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The New Atlantis: Francis Bacon's Theological-Political Utopia?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2008

Suzanne Smith
Suzanne Smith*
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Cambridge, Massachusetts
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In his seminal 1968 study of Francis Bacon's political thought, Howard B. White argued that the New Atlantis is “a rewriting of a Platonic myth, and a rewriting clearly intended as a refutation.” Bacon's attack on Plato, however, is partially mediated through his critique of Christianity. Indeed, Bacon pays more explicit attention to the tropes and themes of revealed religion than he does to those of the story of the “old” Atlantis told in Plato's Timaeus and Critias. Scholars are divided as to the exact nature of Bacon's intentions in his treatment of religion in the New Atlantis. Richard Tuck suggests that “the desire for a reconstructed religion” is “explicit in the blend of Protestantism and Judaism” created by Bacon. Most scholars, however, unlike Tuck, argue that Bacon was more interested in undermining religion—or more specifically, its political authority—than in reconstructing it. Laurence Lampert's argument that Bacon stands at the head of “the actual holy war fought in Europe . . ., the warfare of science against religion that tamed sovereign religion” typifies much of the scholarly commentary on the New Atlantis since White's reading of it almost forty years ago. The consensus view is that Bacon promotes the politic manipulation of the tropes and themes of revealed religion so that they might be made to support the modern scientific project and the cause of peace from religious strife: “Bacon's lifelong concern for religion uniformly expressed itself in arguments for moderation in religion.” White argues that Bacon demonstrates how “religious turmoil” can be countered “not only by religious toleration, but also by religious eclecticism, amounting to religious universality.”

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Harvard Theological Review , Volume 101 , Issue 1 , January 2008 , pp. 97 - 125
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Copyright © President and fellows of Harvard college 2008

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References

1 White, Howard B., Peace Among the Willows: The Political Philosophy of Francis Bacon (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968) 112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Tuck, Richard, “The Utopianism of Leviathan,” in Leviathan After 350 Years (ed. Sorrel, Tom and Foisneau, Luc; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 137.Google Scholar

3 Lampert, Laurence, Nietzsche and Modern Times: A Study of Bacon, Descartes, and Nietzsche (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) 68.Google Scholar

4 See Weinberger, Jerry, “Science and Rule in Bacon's Utopia: An Introduction to the Reading of the New Atlantis,” American Political Science Review 70 (1976) 865–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, introduction to New Atlantis and the Great Instauration, by Francis Bacon (ed. Jerry Weinberger; rev. ed.; Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1989) vii–xxxvi; Timothy H. Paterson, “On the Role of Christianity in the Political Philosophy of Francis Bacon,” Polity 19 (1987) 419–42; idem, “The Secular Control of Scientific Power in the Political Philosophy of Francis Bacon,” Polity 21 (1989) 457–80; Faulkner, Robert K., Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress (Lanham, Md.: Rowan & Littlefield, 1993)Google Scholar; Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times; David C. Innes, “Bacon's New Atlantis : The Christian Hope and the Modern Hope,” Interpretation 22 (1994) 3–38; Kennington, Richard, “Bacon's Humanitarian Revision of Machiavelli,” in On Modern Origins: Essays in Early Modern Philosophy (ed. Kraus, Pamela and Hunt, Frank; Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2004) 57–78.Google Scholar

5 Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times, 67.

6 White, Peace Among the Willows, 132.

7 Stephen A. McKnight, The Religious Foundation of Francis Bacon's Thought (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2005) 11.

8 Ibid., 11, 13.

9 Ibid., 41.

10 The pointedly instrumentalist approach to theology which Bacon takes in the New Atlantis does not reflect the full range of his theological views, but rather a politically purposive restatement of those views designed for popular consumption as well as for more sophisticated audiences. Bacon's decision to make the text available in English as well as in Latin reflects his hope that the New Atlantis would be as widely read as possible. See Benjamin Milner, “Francis Bacon: The Theological Foundations of the Valerius Terminus, ” Journal of the History of Ideas 58 (1997) 245–64for a discussion of Bacon's abandonment of his attempt to set “his program for the advancement of science on a theological footing” (245).

11 Kennington, “Bacon's Humanitarian Revision of Machiavelli, ” 57.

12 Preface to “Of the Wisdom of the Ancients, ” in Works of Francis Bacon (ed. James Spedding, Robert L. Ellis, and Douglas D. Heath; 14 vols.; London: Longman, 1857) 6:696.

13 Bacon, “The Great Instauration,” New Atlantis, 23.

14 That the theology of the New Atlantis does not represent a sincere attempt on Bacon's part to confront the theological challenges posed by the development of natural science is reflected in the most explicit statement on the purpose of religion in the text. Joabin, who is designated as a “wise man” (Bacon, New Atlantis, 65) refers with approval to the Bensalemite saying that “ the reverence of a man's self is, next religion, the chiefest bridle of all vices ” (Bacon, New Atlantis, 68). The purpose of religion is to restrain vice but one can also draw upon “self-reverence” (which is Bacon's term for what we would call “self-esteem”) for the same purpose.

15 Kennington, “Bacon's Humanitarian Revision of Machiavelli,” 65.

16 Box, Ian, “Bacon on the Values of War and Peace,” The Seventeenth Century 7 (1992) 119.Google Scholar

17 Weinberger, Jerry, “On the Miracles in Bacon's New Atlantis,” in Francis Bacon's New Atlantis: New Interdisciplinary Essays (ed. Price, Bronwen; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002) 110.Google Scholar

18 Faulkner, Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress, 230.

19 For a discussion of the concept of human nature in Bacon's work, see Studer, Heidi D., “‘Strange Fire at the Altar of the Lord’: Francis Bacon on Human Nature,” Review of Politics 65 (2003) 209–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 See White, Peace Among the Willows; Weinberger, “Science and Rule”; idem, introduction; Faulkner, Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress; and Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times.

21 William Rawley, preface to Bacon, New Atlantis, 36.

22 Weinberger, “Science and Rule,” 865.

23 Strong arguments have been presented on behalf of the position that the New Atlantis contains an esoteric political teaching (most notably White, Peace Among the Willows; Weinberger, “Science and Rule”; idem, introduction; Faulkner, Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress; and Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times). However, even those scholars who have deemed the New Atlantis to be complete and or possessed of an esoteric political teaching have not detailed in full the substance of Bacon's ostensibly “hidden” teaching on politics. Denise Albanese discusses the New Atlantis from the perspective of contemporary colonialist theory in “The New Atlantis and the Uses of Utopia,” English Literary History 57 (1990) 503–28, as does Claire Jowitt in “‘Books will speak plain?’ Colonialism, Jewishness and Politics in Bacon's New Atlantis, ” in Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, 129–55.

24 Howard White was the first to point out Bacon's “eclectic” syncretism of Christian, Jewish, Roman, Greek, Persian and Egyptian elements, although he does so toward a different end than I do. His emphasis on the Egyptian elements of the Feast causes him to neglect its biblical and classical subtexts. Without developing this point, White suggests that the Feast of the Family is “a presumably Persian feast” and argues (mistakenly, I believe) that the images of the Feast represent “doctrine and symbolism derived from the myths of Isis” (Peace Among the Willows, 144).

25 Bacon, New Atlantis, 37.

26 Bacon, New Atlantis, 68.

27 Bensalem does have some sort of ceremony of “divine service” on feast days (Bacon, New Atlantis, 61) while Salomon's House has a regimen of “certain hymns and services, which we say daily, of laud” (idem, 83).

28 On Bacon's extensive use of biblical allusions and quotations, see especially Paterson, “On “On the Role of Christianity”; idem, “The Secular Control of Scientific Power”; Faulkner, Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress; Innes, “Bacon's New Atlantis”; Ralph Lerner, “The Jihād of St. Alban,” Review of Politics 64 (2001) 5–26 and Charles Whitney, Francis Bacon and Modernity (New Haven; Yale University Press, 1986) 23–37.

29 Paterson, “On the Role of Christianity,” 425.

30 Michele Le Doeuff and Margaret Lasera suggest that the world depicted in the New Atlantis represents a Sabbath, but do not follow up on their suggestion. “Voyage dans la pensée baroque,” in La Nouvelle Atlantide (Paris: Payot, 1983).

31 Bacon, New Atlantis, 58.

32 Bacon, New Atlantis, 45.

33 Samuel H. Beer, “Two Models of Public Opinion: Bacon's ‘New Logic’ and Diotima's ‘Tale of Love,’” Political Theory 2 (1974) 163–80, at 166.

34 Kennington, “Bacon's Humanitarian Revision of Machiavelli,” 66. Timothy Paterson observes that “Bacon looked forward to a greatly increased public role for scientists, and perhaps to an outright rule of scientists over non-scientists” (“The Secular Control of Scientific Power,” 461), but this would amount to a transfer of rule rather than the obviation of the need for it.

35 Bacon, New Atlantis, 60.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid.

39 See White, Peace Among the Willows, 171.

40 See Henri Frankfort, “State Festivals in Egypt and Mesopotamia,” Journal of the Warburg and Cortauld Institute 15 (1952) 1–12, at 1.

41 Bacon, New Atlantis, 66.

42 Ibid., 60.

43 Ibid., 66.

44 Ibid., 61.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid.

47 Kennington, “Bacon's Humanitarian Revision of Machiavelli,” 66.

48 Bacon, New Atlantis, 66.

49 Ibid., 64.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid., 62–63.

52 The scriptural prooftext of the idea that God is indebted to no man is found in Romans 11:35. See the comment of Jean Calvin, Joannis Calvini Opera Selecta (ed. Petrus Barth and Guilelmus Niesel; 5 vols.; Monachii: C. Kaiser, 1968) 4:iii–xi on this passage from Romans.

53 Bacon, New Atlantis, 63.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid., 64.

56 Ibid., 60.

57 It is not entirely evident that a mother of all these descendants is still alive, given the cryptic manner in which Bacon raises the possibility of her presence at the ceremony: “ if [my italics] there be a mother from whose body the lineage is descended, there is a traverse placed in a loft above on the right hand of the chair, with a privy door, and a carved window of glass, leaded with gold and blue; where she sitteth but is not seen” (New Atlantis, 62). Traverses were commonly used by members of the royal family to shield themselves from public view during ceremonies unless their presence was required outside of it. See the description of the royal traverse on the right hand side of the communion table in Westminster Abbey from 1601, as quoted in David Dean, “Image and Ritual in the Tudor Parliaments,” in Tudor Political Culture (ed. Dale Hoak; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 243–71, at 263: “ther was also within the Chapple dore wher the Tombes be a little private place hanged richlye wher in was a pan of coales if her Majestie pleased to repose herself.” See also the description of the placement of the Queen's Traverse in St. Edward's Chapel in 1559 and the provision of a private place for her to say her prayers (comparable perhaps to that in which the Tirsan makes his “private prayers”) in A. L. Rowse, “The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth I,” History Today 3 (1953) 301–10, at 307): “the ‘Queen's traverse to make her ready in after the ceremonies and service [is] done’ is placed within [the chapel] on the south side of the altar. . . .Outside the chapel, in the sanctuary on the south side are placed ‘the carpet and cushions for the Queen to kneel upon when she taketh her prayers to Almighty God. . . . The carpet is of blue velvet and the cushions of cloth of gold.’”

58 The self-flattering grandiloquence of the Tirsan's speech, with its note of assumed portentousness (“thy father saieth it,” etc.) makes it hard to think that Bacon was not being satirical here.

59 Bacon, New Atlantis, 64 n. 193. All quotations in English from the Hebrew Bible are from the Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1985).

60 Bacon, New Atlantis, 64.

61 See The House of Lords Precedence Act of 1539 (31 Henry VIII ch. 10), concerning the seating arrangements for royal family members in Parliament: “noe [person] or [persons] of what estate degree soever he or they be of, excepte onlie the [King's] children, shall at any tyme hereafter attempte or to sytt or have place at any side of the clothe of estate in the pliament chamber, nother of the one hand of the Highnes nor of the other, whether the Majestie be there or absent.” Statutes of the Realm: Printed by Command of His Majesty King George the Third (11 vols.; London: Eyre and Strahan, 1810–1822; repr., Buffalo, N.Y.: Hein, 1993) 3:729. The statement that “none of [the Tirsan's] descendants sit with him, of whatever degree of dignity soever, except he hap to be of Salomon's House” (Bacon, New Atlantis, 63) suggests that the descendants who “hap to be” of Salomon's House are equivalent in dignity to the king's descendants in the order of precedence in Great Britain.

62 Bacon, New Atlantis, 60.

63 Bacon, New Atlantis, 60–61.

64 Ibid., 61.

65 Ibid., 61 n. 171.

66 As the friend of several prominent Hebraists involved in creating the KJV, Bacon would have had access to such limited knowledge of biblical Hebrew as he required. Paul de Lagarde derives from the Bactrian antarekhšatra, meaning “der die Person des Königs vertritt.” Mittheilungen I (4 vols.; Göttingen: Dieterich, 1884–1891); repr., (Osnabrück: Zeller Verlag, 1982) 236. See Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (ed. M. E. J. Richardson; Leiden: Brill, 1999) 1798 and the studies cited there. On the problem of pinning down the meaning and etymology of , see Edwin M. Yamauchi, “Was Nehemiah the Cup Bearer a Eunuch?,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 92 (1980) 132–42; James Barr, “The Question of Religious Influence: The Case of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 53 (1985) 201–35, at 212–13; and W. St. Clair Tisdall, “The Aryan Words in the Old Testament,” Jewish Quarterly Review 2 (1911) 213–19, at 218–19.

67 On the association of the grape harvest with Sukkot, see Jeffrey L. Rubinstein, “The Sukkot Wine Libation,” in Ki Baruch Hu: Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Judaic Studies in Honor of Baruch A. Levine (ed. Robert Chazan, William W. Hallo, and Lawrence H. Schiffman; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1999) 575–91, at 577.

68 In Nehemiah the feast of Sukkot (spread out over several days) is associated with teaching the law to the reassembled children of the exile as well as with the festive rituals themselves. In ch. 7, Nehemiah, acting as , gathers together “the children of the province” who had returned to Jerusalem after having been released from the Babylonian captivity. The genealogy of the children assembled is recounted before the festival of Tabernacles is celebrated. In terms of sources from other traditions, I would suggest as possibilities the yearly ceremony of rewarding fathers who have the most sons referred to in Herodotus, Hist. 1.136, as well as the practice of Caesar Augustus in honoring and rewarding the fathers of at least three children according to the Jus Trium Liberorum. See Dio, Cassius, Roman History: Books 56–60 (trans. Earnest Cary; Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985) 5–9.Google Scholar In seventeenth-century British usage, the practice represented by the Jus Trium Liberorum (of rewarding men for the number of their progeny) had acquired the connotation of an empty honor. See Williams, William P., “The Childrens Threes,” American Notes & Queries 9 (1971) 83–84.Google Scholar

69 Bacon would have been familiar with the idea that Adam may have had thirty sons and thirty daughters from his reading of the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine, a book to which he refers in The Works of Francis Bacon, 6:413. The original source of the reference to the thirty sons and thirty daughters of Adam may be found in Gary A. Anderson and Michael E. Stone, A Synopsis of the Books of Adam and Eve (2d rev. ed.; Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1999) 33–33E.

70 Bacon, New Atlantis, 61.

71 Ibid., 65–66.

72 Ibid., 61.

73 Ibid., 68.

74 Ezra reads the law out loud to the assembled people in such a way that they are “caused . . . to understand it.” As a result, they cry at first but after having been reassured by Nehemiah and told that they should be eating and drinking and celebrating, they are filled with “great mirth, because they had understood the words that were declared unto them” (Neh 8:12). Gathered again “on the second day” to “understand the words of the law” and relay them to the people are “the chiefs of the fathers of all the people,” along with the priests and the Levites, as well as Ezra, who is now designated as a “scribe” (Neh 8:13).

75 Bacon, New Atlantis, 61.

76 Ibid., 61–62.

77 Mor. 4.6.671–72. The figure best known for having been seated under a canopy of ivy is, of course, Dionysos. See Walter Burkert, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983) 238. See also Tacitus, Hist. 5.5, for an account of Sukkot as a Dionysian revel.

78 Bacon, New Atlantis, 62.

79 On the Oschophoria, see Plutarch, Thes. 23.2. See also Martin P. Nilsson, Geschichte der griechischen Religion (2 vols.; München: Beck, 1967) and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World (trans. Andrew Szegedy-Maszak; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) 114–16. White, Peace Among the Willows, 169–73suggests that the festival honors fertility in the persons of Osiris and Isis (as the mother hidden in the traverse) but misses the reference to the Oschophoria and the suggestion of drunkenness and debauchery in the allusion to Dionysos (the Greek equivalent of Osiris), perhaps because he does not consider the allusions to have topical significance.

80 On a broader level, it should be noted that Bacon is not going to all this trouble simply to suggest that biblical rituals were actually bacchic in nature. As the work of Plutarch and Tacitus in this respect suggests, that had already been done long before Bacon's time, so harping on this theme would have been somewhat tedious. Bacon is not intimating that some sort of semibiblical but secretly bacchic rites should be restored or must be established if the human race is to really enjoy its relieved estate.

81 Bacon, New Atlantis, 60.

82 See Mark Hulliung, “Patriarchalism and Its Early Enemies,” Political Theory 2 (1974) 410–19 and Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) on the topic of the relation between familial and political life in Early Modern patriarchal thought.

83 See Bacon, New Atlantis, 44.

84 Ibid., 61.

85 Ibid., 62.

86 King James VI and I: Political Writings (ed. Johann P. Sommerville; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 181.

87 Idem, 63.

88 See n. 58 of this essay. With reference to Bacon's description of the meal service to the Tirsan (“He is served only by his own children, such as are male; who perform unto him all service of the table upon the knee”), see Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum (ed. Mary Dewar; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) 88: “no man speaketh to the prince or serveth at the table but in adoration and kneeling.”

89 See Ernst Kantorowicz , Laudes Regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and Mediaeval Ruler Worship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958) on the role of royal acclamations.

90 See The Old Cheque-Book, or Book of Remembrance of the Chapel Royal from 1561 to 1744 (ed. Edward F. Rimbault; New York: Da Capo Press, 1966) 151–52, for an account of a ceremony in which King James and the visiting Spanish ambassador repeatedly retreat into and emerge from the private enclosures provided by the traverses “on the half-pace” of the Chapel Royal.

91 S. J. Houston, James I (2d ed.; New York: Longman, 1995) 117.

92 On the “drunken orgies” of King James, see Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529–1642 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972) 89, and Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution: 1603–1714 (New York: Norton, 1961) 68. See also the pertinent comment by Lampert, who notes the veiled allusion to Dionyos without pondering its significance beyond this sentence: “Domestication of the sexual passion tames Dionysos by incorporating Dionysos, his ivy and grape, into a bound fruitfulness that serves a foreign God and the Bensalemite state” (Nietzsche and Modern Times, 54). For some problems with Lampert's assumption that the process of domestication to which he refers has been successful, see n. 95 of this essay and the references therein.

93 Some of these very problems would, of course, come to be considered by Locke in the first of his Two Treatises of Government.

94 See the narrator's remark to Joabin: “For that where population is so much affected, and such as with them it seemed to be, there is commonly permission of plurality of wives” (Bacon, New Atlantis, 66). On the underpopulation problem in Bensalem, see Peter Pesic, “Desire, Science, and Polity: Francis Bacon's Account of Eros,” Interpretation 26 (1999) 333–52, at 346–48, and his reference there to Brian Vickers, Francis Bacon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

95 Pesic correctly notes that “Bensalem should not have suffered underpopulation” (“Desire, Science, and Polity,” 351 n. 22), but he attributes the cause to “some alteration of eros,” suggesting that “so much eros goes into the Atlantean's scientific projects that sexual desire wanes and families families shrink” (347). Oddly, given his acknowledgment of the problem posed by the island's underpopulation, Pesic states that “[t]he Bensalemites have acquired control over fertility” (347). The traces of hidden Dionysian excess in the Feast of the Family suggest that eros is not quite as controlled in Bensalem as Pesic implies, Joabin's disingenuously prim insistence to the contrary notwithstanding. Possibly relevant to Bacon's use of viticultural imagery in this context are the themes mentioned in the notes to the “Song of Vintage and Harvest” in Theodor H. Gaster, Thespis: Ritual, Myth and Drama in the Ancient Near East (New York: Harper & Row, 1961). The assumption that Bacon is not being satirical in suggesting that chastity is held in high esteem on Bensalem needs to be subjected to further questioning.

96 Bacon, New Atlantis, 45.

97 Ibid., 46.

98 Ibid. Kate Aughterson notes: “At this stage [of the narrative], the parental symbol is not specifically patriarchal.” “ ‘Strange Things So Probably Told’: Gender, Sexual Difference and Knowledge in Bacon's New Atlantis, ” in Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, 156–79, at 163.

99 See Galatians 4:7.

100 Bacon, New Atlantis, 71.

101 Ibid., 61.

102 Ibid., 69.

103 Ibid., 63 and 70.

104 Ibid., 69.

105 Ibid., 71.

106 Ibid., 60.

107 Ibid., 83.

108 Ibid.

109 Ibid., 71.

110 Ibid., 70.

111 Ibid., 83.

112 On the role of the letter in iconographic representations of Jesus, see the comments of John Oliver Hand, “ Salve sancta facies : Some Thoughts on the Iconography of the ‘Head of Christ’ by Petrus Christus,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 27 (1992) 7–18, at 10.

113 Bacon, New Atlantis, 69.

114 The Apocryphal New Testament (ed. J. K. Eliott; Oxford: Clarendon, 1993) 543. See Ernst von Dobschütz, Christusbilder: Untersuchungen zur christlichen Legende (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrich, 1899) 308–30, esp. 318–19.

115 Bacon, New Atlantis, 71.

116 See Bacon's rather scathing remarks on Natural Philosophers who seek support for their enterprise by broadcasting elaborate claims for its ability to enhance health and material comfort and to manufacture marvels, in the early piece “Thoughts and Conclusions,” he writes: “[Natural Philosophy] has forfeited much of its reputation and esteem by reason of the irresponsibility and worthlessness of some of its champions. These men, partly because they are credulous and partly because they are imposters, have loaded the human race with promises such as prolongation of life, postponement of old age, relief from pain, repair of natural defects, deceptions of the senses, inhibition or excitement of the emotions, enlightenment of the intellectual faculties, exaltations of mood, transmutation of substances, multiplications of motions as desired, impressions and alterations of the air, divinations of future events, visibility of distant events, revelation of hidden things, and so on.” (“Thoughts and Conclusions on the Interpretation of Nature or a Science Productive of Works,” in Benjamin Farrington, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon: An Essay on Its Development From 1603 to 1609 with New Translations of Fundamental Texts; Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1964) 81. This sounds very much like an abstract of the claims made in the New Atlantis.

117 On Bacon's questionable conception of scientific benevolence and charity, see Paterson, “On the Role of Christianity” and idem, “The Secular Control of Science,” as well as Kennington, “Bacon's Humanitarian Revision of Machiavelli.”

118 Bacon, New Atlantis, 66.

119 Elsewhere in his work, especially in “The Case of the Post-Nati of Scotland,” Works of Francis Bacon, 7:641–79, Bacon suggests the centrality of the concept of natural order to his explicitly political thought on the nature of monarchies (which should not, of course, be collapsed with his philosophy): “It is evident that all . . . commonwealths, monarchies only excepted do subsist by a law precedent. For where authority is divided amongst many officers, and they not perpetual, but annual or temporary, and not to receive their authority but by election, and certain persons to have voice only to that election, and the like; these are busy and curious frames, which of necessity do suppose a law precedent, written or unwritten, to guide and direct them; but in monarchies, especially hereditary . . . the submission is more natural and simple; which afterwards by laws subsequent is perfected and made more formal, but is grounded upon nature.

That this is so appeareth notably in two things; the one the platforms and patterns which are found in the natures of monarchies. . . . The platforms are three.

The first is that of a father, or chief of a family; who governing over his wife by prerogative of sex, over his children by prerogative of age, and because he is author unto them of being . . .is the very model of a king. So is the opinion of Aristotle, lib. iii Pol. Cap. 14. . . . And therefore Lycurgus, when one counselled him to dissolve the kingdom, and to establish another form of estate, answered, ‘Sir, begin to do that which you advise first at home in your own house:’ noting, that the chief of a family is as a king; and that those that can least endure kings abroad, can be content to be kings at home. And this is the first platform, which we see is merely natural” (“The Case of the Post-Nati,” 643–44).

120 On Jewish conceptions of the relation between a divinely instituted order of nature for human beings and the natural order in the “nonhuman realm,” see Novak, David, Natural Law in Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) esp. 38–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On the normative concept of the natural order in the Christian tradition of natural law, see Porter, Jean, Nature as Reason: A Thomistic Theory of the Natural Law (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2004).Google Scholar