faith, Add vertue, Patience, Temperance, add Love, By name to come call’d Charitie, the soul Of all the rest. (.–)

Even as they exit the garden, Adam and Eve carry the capacity for caritas, which breathes life into the rest of the virtues and will ultimately enable their souls to enter a state of rest again. Caritas is also, Michael asserts, the “track divine” of God’s footsteps. As we have seen, an impulse behind much seventeenth-century science was the drive to restore God’s image in humanity, an image that was defaced by the Fall. Adding “Deeds to [his] knowledge answerable,” Adam will recover that divine image by imitating divine love.

 

The Misunderstood Spider John Bunyan Reads the Book of Nature

I thought that we were all like Spiders, and that we looked like ugly Creatures, in what fine Room soever we were: But that by this Spider, this venomous and ill favoured Creature, we were to learn how to act Faith, and that came not into my mind. And yet she has taken hold with her hands as I see, and dwells in the best Room in the House. God has made nothing in vain.

Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, part  ()

SPIDER: My venom’s good for something, ’cause God made it Thy sin hath spoiled thy nature, doth degrade it . . . Thou say’st I am the very dregs of nature, Thy sin’s the spawn of devils, ’tis no creature. Thou say’st man hates me ’cause I am a spider, Poor man, thou at thy God art a derider; My venom tendeth to my preservation, Thy pleasing follies work out thy damnation. Poor man, I keep the rules of my creation, Thy sin has cast thee headlong from thy station.

Bunyan, “The Sinner and the Spider,” Book for Boys and Girls ()

The last chapter explored how the imagined world of Milton’s biblical epic lent itself to natural theological inquiry. This one will explore how natural theology infused the imagination of John Bunyan, whose allegories have arguably been as influential in the Protestant world as physico-theology itself. Like proponents of physico-theology such as Robert Boyle and John Ray, Bunyan saw consideration of nature as a means of gaining theological understanding. Among his imaginative works, Bunyan’s engagement with the book of nature grew, in fact, between publication of the first part of Pilgrim’s Progress () and the second part () and his Book for Boys and Girls (). But Bunyan differed from the physico-theologians in his understanding of nature’s ideal audience and how far nature could bring people toward salvation. Unlike contemporary scientists, Bunyan held that 

The Misunderstood Spider



no special training was required to read theological messages in nature; in fact, the book of nature was especially suitable for women and children. To derive any benefit from nature, however, a person needed a conscience already awakened to faith. Bunyan’s treatment of nature differs, on the one hand, from earlier emblem texts in which images were printed in the book – requiring no direct experience of the natural world – and, on the other, from physico-theology, which increasingly required an expert’s understanding of that world. Considering many of the same creatures as did proponents of physico-theology, Bunyan takes the stance of a childlike pupil of nature rather than a master extorting information. Bunyan’s use of poetry and prose fiction to invite his readers to read the book of nature is consonant with this stance: some forms and applications of natural theology lend themselves better to explication in poetry or imaginative writing than in prose. In what follows I will first lay out some observations about Bunyan’s intellectual context in general before exploring his poetic approach to natural theology in particular, with some reflection on Bunyan’s boundary-breaking “reading” of the ill-favored spider. Emphasizing as it does the goodness and efficacy of human reason, natural theology has generally been associated more with mid-century Cambridge Platonists and conforming latitudinarian bishops than with the (puritan) theological plot Bunyan inhabited, where divine sovereignty was emphasized over intelligibility. There is growing recognition among historians of religion, however, that natural theology has long held a place in more reformed circles, and Bunyan is an important part of this story. While Bunyan did not endorse the ambitious project of converting atheists and infidels 



Another literary genre that invited readers to interpret nature was the medieval bestiary; these were less centrally concerned with morals than emblem books, but they lacked the fidelity to nature of later scientific texts, and their entries were often moralizable if not always moralized: C. S. Lewis, Discarded Image, , notes of Isidore of Seville’s highly influential Etymologiae that “he draws no morals from his beasts and gives them no allegorical interpretations.” On typological and ethical moralizations in bestiaries, see Willene B. Clark (ed.), A Medieval Book of Beasts (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, ), –. On seventeenth-century Anglophone puritans and natural theology, see Wallace W. Marshall, Puritanism and Natural Theology (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, ); Calloway, Natural Theology in the Scientific Revolution, – and “John Owen and Scientific Reform,” Matthew Millsap, “Nature’s Creed: Natural Religion, Protestants, and Enlightened Belief in Early America” (PhD Diss., Baylor University, ), and Garey, “In every leaf, lectures of Providence.” On Reformed thought and natural theology more generally, Alvin Plantinga’s “The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology,” in Michael Peterson et al. (eds.), Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings, second edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), – and the discourse it precipitated is useful, as is Thomas Woolford’s concept of “post-fideal” natural theology in “Natural Theology and Natural Philosophy in the Late Renaissance” (e.g. ).



Imagined Worlds

through reason, he came to view God’s revelation in nature as part of the Christian story, and he contributed to a robust natural theological tradition of occasional meditation also valued by Boyle. Although with relatively modest and overwhelmingly spiritual aims, Bunyan reimagines an old emblematic tradition, developing a way of reading the book of nature more in line with new empirical sensibilities.

Bunyan, Puritans, and Natural Theology Bunyan occupies a different region of the seventeenth-century English theological landscape from most of the authors considered in this book thus far, with the notable exception of Lucy Hutchinson. While that landscape shifted over the course of the century, there were always English Catholic recusants and Catholic sympathizers, those in the middle who favored the state church and its prayer book (even when these were proscribed), and staunchly reformed puritans and their descendants who similarly stuck to their convictions even when to do so could have dire consequences. Bunyan famously belonged to this last group: he failed to conform to the restored English church and spent most of the time between  and  in prison because of his illicit preaching. Theologically Bunyan adhered to the high Calvinistic doctrines asserting divine sovereignty and the salvation of even the worst human sinners through grace alone, without any engagement of human will and reason. Notably, though, he stopped short of more radical “antinomian” sects who (for instance) might endorse the unfettered practice of sin or who privileged fidelity to a personal “inner light” of revelation over the Bible. The low view of human reason taken by puritans and members of more radical sects might seem to preclude any interest in natural theology, and perhaps any interest in natural knowledge more generally. Instead it appears that members of these groups could at least take a keen practical interest in natural science: among radical sects, for instance, the Quaker Thomas Lawson practiced botany, while the Ranters Abiezer Coppe and 



Bunyan is generally regarded as a Baptist. This term came into use in seventeenth-century England and denotes Protestant Christians who believe baptism (generally by immersion) should take place once the believer is old enough to understand its significance. Bunyan straddled the line between the English Calvinist “Particular Baptists” and Independents who did not share this stark commitment to “believer’s baptism,” but whose ecclesiology and theology were generally the same. See Dewey D. Wallace, “Bunyan’s Theology and Religious Context,” in Michael Davies and W. R. Owens (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), – and Joseph D. Ban, “Was Bunyan a Baptist?,” Baptist Quarterly , no.  (): –. Wallace, “Bunyan’s Theology,” –.

The Misunderstood Spider



Laurence Clarkson as well as the Leveller William Wallwyn practiced medicine. This trend is visible too among the less radical puritans among whom Bunyan is counted: indeed, for a century now scholars have discussed the possibility of a positive correlation between Puritanism and natural science. What is more, it now appears that at least some puritans endorsed the higher-reaching practice of natural theology as well. Before considering Bunyan’s view of nature as evidenced in his imaginative works, here I will survey that aspect of his context, making the case that Bunyan was tuned in to a fairly robust thread of natural theology running through reformed English thought and practice in the seventeenth century. The s onwards saw the publication of influential studies in various disciplines aiming to establish and explain why a preponderance of seventeenth-century puritans seem to have been invested in the new empirical sciences. This discourse had reached such a state by  that Bunyan’s biographer Richard L. Greaves set out to “anatomize” it, to “examine the possible ways in which Puritanism might have aided in the acceptance and development of scientific thought.” For his part, Greaves was not convinced of a strong or necessary correlation: Bunyan’s highly influential puritan friend John Owen, he noted elsewhere, “displayed little interest in curricular reform, especially the new science,” unlike Owen’s establishment-conforming friend John Wilkins. Since Greaves wrote, however, this conversation has carried on, moving to affinities between modern natural science and Protestantism in general more than Puritanism in particular. There is still a case to be made, for instance, that the theological voluntarism associated with Calvin and his followers has affinities with empirical method. As John Henry puts it, The voluntarist emphasis upon God’s freedom of operation is associated with a belief in the radical contingency of the natural world and the concomitant belief that we can only understand God’s creation a posteriori, by examining it and drawing empirically based conclusions as to what he actually did, or as to what kind of world he created.    



Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . Besides the references in n.  above, see also Mandelbrote, “Early Modern Biblical Interpretation,” –. Richard L. Greaves, “Puritanism and Science: The Anatomy of a Controversy,” Journal of the History of Ideas , no.  (): . Richard L. Greaves, “Owen, John (–),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Greaves also questions the “puritanism and science” thesis in The Puritan Imagination and Educational Thought (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ), e.g., . Henry, “Voluntarist Theology at the Origins of Modern Science,” .



Imagined Worlds

What goes for Protestantism in general in this case certainly goes for puritans, who among Protestants laid special stress on God’s sovereignty and human fallibility: It makes sense that they would prefer the humbler empirical method of learning to the more cogitative methods of (for instance) Plato or Descartes. Bunyan himself points out in part  of Pilgrim’s Progress that “Nothing teaches like experience” (), and Richard Baxter wrote that “it is foolish to reason against sense and experience or deny that which is, because we think that it should be otherwise.” This is not to say that puritans needed to bother with science in the first place; but, in fact, a number of men with puritan convictions or sympathies did bother. Even Greaves did not dispute this, listing “sectaries” keenly interested in empirical science such as John Webster, Thomas Lawson, Gerard Winstanley, Noah Biggs, William Dell, Francis Bampfield, William Penn, George Starkey, and William Sprigg. An interest in empirical science, on the other hand, does not necessitate enthusiasm for natural theology. Bacon himself was not enthusiastic about natural theology, as we have seen: He consistently promoted the downward-facing enterprises of experimentation and natural history while discouraging the upward-facing enterprise of natural theology, or “divine philosophy,” as pridefully applying human reason to divine things. In the middle decades of the century, William Dell and John Webster, both puritan in conviction and opposed to the state church politically, followed suit. Both men sought a thorough revision of English education in the direction of the new empirical sciences; both were also very suspicious of any effort to apply human reason to theology. Dell, an early patron of Bunyan, lamented that “human learning mingled with divinity, or the Gospel of Christ understood through Aristotle, hath begun, continued, and perfected the Mysterie of Iniquity in the outward church,” and wanted universities to stop awarding divinity degrees. Webster too sought to overhaul university curricula along Baconian lines, getting rid of the vain and hurtful “School-Divinity” that presumes theology to be “attainable by the wit, power and industry of man.” Like Bacon, however, even as   



 Baxter, Reasons of the Christian Religion, . Greaves, “Puritanism and Science,” . See pp. –, –. On this campaign to “abolish rationalism in religion rather than even retain it in a subordinate position to empiricism,” Greaves names not only Dell and Webster but also Thomas Lawson and Gerrard Winstanley. See “Puritanism and Science,” . William Dell, The Tryal of Spirits both in teachers & hearers (London, ), . See Pooley, “Proving Things from the Bible: The Case of the Anti-Atheists,” Bunyan Studies no.  (): –.

The Misunderstood Spider



extreme a reformer as Webster left some place for natural theology within bounds, namely, when used to confute atheism by uncovering lawful order in nature, but not “to assert or build up Religion.” Besides having an aversion to the prideful intermingling of reason and religion, puritans are also often viewed as despising the natural world because it distracts people from categorically more important, eternal things. Here again arises the difficulty of the two senses of “world” in the Bible, discussed earlier in connection with Henry Vaughan: the good world that God loves and will redeem, and the fallen world that opposes God and will one day pass away – the things Bunyan locates in his Vanity Fair. There is evidence that some puritans viewed the natural world as part of the dangerous and distracting “world” they were to spurn. In this vein, in his biographical sketch of Thomas Fairfax (the dedicatee of Marvell’s Upon Appleton House), Ian J. Gentles applauds Fairfax’s “sensuous appreciation of natural beauty that was at war with a puritan estrangement from the attractions of this world.” Similarly, U. Milo Kaufman points out how on several occasions Edward Bury “catches himself upon the brink of an honest absorption in nature” and chides himself for this in his Husbandmans Companion (): When I considered what a sweet savour and odoriferous smell, a garden of flowers and hearbs sent forth when it was watered from heaven by a refreshing shower . . . I began with Peter to say, it is good being here; till upon consideration I checkt myself for my folly, for letting out my affection upon such poor objects, and letting them grovel so low upon the ground.

Already in Bury’s text, though, the antidote to this danger was not to ignore or destroy nature but to “spiritualize” nature, reading the book of the creatures for spiritual insights. One phenomenon this chapter explores through Bunyan is how a puritan’s fear that this “book” might become an idol could lessen over time, allowing more space for appreciation of nonhuman creation as good in itself. In fact, Bunyan’s friend John Owen is a good example of how a puritan might grow in appreciation for the book of nature. Owen’s views on science and natural theology are especially helpful in determining how    

Webster Academiarum Examen, or, the examination of academies (London, ), . See Mandelbrote, “Uses of Natural Theology,” –. Ian J. Gentles, “Fairfax, Thomas, Third Lord Fairfax of Cameron (–),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi-org.ezproxy.baylor.edu/./ref:odnb/. Edward Bury, Husbandmans Companion (London, ), ; U. Milo Kaufmann, The Pilgrim’s Progress and Traditions in Puritan Meditation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), . Calloway, “Owen and Scientific Reform,” –.



Imagined Worlds

Bunyan himself might have viewed these subjects, because of the theological ground Bunyan and Owen shared. One of English Puritanism’s theological leading lights, Owen famously said that he would gladly exchange all his learning for Bunyan’s preaching abilities; he was also instrumental in securing Bunyan’s release from prison in  and placing Pilgrim’s Progress with its publisher, Nathaniel Ponder. Bunyan was uneducated and did not write about curricular reform; Owen served as vice-chancellor of Oxford under Cromwell and was forced to take positions, at least occasionally, on these matters. Greaves noticed a lack of enthusiasm for both curricular reform and natural science in Owen, who was far less averse to Aristotle and school theology than were Dell and Webster. Still, Owen affirmed the value of the new natural science insofar as it served theology, the “queen of the sciences.” Owen’s contention that the new science is valuable to the extent that it serves theology indicates a reversal of the bracketing of natural theology in favor of natural science seen in Bacon, Webster, and Dell – in favor of something like the position Calvin had taken in the Institutes. Calvin, we have seen, viewed training in the sciences as enabling men to “penetrate . . . far more deeply into the secrets of divine wisdom” than those without such training. Owen agreed with this, going so far as to aver that scientific endeavor aimed at any other end than knowledge of God made its practitioners “earthly, carnal and vain” (..). Similarly to Bacon, Owen affirmed that the book of nature “is sufficient to detect the folly of atheism,” but Owen’s choice of “detect the folly of atheism” rather than “convince atheism” (as Bacon had it) or “the confuting and convincing of atheism” (as in Webster) sheds light on his Calvinist conviction that natural light cannot help unawakened sinners. For the elect, however, Owen adds to natural theology’s application the detection of idolatry as well as atheism. Initially laying stress on the fallenness of the “whole of creation,” in his final published work, Owen declares that those who meditate on the “works of Creation and Providence” undertake a work







John Tweeddale, John Owen and Hebrews: The Foundation of Biblical Interpretation (London: T&T Clark, ), ; Richard L. Greaves, Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, ), . See Owen’s jubilant fourth Oxford oration () in John Owen, The Oxford Orations of Dr. John Owen, ed. Peter Toon (Callington, UK: Gospel Communication, ), , . Toon glosses these passages as referring to the “Oxford Science Club” at Wadham College. John Owen, Meditations and discourses on the glory of Christ [], second edition (London, ), ; Bacon, Oxford Francis Bacon, iv:–. Bacon makes the same claim in the essay “Of Atheisme ().” John Webster, Academiarum Examen, , quoting Bacon.



The Misunderstood Spider

“worthy of our Nature, and suited to our rational capacities; yea, the first end of our natural Endowment” from God. Based on Bunyan’s general affinity with Owen as well as some hints in his own writing, it seems likely that Bunyan’s view of natural science as an end in itself would have accorded with Owen’s, to the extent that he thought about such things. In the poem prefaced to Pilgrim’s Progress, for instance, when Bunyan avers that “men (as high as trees) will write / Dialogue-wise,” he may have had in mind “philosophers and religious writers such as Robert Boyle,” whose dialogues were well known. The sense one gets from these lines is that such men, whoever they are, were too big for their britches. In the narrative of Pilgrim’s Progress, moreover, Faithful describes an encounter with a reprobate character named Shame who tries to shame godly men (among other reasons) for their “want of understanding in all natural Science,” a comment that W. R. Owens glosses by mentioning the Royal Society’s  charter. The poem prefaced to Holy War contains a more involved reference, as Bunyan requests that his imagined world be distinguished from another sort: Count me not then with them that to amaze The people, set them on the stars to gaze Insinuating with much confidence, That each of them is now the residence Of some brave Creatures; yea, a world they will Have in each Star, though it be past their skill To make it manifest to any man, That reason hath, or tell his fingers can. (–)

In their note on this passage, Roger Sharrock and James F. Forrest speculate that “Bunyan may have heard at second hand through Owen of the speculations of John Wilkins,” pointing out that Wilkins was a founding member of the Royal Society who discussed the possibility of space travel in his work on the plurality of worlds. Whatever his source for these 

 

John Owen, A Vision of Unchangeable Free Mercy (London ), , and Meditations and Discourses,  and . It should be noted here that Owen denied any strictly “natural” knowledge of God, placing such knowledge, however gained, “under the general head of Revelation.” In this chapter I use “natural” to distinguish knowledge that engages the mind from bald acceptance of divine utterance. See Owen, Truth and Innocence Vindicated in a Survey of a Discourse concerning Ecclesiastical Polity (London, ),  and Calloway, “Owen and Scientific Reform,” , n. . Cynthia Wall, “Bunyan and the Early Novel,” in The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan, . John Bunyan, The Holy War: made by Shaddai upon Diabolus. For the Regaining of the Metropolis of the World. Or, the Losing and Taking Again of the Town on Mansoul [], ed. Roger Sharrock and



Imagined Worlds

speculations, it is clear that Bunyan didn’t want to be associated with them. Notably, though, he shows an empirical sensibility in his jibe that these natural philosophers cannot “make it manifest” how there might be a world in each star, even as he disparages their vain confidence. It is not good in Bunyan’s world to be a character called “Ignorance,” and he was invested in apprehending what he calls “the sight and sense of things.” On the question of natural theology’s legitimacy and usefulness, then, Bunyan appears again to agree with Owen, over and against the deflating effort of Bacon and his successors. Drawing on Romans  and  (like both Calvin and Owen), Bunyan affirmed that God revealed himself in nature: in his sermon Sighs from Hell (), for instance, Bunyan names “the book of the Creatures” as one of the books out of which the dead are to be judged. He dramatizes this judgement in The Resurrection of the Dead (), proclaiming that “by the book of nature, which book is themselves, [men] do read, that there is one great and eternal God,” that we stand guilty before him, that he should be sought after by humans, and that we should act justly toward each other. The book of nature is useless to save sinners, but it says enough about God to render all humans inexcusable, because all have access to it. In Pilgrim’s Progress, accordingly, readers learn that stupidity is yet worse than carnality, and it is a bad character who heeds “neither faith nor reason” (, ). Unsurprisingly given this understanding of the book of nature, the “light of nature” also appears repeatedly in Bunyan’s negative allegory, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (). This light shows that Mr. Badman should not steal, swear, or be drunk; even the heathens are aware of these things.





 

James F. Forrest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), , . In a  contribution to the “Puritanism and science” debate, S. F. Mason argued that a plurality of worlds was in fact one belief that puritans shared in common with scientific virtuosi. This point rested squarely on the designation of Wilkins as a puritan, which is not an inaccurate characterization of him in the s and s: see “Seventeenth Century Science and Religion,” Past & Present no.  (): –. W. R. Owens glosses this phrase as meaning knowledge or consciousness and points out that it “was a favourite of Bunyan’s,” in John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to that which is to come [], ed. W. R. Owens (Oxford World’s Classics; Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), , n. . John Bunyan, A Few Sighs from Hell, or, The Groans of a damned Soul (London, ), . Batson, John Bunyan, –, draws on the Resurrection of the Dead as well as The Saint’s Privilege and Profit in placing Bunyan in his sermon-treatises in a broadly defined “two books” tradition coming down from the middle ages and including Calvin and Donne as well as Joseph Hall and Robert Boyle. John Bunyan, The Resurrection of the Dead, and Eternal Judgement [] in J. Sears McGee (ed.), Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, Vol.  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. John Bunyan, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman: Presented to the World in a Familiar Dialogue between Mr. Wiseman, and Mr. Attentive [], ed. Roger Sharrock and James F. Forrest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), , , .

The Misunderstood Spider



Fraud, likewise, is “a thing odious to Reason and Conscience, and contrary to the Law of nature.” What goes against reason and nature, moreover, “must be a sin against God,” according to Mr. Wiseman. Bunyan also depicts “Reason, and Conscience, and Nature” as prescribing positive duties, such as a man’s obligation to provide for his family (which Mr. Badman fails to do). In these pages, not only do heathens evince awareness of a law of nature; nonhuman creatures point to the rules of their creation as well. After calling drunkenness a “beastly sin,” Mr. Attentive corrects himself, calling it “worse than beastly” and telling a story of a drunken groom who “had not so much government of himself as his horse had of himself and consequently [whose] beast did live more according to the Law of his nature by far, than did his man.” In this episode, the book of the creatures is opened in order to show the ways in which sinful humans are wanting. This is a common tack for Bunyan to take, and it accords with a personal reflection from his own testimony in Grace Abounding: Man indeed is the most noble by creation, of all creatures in the visible world; but by sin he has made himself the most ignoble. The beasts, birds, fishes, etc. I blessed their condition; for they had not a sinful nature; they were not obnoxious to the wrath of God; they were not to go to hell-fire after death; I could therefore have rejoiced, had my condition been as any of theirs. ()

A question Bunyan does not positively answer here is where the beasts, birds, and fishes will go after death if not hell. Presumably Bunyan subscribed to the English “Calvinist” belief in their annihilation. If so, we will see, he may later have loosened his grip on this belief. In any case, this episode in Mr. Badman rests on a conviction that nonhuman creation has not been defaced to the point of illegibility. What is more, Bunyan does not follow the logic of physico-theology, inferring God’s existence and power from the evident lawfulness and order of the world. Instead, more particular lessons are being drawn from creatures. These lessons do not help Mr. Badman, but perhaps they can help Wiseman and Attentive – and Bunyan and his readers. And indeed, in other places Bunyan develops a fuller, positive hermeneutic for the book of nature.  



  Ibid., –. Ibid., . Ibid., . The passage bears comparing with the opening lines of Donne’s holy sonnet : “If poisonous minerals, and if that tree, / Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us, / If lecherous goats, if serpents envious / Cannot be damn’d; Alas; why should I be?” Rudrum, “Liberation of the Creatures,” –.



Imagined Worlds

Robert Boyle and the Occasional Meditation Like John Owen, Bunyan saw theoretical potential in the “Book of the Creatures” to reveal spiritual truths to those whose consciences were awakened by grace. Practically, the subgenre of natural theology that best lent itself to Bunyan’s use was the occasional meditation, a genre popular among sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestants that subsequently fell out of favor and largely out of view as part of the historical landscape of natural theology. Here I will give some account of occasional meditation in seventeenth-century England before showing how Bunyan draws on and contributes to that discourse in Pilgrim’s Progress  and  and A Book for Boys and Girls. Occasional meditation involved drawing spiritual truths or lessons from whatever the mediator laid eyes on, these objects being the “occasion.” John Owen approved of occasional meditation: one of the few works he licensed during his time as Vice-Chancellor of Oxford was one Ralph Austen’s Spiritual Use of an Orchard, a work of occasional meditation along explicitly Baconian lines. In general, an occasional meditation need not be scientific or draw on nonhuman creation; the genre predates Bacon and had much in common with the ancient fable as well as the Renaissance emblem book. In seventeenth-century England, however, these could take on an empirical flavor (as in Austen’s case), evolving alongside the nascent genre of physico-theology. A key figure in this development was Robert Boyle, founding member of the Royal Society and arguably the most important patron of English natural theology. Boyle’s world and Bunyan’s were not so distant as they might seem. Despite having endowed a lecture series that became the main English vehicle for the proliferation of physico-theology over the ensuing century, Boyle himself was not as sanguine as many Boyle lecturers would be about what natural theology could achieve, a view that landed him in the company of Owen and Bunyan. In a late seventeenth-century controversy over natural theology that broke out between the latitudinarians Joseph Glanvill and Edward Stillingfleet and more reformed figures such as Owen, for example, Boyle took the more reformed side. A theological   

The practice of taking spiritual lessons from nature has of course continued more diffusely in devotional literature and sermons, genres not often considered in the province of natural theology. Calloway, “Owen and Scientific Reform,” –. On this tradition see Kaufmann, The Pilgrim’s Progress and Traditions in Puritan Meditation, – and Marie-Louise Coolahan, “Redeeming Parcels of Time: Aesthetics and the Practice of Occasional Meditation,” The Seventeenth Century , no.  (): –. Noted authors include Joseph Hall, Edward Bury, and Edmund Calamy.

The Misunderstood Spider



voluntarist, Boyle affirmed that some crucial theological doctrines were above reason and could not be proven by it. With that bound in place, however, Boyle held that experimentalists and natural historians had much to offer in the service of theology – nor did he limit natural theology to the physico-theological effort to establish God’s existence based on design in nature. Not only did he endow the Boyle Lectures and defend natural theology at length in his Some Considerations Touching the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy (, ), Boyle also redefined, promoted, and practiced occasional meditation in his Occasional Reflections (), the intermittent work of nearly two decades. In this endeavor too, Boyle showed his proximity to the puritans despite marked political differences. Boyle’s sister, Mary Rich, was a celebrated practitioner of occasional meditation in her own right and was connected to Owen through her husband’s family. Richard Baxter, the other puritan theological heavyweight, highly praised occasional meditation in general and Boyle’s in particular. In a letter dated June , , Baxter wrote to Boyle, Your special way of occasional meditation, I take to be exceeding useful! Your examples are the translating of the several creatures into a language understood; so that it will teach men, when they see the words (the things) to see withal the signification (the use:) as those, that know not only the materials of an apothecary’s shop, but also the medicinal use of the simples and compositions.

Beginning this remarkable passage with “your special way,” Baxter means to distinguish occasional meditation from theological meditation more generally, but he could easily have meant that Boyle’s “way” was special among authors of occasional meditation. Broadly speaking, all occasional meditation interpreted “things”; the trope of the book of nature had long  

 

See Calloway, “Owen and Scientific Reform,” –. On the composition of Occasional Reflections, see Michael Hunter, Boyle: Between God and Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), , and Raymond A. Anselment, “Robert Boyle and the Art of Occasional Meditation,” Renaissance and Reformation , no.  (): –. Boyle frames these occasional reflections as natural theology, citing in his Discourse to Occasional Reflections, , the same Bible passages used to justify physico-theology by authors such as John Ray. These include Psalm .: “How manifold are thy works, O Lord, how wisely hast thou made them all?” and Psalm .–: “When I consider thy Heavens, the work of thy hands, the Moon and Stars which thou hast ordained, What is man that thou should’st be mindful of him, or the Son of man that thou visitest him?” Coolahan, “Redeeming Parcels,” –. Mary Boyle Rich’s father-in-law was an early supporter of Owen: see Greaves, “Owen, John (–).” Boyle, Robert, The Correspondence of Robert Boyle ( vols.), ed. Michael Hunter, Antonio Clericuzio, and Lawrence M. Principe (London: Pickering & Chatto, ), ii:.



Imagined Worlds

rested on an Augustinian notion that God spoke in things as well as words, making both the world and human history significant. Baxter’s parenthetical intrusion of “use” here is interesting, however. In an earlier chapter I argued that George Herbert (whose poetry Baxter loved, and who was very interested in “something understood”) effectively replaced the traditional book of nature with a Baconian household or cabinet of nature, whose contents were subject to use rather than reading. Baxter appears to want it both ways. By reading things, Boyle and his readers also are using them, as an apothecary uses herbal simples and compounds. Whether conscious or not, Baxter’s sense that Boyle was doing something more Baconian than his predecessors was correct. As Marie-Louise Coolahan has shown, while Boyle and his sister were “at the centre of a network . . . who engaged wholeheartedly in occasional meditation,” Boyle explicitly reconceived the genre in multiple ways in the lengthy methodological Discourse prefaced to his Occasional Reflections; most of these innovations did not gain traction among other authors. Here I focus primarily on another innovation of Boyle’s, arising from his empirical sensibility. Boyle does not jettison the Protestant meditative tradition altogether: in keeping with older works, he insists that the devil is the enemy of natural knowledge since all truth belongs to God and concludes that we should therefore fight the cunning serpent indirectly as well as directly, like the Divine Teacher, who used “Figurative and Indirect ways of conveying ev’n Serious and Sacred matters.” However, “figurative” and “indirect” does not have to mean “pretended.” Boyle rejected the “pretended” aspect of the foregoing tradition, preferring always to match his reflections to things as they actually were even if decorum suffered as a result. Accordingly, the working title of the first section of Occasional Reflections was “Of the Study of the Book of Nature.” In the Discourse, Boyle explains that, although previously it might have been the case that “Subjects were pretended, to which the Conceits might be Accommodated,” here he will show that “this kind of Composures need 

  

See above. On Herbert’s high esteem among later Dissenters, see Wilcox, “Voices and Echoes: Poetical Precedents from Herbert to Bunyan,” Bunyan Studies no.  (): –, and Jenna Townend, “‘[S]weet singer of our Israel’: Psalms, Hymns, and Dissenting Appropriations of George Herbert’s Poetry,” Bunyan Studies no.  (): –. Coolahan, “Redeeming Parcels,” –. Another helpful study of the uniqueness of Boyle’s work is Anselment, “Boyle and the Art of Occasional Meditation.” Unless a page number is given, these quotations all come from unnumbered pages in Boyle’s Discourse Touching Occasional Meditations bound with his Occasional Reflections (). Hunter, Boyle: Between God and Science, .

The Misunderstood Spider



not have recourse to the suspected Artifice.” While occasions for divine meditation did not need to be natural but only “outward” – one might, for example, meditate on “the sight of a Looking-glass, with a rich Frame” – Boyle felt that the natural world lent itself especially well to meditation. Describing himself as “one that do’s assiduously converse with the Works of Nature,” Boyle can conform his reflections to things and events as they naturally present themselves rather than the other way around, for instance spending an entire book of his meditations reflecting on his own experience of an ague. Contrasting his approach with that of the ancient fable, Boyle writes in the second chapter, ’Twas doubtless a very great pleasure to Aesop, that by his ingenious Fictions he could, in a manner, lend Reason and Speech to Lions, Foxes, Crows, and other Animals, to whom Nature had deni’d both; and I know not why it should be less delightful, by Occasional Reflections, to turn not onely Birds and Beasts, but all kinds of Creatures in the world, as well mute and inanimate, as irrational, not onely into Teachers of Ethicks, but oftentimes into Doctors of Divinity, and by compelling senseless Creatures to reveal Truths to us.

The language of “compelling senseless creatures” to reveal truths has a Baconian flavor, though Bacon had wanted to focus on truths about those creatures themselves while Boyle here wants to look into divinity and ethics. Boyle also casts his method as improving on Renaissance emblem books, in which a printed image would typically be interpreted on the same page by an aphorism and a prose exposition. Boyle instead considers “lively emblems” – ones authored by God rather than humans. A major reason Boyle gives for this approach is that he can appeal to a wider audience. Had he written in a way more detached from the world around him, I should perchance have had no Readers but Divines, or Humanists, or Devout Persons or Despisers of the World . . . but treating as I do, of Whatever chanc’d to come in my way . . . Curiosity will probably invite

 

 

Boyle, Occasional Reflections, . This section invites comparison with Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (London, ) as a section on fishing invites comparison with Walton’s Compleat Angler (London, ); as Coolahan points out, however, Donne’s Devotions are in many ways “at odds with common methods and performance of occasional meditation” (“Redeeming Parcels,” ). Boyle, Occasional Reflections, . Ibid., e.g.  and . Wesley Garey has argued that Lucy Hutchinson does something similar in Order and Disorder: see “In Every Leaf.”



Imagined Worlds both the Learned and the Devout; both Gentlemen, and Ladies, and, in a word, Inquisitive Persons of several Kinds & Conditions.

All of these readers, even if they don’t develop the ability to meditate on the natural world themselves, can read his book for their edification. Even better, perhaps many “kinds and conditions” of people will take up the practice themselves, if without the benefit of Boyle’s expertise. Baxter certainly thought that unlearned people could undertake occasional meditation. In the same letter to Boyle, he avers that “women & weak persons may well make [occasional meditation] their frequent profitable worke,” and this “without any danger of overstraining their imaginations” as more rigorous theological effort might do. And in fact, women were practicing occasional meditation: Coolahan names not only Boyle’s sister Mary Rich but also Elizabeth Walker, Anne Ley, Katherine Austen, Julia Palmer, and Margaret Hody as undertaking occasional meditation in their journals or poetry. In contrast with the more “lascivious tales” that had occupied Mary Wroth a generation earlier, these efforts were generally welcomed and celebrated by the men in these authors’ orbits, who might bring the meditations into a funeral sermon or even have them published. What is more, while these women may not have conversed with nature as assiduously as Boyle did, they frequently drew on the natural world, following the example laid down in the Bible of going to the ant (or bee, or spider) for moral and spiritual teaching. Boyle approved of these civilian efforts but thought that occasional reflections were yet more beneficial if they could draw on copious study, for the book of nature is not “distinctly exhibited” but set down in “Hieroglyphicks” that must be decoded. Boyle does not specify here that scientific training is required to take lessons out of nature – or aver that women such as his sister are incapable of doing this – but there does emerge in his Discourse some tension with Baxter’s confident declaration that the book of nature is accessible to all and will not strain the imagination. An untrained reader of things is unlikely to see what Boyle can see, he believes, unless she reads his book. Having conversed assiduously with the works of nature, Boyle can find surprising and new lessons in what he sees rather than rehearsing the obvious or traditional lessons that might be found in Aesop of the biblical book of Proverbs. Previous practitioners such as the influential Bishop  

Boyle, Correspondence of Robert Boyle, ii:. Boyle, Occasional Reflections, .



Coolahan, “Redeeming Parcels,” –.

The Misunderstood Spider



Joseph Hall had cautioned against occasional meditations that were too “farre-fetcht”; Boyle is less concerned about this danger. Proposing to receive from creatures “informations . . . extremely distant from what, one would conjecture to be the most obvious” meanings of those creatures, he insists that “when the Circumstances are thoroughly examin’d, and consider’d, the Informations appear proper enough.” While unexpected, these meanings are nonetheless “proper.” What does Boyle mean by a “proper” reading of nature? Presumably nature would never teach something contrary to Christian principles or morals, though Boyle believes they can have applications outside of theology. In the context, other important senses of “proper” suggest themselves as well. As a natural philosopher, for instance, Boyle says he wants his reflections informed by “thoroughly examin’d” circumstances. In this he resembles his Royal Society colleague John Ray, who was troubled that he could not observe in English ants the industrious behavior associated with them in Proverbs .–. Boyle’s occasional meditations attend to the details of natural history and do not present such problems. To take a well-known example, Boyle considers the bee, who (like the ant) illustrates good industry and prudence – indeed, someone who excels at occasional meditation is a “spiritual bee.” Boyle does not question the bee’s industriousness, but he does not meditate on it either, using this given as a jumping-off point to consider at some length the significance of the bee’s interest in blossoms rather than leaves, which figure the relative merits of devotional literature and “dogmatical” theology. The silkworm, who eats the leaves, produces silk that can make clothes for humans, just as divines who read theology can then write theology to enable readers “to talk with more Acutness.” The bee produces honey, which delights and comforts not only humans but also the bee. This figures how readers of devotional literature can then write similar literature for others, but in reading they also “feel themselves all the Joys, and Advantages, they would procure to others.” Unlike the dubious claim in Proverbs, Boyle’s reflections accord with the observed behavior of bees and silkworms.







Joseph Hall, The arte of divine meditation profitable for all Christians to knowe and practice (London, ), . Boyle, Occasional Reflections, . On the contrast with Hall, see Coolahan, “Redeeming Parcels,” . Ray, Wisdom of God, . By pointing out that he “could never observe any such storing up of grain by our Country-Ants,” Ray leaves open the possibility that some other species in some other place might do this.  Coolahan, “Redeeming Parcels,” –. Boyle, Occasional Reflections, –.



Imagined Worlds

A final potential meaning of “proper” when it comes to reading nature has to do with nature’s good guys and bad guys, as it were. Here, the natural historian might part ways with tradition, with the occasional mediator needing to follow one or the other. In the case of the bee or the ant, Boyle could generally agree with tradition about the bee’s virtuous behavior and proceed into more detailed meditation. Other creatures, however – such as snakes and spiders – traditionally tended to figure evil: to name an example from an earlier author in this book, Donne in “Twickenham Garden” draws on the tradition that the spider “turns all into excrement and poison” in bitterly condemning his “spider Love, which transubstantiates all, / And can convert manna to gall.” This trend continued into the occasional meditations of Bunyan’s day: Edward Bury, for instance, compares the spider’s venomous work to the devil’s and the spider herself to “the cruel enemies of the church”; Edmund Calamy reflects that “a wicked man may be lookt upon as a spider in a glass” and compares the hope of a wicked man to a spider’s web. Such a buildup of evil around a particular creature could be problematic for early modern natural historians, who were focused on uncovering the beautiful, fitting, and orderly design of even the smallest and humblest of God’s creations. It could take a while even for natural historians to come around: John Ray, for instance, was arachnophobic and tended to leave the study of spiders to his friend Francis Willughby. But Willughby and others found much to love in spiders. Boyle’s sometime assistant Robert Hooke rhapsodized in his groundbreaking 





Donne, The Elegies and The Songs and Sonnets, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . An influential biblical text is Isaiah .–, which says of wicked people that “They weave the spider’s web . . . Their webs shall be no garment, neither shall they cover themselves with their labors.” A fascinating case I do not have space to explore in this study is Hester Pulter (–), who draws a typical negative moral from the spider but then pivots: “But why do I blame Spider’s Tyranny / Who forced by Hunger Kills” in “The Ugly Spider”; see Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (eds.), The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making (), http://pulterporject .northwestern.edu. Pulter does not go to the positive lengths Bunyan would, but her poem still stands out against a general anti-spider ethos. Bury, Husbandman’s Companion, –; Edmund Calamy, The Art of Divine Meditation (London, ), –. A few further examples: Rich compared the bee to Satan on one occasion and on another opposed the productivity of the bee to the spider’s futile spinning (Coolahan, “Redeeming Parcels,” , ). One Francis Davison considered at length how “the bee and spider by a diverse power suck hony & poison from the selfe same flower” in The bee and spider by a diverse power, sucke hony’ & poyson from the selfe same flower (London, ) and T. Cooper put forward The Romish spider, with his web of treason (London, ). Joseph Hall used the spider to figure “spiritual free-booters . . . that hale us into Hell” and the “learned & witty heretick” in his influential Arte of Divine Meditation. Brian W. Ogilvie, “Attending to Insects: Francis Willughby and John Ray,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London , no.  (): .

The Misunderstood Spider



Micrographia () about the “admirable and wonderfull Mechanism in the foot of a Spider, whereby he is able to spin, weave, and climb, or run on his curious transparent clew” among many other features of the many types of spiders, some being “prettily bespeck’d” and most, “very nimble.” John Evelyn, a founding member of the Royal Society, attested that no insect (arachnids had not yet been distinguished from insects) had afforded him more pleasure than “a small brown and delicately spotted kind of Spiders” he frequently observed in Rome, giving Hooke a lengthy and spirited account of their behavior: I have beheld them instructing their young ones, how to hunt, which they would sometimes discipline for not well observing; but, when any of the old ones did (as sometimes) miss a leap, they would run out of the field, and hide them in their crannies, as asham’d, and haply not be seen abroad for four or five hours after; for so long have I watched the nature of this strange Insect, the contemplation of whose so wonderfull sagacity and address has amaz’d me; nor do I find in any chase whatsoever, more cunning and Stratagem observ’d.

These observers paved the way for “insecto-theology,” a subgenre of physico-theology focused specifically on these minimae of nature. What is more, while spiders had previously figured sin and evil with their cunning and venom, the new sciences opened a door not only to see them as evidence of divine design, but also to read them as moral exemplars, now that they are better understood. As we will see, it was for Bunyan and not Boyle to walk through that door: for his part, Boyle mentions spiders only once in Occasional Reflections, in a negative light. In sum, while Bunyan was in jail diverting himself “from worser thoughts” by penning Pilgrim’s Progress, men and women in his theological neighborhood were contributing to a burgeoning subgenre of natural theology that drew spiritual and moral lessons analogically from the natural world. These authors set increasingly higher premiums on scientific virtuosity and empirical fidelity to that world. Their works would not remain popular or influential much beyond Bunyan’s death: in  Jonathan Swift lampooned Boyle’s Occasional Reflections in his Meditation upon a Broomstick, and authors of natural theology focused increasingly on less analogical ways of using nature to draw conclusions about God.   

Hooke, Micrographia, , –. On this subgenre see Brian W. Ogilvie, “Maxima in minimis animalibus: Insects in Natural Theology and Physico-theology,” in Blair and von Greyerz (eds.), Physico-theology, –. Boyle, Occasional Reflections, . Similarly, he uses “serpent” only to refer to Satan: see , , , , and .



Imagined Worlds

But occasional meditation lived on the works of the unlearned John Bunyan, especially those aimed at women and children.

The Book of Nature in The Pilgrim’s Progress Know, that he who could overthrow the land of Egypt, with frogs, lice, flies, Locusts, &c. will overthrow the World, at the last day, by the Book of the Creatures; and that by the least, and most inconsiderable of them, as well as by the rest. This Book of the Creatures, it is so excellent, and so full, so easy, and so suiting the capacity of all, that there is not one man in the World, but is catched, convicted, and cast by it. Bunyan, Resurrection of the Dead ()

We have already seen how the book of nature functions in Bunyan’s sermons as well as The Life and Death of Mr. Badman as justifying the condemnation of sinful humans; all humans can read enough in that book about what they owe to God and each other to render them inexcusable on the day of judgement. But what about the Christian whose conscience has been awakened by grace and who is on a journey to the celestial city? Is the book of nature irrelevant for that person, or a useful source of motivation and insight? Pace Francis Bacon, Bunyan shows a lively interest in reading the book of nature for theological truth, fundamentally rooted in the frequent readings of nature in the Bible itself but informed by the contemporary discourse of occasional meditation as well. This investment only grew between the first part of Pilgrim’s Progress () and its second part (), culminating in Bunyan’s final collection of occasional meditations, his Book for Boys and Girls (). Given Bunyan’s conviction that the “most inconsiderable” of the creatures would overthrow the forces of evil on the last day, it seems fitting that the chief of sinners, the son of a tinker with no formal training in theology or science, would reach millions of readers around the world in the centuries after Boyle’s own occasional reflections settled into relative obscurity. Though flatly dismissive of the pride involved with many human scientific endeavors, Bunyan agreed with Boyle that all truth was God’s and that natural knowledge should be deployed in the service of spiritual ends. 

Boyle’s Occasional Reflections did enjoy a “mini-revival” in the nineteenth century (Coolahan, “Redeeming Parcels,” ), but his influence was nowhere near that of Bunyan; see Emma Mason, “The Victorians and Bunyan’s Legacy” in Anne Dunan-Page (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bunyan (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), –.

The Misunderstood Spider



Unsurprisingly, beyond this point of agreement, Bunyan departs from Boyle in many ways. For one thing, he construes the relationship between human and nonhuman creatures differently than does Boyle. Ultimately, Bunyan’s reader of nature does not ingeniously wrest lessons from senseless creatures. She listens attentively to an active and helpful natural world, guided always by the Bible and an awakened conscience. Another difference between Bunyan and Boyle, of course, is that Bunyan worked not in natural philosophy but in allegorical fiction. Mediating between older allegorical works and the novel, Bunyan’s allegories have long invited comment from critics about the nature and degree of their realism – questions that do not need to be asked of Boyle’s natural philosophy. But it is worth bearing in mind that Boyle was invested as well in occasional meditation, which relied on a fundamentally analogical (one could say allegorical) way of seeing the natural world that clashed with embodiments of empirical science then gaining ground. Conversely, although Bunyan was writing fiction, an interest in the book of nature, always on view in his sermons, creeps in even to the relatively dreamy world of Pilgrim’s Progress, part . This thingy-ness increases substantially in part  of the allegory, in which Bunyan nods more explicitly toward the genre of occasional meditation and its suitability for women and children. Bunyan then leaves the world of fiction altogether in his Book for Boys and Girls, which nonetheless builds on the readings of nature in Pilgrim’s Progress. The allegorical landscape of part  of Pilgrim’s Progress (PP ) has been well covered by others, but I will consider it here as an important baseline for Bunyan’s growing interest in reading nature in PP  and Book for Boys and Girls. In this Puritan blockbuster, a narrator sleeping in a “den” (usually glossed as Bunyan in Bedford Gaol) dreams up the world of the text and its hero, Christian, whose journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City forms the matter of the story. The terrain 





See for instance Paschal Reeves, “‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ as a Precursor of the Novel,” The Georgia Review , no.  (): –; Batson, John Bunyan, –; Stuart, “Bunyan and the Early Novel: The Life and Death of Mr Badman,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bunyan, –; Wall, “Bunyan and the Early Novel,” and Nick Davis, “Bunyan and Romance,” in The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan, –. On the “Harrison hypothesis” regarding the scientific reformers’ flattening of the natural world from a set of referential signs to a network of things, see pp. –. On their aversion to analogical language, see Calloway, “Imagining the Scientific Revolution,” –. Besides the studies in note  above, see for instance Crawford, Allegory and Imagination, –; Jeremy Tambling, “Bunyan, Emblem, and Allegory,” in The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan, –; and Roger Pooley, “The Pilgrim’s Progress and the Line of Allegory,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bunyan, –.



Imagined Worlds

Christian traverses is drawn largely from the Bible and the allegorical tradition: the miry Slough of Despond in which Christian gets bogged down, for instance, is based on Psalm .: “[The Lord] brought me also out of the horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock.” Although Bunyan seldom credits sources besides the Bible, the influence of the medieval and renaissance allegorical tradition is also clear. Like earlier knights and travelers, Bunyan’s dreamed-up Christian receives instruction from personified virtues in havens, fights a foul fiend, and is incarcerated in a castle. He does these things against a natural backdrop, but this is composed of hazily described stock features: a hill, woods, a “pleasant arbor,” a valley, mountains, a river. All this adds up to a work in which access to the natural world feels highly mediated, as if dreamed up by someone in a jail cell, though with some intrusions of the country outside. Paschal Reeves has summed up the situation: Pilgrim’s Progress has the shadowy, somewhat illusory, setting best suited for the universal familiarity necessary in allegorical interpretation . . . The pilgrims’ journeys traverse a topography of “never never land” yet one which is reminiscent both of seventeenth-century England and the Bible lands of the Old and New Testaments. The muddy ditches beside the highways that Christian travels are those Bunyan encountered in his wanderings throughout Bedfordshire mending pots and pans . . . The town of Vanity is an English town of Bunyan’s own day; the country of Beulah has scenes on which Christ might have gazed. The setting in each episode is selected for the purposes of providing proper background for the incident Bunyan is relating. The setting is thus a shifting one which mirrors the action rather than determining it.

To use Boyle’s language, that is, Bunyan “pretends” his landscape, accommodating it to his allegorical message rather than the other way around. Instead of particular features of the natural world, in sharp focus in PP  are Christian’s spiritual struggles and dialogic interactions with other characters, both positive and negative. This subordination of physical detail to Christian’s spiritual story has been identified by some critics as problematic on the grounds that it skirts or finesses the real, “making ‘the





See for instance David Mills, “The Dreams of Bunyan and Langland,” in Vincent Newey (ed.), The Pilgrim’s Progress: Critical and Historical Views (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, ) on Piers Ploughman. Dante’s Divine Comedy and Spenser’s Faerie Queene are also frequently noted as predecessors of Pilgrim’s Progress. Reeves, “‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ as a Precursor of the Novel,” –.

The Misunderstood Spider



world to come’ more real, because more ultimately important, than ‘this world’” and forcing readers to share Bunyan’s metaphysics. An exception to this lack of realistic focus arguably occurs during Christian’s stop at the House of the Interpreter. Here he is shown “excellent things” to interpret for his spiritual edification. Granted, these “things” are referred to as “figures” and appear to be at yet one more remove from the real world than the landscape over which Christian passes, conjured up in the rooms of the house for these instructional purposes rather than existing on their own. On top of this, most of these figures depict human drama (such as a man in a cage or a warrior fighting his way into a castle) rather than natural phenomena. On the other hand, at the Interpreter’s house Christian pays more sustained attention to the details of visually observed things – reading them – than through the rest of the narrative. These things are also, to use Boyle’s term, “livelier” than traditional emblems in that they are three-dimensional and animate within Christian’s world and can physically affect him; he nearly chokes on the dust in the first room, for instance. Moreover, although most of these scenes depict humans, two of them do focus on natural (not merely biblical) phenomena and hint at Bunyan’s capacity to read such phenomena for spiritual truth. In the first room, the dust cannot be swept up until it is made to settle with water. This, Christian learns, represents the futile effort to “sweep up” original sin by means of the law, followed by a successful effort to do so once the water of the gospel has entered the picture. In another, a fire is fueled by oil from an unseen source, in spite of someone’s effort to quench it with water. Christian learns that it is the devil who tries to throw water on the fire, which represents grace in the believer’s heart; it is Christ who secretly maintains the fire with oil. Though fire, oil, and water do appear frequently in the Bible, here Bunyan is drawing on the known behavior of these things in order to make a biblical point rather than dramatizing a particular Bible passage. The more involved scene, in which dust cannot be swept up until mixed with water, also appears to be drawn from experience. Here again, Bunyan cites no biblical references to dust or water, and in this case the images are not particularly recognizable as tropes. In PP , in short, Bunyan focuses on the book of nature infrequently, but enough

 

Pooley, “The Pilgrim’s Progress and the Line of Allegory,” ; Pooley names Thomas Luxon, Gordon Teskey, and Brenda Machosky as opposing Bunyan’s metaphysics on these grounds.   Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, . Ibid., –. Ibid., –.



Imagined Worlds

to illustrate that he thought the natural world could be a useful source of insight and not only a dangerous distraction. On this score Bunyan’s approach shifts markedly in the six years between PP  and PP , which narrates the subsequent spiritual journey of Christian’s wife and children over the same basic terrain. Nancy Rosenfield notes summarily that when comparing The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part I () with its sequel, Part II (), . . . we may trace a development away from allegory and towards realism. In Part II, for example, Old Honest introduces himself as “not Honesty in the Abstract, but Honest is my name” (PP, ). Similarly, Mercie does not merely represent the quality of mercy, but is a pleasant young woman named Mercie, a fairly common girl’s name at the time.

Most incarnationally of all, a minor character called Good Will in PP  turns out in PP  to be Jesus himself. While still allegorically depicting the progress of elect characters toward their spiritual reward, then, PP  lacks the strong counter-worldly urgency of PP . In PP , Christian was nearly damned for napping in a pleasant arbor, and the residents of the one town along the way summarily jailed the two pilgrims and killed Faithful. In PP , Christiana and her companions do face antagonism, but in general they find more friends among the characters they meet: their group is much bigger, they tarry safely at places that had been inhospitable to Christian, and their journey lasts long enough for Christiana’s children to grow up, marry, and reproduce, to no one’s spiritual detriment. The landscape too is generally friendlier in PP , in some cases due to the prior work of Christian and in others because of Christiana’s different constitution. The Valley of Humiliation, in which Christian was “hard put to it” in the descent and then met with Apollyon, is revealed in PP  to be “of it selfe as fruitful a place, as any the Crow flies over.” The valley is described at length, and not using exclusively biblical imagery: the pilgrims find a shepherd boy there, for instance, without a clear allegorical referent who seems to wear “that Herb called Hearts-ease,” a plant found not in the Bible but in Bunyan’s England.    



Nancy Rosenfeld, “The Holy War (),” in The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan, . Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, . The residents of Vanity, for instance, are “much more moderate now than formerly,” in PP  (). An exception to this is the spring that has become soiled since Christian’s time, representing the difficulty of “getting . . . good Doctrine in these erroneous times” (Pilgrim’s Progress, ). More often, though, warnings are erected and evil giants are slain on the pilgrims’ journeys, making the way easier for future pilgrims. Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, , –.

The Misunderstood Spider



In brief, Bunyan appears to be less suspicious of the world in PP  – or rather, between the two biblical senses of “world,” the good world of John . has expanded for him and the evil world of  John .– has shrunk. While feminist critics reasonably take issue with Bunyan’s thus softening the way for Christiana, his willingness to let her tarry and attend to her surroundings does position her to read the book of nature more and better than Christian could. And this is what in fact happens when she reaches the House of the Interpreter with her children and Mercie. Here Bunyan taps explicitly into the contemporary practice of occasional meditation, reading things that are more natural and more real than the ones Christian was shown. After we are told the group has seen and interpreted all “those things that were then so profitable to Christian,” the Interpreter shows them many additional things. Still in the Significant Rooms, they see a muckraker, a hen with her chicks, and a spider; they then leave the rooms to see a butcher killing a sheep, flowers, a harvested field, a robin eating a spider, and a rotten tree. This expansion of the list itself signals Bunyan’s increased attention to the book of nature in PP , as does the fact that many of the things are seen outside the house, lending them greater permanence and reality in the world of the text than those in its rooms. The focus has also shifted notably from human to nonhuman creation: only the first of the added scenes focuses on a human. A closer look at these occasional meditations reveals that Bunyan’s “emblematic” imagination is informed by fresh observation of the natural world and can reach for surprising interpretations, much like Boyle’s. After interpreting the muckraker as a person too focused on earthly things, Christiana and her companions are shown into a “very brave Room.” Initially they fail to see anything, finally noticing “a very great Spider on the Wall.” It is Christiana who first recognizes that the spider figures herself and her companions, whose sin is “far more destructive” than the spider’s venom – a painful realization. Just as this is sinking in, however, the Interpreter shifts the meaning of the spider in a positive direction: The Spider taketh hold with her hands, as you see, and is in Kings Pallaces. And wherefore is this recorded, but to show you, that how full of the Venome of Sin soever you be, yet you may by the hand of Faith lay hold of, and dwell in the best Room that belongs to the Kings House above? 

See Margaret Olofson Thickstun, Fictions of the Feminine: Puritan Doctrine and the Representation of Women (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), – and “The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part II (),” in The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan, –.



Imagined Worlds Chris. I thought, said Christiana, of something of this, but I could not imagin it all. I thought that we were like Spiders, and that we looked like ugly Creatures, in what fine Room soever we were: But that by this Spider, this venomous and ill favoured Creature, we were to learn how to act Faith, that came not into my mind. And yet she has taken hold with her hands as I see, and dwells in the best Room in the House. God has made nothing in vain.

This positive use of the spider is drawn from Proverbs . in the (English) Bible, a verse that has been on Bunyan’s mind since Resurrection from the Dead and that prompts the longest meditation in his Book for Boys and Girls. Even the Bible more often uses the spider negatively than positively, however, and Bunyan depends on its negative imaginative heft here, for Christiana says that she “could not imagin” the positive interpretation and it “came not into [her] mind.” This positive reading of the spider is thus just the kind of interpretation “extremely distant from what one would conjecture to be the most obvious” that Boyle endorses in his Discourse. In this case Bunyan has conversed more assiduously with scripture than with nature, unearthing the (English) biblical minority report of the faith-filled spider, but she is nonetheless true to nature in her venom and ability to cling to walls. The surprising revelation of the spider’s good example is apparently what recommended her to Bunyan above the three other “small things in the earth” that yet are “wise” listed in Proverbs .–: ants, “coneys,” and grasshoppers. Among the four, spiders are ugly and venomous, carrying the suggestion of natural evil. For Bunyan, as for contemporary physicotheologians, there is no such thing as natural evil. Christiana’s claim that “God has made nothing in vain” does not come from the biblical passage, but it is consistent with Bunyan’s theology and was axiomatic for physicotheologians, whose project was to show how all things evince God’s  

  

Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, –. Fascinatingly, English translators appear to be unique in rendering as “spider” this Hebrew word, which probably meant some kind of (feminine) lizard or gecko. This innovation occurred between Wycliffe’s fourteenth-century translation, which has “lizard,” and the sixteenth-century Coverdale Bible. Robert Alter notes in his translation that it must be “something small and easily caught” (). I am grateful to Chanita Goodblatt for insights on this translation issue. Bunyan, Resurrection of the Dead, . On Book for Boys and Girls, see below. See Job . and Isaiah . and n.  above. The difficulty of translating the ancient Near Eastern book of nature into terms English readers could understand is on view throughout this biblical passage: besides the problems already mentioned with the ant and the lizard/spider, “coney,” or rabbit is how early modern translators chose to render the hyrax, an animal found throughout Africa and the Middle East but not in England.

The Misunderstood Spider



wisdom and providence. Also consistent with physico-theology is the way this claim foregrounds the spider’s utility to an attentive observer: Rather than seeing a particular creature as having a single spiritual referent, Bunyan (like Boyle and Baxter) viewed the meanest details of nature as potentially pointing to multiple, sometimes surprising, truths. If this meditation on the spider deliberately flouts the dominant interpretive tradition figuring spiders as evil, the next one shows how Bunyan’s interpretations are what Boyle would call “proper” in the sense of conforming to empirical observation. The Interpreter now takes the group to a room with a hen and chickens, explaining, “I chose, my Darlings, to lead you into the Room where such things are, because you are Women, and they are easie for you” (). Chickens are easy for the women and children to interpret because chickens turn up in domestic contexts while (for instance) men battling their way into castles do not. It has already been made clear that Christiana can benefit from the images her husband was shown. What is happening now is that she and her companions are being apprenticed into the practice of occasional meditation, redeeming their time by meditating on real, natural things close at hand for spiritual benefit. Like Richard Baxter, the Interpreter recognizes that women could make occasional meditations a “frequent profitable work” that need not overstrain their imaginations. Further, while this image of a hen does appear in the Bible, figuring Jesus, Bunyan takes this analogy as a point of departure rather than rehearsing it. The way a chicken looks toward heaven after taking each sip of water, the Interpreter says, figures how to “acknowledge whence your Mercies come.” The group then notices that the hen “walks in a fourfold Method towards her Chickens”:

 



Calloway, Natural Theology in the Scientific Revolution, e.g. –, . Here I depart from Kaufmann’s assessment in The Pilgrim’s Progress and Traditions in Puritan Meditation that the images of “contrived action” in PP  were “strong meat which Christian can digest, as a man” in contrast with things Christian and Mercy can understand (–); Christiana and Mercy have already been shown those things, and there is no indication they failed to understand them or received more help from the Interpreter than Christian had: in the very next room, Christiana immediately interprets the “contrived action” of the muckraker correctly (). My reading is in line with Margaret Ezell’s observation that women in PP  “take on the masculine qualities demanded of them when the occasion requires”; see “Bunyan and Gender,” in The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan, . Bunyan cites Matthew ., where Jesus says, “Jerusalem . . . how often would I have gathered my children together, as the hen gathered her chickens under her wings.” George Offor’s nineteenthcentury edition notes here that “observations and experience justify this excellent simile” ([London: Routledge, ], ).



Imagined Worlds She had a common call, and that she hath all day long. . She had a special call, and that she had but sometimes. . She had a brooding note. And . She had an out-cry. Now, said [the Interpreter], compare this Hen to your King, and these Chickens to his Obedient ones. For answerable to her, himself has his Methods, which he walketh in towards his People. By his common call, he gives nothing, by his special call, he always has something to give, he has also a brooding voice, for them that are under his Wing. And he has an out-cry, to give the Alarm when he seeth the Enemy come.

This is what Boyle would call a meditation whose circumstances have been thoroughly examined. Chickens do look up after taking a drink, using gravity to send the water down their throats; and they do make all kinds of noises, including “happy murmuring,” “broody growls,” “parenting and chick chatter,” and “predator alerts.” Now out of jail, Bunyan has been listening to chickens, and he wants his readers to pay more attention to the book of nature as well. To this end, he then takes the group in PP  out of the “Significant Rooms” altogether, but they do not at that point stop interpreting what they see as Christian had. Instead, they continue to interpret things that appear to exist on the same ontological level as themselves, with Christiana playing an active role in the process. Entering the Interpreter’s slaughterhouse – which readers of PP  did not know existed – they view a butcher killing a sheep. With her quiet submission, the sheep shows the pilgrims how to “put up wrongs without murmurings and complaints.” Devout readers would instantly recognize the allusion to Isaiah ., traditionally viewed by Christians (and glossed in the Geneva Bible) as pointing typologically to Christ: “He is brought as a sheep to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth.” Bunyan does not reference this verse, however, and here the sheep figures Christ’s followers rather than Christ himself. Bunyan also adds a gruesome natural detail, as the sheep “suffereth her Skin to be pulled over her Ears” as part of the process. Next, the group goes out to the garden, whose many diverse flowers stand “where the Gardiner has set them . . . and quarrel not with one another,” and then to the Interpreter’s field of wheat and corn, already harvested, whose lack of visible fruit brings on Christiana’s pronouncement that it should be  



Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, . Jason Roberts, “ Common Chicken Sounds & Noises,” Know Your Chickens, Mediavine Food, updated June , , www.knowyourchickens.com/chicken-sounds/#:~:text=noises.,what% they%have %to%say. Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, .

The Misunderstood Spider



burned. Finally, they “espied a little Robbin with a great Spider in its mouth.” Mercie does not understand the meaning of this, but Christiana recognizes that eating spiders does not reflect well on the robin. The Interpreter agrees and says that the robin figures hypocrites who, when alone, “change their Diet, drink Iniquity, and swallow down Sin like Water.” In keeping with Bunyan’s willingness to interpret nature in a variety of ways, the spider’s meaning has become negative, and in this case the image is drawn from nature rather than the Bible, which does not mention robins. At this point the pilgrims reenter the house, but because supper was not yet ready, the Interpreter eventually takes them outside again to view a “Tree whose inside was all rotten, and gone, yet it grew and had Leaves.” Like the robin, this tree represents hypocrites, in this case those who “with their mouths speak high in behalf of God, but indeed will do nothing for him” (). Also like the robin, this rotten tree is not found in the Bible and thus was likely drawn from Bunyan’s experience. Passing over the biblical fruitless fig tree that Jesus cursed as well as the figures of unwashed cups and whited tombs Jesus used to condemn religious hypocrites, Bunyan instead looks to the English countryside for the robin and rotten tree, showing Christiana and his readers that they too can draw spiritual truth from the world around them. The pilgrims then return to the house, finding that “Supper was ready, the Table spread, and all things set on the Board; so they sate down and did eat” (). The fact that the pilgrims eat at the Interpreter’s house, kept on readers’ minds by the pilgrims’ entering the house only to leave again when supper is not ready, lends yet more realism to the whole episode than was the case in PP . We are not told what they eat, but it seems very plausible that it is the sheep they recently saw slaughtered, a possibility that fleshes out the allegorical sheep while also tapping into the well-known biblical imagery of Passover. They certainly eat lamb at their next stop (). In any case, Christian had not eaten at all at the house of the Interpreter: once he had seen his last image, he “began to gird up his loins, and to address himself to his journey” immediately ().  



Ibid., –. W. R. Owens points out in Pilgrim’s Progress, , that “Bunyan had earlier elaborated on this image in . . . The Barren Fig-Tree,” but that treatise dealt with a fruitless fig tree (drawn from Luke .–) rather than, as in this case, a tree “whose inside is rotten.” For the figures Jesus used to describe hypocrites, see Matthew .–. This omission may have bothered Bunyan later; we learn in PP  that Christian was given “a Bottle of Spirits, and some comfortable things to eat” on leaving the Interpreter’s house (). Similarly, in



Imagined Worlds

Though with ungirded loins, Christiana’s party nonetheless carries on, eventually arriving at the House Beautiful as Christian had done. Here again the difference in the instruction the two parties receive suggests a greater investment on Bunyan’s part in the goodness of the created world than in PP , and in encouraging the spiritual development of the group Baxter calls “women and weak persons.” In this case it is not primarily the women in the party who are apprenticed into the reading of nature, but the children. Neither Boyle nor Baxter mention children in their discussion of the wide applicability of occasional meditation. It fell to the less educated, more pastoral Bunyan to do this. At the House Beautiful, the group stays “about a Month or above” (Christian had stayed two nights), and Christiana gives Prudence leave to catechize her boys (). This catechesis begins in the usual way, as Prudence plies James, Joseph, Samuel, and Matthew with such questions as “Who made thee?” and “What is Gods design in saving of poor men?” This dialogue culminates in a summary pronouncement by Prudence: You must still harken to your Mother, for she can learn you more. You must also gently give ear what good talk you shall hear from others, for for your sakes do they speak good things. Observe also and that with carefulness, what the Heavens and the Earth do teach you; but especially be much in the Meditation of that Book that was the cause of your Fathers becoming a Pilgrim.

Readers are to imagine a longer and more involved process than the narrator has space to record, one that carries on beyond the house just as Christiana’s reading of nature was to carry on beyond the House of the Interpreter. Above all, the boys should meditate on the Bible, but they should also listen to their mother and other members of the community of faith – and they should observe “with carefulness, what the Heavens and the Earth do teach” them. While still at the House, Matthew already begins to work on interpreting nature. First he asks Prudence about the meaning of the “physic” he receives from Dr. Skill to cure the effects of the ill-gotten fruit he had eaten earlier – much as Boyle had taken time to interpret his ague in Occasional Reflections. Matthew does not stop there, however, going on to ask a litany of questions about natural phenomena:



PP  Christian does not eat anything when he reaches the pleasant arbor on the Hill Difficulty, while Christiana’s group consumes pomegranate, honeycomb, and “a little Bottle of Spirits” at the same place (). Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, –.

The Misunderstood Spider



What should we learn by seeing the Flame of our Fire go upwards? and by seeing the Beams, and sweet Influences of the Sun strike downwards? . . . Where have the Clouds their Water [and] What may we learn from that? . . . Why do they empty themselves upon the Earth? . . . Why is the Rainbow caused by the Sun? . . . Why do the Springs come from the Sea to us, thorough the Earth? . . . Why do some of the Springs rise out of the tops of high hills? . . . Why doth the Fire fasten upon the Candle-wick? . . . Why is the Wick and Tallow and all, spent to maintain the light of the Candle? . . . Why doth the Pelican pierce her own Brest with her Bill? What may one learn by hearing the Cock to crow?

Matthew is after spiritual interpretations rather than scientific explanations, but his observations are empirically informed, and in one case (“Where have the clouds their water?”) he must scientifically examine the circumstances before the spiritual conclusion can be drawn. Among these phenomena, the pelican is out of place as not native to England and not behaving in the manner Matthew and Prudence assume, but W. R. Owens’s gloss shows that this is an honest mistake based on observation rather than willful pretense. The intrusion of the traditional pelican highlights the nearness and observability of the other phenomena; all of these would be observable by the average child in England or New England. As the group at last leaves the House Beautiful, Piety gives them “a Scheme of all those things that thou hast seen at our House: upon which thou mayest look when thou findest thy self forgetful, and call those things again to remembrance for thy Edification.” This scheme is different from the “Book or map” of the Bible that they also have with them, instead recalling specifically the things they have seen at House Beautiful. The scheme is intended to do what Boyle hoped his Occasional Reflections would do, enabling Christians to form a “conclave mnemonicum” of God’s other book on which to draw for edification. This scheme does not reappear within the text as Christiana and her companions move on successfully to the Celestial City to join her husband, but something very similar materializes in Bunyan’s dedicated work of occasional meditations, published two years after PP . This little book, aimed at the “least” of God’s people, is the culmination of Bunyan’s increasing willingness to attend thoughtfully and hopefully to the book of the creatures.  



Ibid., –. Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, –, n. : “According to popular belief, pelicans fed their young with their blood (a fallacy arising from the fact that the parent bird takes food from the large bag under its bill and gives it to the young).”   Ibid., –. Ibid., . Boyle, Occasional Reflections, Discourse.



Imagined Worlds

Conclusion: Bunyan’s Book for Boys and Girls I have just explored how, in PP , Bunyan not only participates in the broad “two books” tradition and the narrower English Protestant practice of occasional meditation; within that newer genre, Bunyan innovates in a Boylean direction. Bunyan attends to the reality of nonhuman creation and draws lessons Joseph Hall might have called “farre-fetch’d,” departing from the received emblematic tradition if the Bible or experience justifies this departure. Bunyan continues to do all of these things in his  Book for Boys and Girls (BBG), to the extent that it seems likely he knew Boyle’s Occasional Reflections (, OR) specifically and was in conversation with the work. If this is the case, Bunyan may willfully be opposing certain aspects of Boyle’s approach – most notably, the potentially prideful virtuosity on view in Boyle’s prefatory Discourse as well as the meditations themselves, but also his venturing beyond specifically Christian spiritual lessons, a trend Bunyan characteristically reverses. On the other hand, Bunyan clearly saw great value in what Boyle was doing, conversing assiduously with the world around him for spiritual edification. Bunyan’s BBG is a collection of seventy-four verse meditations ranging from four to  lines in length; in each, as in Boyle’ prose OR, a phenomenon is described and then the moral brought out. Like OR (in which Boyle also meditates on seventy-four things) Bunyan’s BBG represents a departure from emblem books, a fact that became obscured in its publication history. The work was initially subtitled “Country rhimes for children” and catalogued by Charles Doe in  as “Meditations on Seventy-four Things”; a highly redacted second edition appeared in  with the subtitle “Temporal things Spiritualized.” By the ninth edition, published in , the work had become Divine Emblems and remained under this title through the twentieth century. Although Bunyan himself uses the word “emblem” in several of the poems, this title is misleading because the book contains no pictures. Instead Bunyan uses what Boyle called lively emblems: the great majority of things on which he meditates could be observed by an English child. Bunyan’s hopefulness 



Boyle’s OR lists seventy-five numbered meditations; of these, however, two continue to meditate on death rather than introducing new “things” (titled “Upon the same subject” and “A further continuation”); Boyle also included one unnumbered meditation on a new subject (“Sports being interrupted by rainy weather”) between two sections. Shannon Murray, “A Book for Boys and Girls: Or, Country Rhimes for Children: Bunyan and Literature for Children,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bunyan, –. Rosemary Freeman identifies Bunyan as “the end of the [emblematic] tradition,” pointing out that “Bunyan’s handling

The Misunderstood Spider



and attention to the natural world impressed the work’s twentieth-century editor Graham Midgeley, who identified in the poems A realism of description of the world and its inhabitants Bunyan knew, its men, its animals, and its work. Though he uses the world as an allegory and draws morals from it for his children, his delight in that world for itself often captures the excited wonder of the child’s eye.

This tone of wonder and delight rather than fear and brimstone was unusual if not unique in children’s literature of this period, the first period to produce children’s literature. In its realism and fidelity to the natural world, the work certainly answers Boyle’s call for lessons to form themselves to observations rather than the other way around. In fact, the two texts take up many of the same objects: a variegated cloud, a fish, a rose, a spider, a disease that needs physic, a candle in a lantern, a mirror, a bird and a bird-catcher, an hour-glass, a horse, and others – in some cases to teach the same lesson. Both works meditate in the author’s own voice as well as “dialogue-wise,” like the men “high as trees” Bunyan referenced in the apology for Pilgrim’s Progress. In his apologetic poem prefaced to BBG, moreover, Bunyan makes several of the same points Boyle had in his Defense. Like Boyle, Bunyan explains that he does not raise his sights to solemn and high matters, instead considering humble things as a concession to his audience. He thus fights the snares of sin indirectly, as often happens in the Bible itself. Despite these similarities between Bunyan’s approach and Boyle’s, already in his address to the reader Bunyan treats his audience differently than had Boyle. Boyle opens with a polite and deferential dedication to Lady Ranelagh; Bunyan opens with a verse apology for his work insisting that he writes not only for literal children but also “Boys with Beards, and Girls that be Big as old Women, wanting Gravity” and in short, “Fools,” who are “addict to nothing as to childish Toys.” Bunyan’s audience is emphatically morally culpable, but it is the foolish that God has chosen, and so Bunyan will work “to show them how each Fingle-fangle / On which they doting are, their Souls entangle.” These fools include boys

   

of the convention is . . . much freer than that of his predecessors; he has not collected his material from familiar literary sources nor is he tied to a particular mode of presentation.” (English Emblem Books, ). Graham Midgeley, “Introduction,” in The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, Vol. VI: The Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), lviii. Murray, “A Book for Boys and Girls,” –. John Bunyan, A Book for Boys and Girls [] in The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, Vol. VI: The Poems, . Ibid., –.



Imagined Worlds

and girls, men and women, educated and not, whereas Boyle makes stark distinctions based on gender and education and does not address children at all. For Bunyan, the only crucial distinction is whether a reader’s conscience has been awakened to sin. Accordingly, his opening meditations do not draw lessons from the natural world. Bunyan follows the prefatory poem with a primer intended to equip any pre-literate members of his audience; they are taught to spell “In Me you find Sin: In Christ, Righteousness” and then their own names. Next comes a verse rendition of the Ten Commandments and a poem entitled “The Awakened Child’s Lamentation.” Faced with the divine law of the previous poem, the awakened child recognizes her own filthiness and need for God. In this painful recognition, the child’s experience matches Bunyan’s own as told in his autobiography. In opening his occasional meditations this way, Bunyan positions the Protestant “Book of the Conscience” as a propaedeutic for reading the book of nature, standing in for the spiritual awakenings that set Christian and Christiana on their pilgrimages in his narrative allegories. As Scott Mandelbrote has shown, for early modern Protestants God speaks through more than just the two books of nature and scripture: to these must be added a third book, conscience. Mandelbrote names the Cambridge Platonists’ concept of an innate idea as a species of conscience, although the conscience operating in “Awakened Child’s Lamentation” carries more of a conviction of sin and guilt, and less of a sense of a godlike rational faculty, than its Cambridge Platonist counterpart. This humility colors Bunyan’s hermeneutic of nature and enables him to submit to nature’s teaching as the Cambridge Platonists did not, avoiding the danger of being “grosly mistaken and confuted by Experience.” In fact, Bunyan’s stance toward nature is humbler even than Boyle’s. Boyle spoke of masterfully “compel[ling] senseless creatures” to reveal spiritual truths, a practice that he says requires much more acumen than taking lessons out of works of divinity. Bunyan chides humans from the start for their foolishness and avers that the book of nature can be much easier than other books: because “some better handle can a Fly, / Then some a text,” Bunyan asks,

 



Mandelbrote, “Early Modern Biblical Interpretation,” –. On this tradition see Greene, “Whichcote, the Candle of the Lord, and Synderesis.” Henry More and Ralph Cudworth are examples of a high view of what human conscience could achieve. Examples of the guilt-inducing variety, which could tip over into spiritual counterproductivity, are on view in George Herbert’s “Conscience” as well as Bunyan’s Grace Abounding. John Ray expresses this concern regarding Descartes and Ralph Cudworth in Wisdom of God, .

The Misunderstood Spider



“Why should we them deny / Their making Proof, or good experiment, / Of smallest things great mischiefs to prevent?” As was the case in PP , Bunyan’s “experiments” in BBG consistently conform to his observation of nature but not necessarily to the emblematic tradition regarding nature’s good guys and bad guys. The expressive chicken returns, for instance, this time with a “kackling” whenever she lays an egg. In this case, however, she represents not Christ but those who brag every time they do anything good. Bunyan meditates on the bee, but as figuring sin with its stinging rather than industry. The snail, who “makes no noise, but stilly seizeth on / The Flow’r or Herb” figures the hopeful Christian who with “one Act of Faith” shall not fail to have life in Christ. Throughout, in sum, Bunyan continues to model how biblically informed attentiveness to the book of the creatures can reveal surprising and edifying spiritual truths. At the same time, Bunyan continues to lay great stress on the mediator’s spiritual status over and against education, age, and gender, while these remain starkly distinguished in Boyle’s meditations. For Boyle, children are useful only as objects of meditation and always negatively: on one occasion, his speaker observes a “lickerish chit” eating only the nonnutritious parts of his meal; this reminds him of “the unwelcome Fate of some papers of mine, that treat of Devotion, have met with.” On another, Boyle unfavorably compares a child’s “querulous and unruly” response to seeing the stars to his own diligent gazing, enabled by his “inclinations for Astronomy”; similarly, many adults cannot read the book of nature calmly and productively as he can. In particular, many men cannot look at beautiful women without wanting them and thus fail to see them as “bright and curious Productions” and adore “only the Divine Artificer” (as Boyle can), which is the appropriate response. This is far from Boyle’s only gender-specific meditation: since the work is dedicated to a lady and aimed at ladies, he singles them out frequently. For example, he observes children using the early modern equivalent of water wings, which keep them from swimming well, but which also keep them from drowning. So too does education in “civility” help women, he pronounces, making “their company tolerable” even if it fails to raise them to Christian heights.    

  Bunyan, Book for Boys and Girls, . Ibid., –. Ibid., –. Ibid., –. On race and nationality, by contrast, Boyle decenters the English as the measure of all things in his striking meditation on eating oysters (Occasional Reflections, –).   Boyle, Occasional Reflections, . Ibid., –. Ibid., –.



Imagined Worlds

Bunyan by contrast makes clear his work is for “boys and girls” alike and never singles women out either as objects of meditation or as audience members – a departure even from his own Pilgrim’s Progress. He does meditate on children, frequently, but when he considers negative “childish” behavior, the emphasis falls on the ways all adults (not just uneducated ones, and including himself ) are similarly foolish. Bunyan also uses children positively, in one instance possibly in conversation with Boyle. Commenting on how unwise humans are in assigning relative values to things, Boyle uses the figure of a child who is sadder “for the scape of a Sparrow” than “for the loss of a good Estate, nay, of a Friend.” Bunyan too interprets a child losing a bird. Speaking in the child’s voice (something Boyle never does), he woos the bird with great care, only to have it fly away at the end. Bunyan then explains, “This Child of Christ an Emblem is; / The Bird to Sinners I compare.” In Bunyan’s reading, rather than evincing a lack of wisdom, the child’s love confers value on the bird as Christ’s love confers value on the sinner. This lesson of the bird is reminiscent of Bunyan’s similar use of a snail to figure the sinner poised to receive Christ’s love, and also of the spider who showed how to “act faith” in PP . In fact, the spider reappears in the longest meditation in BBG: “The Sinner and the Spider.” Crucially (and in contrast with PP ), in this instance, the spider does not just figure a spiritual reality; she also comments on her own literal status as God’s good creation. Like many of Boyle’s meditations, the poem enacts a dialogue, but unlike Boyle’s three enlightened male speakers, here a sinner and spider exchange views, about which of them is worse. Reminiscent of Balaam’s donkey, the spider takes a reprimanding tone once her mouth has been opened. Accused by the sinner of filthiness, she retorts, “Not filthy as thy self,” pointing out that God made her this way. When the sinner returns that she is not made in God’s image, she acknowledges that he is indeed “a Creature far above me” but insists that his “sin has fetcht thee down,” making him a “very Beast” (like Mr. Badman), whereas she has retained “all, but what I lost by thy Ambition.” She continues:    

E.g. Bunyan, Book for Boys and Girls, “To the Reader,” –, –, .  Boyle, Occasional Reflections, . Bunyan, Book for Boys and Girls, . Neither the sinner nor spider is given a gender; I keep the spider female to be consistent with Proverbs and PP  and use “he” for the speaker for clarity. Bunyan, Book for Boys and Girls, .



The Misunderstood Spider My Venom’s good for something, ’cause God made it; Thy Sin has spoilt thy Nature, doth degrade it ... Thou sayst I am the very Dregs of Nature, Thy Sin’s the spawn of Devils, ’tis no Creature. My venom tendeth to my Preservation; Thy pleasing Follies work out thy Damnation. Poor man, I keep the rules of my Creation; Thy sin has cast thee headlong from thy Station. I hurt no body willingly; but thou Art a self-Murderer. ()

The claims here are fuller and stronger than Christiana’s observation of the spider that “God has made nothing in vain.” Here, as in Hooke’s Micrographia and the insecto-theologies that would proliferate in the eighteenth century, the spider’s venom is “good for something” and “tendeth to [her] preservation”; human sin is pure privation and has no place on the scale of being. What is more, this sin has hurt the creatures: the spider laments that the sinner “has brought to Bondage every thing / Created, from the Spider to the King” and adds, “This we poor Sensitives do feel and see” and asks that he “tread not upon me.” Bunyan is not merely “reading” the spider but also opening her mouth so she can comment on her own literal status within God’s story. When she does so, she emphasizes continuity between herself and humans, not categorical difference: they are part of the same story of bondage due to sin – and, by inference, of potential liberation. As the dialogue continues, the spider says she will try to help the sinner even though he despises her, unfolding multiple lessons her behavior can teach, most of them negative ones about how Satan traps humans and takes them to hell. Throughout these, however, it is clear that the spider herself is not evil but is doing her best to help the human, who for his part is a foolish sinner and not a masterful scientist. The last and longest lesson of the spider is the positive one from PP , in which by taking hold of king’s palaces she shows “how thou may’st possess thy self of Bliss: / Thou art worse than a Spider but take hold / On Christ the Door, thou shalt not be controul’d.” Through the dialogue the sinner comes to see his error, admitting to the spider, “Thou art my Monitor, I am a Fool; / They learn may, that to Spiders go to School.” 

Ibid., .



Ibid., , .



Imagined Worlds

In this dialogue, Bunyan does not positively assert that nonhuman creatures have a place in eternity as Henry Vaughan had done, but with the spider’s claim that “sensitives” can feel and see their human-caused bondage, drawn from the claim in Romans . that “every creature groaneth” for the liberty of God, he is headed in that direction. By the time he wrote Book for Boys and Girls, Bunyan had come to see the world less as a potentially dangerous distraction from spiritual realities and more as God’s good creation, subject to frustration as a result of human sin and groaning along with humans for renewal and regeneration. Bunyan’s increasing attention to the natural world, as well as his repeated insistence that human antipathy for certain creatures is misguided, is in harmony with the physico-theologians’ desire to show empirically how all things work for the good of God’s people. At the same time, he does not scrap analogical ways of reading nature, drawing sometimes surprising spiritual meanings from these newly examined things. Moreover, while some scientifically minded Protestants located the difficulty of natural theology in wresting lessons out of an unwilling and perplexing world, Bunyan relocates this difficulty in human sin. Because of sin, the only way a human can read the book of nature is with a conscience awake to the effects of sin on her own reason and relationship to other creatures. Still, the creatures continue to teach, because “The Law of [their] Creation bids” it, as Bunyan’s spider says. Of the role of the creatures in the wayfaring pilgrim’s story, she concludes, Yet I will speak, I can but be rejected; Sometimes great things, by small means are effected. ()

Epilogue Literature and Natural Theology at the Dawn of the Boyle Lectures

Houseman We need science to explain the world . . .. The only reason to consider what Plato meant about anything is if it’s relevant to settling the text. Which is classical scholarship, which is science, the science of textual criticism. Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love ()

If the Seeds of subterraneous Minerals must not ferment, and sometimes cause Earthquakes, then all things must have been overruled miraculously by the immediate interposition of God without any mechanical Affections or settled laws of nature. So that if it was good in the sight of God, that the present Plants and Animals, and Humane Souls united to Flesh and Blood should be upon this Earth under a settled constitution of nature: these supposed Inconveniences, as they were foreseen and permitted by the Author of Nature, cannot infer the least imperfection in his Wisdom and Goodness. Richard Bentley, The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism ()

By the end of the seventeenth century natural theology looked very different than it had at the beginning: Compendious readings of the book of nature gave way to physico-theology with its agenda of proving God’s existence by an appeal to design in the details of nature as uncovered by natural science. Imaginative literature began to look different too, as authors of fiction similarly set increasingly higher premiums on detail and realism. These parallel developments crystallized in Richard Bentley, the textual critic improbably chosen to give the inaugural Boyle Lectures in natural theology in . Bentley aimed to “settle the text” of the book of nature once and for all, just as he had settled Homer’s texts by discovering the digamma, an obsolete Greek letter whose existence suddenly made the lines scan properly. Tom Stoppard wryly celebrates Bentley’s groundbreaking contribution to philology in his character A. E. Housman, a twentiethcentury poet and classicist who likewise viewed “settling the text” as the 



Epilogue

main thing – never mind its meaning. Assuming that Greek and Roman authors knew what they were doing, Bentley set out to establish exactly what they must have written. Turning to natural theology, he approached the divine author of nature the same way, seeking to establish through Newtonian physics the “settled constitution of nature” that would prove God’s existence and wisdom once and for all – never mind the book of nature’s meaning. But Bentley’s was not the only way poetry and natural theology could be brought together, even as the seventeenth century drew to a close and an ambitious strain of physico-theology began to dominate the intellectual landscape. This book began by considering John Donne, a poet who viewed God’s works as “metaphorical,” packed with meanings like Donne’s own poetry. Already in those early decades, Donne was not wedded to the medieval conception of nature as existing only to point beyond herself, to a set of preordained and static eternal meanings; she had agency and could reveal surprising new truths to an attentive and receptive observer. As natural philosophers paid greater attention to nature over the course of the century, poets continued to look for theological truth in their discoveries – sometimes in harmony with the waxing argument from design, sometimes in conflict with it, and often simply going beyond the propositional assertions that philosophers could assert or negate. For these poets, final and efficient causes, deeper meaning and accurate knowledge, remained a “both/and” rather than the “either/or” Bacon had methodologically urged. Thus did George Herbert and Henry Vaughan attend in their devotional lyrics to the economy visible in the circulation of water and the life cycle of plants and animals. Thus did Lucy Hutchinson and John Milton proclaim in their biblical epics that something of God can be discerned in his “visible productions” and that humans can trace God’s footsteps in the natural world, even after the Fall. These poets did not evince fear that natural philosophers would find something that would disprove God’s existence and providence, but they did fight to keep eternity in view as some scientific reformers wittingly or unwittingly began to eclipse eternity in favor of empirical knowledge and mastery of the physical world. At the same time, poets drew from the scientific revolution insights that could allow their readers to appreciate the natural world in new ways. Scholarly narratives tracing the decline or death of (the book of ) nature tend to cast John Bunyan as evincing this death: Bunyan’s allegories are “an experiment in removing the sacred from the material realm of history into the private realm of self” and an example of the way “allegory ceases to be a principle of interpretation and becomes

Epilogue



primarily a device utilized by an author.” Peter Harrison quips that “Bunyan’s Book for Boys and Girls was not confused with treatises on natural history,” and this is true, but we have seen that the Book for Boys and Girls was part of a genre valued and furthered by contemporary scientists who still believed that nature was full of theological truth, especially when contemplated as she really was. Conversely, scientific reformers’ emphasis on the letter of nature, her physical composition and operations, allowed imaginative authors such as Bunyan to reconsider creatures such as the spider as God’s good creation and not merely a symbol of wickedness. One possibility opened by this unsettling of nature’s text, in other words, was a new awareness among literary authors of what nonhuman creatures might be trying to communicate about themselves with their groanings and mutterings – even stones, though speechless, are not dumb, Vaughan declares. Though ecocritics are right to notice a damaging, world-hating strain in some early modern Calvinist authors, in this book Protestantism emerges as full of potential to give creatures a voice. Protestant reformers’ emphasis on the literal text of scripture led authors such as Vaughan and Bunyan back to biblical passages stressing the spiritual importance and agency of nonhuman creation. In Luke ., for instance, Jesus proclaims that if people were remiss in praising him, “the stones would immediately cry out” instead, and in Romans . St. Paul writes that “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth together” in the knowledge that things are not as they should be, for “the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” Taken literally, as a Protestant might take them, verses such as these have striking things to say about the spiritual status of nonhuman creation. Answering Andrew Marvell’s rhetorical question of why doves should mourn, Vaughan and Bunyan accordingly arrived at the conclusion that they do so not (only) to emblem regeneration but because they are in bondage just as we humans are. This renewed awareness of the creatures’ spiritual predicament was aided rather than hindered by the new sciences’ emphasis on the letter of nature, and the microscope was uncovering the beauty and detail of God’s works just as Hutchinson was celebrating these things in her Protestant biblical epic.  

Crawford, Allegory and Enchantment, ; Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Modern Science, . Ibid., .



Epilogue

But these poems could go beyond the microscope and telescope, to places prose scientific and natural theological treatises could not reach. Authors such as Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson, and John Milton could imagine at length what it was like to create a world, considering in the process why the Creator might have made our own world one way and not another. Poets might even question if there always needed to be a reason, as Herbert does when he celebrates the playfulness on view in the way God made the crocodile and elephant. They could open their fellow creatures’ mouths, as Vaughan and Bunyan did for the rooster and the spider. And while natural philosophers began methodologically to rule out eternal meaning in nature, poets were free to continue finding such meaning, even as they accepted and incorporated new scientific knowledge into their works. They could do this because they viewed God’s book of nature not as a flat prose treatise with a single and unchanging set of spiritual referents, but as poetry – like much of the book of scripture. The lively variety of “readings” in their works did not conclusively prove religious doctrines, but they invited readers into the poetic work of a metaphorical God. 

See David Lyle Jeffrey, Scripture and the English Poetic Imagination (Ada, MI: Baker Academic, ); e.g.: “When we look more closely at the full canon of Scripture . . . we soon encounter the voice of a God who speaks fulsomely and frequently in poetry, and that not in any such way as to mask the truth he utters” ().

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Whitney, Charles, “Bacon and Herbert: Bacon and Herbert as Moderns,” in Edmund Miller and Robert DiYanni (eds.), Like Season’ d Timber: New Essays on George Herbert (New York: Peter Lang, ), –. Wilcox, Helen, “A Garden in a Paradise: The Eloquence of Place in Herbert’s Temple,” George Herbert Society Plenary Preview Panel, streamed live on June , , YouTube video, www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHIYhhEcA, at :. “Herbert, George (–),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), online ed., , doi.org/./ ref:odnb/. “Voices and Echoes: Poetical Precedents from Herbert to Bunyan,” Bunyan Studies  (): –. ed., The English Poems of George Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Woolford, Thomas, “Natural Theology and Natural Philosophy in the Late Renaissance” (PhD Diss., University of Cambridge, ). Wright, Joanne H. “Darkness, Death, and Precarious Life in Cavendish’s Sociable Letters and Orations,” in Brandie R. Siegfried and Lisa T. Sarasohn (eds.), God and Nature in the Thought of Margaret Cavendish (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, ), –. Wright, Seth Andrew, “Meditative Poetry, Covenant Theology, and Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorderss” (PhD Diss., Baylor University, ). Young, Davis A., John Calvin and the Natural World (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, ).

Index

Adam (in Paradise Lost), –, – allegorical tradition in Pilgrim’s Progress, – allegory and nature,  Alston, William P.,  analogy of being (analogia entis), –, – see also Sylvester, Joshua, ants,  Aquinas, Thomas, ,  Augustine, St., – Bacon, Francis and the book of nature, – and Cavendish, – and Donne, – and Herbert, –, – and Milton, – and natural theology, –, –,  and science,  summary (natural) law, – Bacon, Francis, works Advancement of Learning, –, , –, , , – De Dignitate,  De Sapientia Veterum, ,  New Atlantis, ,  “Of Atheism,” , – Banks, T. H.,  Barth, Karl,  Baxter, Richard and Boyle, – Knowledge and Love Compared, – and Milton, –, – More Reasons of the Christian Religion, – Reasons of the Christian Religion, , – bees, , – Bentley, Richard, –, –, , – Berger, Harry, 

Bible, The, natural theology in, – biblical epic, , –,  see also Divine Weekes and Workes (Sylvester); Order and Disorder (Hutchinson); Paradise Lost (Milton), Blazing World, The (Cavendish), , – Book for Boys and Girls (Bunyan), – book of nature, the and Bacon, – and Bentley, – and Boyle, – and Bunyan, –, –, –, , – in Christian theology,  and Denham, – and Donne, – and Herbert, , – and Hutchinson,  and Marvell, – medieval, –, – and Milton,  and physico-theology,  Puritan view of, – Reformation, pre- and post-, – and Sylvester, – and Vaughan,  Boyle Lectures, –,  Boyle, Robert and Baxter, – book of nature, the, – and Bunyan, – and children, – and occasional meditation, – and science,  Bunyan, John book of nature, the, –, –, –, , – and Boyle, – and children, – realism, –, – and science, –



Index Bunyan, John, works Book for Boys and Girls, – Grace Abounding,  Life and Death of Mr. Badman, The, – Resurrection of the Dead, The,  Sighs from Hell,  “Sinner and the Spider, The,” – see also Pilgrim’s Progress Burnet, Thomas, – Bury, Edward, ,  Calamy, Edmund,  Calvin, John, –,  candle of the Lord, the, –, – caritas in Paradise Lost,  Cavendish, Margaret, , – chickens, – children, , –, – Christiana (in Pilgrim’s Progress Part ), – coconuts, – Colie, Rosalie,  “comprehend,” to, , , ,  conscience, book of the, – Coolahan, Marie-Louise, ,  Coopers Hill (Denham), – Covenant, God’s, – Crashaw, Richard,  Crawford, Jason,  creation, human and divine in Denham, – in Hutchinson, – in Marvell, – in Sylvester, – creation, nonhuman in Bunyan, – in Herbert, – and salvation,  in Vaughan, , –, – Culverwell, Nathaniel,  Curtius, E. R.,  decline of the world, – Dell, William, ,  Denham, Sir John, – Derham, William,  devotional poetry,  Dickson, Donald,  Divine Weekes and Workes (Sylvester), –,  Doerksen, Daniel,  Donne, John and Bacon, – and the book of nature, – “elemented” nature of the divine, – emblematic tradition, –



and God, – and the human body, – natural (summary) law, – seafaring metaphors, – and Sebond,  wonder, – Donne, John, works Anniversaries, –,  Biathanatos,  “Blossom, The,”  “Ecstasy, The,” – Elegy ,  Essayes in Divinity, –, –,  “Expostulation ,”  “Good Friday : Riding Westward,” – Holy Sonnet,  “Love’s Growth,”  sermons, –, , – “Twickenham Garden,”  “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” – “A Valediction: of the Book,”  Donnelly, Phillip,  doves, –,  Du Bartas, Guillaume de Saluste, Sieur, –,  Ecclesiastes, book of, –, , , ,  ecocriticism, –, ,  Edwards, Karen,  “elemented” nature of the divine, – emblem books, –,  emblematic tradition, –, –, –,  equivocity of being, , – Eve (in Paradise Lost), –, – Evelyn, John,  fables,  Fall, the (in Paradise Lost), – fiction and poetry, – final causes in classical philosophy,  Fish, Stanley,  Flannagan, Roy,  Forrest, James F.,  Funari, Anthony,  Gascoigne, John,  Gentles, Ian J.,  Gillies, John, – glossative reading of nature,  God as architect, –, – and Cavendish, – as designer, –

 God (cont.) and Donne, – and Hutchinson, – providence, – God-knowing and godlike knowing, –, –, – God’s books, –, –, ,  God’s Covenant, – God’s lieutenant, nature as, – Greaves, Richard L., , ,  Greek philosophy, Herbert and, – Harrison, Peter, – Henry, John,  Herbert, Edward,  Herbert, George and Bacon, –, – book of nature, the, , – education,  emblematic tradition, – God-knowing and godlike knowing, – God’s Covenant, – and Greek philosophy, – and natural theology in practice, – and the natural world, – nonhuman creation, – and science, – Herbert, George, works “Affliction (IV),”  “Altar, The,”  “Church, The,”  Church Militant, The, – Country Parson, The, , –,  “Decay,” – “Divinitie,”  “Easter Wings,”  “Elixer, The,”  “Faith,” – “Grace,”  “Holy Baptisme (II),”  “Longing,”  “Man,” ,  “Man’s Medley,”  “Mattens,” – “Miserie,”  “Nature,” – “New Year Sonnet,” – “Praise (I),”  “Providence,” –,  “Pulley, The,”  “Search, The,”  “Sinne (I),” , – Temple, The, –,  “Trinity Sunday,”  “Ungratefulnesse,” 

Index “Vanitie (),” , – “Virtue,”  Herbert, Henry,  Hillier, Russell,  Hooke, Robert, –,  House Beautiful (in Pilgrim’s Progress), – House of the Interpreter (in Pilgrim’s Progress), , – housekeeper, nature as divine, –,  humans, theological status of,  Hume, David, ,  Hutchinson, F. E.,  Hutchinson, Lucy, – Isaiah,  Johannine books,  Kaufman, U. Milo,  language, perfect, – light, divine, –, – local poems,  Lodwick, Francis,  Lubac, Henri De,  Lucretius, ,  Mandelbrote, Scott,  Marvell, Andrew, – Matthew (in Pilgrim’s Progress Part ), – medieval book of nature, –, – Merchant, Carolyn,  Michael (in Paradise Lost), –, ,  microscopes, ,  Midgeley, Graham,  Milton, John and Bacon, – and Baxter, –, –, – book of nature, the,  and science, – see also Paradise Lost, Montaigne, Michel de, – More, Henry An Antidote against Atheism, –, , , , –,  univocity of being,  Ψυχωδια [Psychodia] Platonica, – natural (summary) law, –, – natural theology (definitions), – Newton, Isaac,  occasional meditation, , –, ,  O’Hehir, Brendan, –,  Ong, Walter, 

Index Order and Disorder (Hutchinson), – Owen, John, , –,  Owens, W. R., ,  Paradise Lost (Milton) Adam, –, – and Baxter, –, – and Bentley, –,  biblical material,  book of nature, the,  caritas,  Eve, –, – Fall, the, – God-knowing and godlike knowing, – Michael, –, ,  and natural theologists, – Raphael, –, , – reason, – Satan, – science in, –, –, – theocentrism in, – Pettet, E. C., , ,  physico-theology, , , , – Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan) allegorical tradition in, – book of nature, the, ,  Christiana, – House Beautiful, – House of the Interpreter, , – Matthew, – spiders, – poetry (poesy) (in the seventeenth century), – providence, God’s, – Psalm , –,  Puritanism book of nature, the, – and science, – Rajan, Balachandra, – Raphael (in Paradise Lost), –, , – Ray, John, , –, –, – realism in Bunyan’s works, –, – reason, human in Paradise Lost, – Reeves, Paschal,  Reformation and the book of nature, – Renaissance Europe and natural theology, – revelation, special, , , , – Rich, Mary, ,  Robertson, D. W., – Royal Society, , ,  Rudrum, Alan, 



salvation, , , – Satan (in Paradise Lost), – science and Bacon,  and Boyle,  and Bunyan, – and Herbert, – and Milton, –, –, – and occasional meditation, – and Puritanism, – seventeenth century, –, – and Vaughan, –, – seafaring metaphors, –,  Sebond, Raymond of, –, –,  Semaines (Du Bartas), –,  Sharrock, Roger,  Sidney, Sir Philip, –, – silkworms,  spiders, –, –, , – Spurr, John,  summary (natural) law, –, – Svendsen, Kester, ,  Sylvester, Joshua, –,  theocentricism in Paradise Lost, – Thomas Aquinas, ,  Todd, Richard, , – torture,  Turnbull, Margaret,  Tuve, Rosamund,  typology, – univocity of being, – see also Denham, Sir John; Sylvester, Joshua, Upon Appleton House (Marvell), – Vaughan, Henry book of nature, the,  creation, nonhuman, , –, – education,  God’s Covenant, – and the natural world, –, – and science, –, – Vaughan, Henry, works “And Do They So?,” ,  “Bird, The,”  “Book, The,” , – “Cock-Crowing,” – “Corruption,” – “Day of Judgment, The,”  “I walk’t the other day (to spend my hour),” – “Morning Watch,” –

 Vaughan, Henry, works (cont.) “Providence,”  “Religion,” – “Retreate, The,”  “Search, The,” – Silex Scintillans, , , – “Stone, The,”  “Tempest, The,” – “Vanity of Spirit,” – Vaughan, Thomas, , 

Index Watson, Robert N., – Webster, John, , – Wesley, John,  Whiston, William,  Wilcox, Helen,  Wilkins, John, , ,  women and occasional meditation, ,  world, decline of the, – “world,” definitions of, ,  world-building, 