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.”Footnote 1 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.Footnote 2 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”Footnote 3 typifies much of the scholarly commentary on the New Atlantis since White's reading of it almost forty years ago.Footnote 4 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.”Footnote 5 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.”Footnote 6
Most recently, Stephen A. McKnight has disputed the argument that Bacon wished to undermine and to transcend the particularities of Christianity in favor of a generic universal “religion” and the view that Bacon's treatment of religious matters is “disingenuous and manipulative.”Footnote 7 He contends that “Bacon's program of utopian reform presented in the New Atlantis is grounded in genuinely and deeply felt religious convictions” and that this text affords the reader an overview of Bacon's comprehensive “program for rehabilitating humanity and its relation to nature.”Footnote 8
The New Atlantis . . . offers a multilayered analysis of the disorder of the Europeans' society and prescribes necessary cures. The contrast between European nations and Bensalem [the name of the island utopia in the New Atlantis] points to the sources of order and disorder. Both Bensalem and Europe have the benefit of Christian religion. Bensalem's Christianity is a pure form of gospel Christianity, uncorrupted by human ignorance and error. Europe's Christianity by contrast has been distorted and is plagued by human ignorance and error.Footnote 9
In this paper, I disagree with both the view that Bacon's comparative treatment of religion and science in the New Atlantis is exclusively critical of religion and the rival view that Bacon's program of reform is grounded in sincere religious conviction. I suggest that both of these views neglect the fact that the New Atlantis represents a utopia that is effectively divided against itself in terms of its laws, its politics and its religion. The New Atlantis does not offer a consistent portrait of an ideally organized state that may be viewed in opposition to its degraded European counterpart, but rather an image of a state that is torn between the rival claims of religion and science concerning the order of nature, instead of the rival claims of different forms of Christianity.
There is evidence for the view that the crudely instrumentalist theology of the New Atlantis Footnote 10 represents Bacon's attempt to draw on what he learned from Machiavelli about using the “weapons” of Christianity to further its own demise and to fuel the modern scientific project.Footnote 11 It must be said, however, that if this is all that Bacon was doing in the New Atlantis, he was not altogether successful. Bacon's appropriation of Christian (and Jewish) narrative patterns, tropes and themes is so lavishly extensive that one is forced to wonder at what point a work so indebted to its “opponent” simply recreates the perceived problems that caused Bacon to attack religion in the first place. Bacon maintained that while “religion delights in . . . veils and shadows,”Footnote 12 science clears up obscurities and “submit[s] to examination those things which the common logic takes on trust.”Footnote 13 Strangely enough, however, one can easily read the New Atlantis itself as a tribute to and a manual of instruction in the practice of obscurantism and deliberate deception on the part of scientists and the state alike.Footnote 14
The peculiar nature of this problematic text in relation to the rest of Bacon's oeuvre has led scholars to raise questions about just how utopian Bensalem is supposed to be. Does it really represent Bacon's view of what Richard Kennington calls “a perfect society”Footnote 15 in which the respective truth claims of revealed religion and natural science have been seamlessly reconciled? Ian Box notes that Bacon's essays “suggest a preoccupation with political life that is absent from the NewAtlantis . . . the concern with such character traits as cunning, envy, vanity, boldness, anger and revenge has no application in a fable whose characters are uniformly virtuous and altruistic. In Bacon's ideal society of science the problems of ethical and civil life that figure so prominently in the Essays no longer exist.”Footnote 16 These inconsistencies have led several scholars (most notably White, Weinberger, Faulkner and Lampert) to argue that Bacon's narrative is far from being sincere or straightforward in its claims and intentions. Against the interpretation of the NewAtlantis as a purely sincere utopia, Weinberger has argued that “[t]he New Atlantis suggests the problem, as much as the promise, of technology and the story raises questions about the ways and means of the scientific project, the ends and limits of the conquest of nature, and the implications of science and technology for human life and values.”Footnote 17
The Contribution of This Paper
The overall argument of this paper is consistent with Weinberger's point that Bacon suggests the limits of science as much as he does its possibilities and with Faulkner's argument that “the New Atlantis exhibits the most ominous of Baconian political innovations: “the relationship between the promise of progress by control of nature and the management of peoples by control of human nature.”Footnote 18 My argument differs from the work of Faulkner and of Weinberger (to which I am greatly indebted in both cases) in terms of sources, evidence and conclusions. I argue that Bacon suggests the existence of a jarring conflict between the project of mastering nature and that of mastering human nature.Footnote 19 In other words, the relationship referred to by Faulkner (i.e., that “between the promise of progress by control of nature and the management of peoples by control of human nature” is not harmonious). Based on a novel reading of the text that calls attention to Bacon's use of biblical, classical and apocryphal texts, I claim that the overall object of Bacon's dual critique of religion and science is to demonstrate that the forced reconciliation of the religious and scientific visions of the “relief of the human estate” that we see in the New Atlantis can only be accomplished at the cost of a potentially tyrannical politics. Bacon demonstrates how such politics (based on his politically and theologically significant concept of the “order of nature”) might be redirected (rather than done away with completely) and made to serve the larger objective of mastering nature (and, as Faulkner suggests, human nature). Bacon does not, however, offer any promise of the conflict being solved decisively in favor of science, although he holds out considerable hope that science and religion (in their specific capacity as rival, all-inclusive explanations of the totality of experience) can be used to limit their respective tendencies toward excess.
With several significant exceptions,Footnote 20 most scholars have concurred with Richard Tuck that the New Atlantis is a fragmentary work due to accidental causes, rather than formal design. The vast majority of scholars (with a few important exceptions) continue to accept without demur the claim that the New Atlantis is fragmentary primarily because of the apparent fact that it lacks an account of “the best state or mould of a commonwealth.”Footnote 21 The question of the work's completeness and the issue of whether or not it contains an account of utopian politics center upon the same basic problem of the missing or at best, ambiguous account of the regime in Bensalem.Footnote 22 Here, I argue (for reasons that differ from those cited previously by other scholars) that the New Atlantis is complete and that it does not lack a political account of the state or commonwealth. It is accurate to say that it lacks a utopian account of the best state of a commonwealth, but it offers a portrait of the best state that may be possible, given the intractable nature of the conflict between religion and science that challenges the efforts of the political philosopher (or the theologian) to resolve it in the name of peace.
As other scholars have convincingly demonstrated along different lines, the contradictions and textual allusions of the New Atlantis suggest an esoteric political and theological commentary,Footnote 23 which does not hold out the utopian hope that the natural sciences can save the world while dispensing with the traditions of politics and religion. Ultimately, the ostensible “utopia” of Bensalem represents the necessity of concession to necessity, as much as an achieved triumph over it.
I follow several related lines of argument in discussing Bacon's representation of the “ideal” relation of scientific, political and religious authority. As I shall discuss, the argument that Bacon primarily sought to elevate science by distorting the claims of Christianity on behalf of the Epicurean goals of bodily pleasure and freedom from metaphysical terror, while satisfactory on one level, does not account for the astonishingly complex and painstaking treatment of religious themes and theological claims in the New Atlantis. For one thing, it does not take into account Bacon's treatment of tropes and themes from the Hebrew Bible. While I cannot agree that Bacon's utopia reflects sincere religious convictions, the alternative suggestion that Bacon should be viewed simply as attacking religion in order to further the cause of science, while not wholly inaccurate, is reductive at best. At the same time as Bacon represents the scientist as something tantamount to a savior of humankind, and science as institutionalized benevolence, he presents a clear-eyed critique of the assumptions embodied in those images. He quietly questions the belief that some combination of physical comfort, pleasure and freedom from metaphysical terror is an ideal or utopian image of “the human estate” without, however, suggesting some alternative conception of a summum bonum.
The Focus and Approach of This Paper
In order to discuss a critical issue that has heretofore been understated (or even ignored) in considerations of Bacon's work, I shall focus my discussion on one extended passage of central importance in the work, depicting a ceremony called “The Feast of the Family.” Although I cannot examine all of the most important passages in Bacon's narrative in the context of this paper, I shall suggest that taken as a whole, the New Atlantis may be read in terms of an extremely peculiar syncretistic sequence of quasi-liturgical rites, festivals and occasions. Bacon extracts disparate elements of rites from Christian, Jewish, Greek (and to a lesser extent, Roman and Persian) contexts and compounds them into novel and virtually unrecognizable forms.Footnote 24 Using a series of pointed textual allusions to biblical, apocryphal and legendary sources, he creates a narrative sequence that is punctuated by composite versions of vernal and autumnal rites.
Here, my examination of the “Feast of the Family” episode shall have to suffice as an example of Bacon's intricately detailed use of religious tropes and themes. It is in this dense and tightly constructed portion of the narrative that Bacon's theological-political teaching is most powerfully developed. Before discussing the Feast of the Family in detail, I shall give a brief account of the events leading up to it.
The New Atlantis
The New Atlantis, which was probably written in 1624 or 1625 but published in 1627, tells the story of “one and fifty” European sailors who, in the course of straining after their own self-preservation, are carried up by “strong and great winds” into a new world, the somewhat paradisiacal island of Bensalem. The narrative begins with the sailors attempting to navigate an unpredictable and inhospitable “wilderness of waters.”Footnote 25 Eventually, the sailors are allowed to enter a land in which something reminiscent of the prelapsarian earthly paradise seems still intact. The bulk of its ostensibly sedated populace apparently has little to do but feast, dance, and stand around in rows on either side of the streets, watching a series of processions, spectacles, and parades suggestive of an extended holiday. They are too involved in fully taking in the parade of images passing by to bicker over religious differences that might lead to more serious forms of conflict. Peace prevails among the strangely wooden denizens of Bensalem, although religious differences persist. Given the stupefied passivity of the island's citizenry, it is not clear why Bensalem needs to have a code of law, and indeed the one they do have is quite mysterious. Bensalem is described by one of its figures of authority as having “many wise and excellent laws”Footnote 26 yet those laws are not applied uniformly to all of its subjects and a number of Bensalemites have their actions regulated by the decrees of a figure whose decisions do not appear to take the law into account at all. The decidedly muddled nature of Bensalemite law seems particularly strange in light of Bacon's own thoroughgoing knowledge of law and his ambitious conceptions of comprehensive legal reform. Bacon's use of Jewish and Christian ritual law might lead one to argue that the island is supposed to be a scientifically sophisticated theocracy, thus explaining the coincidence of religious and secular law, but there are serious obstacles to supposing that Bensalem's legal code is characteristic of a recognizable form of theocracy.
For instance, one might reasonably expect that an island whose religion represents what Tuck correctly refers to as a “blend of Protestantism and Judaism” would include the institution of a Sabbath, but the narrative lacks any mention of one (a rather glaring omission), even though the stranded European sailors who visit Bensalem stay for more than seven days.Footnote 27 In addition, as more than one scholar has pointed out, the Christianity depicted on the island seems to be decorative at best, despite the lavishness of Bacon's range of biblical allusions.Footnote 28 In a small masterpiece of understatement, Paterson observes that “Bacon's characteristic manner of employing biblical texts for rhetorical purposes suggests a certain inner distance from Christianity.”Footnote 29
Is the New Atlantis meant to suggest a sphere of existence like that of the New Jerusalem in which there is no Sabbath, because every day is a simulacrum of one?Footnote 30 That explanation fails because the entire island is structured around a research institution which is sometimes called “the College of the Six Days' Works.”Footnote 31 For the Bensalemite scientists working in the College of the Six Days' Works, there is effectively no seventh day of rest at all, while others (i.e., their otiose and presumably non-scientifically inclined counterparts) have been spared by science from the exertions associated with wakefulness and the workaday world. The world has been reconfigured to give the nonscientific populace of Bensalem the impression of being in a peaceful half-slumber; the problems that required most people to stir from their repose have been solved by science and technology. This might explain why the New Atlantis appears at points to be populated by people who have transcended the need to struggle and to wrest from ungenerous nature the requisite means of sustenance. Money seems to be relatively meaningless in Bensalem because the island has so much of it; its officers will not even look at the money offered by the visiting Europeans, and to the natives, merchandise and gold and silver “are all one.”Footnote 32 However, the transcendence of material necessity suggested by the Bensalemites' indifference to money scarcely amounts to freedom from political authority or from exclusive concern for the needs of the body on the part of the idle and ostensibly satiated populace.
In suggesting as much, I disagree with the arguments of some scholars who have suggested that Bacon may be depicting a world in which “there is no ground for politics or government,” because “the state has withered away” as the result of the triumph of science.Footnote 33 Kennington suggests that “[w]isdom is so embodied in the institutions that the political, and especially force, is minimized.”Footnote 34 The end of politics and of the need to employ coercive force is the result of a mastery of nature so comprehensive that it seems to include mastery over the political nature of human beings. The visiting European sailors come from a fearful world of scarcity which is at the mercy of the hostile and unpredictable forces of nature. They enter into a world in which such forces appear to have been soundly defeated at the hands of science. Why is it, then, that “nature” is still employed as a source of normative standards in Bensalem? “Natural” is a term of praise in the Bensalemite lexicon as well as a descriptor of all that the island has ostensibly defeated and overcome.
The Feast of the Family
As they are instructed in the wonders of Bensalem, the visiting sailors gradually lose any sense of being bound to their former lives.Footnote 35 A brief acquaintance with some of the island's natives suffices “to make [them] forget all that was dear to [them] in [their] own countries.” Bensalem is so full of “many things right worthy of observation and relation” that the narrator suggests that “if there be a mirror in the world worthy to hold men's eyes, it is that country.”Footnote 36 The first thing seen in that mirror is a festival called the “Feast of the Family,” which the narrator describes as “a most natural pious and reverend custom . . . showing that nation to be compounded of all goodness.”Footnote 37
The peculiarity of regarding this custom as natural (not to mention natural and pious and reverend) is suggested not only by the obvious paradox of a “natural custom” but also by the fact that this feast, “which is done at the cost of the state”Footnote 38 is apparently occasional and exceptional rather than regular and seasonal in nature. On the face of it, the Feast of the Family does not seem to be the sort of gathering that occurs as a matter of course at a particular time of year, such as a harvest festival, a relic of the time in which most people could only enjoy leisure when the agricultural cycle allowed for it. While the initial sequence in the New Atlantis detailing the arrival of the visitors to Bensalem has echoes of the spring festivals of Easter and Passover, the Feast of the Family seems to be, at least in part, an adaptation of an autumnal grape harvest festival. However, Bacon's festival has been displaced from its autumnal context. It is no longer part of a cycle, but an isolated event (if one that may be repeated upon occasion).Footnote 39
Through the narrator's description of the Feast of the Family as a “most natural . . . custom,” Bacon suggests something of the paradoxical quality of festal holidays in general, which simultaneously have their origin in natural cycles, and also in events outside of the norm (including crises and events presumed to be miraculous).Footnote 40 Those events are then commemorated and ultimately institutionalized into the order of time. The Feast of the Family is occasional and noteworthy without being so wildly exceptional that it may be regarded as miraculous. Far from being an event that is memorable because it is ultimately inassimilable into a conception of an “order of nature,” it is said to be a feast “wherein nature did so much preside.”Footnote 41 The feast is not granted as a matter or course to all the families of Bensalem at a particular time of year by virtue of the fact that it is that time of year; rather, it is “granted to any man that shall live to see thirty persons descended of his body alive together, and all above three years old.”Footnote 42 In Bensalem, having thirty children actually increases prosperity. Prosperity, it is even ironically suggested, follows from having partaken of the Feast of the Family “ever after in an extraordinary manner.”Footnote 43 To it are summoned “all the persons of the family, of both sexes . . . to attend,” and to enjoy the munificence of the state while renewing their allegiance to the “order of nature.”Footnote 44
For the first two days of this three-day festival, “the Father of the Family, which they call the Tirsan ” adjudicates in cases pertaining to “the good estate of the family.”Footnote 45 He is assisted in this enterprise by “three of such friends as he liketh to choose” and by “the governor of the city or place where the feast is celebrated” who “put[s] in execution by his public authority the decrees and orders of the Tirsan.” The ostensibly private authority of the Tirsan apparently does not suffice to invest his “decrees and orders” with the status of binding constraints. If the Tirsan's decrees are disobeyed, the assistance of the governor's public authority is invoked, but the narrator observes that such a course of action is seldom necessary in light of the “reverence and obedience they give to the order of nature.”Footnote 46 Where the order of nature fails to inspire reverence and obedience, the state is invoked to correct for its deficiencies. Revering and obeying the order of nature, then, means obeying and appearing to revere the Tirsan (as its representative) in the interest of avoiding an encounter with the coercive power of the state, which has apparently not been vanquished in Bensalem to the extent that Kennington suggests.Footnote 47
The difficulty of attempting to account for Bacon's decision to insert a festival “wherein nature did so much preside”Footnote 48 into a book that ostensibly represents the triumph of art and artifice over nature is not reduced by the fact that the Tirsan (and, by extension, “the order of nature” that he represents) seems to have authority only insofar as it is imparted to him and enforced by the “public authority” of the state. Nature does not provide a source of commonly recognized public authority. In the “order of nature” represented by the Tirsan, private concerns for “the good estate of the family” are in first place. Only to the extent that the private concerns for “the good estate of the family” can be made to coincide with those of the state can the “order of nature” (and the authority of the Tirsan) be said to offer any promise (even indirectly) of a principle beyond an interest in the well-being of the Tirsan's individual and collective body.
During the festive portion of the Feast of the Family, a hymn is sung in honor of “Adam and Noah and Abraham; whereof the former two peopled the world and the last was the Father of the Faithful.”Footnote 49 The processes of peopling the world with the descendants of one's body and figuratively fathering the faithful are subtly but effectively differentiated; it should be stressed that only the latter is explicitly designated as fatherhood. The hymn singing session is preceded by the ceremonial procession of the Tirsan and “all his generation or lineage” into some sort of a banquet room with “an half-pace at the upper end.”Footnote 50
After they are all seated on the half-pace, a herald enters, accompanied by two youths, one of whom is carrying a golden stalk of grapes with a long stem. The herald reads out loud from the King's Charter, detailing the gifts and rewards that are to be imparted to the Tirsan as “our well-beloved friend and creditor,” for “the king is debtor to no man, but for propagation of his subjects.”Footnote 51 While the expression “debtor to no man” was characteristically used in reference to God,Footnote 52 here the expression is used to characterize the unnamed king of Bensalem. It is not necessary to suggest that the unnamed king is meant to “be” God in any literal sense in order to argue that he is meant to represent a figure tantamount to a “king of kings” or to an emperor who, for all intents and purposes, represents something like the height of divine magnanimity, which gives, but cannot receive. If the Tirsan himself were to be regarded solely as a subject of the king, he would not have been described as a “friend and creditor.” As such, the Tirsan seems to have king-like status that is analogous to that of the “friend” whose grant of authority he receives.
The king, whose disembodied presence is registered in his writing and in his image on the seal of the charter, has a more significant claim upon the children of the Tirsan than does the Tirsan himself, whose relation to his children, it is stressed, exists through his body and represents “the order of nature.” The Tirsan stands up while the charter is read out loud, but perhaps nature has made it impossible for him to do so by himself; his sons support him from either side. The herald then delivers the charter to the king on the half-pace by hand while “all that are present” recite an acclamation: “Happy are the people of Bensalem.”Footnote 53 The herald also gives to the Tirsan the golden cluster of grapes (which has as many grapes as there are descendants of the family in question), who then gives it to one of his sons, who is thereafter known as “the Son of the Vine.” The basis upon which this son, among so many others, is singled out for this distinction is never stated. His eligibility for the position is inherited, but he is also chosen; the position of “Son of the Vine” does not fall to him by virtue of his status as the eldest son, for instance. The Tirsan retires into some unspecified place at this point. When he returns for dinner, he does not sit next to the Son of the Vine, but “alone” under a canopy of ivy, as before: “none of his descendants sit with him, of whatever degree of dignity soever, except he hap to be of Salomon's House.”Footnote 54 While the Son of the Vine had to be chosen in order to receive his golden cluster and the privilege of sharing the same house as the Tirsan, the sons who “hap to be of Salomon's House” seem to have something close to a right to be seated with the Tirsan in his place of authority on a state-sponsored occasion. The Tirsan then retires to “a place where he maketh some private prayers” again, after which he gives a postprandial blessing to his sons and daughters.Footnote 55
By this point, a slight but notable shift has occurred—the members of the Tirsan's lineage are referred to as sons and daughters of Bensalem, rather than the persons “descended of [the] body”Footnote 56 of the Tirsan. Here, it is suggested that the Tirsan's concerns can in fact be made to coincide with those of the state, but it does not follow that his concern may then be understood to extend beyond his family estate to include the common good. Rather, his conflation of his children with the children of Bensalem suggests that his concern extends beyond his own estate only in the sense that the state is construed as somehow being coextensive with his family.
The Tirsan stresses that his children have “breath and life” solely because of him, not even implying a helpful assist from their mother, in reminding them of the source of their being.Footnote 57 The words of the general blessing (administered to each son and daughter individually) express the hope that “the days of thy pilgrimage [will be] good and many.”Footnote 58 As has been noted, Bacon is alluding here to Jacob's remark to Pharoah in Genesis 47:9 that “few and hard have been the years of my life, nor do they come up to the life spans of my fathers during their sojourns.”Footnote 59 After the general blessing, the Tirsan singles out two (and only two) of his sons who are possessed of “eminent merit and virtue” and awards to each of them “a jewel, made in the figure of an ear of wheat, which they ever after wear in the front of their turban or hat.”Footnote 60 The sons who “hap to be of Salomon's House” are not chosen, but simply take their place by their father's side (without any tokens being distributed).Footnote 61 All the sons and daughters are blessed by virtue of the fact that they are “persons descended from [the Tirsan's] body.”Footnote 62
One question about the “natural” authority of the Tirsan that Bacon hints at (but ultimately leaves unresolved) pertains to the relation between the private man who has lived “to see thirty persons descended of his body altogether” and the designation of that man as “the Tirsan. ”Footnote 63 Given the manner in which the role of the Tirsan is depicted, it might appear to us to be something akin to a “king for a day” or a “governor of the feast” whose authority extends only as long as the festival lasts, yet the decrees and orders he gives to his children are binding and state-enforced. They are also quite comprehensive. The Tirsan is in charge of the “good estate” of his family as a whole; his jurisdiction pertains to matters large and small, including “discords or suits between any of the family,” the relief of “distressed and decayed” persons within the family, the reproof and censure of persons given over to vice, and instructions concerning marriages and “the courses of life which any of them should take, with divers other the like orders and advices.”Footnote 64 Given the wide range of matters which fall into the Tirsan's limited sphere of absolute jurisdiction, it is not clear what, if anything, would be left for some alternative legal or political authority to usurp for itself. If, in keeping with the conventional wisdom that the work is an apolitical fragment, we imagine that Bacon had some putative other source of governance in mind (an account of which he theoretically failed to include in the New Atlantis) we would be forced to surmise that the children of the Tirsan (and all the children of Tirsans before and after the particular Tirsan featured in the Feast detailed in the narrative) are somehow exempt from or not protected by the same body of law as the rest of the Bensalemites.
Hence, although one might initially think of the Roman figure of the rex sacrorum in connection with the Tirsan, further reflection suggests that the Tirsan's authority is not as circumscribed as that of the former. It is of vital importance that the governor “put[s] into execution the decrees and orders” (rather than the helpful hints and suggestions) of the Tirsan without any mention of a review process by which the justice of those dictates may be assessed or any means by which those decrees and orders can be rejected before they are carried out. Bacon leaves open the possibility that the Tirsan may have sons who “hap” to be of Salomon's House, yet there is no suggestion that these particular sons are exempt from his rulings. It appears then, that some of the “wise men” of Salomon's House could conceivably have important aspects of their lives (indeed, the very “courses of life which any of them are to take”) regulated by the state-enforced decrees of the Tirsan. It is worth calling attention to the fact that, in this instance, the will of the Tirsan (embodied in his “decrees and orders”) determines the action of the state, at least in the negative sense of causing it to exercise its power in putting into execution his decrees when the reverence and obedience of his children do not suffice to prompt their submission to his will. The Tirsan is not solely a figurehead who presides over rather silly ceremonies at state-sponsored family parties.
It has been suggested that in calling the father of the family the Tirsan, Baconwas alluding to a Persian adjective meaning timid or fearful.Footnote 65 While that may be, it seems at least as likely that he had in mind as well the title of 
, which is a Persian loan word in postexilic biblical Hebrew meaning “His Excellency” or “governor.”Footnote 66 It is best known for its use in reference to provincial governors and officials whose authority has been entrusted to them by an empire The fact that the Tirsan, like the , is always referred to with the definite article 
) suggests that it may be the title of an office or an honorific pertaining to some of the functions of an office, with the effect that the “father of the family” is also “the Tirsan.” The Tirsan, of course, is not strictly equivalent to the ; the latter seems to be something of a mix between a petty tyrannus, who rules for the private good of his extended body, and the more benign figure of the .
At first glance, Bacon would seem to have expanded the ceremonial and familial role of the at the expense of his public authority in such a way that most of the latter has effectively been redistributed to the governor. When one considers the Tirsan in terms of the representation of his role in the Feast of the Family, rather than his political significance, it is difficult not to think that Bacon must have loosely had in mind the role of the in the feast of Sukkot, particularly as it is described in chapter 8 of Nehemiah. The difficulty in identifying the traces of Sukkot in Bacon's depiction of the Feast of the Family arises because, as I shall discuss, he is drawing from the imaginative or distorted representations of Sukkot as a wine festival in Plutarch and Tacitus (and from other grape harvest festival traditions) as much as he is drawing from the biblical account of the holiday that occurred at the conclusion of the grape harvest.Footnote 67 Bacon deliberately drew together elements from a number of different traditions in creating the Feast of the Family, so his representation of it should be seen as a broad composite of those elements, although one of its sources does seem to be the account of the feast in Nehemiah.Footnote 68 In making the possession of thirty descendants the standard of fruitfulness sufficient to merit reward, Bacon may have had in mind the apocryphal and pseudepigraphic tradition (which was known to him in its medieval form) that Adam was the father of thirty sons and thirty daughters after his expulsion from Eden.Footnote 69 Having thirty descendants was a trope for abundant progeny in the biblical tradition as well; in Judges 10:4, the Gileadite judge Jair, who led Israel for twenty-two years, is said to have “had thirty sons, who rode on thirty burros and owned thirty boroughs in the region of Gilead.” Bacon disregards the biblical distinction between sons and daughters, implying that in fathering thirty children of either sex, the Tirsan would be rising to a standard of fruitfulness associated with biblical patriarchs.
Whatever the merits of the Tirsan might have been that enabled him to father thirty children, Bacon does not imply that wisdom and good judgment are necessarily among them. The potential dubiousness of the Tirsan's decrees pertaining to the marriage of his children in particular is hinted at by the fact that the merchant Joabin, whose discussion with the narrator directly follows the account of the Feast, describes a set of marriage laws that say nothing about the wisdom of accepting the authoritative role of fathers in giving “direction . . . touching marriages.”Footnote 70 It is not at all clear how the “wise and excellent laws touching marriage” described by Joabin (who is himself said to be “wise . . . and learned, and of great policy and excellently seen in the laws and customs of [Bensalem]”Footnote 71) are to be conjoined with the unwritten decrees of the Tirsan, unless we are to understand that the children of the Tirsan are subject to different legal codes and customs. If having marriages directed by patriarchal decree is to be regarded as an ideal, why aren't all Bensalemites divided up into clans governed by individual Tirsans, rather than only those families in which thirty children have been fathered by one man? In Bensalemite law, marriages that do not secure parental consent are specifically said not to be voided, although the descendants of such marriages are eventually subject to financial penalty. The children of the Tirsan are presumably forced by the state to obey their father's directives “touching marriage,” since “the decrees and orders of the Tirsan” are said to be “put into execution” by “public authority.”Footnote 72 In Bensalemite customs, individual physical attractiveness plays a central and even an institutionalized role in the choice of marriage partners, for partners are subject to scrutiny aimed at detecting the “hidden defects in men and women's bodies.”Footnote 73 (Hidden defects of character are not mentioned.) In the context of Joabin's discussion of this custom, absolutely nothing is said of the determinative role of paternal decrees like those of the Tirsan. It is the set of laws and customs described by Joabin that is deemed to be “wise and excellent” whereas no qualifying adjective is applied by the narrator to the decrees and orders of the Tirsan. At best, Bacon seems to be suggesting that there exists a manageable conflict between disparate bodies of law and custom in Bensalem; at worst, he is hinting at a society in need of a comprehensive program of political and legal reform.
To a large extent, the Tirsan embodies what Bacon saw as the limitations of “the Father of the Family” as a potentially tyrannical model for public authority. This is especially problematic in light of the fact that his function is, again, not exclusively ceremonial. The consultation concerning the “good estate of the family” (replete with the issuance of “decrees and orders”) on the first two days of the feast is as important as the feasting itself. If one accepts that Bacon may have been loosely considering the role of the in constructing that of the Tirsan, one notes that in Nehemiah, it is the himself who summons all the children to be assembled, while it appears that in Bensalem the state assembles the children of the Tirsan for the feast. The is responsible for getting the returned children of exile to hear the law and to grasp it (with the assistance of the priest, Ezra, and the Levites).Footnote 74 In the course of examining the law, it is discovered that they are to “live in booths” during the feast of Tabernacles, at which point the people go out and gather several sorts of branches from trees and build out of them temporary shelters for themselves and their own families “every one upon the roof of his house and in their courts and in the courts of the house of God” (Neh 8:16).
The branches used in building the leafy booths are from olive, myrtle and palm trees and everyone builds his own booth. In contrast, there is only one leafy canopy (made out of ivy) in the Feast of the Family and it rests over the Tirsan alone as he sits in his chair on the feast-day that follows the extended family council meeting. The fact that no one else is sheltered by it, or possessed of a canopy of his or her own is a phenomenon that is consistent with the implied exclusivity of the Tirsan's concern for the good of his own body. Bacon emphasizes the nature of the ivy by having the narrator remark that it is “an ivy somewhat whiter than ours, like the leaf of a silver asp, but more shining, for it is green all winter.”Footnote 75 The canopy of ivy is not simply a single wreath or strand; rather, “the state is curiously wrought with silver and silk of divers colours, broiding or binding in the ivy . . . and veiled over at the top with a fine net of silk and silver. But the substance of it is true ivy; whereof after it is taken down, the friends of the family are desirous to have some leaf or sprig to keep.”Footnote 76 As I have already suggested, Bacon was not without precedent in putting together a syncretistic compound of elements from biblical and bacchic festivals. Plutarch's Moralia includes a description of Tabernacles as a feast involving ivy and vines that is devoted to Bacchus. The figure of Symmachus, who has apparently conflated the fasts and feasts of all three autumnal holidays in the biblical liturgical year, refers to the “so-called Fast at the height of the vintage” and notes that it involves shelters “plaited for the most part of vines and ivy. They call the first of the two days Tabernacles.”Footnote 77
The only other plant-related item involved in the feast is that of the “cluster of grapes of gold, with a long foot or stalk” that is carried by one of the “young lads” who walk on either side of the herald as he enters the room where the feast is held.Footnote 78 Confusingly or intriguingly enough, this image evokes a ritual of the Greek vintage festival known as the Oschophoria, or the “Carrying of Grape Clusters,” one of the relatively more decorous of the Dionysian rites. In this state-sponsored autumnal rite (whose ostensible founder is Theseus), two oschophoroi (who are boys dressed as women) carry branches with grapes on them as they accompany a herald into the Temple of Dionysus, from which point they progress to the temple of Athena.Footnote 79
Political Implications of Bacon's Satire
What precisely might Bacon have been doing by weaving strands of such widely disparate subtexts into his account of the Feast of the Family and why should it matter to us that he did so? In considering what it suggests about his understanding of the “order of nature” and the role of royal and paternal authority in upholding it, one must first consider the possibility that Bacon's portrait of the ostensibly “natural pious and reverend custom” of the Feast of the Family and its figurehead, the Tirsan, is both more satirical and more serious than it has been considered to be.Footnote 80 It should be emphasized that what is being satirized in the Feast of the Family episode is precisely the composite ideal of luxury, pleasure, prosperity, and exclusive concern for private goods that Bacon has been regarded as taking very seriously indeed. How can the New Atlantis be said to promote a vision of life devoted to self-satisfaction, self-promotion, and bodily comfort and pleasure when the central event in its narrative mocks this very complex of ideals? If this is the upshot of deliverance from the ills of nature by means of science, then Bacon's outlook for the future seems to be an odd mixture of grim sobriety and black humor as much it is one of boosterism for the scientific project.
It may be evident by this point that I believe the Tirsan to be, in part, a satirical portrait of Bacon's patron and (it would seem) nemesis, King James I, for reasons that I shall later elaborate. While I do not consider the parody of James I to be the most important aspect of Bacon's depiction of the Tirsan, anyone who denies that such a portrait is indicated needs to explain why direct allusions to the ceremonial appurtenances of English kingship are there. Some plausible alternative reading of the allusive references to kingship would have to be proposed to sustain an objection to the suggestion that Bacon was indeed commenting on kingship. It is difficult to imagine how such a pointed portrait of a hybrid father-king could have fallen into such a painstakingly crafted text by accident. If one does accept that something like a portrait of a patriarchal ruler exists—even in the rudimentary outline that I have sketched—what is its importance?
As funny as Bacon is (and he has not been given enough credit for being as deeply funny as he was) his intentions in embedding a theological-political drama in miniature in the text of the New Atlantis are not purely comical. If one concedes that suggestions of a comment on kingship by divine right exist, but then proposes that they are merely funny and trivial details, one must ask what Bacon hoping to accomplish by cluttering up his book with such trivialities. Was he simply indulging his unforgiving sense of humor in mocking King James? James had offered insufficient support for Bacon's program for the advancement of learning during the time that Bacon was in favor at court and also had failed to show mercy to Bacon when he was in a state of disgrace. To view his portrait of the king as “Father of the Family” as being primarily an act of vengeance, one would have to assume that Bacon was willing to waste one of the last opportunities he would have to record his thoughts for posterity before his death in an attempt to redress by means of merciless satire his admittedly bitter personal grievances.
Entertaining an alternative possibility—that Bacon was doing something much more important and much more ambitious—does not demand that we assume that his motives were strictly pure and lofty. It does demand that we consider several facts about the text of the New Atlantis. First, the text itself encourages us to consider the centrality of the Feast of the Family to our interpretation of Bacon's utopia as a whole. The narrator observes that it is the “natural, pious and reverend custom” of the Feast that “[shows] that nation to be compounded of all goodness.”Footnote 81 If the Feast is not clearly suggestive of “goodness” (as I have suggested is the case), we need to consider how that affects our understanding of the ostensibly simple “goodness” of the island as a whole. Secondly, given the long and well-developed tradition of political thought on the question of the extent to which familial and political rule are identical (beginning with Plato and continuing with Aristotle's dissent in Book 1 of the Politics), it would strain credulity to suggest that someone as well-informed as Bacon could have inserted himself unknowingly into the extremely important debate on this subject.Footnote 82 Bacon's creation of a figure that blurs the boundary between the figures of “father” and “king” was not an innocent or a trivial flight of fancy; it pertains to a more general philosophical consideration of the relationship between the family and the state, between paternal and political authority, and between public and private goods.
The New Atlantis is only funny when we take its apparent absurdities (such as the Feast of the Family) seriously. The idea of a society that is torn between conflicting principles of rule (with the effect that some subjects of the kingdom seem to be subject to arbitrary “decrees and orders” while others are governed by “wise and excellent laws”) may be thought to have some remote comic potential in that it produces absurdities; however, it does not seem to me to be an intrinsically amusing and or trivial problem. Bacon does show us the funny aspects of this conflict, but that should not lead us to neglect the serious and the ineluctably political elements of his satire upon Bensalem as paradise restored. In the beginning of the New Atlantis, Bensalem seems to be governed by a judicious combination of a vague and costless love for mankind and of the capacity to induce mortal fear. Somehow the island that appears to its visitors to be a stunning example of bland and undemanding piety, humanity and charity is the same one that also seems to threaten strangers with banishment or even death for no particular reason.Footnote 83 When we arrive at the episode of the Feast of the Family, it seems that Bensalem is ruled according to the principle of “the order of nature” which ultimately amounts to unaccountable personal rule (embodied in the figure of the Tirsan). In direct conflict with this sort of rule is one described by Joabin: the regime of “wise and excellent laws.” From yet another angle, Bensalem appears to be governed by scientific expertise (represented by the Father and Fellows of Salomon's House). The ubiquitous presence of the state does not wholly suffice to harmonize the conflict I have mentioned, even if it does render it manageable.
Because the version of paternal rule that we see in the New Atlantis is state-enforced, and because the categories of children and subjects overlap to a considerable extent, the rule of the Tirsan cannot be understood as confining itself exclusively to the familial sphere. Bacon situates the figure of the Tirsan at the juncture between theological-political and paternal rule. In considering the figure of the Tirsan as a father-king, it should be emphasized that he does not exercise his judgment exclusively at home. Moreover, he does not execute the decrees and orders of the state, but vice versa. While particular Tirsans only sit in judgment for a short time, the institution of the Tirsan is not presented as being wholly transitory in nature. Bensalem is supposed to have already arrived at a well-polished state of utopian perfection, so the Feast of the Family must be understood in light of that “perfection,” rather than as a stopgap measure to be employed until the problem it seeks to redress has gone away for good.
Bacon's Comment on Patriarchy and Divine-Right Kingship
Here, at the risk of reiterating points I have already suggested, I shall briefly summarize the reasons for suspecting the Tirsan to be a comic portrait of a patriarchal king with a distinct resemblance to James I. First, one must point to the title of “Tirsan.” The authority of the Tirsan, like that of the , is strictly limited to local authority within the context of some larger whole. The has authority within a single province of an empire; the Tirsan has authority within a single family of a kingdom. As I shall discuss, questions concerning the patriarchal theory of kingship arise in the course of comparing the rather different roles of the Tirsan and the because of the overlap that this theory posits between subjects of a kingdom and children of a father. If the Tirsan is roughly akin to a king, and a king's subjects are to be understood as his children, who is exempt from the authority represented by the Tirsan, which is also ostensibly that of “the order of nature”? Without retrojecting the objections posed to Filmer's theory of patriarchal kingship in the Two Treatises of Government onto the New Atlantis, one may suggest that Bacon seems to have anticipated some of the concerns that thinkers such as Locke would eventually articulate at length concerning the overlap between subjects and children implicit in the patriarchal and the divine right theory of kingship.
The Tirsan's relationship to his children is governed by state-enforced “reverence and obedience.”Footnote 84 Again, without overdoing the comparison, one may note that like the , the Tirsan is given his privileges through a direct grant from a higher authority. In the case of the Tirsan, that higher authority is the “king of Bensalem,” whom I have already described as a figure suggestive of imperial or even divine authority. The Tirsan, to repeat, is not described as a subject of the king, but as his “friend and creditor.”Footnote 85 What could be a more effective parody of the notion promulgated by James I that kings are like gods, and that kings receive their privileges directly from “on high”? James is well-known for having regarded and represented himself as a figure very much like both a god and a father of many; in his 1610 speech to Parliament, he famously announced that “Kings are not onely GODS Lieutenants vpon earth, and sit vpon GODS throne, but euen by God himselfe they are called Gods . . . Kings are also compared to Fathers of families: for a King is trewly Parens patriae, the politique father of his people.”Footnote 86 He also went out of his way to stress his unique access to and even his implied status as the embodiment of “the Laws of Nature.”Footnote 87
Secondly, one must consider the implications of the setting that Bacon creates for the Feast of the Family. His decision to insert the Tirsan's wife into a traverse on a half-pace can hardly be considered trivial or accidental. In addition, as I have already observed, the description of the Tirsan's seating arrangements are directly evocative of the arrangements described in the House of Lords Precedence Act of 1539.Footnote 88 The designation of the “Son of the Vine” suggests nothing so much as the choice of a Prince of Wales, and the quasi-liturgical acclamation given by the people was a ritual carried out at royal ceremonies (particularly accessions to the throne) with which Bacon would have been extremely familiar.Footnote 89 The Tirsan's repeated withdrawals for private prayers are directly evocative of the king's withdrawals to his own traverse in recorded ceremonies involving James.Footnote 90 Even the fact that the Tirsan stands up supported by two of his sons reminds that King James was “ever leaning on other men's shoulders.”Footnote 91
Thirdly, the cluster of imagery associated with Dionysos or Bacchus subtly evokes the debauchery and dissipation that were known to have characterized the Jacobean court and the drunkenness that was said to have characterized the Jacobean monarch on more than one occasion.Footnote 92 Finally, the quotation from the biblical patriarch Jacob that Bacon puts in the mouth of the Tirsan is not, I think, a random choice, given the hint of the Jacobean monarch it conveys. By creating the figure of the Tirsan and linking him to Adam and Noah, Bacon evokes the patriarchal and the divine right theories of kingship in order to show their absurdity but also, perhaps, their necessity. He deliberately points to the problems associated with the identification of royal, religious, and paternal authority.Footnote 93 If all fathers are in fact to be regarded as kings within the context of their own families, won't an inevitable conflict ensue between the authority of the patriarch and that of the adult sons who are fathers themselves? Why should individual fathers obey the paternal authority of the king, if their own authority is itself grounded in nature and divinely sanctioned?
While Bacon leaves open the question of why any man who has fathered thirty children should be honored and entrusted with authority by the state, one practical reason that suggests itself is that Bensalem apparently has a fairly serious population deficit.Footnote 94 Somehow the marvels of Bensalemite science have not remedied the need for more people to enjoy its blessings. This is a striking instance of the extent to which science has failed to master a problem that Bacon regarded as being of vital political importance.Footnote 95 Even if one resorts to a minimalist interpretation of the “Feast of the Family” as a political device to encourage population growth, the philosophical and the political questions about the commonality it suggests between the role of father and that of king remain. If the wisdom and authority of the father is all but wholly coterminous with that of the wisdom and authority of God himself and “the order of nature” itself, why does the “Father of the Family” have to call upon the state to put his decrees into execution? Why has the state not, in fact, withered away, given that the promise of Bensalemite science is to remedy the deficits and vagaries of nature? Since it has not withered away, we must conclude that the state in Bensalem exists for some reason other than that of a remedy for the deficiencies of nature, or be forced to acknowledge that Bensalem does not solely represent the achieved mastery of nature.
Bacon's acute sense of the difficulty of reconciling the theological-political concept of the “order of nature” represented by the Tirsan with the modern scientific project of mastering nature is suggested by the manner in which he contrasts the portrait of the Tirsan with that of the Father of Salomon's House. These two figures are most usefully read against each other, and both of them, taken together and separately, should also be compared to the Christian priest who instructs the sailors in the history of Bensalem. Bacon deliberately creates parallels and contrasts among all three figures, but particularly between the two fathers, in such a way that he encourages a consideration of the different types of authority that they represent. The Christian priest and Governor of the “Stranger's House” in which the sailors stay during their visit is never called “Father.” He is described as having offered “parent-like”Footnote 96 treatment and “brotherly love”Footnote 97 to the visiting Europeans, who are his self-professed “true servants.”Footnote 98 If we compare the relation of the narrator to the Christian priest and to the Father of Salomon's House, we detect a movement by which he goes from being a “stranger” to being a “servant” of the former and a “son” to the latter.Footnote 99 Significantly, the Tirsan does not establish any sort of relationship with the strangers; he only interacts with the children of his own body, with his chosen friends, and presumably with agents of the state that executes his decrees. The Tirsan's personal authority is exhausted in the very exercise of it (although his decrees and orders evidently persist after the Feast is over), while that of the Father of Salomon's House is designed to last. It endures because it is transmittable through the dispersal of knowledge and because of the goal it seeks (“knowledge of Causes and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible”)Footnote 100 can never be wholly attained.
The ceremonies honoring the Tirsan take place amongst his children inside a “large room” from which the Tirsan repeatedly retreats to make his “private prayers”;Footnote 101 the procession honoring the Father of Salomon's House occurs outside and in public, so that all the citizens of Bensalem can line the streets and watch in silence as he passes by.Footnote 102 Both the Tirsan and the Father of Salomon's House sit “alone”Footnote 103 but the Tirsan's sons who “hap to be of Salomon's House” are allowed to sit with him, while the Father of Salomon's House sits all by himself in his gilded cedar chariot with “a sun of gold, radiant upon the top, in the midst,” borne aloft by footmen.Footnote 104 Both the Tirsan and the Father of Salomon's House are invested with various symbols and appurtenances suggestive of royalty, but it is the latter to whom the narrator prostates himself in an act of proskynesis, “kissing the hem of his tippet” when they meet for a private audience.Footnote 105 It is worth noting that when the sailors had attempted to do the same to the Christian priest (“we . . . presented ourselves to kiss the skirt of his tippet”Footnote 106) the priest refuses to let them do so. The Tirsan receives substantial gifts from a higher authority, but he only gives out heraldic devices and tokens of fealty to a select few of his children; the Father of Salomon's House receives nothing from anyone (like the paradigmatic figure of magnanimity that he is meant to evoke) and bestows “great largesses” not only to the visiting European strangers but also, it would seem, to the inhabitants of Bensalem he encounters “where they come upon all occasions.”Footnote 107 The decrees of the Tirsan pertain only to the children of his body, whereas the Father of Salomon's House seeks to bestow the blessings of Bensalem on all the nations of the world.Footnote 108 He gives his account of Salomon's House to the narrator ostensibly “for the love of God and men.”Footnote 109
Despite the note of triumphalist parochialism in his speech to the narrator, we are meant to view the Father of Salomon's House as being basically magnanimous and loftily cosmopolitan, and, of course, he looks even more so when compared to the Father of the Family. However, given that we are to assume that the Father of Salomon's House wishes to partially ameliorate the curse of human ignorance by bestowing enlightenment on all nations, why does Bacon represent him as choosing for his vehicle of enlightenment one single European sailor? Bacon evidently had yet another contrast with the Tirsan in mind: the strength of the Tirsan depends upon the quantity of children he has, while that of the Father of Salomon's house depends heavily upon the quality of his chosen “son.” Importantly, that son is “chosen by [his] fellows for the private access”Footnote 110 rather than designated by the Father himself for such an honor. The narrator is given leave to “publish”Footnote 111 what he heard in his encounter with the Father to a general audience, but the mode of revelation leaves open the possibility that human error could mar the transcription of the account of Salomon's House. Surely a general, direct revelation of the Father's blessing to all the sailors would have been more reliable in terms of enlisting humanity in the collective effort to extend the bounds of human empire. Instead Bacon represents the Father as duplicating the revelation of saving knowledge to a single chosen recipient that is a central feature of the religious traditions that he mocks.
The impression that the Father of Salomon's House partakes of something akin to divinity is heightened by the fact that the Father even bears a distinct resemblance to a popular thirteenth-century apocryphal description of Jesus in the forged letter of a nonexistent individual named Publius Lentulus (supposed governor of Judea before Pontius Pilate).Footnote 112 The Father of Salomon's House is “a man of middle stature and age, comely of person, and had an aspect as if he pitied men. . . . His hair was like a helmet . . . and his locks curled below it decently; they were of colour brown. His beard was cut round and of the same colour with his hair.”Footnote 113 In the “Letter of Lentulus,” Jesus is described as “a man in stature middling tall, and comely, having a reverend countenance, which those who look upon may love and fear; having hair of the hue of an unripe hazel-nut and smooth almost down to his ears, but from the ears in curling locks somewhat darker . . . [and] a full beard of the colour of his hair, not long . . . sometimes he wept, but never laughed.”Footnote 114 In terms of the possible allusion to the physical appearance of Jesus, it seems that Bacon decided to de-emphasize the aspect of Jesus that might arouse fear in those who looked upon his face, and to stress that aspect which could evoke love. However, while Bacon designed the Father of Salomon's House in such a way that he suggests a love of humanity and a working knowledge of human needs and passions, Bacon does not imply that he is endowed with humility and a comprehensive knowledge of human aspirations.
Perhaps most prominent among the passions to which the Father of Salomon's House appeals in his address is sad discontent at their lot on the part of the sailors (and of Bacon's readers?) and a sense of envy (accompanied by the desire for gain prompted by that envy) as well as a sense of competition. He also seeks to evoke wonder or at least, stupefied astonishment at the various marvels he describes. What the Father does not appeal to is a disinterested love of knowledge; even the end of the sentence that begins by indicating that “[t]he End of our foundation is the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things” ends with “and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”Footnote 115 As has been observed by more than one scholar, the Father of Salomon's House focuses on the tangible effects of knowledge and the material comfort and power that can be derived from it rather than thoughts that are sufficient in and of themselves. If Bensalem is a kind of paradise, it is a cheerfully vulgar one, being founded on the lightly varnished appeal to people's passions and fantasies that Bacon had bitterlyscorned in his earlier writings.Footnote 116
Conclusion
In terms of the New Atlantis as a whole, it is not wholly inaccurate to suggest that Bacon is primarily concerned with neutering religion and the state as independent sources of authority and redeploying them in tandem (like the figurative equivalent of yoked prisoners in Roman triumphal processions) as elaborate bodies of support staff for the center of gathering and dispersing knowledge that is Salomon's House. However, this view is insufficient to explain why Bacon went to the elaborate lengths that he did in representing Bensalem's “reconstructed religion.” It is not clear why a perfected science would still need what Bacon regarded as the salutary deceptions of religion, the coercive power of the state, and the occasional exercise of will unchecked by law represented by the Tirsan, if such a science would by definition include the mastery of human nature as part of nature itself. Mastering human nature would seem to necessarily entail doing away with the fear of the unknown aspects of nature that Bacon at his most Lucretian saw at the root of religion. By including religion in the society of Bensalem, Bacon rejects the notion that science unvarnished by what he viewed as the useful lies of religion could suffice to quell this fear. Without the copious use of religious stories, images, and ceremonies, the capacity of a not necessarily benevolent science to induce fear, rather than to eradicate it, might be all too apparent.Footnote 117 While Bacon's composite religion gives priority to “love” over fear, Bacon does not even hint at some point in the future in which science can finally cast off the necessity of appearing to defer to religion. The theological-political problem that is given its clearest articulation in the Feast of the Family episode (particularly when taken in conjunction with Joabin's discussion of the Feast) is not “solved” by the contrary figure of the Father of Salomon's House and the institution he represents. The text of the New Atlantis is divided between contradictory claims to rule.
If the Father of Salomon's House does not appear to be an exact counterweight to the power of the Tirsan, it may be because Bacon tactfully refrains from directly juxtaposing their respective claims to rule as different sorts of “Fathers.” The private authority of the Tirsan and the public authority of the state are joined at the point where artificially cultivated “reverence and obedience” to the father (as dictated by the “order of nature”) breaks down. While he pits them against each other in an important sense, Bacon does not suggest that the Father of Salomon's House can effectively replace the Father of the Family and evoke reverence and obedience all by himself. If the latter represents the “order of nature,” the former represents the mastery of nature, and nature, Bacon implies, resists mastery. The Father of the Family's fertility is celebrated because it is still understood to be exceptional in some important sense and because the state is in need of it, scientific sophistication notwithstanding. Why is his family of thirty children not the norm if science has actually succeeded in mastering nature by overcoming the problem of insufficient numbers of progeny amongst its citizens and by directly correlating an increase in the number of children with an increase in prosperity? If fertility is not an issue, and there are abundant material rewards to be reaped from participating in the feast (apparently with no attendant costs), it is not clear why there are not many Tirsans to be celebrated at the same time. We should keep in mind the important fact that the Father of Salomon's House can generate “sons” without having to go through human bodies in order to get them. In this sense, he has conquered nature; the Tirsan has not. The institutionalized ceremony that honors him would not exist if the problem of underpopulation (which is a problem posed by nature) did not exist.
The existence of the sons and daughters of the Tirsan presumably depends upon the direct involvement of human bodies, or what the narrator refers to as the “nuptial copulation” from which the “propagation of families proceedeth.”Footnote 118 If nature had been substantially mastered by science in Bensalem, the population could be replenished without having to rely upon unreliable human bodies. The Father of the Family would then be able to generate sons as does the Father of Salomon's House. We see the perdurable nature of a problem posed by nature (here, in the specific form of underpopulation) in the very heart of an island that is supposed to signify the conquest of nature by science.
My argument that Bacon's conception of the possibilities of science for relieving the human estate was a skeptical and wary one should not be taken as implying that he was plagued with misgivings about forging ahead in his program for the advancement of learning and the progress of science. He saw science as the best chance that humanity had for attaining relief from the harshness of nature unmitigated by human artifice. Bacon's subtle suggestions of the limitations of science in solving the problems presented by nature should be given as much weight as his louder insistence upon the necessity of collectively attempting to do so by radically new methods in the context of new institutions. In the midst of this “new” world of science, the old institution of paternal rule (which is, Bacon suggests, bound up with the concept of divine right kingship) and the concept of an “order of nature” that it represents is not discarded, despite its foundation in tradition rather than reason. Through his scathing critique of the limitations of paternal rule, Bacon undermines its theoretical legitimacy, but he refrains from doing away with it altogether. Bacon gives no suggestion that the problem to which paternal rule offers a decidedly imperfect corrective (that problem being the absence of an ascertainable hierarchical order in nature) is diminished by the triumph of the natural sciences, in part because such sciences do not affirm the conventional “order of nature” that secured some measure of reverence and voluntary obedience in the first place.Footnote 119 Modern natural science cannot recur to a classical, Jewish or Christian concept of natural order to support its claim to rule, but it can (and Bacon suggests, it must) recur to a pointedly vague concept of supernatural order and benevolence, at least on a rhetorical level.Footnote 120 The New Atlantis fails to look with favor on the prospect of universal enlightenment. Perhaps the most potent sign of the chastened and constrained nature of Bacon's utopianism is that while holding out the ambiguous promise of the fruits of knowledge, the New Atlantis does not advocate the widespread diffusion of their source or seek to awaken an appetite for abstract knowledge among people not already subject to such cravings.
