Nature and Scripture in the

Abrahamic Religions: Up to 1700

Volume 1

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Brill’s Series in
Church History
Edited by
Wim Janse, Amsterdam

In cooperation with
Theo Clemens, Utrecht/Antwerpen
Olivier Fatio, Genève
Alastair Hamilton, London
Scott Mandelbrote, Cambridge
Andrew Pettegree, St. Andrews

VOLUME 36

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Nature and Scripture in the
Abrahamic Religions:
Up to 1700
Volume 1

Edited by
Jitse M. van der Meer
Scott Mandelbrote

LEIDEN • BOSTON
2008

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On the cover: Painting from the Ultimate Realities collection by Wilhelmina Kennedy.
Photo by Edwin Amsden. Used by kind permission.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

ISSN 1572-4107
ISBN 978 90 04 17187 9 (volume 1)
ISBN 978 90 04 17189 3 (volume 2)
ISBN 978 90 04 17191 6 (set)

Copyright 2008 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing,
IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.

Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted
material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the
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Fees are subject to change.

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 Dedicated to the Jackman Foundation
in grateful acknowledgment of support
through the Reverend Edward Jackman

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 CONTENTS

VOLUME 1

Acknowledgements ..................................................................... xi
Notes on Contributors ................................................................ xiii
List of Illustrations ...................................................................... xvii

INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS

Chapter One Introduction ...................................................... 3

Jitse M. van der Meer and Scott Mandelbrote

Chapter Two On the Concept and History of Philosophical

Religions .................................................................................. 35
Carlos Fraenkel

PART I

100–800

Chapter Three Nature and Scripture: The Two Witnesses to

the Creator .............................................................................. 85
Pamela Bright

Chapter Four Natural Knowledge and Textual Meaning in

Augustine’s Interpretation of Genesis: The Three Functions
of Natural Philosophy ............................................................. 117
Kenneth J. Howell

Chapter Five Entering “This Sublime and Blessed

Amphitheatre”: Contemplation of Nature and Interpretation
of the Bible in the Patristic Period ......................................... 147
Paul M. Blowers

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viii contents

PART II

800–1450

Chapter Six Interpreting the Books of Nature and Scripture

in Medieval and Early Modern Thought: An Introductory
Essay ........................................................................................ 179
Charlotte Methuen

Chapter Seven Thomas Aquinas on Science, Sacra Doctrina,

and Creation ........................................................................... 219
William E. Carroll

Chapter Eight Science and Theodicy in Qur ān 2:6/7 ......... 249

Robert G. Morrison

PART III

1450–1700

Chapter Nine The Hermeneutics of Nature and

Scripture in Early Modern Science and Theology ............... 275
Kenneth J. Howell

Chapter Ten The Two Books and Adamic Knowledge:

Reading the Book of Nature and Early Modern Strategies
for Repairing the Effects of the Fall and of Babel ................ 299
James J. Bono

Chapter Eleven Hermeneutics and Natural Knowledge in the

Reformers ................................................................................ 341
Peter Harrison

VOLUME 2

Chapter Twelve God, Scripture, and the Rise of Modern

Science (1200–1700): Notes in the Margin of Harrison’s
Hypothesis ............................................................................... 363
Jitse M. van der Meer and Richard J. Oosterhoff

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 contents ix

Chapter Thirteen Sacred Philosophy, Secular Theology:

The Mosaic Physics of Levinus Lemnius (1505–1568) and
Francisco Valles (1524–1592) ................................................. 397
Kathleen M. Crowther

Chapter Fourteen “Horrible and Blasphemous”: Isaac la

Peyrère, Isaac Vossius, and the Emergence of Radical
Biblical Criticism in the Dutch Republic .............................. 429
Eric Jorink

Chapter Fifteen Thomas Burnet, Biblical Idiom, and

Seventeenth-Century Theories of the Earth .......................... 451
Kerry V. Magruder

Chapter Sixteen “Not in the Language of Astronomers”:

Isaac Newton, the Scriptures, and the Hermeneutics of
Accommodation ...................................................................... 491
Stephen D. Snobelen

Chapter Seventeen Creation, Time, and Biblical

Hermeneutics in Early Modern Jewish Philosophy ............... 531
T.M. Rudavsky

PART IV

COPERNICAN DEBATES AND SCRIPTURE

Chapter Eighteen Tycho Brahe, Caspar Peucer, and

Christoph Rothmann on Cosmology and the Bible ............. 563
Miguel A. Granada

Chapter Nineteen Kepler and Melanchthon on the Biblical

Arguments against Copernicanism ........................................ 585
Peter Barker

Chapter Twenty The Debate on the Motion of Earth in the

Dutch Republic in the 1650s ................................................. 605
Rienk H. Vermij

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x contents

Chapter Twenty-One The Biblical Argument against

Copernicanism and the Limitation of Biblical Authority:
Ingoli, Foscarini, Galileo, Campanella .................................. 627
Maurice A. Finocchiaro

Chapter Twenty-Two “Our Mathematicians Have Learned

and Verified This”: Jesuits, Biblical Exegesis, and the
Mathematical Sciences in the Late Sixteenth and Early
Seventeenth Centuries ............................................................ 665
Volker R. Remmert

Chapter Twenty-Three “In the Language of Men”: The

Hermeneutics of Accommodation in the Scientific
Revolution ............................................................................... 691
Stephen D. Snobelen

Index ........................................................................................... 733

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

These four companion volumes are in part the result of a conference

with the title Interpreting Nature and Scripture: History of a Dialogue. This
conference was conceived by Jitse van der Meer and organized jointly
with Dr. Wayne Norman and the assistance of Joan Alexander at
Redeemer University College in 2005. We acknowledge the financial
support of the Pascal Centre at Redeemer University College, and
of the Jackman Foundation, Toronto, through the Reverend Edward
Jackman. Jitse would like to thank Redeemer University College for
granting the sabbatical that made this project possible as well as Jim
Rusthoven, Sara Croke, Dan Reilly, and Elizabeth Avery for assuming
his teaching responsibilities. He is particularly grateful to the members
of the program committee for generous help and wise advice in shaping
a large idea into a manageable conference theme. In addition to Jitse
as chair, the committee included Dr. Craig Bartholomew and Dr. Al
Wolters both from Redeemer University College as well as Dr. Pat-
rick Heelan, William A. Gaston Professor of Philosophy, Georgetown
University, Washington, DC, USA; Dr. Peter Harrison, then professor
of philosophy at Bond University, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia;
Dr. Ken Howell, director and professor of theology, St. John Institute
of Catholic Thought and adjunct associate professor of religious stud-
ies, The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA; Dr. Ernan
McMullin, professor emeritus, history and philosophy of science, Uni-
versity of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, USA; the Reverend Dr. John
Polkinghorne, KBE, FRS, Queens’ College, Cambridge University,
UK; Dr. Janet Soskice, university reader in philosophical theology,
Jesus College, Cambridge University, UK; Dr. Anthony C. Thiselton,
professor emeritus, Nottingham University, UK; Dr. Jakob van Bruggen,
professor emeritus of New Testament, Theological University, Kampen,
The Netherlands.
Following the conference, Scott Mandelbrote joined the project
as co-editor of the two volumes. Papers from that conference as well
as newly invited ones are included as chapters after peer review and
revision. Each paper was reviewed by a historian of science and a his-
torian of scripture interpretation. The editors as well as the authors are
indebted to the reviewers for help and guidance in navigating through

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xii acknowledgements

unfamiliar interdisciplinary terrain. We thank Al Wolters for checking

translations of Latin texts.
The production of these volumes would not have been possible
without further assistance. Joan Alexander managed the peer review
process. Roberta Podbielancik held authors to instructions while proof-
reading and going the extra mile under the pressure of a publication
schedule. Judy Reveal prepared the index and Jitse also served as
corresponding editor. We thank the contributors to these two volumes
for their cooperation in the revision of their essays. Jitse owes a special
debt of gratitude to Wayne Norman for assembling the manuscript and
to Boris van Gool of Brill for making adjustments to the schedule to
accommodate trying personal circumstances. Scott thanks the Lever-
hulme Trust for their support.
Finally, we acknowledge the following permissions to use copyrighted
material. Images used in the chapter by Kerry Magruder are courtesy
of the History of Science Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries;
copyright the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma.

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 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Peter Barker, professor, Department of the History of Science, University

of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA. Research interests: history and
historiography of the Scientific Revolution, nineteenth- and twentieth-
century physical science, nineteenth- and twentieth-century psychology;
philosophy of science.

Paul M. Blowers, Dean E. Walker Professor of Church History, Emman-

uel School of Religion, Johnson City, TN, USA. Educated as a historian
of early and Byzantine Christianity, he has particular interests in the
history of biblical interpretation and in the theological and spiritual
traditions of the Eastern churches. Much of his published work has
been focused on Greek patristics, especially the figures of Origen, the
Cappadocian Fathers, and Maximus the Confessor.

James J. Bono, associate professor in the Department of History and the

Department of Medicine, State University of New York at Buffalo, NY,
USA. His research covers the cultural history of science and medicine
during the Renaissance and early modern periods, the Scientific Revolu-
tion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (especially the relations
among language, religion, society, natural philosophy, medicine, and
natural history), images, visualization, and technologies of the “literal”
in early modern science, the history of the body and sexuality, the role
of metaphor and narrative in science, and the function of technologies
of communication in the production and dynamics of knowledge and
culture. He is also interested in medical humanities, literature, and
medicine, and the narrative construction of illness and the physician-
patient relationship.

Pamela Bright, Department of Theological Studies, Concordia Univer-

sity, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Research interests include the first
five centuries of Christian communities, the lived experience of people
who become fascinated by the implications of the Gospel for their
own spiritual journey and for their interaction with others. She has
explored the spiritual legacy of the Syrian-speaking communities of the
eastern Mediterranean from the second to the fourth centuries, as well
as the intellectual creativity of the Egyptians in the third and fourth

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xiv notes on contributors

centuries. Her principal research has been on how the Bible has been
understood in the Roman Province of Africa (today, Tunisia, Algeria,
and Morocco). Her publications focus on questions of hermeneutics,
on asceticism (principles of spiritual life), and ecclesiology (the church
as Gospel community).

William E. Carroll, Thomas Aquinas Fellow in Theology and Science,

University of Oxford, Oxford, UK. Research interests: the reception of
Aristotelian science in medieval Islam, Judaism, and Christianity and
the development of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. The appropria-
tion of medi-eval discussions of creation and the natural sciences to
contemporary science. Galileo and the Inquisition.

Kathleen M. Crowther, assistant professor in the Department of the His-

tory of Science, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA. She
specializes in early modern science and medicine, body and gender in
early modern Europe, and science and religion.

Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus,

University of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV, USA. Known for his work on
Galileo, he has also published widely in the field of informal logic and
critical thinking, history and philosophy of science, twentieth-century
Italian social and political philosophy. He was honored by Cambridge
University Press with the publication of a collection of his articles
entitled: Arguments about Arguments.

Carlos Fraenkel, associate professor in the Departments of Philosophy

and Jewish Studies, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
He specializes in the history of philosophy (ancient, medieval Islamic
and Jewish, and early modern).

Miguel A. Granada, professor in the Departament d’Història de la Filoso-

fia, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain. Professor Granada is an
authority on Bruno. He has prepared Spanish translations of the Italian
works, contributed to the preparation of critical editions, and published
various studies on Bruno and the cosmology of his era. Currently he
is doing research on the astronomical and cosmological revolution in
early modern Europe, between Copernicus and Kepler.

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 notes on contributors xv

Peter Harrison, Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion, Uni-

versity of Oxford, Oxford, UK. He has published extensively in cultural
and intellectual history, with a particular focus on the philosophical,
scientific and religious thought of the early modern period.

Kenneth J. Howell, director and professor of theology, St. John Institute

of Catholic Thought and adjunct associate professor of religious studies,
The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA. He is cur-
rently engaged in research on the early Greek church fathers, especially
Ignatius of Antioch and John Chrysostom.

Eric Jorink, researcher at the Huygens Instituut, The Hague, The Neth-
erlands. He is engaged in research on scientific culture in early modern
times as well as on a biography of the Amsterdam natural scientist Jan
Swammerdam (1637–1680). He is the editor of De Achttiende Eeuw.

Kerry V. Magruder, librarian of the History of Science Collections, assistant

professor of the history of science, University of Oklahoma, Norman,
OK, USA. Research interests: seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
Theories of the Earth, early geology, cosmology, visual representation,
and the development of the historical sciences.

Scott Mandelbrote, Official Fellow and director of Studies in History,

Peterhouse, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK, and Fellow of
All Souls College, Oxford University, Oxford, UK. Research interests:
early modern intellectual history, in particular the history of biblical
scholarship and the history of natural philosophy.

The Reverend Canon Charlotte Methuen, departmental lecturer in eccle-

siastical history, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK. Assistant chaplain,
Keble College. Canon Theologian, Gloucester Cathedral. Research
interests include science and theology in the sixteenth century, the
German Reformation, the ecumenical movement between the First
and Second World Wars, the history of women’s ministry.

Robert G. Morrison, associate professor of religion, Bowdoin College,

Brunswick, ME, USA. His teaching and research interests include Islam
and science, interpretations of the Qur’an, the relationship between
Islam and Judaism. In his dissertation and recent publications he has
examined the role of science and philosophy in religious texts.

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xvi notes on contributors

Richard J. Oosterhoff, doctoral student. Program in history and philosophy

of science, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA. Interests:
late medieval and early modern history of science, history of science &
religion, medieval & Renaissance pedagogy of mathematics.

Volker R. Remmert, assistant professor of the history of science and history

of mathematics, Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz, Germany.
He combines interests in history of science, art, and culture focusing
on early modern Europe. His research also includes the history of
mathematics during the Nazi regime.

Tamar M. Rudavsky, professor of philosophy and director of the Melton

Center for Jewish Studies, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA.
She specializes in medieval Jewish philosophy focusing on philosophical
cosmology in medieval Jewish and scholastic thought.

Stephen D. Snobelen, associate professor in the history of science and tech-

nology, University of King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Stephen Snobelen is currently studying Isaac Newton’s theology and
the relationship between his religion and natural philosophy. He serves
on the editorial board of the Newton Project and is Director of the
Newton Project Canada.

Jitse M. van der Meer, professor of biology and history and philosophy
of science, Redeemer University College, Ancaster, Ontario, Canada.
Areas of expertise include embryonic pattern formation, the history of
nineteenth- and twentieth-century biology, and cognitive interactions
between scientific and religious knowledge. Current research interests:
engagement of religion and science, history and philosophy of nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century biology (G. Cuvier, T. Dobzhansky),
theoretical biology.

Rienk H. Vermij, assistant professor, University of Oklahoma, Norman,

OK, USA. Research interests: Cartesian natural philosophy, Coper-
nicanism, early modern meteorology, Enlightenment, science in the
Netherlands.

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 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Kerry V. Magruder, Thomas Burnet, Biblical Idiom, and Seventeenth-Century

Theories of the Earth

Fig. 1. Thomas Burnet, Theory of the Earth (London, 1684). Frontispiece

for the 1684 English translation.
Fig. 2. Burnet 1684, 135. Global hemisection showing the formation
of an ocean basin.
Fig. 3. Burnet 1681, 46. Global view (top) and global section (below).

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INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS

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 CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Jitse M. van der Meer and Scott Mandelbrote

Setting the Stage and Identifying the Challenges

Background
One of the most important factors infl uencing the reception of all ideas
in the cultures of Europe and the Middle East has been the intellectual
context of the religions of the book, and within that, of the framework
provided by the understanding and interpretation of privileged religious
texts (the Tanakh, the Christian Bible, the Qur’an). Surprisingly, while
the history of the interpretation of Scripture is currently undergoing
a revival, historians of exegesis have so far overlooked its interaction
with another major cultural force, namely natural philosophy and the
natural sciences. Further, historians of science have only recently begun
to notice the importance of the interaction between the subjects of their
discipline and those of the history of exegesis. The rationale for these
two edited volumes is to contribute to filling these gaps.

Objective
The goal of this project is to explore how the development of different
styles of interpretation found in reading scripture (the Tanakh, the
Christian Bible, the Qur’an) and nature, helped to transform ideas of
both the written word and the created world over several centuries,
and how this engagement was affected by the larger cultural context.
The approach is historical. The period of interest covers the last two
millennia up to the present.

Focus
Our focus is not on theology and science, but on specific strategies of
interpretation and on hermeneutical principles that shape knowledge of
God and nature in interaction with contextual infl uences. The goal is
to describe what happened in the dialogue between the interpretation

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4 jitse m. van der meer and scott mandelbrote

of natural phenomena and the interpretation of scripture and to explain

why it happened. The notion of interpretation of nature is taken in
its context. Thus this notion is not restricted to the interpretation of
nature in the theories and models of contemporary science, nor to the
interpretation of nature as understood in the so-called hermeneutical
philosophy of science, but it also includes, for instance, the interpreta-
tion of nature as part of the interpretation of scripture in the Middle
Ages. It is an historical, rather than a philosophical or (in contemporary
terms) a scientific concept.

Complexity of the Topic and Focus of the Workshop

The complexity of the topic has forced us to limit the scope of this proj-
ect. The theme of interpretation links history of science with the specific
histories of a range of other fields associated with the interpretation of
scripture such as studies in cultural history, literary history, history of
philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, religion, theology, and philosophy.
Each dimension deserves attention in its own right and all need to be
considered together in the complexity of their interaction in order to
clarify the mutual engagement of the interpretation of the Bible and
of nature. For various obvious reasons this cannot be done. But the
observation draws attention to the engagement or lack thereof between
the fields that constitute the background for interactions between his-
tory of science and history of text interpretation. Given the multiple
dimensions of our theme, the absence of contributions by theologians,
philosophers of science, philosophers of religion, literary historians,
and others needs explanation. The decision to invite only historians of
exegesis and historians of science refl ects our attempt to manage the
complexity of the engagement. Our first priority was depth of descrip-
tion. We simply want to know what happened and why. The difference
is not unlike that between history of philosophy and philosophy. We
want to contribute a history of interpretation of nature and scripture
in all its aspects such as theology, linguistics, and philosophy without
engaging in research in these auxiliary disciplines.
The theme of interpretation also links history of science with main-
stream history in a variety of ways. First, the development of a sense
of history itself has shaped the history of interpretative practices. One
might consider the typological interpretation of religious texts, which
presupposes a linear conception of history in which past events or
persons can be types of what transpires in the future. Without such

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 introduction 5

a dynamic view of history one would expect the dominant styles of

interpretation to focus on the moral and spiritual senses of scripture
and nature. A second link with general history lies in the movement of
European Christianity from a medieval culture of images to an early
modern culture of words. Peter Harrison has suggested that Protestant
interpreters of the Bible focussed on the literal sense of Scripture to
such an extent that this undermined the symbolic meaning of things,
events and persons not only in Scripture but also in nature and on the
large scale of European culture.1 The interpretation of both Scripture
and nature is also embedded in general history because the rise of a
new phase in historical awareness in the nineteenth century included
the history of religion and its religious books as well as the history
of nature. This new stage of historical awareness underlies much of
the subsequent entanglements of the interpretation of Scripture and
nature, as has been shown by Jim Moore in The Post-Darwinian Contro-
versies (1979), or, at least, so it seems according to the received view.
Finally, mainstream history enters the picture because social, political,
and economic contexts have always been recognized as essential to the
interpretation of texts. To take one example of the entanglement of
such contexts, the curse placed on Ham, one of the three sons of Noah
in the fl ood narrative, has served to justify various forms of racism,
from the Hebrew occupation of Canaan to early modern European
conquests in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. In postbiblical times, this
justification has focussed on a supposed link between the recipients of
the curse and dark skin color. It has been deployed to provide religious
and, through the development of the category of race, scientific support
for the enslavement of black Africans by Europeans or, more recently,
in South Africa, for the institution and development of Apartheid.2 In
eighteenth-century British interpretations of India, by contrast, bibli-
cal ethnography combined with a Newtonian chronology, which was
based on the application of astronomical data to the interpretation of
Scripture, to rescue a vision of ancient wisdom, embodied in Sanskrit
texts and believed to have been transmitted through the descendants
of Ham, from Egypt to Iran to the Hindus.3 The better-known aspect

1
See Harrison 1998, 11–63.
2
See Kidd 2006; on the New World, see also Haynes 2002; on South Africa, see
also Dubow 1995; for a discussion of the origins of the linkage between race, color,
and slavery in postbiblical Jewish and Islamic thought, see Goldenberg 2003.
3
See Trautmann 1997, 37–61.

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6 jitse m. van der meer and scott mandelbrote

of the story of Noah, namely the deluge and its interpretation in scien-
tific creationism is interwoven with recent social and religious history
of the USA.
Finally, taking the historical approach still leaves us with the consid-
erable challenge of encouraging meaningful communication between
historians of science and historians of biblical interpretation. We identify
two potential obstacles to a fruitful exchange.

Reading Nature in the Light of Scripture

We see the first obstacle to communication between historians of science
and historians of exegesis in the popular but anachronistic assumption
that science has set the agenda for the interpretation of scripture,
rather than being shaped itself in part by exegetical questions. This
positivistic ideology moved one of the Italian groups reacting in 1983
to Pietro Redondi’s Galileo—Heretic. Their fear was that they would
lose the advantages of the Galileo myth which allowed them to use the
assumption of a neutral science as a weapon against subjective religion
as represented by the perceived role of the Roman Catholic Church.
The initiative of John Paul II to revisit the Galileo trial, particularly
through the work of the Vatican study commission established in
1981, eventually pulled the rug from under their platform.4 Historians
of exegesis may be surprised to learn that various authoritative texts
including religious scriptures have been used to compile interpretations
of nature in undertakings such as ‘Mosaic physics’ or scriptural geology.
The contemporary relevance of this infl uence of scripture interpreta-
tion may be seen in creation science or Islamic science. We hope that
reading these volumes will go some way toward levelling the barrier
between historians of science and historians of exegesis.

Interpretation is Involved in the Natural Sciences: Particularity

A second barrier to communication between historians of exegesis and of
science is the popular misconception that the category of interpretation
is not to be found in the toolbox of natural philosophers and natural
scientists. This may explain why historians of scripture interpretation

4
See Finocchiaro 2005, 338–65. For recent refl ections and reinterpretations of the
evidence presented by Redondi and by the study commission, see the essays of Beretta;
Artigas, Martínez, and Shea; Sharratt; and Coyne in McMullin 2005.

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 introduction 7

have overlooked interaction with the natural sciences. For instance,

neither the Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation (Barton 1998),
nor The Bible in Modern Culture (Harrisville and Sundberg 2002), nor
History of Biblical Interpretation (Yarchin 2004) offer work that touches
upon any infl uence from this direction. To a great extent, however,
this is an issue in the philosophy of science and, therefore, cannot be
covered in these volumes. Instead, we review the role of interpretation
in natural philosophy and science as background information for those
unfamiliar with it and as justification for the prominent role of the idea
of interpretation of nature in this project.
The main concern in this respect for historians of scripture inter-
pretation operating within the Christian tradition was expressed by
Professor Anthony Thiselton as a member of the program committee
responsible for the initial design of these volumes. It related to the
radical difference in method between hermeneutics and the natural
sciences. These volumes show that there can be a ready dialogue
between the interpretation of specific biblical passages and specific
uses in the natural sciences and in the history of scientific discovery.
What might raise more complex concerns is the difference of mind-set
between exegetes of religious texts trained in hermeneutics, in which
(for modern exponents, at least) particularity, contingency, and the
importance of questions and actualizations take priority over more
generalizing theory, and a more scientific concern, rightly, for coher-
ence and rational system in the sciences.
Professor Thiselton was concerned here with the effect of scientific
meta-narratives, research traditions in the parlance of philosophy of
science, on the interpretation of religious texts. Science can be seen
as imposing a way of answering hermeneutical questions that become
fixed or are too generalized before the subject matter of the religious
text can be genuinely ‘heard.’ Hermeneutics in this view leads to a
rejection of prior categorizations of science, in the belief that what
is to be understood should not be pigeonholed within the conceptual
boxes of a system prior to hermeneutical actualizations in the process of
understanding itself. Perhaps this is best illustrated from hermeneutical
approaches in the social sciences. Very often a social science question-
naire may impose onto the human subject ‘answers’ that may fail to
do justice to ‘the otherness of the other.’ Theologians face the same
problem when they explore the hermeneutics of doctrine. It is hard
to prevent hermeneutics from becoming assimilated into some prior
systematic theology. On the other hand if a hermeneutical mindset and

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approach is to stand on its own feet, it remains a hard struggle to ensure

that such an approach does full justice to the content of theology. If
we transfer this dilemma from theology to the sciences, the problem of
preventing the historical and contingent from becoming subsumed into
preformed ‘ideas’ seems to become even more complex and difficult.
One classic source of the articulation of such an anxiety comes espe-
cially from Gadamer not least in his work on the nature of dialectic.
Another is the later Wittgenstein. Both writers expressed deep concern
over the generalizing method of science and the contemptuous attitude
towards the particular case. What Gadamer, Wittgenstein, and Thiselton
want to avoid is premature interpretation of a one-sided kind known
as reductionism in the natural sciences. Explanatory antireductionism
in science would be more to their liking.
We believe that this assessment is based on a view of science that
is as dated among philosophers of science as it is popular elsewhere.
One might begin with the fundamental issue of particularity. Gadamer
and Wittgenstein lived during the heyday of positivism and the move
toward the so-called unification of the sciences. So their concern about
the generalizing method of science is very understandable. The positivist
myth of scientific knowledge as absolutely certain and universally valid
still persists, but mainly among the public and among some practicing
scientists. However, the last three decades have seen a radical change
in views of science among philosophers (the so-called hermeneutical
philosophy of science) and historians of science (contextual history of
science, sociology of science) whose effects are becoming more widely
acknowledged. It is represented by a body of literature and may be
summarized as follows.
Particularity may be found in science both on the side of the scientist
and on the side of the phenomena. Scientists introduce particularity
in the form of frameworks of interpretation within which things are
perceived and conceptualized. This subjectivity extends beyond personal
knowledge to that sanctioned by communities of scientists and referred
to as schools of thought. Further, phenomena are always particular. This
is obvious in the study of past phenomena in cosmology and palaeon-
tology. Particularity is also encountered in observation for the purpose
of biological classification: no two beetles are alike. In experimentation
particularity is experienced in the struggle to standardize the phenom-
enon studied. It is true that the knowledge ideal in science is to abstract
from the particularities, but this is achievable only to a limited extent.
Cosmology and palaeontology remain stubbornly particular. In other
fields such as chemistry, physics and biology, a degree of particularity

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remains even after abstraction. For instance, organisms and electrons

are uniquely different in that organisms have purposes while electrons
do not. After centuries of debate no one has succeeded in removing
teleological language and explanation from biology so as to make it
like physics with its causal explanations. Teleology continues to be the
biologist’s mistress without which he cannot live, but with whom he
is unwilling to be seen in public. Even within biology, heredity, for
instance, cannot be generalized across the molecular and macroscopic
levels: a classical gene does not have a counterpart at the molecular
level. There are very few laws in biology as compared to physics. In
general, non-reductive explanation is gaining popularity. The concern to
acknowledge particularity in the natural sciences is legitimate in so far
as it is directed against attempts at reduction of an ideological nature.
They not only distort reality as in applications of Newtonianism in biol-
ogy and psychology, but also have unwanted social consequences as in
mechanistic medicine. This is what motivated Nancy Cartwright when
she said that the laws of physics lie. The point is that the particularity
of things and events in nature is removed as much as possible as part
of the interpretative process in the natural sciences. The distortion of
the particularity of natural phenomena has been acknowledged in a
movement toward plurality in explanation. In addition to particular-
ity, subjectivity also illustrates the role of interpretation in the natural
sciences.5

Interpretation is Involved in the Natural Sciences: Subjectivity

Historians of science since Michael Polanyi, Ludwig Fleck, and Thomas
Kuhn as well as sociologists of knowledge have shown that natural
phenomena are often explained in terms of large-scale interpretative
frameworks that represent visions of nature such as medieval nature
symbolism, early modern readings in terms of a Christian or Muslim
atomism, a Christian mechanism or teleomechanism, psychologism,
and cyberneticism (systems philosophy). These volumes show that
such interpretative visions of nature also mediate in the engagement
of scripture and science.6

5
Cartwright 1983.
6
For Christian atomism see Osler 1994; for Muslim atomism see Dhanani 1994; for
teleomechanism see Lenoir 1982; for psychologism see Whitehead 1925; for cyberneti-
cism see Bateson 1979, Laszlo 1996, Wiener 1950.

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‘Vision’ is used here in the double sense of having a visionary experi-

ence and having an all-encompassing view of the world in general.
Visions, if not the conversions to which they often point, have received
meagre historical examination in the history of theology, and less in
the historical study of natural philosophy. Even less attention has been
given to the similarities of conversion accounts in both ‘religious’ and
‘scientific’ traditions. The similarity of Helmont’s account of his vision
and conversion to those in a long tradition of theologians from Paul to
the seventeenth century is remarkable.7
At times of rapid change in understandings of nature, one vision may be
exchanged for another. Mary Hesse has explained why this is so in her
work on the role of metaphor in science and on the cognitive content
of metaphor.8 This confirms Gadamer’s insight that an interpreter is
never free from the interpretations of other interpreters. Ludwig Fleck,
Michael Polanyi, Thomas Kuhn, and Patrick Heelan have argued
that interpretation is essential not only in the understanding of natural
phenomena, but also in the perception of nature.9 In “Personal Knowl-
edge” Polanyi argued that prior categories shape scientific knowledge.
This is inevitable because human cognition always takes place within
an existing context. It follows that avoiding one pigeon hole is possible
only by dwelling in another. However radical the process of change,
ideas must always be expressed within a network of assumptions and
knowledge that provides the environment in which interpretation and
understanding may take place. Changes in the physical environment,
objects and technologies also play an important role in prompting and
shaping conversations that alter understandings of nature.10
But one can also take ‘vision’ in the sense of perception of reality.
In this sense it is a theme in the so-called hermeneutical philosophy
of science that has been initiated and developed in the path-breaking
work of Patrick Heelan. This theme is now referred to as the ‘theory-
ladenness of observation.’ In his Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science
Heelan (1983) shows

7
For a description of the reformation of visions of nature and the implications for
natural philosophies emerging from different visions, see Klaaren 1977: 72–76.
8
Hesse 1988.
9
For an introduction to the hermeneutical philosophy of science see: Crease 1997;
Eger 1993a; Eger 1993b; Heelan 1989; Heelan 1997; Heelan 1998; Kuhn 1962; Kuhn
1977; Polanyi 1958.
10
See Daston 2004.

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that, despite the fact that we perceive a visual Cartesian [ Euclidean]

world, our natural mode of unaided visual perception is hyperbolic; medi-
ating our everyday perception of a Cartesian world in the carpentered
environment that we have learned to ‘read’ like a ‘text.’
In other words,
Scientific perception, like all perception, gains its meaning from the con-
text of inquiry that generates the data. Thus the perception of scientists
is transformed during the course of an investigation. Similar conclusions
have been reached by N.R. Hanson, S. Toulmin, T.S. Kuhn, P. Feyerabend,
M. Hesse, M. Polanyi, M. Grene, C. Hooker and others.11
Another theme in the hermeneutical philosophy of science introduced
by Polanyi is that of theories as tools, i.e., extensions of the mind. He
explains this with an analogy. People remember the meaning of a
text they have read, but not the language in which the meaning was
expressed. Polanyi points out that language functions as an instrument
or tool used to convey meaning. Frameworks of interpretation in science
are like language. When we attend to an explanation or a perception
we are unaware of the interpretive context, but it remains there.12
In sum, the natural sciences are themselves a hermeneutical enter-
prise. This fact is obscured by a methodological move from particularity
to generality by way of abstraction. But this methodology is not equally
appropriate and successful across the disciplines. As a result there are
degrees of particularity and generality depending on the discipline and
on the object of study. Subjectivity, however, characterizes all the dis-
ciplines equally. The particularity both of the phenomena and of the
interpreter as well as the subjectivity of the latter are our justification
for the assumption underlying this project, which is that the natural
sciences have a hermeneutical dimension.

Methodological Issues
Case studies on the interaction of the books of nature and scripture
require individuals with reasonable expertise in the interpretation of
both. It has been a challenge to find such interpreters. They are not
so difficult to locate in the early modern era. Reformers in theology,
notably Philip Melanchthon, also sought the reformation of the study

11
Heelan 1988.
12
Polanyi 1958, 55, 59.

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of nature.13 This observation, which was favored by the first historian

of the Royal Society of London, Thomas Sprat, might be extended to
embrace lay theologians as well as professionals.14 Francis Bacon or
Robert Boyle, in this sense, embodied both the religious and the scien-
tific aspirations and practice of early modern natural philosophy with
even more success than John Wilkins, the future Bishop of Chester
who took the chair at the Royal Society’s first meeting.15 But, as one
approaches the modern era, professionalization makes it increasingly
difficult to find individuals for case studies. They are experts either in
one or in the other book, but not in both. Interaction may be commoner
in the field than in the laboratory, although even so it is rare to find a
missionary such as James Gulick (1832–1932) who was a professional
Scripture interpreter and also contributed substantially to evolutionary
biology.16 Such individuals provide greater depth to more theoretical
refl ections on the theme of our project.
More often one finds a professional exegete with an interest in science
or a professional scientist with an interest in scripture. They may well
not be representative of a school of thought or a religious tradition.
The classical example is the heterodox theology that informed the
interpretation of Scripture by Newton at the close of the seventeenth
century. Darwin and Dobzhansky illustrate the point for the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, respectively. For instance, the value of the
religious idea of evolutionary progress is apparent in Dobzhansky’s
interpretation of the book of Genesis on the Fall. Traditionally this
story implied that people are by nature inclined to do evil rather than
good, and that salvation from this state is possible only by divine grace.
Dobzhansky understood that these two interpretations have tended to
exclude the notion of progress from Christianity: “. . . the idea of the
Fall as the beginning of the world’s history [i]nterpreted literally rather
than symbolically is anti-evolutionistic.”17 He removed this theological
obstacle by interpreting the Fall symbolically. Dobzhansky was an
evolutionary biologist with a broad education and interests. It would
be unreasonable to expect to find exegetical and theological refl ection

13
See Kusukawa 1995.
14
Sprat 1667, e.g., 327–9, 372–3.
15
Matthews 2007; Hunter 2000; Shapiro 1969.
16
England (these volumes); for the relatively common linkage between missionary
medicine and the interpretation of Scripture (of which perhaps the most startling
example was the career of Albert Schweitzer), see Vaughan 1991, 55–76, 155–79.
17
Dobzhansky 1962: 2.

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 introduction 13

on symbolic interpretation of Scripture. The most a historian can do

is suggest a link with the fact that Dobzhansky, like Darwin before
him, did not have the conception of sin as an inherent inability to do
good.18 In contrast he believed that people were capable of doing both
good and evil.
Limitations in the range of expertise manifested by particular his-
torical figures can be avoided to some degree by a judicious choice of
cases, but there remain gaps in the record and this is apparent in our
project. So in interpreting the results of our project and similar ones,
one must be careful about making generalizations based on a few case
studies.

Objectives and Rationale

Objective
The question is how biblical interpretation and the interpretation of
nature have infl uenced each other, and how this engagement was
affected by the larger cultural context. Restated, our aim is to contrib-
ute to a description and evaluation of the mutual infl uences between
scriptural exegesis and hermeneutics on the one hand and practices
or techniques of interpretation in natural philosophy and the natural
sciences on the other.

Rationale
The primary rationale for this project is that this theme has had such a
low profile both in the history of science and in the history of biblical
interpretation. This is surprising given the fundamental role of religious
texts in Christian, Islamic, and Judaic cultures. Moreover, for the last
two decades, in which studies of science and religion have burgeoned
in each of the traditions of the Book, the focus normally has been on
the relationship of theology and science.19 Relatively little attention
has been paid to questions of biblical interpretation, perhaps because
this was seen as subjective and prone to interminable disagreements.
Such an interpretation appears to be strengthened by consideration

18
van der Meer 2007.
19
For discussion of the problems generated by this and some suggestions for a
historical way out, see Brooke and Cantor 1998, 43–72.

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14 jitse m. van der meer and scott mandelbrote

of the most infl uential attempt to argue both for the importance of
the Bible in shaping a modern scientific view of the world and for the
role of a particular kind of biblical exegesis in the later development of
scientific ideas. Reijer Hooykaas’s Religion and the Rise of Modern Science
claimed that both a biblical conception of the role of God in nature
and a specifically Calvinist or Puritan attitude to biblical interpreta-
tion had played a formative role in the creation of modern science.
Neither Hooykaas’s rather jaundiced view of Greek science and its
legacy in the Arabic world and the medieval West, nor his partisan
dismissal of Catholic and Lutheran natural philosophy, has stood up
well to the passage of time.20 Yet theology would be empty without
the interpretation of religious texts: their meaning in the relationship
between science and religion requires further elucidation. Moreover,
as we have seen, it is now acknowledged that natural philosophy and
the natural sciences would not exist without the interpretation of
perceptions, concepts and theories, whose hermeneutical implications
may have resonance with those of exegesis. The interpretative nature
of the natural sciences levels the playing field between interpretation
of scripture and interpretation of nature. History of science is incom-
plete without considering the infl uence, methods, and styles of biblical
interpretation. This project focuses on these two interpretive endeavors
because they have been neglected.
There are two secondary reasons that moved us to undertake this
project. Until very recently the history of the two interpretative endeav-
ors could be compared with two parallel lines—they contain two differ-
ent sets of points and never intersect. Thus a secondary rationale for
this work is to encourage engagement between these disciplines.
Further, questions for the interpretation of Scripture continue to
be raised by current theological refl ection on scientific theories. For
instance, refl ection on cosmological theories raises questions of inter-
pretation of biblical passages associated with the doctrine of creation
ex nihilo. If the mind emerges from the body how does one interpret
biblical texts that imply a nonbodily existence after death? If the uni-
verse has an end, how does one interpret eschatological passages? If
our everyday macroscopic reality emerges from a quantum world, and
were theological attempts to locate divine action in quantum phenomena
to prove warranted, how might one interpret Scripture on such issues

20
Cf. Hooykaas 1972.

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 introduction 15

as divine providence and prayer? Each of these questions makes clear

the necessity of renewed refl ection on the role of the hermeneutics of
Scripture in the development of theological doctrines that interact with
the natural sciences.

Plan of the Book

Strategy
We have chosen for a format that surveys the questions rather than one
that claims to offer complete solutions. Such a format was dictated by
the current embryonic state of this interdisciplinary field of studies. It
is too early to aim for solutions when we are scratching the surface of
very complex interactions that involve many disciplines in addition to
the two we have focused on. These considerations made an historical
approach the natural one. Within this approach we have accommodated
case studies in order to create the depth necessary for identifying what
the important questions might be. While this strategy excludes a the-
matic approach, the development of broad themes may be found in the
introductions and responses to sections that were designed to facilitate
interaction between historians of science and historians of exegesis, and
in the correspondences that emerge between chapters.21
We include material that refers to developments across much of the
last two millennia, that is the period in which the three contemporary
religions of the book have emerged. Within this time frame we have
largely concentrated on interactions that have occurred in the last five
hundred years or so, partly because this represents the period of devel-
opment of increasingly modern forms of scientific understanding. Our
long timescales may make it possible to correlate or contrast develop-
ments in the history of the interpretation of nature and the history of
the interpretation of scripture. Both histories will be read in parallel
without focussing exclusively on the priority of one or the other. In this
way we hope not only to make room for mutuality in the engagement
of the two interpretive endeavors, but also to discover what factors in
the cultural context have acted to shape them both.

21
Chapters designated as Introduction or Response are identified in a footnote to
the chapter title.

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16 jitse m. van der meer and scott mandelbrote

Organization
The two volumes follow a roughly chronological order for two reasons.
Firstly, this allows different phases in the development of interpretive
strategies to be seen more coherently within their historical context.
In a thematic approach contextual information would have had to be
repeated in the treatment of each theme. Secondly, most scholars spe-
cialize in the movements and individuals of a specific period. It would
have been counterproductive to ask contributors to stretch beyond their
expertise for the sake of sticking to a theme.
Sectional Introductions and Responses also serve to encourage
meaningful communication between members of two disciplines who
had not talked much before: historians of science and historians of
scripture interpretation. Historians of scripture interpretation and
church historians have contributed Introductions and Responses for
Parts composed primarily of history of science and vice versa. These
have been written at a level aimed to be of benefit across disciplinary
boundaries. Given the Parts introductions this general introduction
does not enter into the substance of the project.
The first volume covers early Christianity up to the seventeenth
century with a separate Part offering case studies on the Copernican
debates. Further, there are chapters featuring the church fathers, the
role of Renaissance theories of language, the contribution of Scripture
interpretation by the Protestant reformers to the development of modern
science, and the infl uence of religious perspectives on scripture inter-
pretation in its engagement of the interpretation of nature including
Eastern Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Special topics include ‘Mosaic
philosophy,’ Isaac Newton and ‘Theories of the Earth.’
Volume two spans the eighteenth to the twentieth century with a
separate Part on theories of biological evolution treated geographically.
In addition to biology its disciplinary scope includes physics, geology,
and ethnology. Religious perspectives include Christianity with a special
chapter on Eastern Orthodoxy as well as Islam and Judaism. Special
topics include the problem of evil, creationist hermeneutics, the par-
ticular relationship between biblical hermeneutics and scientific practice
in the reformed communities of the Netherlands, ‘scientific exegesis’
of the Qur’an from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century,
and a comparison of Hebrew and Christian practices of interpreting
nature and scripture in response to the religious crisis of modernity in
Judaism and Christianity. The topic often referred to as: “Body, soul,

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 introduction 17

and spirit” which initially represented anthropology in the project is so

large that it deserves separate treatment and was excluded.

Conclusions and Areas of Future Research

The Topic in Broader Perspective

The current surge of interest, led by the work of Harrison and Howell,
in the history of biblical interpretation in relation to understandings of
nature raises the question of how significant interpretations of nature
have been for exegesis.22 Have the natural sciences ever generated
problems for biblical interpretation that had not already arisen in other
contexts? As Howell and others have shown, when facing questions
raised by new developments in natural knowledge, Galileo could rely
on established Augustinian strategies for the interpretation of Scripture.
Indeed, the ubiquity of the practice of accommodation, by no means
always drawing on the Galilean example, in cosmological debate of the
early modern period is very striking. Writers from all parts of the wide
confessional spectrum of early modern Europe, who were committed
to realist versions of Copernicanism, were encouraged to deploy some
version or other of an argument from accommodation, based on a
relatively discrete range of patristic authorities. The setting for this was
in part the hostile attitude of ecclesiastical and educational authorities
in environments as diverse as Catholic Italy or Calvinist Holland to
the challenge that realist Copernicanism appeared to pose to publicly
sanctioned methods of reading Scripture. The appeal to the practice
of the fathers was as persuasive in the context of Protestant exegesis
as it appeared to be for Roman Catholics, for whom the example of
patristic interpretation was endorsed by the authority of the Council
of Trent.23 Lutheran writers, who were committed to the principle that
the Bible and nature provided compatible visions of divine providence,
were perhaps most resistant to, although not immune from, this ten-
dency, just as they were most innovative in developing hypothetical
readings of Copernicus.24 Before getting too carried away with this

22
See Harrison 1998; Howell 2002; see also Bennett and Mandelbrote 1998.
23
See Howell 2002, Vermij 2002, 241–71; see also Blackwell 1991, 1–110; Pedersen
1983; Reeves 1991. For the broader infl uence of Augustine on ideas of natural knowl-
edge, see Harrison 2007.
24
See Kusukawa 1995, 124–73; cf. Methuen 1998, 107–204. Westman 1975. For

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example, however, it is worth remembering that the entire debate

over the reception of heliocentrism must be set within the context of
the ongoing refinement of Aristotelian natural philosophy, in which,
for many writers, Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed alike, a proper
conception of divine or scriptural physics seemed most compatible with
some version of the scholastic interpretation of nature. Viewed in this
light, the tendency to practice accommodation may have derived as
much from scholastic techniques of reasoning and interpretation, which
came increasingly to privilege the literal sense of Scripture, as it did
from the need of a few self-conscious innovators in natural philosophy
to find patristic justifications for facts that appeared inconvenient to
the witness of the Bible. To determine which source was uppermost
at a particular historical moment or even for a given historical actor
remains a challenge.25
From the perspective of the history of the interpretation of sacred
texts and of hermeneutics, questions about the interpretation of nature
within the Islamic tradition appear at times to have been important
primarily for the purpose of a better understanding of scripture. The
resulting primacy of the sacred text has of course also been a theme
of much Christian discussion of nature, and has similarly underpinned
much Jewish thinking about nature. To some extent, the greater stabil-
ity of religious authority in postmedieval Islamic and Jewish thought
gave greater consistency to this hierarchy in hermeneutics outside
post-Reformation Christianity. It would be a mistake, however, to put
too much stress on this apparent difference. In both the postmedieval
Sephardic and Ashkenazic worlds, for example, there were individuals
who combined curiosity about innovations in natural knowledge with
hypothetical solutions to the apparent contradictions between such
innovations and traditional teachings, based on sacred texts. Equally,
there were developments within Jewish philosophies of nature, particu-
larly as a result of the application and refinement of Kabbalah, which
generated controversy about the status of Aristotelian physics and its
compatibility with authoritative readings of sacred texts.26

Catholic opposition to the use of biblical accommodation in cosmological arguments,

see Kelter 2005.
25
Armogathe 2007, especially 41–89, 113–48; cf. Trueman and Clark 1999; Muller
1993, 487–540.
26
See Ruderman 1995; Efron and Gissis 1997.

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 introduction 19

Knowledge of nature has sometimes constituted readings of scripture,

but this role has been modest compared to, for instance, the infl uence
of interpretations of history on scripture interpretation. The popular
misunderstanding that higher biblical criticism originates in the natural
sciences fails to acknowledge its primary origin in the rise of historical
awareness and the development of historical research. This observa-
tion about the centrality of history may be as true when one examines
authors who have recently been credited with the invention of a criti-
cal method in exegesis, such as Thomas Hobbes, Isaac La Peyrère,
Richard Simon, or Baruch Spinoza, as it is when considering writers
in the nineteenth century.
Interpretations of nature for the sake of knowing God have some-
times motivated a closer look at Scripture. In the letter of Paul to the
Roman Christians, the apostle asserts that the Divinity and power of
God can be known from nature. But the limited knowledge of the
divine attributes possible in this way implies an invitation to explore
other attributes of God in Scripture, or even through means of the
spirit or of practical piety. This was recognized by William Whewell in
the early nineteenth century, as it had been by the seventeenth-century
founders of the natural theological tradition in which he operated, John
Wilkins and John Ray.27
Less modest has been the regulative role interpretations of nature
have fulfilled whenever scripture interpretation has been constrained
by theologies which themselves accommodated new interpretations
of nature. Examples are Aristotelian and evolutionary interpretations
of Scripture. Both Aristotelian theology and process theology contain
interpretations of nature that regulate the interpretation of Scripture.
For authors working within the Aristotelian tradition, particularly as
modified by the infl uence of Aquinas, assumptions about the nature of
God as creator and first mover were intrinsic to any attempt to make
sense of the natural world. The resulting concentration on topics such
as divine foreknowledge had direct consequences also in the realm of
exegesis and, indeed, on the practical interpretation of the meaning
of the Christian religion, in terms of the pastoral process of confession
and the forgiveness of sins. As Rivka Feldhay has shown, differences

27
For Whewell, see Vidal and Kleeberg 2007, 395; Brooke 1991; for Wilkins and
Ray, see Mandelbrote 2007 and Ray 1713.

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between Catholic teaching orders, such as the Dominicans or the

Jesuits, over the nature of their scholastic inheritance were intimately
bound up with quarrels about attitudes to biblical interpretation, prac-
tical divinity, and even new developments in natural knowledge. 28
Likewise, an evolutionary perspective has transformed the traditional
Augustinian interpretation of the story of the Fall into sin in the book
of Genesis. As Ashley describes, whereas authors in the Augustinian
tradition take original sin as a product of the human will, authors in
the tradition of evolutionary and process theology take it as a cosmic
force. The primary implication for exegesis has been that the story of
the Fall was transformed from a historical episode involving human
will and responsibility to a mythical expression of the universal human
experience of evil both natural and moral. A God who pays the price
of natural evil for the sake of creating a cosmos through evolutionary
change replaces an act of human rebellion. As Ashley points out it is
hard to see how one “can avoid either making God responsible for evil
or positing a Manichean dualism.”29 Other exegetical implications can
be seen, for instance, in contemporary discussions about ‘open theism’
that have emerged from the notion that God is not all-powerful.
A further question concerns the roles that readings of nature have
played in the interpretation of scripture and in the practice of the
religious life of the peoples of the book. Valuable as they are, many of
the studies in these volumes, in common with other recent publications,
focus on theologians, natural philosophers, natural historians, physicians
and scientists. But the map of experience in these fields must also include
people from many other walks of life, ordinary readers and interpreters
whose understandings of sacred texts and of nature may turn out to be
anything but ordinary.30 A full measure of the significance of our topic
will require these blank areas to be filled.

28
Feldhay 1995, especially 73–198.
29
Ashley (these volumes).
30
The canonical example of such a reader and interpreter remains that of Domenico
Scandella (Menocchio), as described by Ginzburg 1980. A similarly remarkable case is
that of Evert Willemsz, discussed by Frijhoff 1995 and Frijhoff 2002, 67–91, although
Willemsz admitted that he did not have extensive knowledge of Scripture. The prophetic
nature of Willemsz’s peculiar attitude to Scripture and nature is widely echoed in other
circumstances. It often helped to generate hostility from contemporary (male) priests,
philosophers, and doctors, who were authorized to interpret natural and biblical signs.
See Mack 1992, 127–235; Schaffer 1996; Shaw 2006.

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Regional Studies
In one area it has proved easier to address questions of local dif-
ferences and similarities—that of biological evolution and Scripture
interpretation. This section confirms the need for regional studies, but
also reveals their limitations. In the seventeenth century, writers from
the Dutch Republic stand out for their extraordinary infl uence on a
Europe-wide scale, a product as much of the Republic’s importance
in the European publishing trade, perhaps, as of any other factor. For
instance, the Dutch theologian Voetius was respected for his challenge
to Cartesianism among both Calvinists and Lutherans across Europe
(Vermij, these volumes). Yet his infl uence was paralleled by the emer-
gence of a radical biblical criticism in the Dutch Republic during the
seventeenth century, which itself drew on materialist interpretations of
nature that owed much to the reading of Descartes.31 In the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, the Dutch example again appears unique, but
it is now marked out by the extraordinary insensitivity of theologians to
overtures from scientists who asked for help in questions about Scripture
interpretation (Visser, in these volumes), as well as by the way in which
neo-Calvinists faced the challenge of higher biblical criticism (Harinck,
de Knijff, these volumes).32 On the other hand, few regional differences
show in the way in which Christian theologians and scientists insisted
on attributing meaning to an evolving world as seen through Darwinian
eyes. In Germany, as well as in the Netherlands and the USA, the
response occurred at the level of metaphysics rather than that of textual
interpretation. Kleeberg, Visser, and England describe how the matter
that was insisted on was divine guidance of the evolutionary process
toward a goal. Even compared with the Copernican debates, this is a
sea change that needs further analysis.

Galileo’s Shadow
An enduring legacy of the Galileo myth is the popular perception that
the church has attempted to impose interpretations of Scripture on the

31
See Israel 2001, 159–327; Jorink (these volumes). This is not the place to contest
Israel’s tendency to overemphasize the extent to which Spinoza’s writings were directly
responsible for these developments.
32
An explanation for such a change in emphasis may lie in relative economic decline,
at least in the period 1675 to 1815, but probably owes more to the growing intellectual,
cultural, and social isolation from one another of the various confessional groupings
within Dutch society, particularly during the nineteenth century. See Wintle 2000.

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study of nature, that this has inhibited the progress of science, and that
science has won this battle. Nelson (these volumes) draws attention
to Josiah Nott (1804–1873) for attempting to include ethnology with
astronomy and geology in this mythology, stating that:
Astronomy and geology, so long kept down by bigotry and ignorance,
have triumphed, and the day is at hand when the natural history of man
will burst the trammels which have so long held it captive. The unity of
the races can only be deduced from forced constructions of the Old and
New Testaments, and persistence in this error is calculated to subvert
and not to uphold our religion.33
This stereotype is informed by undue focus on Galileo’s reading of
Joshua in his letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of 1615 and its
role in Galileo’s initial debate with Bellarmine, which established the
parameters for interpretation that Galileo subsequently broke. It has
been repeatedly exposed, in studies which have highlighted the rhetori-
cal nature of Galileo’s use of exegesis; the variety of opinion within the
church; the importance of the style and force of Galileo’s advocacy of
realist Copernicanism in provoking the trial of 1633, and the continu-
ing role of Augustinian patterns of thinking in Galileo’s natural theol-
ogy.34 Studies such as ours show that in fact during any particular era
interpretations of nature that were common have been read into the
meaning of Scripture. Apparent confl icts between scripture and sci-
ence, therefore, have to be reassessed as struggles between competing
interpretations of nature in which readings of scripture have become
implicated. The essays in these volumes also show that when nature
is read in terms of scripture the results have not always been negative
for knowledge and understanding. There are instances of the interpre-
tation of Scripture that have stimulated natural knowledge, as it was
understood at a particular time.35 Bono describes how speculations
about the cognitive powers of Adam in the Book of Genesis stimu-
lated attempts to recapture this privileged knowledge by reforming the
study of nature. Crowther offers two case studies on Mosaic physics.
Magruder shows how a scriptural idiom was incorporated in Burnet’s
theory of the Earth. The idiom of original chaos, paradise, fl ood, and

33
Nott 1849, 92 [drapery]; 7 [Astronomy].
34
The literature here is vast: the issues at stake are however well summarized in the
chapters of Redondi, McMullin, Blackwell, Pera, and Segre in Machamer 1998.
35
These comments are intended to be compatible with the complexity thesis
advanced by Brooke 1991.

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final confl agration helped shape a discourse about the history of the
Earth which featured in scientific writing for over a century. Nelson
describes the role of the creation of Adam and Eve in nineteenth-century
American monogenetic and polygenetic theories of ethnology. Finally,
Harrison argues that modern natural science began once the medieval
symbolic order of nature collapsed when it was rejected by Protestant
reformers for reasons of biblical interpretation. Van der Meer and
Oosterhoff question the rejection of nature symbolism as well as the
role of Protestantism.
The claim that passages from sacred texts are compatible with the
development of the natural sciences has sometimes been used for
popular apologetic purposes in both Christianity and Islam. Attempts
to bolster the authority of the Bible and the Qur’an with the reputation
of the natural sciences are present in the interpretations of nineteenth-
century Protestant biblical geologists as well as nineteenth-century
Muslim reforming theologians.36 It is important, however, to recognize
that the constructive working together of interpretations of sacred texts
and of natural knowledge is not a unique example of the way in which
authoritative texts may drive understandings of nature. The sacred texts
of the Abrahamic religions do not have the unique role in this respect
that has sometimes been assigned to them by scientific materialists and
others. Other examples of a process in which hermeneutical authority
has shaped the interpretation of nature range from the infl uence of
schools in ancient Greek and Chinese science to the role of the writings
of Aristotle in early modern theories of nature, to the role of canonical
texts in modern-day psychoanalysis.37

Hermeneutical Circle
The relationship between the two interpretative endeavors that we are
considering is essentially circular. The apparent meaning of scripture
passages is shaped by interpretations of nature in all three religions of
the book. This is a natural consequence of attempts to use contempo-
rary natural knowledge to understand references to nature in scripture.
Aristotelian readings of scripture were offered in Judaism (Maimonides),
in Christianity (Aquinas) and Islam (Ibn Sina). In each case, alternative
readings of nature and of scripture existed within the interpretative

36
See Young 1995 and Elshakry (these volumes).
37
See Lloyd 1996, especially 20–46; Gellner 1993.

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community, leading to controversy both over the relevance of such

readings and over the piety of those who offered them. Thus descrip-
tion of the infl uence of scripture interpretation on the interpretation
of nature must consider the possibility that this infl uence is in fact a
return to its original source—natural knowledge interpreting itself in
terms of itself. This means further that philosophies of nature have
played a mediating role in the engagement of scripture interpretation
and interpretation of nature.
By contrast, things, events and processes in nature may receive
religious meaning originating from interpretations of scripture. The
most startling example of this remains the use of fossilized remains as
material evidence in debates about the status and interpretation of the
Bible in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe.38 There are
however many other examples, from the reading of celestial signs as
portents to the categorization of certain forms of generation or of species
differentiation according to norms derived from sacred texts.39

Contextualized Reading of Scripture

In these volumes one encounters a variety of reasons or purposes for
reading scripture that are associated with specific ways of reading the
sacred text. For instance, the contemplative reading or lectio divina
is a kind of reading aiming at encouraging a way of life marked by
specific kinds of action. It was dominant in medieval communities of
philosopher-theologians where contemplation was an ideal of life and a
symbolic world view provided the means to achieve it. Contemplative
reading does not exclude other ways of reading such as cognitive read-
ing, but it places reading for knowledge acquisition in the perspective
of a means to an end whose primary characteristic is not cognitive. It
offers a perspective that is both broader and deeper than the slogan
that the Bible is not a textbook for science. Following the Protestant
Reformation and the decline of the symbolic world view, the geography
of reading styles for Scripture became more complex. Some commu-
nities emphasized the reading of Scripture for intellectual knowledge
while others, often out of reaction, continued contemplative styles of

38
See Rappaport 1997; the pre-eminent exponent of this argument was Johann
Jakob Scheuchzer (1672–1733) on whom see Kempe 2003, especially 110–87.
39
See Schechner Genuth 1997, especially 27–50; Cadden 1993, especially 188–95;
Atran 1990, especially 127–81.

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reading or developed new experiential styles. We need to know more

about how ways of reading Scripture are shaped by infl uences both
internal and external to Scripture and how they affected engagement
with the interpretation of nature.
This also raises the ancient question of how legitimate and illegitimate
ways of reading can be distinguished. The Genesis narrative of the Fall
is one example of a text from which too much has been asked. Ashley
(these volumes) describes how the Scripture narrative has been used
either to explain the origin of evil or to excuse God. The majority of
those who now look for theological causes of evil find them in contem-
porary accounts of evolutionary psychology in which evil inheres in the
creation. This they combine with some form of mythical conception
of the Scripture text. The doctrine of the Fall changes to include the
old Gnostic view of Creation as inherently evil. This makes God the
Creator responsible for natural evil so that a justification of God in
the face of evil becomes impossible. Moreover, for such a justification
to be convincing it must be rooted in real causes rather than myth.
Ashley concludes that finding the hermeneutical tools to chasten
reason’s ambitions as manifest in explanations of human origins and
the human condition is crucial for a continuing and fruitful interrela-
tion of the two books on the question of human evil. A text should not
be made to reveal more than it can. A similar concern for the limits
of interpretation underpinned many earlier attempts to make sense
of Scripture in the light of natural knowledge, not least among those
interested in the argument for the accommodation of the text to human
understanding. The difficulty has been to limit the scope of the text in
the absence of firm doctrinal positions deriving from sources of author-
ity outside Scripture. This may provide at least a partial explanation
for the continuing appeal of naively literalist readings of Scripture to
radical sectarian movements, beyond the mainstream of interpretation
in Christian, and, to some extent, Jewish and Islamic theology.40

40
For such movements in Christianity and their attitudes, see, for example, Barkun
1994, Boyer 1992, and Katz and Popkin 1998. For Jewish approaches to the literal
sense, see Halbertal 1997, 90–134; for an example of the sectarian appeal of literalism
in both Judaism and Islam, see Friedland and Hecht 1996, especially 143–62, 346–84.
For discussion of interpretations of the Genesis story, as presented over time according
to all three traditions, see Kvam, Schearing, and Ziegler 1999.

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Contextualized Reading of Nature

Given that the natural sciences are a hermeneutical enterprise, does
this help clarify the description and analysis of their engagements with
scripture interpretation? Changing assumptions about the way in
which nature should be interpreted and about the range of meanings
of natural phenomena may indeed have been paralleled by develop-
ments in biblical hermeneutics, in so far as a shift took place from a
medieval symbolic to an early modern literal world view.41 Similarly,
the hegemony of a literalist hermeneutic in some areas of the sciences
may explain the popularity of certain disciplines, both for education and
as a career, among those who hold to extreme literalist interpretations
of Scripture in the modern world.42 By contrast, a decisive factor for
many who came to accept the findings of higher criticism in the early
twentieth century was commitment to the principles of scientific induc-
tion, understood in terms of the prevailing model in the contemporary
natural sciences. New findings about Scripture had to be accepted
because they had their origin in an approach to evidence that had been
validated by the successes of the natural sciences.43 It may be surprising
that the epistemological claims that have characterized the growth of
relativity theory and quantum physics in the twentieth century have
proved to be comparatively conducive to a particular form of Christian
apologetics, which has sought to find philosophical evidence for the
existence of God as an argument against atheism. Nevertheless, the
difficulty in engaging with Scripture that is manifest in that apologetic
may itself be a consequence of such an epistemology, in which much
of the particularity of religious experience appears to be sacrificed.44 It
is an irony that the latest form of natural theology thus appears to be
bound up with an existentialist or kerygmatic reading of the Bible that
no longer commands assent among most theologians.45
One implication of the hermeneutical character of science is that
readings of scripture in terms of nature need to be subjected to suspi-
cion directed at the large-scale interpretative frameworks that inform
some specific interpretation of nature and that may thus insert them-

41
See Harrison 1998.
42
For some examples, see Davis and Chmielewski (these volumes).
43
Noll 1986, especially 15–27.
44
For discussion of this issue, see Hiebert 1986; Schlegel 1981.
45
See Daecke 1981.

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selves into the interpretation of scripture. An alternative response to

this problem has been a complete separation of the two interpretative
endeavors. For instance, as Nelson (these volumes) observes, Agassiz
“wanted science liberated from religious scrutiny because he believed
that that scrutiny would impose restrictions on science, restrictions that
may well be human constructions rather than biblical doctrines.”

Methodological Issues
One conclusion that we may draw is that theology and science or reli-
gion and science are inadequate as categories of description not only
because they are too general, but also because interpretations of scrip-
ture as well as interpretations of nature remain as additional categories
of description, which are otherwise being taken for granted.
There is a need for more in-depth case studies. Natural philosophers
who refer to religious texts do so usually without giving a full explana-
tion of their exegetical strategies and hermeneutical principles. The
religious text is used, but there is little interest in justifying this use. For
instance, it was difficult to find practicing scientists who called themselves
Christian, and who had considered questions about the engagement of
Scripture and science, while refl ecting on their interpretative principles
(see England, vol. 2, ch. 6). This may limit the number of case studies
that prove to be possible.

Principle of Accommodation
A further conclusion that we may draw with confidence is that the
meaning of the principle of accommodation has changed over time. For
instance, in Augustine, God’s condescension to humanity is manifest
in commonsense language used to describe natural phenomena. This
linguistic principle is the one in use during the Copernican debates.
For Eichhorn, by contrast, God accommodated his meaning to the
psychological or spiritual level of maturity of his audience, an idea
applied by among others the Baptist Rev. George Dana Boardman
(1828–1903) in the American debates about race. “To understand the
Genesis account, the reader must identify with the point of view of the
ancient Hebrew, which Boardman described as ‘childlike.’ ” (Nelson,
these volumes.) The difference between the linguistic and the psycho-
logical forms of the principle lies in the reason being given for divine
accommodation: human ability to understand God in the case of the

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linguistic principle; the stage of individual personal development in the

psychological principle. This development of the principle of accom-
modation means that its use in the resolution of debate or confl ict must
depend on the historical context.
The development of the principle of accommodation also raises the
question of the standards for and limitations of accommodation (see
Barker, these volumes). In order to identify a text in Scripture as hav-
ing been accommodated to its audience, the interpreter must make
assumptions about what might count as unaccommodated knowledge.
For Augustine, and even for Eichhorn, accommodation with regard to
the physical world or the anthropological development of Israel did not
presume accommodation with reference to the fact of the essentials of
salvation history. Yet, to those theologians, particularly in the twentieth
century, for whom reliance on miracle had become epistemologically
unacceptable, this has been precisely where accommodation has had
to start (see de Knijff, these volumes). When applied to the engagement
of the two interpretative endeavors, the standard has often been the
contemporary state of scientific knowledge. Objections such as those
posed by Voetius have been directed precisely against locating the
standard for accommodation outside of Scripture. For instance, Voetius
in the seventeenth century and Samuel Davies Baldwin and Buckner
H. Payne (1799–1883) in the nineteenth century severely limited the
scope of divine accommodation in the Bible. They found in Scripture
an explicit and detailed mandate—Voetius for an earth-centered cos-
mos and biological unity of the human race in Adam and Eve (Vermij,
Jorink, these volumes). Baldwin and Payne for the separation of the
races and subordination of non-whites (Nelson, these volumes). From
a methodological perspective, the problem has not only been that the
standard provided by science has changed over time, but also that there
may have been a loss of confidence in this standard.
The discussion of the role of standards for and of the limits of accom-
modation in Christian and Jewish exegesis provides an opportunity
to ask whether and if so why accommodation seems to be absent in
Islamic exegesis. For in Islamic exegesis nonliteral interpretation is
accepted only if it can be argued to have originated with the divine
author, not if it originates with the interpreter.46 While much medieval
Islamic scholarship was content to stress the separation of scientific and

46
Lazarus-Yafeh 2002, 367.

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religious knowledge, many contemporary Islamic interpreters appear

to wish to argue that the sacred text predicted or had foreknowledge
of modern scientific discoveries. The idea that Scripture only reveals
its true meaning gradually to interpreters, which is also a feature of
exegesis in the other Abrahamic traditions, may be seen as the comple-
ment to the practice of accommodation.47

Philosophical Religion and Natural Theology

Fraenkel describes how ‘philosophical religion,’ that is the interpreta-
tion of the historical forms of a religion such as Judaism or Islam in
philosophical terms, has shaped views of the mutual engagement of
literal and allegorical interpretation of scripture. He shows that repre-
sentatives of philosophical religion, Plato prominent among them, argue
that no one is born a philosopher. To reach perfection, most human
beings require guidance from an imitation of philosophy designed for
that purpose by philosophers such as Moses, Christ, and Muhammad.48
This imitation is found in the literal content of scriptures like the
Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur’an. As an imitation
of philosophy, religion translates the philosopher’s knowledge and
way of life into a program that prepares those who are not yet phi-
losophers for the philosophical life. The truth of the religious sources
in turn is secured through the notion of their allegorical content. This
means that the doctrines imitated by the literal content of scripture
are the doctrines demonstrated in philosophy, and that the latter can
be obtained through an allegorical interpretation of scripture. The
relationship between the study of nature, culminating in knowledge
of God, and religious sources like the Hebrew Bible, the New Testa-
ment, or the Qur’an is thus twofold: taken literally these sources serve
to either prepare for a life devoted to scientific study or to replace it.
Students who succeed in becoming philosophers in turn gain access to
the allegorical content of the sources in question which coincides with
the objects of their studies. They can thus move up from a literal to
an allegorical understanding of the texts. These positions have some-
thing in common with the approach taken by early modern natural
theologians, for whom observation of nature demonstrated the necessity
of belief in a God and provided knowledge of the essential teachings

47
See Dallal 2008.
48
Fraenkel (these volumes).

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that he had otherwise revealed in Scripture. Study of the sacred text

put fl esh onto the bones of those teachings and provided a surer, but
not necessarily a better, path to salvation. This form of natural theol-
ogy, moreover, actively sought to bridge the gap between Christian
and pagan religiosity and to acknowledge the possible contribution of
Islamic and Jewish traditions of nature and of natural law in bearing
witness to one Abrahamic God.49
The complexity of philosophical and natural theologies provides one
strand of the argument that we have sought to set out with regard to
the interaction of the hermeneutics of scripture with those of nature.
Many other strands are represented in the chapters that follow, and an
attempt is made to keep an eye on all three traditions of the religions
of the book. Inevitably, not all the essays that we have commissioned
succeed in singing from the same hymn sheet: a plurality of views is
in the nature of this topic. This may also be a refl ection on the early
stage of research in this area: many of our essays must be seen as initial
attempts at answers rather than definitive conclusions. Nevertheless, we
hope that these volumes may act as a spur to further research and that
they will already go some way to revising existing assumptions about
the relationship between the hermeneutics of scripture and the paths
of interpretation in natural knowledge.

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 CHAPTER TWO

ON THE CONCEPT AND HISTORY OF

PHILOSOPHICAL RELIGIONS

Carlos Fraenkel

Introduction1

When the medieval Muslim philosopher Averroes, who spent most of

his life explaining Aristotle, examined the relationship between Islam
and philosophy, he reached the following conclusion:
Since this Law (sharî ah) is true and calls to the refl ection leading to cogni-
tion of the truth, we, the Muslim community, know firmly that demon-
strative investigation cannot lead to something differing with what is set
down in the Law. For the truth does not contradict the truth (al- aqq lâ
yu âd al- aqq); rather, it agrees with it and bears witness to it.2
According to Averroes, “demonstrative investigations” are conducted
by philosophers. The results they reach, he claims, cannot differ from
the content of the sharî ah, because the truth of the former is the same
as the truth of the latter.3
It is instructive to compare Averroes’s assessment of the Muslim Law
with the assessment of the Mosaic Law by Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron
d’Holbach, an important representative of the French Enlightenment:4

1
I will refer to both primary and secondary sources by author and date of publica-
tion. If a translation is my own I give the full original text in a footnote. Where I rely
on existing translations I provide references to both the original and the translation,
except when references are standardized (e.g., references to Plato, Aristotle, Philo
etc.). In the latter case, I will only list the translation in the bibliography. I will often
modify existing translations.
2
Averroes 2001, Arabic and English 8–9 (in the edition I use the pagination of the
Arabic text corresponds to that of the English translation).
3
This, at any rate, is Averroes’s intention. Strictly speaking, the view that the truth of
philosophy does not contradict the truth of religion is also compatible with the weaker
claim, proposed for instance by Thomas Aquinas, that revelation contains truths that
do not contradict philosophy, but are also not accessible to it.
4
d’Holbach 1776, 87–89: “[ D]ès l’entrée de la Bible, nous ne voyons que de l’ignorance
et des contradictions. Tout nous prouve que la Cosmogonie des Hébreux n’est qu’un tissu
de fables et d’allegories, incapable de nous donner aucune idée des choses, et qui n’est
propre qu’à contenter un peuple sauvage, ignorant et grossier, étranger aux sciences,

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From the outset of the Bible we see nothing but ignorance and contradic-
tions. Everything proves to us that the cosmogony of the Hebrews is no
more than a composition of fables and allegories, incapable of giving us
any [true] idea of things, appropriate only for a savage, ignorant, and
vulgar people, unfamiliar with the sciences and with reasoning. In the
remaining works attributed to Moses, we find countless improbable and
fantastic stories and a pile of ridiculous and arbitrary laws. At the end
the author describes his own death. The books following Moses are no
less filled with ignorance. . . . One would never come to an end if one
attempted to note all the blunders and fables, shown in every passage of a
work which people have the audacity to attribute to the Holy Spirit. . . . In
one word: In the Old Testament everything breathes enthusiasm, fanati-
cism, and raving, often ornamented by a pompous language. Nothing is
missing from it, except for reasonableness, sound logic, and rationality
which seem to have been excluded stubbornly from the book that serves
as guide to Hebrews and Christians.
To be sure, the Enlightenment’s attitude to religion is not monolithic.
Materialists like Julien de La Mettrie and d’Holbach who reject religion
altogether represent only one side of the spectrum.5 On the opposite
side intellectuals like Mendelssohn and Lessing try in different ways to
reconcile their Enlightenment commitments with traditional forms of
Judaism and Christianity.6 In between are Deists like Voltaire, Her-
mann Samuel Reimarus, and Thomas Paine who can be as acerbic
as d’Holbach when it comes to the “fabulous theology” of traditional
religion, “whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish,” while espousing what
they consider the “true theology” of reason.7

au raisonnement. Dans le reste des ouvrages, attribués à Moïse, nous verrons une
foule d’histoires improbables et merveilleuses, un amas de loix ridicules et arbitraires,
enfin, l’auteur conclut par y rapporter sa propre mort. Les livres postérieurs à Moïse
ne sont pas moins remplis d’ignorance. . . . On ne finiroit point si on vouloit relever
toutes les bévues et les fables, que montrent tous les pafl ages d’un ouvrage qu’on a
le front d’attribuer à l’esprit saint. . . . En un mot: dans l’ancien testament tout respire
l’enthousiasme, le fanatisme, le délire, souvent ornés d’un langage pompeux; tout s’y
trouve, à l’exception du bon sens, de la bonne logique, de la raison, qui semblent être
exclus opiniâtrement du livre qui sert de guide aux Hébreux et aux chrétiens.” Inter-
estingly d’Holbach is aware of the fact that what he describes as the irrational content
of the Bible can be reconciled with philosophy by means of allegorical interpretation.
See his reference to Origen’s and Augustine’s allegorical reading of Genesis in the
note on p. 88. This is Averroes’s solution as well for contradictions occurring between
philosophy and the sharî ah. See e.g., Averroes 2001, Arabic and English 9–10.
5
For his materialism, see in particular de la Mettrie 1996. On the different trends
in the Enlightenment, see Israel 2001 and 2006.
6
See Mendelssohn 1983; Lessing 1886–1924.
7
Paine 1794, 6. For the opposition of “true and fabulous theology,” see the title
page of the first edition 1794. See Reimarus 1972; Voltaire 1980 (e.g., articles “Église,”
“Fanatisme,” “Religion,” “Superstition,” etc.).

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 concept and history of philosophical religions 37

From Enlightenment attitudes to religion it is possible to draw a line

to, on the one hand, the nineteenth-century critiques of religion as
alienation by Feuerbach and Marx and in a different way by Nietzsche;8
on the other hand to the late Victorian topos of a perpetual “warfare”
between science and religion9—a topos enjoying a curious revival in the
recent invectives against religion brought forth by a self-stylized neo-
Enlightenment that often contrasts science and religion as the realms
of the rational and the irrational.10 This background has significantly
shaped the contemporary perception of philosophy and its partial heir,
the sciences, as something fundamentally different from religion, if not
opposed to it, or worse, in confl ict with it. According to this percep-
tion science is governed by reason, while religion is governed by faith;
science pursues knowledge, while religion relies on a miraculous act
of revelation; science strives to explain the universe, while religion is
devoted to the worship of God. And so forth.
My purpose in this chapter, of course, is not to defeat a windmill.
As far as I can see, no intellectual historian today would characterize
the historical relationship between philosophy, science, and religion in
terms of the contemporary intuitions I just described. But for one thing,
the stark contrast between these intuitions and the position represented
by Averroes helps to bring into focus how much the latter defies the
categories to which we are now habituated. Philosophers like Aver-
roes not only deny that philosophy and religion are in confl ict. They
deny that the two can be meaningfully distinguished at all! The view
illustrated by d’Holbach, moreover, can ultimately be traced back to
Spinoza’s critique of religion. But paradoxically at first view, Spinoza
advocates the view illustrated by Averroes as well. Solving this puzzle
will be one of the main concerns of this chapter.
Averroes is a representative of what I propose to call a philosophical
religion. By ‘philosophical religion’ I mean the interpretation of the
historical forms of a religion such as Judaism or Islam in philosophical
terms. Two characteristics of this interpretation stand out: On one level

8
Feuerbach 1957 and 1967. See, among others, Das Wesen des Christentums (The
Essence of Christianity) and Vorlesungen über das Wesen der Religion (Lectures on the
Essence of Religion); for Marx, see 1976, for Nietzsche, see, among others, 1974, in
particular paragraphs 125, 158–160, and 1968.
9
See in particular Draper 1874 and White 1896. Note that White, other than
Draper, distinguishes between theology and religion. His criticism is mainly directed
against the former.
10
See e.g., Dawkins 2006. Among historians of science, the “warfare” thesis is no
longer taken seriously. For a recent assessment, see the contributions to Ferngren 2002.

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it takes religion to coincide with philosophy. On another level it takes

religion to be philosophy’s handmaid. Philosophy in this context means
the pursuit of knowledge with the ultimate goal to attain knowledge
of God. This gives rise to an obvious question: What does religion
in this sense have in common with the literal content of a traditional
religion—with the narratives of Scripture, its pious exhortations, a
religious law-code, or individual and communal forms of worship?
According to proponents of a philosophical religion, all of these things
are components of a pedagogical-political program, devised by philoso-
phers for the guidance of nonphilosophers. This program is conceived
as an imitation of philosophy that allows nonphilosophers to share as
much as they can in the philosopher’s perfection. Albeit daring, the
interpretation of traditional religions as philosophical religions was by
no means marginal. It was set forth by pagan, Jewish, Christian, and
Muslim philosophers in a wide range of contexts from antiquity to the
early modern period. Since this interpretation has not yet been system-
atically examined, an exhaustive account of its history is not possible
at this point. In what follows, my goal is to explain how the pattern
works in a number of representative authors in late antiquity and in the
early Middle Ages. Plato’s political philosophy in the middle and late
dialogues provided the conceptual framework for this interpretation,
although concepts from other intellectual traditions were integrated into
it, most importantly Aristotelian and Stoic concepts, and, in Spinoza’s
case, early modern concepts as well. Besides discussing Plato’s political
philosophy as it informs the philosophical interpretation of traditional
religions, I examine three contexts that I argue are conceptually and
historically related as parts of the reception history of Plato’s politi-
cal thought: Firstly, the interpretation of Judaism and Christianity as
philosophical religions in ancient Alexandria, focusing on the Jewish
and Christian philosophers Philo (d. ca. 50 CE), Clement (d. 215), and
Origen (d. ca. 254). Then the interpretation of Islam and Judaism as
philosophical religions in the Middle Ages. Here I will look mainly at
al-Fârâbî (d. 950), Averroes (d. 1198), and Maimonides (d. 1204).11

11
The close connection between Philo of Alexandria and the Christian Platonists
Clement and Origen has been well established. See van den Hoek 1988 and 2000,
Runia 1993 and the special section in Studia Philonica 1994. Al-Fârâbî was the founder
of the philosophical school, of which Averroes and Maimonides were the last two
important representatives in Muslim Spain. The model he proposed for describing the
relationship between philosophy and religion was applied by Averroes to Islam and
by Maimonides to Judaism. In addition to being good examples for illustrating this

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 concept and history of philosophical religions 39

Finally, I examine Spinoza, who is well known for his astute critique
of the medieval interpretation of Judaism as a philosophical religion.
While some scholars noted that elements of a philosophical religion
are present in Spinoza’s thought—prominently in his portrait of Christ
for example—they usually dismissed them as the strategic maneuver
of a radical philosopher who in his youth had been ostracized by the
Jewish community and wished to avoid suffering the same fate by
Christians. I suggest turning this interpretation on its head: Although
astute, Spinoza’s criticisms are an incidental by-product of his critique
of Christian orthodoxy which he perceived as a threat to the “freedom
to philosophize.” His systematic commitments, I contend, are not
only compatible with the concept of a philosophical religion but often
require it. As a critic, however, Spinoza arguably puts an end to this
intellectual tradition as a viable approach to religion.12
* * *
After having said what I will do in this chapter, let me briefl y say some-
thing about what I will not do and why. As I already stressed: my goal
is not to present an exhaustive account of the interpretation in question,
but to provide a foundation that I hope will give rise to further studies.
These should include the relation of later patristic developments to the
Alexandrian philosophers, a comparative study of Neoplatonic interpre-
tations of pagan religious traditions which are often strikingly similar
to the interpretations here examined, and a comprehensive account of
medieval Muslim and Jewish proponents of a philosophical religion.
Also various traditions of Christian thought remain to be investigated
in this context, ranging from Byzantine Christianity to Arabic-Christian
philosophers in the Islamic world. Moreover, when Plethon (d. 1452)
and other Byzantine scholars introduced the works of Plato and later
Platonists into Renaissance Italy, some of the interpretative strategies
that I analyze in this chapter were used to integrate Platonism and

interpretation, Averroes and Maimonides also shaped the medieval tradition leading
to Spinoza.
12
To be sure, elements of this interpretation of religion can still be found in authors
after Spinoza. The most interesting example is perhaps the German Enlightenment
intellectual Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (d. 1781). See in particular Lessing 1886–1924.
But the last sustained attempt to interpret a religion in philosophical terms was made
by the medieval Jewish intellectual tradition whose fundamental assumptions Spinoza
criticizes in the TTP.

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Christianity—most prominently by Marsilio Ficino (d. 1499), the main

translator of Platonic writings from Greek to Latin.
From the point of view of my project the question why the inter-
pretation of Christianity as a philosophical religion did not take hold
in medieval Christian thought is, of course, one of the most interesting
questions yet to be explored. The fact that Christian philosophers in
late antiquity did propose such an interpretation shows that there is
nothing in the nature of Christianity that would preclude it from the
outset. There are, moreover, some similarities between the intellectual
traditions examined in this chapter and the medieval Latin West.
Figurative interpretation, for instance, played an important role in both
contexts, even though it took on different forms and served different
purposes.13 But these similarities remain on the surface and should not
prevent us from seeing the substantive differences. While the relation-
ship between philosophy and Christianity in the Middle Ages took on
a wide range of shapes, the two always remained identifiable as two
distinct traditions. Latin Averroists, for instance, who tried to work out
a consistent philosophical position on the basis of Aristotle and Aver-
roes, reached the conclusion that a number of their core philosophical
doctrines contradicted Christian beliefs.14 This is the exact opposite
of the position advocated by Averroes with respect to philosophy and
Islam. The tensions between philosophy and Christianity culminated
in the condemnation of 219 philosophical and theological theses by

13
Thus the “allegorical sense” is one of the four senses of Scripture assumed by
medieval Christian exegetes. See e.g., Hugo of St. Cher (d. 1263): Postillae in universa
biblia secundum quadruplicem sensum: historicum, allegoricum, moralem et anagogicum (Glosses
on the entire Bible according to the fourfold sense: historical, allegorical, moral, and
anagogical). But as far as I can see, this exegetical program has little in common with
the approach adopted by proponents of a philosophical religion. The important differ-
ence does not concern the number of levels of meaning. While I will normally speak of
only two levels—the allegorical and the literal—this is to some extent a simplification.
Origen 1913, for instance, distinguishes between three levels of meaning (Book 4) and
so does Averroes 2001 (see e.g., Arabic and English 8). Al-Fârâbî suggests a scale of
meanings that gradually approach scientific knowledge (see al-Fârâbî 1985, ch. 17,
sec. 3. Section numbers refer to both the Arabic and the English trans.). The crucial
distinction, however, is the one between the philosophical and the nonphilosophical
understanding of religion, whereby the nonphilosophical understanding is often further
subdivided into levels that gradually approach the philosophical understanding. The
assumption governing this approach is that the true core of religion coincides with
philosophy. As I will argue in what follows, this assumption was not shared by Christian
exegetes in medieval Europe.
14
See e.g., philosophers like Boethius of Dacia (fl . ca. 1275) or Siger of Brabant
(d. ca. 1284). See Boethius 1987 and van Steenberghen 1977, respectively.

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 concept and history of philosophical religions 41

Bishop Tempier in Paris which institutionalized the division between

Christianity and many of the teachings constituting the Greco-Arabic
philosophical legacy in the West.15 In part these differences can be
accounted for by the fact that the Platonic conceptual framework
which informs the interpretation of religious traditions as philosophical
religions did not play a significant role in the medieval Latin context.
This, of course, does not answer the question, but only moves it up one
level: since Christian appropriations of this Platonic framework were
available in patristic literature, it remains to be explained why it was
not adopted for integrating Christianity with Greco-Arabic philosophy
in the Middle Ages. Attempting to answer this question would go far
beyond what I can accomplish in this chapter. It is safe to assume, on
the other hand, that one important reason for the lack of a compre-
hensive study of the concept and the history of philosophical religions
is the fact that the historiography of medieval philosophy was tradi-
tionally shaped by the specific character of medieval Latin philosophy
and hence did not pay attention to a tradition that does not fit on the
latter’s intellectual map.
Let me finally address—with some reluctance I admit—what is
sometimes called the “principle of accommodation,” because scholars
have claimed that several of the authors examined in this chapter—e.g.,
Origen, Eusebius, and Maimonides—have adopted such a principle.16
According to Stephen Benin,
divine accommodation . . . alleges, most simply, that divine revelation is
adjusted to the disparate intellectual and spiritual level of humanity at
different times in history. . . . The Lord accommodates or condescends,
freely and benevolently, to the human level lest his salvific message go
unheard or unheeded.17
I am not competent to judge whether this view has ever been held in
the way Benin describes it. I am confident, by contrast, that its striking
anthropomorphism is incompatible with the metaphysical commit-
ments of all the philosophers whom I will discuss in this chapter. To be
sure, they sometimes write as if they subscribed to such a principle.
But this is because they themselves—not God!—use traditional reli-
gious language in order to mediate between their philosophical views

15
For a recent edition with commentary, see Tempier 1999.
16
See Benin 1993, 10–13; 13–22; 147–162.
17
Ibid., xiv.

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and the conceptual framework of their audience. In this they follow

the model of the prophets (according, of course, to their concept of
philosopher-prophets that I will outline below), but also of Plato, who
translated some of his central philosophical doctrines into parables and
metaphors—the parable of the cave in the Republic, for instance, or the
metaphor of the chariot in the Phaedrus. One problem that concerns
in particular Hellenistic-Jewish and patristic thought is that it is often
studied by scholars who are trained as theologians or historians of
religion and not as philosophers. As a consequence they usually fail to
distinguish between the philosophical commitments of their authors and
the figurative language used to express them. I cannot further discuss,
much less attempt to solve, this problem here. The interpretation that
I propose below succeeds, I believe, to make sense of the texts without
having to assume something like the principle of accommodation. In
my view it is superior to interpretations that appeal to such a principle,
not least because it avoids attributing doctrines to the authors under
discussion that are highly implausible within the respective frameworks
of Platonic or Aristotelian metaphysics that they adopt.

Philosophy as the Foundation and

Goal of Religion

Averroes was certainly convinced that the highest worship of God to

which Islam exhorts the members of the Muslim community is not
different from the one promoted by Plato and Aristotle.18 Aristotle, for
example, writes at the end of the Eudemian Ethics that the goodness or
badness of every human action depends on whether it contributes “to
worshipping and contemplating God (ton theon therapeuein kai theoreîn).”19
If we take the “kai” in this passage to be epexegetic, worshipping God,
insofar as it constitutes the highest good, means contemplating God.
This corresponds to the “felicity (sa âdah)”—i.e., the highest good—to
which according to Averroes the sharî ah calls: “the knowledge (ma rifah)
of God, Mighty and Magnificent, and His creation.”20 Even more
clearly, Aristotle’s stance is refl ected in the highest good of the Law of

18
Medieval Arabic philosophers usually adopt a strong version of the late ancient
view of the harmony of Plato and Aristotle. For a comprehensive statement of this
position, see al-Fârâbî 1999.
19
Aristotle 1952, 1249 b20–21.
20
Averroes 2001, Arabic and English 8.

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Moses as conceived by the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides

(d. 1204):
Man needs to subordinate all his soul’s powers to thought . . . and to set
his sight on a single goal: the apprehension of God (idrâk Allâh), may He
be glorified and magnified, I mean knowledge (al- ilm) of Him, in so far
as this lies within man’s power. He should direct all his actions, both
when in motion and at rest, and all his conversation toward this goal
so that none of his actions is in any way frivolous, I mean, an action
not leading to this goal. For example, he should make his aim only the
health of his body when he eats, drinks, sleeps, has sexual intercourse, is
awake, and is in motion or at rest. The purpose of his body’s health is
that the soul finds its instruments healthy and sound in order that it can
be directed toward the sciences (al- ulûm) and toward acquiring the moral
and rational virtues, so that he might arrive at that goal. . . . On the basis
of this reasoning the art of medicine is given a very large role with respect
to the virtues, the knowledge of God, and attaining true happiness. To
study it diligently is among the greatest acts of worship. . . . This is what
the Exalted requires that we make as our purpose when He says: “And
you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your
soul” (Deut. 6:5). He means, set the same goal for all the parts of your
soul, namely, “to love the Lord your God.”21
In the Eight Chapters, from which the quotation is taken, Maimonides’
main aim is to show that in the same way as the prescriptions of the
medical doctor lead to and preserve the health of the body, the pre-
scriptions of the Law of Moses lead to and preserve the health of the
soul, thus putting it into the condition in which it can devote itself to
the intellectual love of God. In his chief philosophical-theological work,
the Dalâlat al- â irîn (Guide of the Perplexed), Maimonides quotes the
same verse from Deuteronomy and explains the commandment to love
God as a “call” to acquire “all the . . . correct opinions concerning the
whole of being—opinions that constitute the numerous kinds of all the
theoretical sciences (al- ulûm al-na ariyyah) through which the opinions
forming the ultimate end are validated.”22 What Maimonides means
by the “theoretical sciences” is mathematics, physics and metaphysics,
preceded by the study of logic as the “tool” of philosophy.23 Aristotelian
physics, i.e., the investigation of things in motion, leads via the eternal
motion of the celestial spheres to the apprehension of divine Reason,

21
Maimonides 1963–68 5, Arabic 164; English 75–76.
22
Maimonides 1931 3.28, Arabic 373; English 512.
23
Maimonides 1931 1.34, Arabic 50; English 75.

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who as the unmoved mover is the first cause of nature’s rational order.24
The same idea is encapsulated in Averroes’ definition of “philosophy
( falsafah)” which in his view Islam calls to pursue: “the rational inquiry
(al-na ar) into the existing things and their contemplation (i tibâruhâ)
insofar as they are proof (dalâlah) of the Maker (al- âni ).”25 This in turn
requires the study of logic whose relation to philosophy is like the rela-
tion “of tools (âlât) to work.”26 Both Aristotle’s writings and Averroes’
commentaries can be seen as the implementation of this program and
thus as an expression of divine worship in the sense of the passage
from the Eudemian Ethics. But in Averroes’ case they are also his main
contribution to Islam and the fulfillment of his duty as a Muslim.27
Maimonides for his part not only claims that the intellectual love
of God is the goal of the Law of Moses, but he also portrays Moses
as the exemplar of a person whose life was devoted to intellectually
loving God. According to the Talmud, Deut. 34:5—“And Moses the
servant of the Lord died . . . by the mouth of the Lord”—means that
Moses “died by a kiss” which Maimonides in turn interprets as the
intellectual union with God at the end of a life consumed by intel-
lectual love.28 Intellectual love is also more generally a key to under-
standing Maimonides’ concept of prophecy. As we saw, intellectual
love for Maimonides consists in the acquisition of knowledge through
the study of the theoretical sciences. In De anima 3.5 Aristotle had
described the acquisition of knowledge as the transition of the human
intellect from potentially knowing to actually knowing and the agent
causing this transition as the “active intellect (nous poiêtikos).”29 Building
on an exegetical tradition of the relevant passages in the De anima that
combined Aristotelian and Neoplatonic concepts, medieval Islamic
and Jewish philosophers did three things: they identified the ultimate
source of knowledge with God, described God’s agency as “emanation”
and made the transition from potentially knowing to actually knowing
into the foundation of prophecy. Thus for Maimonides, “prophecy
(nubûwwah)” is based on “an emanation ( fay ) emanating from God,

24
Aristotle Physics 8.5–6 and Metaphysics 12.6–7. Maimonides refers to the Aristotelian
proof as “the greatest proof through which one can know the existence of the deity”
in Maimonides 1931 1.70, Arabic 121; English 175.
25
Averroes 2001, Arabic and English 1.
26
Ibid., Arabic and English 3.
27
On the study of philosophy as a religious duty in medieval Islamic and Jewish
philosophy, see Davidson 1974.
28
Maimonides 1931 3.51, Arabic 463; English 628.
29
Aristotle 1957, 430a10–25.

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may He be cherished and honored, . . . toward the rational faculty.”30

For the Muslim philosopher al-Fârâbî (d. ca. 950)—the founder of the
philosophical school of which Averroes and Maimonides were the last
two important representatives in Muslim Spain—the same process is
the basis of “divine revelation (wa y)” received by the prophet from
“God (Allâh) Mighty and Great.”31
If I may sum up the point in question in a somewhat anachronistic
way: According to philosophers like Averroes and Maimonides, as well
as according to Aristotle as he was seen by medieval Muslim and Jewish
philosophers, the research that biologists and physicists conduct in their
laboratories is a higher form of worshipping God than attending a Greek
religious festival or a service in the Synagogue or the Mosque.32 They
take the order of nature to be both a manifestation of God’s rationality
and as leading to the apprehension of God. Moreover, like many Arabic
Aristotelians, Averroes and, on my interpretation, Maimonides—though
this claim is subject to scholarly controversy—go one step further than
Aristotle by claiming that God in a sense is identical to the order of
nature. Whereas Aristotle stressed that God knows only himself, the
medieval philosophers usually followed Themistius, Aristotle’s fourth-
century commentator, who argued that God’s self-intellection must
comprehend knowledge of everything that follows from him, because
knowledge of the cause entails knowledge of the effect. Since intellect,
subject, and object of intellection are identical in God according to
Aristotle’s theory of the intellect, the medieval philosophers concluded
that “all the existents are inscribed in God’s essence,” as Profiat Duran,
one of the medieval commentators on the Guide, aptly summarized what
arguably is Maimonides’ position.33

30
Maimonides 1931, 2.36, Arabic 260; English 369.
31
al-Fârâbî 1985 15, sec. 10. The conceptual and historical links that I briefl y
sketched have been well established in the scholarly literature (see e.g., Walzer’s com-
mentary on chapters 13–15 in al-Fârâbî 1985). Note that this integration of philosophy
into the concept of prophecy presented a particular problem to Islamic philosophers
because of the Muslim doctrine that Muhammad was “ummî,” i.e., “illiterate” or
“uneducated.” This led to some deviations from what I take to be the standard posi-
tion of advocates of a philosophical religion.
32
I do, of course, not wish to minimize the profound changes that occurred in the his-
tory of science. No direct line connects Aristotle’s teleological explanation of the parts
of animals to the research program of contemporary genetics. But in my understand-
ing a philosophical religion does not depend on a specific scientific world view. The
scientific world views of Philo, Maimonides, and Spinoza for instance differ considerably.
33
See Pines 1996 and Fraenkel 2006, 179–193. For a detailed discussion of the
scholarly controversy concerning Maimonides’ concept of God, see Fraenkel 2006,
Appen. 1.

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* * *
Aristotle’s description of the highest good at the end of the Eudemian
Ethics is only one striking example for the attitude to the divine that
Greek philosophers shared with medieval philosophers like Averroes
and Maimonides. A visitor to Hellenistic Athens would, in fact, find that
most major philosophical schools of the period—Platonists, Aristotelians,
Epicureans, and Stoics—take “Godlikeness” to be the highest human
perfection and promote their philosophy as the path to attain it.34 The
second main intellectual context that I will examine in this chapter is
the philosophical interpretation of Judaism and Christianity in ancient
Alexandria. For this context, the most important Greek philosopher is
Plato. It is clear that for Plato philosophy in some form is a religious
practice. Let me only note that from the middle dialogues onwards
the incorporeal forms which the philosopher studies and according to
which he orders his life are the highest constituent of the realm of the
divine. In the Republic the philosopher consorts “with what is divine and
well ordered” and consequently “becomes himself as divine and well
ordered as a human being can be.”35 In the Timaeus Plato asserts that
“if a man has seriously devoted himself to the love of learning and to
true wisdom . . ., then there is absolutely no way that his thoughts can
fail to be immortal and divine, should truth come within his grasp.”36
According to the Timaeus the realm of forms can be described as the
intelligible order of nature. Plato assumes the existence of such an order
to explain nature’s recurrent patterns. The form e.g., of an animal spe-
cies serves to explain the recurrent physical instantiation of that species.
On this account the formula of the Theaetetus—“to become like God as
much as possible”—which was adopted as the definition of the goal of
human perfection by the entire later Platonic tradition, must be taken
to include establishing the generic features of trees, fish, birds etc. and
the systematic connections between them.37 When we turn from Athens

34
That this holds for Epicureans too, may surprise some. But see e.g., Diogenes of
Oenoanda 1993 fr. 56 and 125. On this issue, see in general O’Meara 2003, 32–34.
35
Plato 1900–1907, Republic 500c; cf. 540a–b. English translations are based on Cooper
1997.
36
Ibid., Timaeus 90b–c.
37
Ibid., Theaetetus 176a–b. Plato explains that becoming like God means becom-
ing “just and pure (hosios), with wisdom ( phronêsis).” Being “just” in the Republic can
certainly be interpreted as devoting one’s life to the pursuit of knowledge. For a per-
son is just if each of the soul’s three faculties performs the task appropriate to it (see
435b–441c). Since “the intellectual faculty (to logistikon)” is the soul’s highest faculty,
its task is to govern the lower faculties, as well as to carry out its natural activity, that

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to Alexandria we find that this is precisely what Moses did—at least

according to Philo of Alexandria whose work represents the culmina-
tion of the first encounter between Greek culture and Judaism. How is
Moses’ interest in the generic features of trees, fish, and birds motivated
for Philo? To begin with, Philo follows Plato in explaining the recurrent
patterns of nature as physical instantiations of incorporeal forms.38 But
while the form of the bird, for instance, explains its physical instantia-
tions, it does not explain the place of birds in relation to other classes
of things. In other words: the order of nature itself requires explanation.
Precisely for this purpose Plato in his late theology introduces God as
“Reason (Nous)” described as divine Craftsman in the Timaeus, whose
activity consists in ordering the physical world in view to what is best.39
Philo, however—like other later Platonists—goes beyond Plato when
he makes the existence and order of the forms themselves dependent
on divine Reason by interpreting them as God’s intellecta. Note that
Philo calls divine Reason “Logos” or “Sophia” instead of “Nous,” the term
commonly used by pagan Platonist. Since Logos also means “speech,”
this choice may refl ect the biblical account of creation in which God’s
speech brings things into existence.40 The use of “Sophia” on the other
hand is based on Prov. 8:22 where God is said to have created Wisdom
at the “beginning of his work.”41 Comparing God’s creative activity to
that of an architect who first conceives the city’s different buildings in
his mind, then puts the city’s plan together, and finally executes the
plan “in stone and timber,” Philo writes:

is, the apprehension of what exists (see 582c). For the scope of the world of forms,
see Parmenides 130a–e where Plato suggests that the forms include general ontological
categories (e.g., likeness, one, and many), moral and esthetic norms (e.g., the just itself
and the beautiful itself ), and forms of physical objects (e.g., human being, fire, water).
The last group seems to extend to things that at first seem “undignified and worthless”
(e.g., hair, mud, and dirt). For Godlikeness in Plato, see Sedley 2000; on the adop-
tion of Godlikeness as the goal of human perfection in the early Platonic tradition,
see Dillon 1977, 44. For the Neoplatonic ideal of “divinization,” see O’Meara 2003,
in particular part 1.
38
See Philo 1929–1962, De specialibus legibus (On the Special Laws) 1.45–50; 327–329.
References are to the Greek and English translation in the Loeb edition of Philo’s
Complete Works.
39
See the account in Menn 1995.
40
Note that the Septuagint uses “eipein” and not “legein” in Genesis 1. But see Sapientia
Salomonis (Wisdom of Solomon) 9:1–2.
41
See Philo 1929–1962, De ebrietate (On Drunkenness) 31 and Legum allegoriae (Alle-
gorical Interpretation) 1.43.

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Similarly must we think about God. When he was minded to found the
Great City, he first conceived the forms of its parts, out of which he put
together the intelligible world (kosmos noêtos), and, using that as a model,
he also brought to completion the sensible world (kosmos aisthetos).42
The “intelligible world,” Philo stresses, contains the forms of all things
whose creation is described in Genesis 1, including, of course, trees,
fish, and birds.43
For Philo, like for Averroes and Maimonides, “the first and high-
est good” is “to know Him who truly is,” i.e., God.44 Moses’ dialogue
with God in Ex. 33:13–23 is interpreted by Philo as the paradigmatic
expression of the intellectual love informing the “search for the true
God.”45 But before Moses embarks on his philosophical quest, he first
receives a solid scientific education by a group of teachers coming from
different parts of the world. Among others he is instructed in arithmetic,
geometry, and music by the Egyptians, in astronomy by the Chaldeans,
and in “the rest of the encyclical studies” by the Greeks. Moses, there-
fore, first studies with teachers from the nations credited with ancient
wisdom in Hellenistic Alexandria.46 But next and more importantly, he
greatly surpasses his teachers, opening up “new spheres of knowledge”
thanks to his outstanding intellect until he has “reached the summit
of philosophy.” Not unlike al-Fârâbî and Maimonides, Philo equates
reaching “the summit of philosophy” with divine revelation by adding
that Moses “was divinely taught (anadidachtheis) the greater and most
essential truths of nature.”47 Elsewhere Philo interprets Moses’ entering
“the darkness where God was” in Ex. 20:21 as Moses’ entering “the
unseen, invisible, incorporeal, and paradigmatic essence of existing
things.”48 In other words: Having reached “the summit of philosophy,”
Moses apprehends the incorporeal forms constituting the intelligible
world in God’s mind which, as we saw, is the model of the physical
world and accounts for its recurrent patterns and order, for example

42
Philo 1929–1962, De opificio mundi (On the Creation of the World) 19.
43
Ibid., Opificio 129–130. See also Runia 1999.
44
Ibid., De decalogo (On the Decalogue) 81.
45
Ibid., Specialibus legibus 1.41–50. But note that in this passage Philo denies that
Moses is able to apprehend the forms whereas he affirms it in the passages discussed
below.
46
Ibid., De vita Mosis (On the Life of Moses) 1.21–24.
47
Ibid., Opificio 8; cf. Winston 2001, 156. See also the identification of “true and
authentic philosophy” with the “utterance and word of God” in De posteritate Caini (On
the Posterity of Cain) 101–102.
48
Ibid., Mosis 1.158.

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the recurrent instantiations of trees, fish, birds, and so forth, as well as

their relations to other classes of things.
For Philo, like for Maimonides, Moses is an exemplar of a life devoted
to the intellectual love of God, i.e., to what Plato in the Timaeus calls
“the love of learning” and “true wisdom.” A formal account of the
curriculum which Moses’ intellectual path illustrates is given by Philo
in his allegorical interpretation of Abraham’s relationship to Hagar
and Sarah where the preliminary studies represented by Hagar are
described as the means for attaining philosophy represented by Sarah.49
But according to this account philosophy is not the end of the curricu-
lum either. Defined as “devotion to wisdom (epitêdeusis sophias)” it is the
means for attaining wisdom itself which consists in “the knowledge of
things divine and human and their causes.”50 Whereas the immediate
source of the definitions of philosophy and wisdom in this passage is
Stoic, the concept of philosophy as a process culminating in wisdom
ultimately stems from Plato’s Symposium.51 The first cause “of things
divine and human” for Philo is, of course, God. Elsewhere he describes
how the human mind explores the different parts of the physical world
through the “arts” and “sciences” until it is seized by “love of wisdom
(erôs sophias)” carrying it up to the apprehension of the “intelligible
world” and finally toward “the Great King Himself.”52 In yet another
passage, Philo identifies “true and authentic philosophy” with both
“the word and utterance of God” and the “royal road” leading to
“the first and sole King of the universe.” On the basis of this twofold
identification he goes on to interpret Deut. 28:14—“You shall not turn
away from the word which I command you this day to the right or
to the left”—as an exhortation to pursue philosophy as the “royal
road” to God.53 Also for Philo, therefore, the intellectual love of God
is the highest form of worship. It is, moreover, the worship to which,
according to his self-portrait, he has devoted himself. After having first
consorted with philosophy’s “servants,” e.g., grammar, geometry, and

49
For a similar allegorical interpretation of Penelope and her handmaids in pagan
contexts, see e.g., Diogenes Laertius 1925, 2.79–80 and Aristo of Chion apud Stobaeus
1884–1923, 4.140.
50
Philo 1929–1962, De congressu eruditionis gratia (On the Preliminary Studies) 79.
51
Cf. Seneca 1917–25, Letter 89, 4. And see Diotima’s speech on “desire (erôs)” and
“philosophy” as motive forces of the ascent from the human level to divine wisdom in
Symposium, 201d–212c, Plato 1900–1907.
52
Philo 1929–1962, Opificio 69–71.
53
Ibid., Posteritate 101–102.

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music, Philo proceeds, like Abraham and Moses, to court the “lawful
wife,” i.e., philosophy itself.54 This courtship he describes as follows:
There was a time when I devoted myself (scholazôn) to philosophy and the
contemplation of the world and its contents, when I enjoyed the beauty,
exceeding loveliness and true blessedness of its Reason (Nous), when I
consorted always with divine principles (logoi ) and doctrines (dogmata)
wherein I rejoiced with a joy that was insatiate and unceasing.55
It is plausible to take the world’s “Reason” in this passage to refer to
the same entity that Philo elsewhere calls “Logos” or “Sophia,” i.e., the
realm of incorporeal forms which later Platonists had identified with
the content of God’s thinking and which Philo had interpreted as the
intelligible pattern of the creation of the world. This pattern, as we
saw, accounts for the recurrent instantiation of things like trees, fish,
and birds, as well as for the orderly relations between them.
In the context of the philosophical interpretation of Christianity in
Alexandria on which Philo had a formative infl uence the same pat-
tern received a new name. While being Nous for pagan Platonists, and
Logos and Sophia for Philo, Clement and Origen of Alexandria, the
main proponents of this interpretation, identify the intelligible order
of nature with Christ as well.56 Exegetically this step was, of course,
facilitated by a number of biblical texts, for example the Prologue to
John where Christ is identified with the Logos by which God created
the world.57 Without having to abandon the fundamental metaphysical
commitments of the pagan and Jewish Platonic tradition, Clement and
Origen can thus present Christianity as the source of both. Whereas
Plato and Moses where accomplished lovers of wisdom, Christ is Sophia
itself. Whereas Plato and Moses strove to understand the incorporeal
forms of trees, fish, birds, and other things making up the world, Christ
is these forms themselves. Identifying Christ with the Wisdom which
God according to Prov. 8:22 created at the “beginning of his work,”
Origen writes, for instance, that “she preformed and contained within

54
Ibid., Congressu 74–76.
55
Ibid., Specialibus legibus 3.1.
56
See Origen 1913 2.6, 1, Greek and Latin 140; English 108 where Christ is identi-
fied with Verbum, Ratio, and Sapientia to which Origen adds Veritas.
57
See in general Origen 1989, chap. 1 and 2. These passages in the New Testa-
ment as well as in other texts included in the Christian Bible—e.g., the Sapientia
Salomonis—in part stem from the same intellectual milieu to which Philo belongs. See
Runia 1993, chap. 4.

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 concept and history of philosophical religions 51

herself the species and models of all creation.”58 In another passage,

Origen borrows Philo’s image of the architect to illustrate the formation
of the intelligible world.59 But how does Christ as God’s Logos relate
to the embodied Christ of the Gospels? The shortest chapter in Peri
archôn (On First Principles), Origen’s chief theological work, clearly
bears witness to his puzzlement about the doctrine of incarnation.60
The explanation he suggests is that as a human being Christ had a
“human and rational soul (humana et rationabilis anima)” whose nature
“is the same as that of all other souls.”61 In this sense, Christ is merely
one of the “rational creatures” who in differing degrees have part in
Christ the Logos, depending on the strength of their love for him.62
The difference is that the soul of Christ is more perfectly united with
the intelligible world—i.e., with Christ the Logos—on account “of [his
soul’s] perfect love” and as “the reward of its virtues.”63 None “of the
other souls that descended into human bodies had a pure and genuine
image (similitudo) of the archetype [i.e., the Logos] in it.” In other words:
The soul of the embodied Christ is, according to Origen, more virtuous
than any other soul; it is driven by a greater intellectual love of God
than any other soul. As a consequence it is more perfectly united with
the Logos than any other soul. But while this makes the embodied Christ
into the greatest philosopher of all times who on a scale of perfection
comes out at the top, his soul is not fundamentally different from other
rational souls. It surpasses them in degree, not in essence.64 Concerning

58
Origen 1913 1.2, 3, Greek and Latin 30; English 16; cf. also the end of 1.2, 2.
59
See the discussion of archê in Origen 1989 1.23.
60
Origen 1913 2.6, 1, Greek and Latin 140; English 108–109; 2.6, 2, Greek and
Latin 141; English 109–110. See also the expression of uncertainty concerning the
doctrine in ibid. and the suggestion of its preliminary character in 2.6, 7, Greek and
Latin 147; English 114–115.
61
Ibid. 2.6, 4, Greek and Latin 144–145; English 112–113.
62
Ibid. 2.6, 3, Greek and Latin 141–142; English 110.
63
Ibid. 2.6, 4, Greek and Latin 143; English 111–112.
64
This is, of course, a controversial reading. Origen’s Christology was and continues
to be a battlefield. See e.g., the first five accusations to which Pamphilus of Caesarea
responds in 2002, 88–121, in particular the third. But I cannot find strong textual
evidence in 2.6 that for Origen the unity of Christ’s soul with Christ as the Logos
means identity. As we saw above, he claims that Christ’s soul contains a “pure and
genuine image” of the Logos. Elsewhere he describes their relation as that of a shadow
to a body, or of iron heated in fire to fire, or of a vessel to oil. Concerning the union
of Christ’s soul with the Logos he says that they “are more in one fl esh than man and
woman” (Origen 1913 2.6, 3, Greek and Latin 143; English 111); cf. Matt. 19:5–6.
With reference to 1 Cor. 6:17, moreover, he compares this union to the union attained
with Christ by those who “imitate” him. All this suggests that Christ’s soul and the Logos

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the superior virtue of Christ’s soul, Origen accepts the claim that Christ
was incapable of sin, but rejects that this implies that his soul was not
human. Instead he offers an Aristotelian explanation for the claim:
The readiness to do good which at first “depended upon the will, was
changed by the effect of long custom into nature.”65 Like every other
human being, Christ, according to Origen, had to choose between good
and evil. On account of his devotion to the intellectual love of God
he invariably chose good until doing good became a stable character
disposition through habituation.
As in the case of Judaism for Philo, Christianity for Clement and
Origen is not only grounded on wisdom but also has wisdom as its
goal. Both Clement and Origen adopt the structure of the intellec-
tual curriculum that Philo set out in his allegorical interpretation of
Abraham’s relation to Hagar and Sarah: the preliminary studies which
are subservient to philosophy and philosophy which is subservient
to wisdom. Clement, in fact, quotes and discusses the entire passage
in Stromateis 1.5. At the end of the chapter he returns to the theme,
characterizing the preliminary studies as “exercising the mind” and
“rousing the intellect” and philosophy as an “investigation into truth
and the nature of things.” Wisdom, however, as the end of philosophy,
is replaced through “rest in Christ” in this passage. The same replace-
ment is made by Origen:
But I would like that you use all the power of your natural dispositions
having as the goal Christianity (telikôs eis ton christianismon). The means that
I wish you to use is to take from the philosophy of the Greeks everything
that can serve as encyclical or propedeutical instruction for introducing
into Christianity. . . . And in this way, what the philosophers say about

are united in a way that does not entail identity. That this union differs in degree and
not in essence from the union of other souls with the Logos is equally suggested by the
metaphors that Origen uses. Thus the heat transmitted by the fiery iron to other souls
is not essentially different from the heat caused by the fire in the iron itself. Likewise the
odor reaching other souls is not essentially different from the perfumed oil contained
in Christ’s soul. While other passages may support a more orthodox interpretation of
Origen, it can often not be ruled out that they refl ect dogmatic corrections in light of
the Nicene Creed made by Rufinus in his Latin translation of Origen’s work. See the
observations of Studer 1972. In my opinion, the issue cannot be conclusively settled
on textual grounds. If the choice is between philosophical consistency and orthodoxy,
preference must, in my view, be given to the former. Someone who takes Christ as
the Logos to be the intelligible order of nature will hardly concede that the doctrine at
the heart of Christianity is not accessible to reason.
65
Origen 1913 2.6, 5, Greek and Latin 145; English 112.

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geometry, music, grammar, rhetoric and astronomy as being the servants

with regard to philosophy, this we say about philosophy itself with regard
to Christianity.66
In light of the fact that Clement and Origen conceive Christ as the
intelligible order of nature it should be clear that the replacement of
“wisdom” through “Christianity” is only a change in name, not in
content. Clement and Origen do not hold that philosophy is the hand-
maid of Christianity if Christianity is taken to mean something different
from wisdom. As we will see below, they conceive the literal content of
Christianity as the handmaid of philosophy. Like other Platonists they
take wisdom to consist in the apprehension of the incorporeal forms. But
since these forms constitute Christ as the Logos in their interpretation,
philosophy becomes a means to attain both wisdom and Christ—which
are two names for the same thing: the apprehension of the intelligible
order of nature, i.e., of the forms and the orderly relations between
them. This equation of Christ and wisdom was, as far as I can see,
not adopted in the Latin intellectual traditions of the Middle Ages. It
recurs, however, in the work of a philosopher in whom one would at
first not expect it: Spinoza.
* * *
In the Ethics Spinoza describes the “spirit of Christ (spiritu Christi )”
as the “idea of God (idea Dei ).”67 The “idea of God” in turn is God’s
“infinite intellect,” which apprehends the “attributes of God and his
affections.”68 The content of the “idea of God,” therefore, is God’s
“essence” and “everything that necessarily follows from his essence.”69
Spinoza had suggested the same much earlier in the Short Treatise when
he called the mode of understanding immediately dependent on God
the “Son of God.”70 This mode corresponds precisely to the “infinite
intellect” in the Ethics. Since for Spinoza “the order and connection of
ideas” that constitutes the “infinite intellect” is “the same as the order
and connection of things,” his Christ, like the Christ of Clement and

66
Origen 1969, Greek 1; English 211.
67
Spinoza 1925 EIVP68 (= Ethics, part 4, proposition 68) scholium; Gebhardt edition
vol. 2, 262. The English translation indicates the Gebhardt pagination on the margin.
On the context of this portrait of Christ, see Fraenkel 2008a.
68
Spinoza 1925 EIIP4 demonstratio; vol. 2, 88.
69
Spinoza 1925 EIIP3; vol. 2, 87.
70
Spinoza 1925 KV (= Korte Verhandeling [Short Treatise]) 1, 9; Gebhardt edition
vol. 1, 48.

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Origen, can be said to be the rational order of nature.71 Historically,

the conception of the “infinite intellect” in Spinoza’s ontology is, in fact,
related to elements of the conception of Nous in both the Platonic and
Aristotelian tradition.72 I must stress, however, that Spinoza’s Christ
does not consist in the generic forms of things like trees, fish, and birds.
For Spinoza universals have no real existence and are not part of true
knowledge at all.73 Trees, fish, and birds—like all other things in the
physical world—are configurations of atoms, brought about mechani-
cally through universal laws of motion and not instantiations of eternal
and incorporeal forms. As idea Dei, therefore, Christ is the scientific
understanding of these laws and of how they are causally dependent
on God, as well as of everything that follows from them—e.g., things
like trees, fish, and birds and their interrelations. But while this bears
witness to important ontological, epistemological, and scientific devel-
opments that took place between the time of Clement and Origen and
the time of Spinoza it does not change the fact that for both the Alex-
andrians and Spinoza everything serving to attain true knowledge by
the same token serves to attain Christ. The acquiring of true knowledge
for Spinoza results from what he describes as the “intellectual love of
God (amor Dei intellectualis).”74 Loving God intellectually constitutes the
highest human perfection. The more true knowledge a person acquires
through practicing it, the greater is that person’s share in Christ. For
Spinoza, as for Clement and Origen, the Wisdom represented by Christ
is, therefore, both the foundation and the goal of Christianity.

Religion as the Handmaid of Philosophy

One may, of course, ask what this religion of the philosophers has to
do with traditional religion—with the narratives of Scripture, its pious
exhortations, the codes of religious law, or the prayers and services of
the religious community. And how do the philosophers explain that the
epics of Homer, for example, or the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament,
and the Koran teach so many things that appear to be at odds with
philosophical doctrines? If the founders of the traditional religions were

71
Spinoza 1925 EIIP7; vol. 2, 89.
72
See Fraenkel 2006.
73
See Spinoza 1925 EIIP40 scholium 1.
74
Spinoza 1925 EVP32 corrolarium; vol. 2, 300.

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indeed exemplars of a life devoted to the intellectual love of God—why

do the religions themselves not seem to have a clearly recognizable
philosophical content?
Tensions between philosophy and traditional religion, as well as
attempts to solve these tensions accompany philosophy from its incep-
tion. Xenophanes (sixth–fifth century BCE), for example, rejects the
anthropomorphic representation of the gods in Greek poetry as incom-
patible with the philosophical conception of the divine.75 At the same
time his contemporary, Theagenes of Rhegion, tries to reconcile the
two through allegorical interpretation.76 On the whole one can say
that Theagenes’ approach prevailed over the hostile attitude to the
religion of the poets exemplified by Xenophanes. Plato, of course, is
rather harsh with Homer and Hesiod in Books 2 and 3 of the Republic.
Most of what they wrote is discarded by Plato because he consid-
ers it pedagogically inappropriate for the citizens of a virtuous state.
Instead of proposing a philosophical reconstruction of existing Greek
religious stories, Plato in the Republic provides philosophical guidelines
for composing new ones. But already Aristotle suggests that Greek
myths can be seen as allegorical statements of scientific insights.77 The
Stoics systematically explore Homer and Hesiod for ancient wisdom.
And to the later Platonic tradition Plato’s criticism in the Republic was
clearly an embarrassment rather than a model. Middle- and Neopla-
tonists as a rule take Homer to be an accomplished theologian who
conveyed his wisdom through metaphors and parables.78 Although
Plato did not rehabilitate Homer and Hesiod, he nonetheless made a
substantial contribution to the philosophical interpretation of existing
legal and religious traditions. For the divine nomoi established in the
Laws for the fictional polis of Magnesia have been shown to be a philo-
sophical reconstruction of Greek legislation.79 In other words: Plato
interprets the nomoi of ancient Greece as if they had been established
by a philosopher. In this sense his procedure is analogous to later
Platonists when they interpret Greek poetry as if philosophers had

75
See Diels and Kranz 1960, 21 B10–17.
76
Ibid., 8.2. Note that the earliest allegorical reading of Homer was probably not
defensive. See Lamberton 1986, 15; 31–43.
77
See Aristotle, Metaphysics 12.8.
78
On the history of the allegorical interpretation of Homer, see in general Lamberton
1986. Note, however, the distinction between the Stoic and the Platonic interpretation
of Homer suggested by Long 1992 and 1997.
79
I will discuss this issue at greater length below.

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composed it. These strategies of philosophical reconstruction and

interpretation in antiquity, are, of course, not confined to the divine
nomoi and religious stories of the Greeks. The same strategies recur,
for example, in the philosophical reconstructions of Egyptian religion
proposed by Chaeremon, Plutarch, and Iamblichus, or the philosophi-
cal reconstruction of Roman political, legal, and religious traditions
proposed by Cicero.80 They also recur when Jewish and Christian
philosophers in late antiquity such as Philo, Clement, and Origen take
on the task of clarifying how philosophy relates to the historical forms
of Judaism and Christianity. And they are taken up once again when
Muslim and Jewish philosophers in the Middle Ages take on the task
of clarifying the relationship of philosophy to the historical forms of
Islam and Judaism.
* * *
The key for understanding the philosophical interpretation of Juda-
ism and Christianity in late antiquity and of Islam and Judaism in the
Middle Ages lies in Plato’s political philosophy which provided the
conceptual foundation for integrating traditional religions into a philo-
sophical framework. This is the main thesis for which I will argue in this
section. The philosophers under examination are not only philosophers
with respect to doctrines that fall into the domain of philosophy prop-
erly speaking, for example, their psychology, cosmology, metaphysics,
and ethics. They also follow a philosophical model when it comes to
interpret their respective religious tradition: the purpose of its narratives,
exhortations, laws, prayers, forms of worship and so forth. Concerning
these contents which are, of course, outside the scope of philosophy
in the strict sense they offer what is best described as a philosophical
reconstruction. The main framework for this reconstruction was pro-
vided by the solution that Plato proposes for what he came to see
as the problem of nonphilosophers in the middle and late dialogues.
Let me stress from the outset that my claim is not that Plato accounts
for all elements of the interpretation of religion as the handmaid of
philosophy. In late antiquity Philo, for example, integrates the Stoic
notion of ‘natural law’ into the Platonic framework. Most significant is,

80
See the extant fragments of Chaeremon in Chaeremon 1984; Plutarch 1936;
Iamblichus 1989; Cicero 1928. Cf. also the attempts, documented in Jeck 2004, to
link Plato’s wisdom to a wide range of oriental sources.

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of course, the integration of a wide range of Aristotelian concepts into

this framework by medieval Muslim and Jewish philosophers. They
explain, for example, the process of prophecy in terms of Aristotle’s
psychology, the character of the pedagogical-political program in terms
of a late ancient version of Aristotle’s Organon, and the purpose of the
divine Law in terms of Aristotle’s theory of habituation. Only the overall
framework, I contend, is derived from Plato.
To substantiate my claim that Plato can be seen as the source of
what I suggest describing as the concept of religion as philosophy’s
handmaid, I will discuss two changes that occurred in Plato’s political
thought from the early dialogues to the middle and late dialogues. Both
changes are motivated through developments in Plato’s conception of
the soul.81 A basic assumption underlying Plato’s political philosophy
from the Apology to the Laws is that a good ruler is a ruler who possesses
the art of making the citizens better, i.e., is capable of leading them to
“aretê (excellence or goodness).”82 Since for Plato it is the philosopher
who has knowledge of the good, as well as of the way how to achieve it,
the philosopher is best qualified to be the ruler. In this sense, Socrates,
although he deliberately stays out of Athens’ public affairs, is praised as
the only Athenian to practice “the true art of politics.”83 In the early
dialogues, the Socratic project of making the citizens better has the
following important characteristics. For one thing it is intellectualistic:
Knowledge of the good is a necessary and sufficient condition for doing
the good. For it is the only way of motivating good action and on the
assumption that it would be absurd to act knowingly against one’s
best interest, it does so necessarily.84 It is, therefore, not surprising that
Socrates seeks to guide all citizens to the knowledge on which their
perfection depends: “I never cease to stir up each and every one of
you, to persuade you and reproach you all day long and everywhere I
sit down.”85 Nor is it surprising that the characteristic form of Socratic

81
This development and its consequences for Plato’s ethics have been the object of
a considerable amount of scholarship. See e.g., Price 1995 and Irwin 1995. My main
interest, however, is in the political implications.
82
For a number of characteristic passages, see Plato 1900–1907: Apology 25a–c;
Protagoras 318c–d; ibidem 319e–320b; Gorgias 464b–465a; ibid. 515b–521d; Republic
420b–421c; Statesman 296e–297b; Laws 630a–631d; ibid. 650b.
83
Plato 1900–1907, Gorgias 521d.
84
See Plato’s argument in the last part of the Protagoras, Plato 1900–1907.
85
Ibid., Apology 30e.

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politics is the elenchos: for the “greatest good (megiston agathon) for man
is to discuss virtue every day and those other things about which you
hear me conversing and testing myself and others.”86
In the middle and late dialogues, however, Plato partly modifies and
partly abandons the premises informing the Socratic project. At the
same time there are points of continuity: The best life continues to be
the philosophical life: it is not only the most pleasant, but also the most
divine, a form of imitatio Dei, since the philosopher acquires knowledge
of the forms, the realm of the divine, and the soul becomes like the
objects it apprehends.87 Likewise the perfection of the city continues
to depend on the rule of the philosopher who as philosopher acquires
knowledge of the divine and becomes like it, and who as ruler is a
“craftsman” of virtue, i.e., leads the citizens as close as possible to the
same goal by shaping them according to the divine as his model.88
Philosophical instruction in the Republic, however, constitutes the last
stage of the educational curriculum that only very few and rigorously
selected citizens reach. This gives rise to three questions: What is the
function of pre-philosophical education in Plato’s curriculum? Why are
most citizens excluded from philosophical instruction? And finally, how
can they still have a share in the best life? To begin with, knowledge
is no longer considered a sufficient condition for goodness by Plato.
He now recognizes a twofold irrational part of the soul, as well as
two conditions under which it cannot be governed by reason. First,
our rational faculty develops at a relatively late stage in life, for “no
animal to which it belongs to have intellect (nous echein) after reaching
perfection, has this faculty, or has it in the same measure, when it is
born.”89 One purpose of the prephilosophical educational program is,
therefore, to prepare the citizens for a philosophical life. This is achieved
by habituating the irrational part of the soul in such a way that it
acts and reacts as if it were guided by reason, so that a person “will
welcome reason when it comes and recognize it easily because of its
kinship with himself.”90 Since, however, only very few citizens actually
reach the level of philosophical instruction, preparation for it cannot
be the program’s only purpose. Although for Plato all human beings

86
Ibid., Apology 38a.
87
Ibid., for the former, see Republic 9; for the latter, see ibid. 500b–d.
88
Cf. Plato 1900–1907, Republic 500d–501c.
89
Ibid., Laws 672b–c.
90
Cf. Plato 1900–1907, Republic 402a; Laws 653b–c.

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share the basic structure of the soul, the dominating part of the soul
varies from one to another. The rational part “rules in some people’s
souls, while one of the other parts—whichever it happens to be—rules
in other people’s.”91 Accordingly, Plato distinguishes between “three
primary kinds of people: wisdom-loving, victory-loving, and profit-lov-
ing.”92 Thus human beings for Plato are in an important sense unequal,
which explains why in his view most citizens will not reach the level of
philosophical instruction at all: they simply are not capable by nature.
In this sense Plato abandons the goal of Socratic politics of leading all
citizens to virtue through knowledge. Prephilosophical education has,
therefore, not only a pedagogical, but also a political purpose: it func-
tions as a replacement of philosophy for all those who by nature have no
access to it. As either a preparation for or a replacement of philosophy,
the pedagogical-political program thus plays an important role in the life
of all citizens of the virtuous state. This explains the elaborate discus-
sion that Plato devotes to nonphilosophical devices—most prominently
in the Laws. The program’s main components are religious stories,
persuasive speeches, laws, and religious practices. Later philosophers
describe them as constituents of an “imitation” of philosophy, perhaps
on account of Plato’s claim that the “entire politeia” set out in the Laws is
an “imitation (mimêsis) of the finest and noblest life.” By this he arguably
means the life of the philosopher.93 The religious stories about gods,
demons, and heroes, for example, can be interpreted as imitating the
forms of justice and of the good known by the philosopher who sets up
the “norms (typoi )” to which these stories must conform.94 Laws in turn
prescribe actions that imitate the philosopher who acts on the basis of
rational insight.95 In this way the not-yet-philosopher is prepared for
the philosophical life and the nonphilosopher is led as close as possible
to it: to a second-degree likeness of the divine, as it were, achieved by
means of an imitation of the philosopher’s first-degree likeness of the
divine. Thus Plato’s educational-political program, while not philosophi-
cal itself, is integrated into the over-all project underlying his political
philosophy, i.e., the project of making the citizens better.

91
Plato 1900–1907, Republic 581b.
92
Ibid., 581c.
93
Ibid., Laws 817b.
94
Ibid., Republic 379a.
95
Cf. Plato 1900–1907, Republic 590d.

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One last implication of the turn from Socratic politics to Plato’s

later political thought must be noted. A nonphilosopher in the best
city possesses only an imitation of philosophical knowledge, that is,
notions of justice and goodness derived from stories about gods, demons
and heroes. He would, therefore, neither be able to defend them in a
Socratic elenchos, nor derive any benefit from the insight that he does not
really know what he thought he knew, given his incapacity to replace
the refuted notions through knowledge. In this sense the Socratic proj-
ect as presented in the Apology is not only judged inadequate given the
reality of the human soul; it is also dangerous, because it potentially
leads to the moral corruption of the nonphilosopher who is left without
philosophy’s imitation while being unable to reach philosophy itself.
In the Republic Plato, in fact, explicitly criticizes the use of the elenchos
for testing the beliefs of nonphilosophers: because it will cause them
to loose the traditional beliefs established by “the lawgiver” in which
they were brought up and because they lack the ability to “discover the
true ones.” After having been “law-abiding,” therefore, they “become
lawless.”96 Although philosophy still holds the key to the best life, Plato
now thinks that it should be practiced outside the public sphere.
* * *
How did Plato’s later political philosophy become useful to philoso-
phers like Philo, Clement, and Origen in late antiquity, and al-Fârâbî,
Averroes, and Maimonides in the early Middle Ages for integrating
their religious traditions into a philosophical framework? In a some-
what schematic way the basic pattern can be described as follows: The
excellence of the religious tradition, according to these philosophers,
is due to the fact that it makes the members of the religious com-
munity better by leading them to aretê. They adopt the fundamental
division of humankind into philosophers and nonphilosophers that
resulted from the development of Plato’s psychology. The founders
of the religion—Moses, Christ, and Muhammad—are presented as
accomplished philosophers. They can, therefore, convey knowledge to
the philosophically talented members of the religious community. But
they are also prophets, lawgivers, and teachers, and as such devised a
pedagogical-political program for the guidance of nonphilosophers. The
literal content of the religious tradition is interpreted as this pedagogical-

96
See the entire passage in Plato 1900–1907, Republic 538c–539a.

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political program, functioning as a preparation to philosophy for not-yet-

philosophers and as a replacement of philosophy for nonphilosophers.
Like Plato’s program, it consists of religious stories, exhortations, laws,
and religious practices. But in contrast to what Plato does with Homer
and Hesiod in the Republic, the philosophers here considered integrate
the foundational texts of their religious traditions into a philosophical
framework by attributing to them an allegorical content coinciding with
philosophy. This content in turn can be uncovered through allegori-
cal exegesis. Moreover, Plato’s view that philosophy should be kept
out of the public sphere, because it can lead to the moral corruption
of nonphilosophers, is used by the philosophers considered here, as
an explanation for the absence of philosophy from their respective
religious traditions. Maimonides, for instance, claims that in antiquity
philosophy was transmitted only orally from one generation of Jewish
philosophers to the next until the unfavorable circumstances of the
Diaspora interrupted the chain of transmission.97 The supposed inter-
ruption in turn is used as a justification for studying philosophy from
non-Jewish sources. Since the religious tradition is an imitation of
philosophy, it contains philosophy only as its allegorical content which
cannot be apprehended without the prior study of philosophy. Also in
this sense, therefore, studying philosophy becomes a religious practice,
for it is essentially the same as the study of the allegorical content of
a religious tradition.
All the components of the pedagogical-political program are part of
the code of divine nomoi set forth in the Laws. There is, moreover, a
well established scholarly tradition of interpreting the Laws as a reli-
gious text. Andrea Nightingale, for instance, describes it as a “sacred
text.”98 For André Laks it is “le premier traité théologico-politique.”99
The Laws can, in fact, be read as both a programmatic statement about
what the nature of a divine law-code must be and as the philosophical
reconstruction of a historical law-code in light of this program. Plato
argues that what makes nomoi divine is that they aim to lead the citi-
zens to “hê megistê aretê ”—the highest virtue which consists in the four
cardinal aretai that Plato defined in the Republic: courage, self-control,
wisdom, and justice.100 These in turn are identified as the “divine goods”

97
See Maimonides 1931, 1.71.
98
Nightingale 1993.
99
Laks 2005, 22.
100
Plato 1900–1907, Laws 630b–c.

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on whose acquisition eudaimonia depends.101 The divinity of the nomoi

thus consists in their ability to turn citizens into excellent citizens by
guiding them towards the highest virtue. This in turn requires that the
nomoi are rational, i.e., grounded on God as Nous whose role in Plato’s
late dialogues is to order things in view to what is best—both in the
cosmological context of the Timaeus and in the political context of the
Laws.102 Scholars have convincingly argued that the politeia of Magnesia
that the Athenian and his Spartan and Cretan interlocutors conceive in
the course of their discussion is in fact a philosophical reconstruction of
Greek legislation. “Outright invention,” Glenn Morrow, for example,
claims, “plays almost no part at all” in the Laws.103 The project of the
Laws, therefore, seems to be less the philosophical construction of a
new law-code than the philosophical reconstruction of existing legal
and religious traditions making them conform to the rational character
that defines divine nomoi. But if this can be done for the nomoi of Greek
cities—why should it not be possible to do the same for the nomoi of
other communities as well? The program of philosophical reconstruc-
tion that Plato outlines and in a sense puts into practice in the Laws
was, for instance, enthusiastically adopted by Philo and applied to a
philosophical reconstruction of the nomoi of the Jews. The claim that the
Law of Moses, precisely like the divine nomoi described in Plato’s Laws,
aims at imparting the four cardinal aretai that Plato had defined in the
Republic is, in fact, a topos in Hellenistic-Jewish literature.104 As we will
see below, almost all of Philo’s extant work can be understood as an
attempt to substantiate this claim. Plato’s philosophical reconstruction
of Greek legislation thus may be said to have its counterpart in Philo’s
philosophical reconstruction of Jewish legislation. A similar claim can
be made for the work of Maimonides in the medieval period.105 My
thesis, then, is this: Plato’s Laws were read by the philosophers here
examined as a pedagogical-political program conceived to guide not-

101
Ibid., 631b–d.
102
See Menn 1995.
103
Morrow 1960, 591. But Morrow argued that the politeia of Magnesia is the
idealized politeia of ancient Athens which is much less plausible than Stephen Menn’s
suggestion that Plato’s reconstruction is a critical response to the literature written in
praise of the Spartan politeia, e.g., Xenophon’s Politeia of the Spartans. See Menn 2005.
104
See e.g., Josephus 1926 2.170–171; Sapientia Solomonis 8:7; 4 Macc. 1:2–4 and 1:17–18.
105
See in particular the definition of “divine Law” in Maimonides 1931, 2.40 and
the account of Moses’ Law as divine Law in 3.27–28. The ultimate purpose of the
divine Law is leading to intellectual perfection and much of Maimonides’ work consists
in showing that this is what the Law of Moses does.

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yet-philosophers and nonphilosophers towards perfection as defined in

the Republic. This program cannot convey perfection in the full sense.
The highest perfection can only be attained through what Plato in the
Timaeus describes as “the love of learning” and “true wisdom.” But it
is a preparation or a substitute for this perfection.
The most compelling evidence that this is how Plato’s political phi-
losophy was read in the context of the philosophical interpretation of
Judaism and Christianity in ancient Alexandria is provided by Eusebius
of Caesarea (d. 339). Intellectually, Eusebius clearly sees himself as
continuing the project of the Alexandrians whose portrait he draws in
his Historia Ecclesiastica (History of the Church).106 But the main interest
of Eusebius does not lie in the originality of his philosophical contribu-
tion to this tradition. He is, in fact, not primarily a philosopher but a
historian. Eusebius’s importance stems from the fact that he makes the
philosophical assumptions underlying the Alexandrian project explicit.
For in book 12 of his Praeparatio Evangelica (Preparation to the Gospel)
he quotes almost every single passage from the Republic and the Laws
on which I rely in my interpretation of Philo, Clement, and Origen.
By adducing what he takes to be biblical parallels to the passages from
Plato, Eusebius, of course, wants to demonstrate that Plato derived
the principles of his political philosophy from the tradition of ancient
Hebrew wisdom. What he in fact shows, however, is how the Alexan-
drians interpreted Judaism and Christianity in light of Plato’s political
philosophy. Let me give just one example:
Moses had made his entire legislation (nomothesia) and the constitution
( politeia) established by him dependent on the religion (eusebeia) of the God
of the Universe. He had made the Demiurge of all things the starting
point of the legislation. Then he taught that from the divine goods the
human goods proceed and referred the divine goods to the ruling Rea-
son of all things (ho pantôn hêgemôn Nous), i.e., to the God of the Universe
himself. Consider how the philosopher [i.e., Plato], walking on the same
path, criticizes the legislators of the Cretans and the Lacedaemonians,
and teaches (ekdidaskei ) the Law dear to Moses.107

106
See in particular the account of Philo’s writings in Eusebius 1926 2.18; the
chapter on Pantaenus “the philosopher,” described as the founder of the catechetical
school in Alexandria and as the teacher of Clement in 5.10; the chapter on Clement
of Alexandria in 5.11 (cf. 6.6), as well as the list of his writings in 6.13. Much of 6 is
devoted to Origen.
107
Eusebius 1982 12.16; English vol. 2, 637.

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Eusebius first incorporates Plato’s account in Laws 631b–d of the rela-

tionship between human and divine goods and their ultimate goal: “the
ruling Reason of all things.” Then he claims that Plato adopted this
account of the goal of divine nomoi from Moses and used it to criticize
the Cretan and Spartan legislation as set forth by Clinias and Megillus
at the beginning of the Laws. For my purpose, however, Eusebius is
the chief witness for how Judaism and Christianity were philosophically
reconstructed in light of Plato’s political thought.
A full discussion of the Alexandrian philosophers is not possible here.
But let me give a few examples of how Eusebius’s testimony can be
used as a hermeneutical key to their project. The conceptual framework
within which Philo carries out this project can be sketched as follows:
The pursuit of knowledge, aiming at knowledge of God, is the high-
est good and Moses is the exemplar of a life devoted to achieving it.
After a comprehensive scientific education he reaches the summit of
philosophy and apprehends the forms constituting God’s Logos, i.e., the
intelligible order of the world which is the highest manifestation of God
accessible to human beings.108 But Moses is not only a philosopher,
but also a lawgiver and Philo explicitly describes him in terms of the
philosopher-king in the Republic.109 As a lawgiver, Moses establishes a
pedagogical-political program that aims at leading all members of the
Jewish community to aretê: by preparing not-yet philosophers for the
philosophical life and by making the intellectual and practical contents
of philosophy accessible to nonphilosophers.110 How Philo’s program of
philosophical reconstruction is modelled on Plato’s is most in evidence
in De decalogo and De specialibus legibus. Here Philo explains in detail how
the nomoi of Moses contribute to what he takes to be their general pur-
pose: “to prepare and exhort us to wisdom and justice and piety and
the rest of the chorus of virtues (aretai )” (Spec. 4, 134). As a whole this
pedagogical-political program relates to the objects of the philosopher’s
knowledge as a shadow relates to a real thing.111 Philo thus applies
Plato’s ontological dualism to the Law of Moses: its literal content is
an imitation of the doctrines established in philosophy which in turn

108
For references, see my account in the second section, Philosophy as the Founda-
tion and Goal of Religion.
109
Philo 1929–62, Mosis 2.2.
110
See e.g., Philo 1929–62, Quod Deus sit immutabilis (On the Unchangeableness of
God) 51–69.
111
See Philo 1929–62, De confusione linguarum (On the Confusion of Tongues) 190;
cf. De vita contemplativa (On the Contemplative Life) 78.

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correspond to its allegorical content.112 Whereas the philosopher, for

instance, knows what justice is, the narratives of the Mosaic Law imitate
that knowledge by describing the behavior of exemplary just individu-
als.113 Plato’s view that philosophy, although inherently good, can prove
destructive for nonphilosophers, is developed by Philo into a general
ontological principle: As God must restrict the goodness bestowed on
his creatures because of their ontological limitations, Moses must teach
an imitation of philosophy to the religious community because of the
intellectual limitations of most of its members.114
Clement and Origen, I argue, did not introduce major changes into
the philosophical framework adopted by Philo, but simply identified
its foundation with Christ. As I suggested above, whereas Moses and
Plato strove to apprehend the forms constituting God’s Logos, Christ is
God’s Logos; whereas Moses and Plato were lovers of wisdom, Christ is
Wisdom. The conception of Christianity as an imitation of philosophy
is made explicit in Origen: like Philo he applies Plato’s ontological dual-
ism to Scripture by comparing the relationship between the gospel’s
literal and allegorical content to that of a shadow to a real thing.115
This conception informs the discussion of exegesis in the last book of
Peri archôn (Book 4) and explains how the systematic exposé of Chris-
tian doctrine in the preceding three books relates to Scripture’s literal
content. Within this framework Origen also can address the objections
against Christianity set forth by the pagan Platonist Celsus: that the Bible
was a compilation of baseless fables, for example, or that Christians
had replaced rational judgment through blind faith. Origen points to
the pedagogical-political utility of faith and fables for the perfection
of nonphilosophers and at the same time claims that their allegorical
content coincides with the doctrines established by reason.116
What most sets the Christian philosophers apart from Philo is how
they connect the distinction between philosophers and nonphilosophers
and between philosophy and philosophy’s imitation with a notion of
progress built into a concept of universal history. For Origen all rational
souls were equally united with the Logos in an initial state of perfection.

112
See Philo 1929–62 Posteritate 1.1; De agricultura (On Agriculture) 96–97.
113
See e.g., the description of the Patriarchs as “living laws” in Philo 1929–62 De
Abrahamo (On Abraham) 2–6.
114
See Philo 1929–62 Opificio 23 with Posteritate 143–145.
115
See Origen 1989 1:1.
116
See e.g., Origen 1965 1.9.

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Turning away from the Logos—thus Origen interprets the biblical

‘fall’—leads to the embodiment of the souls. In successive embodi-
ments they gradually move further away from or back up to the Logos
depending on how rational a life they lead. Christianity’s mission is to
turn humankind as a whole back to the Logos by directing all human
beings to aretê. This means bringing them as close as the current state
of their souls allows to intellectual perfection which is attained through
the apprehension of the Logos: philosophers by means of philosophy and
nonphilosophers by means of philosophy’s imitation.117 In the course of
successive embodiments, however, also nonphilosophers—once turned
into the right direction—will be able to gradually replace philosophy’s
imitation through philosophy itself. In this sense the advent of Christi-
anity is seen as a turning point in the history of humankind: it initiates
the restoration of the souls to the state of intellectual perfection which
they had lost through the ‘fall.’118
* * *
A hermeneutical key like the one provided by Eusebius for understand-
ing the Alexandrian project is not required for the medieval period.
Leo Strauss has long ago established that Plato’s political philosophy
played a crucial role for the conception of the relationship between
philosophy and religion from al-Fârâbî onwards.119 Al-Fârâbî himself,
moreover, wrote an Epitome of Plato’s Laws and Averroes a Com-
mentary on the Republic.120 The main problem in this context is that
Strauss’s interpretation of how Plato’s political philosophy shaped the
medieval approach to religion is in my opinion wrong. For Strauss
there is an irreconcilable “struggle” between philosophy and religion.
From this assumption his notions of persecution and an esoteric art of
writing promptly follow. To avoid persecution and to preserve religion
as a means to control the “masses,” philosophers like Plato, al-Fârâbî,
Averroes, and Maimonides feigned religious orthodoxy while signaling

117
For the education of nonphilosophers through the Logos, see Origen 1965
4.71–72.
118
This paragraph summarizes what I take to be the main line of argument of Origen
1913 1.4–3.6. See in particular 3.6 where Origen stresses the circular character of the
development of the rational souls.
119
See in particular Strauss 1935, Strauss 1952, 7–21, and Strauss 1967.
120
The question whether al-Fârâbî had access to Plato’s text or relied on a sum-
mary by Galen has not yet been settled. For the latest contribution to the debate, see
S. Harvey 2003.

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their heterodox philosophical views between the lines to initiated read-

ers. Let me try to sketch an alternative to this interpretation by briefl y
presenting al-Fârâbî’s concept of religion.121 Al-Fârâbî is not only the
founder of the medieval intellectual tradition under consideration but
also provided a particularly clear statement of the general pattern that
I outlined schematically above.
Al-Fârâbî adopts Plato’s fundamental premise that human beings
are unequal by nature and divided into a minority of philosophers and
a majority of nonphilosophers.122 In his account of the philosophy of
Plato, moreover, he clearly distinguishes between the Socratic method
and the method advocated in Plato’s later dialogues.123 “Socrates,” he
claims, was only able “to conduct a scientific investigation of justice and
the virtues . . . but did not possess the ability to form the character of the
youth and the multitude (al-a dâth wa-al-jumhûr).” The “philosopher,
the king, and the lawgiver,” by contrast, must be able to do both: to
instruct “the elect (al-khawâ )” by means of “the Socratic method”
and to form the character of “the youth and the multitude” by means
of a pedagogical-political program.124 The distinction between “the
youth” and “the multitude” corresponds to the distinction between
not-yet-philosophers and nonphilosophers by nature. That al-Fârâbî
at a minimum was familiar with the main traits of the pedagogical-
political program that Plato had worked out in the Laws is clear from
the Epitome he wrote of the dialogue.
In the Kitâb al- urûf (Book of Letters) al-Fârâbî, describes the process
by which theoretical and practical philosophy reach perfection. This
is followed by an outline of the two methods used for disseminating
the results of this process to the political community. They correspond
precisely to the two methods that we just saw: the “instruction” of phi-
losophers “proceeds by demonstrative methods,” whereas the instruction
of nonphilosophers, “which is public, proceeds by dialectical, rhetorical,

121
A number of important contributions have been made to the interpretation of
al-Fârâbî’s political thought outside Strauss’s conceptual framework. See e.g., Walzer
1957, O’Meara 2003, and Vallat 2004. For a more detailed discussion, see Fraenkel
2008b.
122
For the former, see al-Fârâbî 1964, Arabic 44; English 35; for the latter, see
al-Fârâbî 1992, Arabic 36–37; English 41.
123
al-Fârâbî is of course not led by considerations of Platonic chronology to make
this distinction.
124
al-Fârâbî 1943, Arabic 21–22; English 66–67. Cf. Aristotle’s characterization of
Socrates in the Eudemian Ethics 1.5 (Aristotle 1952).

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or poetical methods.”125 This second kind of instruction in turn con-

stitutes “religion (millah)” which al-Fârâbî takes to be an “imitation of
philosophy (mu âkiyyah li-l-falsafah).”126 Religion thus conceived fulfills
precisely the role of Plato’s pedagogical-political program: “through
religion, the multitude is taught, educated, and given all that is needed
to attain felicity.”127 Its purpose is to convey “theoretical and practical
matters that have been inferred in philosophy, in such a way as to
enable the multitude to understand them by persuasion or imaginative
representation, or both.”128 Religion thus serves as the “tool (âlah)” of
philosophy which makes philosophical contents accessible to nonphiloso-
phers.129 God’s description as a king in Scripture, for instance, is seen
as a pedagogically useful metaphorical imitation of the philosophical
doctrine of God occupying the first rank in the hierarchy of existents.
The notion of the king conveys an approximate idea of God’s rank
to nonphilosophers who cannot understand the ontological order, but
who do understand the political order.130
Plato’s philosopher-king who has the task of guiding both philosophers
and nonphilosophers to the perfection possible to them is replaced by
al-Fârâbî through the prophet.131 The virtuous political community is,
therefore, by the same token a virtuous religious community. The dif-
ference between the philosopher and the prophet is explained in terms
of Aristotle’s psychology: the prophet has not only perfected his intellect
like the philosopher, but he also has a perfect imagination. And one
of the imagination’s functions, according to al-Fârâbî, is precisely “to
imitate” things.132 In other words: The prophet is not only a philoso-
pher, but a poet and orator as well which allows him to guide both the
philosophers and the nonphilosophers in his community. Taken literally,
religious texts for al-Fârâbî consist mainly in metaphors, parables, and
rhetorical and dialectical arguments.
But what is this perfection that religion supposedly conveys to nonphi-
losophers? Both the Alexandrians and the medieval Islamic and Jewish

125
al-Fârâbî 1969, sec. 143 (section numbers refer to both the Arabic and the
English trans.).
126
al-Fârâbî 1992, Arabic 185; English 44. al-Fârâbî 1968 is his most elaborate
discussion of religion.
127
al-Fârâbî 1969, sec. 144.
128
Ibid., sec. 108.
129
Ibid., sec. 110.
130
See e.g., al-Fârâbî 1992, Arabic 185; English 45, quoted by Averroes (1969) in his
Commentary on Plato’s Republic, Hebrew 30; English 18–19; cf. Maimonides 1931 1.8–9.
131
See in particular chapter 15 of al-Fârâbî 1985; see also Walzer 1957.
132
al-Fârâbî 1985, 14, sec. 2.

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thinkers identify the highest form of perfection with intellectual perfec-

tion. But already Plato uses the terms “wisdom” and “knowledge” in a
derivative sense in Republic 441e–442c to describe the state of the rational
part of the soul after having been shaped by the pedagogical-political
program. I suggest describing this kind of wisdom as an imitation of
the wisdom and knowledge accessible to the philosopher only. This
at least is arguably al-Fârâbî’s understanding. Intellectual perfection,
according to him, includes various levels of which scientific knowledge
and the pleasure derived from it is only the highest. Below it are a wide
range of experiences that may be characterized, broadly speaking, as
cultural-religious. Like scientific knowledge they are “apprehensions
that are sought only for the sake of apprehension and the pleasure of
apprehension, not for the sake of being utilized” to attain other goals.
They thus constitute the highest good for nonphilosophers. These
experiences include
the myths, stories, histories of peoples and histories of nations, that man
narrates and to which he listens solely for the pleasure they give. For to
take pleasure in something means nothing other than the achievement
of comfort and delight. Likewise, looking at imitators and listening to
imitative statements, listening to poems, and going over what one com-
prehends of the poems and the myths he recites or reads, are used by
the man who delights in them and is comforted by them only for his
pleasure in what he comprehends. The more certain his apprehension,
the more perfect his pleasure. The more excellent and perfect in himself
the man who comprehends, the more perfect and complete his pleasure
in his apprehension (Wa-kullumâ kâna al-mudrik af al wa akmal fî nafsihi kâna
al-iltidhâdh bi-idrâkihi akmal wa-atamm).133
Hence the perfection derived from philosophy and the perfection
derived from philosophy’s imitation do not differ in kind, for al-Fârâbî,
but only in degree.

The Apparent Paradox of Spinoza134

The interpretation of religious traditions as philosophical religions is

not entirely confined to antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Versions
of it recur in a number of later contexts: I already mentioned Marsilio
Ficino who uses some of the strategies that I described above to integrate

133
al-Fârâbî 1961, Arabic 61; English 73.
134
This section summarizes Fraenkel 2008a where I discuss the issue in greater
detail and give an outline of the scholarly context.

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Platonism and Christianity in fifteenth-century Florence. But as I stressed

in the introduction: this interpretation did not become part of the main
intellectual configurations of Christian Europe. The most important
later philosopher requiring examination is Spinoza who was familiar
with the interpretation in question through medieval Jewish sources.
The apparent paradox of Spinoza is that he appears to advocate both
the view of Averroes—that the truth of Scripture does not contradict
the truth of philosophy—and the view, later adopted by Enlightenment
critics of religion, that one would search in vain in Scripture for the
true doctrines demonstrated in philosophy. It is mainly as a critic of
religion that Spinoza was both cursed and celebrated. Reviled as an
atheist already in his lifetime, “Spinozism” became a swearword by
and large synonymous with atheism and materialism throughout the
seventeenth and eighteenth century. But Spinoza has also been recruited
many times for genealogies of modernity, most recently by Jonathan
Israel who celebrates him as the founder of what he describes as the
“radical enlightenment.”135 Almost no attention, on the other hand, has
been paid to the ample evidence that Spinoza adopted a version of the
conception of a philosophical religion. I have already briefl y discussed
Spinoza’s portrait of Christ. Consider now a passage from the Cogitata
Metaphysica (Metaphysical Thoughts), a treatise that Spinoza wrote
before he worked out his critique of religion in the TTP:
But when we say that God hates certain things and loves certain things,
this is said in the same way as Scripture says that the earth will spit out
human beings and other things of this kind. That God, however, is not
angry at anyone, nor loves things as the multitude (vulgus) believes, can
be sufficiently derived from Scripture itself. For this is in Isaiah and more
clearly in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, chapter 9. . . . Finally, if in the Holy
Scriptures some other things occur, which induce doubt, this is not the
place to explain them; since here we only inquire into the things which
we can grasp in the most certain way through natural reason (ratione
naturali ); and it is sufficient that we demonstrate these clearly in order to
know that Scripture must also teach the same things (ut sciamus Sacram
paginam eadem etiam docere debere); because the truth does not contradict the
truth (veritas veritati non repugnat) and Scripture cannot teach the absurdities
(nugas) which the multitude imagines. . . . Let us not think for a moment
that anything could be found in Sacred Scripture that would contradict
the Natural light (quod lumini naturae repugnet).136

135
See Israel 2001 and 2006.
136
Spinoza 1925 TTP Gebhardt edition vol. 1, 264–265.

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Spinoza here makes the exact same claim that defines Averroes’ stance
on the relationship of philosophy and Islam: “veritas veritati non repug-
nat.” The problem I am interested in is this: In his critique of religion
Spinoza develops an exegetical method by which he intends to show
that Scripture contains no truth and, therefore, cannot interfere with
philosophy.137 Whereas philosophy determines what is true and false,
religion based on Scripture secures obedience to the law.138 On the other
hand, there are a significant number of passages throughout Spinoza’s
work—from the Metaphysical Thoughts to the Ethics and the late correspon-
dence with Oldenburg—in which he attributes a true core to Scripture,
often presented as its allegorical content. The main thesis for which I
will argue is that this inconsistency is best explained by assuming that
Spinoza is committed to two projects that he ultimately was unable to
reconcile: he wants to use religion as the handmaid of philosophy that
provides the basis for the best life accessible to nonphilosophers and
he wants to refute religion’s claim to truth in order to defend what he
calls the “freedom to philosophize (libertas philosophandi ).”139 Spinoza’s
critique of religion was, of course, momentous. He argued that we have
no good reason to take for granted what everyone committed to a reli-
gion based on Scripture must assume: that the content of Scripture is
true—whether this truth is taken to coincide with scientific knowledge
and derived from the intellectual perfection of the religion’s founder or
whether it is taken to be above scientific knowledge and derived from a
miraculous act of divine revelation. Both positions stand and fall with
the assumption of Scripture’s truth. After suspending this assumption
at the beginning of his examination of Scripture, Spinoza proceeds in
an analogous way to the scientist whose aim is to explain nature. Both
work out a “history,” i.e., a methodical account, of the object of their
study.140 For the Bible scholar this means collecting and ordering the
data contained in Scripture and then interpreting them in light of the
relevant historical and socio-cultural contexts as well as the psychologi-
cal peculiarities of the prophets insofar as these can be reconstructed
from the available sources. This is what Spinoza means by the claim
that “the knowledge of all the contents of Scripture must be sought

137
See in particular Spinoza 1925 TTP 7.
138
See in particular Spinoza 1925 TTP 12–15.
139
Spinoza 1925, see the subtitle of the TTP and Letter 30 in which Spinoza lays
out the project of the TTP.
140
Spinoza 1925 TTP 7 vol. 3, 98; English 89.

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from Scripture alone.”141 Only after reconstructing the meaning of the

text in this manner its truth or falsehood is assessed, which in the case
of the Bible usually leads to the conclusion that it is false. It is perhaps
not surprising that this strand in Spinoza’s thought stood at the center
of the scholarly interest in his views on religion. The few scholars who
took note of the inconsistency in Spinoza’s work at all usually dismissed
the passages refl ecting the medieval Islamic and Jewish position as the
strategic maneuver of a radical philosopher who in his youth had been
ostracized by the Jewish community and wished to avoid suffering the
same fate by Christians. This explanation seems untenable to me, not
least because even after cutting all ties between philosophy and religion,
Spinoza determines their respective roles in a way that bears a striking
resemblance to Averroes’s version of the concept of a philosophical
religion. Turning the prevalent scholarly view on its head proves in
my view a more promising approach: Spinoza’s prior commitment is
to a version of the medieval concept of a philosophical religion. His
critique of it, by contrast, is an incidental by-product of his critique
of Christian orthodoxy. One of the main reasons that motivated Spi-
noza to compose his critique of religion in the TTP, is “the excessive
authority and the impertinence of preachers” which he perceived as a
fundamental threat to “the freedom to philosophize and to say what
we think.”142 This critique is thus not motivated by his philosophical
project, but by historical circumstances in seventeenth-century Holland
when the alliance of the Calvinist Reformed Church with the monarchist
supporters of the House of Orange threatened the relatively liberal and
tolerant Dutch Republic under Johan de Witt.143
To begin with we know that Spinoza read and understood Mai-
monides’ philosophical interpretation of Judaism from his restatement
and astute criticism of this position in the TTP.144 It is, moreover, very
likely that Spinoza was familiar with the main premises underlying Aver-
roes’s approach to religion on account of the striking parallels between

141
Ibid., vol. 3, 99; English 90.
142
Ep. 30, written in 1665; Spinoza 1925 TTP vol. 4, 166; English 844.
143
For the general historical setting, see Israel 1995, ch. 30, in particular 785–795
in which the composition of the TTP is situated against the background of the period’s
confl icts and tensions. For a more detailed account of the historical circumstances under
which Spinoza composed the TTP, see Nadler 1999, ch. 10. Note, however, that I do
not share Nadler’s view about the continuity of Spinoza’s stance concerning religion
from the time of his excommunication to the TTP.
144
Spinoza 1925 TTP 7 and 15.

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Averroes’s and Spinoza’s stance. These parallels can be explained on

the assumption that Spinoza read the short Hebrew treatise Be inat ha-
dat (The Examination of Religion) by the Jewish Renaissance Averroist
Elijah Delmedigo, a copy of which was in his library.145 In the passage
from the Metaphysical Thoughts quoted above the confl ict between the
philosophical doctrine of God’s will and Scripture is resolved in the
way most medieval Muslim and Jewish rationalists would resolve it:
the statements about God’s love and hate in Scripture must be under-
stood allegorically. Only the vulgus understands them literally. The
criterion to determine which passages of Scripture are to be understood
literally and which allegorically clearly is their agreement or disagreement
with the corresponding philosophical doctrine. The need to explain
Scripture derives from the fact that it does not teach things more philo-
sophico, i.e., in the way we grasp them when we inquire into them by
means of “natural reason.” But since the truth arrived at by reason is
the same as the truth contained in Scripture, we can rest assured that
nothing clearly demonstrated by reason contradicts what Scripture
teaches. The literal content of the teachings of Scripture is adapted to
the imagination of nonphilosophers.
Whereas from this passage we learn that Scripture’s anthropomorphic
representation of God has an allegorical sense, there are a number of
additional passages in Spinoza’s writings in which he explains how
the literal sense is useful to nonphilosophers. In the first letter to Wil-
lem van Blyenbergh, for instance, Spinoza explains that by speaking
of God more humano—that is in a way that simple human beings can
understand—and by translating causal connections into laws associ-
ated with rewards and punishments, Scripture is able to replace for
nonphilosophers philosophical insight as a guide to virtuous action.146
This I take to be the most important reason for why Spinoza adopted
the medieval position:147 it allows preserving the authority of Scripture
as the basis of traditional religion which provides a pedagogical-political
program replacing philosophy for nonphilosophers.
Before Spinoza started working on the TTP in 1665, he, in fact,
consistently endorsed the medieval position whenever he discussed

145
See Freudenthal 1899, No. 56 and 161. For a detailed discussion of the relation-
ship between Averroes, Delmedigo, and Spinoza, see Fraenkel (forthcoming).
146
Spinoza 1925, Letter 19.
147
Note that by ‘medieval position’ I mean here and in what follows the position
exemplified by Averroes and Maimonides.

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the character of Scripture. Supporting evidence for this claim is that

Lodewijk Meijer, Spinoza’s doctor and close friend, who assisted him
with the publication of his works, not only defends a version of the
medieval position in his Philosophia S. Scripturae Interpres, written in the
mid-1660s, but announces the Ethics as the “infallible norm” provided
by philosophy for the correct interpretation of Scripture.148 The puzzle,
how a close friend of Spinoza such as Meijer could in the first half of the
1660s elaborately argue for a position that Spinoza explicitly rejects in
the TTP can best be solved on the assumption that at the time Meijer
worked out his position, Spinoza had not yet rejected it.
If until about 1665 Spinoza’s position on the relationship between
philosophy and religion is indeed the same that he rejects as Mai-
monides’ “dogmatism” in the TTP, i.e., the position, according to which
theology is the ancilla philosophiae, the issue becomes more complicated
after 1665 when he begins to work out his critique of religion, pub-
lished in 1670 as the TTP. But despite the critique of religion in the
TTP, different versions of the medieval position reappear throughout
Spinoza’s later writings. Spinoza’s portrait of Christ that I briefl y dis-
cussed above is only one prominent example. What all the passages
in question have in common is this: none of them can be justified
through the exegetical method that Spinoza promises to adopt in the
TTP, namely “to neither affirm anything of Scripture nor to admit
anything as its doctrine which I did not most clearly derive from
it.”149 To put it in a provocative way: If Spinoza had never written his
critique of religion, these passages, together with those of his earliest
writings, would have allowed him to claim that the allegorical content
of traditional religion is never in confl ict with what the Ethics teaches
philosophers more geometrico and that the literal content of Scripture
teaches nonphilosophers more humano, i.e., by means of parables and
laws, an imitation of the doctrines of the Ethics.
Taking for granted for now that the textual evidence supports my
claim, this raises, of course, a number of questions: Why did Spinoza
adopt the medieval position in his early writings, why did he argue
against it in the TTP, and why did he continue to make use of it even
after having argued against it? It is clear that he had good reasons to

148
Meijer 1666, Epilogus, 10. On Spinoza’s identification of Meijer’s and Maimonides’
position in the TTP, see Walther 1995.
149
Spinoza 1925 TTP, Preface vol. 3, 9; English 5; Spinoza elaborates the method
in TTP 7.

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endorse it, most importantly because he shares the premises which

motivated the interpretation of traditional religions as philosophical
religions in late antiquity and in the Middle Ages: the division of human
beings into philosophers and nonphilosophers, the disruptive effect of
irrational passions in relation to reason and the identification of human
perfection with intellectual perfection.150 As far as I can see the view
that philosophy determines the true core of religion does not interfere
with Spinoza’s philosophical project in the Ethics, or with the freedom
to philosophize that he sets out to defend in the TTP. On the contrary:
a pedagogical-political program that could serve as preparation to or
as replacement of philosophy for nonphilosophers would seem to fit
well with his systematic commitments.
But if this is indeed the case, why did Spinoza elaborately argue
against the philosophical interpretation of Scripture? Let me briefl y
outline what I think is the correct answer. It is clear that Spinoza’s main
opponent in the TTP is not the position of medieval Islamic and Jewish
philosophers or of Lodewijk Meijer, but the position of the Christian
orthodoxy in the Netherlands of the seventeenth century and, more
generally, any form of religious orthodoxy that takes the authority of
Scripture to override the authority of reason.151 Spinoza describes this
position as “scepticism” in the TTP and contrasts it with the medieval
position. It is this form of “scepticism” that turns philosophy into the
“handmaid (ancilla) of theology” which, according to Spinoza, is the chief
threat to the libertas philosophandi.152 The only efficient way to refute the
sceptic in Spinoza’s view is to show that Scripture contains no truth.
But although the medieval position and the orthodox Christian position

150
For Spinoza’s intellectual elitism, see Spinoza 1925; e.g., EVP42, scholium; for the
role of the passions and intellectual perfection, see in general Ethics IV and V.
151
On the identity of scepticism and “orthodox Calvinism,” see already Gebhardt
1987, 82. For Calvin’s sceptical stance, see for example Calvin 1960 1.5, 11–12 where
Calvin introduces the motive of the “blindness of the human mind (mentis humanae
caecitas)” and describes the irresolvable disputes among philosophers. See also the
argument of 1.6 for the need of Scripture to attain knowledge of God. Spinoza had
the 1597 Spanish translation of the Institutiones; cf. Freudenthal 1899, 160, no. 27.
Although Spinoza’s immediate target was the Calvinist Reformed Church, this was
not the only version of scepticism advocated in this period. For a general account of
the “sceptical hypothesis,” see Harrison 2007, 73–88.
152
See Spinoza 1925 TTP 15 for a characterization of the “sceptical” position. In
the preface to the TTP Spinoza mentions only scepticism as an “obstacle” prevent-
ing potential philosophers from philosophizing (vol. 3, 12; English 8). As I already
mentioned, Spinoza states in Letter 30 that his aim is to defend the “freedom to
philosophize” against the “excessive authority and the impertinence of preachers”
(vol. 4, 166; English 844).

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are in a sense opposed to each other—the former subordinates religion

to philosophy, the latter philosophy to religion—in different ways both
depend on the premise that religion is true. Thus rejecting the one
entails rejecting the other. While his immediate target is contemporary
Christian orthodoxy, Spinoza has no choice but to give up the medi-
eval position as well. At the same time he has no new solution for the
problem of nonphilosophers. This explains why, despite rejecting it, he
continues using it in various contexts in his later writings.

Conclusion

How do proponents of a philosophical religion conceive the relation-

ship between the study of nature, culminating in knowledge of God,
and the sources of their religious traditions, for example the Hebrew
Bible, the New Testament, and the Koran? The former, it turns out,
clearly provides the ground for the latter. Since revelation is inter-
preted as the achievement of intellectual perfection—the intersec-
tion of human knowledge and divine reason—philosophy provides
religion’s foundation. Intellectual perfection is also the goal of religion:
the highest worship of God consists in the pursuit of knowledge. On
this level, therefore, philosophy and religion cannot be meaningfully
distinguished at all! This, of course, raises the question what such a
religion of philosophers has in common with religion in its historical
form: the narratives of Scripture, its pious exhortations, religious laws,
prayers, forms of worship and so forth. After all, none of these have a
clearly recognizable philosophical content. Proponents of a philosophical
religion concede that taken literally the content of the religious sources
is not philosophy. But it is, they argue, integrated into a philosophical
framework—as philosophy’s handmaid, which they conceive according
to a model first developed by Plato. The problem Plato addressed was
how nonphilosophers can be led to perfection. The program that he
worked out for this purpose—most importantly in the Laws—is a philo-
sophical reconstruction of existing Greek legal and religious practices.
Whereas the philosopher determines what perfection is, these practices
are put to use for guiding all members of the political community
towards it—as if they had been established by philosophers in the first
place with the aim to order the community in view to what is best. In
the same manner it proved possible to philosophically reconstruct the
historical forms of other traditions—for instance the contents of the

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Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Koran. The philosophers
examined in this chapter, I contend, are not only philosophers with
respect to doctrines that fall into the domain of philosophy properly
speaking, for example their psychology, cosmology, metaphysics,
and ethics. They also adopt a philosophical model—more precisely
a Platonic model—when it comes to interpret the historical forms of
their respective religious traditions. With Plato they argue that no one
is born a philosopher and most human beings lack what it takes to
become philosophers. This observation they use to support the claim
that the literal content of religious sources like the Hebrew Bible, the
New Testament, and the Koran is an imitation of philosophy, designed by
accomplished philosophers like Moses, Christ, and Muhammad for the
pedagogical-political guidance of nonphilosophers. As an imitation of
philosophy, religion translates the philosopher’s knowledge and way of
life into a program which prepares not-yet-philosophers for the philo-
sophical life and allows nonphilosophers as much as possible to share
in the philosopher’s perfection. The truth of the religious sources in
turn, on which their validity depends, is secured through the notion
of their allegorical content according to which the doctrines imitated by
their literal content are the doctrines demonstrated in philosophy. The
relationship between the study of nature, culminating in knowledge of
God, and religious sources like the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament,
or the Koran is thus twofold: taken literally these sources serve to either
prepare for a life devoted to scientific study or to replace it. Students
who successfully make the transition from potential philosophers to
actual philosophers in turn gain access to the allegorical content of the
sources in question which coincides with the objects of their studies.
They can thus move up from a literal to an allegorical understanding
of the texts. This is, no doubt, a daring interpretation of traditional
religions. While philosophy is the highest worship of God, religion’s
historical forms, as articulated in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament,
and the Koran, are no more than philosophy’s handmaid.

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Voltaire. 1980. Dictionnaire philosophique (Philosophical Dictionary). In Oeuvres complètes
de Voltaire, Ed. R. Pomeau. Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, vols. 35–36.
Walther, Manfred. 1995. Biblische Hermeneutik und Historische Erklärung. Studia
Spinozana 11: 232–238.
Walzer, Richard. 1957. Al-Fârâbî’s Theory of Prophecy and Divination. The Journal
of Hellenic Studies 1: 142–148.
White, Andrew Dickson. 1896. A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Chris-
tendom. 2 vols. New York: D. Appleton.
Winston, David. 2001. The Ancestral Philosophy—Hellenistic Philosophy in Second Temple
Judaism. Providence: Brown Judaic Studies.

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PART I

100–800

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 CHAPTER THREE

NATURE AND SCRIPTURE:

THE TWO WITNESSES TO THE CREATOR

Pamela Bright

The phrase, “the two witnesses to the Creator” comes from a “teaching
song,” madrashe, of the fourth-century exegete, Ephraem, the Syrian.
Throughout a range of sophisticated hermeneutical practices within the
Christian communities of third and fourth centuries, the Hexaemeron
tradition—a series of Lenten sermons on the “six days” of creation in
Genesis—demonstrates that both nature and Scripture are sources of
revelation of God’s presence and loving purpose throughout Creation.
Long separated from the West by distance, the exigencies of history,
and above all by language, the fourth-century Syrian exegete and litur-
gical song-writer, Ephraem, speaks directly to the topic of the present
chapter in one of his “teaching songs” or madrashe:
In his book Moses
described the creation of the natural world,
so that both Nature and Scripture
might bear witness to the Creator;
Nature, through man’s use of it,
Scripture through his reading of it.
These are the witnesses
which reach everywhere;
they are to be found at all times
present at every hour,
confuting the unbeliever
who defames the Creator.1

1
Brock 1990, 102–3. In his fifth hymn ‘On Paradise’ St.Ephrem speaks of the Bible
and the natural world as the two requisite witnesses to God (see John 8:17). This is
the theme to which Ephrem returns elsewhere: these two witnesses point the way to
the New Covenant, the one providing the Torah for the Jewish ‘People,’ the other the
source of natural law for the Gentile ‘Peoples,’ in both cases in preparation for the
coming of the “Lord of Scripture and of nature”:
Look and see how Nature and Scripture
Are yoked together for the Husbandman; Nature abhors adulterers,
Practices of magic and murderers;

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Ephraem was not the first, nor was he the last, to suggest that both
nature and Scripture were “revelatory,” in the sense that they both
spoke to a profundity of human awareness, launching their “readers”2
into a quest as seemingly boundless as the inner and outer cosmos that
invited their contemplation and their interaction. The inner cosmos of
human self-awareness and the outer cosmos—all that was other than self
and yet at the same time inextricably bound with self—defined the very
nature of self. In antiquity the awareness of the immensities of this inner
and outer cosmos is encapsulated in the notion of the human being as a
microcosm, the meeting place of spirit and matter. Readers of Scripture
in the period known as late antiquity faced their own specific challenges
in responding to what Ephraem calls the two “witnesses” to Creation.
Their focus on understanding their own humanity as the summit of the
‘six days’ of Creation in the opening chapter of Genesis, constricted a
broader appreciation of a whole range of cosmological issues in modern
awareness, the immense ‘otherness’ of space and the complexities of
our own biosphere. On the other hand, these ancient writers’ insistence
on the role of nature as witnessing to, and revelatory of God, the Ulti-
macy of otherness, paradoxically challenges any presupposition of the
‘ultimacy’ of either nature or Scripture. The exegetes and theologians
of late antiquity present their own challenge to the twenty-first century
to explore modes of discourse that move beyond a kind of a ‘reading’
of either nature or Scripture as self-enclosed domains with intractable
divides of intelligibility. These modes of discourse would respect what
is distinctive of the immense ‘worlds’ of nature and Scripture and yet
be open to a boundless trajectory impelled by the multidimensionality
of human awareness.

Scripture abhors them too.

Once Nature and Scripture had cleared the land,
They sowed in it new commandments
—in the land of the heart, so that it might bear fruit:
Praise for the Lord of Nature, glory for the Lord of Scripture. (Hymns against Her-
esies, 28, 11), Hymns against Heresies, CSCO 169–70 = SS 76–7. Brock 1974, 10.
2
In the Advancement of Learning I.vi.16, Francis Bacon writes: “[ There are]two books
or volumes to study, if we will be secured from error, first the scriptures, revealing the
will of God, and then the creatures expressing his power, whereof the latter is a key
unto the former.” See also Howell 2002.

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 two witnesses to the creator 87

Nature and Scripture:

The Challenge of Philosophy and Gnosticism

In spite of Ephraem’s confident assertion that the two ‘witnesses’ to

the Creator, nature, and Scripture, are to be found “everywhere . . . at
all times . . . present at every hour,” early Christian exegetes were pro-
foundly challenged by the complexities that confronted them, on the
one hand by a millennium of philosophical refl ection concerning nature,
and on the other, by Gnostic writings that presented educated circles
both within and beyond the Christian communities with an alternate
reading of the cosmology and anthropology of the Scriptures.
Except for an anonymous second-century work, the Physiologos,3
offering a typological description of animals, stones and plants, based
on the Septuagint and the New Testament, we look in vain among the
Christian writings of the first six or seven centuries for a treatise on
nature like the Periphyseon4 of the Irish philosopher of the Carolingian
period, Eriugena, who, in the literary form of a dialogue between Mas-
ter and Disciple, poses the question: “Is therefore nature the general
name of all things that are and are not?” The Latin title of the work
De divisione naturae, specifies the precise philosophical perspective that
will dominate the argument that follows. In her book, The Anthropology
of Johannes Scottus Eriugena, Willemien Otten writes:
In its opening lines the Periphyseon presents the notions of natura and divisio
as totally interrelated, to the extent that they ultimately condition each
other. Instead of starting out from a fixed totality, it is through a process
of division that the Master contrives to present a definition of natura as a
universal concept. He predicates natura as the general name for all things
that are and are not. Through the complementary character of being and
non-being, this implicitly constitutes an exhaustive totality.5
At first sight, Eriugena’s bold initiative of defining nature as a totality of
“being and non-being” would have been extremely problematic for the
Christian thinkers of the early centuries for many reasons. The brilliantly
argued proposition of Eriugena that God was included in the totality
of nature rests upon “a dynamic reinterpretation of the traditional

3
Kannengiesser 2004, 426–7. Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Hyppolytus of
Rome refer to the Physiologus, and it is quoted in the Proto-Gospel of James (10, 2–11,4:
Phys. 35), 427 (Hock, 1996).
4
Otten 1989.
5
Otten 1989, 7.

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distinction between God and creation by presenting an interplay

between natura’s creative and created aspects.” However, this “traditional
distinction” between God and nature had been a lengthy and hard won
battle for the exegetes of the early years of Christianity—one where
the high ground was held by redoubtable thinkers who were not ready
to concede the field to an understanding of nature resting upon the
biblical narrative of God as Creator and nature as the “heavens and
earth,” created in time, and in the goodness of the Creator.
It was not only the thinkers of the first millennium of the Common
Era who have found that the notion of nature presents special difficul-
ties. Contemporary studies note that nature is an “indefinitely mutable
term changing as our scientific conception of the world changes and
often best seen as signifying a contrast with something considered not
part of Nature.”6 “[ F ]lexibility and imprecision marks its whole his-
tory.”7 At times, the term nature refers to the totality of things, or it
may be used in the context of laws and principles of structure by which
the behavior of things may be explained.8 In antiquity, Pre-Socratics,
Pythagoreans, Platonists, and Aristotelians posed questions about the
substances out of which the world was structured, its geometric forms,
its mutability, and its final cause.9 While the Stoics looked to nature as
the norm, and tended to undervalue human achievement, Plato argued
that human productivity (in accord with truth) is related to the divine
productivity that brings forth physis, nature.10
Christian thinkers of late antiquity inherited the challenge of this
proliferation of perspectives and theories about nature or rather, phi-
losophies of nature. However it is important to recognize that to be
challenged by this wealth of knowledge and opinion was to be drawn
into an ongoing dialogue, rather than to be mired in a kind of endless
duel. Of course Christian exegetes found themselves in profound dis-
agreement on fundamental questions concerning time and eternity, and

6
Blackburn 1994, 256–7.
7
Fahlbusch, Lochman, Mbiti, Pelikan, and Vischer 2003, 711.
8
Edwards 1967, 454–8.
9
In the dialogue of the Timaeus, Critias introduces his friend, Timaeus of Locri, to
Socrates and Hermocrates as a notable expert in the field of astronomy and mathemat-
ics. The Timaeus treats of the immense topic, the construction of the universe: “Consider
Socrates, the order of the feast as we have arranged it. Seeing that Timaeus is the best
astronomer and has made it his special task to learn about the nature of the Universe,
it seems good to us, that he should speak first, beginning with the origin of the Cosmos
and ending with the generation of mankind.” Plato 1929, 1975, 47.
10
Fahlbusch, Lochman, Mbiti, Pelikan, and Vischer 2003 vol. 3, 711.

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 two witnesses to the creator 89

the origin and ‘end’ of the cosmos, but these disagreements, no matter
how intense, reveal a common logic, a kind of shared ‘grammar’ of
debate. This is obvious in the first century of the Common Era when
the Jewish exegete, Philo of Alexandria, is faced with the problem of
commenting on the so-called double creation narratives of chapters one
and two of Genesis. Drawing attention to the difference in the cardinal
and ordinal numbering of the days of creation in the Septuagint text,11
(day one, then second, third, fourth day etc.), Philo argues that in “day
one” the generative forms of the cosmos were created so that what
appears to be parallel, or separate narratives in the following verses of
chapters one and two are logically connected to the biblical account of
“day one.” This argument does not make him a ‘platonizing’ Jew, but
rather an exegete who shares a frame of discourse with his Hellenized
Jewish contemporaries in the cosmopolitan society of Alexandria.
In the same vein one could argue that for both Jews and Christians,
the Stoic concept of an all pervasive Logos/World-Soul, with its implica-
tions for uniting ethics and reason, provided a certain common ground
of understanding with the biblical Logos/Wisdom of God. But in the
opening chapters of John’s gospel, we can see the paradoxes inherent
in the discourse between Jews and Christians, on the one hand, and
with the notions of the philosophical schools on the other: “In the
beginning was the Logos/Word . . . and the Logos/Word became fl esh
and dwelt among us” ( John 1:1,14). The Logos becomes fl esh, assum-
ing the created nature of humankind. The dazzling paradox of the
Incarnate Logos, was greeted with joy in the liturgy and the baptismal
creeds of the early Christian centuries; it was defended in the strictures
of the apologists, and illuminated in the frescos and mosaic arts, but
not until the fourth century did a young bishop compose a lengthy
treatise precisely on the question of the incarnation—the assumption
of ‘fl esh,’ human nature, by the divine Logos. This was Athanasius of
Alexandria in his ground-breaking essay, On the Incarnation of the Word.
While the paradox of the uncreated and the created natures in the one
person of the Savior is never far from the thought of the bishop, his
focus is on the “why” of the incarnation—that the Word became fl esh
so that we, the created, may participate in the life of the uncreated. For
Athanasius, as for Paul, it is the fallenness of our nature, that draws
the Logos/Son to a perishing race:

11
Philo 1929/1971, 15.

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. . . through the union of the immortal Son of God with our human nature,
all men were clothed with incorruption in the promise of the resurrec-
tion. For the solidarity of mankind is such that by virtue of the Word’s
indwelling in a single human body, the corruption that goes with death
has lost its power over all. . . . For the human race would have perished
utterly had not the Lord and Savior of all, the Son of God, come among
us to put an end to death.12
While the biblical notion of the fallenness of humanity is one that was
opaque for the ancient philosophers, even if they spoke in terms of a
duality of spirit and matter, for the Gnostics, this concept of fallenness,
as it was elaborated by leading Christian writers like Irenaeus of Lyon,
Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian of Carthage, and Origen of Alex-
andria, in the second and third centuries, was a misreading both of
nature and of Scripture. The radical nature of the Gnostic separation
of spirit and matter finds its precise focus in their refusal of the goodness
of either the Creator god or of created matter. It was their cosmology
and their anthropology that drew fire from both the Christian and
neo-Platonist of late antiquity.
Any exploration of the differences in Christian and Gnostic under-
standing of the relationship between God, human beings and the
cosmos as a whole begs the question of who is to be identified as
Gnostic.” Paul, in the First Letter to the Corinthians declares that the
only saving gnosis is knowing” the Good News concerning the crucified
God/man—a gnosis that is a folly and a scandal to many (1 Cor. 1:23).
Even as late as the closing decades of the second century, Clement of
Alexandria still speaks of true and false Gnostics. According to Clement
some (the false Gnostics) have “elevated themselves above the apostle
[ Paul],” but that the true Gnostic can be recognized by his or her
constant contemplation of the framework of the cosmos (the affinities to
Platonism are obvious); a fulfillment of the commandments of the two
testaments (Gnostics often refused the authority of the Jewish scripture13

12
Athanasius 1953, 35. Sources Chretiennes 199, 296, 298. . . . συνὼν δὲ διὰ τοῦ
ὁμοίου τοῖς πᾶσιν ὁ ἄφθαρτος τοῦ Θεοῦ ‛Υιὸς εἰκότως τοὺς πάντας ἐνέδυσεν ἀφθαρσίαν
έν τῇ περὶ τῆς ἀναστάσεως ἐπαγγελίᾳ. Καὶ αὑτὴ γὰρ ἡ ἐν τῷ θανάτῳ φθορὰ κατὰ
τῶν ἀνθρώπων οὐκέτι χώραν ἔχει διὰ τὸν ἐνοικήσαντα Λόγος ἐν τούτοις διὰ τοῦ ἑνὸς
σώματος . . . Παραπωλώλει γὰρ ἃν τὸ τῶν ἀνθρώπων γένος, εἰ μὴ ὁ πάντων ∆εσπότης
καὶ Σωτὴρ τοῦ Θεοῦ ‛Υιὸς παρεγεγόνει πρὸς τὸ τοῦ θανάτου τέλος.
13
Pasquier 2004. “Even a cursory reading of the Nag Hammadi treatises and of
the patristic literature dealing with Gnosticism reveals the unmistakable importance of
the First Testament exegesis for the Gnostics. Whole treatises are dedicated to it. It is
for them an inspired book. However, like Marcion, they did not see how they could

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 two witnesses to the creator 91

since it spoke in the name of the Creator god); and an engagement in

the training of competent students.14 However the authentic Gnostic
is to be self-identified, ( Justin of Rome reminds us that they them-
selves insisted that they were to be called Christians)15 the Gnostics
of late antiquity come down to us under various titles: Marcionites,
Valentinians, Basilidians, Satornilians and so on. While much of the
information about them came through hostile sources, both Christian
and non-Christian, the manuscript discoveries of the twentieth century
have led to a resurgence of scholarship that has already transformed
our knowledge and understanding of this phenomenon.16
In a recent monograph, Christoph Markschies draws up an eight
point typological model of Gnosticism: 1. An experience of a com-
pletely other-wordly, distant God; 2. A series of divine figures closer
to humans than the supreme God; 3. An experience of being alien in
a world/ matter, considered as evil; 4. A creator god, evil or ignorant;
5. A mythological drama of the fall of a divine element into the world.
This divine spark slumbers in one class of human beings; 6. Gnosis
of this state achieved through the descent of a redeemer beyond this
world; 7. Redemption, through knowledge that the divine is in them;
8. A tendency toward dualism opposing spirit and matter.17
Of course, Gnostics were not alone in favoring mythological models
to communicate their insights into the malaise and suffering endemic
in society. Nor were they singular in expressing a certain pessimism or
even negativity toward human aspirations for happiness on a mundane
scale. The sophistication of much of their thought belies simplistic
characterization.18 But for the present enquiry into the understanding
of nature in the thought of Christian communities of late antiquity,
it is clear that the prevalent Gnostic attitudes toward God as Creator
and to nature (either as cosmos or simply as the world around us)
could only meet with opposition and repugnance from biblical com-
mentators within the Christian communities whose scriptures were the
“two Testaments,” as Clement of Alexandria insisted. In defending the

ignore the distance existing between the Law and the Gospel. . . . The Jewish Bible is
seen as a provisional revelation, in need of being relativized, and imperfect in some
of its parts (be it in its spirit or its interpretation),” 458–9.
14
Clement of Alexandria, Carpets, II 46.1 (Cox 1995); Quoted in Markschies, 2003, 9.
15
Markschies 2003, 10. Dialogue with Trypho, 35.6.
16
Kannengiesser 2004, vol. 1, 448–506.
17
Markschies 2003, 16.
18
See Pasquier 2004, 461–469.

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sacredness of the Jewish scriptures, these exegetes played a vital role

in the development of the self-understanding of the Christian com-
munities of late antiquity. This self-understanding shaped Christian
attitudes toward what it means to be human, including relationships
within the human family, and went beyond humankind to include
our relationship with the totality of nature. These Christian exegetes
refused what they judged to be the elitism and the fatalism inherent
in the compartmentalizing of salvation to include only certain sections
of humankind—the Gnostics.
In this first section, I have emphasized the challenges faced by the
early Christian thinkers in respect to the understanding of the world of
nature, in all its forms, including the understanding of human nature
and its relationship to the otherness of the creation of which they are
part. These challenges were posed by the whole weight of century upon
century of philosophical perspectives, filtered through practically every
level of the cosmopolitan society of their day. These intellectual and
cultural challenges were compounded by a kind of inner struggle for
self-understanding of the early church communities with Gnosticism.
Both these challenges lay at the core of their understanding of their
relationship with God, not in terms of an abstraction, ‘nature,’ but of
their own nature as human beings. In other words, who were they
before God and what was their hope and their destiny?
While the philosophical tradition, as part of the general culture,
demanded a reasoned response in a shared ‘grammar’ of debate, thus
inviting creative dialogue, the challenge of Gnosticism—whatever its
form or provenance—was perceived as a “clear and present danger”
which called upon all the resources of the community to address, and
to resist. In the words of the Syrian exegete, Ephraem, any denial
of the goodness of creation, was a “defamation” of the Creator. For
Ephraem, nature and Scripture are co-witnesses to the goodness of
the Creator and thus witnesses to the inclusiveness of the Creator’s
love for all creation. Together with the host of other Christian biblical
commentators of early Christianity, Ephraem could turn confidently
to the words of Paul in the Letter to the Romans:
For all that may be known of God by men lies plain before their eyes;
indeed God himself has disclosed it to them. His invisible attributes, that
is to say, his everlasting power and deity, have been visible ever since
the world began, to the eye of reason, in the things he made (Rom.
1:19–20).

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 two witnesses to the creator 93

Scripture and Nature in the Commentaries on Genesis

Scripture occupies an absolutely fundamental place in the life of the

Christian communities. Manlio Simonetti in Biblical Interpretation in the
Early Church argues:
Every action in the life of the community, collective or individual, from
doctrine to discipline and worship, should be shaped by it. At the same
time, Scripture is a complex of writings diverse in subject, form, and
date, and sometimes inaccessible for various reasons, so that the effective
knowledge and use of them by Christians was not obvious, but required
a notably complex effort of interpretation.19
Perhaps few texts exemplify this “notably complex effort of interpre-
tation” more than the reception in the Christian communities of the
opening chapters of Genesis. One has only to note the density of the
references to the first chapter of Genesis in the vast index of scriptural
citations compiled in Biblia Patristica20 to appreciate, on the one hand,
how important was the opening chapter of the Bible for early Chris-
tian commentators, and on the other, the extent of the struggle for an
“effective knowledge and use” of such a text. There are more than three
hundred citations or allusions in works of the second-century authors,
including about seventy in those of Irenaeus of Lyon; as many in various
writings of Clement of Alexandria, and over a hundred in the works
of Tertullian of Carthage. There are at least a thousand citations in
works of writers of the third century, with more than half of these in
surviving works of Origen of Alexandria. There is a spread of citations
over the whole first chapter of Genesis, but it is not surprising to note
that hundreds of these references are to Gen. 1: 26–27, the creation of
the human being in the image and likeness of God. One would expect
a concentration of attention by the early exegetes on such a significant
section of Genesis 1. However, beginning in the middle of the third
century, and reaching a significant concentration of literary output by
the second half of the fourth century and early fifth century, Christian
exegetes began to focus their attention on the first chapter of Genesis
in the form of a running commentary on the six days of Creation,
On the Hexaemeron.

19
Simonetti 1994, 1.
20
Allenbach, Benoît and Bertrand 1975–1995.

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The first of the commentaries on a gospel seems to have been written

in Gnostic circles, according to Origen of Alexandria’s references to a
commentary on the Gospel of John by the Gnostic exegete, Heracleon,
in Origen’s own vast commentary on that gospel in the mid-third cen-
tury. But the Christian commentaries on Genesis, and specifically the
commentaries on the six days of Creation look to an older model in
the commentaries of Philo of Alexandria. The Jewish commentator, the
infl uence of whose writings can be traced through centuries of Christian
exegesis, not only left commentaries on the books of the Pentateuch,
but also witnesses to the special role of the opening chapters of Genesis
for biblical commentators. He expresses his admiration for the first
chapter of Genesis as an exordium to a Book of Laws:
While among other lawgivers some have nakedly and without embel-
lishment drawn up a code of the things held to be right among their
people, and others, dressing up their ideas in much irrelevant and cum-
bersome matter have befogged the masses and hidden the truth under
their fictions, Moses, disdained either course, the one as devoid of the
philosopher’s painstaking effort to explore his subject thoroughly, the
other as full of falsehood and imposture, introduced his laws with an
admirable exordium.21
Philo has a special importance in the history of biblical commentaries in
his methodical treatment of the text as an ordered whole. He not only
cites the text, but he explores the logic of its narrative, paying special
attention to the ordering of the subject matter. We have already noted
his careful discussion of the problem of the double-creation in Genesis
1 and 2, not only in the important work, Questions on Genesis,22 but also
in the classic essay, On the Making of the World, De Opificio Mundi.23 In
the opening comments of this work, Philo explains that in the careful
reading of this book of Law, one learns that “the world is in harmony
with the Law, and the Law with the world”:

21
Philo 1929/1971, 6–7; De opificio mundi, Τῶν ἄλλων νομοθετῶν, οἱ μὲν ἀκαλλώπιστα
καὶ γυμνὰ τὰ νομιστθέντα παρ᾽ αὐτοῖς εἶναι δίκαια διετάξαντο, οἱ δὲ πολὺν ὄγκον τοῖς
νοήμασι προσπεριβαλόντες ἐξετύφωσαν τὰ πλήθη, μυθικοῖς πλάσμασι τὴν ἀλήθειαν
ἐπικρύψαντες. Μωυσής δ’, ἐκάτερον ὐπερβάς, τὸ μὲν ὡς ἄσκεπτον καὶ ἀταλαίπωρον καὶ
ἀφιλόσοφον, τὸ δ’ ὡς κατεψευσμένον καὶ μεστὸν γοητείας, παγκάλην καὶ σεμνοτάτην
ἀρχὴν ἐποιήσατο τῶν νόμων . . .
22
Philo 1953/1961.
23
Philo 1929/1971. In their analytical introduction the editors note: “The theme
dealt with in a Cosmology is, indeed, too lofty for adequate treatment. In Moses’ treat-
ment of it, two salient points at once meet the eye. The World’s origin is ascribed to a
Maker, who is Himself unoriginate, and who cares for what he has made” (2).

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 two witnesses to the creator 95

It [the opening chapter] consists of an account of the creation of the

world, implying that the world is in harmony with the Law, and the Law
with the world, and that the man who observes the law is constituted
thereby a loyal citizen of the world, regulating his doings by the purpose
and will of nature, in accordance to which the entire world itself also is
administered.24
Philo ends his commentary on the creation narrative of the opening
chapter of Genesis by returning to this theme:
He that has begun by learning these things with his understanding rather
than with his hearing, and has stamped on his soul impressions of truths
so marvelous and priceless, both that God is and is from eternity, and that
He that really is One, and that He has made the world and made it one
world, unique as Himself is unique, and that He ever exercises forethought
for His creation, will lead a life of bliss and blessedness, because he has a
character moulded by the truths that piety and holiness enforce.25
Christian exegetes not only shared Philo’s enthusiasm for exploring the
splendor of the text of Genesis and drawing out its riches for its read-
ers, but they too experienced what it was to be in a situation where,
at best, they found themselves in a community of discourse concern-
ing the interpretation of this sublime text, or in a defensive situation,
or even an antagonistic interchange. Three centuries later, Augustine
of Hippo, in Book XII of the Confessions witnessed to the diversity of
hermeneutical discourse on Genesis 1, and commenting on the range
of interpretations from those of contradictors (contradictores), whose opin-
ions were deformations of Christian understanding, to fellow praisers
(laudatores), of the text whose opinions were “diverse but true.”26 The
extent of challenge for Christian exegetes is amply demonstrated in
Augustine’s own efforts on at least four occasions and over a period
of three decades to write commentaries on Genesis 1. For Philo the

24
Philo 1929/1971, 6–7. κοσμοποιίαν περιέχουσα, ὡς καὶ τοῦ κόσμου τῷ νόμῳ καὶ
τοῦ νόμου τῷ κόσμῳ συνᾁδοντος, καὶ τοῦ νομίμου ἀνδρὸς εὐθὺς ὄντος κοσμοπολίτου,
πρὸς τὸ βούλημα τῆς ςύσεως τὰς πράξεις ἀπευθύνοντος, καθ’ ἣν καὶ ὁ σύμπας κόσμος
διοικεῖται.
25
Philo 1929/1971, 136, 137. ὁ δὴ ταῦτα μὴ ἀκοῇ μᾶλλον ἢ διανοίᾳ προμαθὼν
καὶ ἐν τῇ αὑτοῦ ψυχῇ σφραγισάμενος θαυμάσια καὶ περιμάχητα εἴδη, καὶ ὅτι ἔστι
καὶ ὑπάρχει θεὸς καὶ ὅτι εἷς ὁ ὦν ὅντως ἐστὶ καὶ ὅτι πεποίηκε τὸν κόσμον καὶ
πεποίηκεν ἕνα, ὡς ἐλέχθη, κατὰ τὴν μόνωσιν ἐξομοιώσας ἑαυτῷ, καὶ ὅτι ἀεί προνοεῖ
τοῦ γεγονότος, μακαρίαν καὶ εὐδαίμονα ζωὴν βιώσεται, δόγμασιν εὐσεβείας καὶ
ὁσιότητος χαραχθείς.
26
Augustine 2000 XII 15, 19; 30, 41. Ecce autem alii non reprehensores, sed lau-
datores libri Geneseos. See Bright 2004, 1231.

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interpretative opponents were the inveterate literalists whose wooden

literalism exposed the text to ridicule by their insensitivity to the impli-
cations of their interpretations.
To counteract this danger, Philo has no hesitation in turning to the
literary methods of Hellenistic culture of his day, “allegorism.”27 His
turn from the literal understanding of Adam as industrious cultivator
in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2) to a sustained focus on the ethical
or ‘psychic’ sense of the text, emphasizing the diligence with which we
are called to cultivate virtue,28 had a long history in the subsequent
Christian exegesis of chapter 2 of Genesis. While the importance of the
infl uence of Philo’s commentaries on Christian exegesis is undeniable,
its reception was not without controversy. Allegorism for or against,
became a watchword typifying hermeneutical methodologies. A simplis-
tic understanding of this term is generally decried in current studies29
concerning hermeneutical theories and practices in the early church,
but the different exegetical methodologies reveal a range of attitudes to
nature and to humanity’s relationship with the rest of Creation.
For Christian communities of late antiquity, a central challenge for
understanding nature lay beyond that posed by the popularized notions
in the culture of late antiquity, and even beyond the challenge of Gnos-
ticism (but was certainly related to it). The challenge lay in the very
methods of interpreting Scripture. So finally, one may argue that one
of the most difficult challenges to an understanding of the relationship
between Scripture and nature lies in Scripture itself—or rather, it lies
in the vast and daunting task Scripture presents to its readers, sophis-
ticated or not, in establishing an understanding of human society in,
and of, the created whole, an understanding shaping their lives, and
directing their hopes.
There was an intensity of awareness circulating among exegetes of
the fourth and fifth centuries about the implications of certain philo-
sophical frameworks for the understanding of nature. This philosophical
framing is well illustrated as early as the first century of the Common
Era in Philo’s comment:

27
See Böhm 2004, 213–226.
28
Philo 1929, 140–145.
29
“Historical scholarship on early Christian theology and exegetical practice has also
changed in recent decades. First, recent work has undercut many of the fundamental
categories used to describe early Christian exegesis: the distinction between ‘allegory’
and ‘typology’ is increasingly seen as problematic and misleading.” Ayres 2006, 13.

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Moses, both because he had attained the very summit of philosophy, and
because he had been divinely instructed in the greater and most essential
part of Nature’s lore, could not fail to recognize that the universal must
consist of two parts, one part active Cause, and the other passive object;
and that the active Cause is the perfectly pure and unsullied Mind, nous,
of the universe, transcending virtue, transcending knowledge, transcending
the good itself and the beautiful itself; while the passive part is in itself
incapable of life and motion, but when set in motion and shaped and
quickened by Mind, changes into the most perfect masterpiece, namely
this world.30
Philo is perfectly clear that Moses at the “summit of philosophy” is
insisting on the goodness of that “most perfect masterpiece, namely the
world.” For some Christian exegetes of the fourth century who led the
attack on allegorism, it was not so much a Gnostic-type rejection of
the fundamental goodness of nature that they feared (although Man-
ichee teachings and infl uences31 were widespread and formidable). It
was an ‘over-spiritualizing’ of the Creation narratives, or rather, a kind
of ‘de-materializing’ tendency that they rejected.
Rather than focussing on the term allegory, it is more helpful to
broaden the context of the discussion to the question of the ‘senses’ of
Scripture.32 The wide-ranging debate over the meaning of the ‘senses’ of
Scripture finds its adversaries and proponents even to postmodernity.33
Especially in the fourth century, this debate raged over the hermeneutics

30
Philo 1929/1971, 9, 11. Μωυσῆς δὲ, καὶ φιλοσοςίας ἐπ’ αὐτὴν φθάσας ἀκρότητα,
καὶ χρησμοῖς τὰ πολλὰ καὶ συνεκτικώτατα τῶν τῆς φύεως ἀναδιδαχθείς, ἔγνω δὴ ὅτι
ἀναγκαιότατόν ἐστιν ἐν τοῖς οὖσι τὸ μὲν εἶναι δπαστήριον αἴτιον, τὸ δὲ παθητόν· καὶ
ὅτι τὸ μὲν δραστήριον ὁ τῶν ὅλων νοῦς ἐστιν εἱλικρινέστατος καὶ ἀκραιφνέστατος,
κρείττων ἣ ἀρετή, καὶ κρείττων ἢ ἐπιστήμη, καὶ κρείττων ἢ αὐτὸ τὸ ἀγαθὸν καὶ αὐτὸ
τὸ καλόν· τὸ δὲ παθητὸν, ἄψυχον καὶ ἀκίνητον ἑξ ἑαυτοῦ, κινηθὲν δὲ καὶ σχηματισθὲν
καὶ ψυχωθὲν ὑπὸ τοῦ νοῦ, μετέβαλεν εἰς τὸ τελειότατον ἔργον, τόνδε τὸν κόσμον·
31
Viviano 2004, 649–669.
32
See Kannengiesser 2004, vol. 1, 208–209: “A typically hierarchical mode of
thought inclined ancient interpreters of the “senses” of Scripture toward metaphors
of spatiality more than to metaphors of chronology. A scriptural “sense” was always
placed in its spatial relevance, for instance, the literal sense was said to be “lower”
or “closer,” and immediately available to the reader, whereas the spiritual sense was
thought to be “higher” or “deeper” or “more remote.”. Kannengiesser draws atten-
tion to the long debate about Alexandria-Antiochene hermeneutics in emphasizing
the commonalities beyond differences; “This is why common to all of them beyond
their different languages and cultures or their local school traditions, Greek or Syriac
or Latin alike, belonging to the so-called schools of Alexandria or of Antioch, reaching
fame in second-century Roman Africa or in sixth century Constantinople, was a shared
‘spiritual sense’ of Scripture, at once rooted in Scripture itself, and in a millenium-old
trend of poetic imagination.”
33
Loughlan 2006, 300–322.

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of Origen of Alexandria who insisted on the importance of recognizing

the different ‘senses’ or levels of meaning in Scripture. Origen argued
for a three-fold pattern senses of Scripture: an anthropomorphic struc-
ture—literal, psychic and spiritual, the body being the literal reading,
the two higher senses, the psychic/moral reading in which one grows
toward a virtuous, God-like way of life, and the spiritual being the sum-
mit to which Scripture is directed, which is to live in Christ, in accord
with God’s highest revelation which is Christ’s saving action for the
whole world to which both Testaments bear witness.34
In opposition to the allegorizing of the Gnostics, Origen argues that
the connection between letter and the spirit of the text must be respected.
However Simonetti notes Origen’s “Platonizing caste of mind”:
To the extent that sensible reality is an image and refl ection of intelligible
reality he sees it as a point of departure enabling one to pass from the
lower to the higher level of understanding. Thus the literal sense, with
its educative function, has a precise but modest value in the interpreta-
tive procedure.35
In his commentary on the Song of Songs, Origen carefully maintains his
attention to the literal sense that provides the straight forward under-
standing of the text, or the historical circumstances, but the thrust of his
attention is toward the spiritual understanding. In Book IV of On First
Principles (De Principiis), Origen explains:
With regard to scripture as a whole, we are disposed to admit that all of
it has a spiritual significance, but not all of it has a literal significance,
since in several places we can see that the literal sense is impossible . . . God
himself has arranged that the Old Testament should include improbable
or scandalous passages to lead the interpreter to search for a deeper
meaning.36
The place of nature in Origen’s world is somewhat ambiguous. There
is no doubt about its origin in, and through, the goodness of God, but
the immediate focus on the highest “sense” of biblical interpretation,
the “spiritual sense,” in the opening sentence of his Homily on Genesis
is significant:

34
Dively Lauro 2005, 2–3.
35
Simonetti 1994, 44.
36
Simonetti 1994, 45. Sources Chrétiennes 268, 362. ∆ιακείμεθα γὰρ ἡμεῖς περὶ
πάσης τῆς θείας γραφῆς, ὅτι πᾶσα μὲν ἔχει τὸ πνευματικόν, οὐ πᾶσα δὲ τὸ σωματικὸν·
πολλαχοῦ γὰρ ἐλέγχεται ἀδύνατον ὂν τὸ σωματικόν.

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 two witnesses to the creator 99

In the beginning God made heaven and earth. What is the beginning of
all things except our Lord and “Savior of all,” Jesus Christ, “the firstborn
of every creature?” . . . Scripture is not speaking here of any temporal
beginning, but it says that the heaven and the earth and all things which
were made were made “in the beginning” that is “in the Savior.”37
Of course, one must take into account, the homiletic context and sub-
limity of the language of the opening passage of Genesis, which calls
forth a sublime response from a preacher of such eloquence. How-
ever, while the literal, (or historical) ‘sense’ is not ignored throughout
the homily, there is a muting of interest in nature and its forms that
contrast strongly with the sermons on the six days of Creation of the
fourth century which we will consider in some detail in Section III of
this chapter.
The vivid portrayal of nature in the homilies of the fourth-century
bishop, theologian and exegete, Basil of Caesarea in Cappadocia, raises
the question whether this shift of focus is related to a very different way
of approaching scriptural exegesis:
I know the laws of allegory, although I did not invent them of myself
but have met them in the works of others. Those who do not admit the
common meaning of the Scriptures say that water is not water, but some
other nature and they explain a plant or a fish according to their opinion.
They describe also the production of reptiles and wild animals, changing
it according to their own notions, just like the dream interpreters, who
interpret for their own ends the appearances seen in their dreams. When
I hear ‘grass,’ I think of grass, and in the same manner, I understand
everything as it is said, a plant, a fish, a wild animal, and an ox. ‘Indeed
I am not ashamed of the Gospel’ (Romans 1:16).38

37
Origen 1981, 47. Sources Chrétiennes 7 bis, 24.
In principio fecit Deus caelum et terram. Quod est omnium principium nisi Dominus
noster et Saluator omnium, Iesus Christus, primogenitus omnis creaturae . . . Non ergo
hic temporale aliquod principium dicit, sed in principio, id est in Saluatore, factum
esse dicit caelum et terra et omnia quae facta sunt.
38
Basil of Caesarea 1963, 135. Sources Chrétiennes 26, 478, 480. Οἶδα νόμους
ἀλληγορίας, εἰ καὶ μὴ παρ’ ἐμαυτοῦ ἐξευρὼν, ἀλλὰ τοῖς παρ’ ἑτέρων πεπονημένοις
περιτυχών. ῝Ας οἱ μὴ καταδεχὸμενοι τὰς κοινὰς τῶν γεγραμμένων ἐννοίας, τὸ ὕδωρ οὐχ
ὕδωρ λέγουσιν, ἀλλά τινα ἄλλην φύσιν, καὶ φυτὸν καὶ ἰχθὺν πρὸς τὸ ἑαυτοῖς δοκοῦν
ἑρμηνεύουσι, καὶ ἑρπετῶν γένεσιν καὶ θηρίων ἐπὶ τάς οἰκείας ὑπονοίας παρατρέψαντες
ἐξηγοῦνται, ὥσπερ οἱ ὀνειροκρίται τῶν φανέντων ἐν ταῖς καθ’ ὕπνον φαντασίαις πρὸς
τὸν οἰκεῖον σκοπὸν τὰς ἐξηγήσεις ποιούμενοι. ’Εγὼ δὲ χόρτον ἀκούσας, χόρτον νοῶ,
καὶ φυτὸν, καὶ ἰχθὺν, καὶ θηρίον, καὶ κτῆνος, πάντα ὡς εἴρηται οὕτως ἐκδέχομαι. Καὶ
γὰρ οὐκ ἐπαισχύνομαι τὸ εὐαγγέλιον.

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It is certainly true that in the fourth-century Christian communities

around Syria, Asia Minor and the regions around Edessa and Nisibis,
there was a consistent, pointed criticism of allegorism. As early as the
first decades of the century, Eusebius of Caesarea, the scholarly historian
and biblical commentator, recorded the attacks on Christian allegorism
by the infl uential Neo-Platonist, Porphyry. Scholar, writer, and disciple
of Plotinus himself, Porphyry’s trenchant comments included specific
criticism of the biblical interpretations of Origen.39 However from within
the church there were leading commentators who also formulated criti-
cal arguments about the use and abuse of allegory in the interpretation
of Scripture, and who, at the same time, demonstrated that moving
the focus of interpretation to the ‘ordinary’ level of reading was no less
demanding and sophisticated. Among these teachers was Eusebius,
Bishop of Emesa in Lebanese Phoenicia. Born in Edessa around 300,
Eusebius achieved popular success with his homilies on the gospels
(according to Jerome) and fragments of his commentary on Genesis
have survived. Eusebius was one of the teachers of Diodore of Tarsus,
the first significant exponent of the Antiochene exegetical ‘school.’40
Counted among his students are Theodore of Mopsuestia and John
Chrysostom. Diodore wrote extensive commentaries on the books of
the Bible, including a commentary on the Psalms, surviving sections
of which illustrate his exegetical practice. Diodore claims to interpret
the psalms “according to history” and specifically avoids what he calls
the myths of the allegorists:
Diodore never tires of stressing the poetic nature of the psalms, by mak-
ing clear to which down-to-earth realities and aspects of the immediate
experience of life, the images, metaphors, and symbolic phrases of the
psalmist refer. He does not denigrate psalmic poetry by rationalizing
it, nor does he move away from the biblical text by moralizing with a
paraphrase of his own.41

39
Simonetti 1994, 62. Eusebius’s comments are in Scaff 1890, 6.19.8.
40
“From antiquity to the present, Theodore has been and is considered the most
significant representative of the Antiochene School, especially in its exegetical but also
in its doctrinal aspect. It is advisable to make clear at this point that the so-called School
of Antioch is not to be considered as an institution with teachers and administrators,
such as was the School of Alexandria. Rather it must be conceptualized as only a
group of exegetes and theologians, some of whom, such as Diodore, were active in
their own right as teachers, bound together by teacher-pupil relationships and by a
common theological and exegetical outlook,” Simonetti 1994, 803.
41
Kannengiesser 2004, vol. 2, 781.

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 two witnesses to the creator 101

Exegetes, like Diodore, were deeply suspicious of an exegesis that

seemed to them to privilege the symbolic over the actualities of human
life, in other words against an awareness of history. We can see even
admirers of Origen, like Eusebius of Caesarea, being uncomfortable
with the degree of complexity of the interpretation of the allegorists.
Simonetti argues that, to understand the roots of the kind of program-
matic attack on allegorism by the so-called Antioch school associated
with Diodore of Tarsus, one should take into account “a certain incipi-
ent historical sensitivity which naturaliter inclined to a respect for the
letter of the biblical text.”42 Here in the so-called Alexandrian-Antioch
divide on scriptural exegesis, it is not nature itself that stands between
them. It may be more correct to suggest that it is a need to underline
the sense of concrete human experience that generations of readers of
the Bible identify as authentically biblical. In other words, it is a sense
for history as much as nature that created a climate of suspicion against
aspects of biblical interpretation associated with the methodologies of
the great Alexandrians, Philo, and Origen.
That this hermeneutical divide was more complex than a simple
regional differentiation between Alexandria and Antioch, is illustrated
by a closer look at a series of homilies on the opening chapter of Gen-
esis delivered in Caesarea of Cappadocia by Basil in the second half of
the fourth century, and by his brother, Gregory of Nyssa, and then a
further series preached by Ambrose of Milan.43 In their written form,
these series are representative of the literary genre known as On the Six
Days (In Hexameron). According to pastoral practice in the early church,
they were delivered during the weeks preceding Easter. I have chosen
Basil, Gregory, and Ambrose, not only because of the outstanding
quality of their homilies, but because these homilies give us a glimpse
into the ways that the natural world was portrayed by homilists in
the early Christian communities. They also demonstrate that while
there is no rigid classification to make between the different exegeti-
cal methodologies in the concrete circumstances of pastoral praxis, at
the same time styles of exegetical emphasis do give us a window into
ways and modes of thinking that were formative of the communities’
understanding of being in, responding to, and making decisions about,
the world around them.

42
Simonetti 1994, 822.
43
Ambrose of Milan, 1963.

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Nature in the Fourth-century Homilies:

On the Hexaemeron

To capture something of the intensity of the focus one finds on various

aspects of nature in the sermons of Basil and Ambrose, I will concentrate
my attention on the verses of the first chapter of Genesis concerning
the creation of the “living creatures” of the sixth day, just prior to the
creation of the human being, male and female in the image of God:
God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures, according to their
kind: cattle, reptiles, and wild animals, all according to their kind.” So it
was; God made wild animals, cattle, and all the reptiles, each according
to its kind; and he saw that it was good. (Gen. 1 24–25).44
Basil begins his commentary on these verses at the introduction of
the ninth homily of the series. This sermon was delivered in the eve-
ning, and had followed a morning homily of the same day, Homily
8, devoted to the creation of the winged creatures, birds, and insects
(Gen. 1:22). It is typical of the careful attention that Basil gives to the
text that in this morning sermon he draws attention to the fact that
in the previous evening, Homily 7, he had overlooked a discussion on
this class of creatures:
Perhaps many wonder why, when my sermon was hurrying along with-
out a break, I was silent for a long time. It is not the more studious of
my audience who are ignorant of the cause of my speechlessness. Why
should they be who by their glances and nods to each other had turned
my attention toward them and had led me on the thoughts of things
omitted? For I had forgotten an entire class of creatures, and this by no
means the least; moreover my discourse was nearly finished, leaving that
class almost entirely uninvestigated.45
To remedy this lapse of attention to the details of the text of Genesis,
Basil treats his morning audience to a long consideration of character-
istics of different birds and insects, for example various body shapes,
social patterns, and includes a lengthy section on individual species

44
The New English Bible 1976.
45
Basil of Caesarea 1953, 120. Sources Chretiennes 26, pp. 436, 438. Τίνος ἕνεκεν,
τοῦ λόγου τρέχοντος ἀθρόως, ἀπεσιώπησα χρόνον οὐκ ὀλιγον, ἴσως θαυμάζουσιν οἱ
πολλοί· ἀλλ’ οὐχί οἵγε φιλοπονώτεροι τῶν ἀκροατῶν ἀγνοοῦσι τὴν αἰτίαν τῆς ἀφασἰας.
Πῶς γὰρ; οἱ διὰ τοῦ πρὸς ἀλλήλους ὁρᾶν καὶ ἐννεύειν ἐπιστρέψαντές με πρὸς ἑαυτούς,
καὶ εἰς ἔννοιαν ἀγαγόντες τῶν παρεθέντων.

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 two witnesses to the creator 103

like bees, and storks and cranes. He adds comments on the care of
offspring in winged creatures of all kinds, references to which, section
after section, can be identified in Aristotle’s History of Animals.46
By that evening, in Homily 9, the last of the series, Basil is well
focused on the commentary on the “living creatures,” this time the land
animals. First he considers the “one command”: “Let the earth bring
forth living creatures” and its implication for the on-going generation
of each species:
As a ball, when pushed by someone, and then meeting with a slope, is
borne downward by its own shape and the inclination of the ground and
does not stop before some level surface receives it, so too, the nature of
existing objects set in motion by one command passes through creation
without change by generation or destruction, preserving the succession
of the species through resemblance, until it reaches the very end.47
While it is obvious that lions beget lions, and horses, horses, Basil turns
to Aristotle again in a brief discussion about the generation of eels where
the emergence of their young was not so obvious to naturalists of the
time.48 Twice more Basil repeats the verse of Genesis: “Let the earth
bring forth living creatures” (Gen. 1:24). First, he turns the attention
of his hearers to noting that the herds while grazing are turned to the
earth, and uses this observation to contrast the upright posture of the
human being. He follows with a short exhortation to his hearers to
listen to their own body language: “Your head stands erect towards the
heavens . . . As you have been moulded, so dispose your own life. Keep
your citizenship in Heaven.”49 It is easy to dismiss this comment as a
moral injunction of no particular originality. But what is significant is the
insistence: “As you have been moulded, so dispose your life.” The one
command (Gen. 1:24) that set in motion the generation of the species
and all their characteristics and structural features is worthy of profound

46
There are more than fifty citations or allusions to Aristotle’s History of Animals in
the nine homilies.
47
Basil of Caesarea 1953, 187. Sources Chrétiennes 26, p. 484. (Ως γὰρ ἡ σφαῖρα,
ἐπειδὰν ὑπό τινος ἀπωσθῇ, εῖτα πρανοῦς τινος λάβηται, ὑπό τε τῆς οἰκίας κατασκευῆς
καὶ τῆς ἐπιτηδειότητος τοῦ χωρίου φέρεται πρὸς τὸ κάταντες, οὐ πρότερον ἱσταμένη
πρὶν ἄν τι τῶν ἰσοπέδων αὐτὴν ὑποδέξηται· οὕτως ἡ φύσις τῶν ὄντων ἑνὶ προστάγματι
κινηθεῖσα, τὴν ἐν τῆ γενέσει καὶ φθορᾷ κτίσιν ὁμαλῶς διεξέρχεται, τὰς τῶν γενῶν
ἀκολουθίας δι’ ὁμοιότητος ἀποσώζουσα, ἕως ἂν πρὸς αὐτὸ καταντήση τὸ τέλος.
48
Basil of Caesarea 1953, 137 n 4.
49
Cf. Phil. 3:20. Basil of Caesarea 1953, 138. Sources Chrétiennes 26, p. 488. (Ως
διεσχηματίσθης, οὕτω διάθου σεαυτοῦ καὶ τὸν βίον. Τὸ πολίτευμα ἔχε ἐν οὐρανοῖς.

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contemplation, because through creation, God is revealed (Rom. 1:12)

and continues to reveal the divine purpose of creation itself.
Again Basil directs his hearers to the one command: “Therefore the
soul of brute beasts did not emerge after being hidden in the earth,
but it was called into existence at the time of the command.”50 There
is an extensive discussion about the implication of the soul of animals.
It is not a rational soul like that of the human being, but it is a marvel
in itself. Each animal has a particular characteristic according to its
nature. Basil speaks about oxen and horses, foxes, wolves, deer, lions
and leopards and bears. After noting that the dog is “constant in friend-
ship,” he draws a contrast with the bear:
The nature of the bear is sluggish and his ways peculiar to himself,
treacherous and deeply secretive. He has been clothed with a body of
the same type, compact, not distinctly articulated, truly fit for chilly
hibernating in caves.51
Animals show much prudence in taking care of their lives. They avoid
needless suffering. They know how to care of their wounds, and they
make careful preparations for seasonal changes. “What words can
express these marvels? What ear can understand them? What time can
suffice to say and to explain all the wonders of the Creator?”52 At this
stage another preacher could have been content to draw moral lessons
for the congregation. But Basil is focussed on the “wisdom” of a dog
in discriminating which tracks to follow. Basil notes that there was a
recent murder case in which dogs brought “an evil-doer” to justice. The
skill of the dogs in “solving the complexities of inference” in tracking, is
not the result, as it would be for humans, of long years of book study.
“In fact, the dog appears to have been taught by nature.”53 Nature is
the marvel that Basil underlines throughout his homily. Nature itself
in all its variety and all its wonder is a proper and necessary object of
contemplation because it reveals the Creator.
Noticing that “. . . evening having long ago sent the sun to its setting,
again imposes silence upon us,” Basil had no time to examine in detail
the verses that follow in Gen. 1:25–31:

50
Basil of Caesarea 1953, 138. Sources Chrétiennes 26, p. 488. Οὐ τοίνυν
ἐναποκειμένη τῆ γῆ ἡ φυχὴ τῶν ἀλόγων ἐξεφάνη, ἀλλ’ ὁμοῦ τῷ προστάγματι
συνυπέστη.
51
Basil of Caesarea 1953, 139. Sources Chrétiennes 26, 490.
52
Basil of Caesarea 1953, 141. Sources Chrétiennes 26, 495.
53
Basil of Caesarea 1953, 147. Sources Chrétiennes 26, 498.

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Then God said, “Let us make man in our own image and likeness to rule
the fish in the sea, the birds in the heaven, the cattle, all wild animals on
the earth, and all reptiles that crawl upon the earth.” So God created
man in his own image; in the image of God he created him; male and
female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful
and increase, fill the earth and subdue it, rule over the fish in the sea, the
birds in the air, and every living thing that moves upon the earth.” God
also said, “I give you all plants that bear seed everywhere on earth, and
every tree bearing fruit which yields seed; they shall be yours for food.
All green plants I give to wild animals, to all the birds of heaven, and to
all reptiles on earth, every living creature.” And so it was; And God saw
all that he had made and it was very good. Evening came, and morning
came, a sixth day.54
He never completed his Hexaemeron. He died in his late forties, leaving
an extraordinary literary legacy of theological works, biblical exegesis,
and ascetical works, including the monastic Rules which bear his name.
His brother, Gregory of Nyssa, himself still celebrated for his profound
writings, decided to address the verses of Genesis concerning the
creation of the human being that Basil had not commented on, in a
work of his own, Apologia in Hexaemeron. In a recent study of the biblical
hermeneutics of Gregory of Nyssa, Lucian Turcescu has noted that
whereas Basil was critical of allegorism, his younger brother was more
attracted to a mystic and allegorical style of biblical interpretation.55
Again and again, Gregory embraces Origen’s methodology about the
“senses” of Scripture. In his work, Against Eunomius, Gregory argues that
one must seek the spiritual rather than the literal sense of Scripture
if the text represents a theological impropriety, a physical or logical
impossibility, or immoral acts.56
Rather than focus on the differences in the literal and allegorical
methods of the interpretation in the writings of Basil and Gregory, I
would prefer to try to single out what is distinctive in their understand-
ing of nature. In Gregory’s work, On the Making of Humans (De opificio
hominis), Turcescu points to the significance of Gregory’s use of the term
‘sequence,’ in relation to the proper order of salvation:

54
Basil does not proceed beyond verse 25. “We have at present employed our
speech to arouse your zeal as much as possible, but, with the help of the Spirit, we
shall later add a more perfect examination of the facts lying before us. Depart, I beg
of you, rejoicing, O Christ-loving assembly, and arrange your modest tables with a
remembrance of what I have said, instead of with expensive foods and varied delica-
cies.” 1953, 150.
55
Turcescu 2008, 511–526.
56
Turcescu 2008, 3–469.

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The lawgiver [ Moses] says that after inanimate matter (as a sort of
foundation for the form of animate things), this vegetative life was made,
that had earlier existence in the growth of plants; then he proceeds to
introduce the genesis of those creatures which are regulated by sense;
and, since following the same order, of those things which have attained
life in the fl esh, those which have sense can exist in themselves even
apart from the intellectual nature, while the rational principle could not
be embodied save as blended with the sensitive—for this reason man was
made last after the animals, as nature advanced to an orderly course to
perfection.57
Therefore both nature and Scripture witness to the divine ordering or
sequencing of Creation. In the final section of the De opificio hominis,
Gregory deepens the implications of his argumentation about sequenc-
ing. Here, commenting on the creation of the human being in the
divine image, Gregory claims:
[ The form of our soul created in the divine image] indeed would have
been perfect from the beginning had our nature not been maimed by
evil. Thus our community in that generation, which is subject to passion
and of animal nature, brings it about that the divine image does not at
once shine forth at our formation, but brings man to perfection by a
certain method and sequence, through those attributes of the soul which
are material, and belong rather to the animal creation.58
To consider the implication of the animal soul in the “sequencing”
of the human being toward “perfection” would bring us into deep
waters indeed, but for the present study it is significant that this fourth-
century thinker would insist that an understanding of nature and an
understanding of Scripture are complementary. In this respect Basil’s
delight in, and insistence on, contemplating nature and Gregory’s more
philosophical and speculative approach to natural science may have
more in common than appears at a first reading.
Using Basil’s Hexaemeron as his guide,59 Bishop Ambrose of Milan
delivered nine sermons around the year 387. The sermons are marked
by Ciceronian elegance of the Latin prose and the lyric quality of his
descriptions of nature:

57
Turcescu 2008, 515. ὁδῷ τινι πρὸς τὸ τέλειον ἀκολούθως προϊούσησ τῆς φύσεως,
De opif. hom. 145.25–31, Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers (NPNF) 2.5:394.
58
Turcescu 2008, 516.
59
Savage 1963, vi: “For the homilies on creation Ambrose is much indebted to the
celebrated work on the same subject by his Greek contemporary, St. Basil . . . It would
be a mistake to assume that Ambrose’s work is merely a translation. It is in fact a free
adaptation in a Latin dress, filled with reminiscences from Ambrose’s reading in the
Latin classics . . .”

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 two witnesses to the creator 107

How can I describe the violets with their shades of purple, the lilies of
brilliant white, and the roses with their shades of red? How describe the
landscape painted with fl owers, sometimes of a golden hue, or of varied
colors or of bright yellow, among which you cannot decide whether
their beauty or their fragrant scent gives more delight. Our eyes revel in
this pleasant spectacle as that fragrance which fills us with its sweetness
is spread far and wide. Whence the Lord had justly said: ‘And with me
is the beauty of the field’. (Ps. 49:11) This beauty is with him because
he created it. What other artist could depict such charm in each and
every object?60
It is not enough for him to recall such delightful impressions of nature
to his congregation. He goes on to invite them to consider in detail
the divine craftsmanship within a single fl ower:
Consider the lilies of the field, what brilliance in their petals, how they
appear to rise in packed rows all the way to the top so as to form a goblet!
Note how within it gleams like gold, and furthermore how around its edge,
as a defence against any injury, a kind of rampart is constructed! If anyone
were to pluck this fl ower and take each petal apart, what craftsman’s hand
is so expert so as to be able to restore the form of the lily? Who is such
an effective imitator of nature as to presume to reconstruct this fl ower
to which the Lord has so borne testimony as to say: ‘Not even Solomon
in all his glory was so arrayed as one of these?’61
In Homily 4, one can see further evidence of the poetic vein in which
Ambrose delivers his sermon, the second of his commentaries on Day
Three, “Let the waters that are under the heaven be gathered together
in one place” (Gen. 1:6). He concludes his sermon, not with an allegory,
relating the sea to the Church, but, rather with an extended image of
the congregation surging in and out of the basilica in Milan:

60
Ambrose 1963, 94. Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (CSEL), vol. 32 Part
1, 83, 5–10. quid igitur describam purpurescentes uiolas,candida lilas, rutilantes rosas,
depicta rura nunc aureis,nunc uariis, nunc luteis fl oribus,in quibus nescias utrum spe-
cies amplius fl orum an uis odera delectant? pascuntur oculi grato spectaculo.longe
ataque odor spargitur, cuius suauitate complemur. unde digne dominus ait:et species
agri mecum est. cum ipso est enim quam ipse formauit; quis enim alius artifex posset
tantum rerum singularum exprimere uenustatem?
61
Ambrose 1963, 95. CSEL 1864, vol. 32 Part 1, 83, 12–22. considerate lilia agri,
quanus sir candor in filiis, quemadmodum stipata ipsa ab imo ad summum uideantur
adsurgere, ut scyphi exprimant foram, ut auri quaedam species intus effulgeat, quae
tamen uallo in circuitu fl oris obsaepta nulli pateat inuriae. si quis hunc fl orem decerpat
et sua soluat in folia, quae tanti est artificis manus, quae posit lilii speciem reformare?
quis tantus imitator naturae, ut fl orum hunc redintegare praesumat, cui dominus
tantum testimonium tulit, ut diceret: nec Solomon in omni gloria sic uestiebatur sicut
unum ex istis?

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How is it possible for me to comprehend all the beauty of the sea—a

beauty beheld by the Creator? Why say more? What else is that melodic
sound of the waves if not the melody of the people? Hence the sea is often
compared to a church which ‘disgorges a tide’ through all its vestibules
at the first array of the approaching congregation; then, as the whole
people unite in prayer, there is a hiss of receding waves; the echo of the
psalms when sung in responsive harmony by men and women, maidens
and children is like the sound of breaking waves. Wherefore what need
I say of this water other than it washes away sin and that the salutary
breath of the Holy Spirit is found in it?62
In Homily 9, Ambrose follows the model of Basil closely in his com-
mentary on the creation of the animals on the sixth day: “God said,
‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures’ ” (Gen. 1:24). We hear many
of the same detailed observations on the different characteristics of the
wild and domestic animals, a mixture of observation and of material
quoted from classic sources, such as Lucretius, Aristotle, Pliny, and
Galen.63 Whereas Basil had never completed his commentary on the
sixth day, it is interesting to compare the approach of Gregory of Nyssa
to that of Ambrose. The highly sophisticated commentary of Gregory
is close to what may be called theological anthropology, in setting up
a dialogue with philosophical concerns about the nature of the rational
soul and its interaction with ‘lower’ forms of the psyche. There are
no such concepts to be found in the second half of Homily 9 in the
Hexaemeron of Ambrose. Ambrose first gives an extensive commentary
on the soul’s being created in the image of God, reminding his hearers
of their essential human dignity:
Be fully aware, O beautiful soul, of the fact that you are the image of God . . .
Hear the words of the prophet on the question of glory: “Thy knowledge
has become wonderful to me’ That is to say that in my work your majesty,
O God, has become more wonderful . . . When I contemplate myself such
as I am known to You in my secret thoughts and deepest emotions, the
mysteries of Your knowledge are disclosed to me” (Ps. 138:6).64

62
Ambrose 1963, 84. CSEL 1864, vol. 32 Part 1, 75, 1–10. unde mihi ut omnem
pelagi puchritudinem conprehendam, quam uidit operator? et quid plura? quid aliud
ille concentus undarum nisi quidam concentus est plebis? unde bene mari plerumque
comparator ecclesia, quae primo ingredientis populi agmine totis uestibulis undas
refl entibus stridit, cum responsoriis psalmorum cantus uirorum mulierum uirginum
paruulorum consonus undarum fragor resultat. nam illud quid dicam, quod unda
peccatum abluit et sancti spiritus aura salutaris aspirat?
63
Whereas Basil cites Aristotle abundantly, Ambrose turns more to the observations
of Virgil in the Georgics (more than fifty), to Cicero De senectute, and popular phrases
from Lucretius. See comments of Savage 1963, viii.
64
Ambrose 1963, 263. CSEL, 1864 vol. 32 Part 1, 241, 14–20. cognosce ergo te,

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 two witnesses to the creator 109

In drawing to the end of his commentary on the six days of creation,

Ambrose does not leave his audience focussed on the soul. He turns
to the body:
But something must be said on the subject of the body. Who can deny
it exceeds all things in grace and beauty? Although it seems in substance
to be one and the same with all earthly things, certain wild animals have
superiority in strength and size. Yet the form of the human body, by
reason of its erectness and stature, is such that it lacks massive hugeness
as well as abject lowliness. Moreover the very appearance of the body
is gentle and pleasing without those extremes of size and insignificance
which might lead either to dread or indifference.65
He follows up with a series of acutely observed, and at times, to modern
taste hilariously detailed,66 comments on the excellence of the human
body and the arrangement of its functions: The close association of
the spleen and the liver is noted with approbation: the construction
of the intestines
With their involved folds, woven without entanglement one with the other,
indicates nothing else but the providence of the Creator, in as much as
the food particles neither pass quickly through the stomach nor are they
immediately evacuated.67
We seem in these instances to be far from the nuanced philosophical
refl ections of Gregory of Nyssa, and yet there is a level of consistency
in argument in these two very different commentators in their under-
standing that to know ourselves, as human beings, we are first called to

decora anima, quai imago dei . . . propheta dicit: mirabilis facta est cognition tua ex
me, hoc est: in me opera tua mirabilor est maiestas . . . quem tu in ipsis cogitationibus
occultis et internis affectibus deprehendis, scientiae tuae agnosco mysteria.
65
Ambrose 1963, 268. CSEL 1864, vol. 32 Part 1, 246, 7–15. sed iam de ipso
aliqua dicenda sunt corpore hominis, quod praestantius ceteris decore et gratia esse
quis abnuat? nam etsi una atque eadem omnium terrenorum corporum uideatur esse
substantia, firmitudo et proceritas quibusdam maior in bestiis, forma tamen humani
corporis est uenustior, status erectus et celsus, ut neque ernormis proceritas sit neque
uilis et abiecta pauxillitas. tum ipsa habitude corporis suauis et grata, ut neque beluina
uastitas horrori sit nec gracilitas tenuis infirmitati.
66
“The hair with its tree-top like foliage, the two-fold hedge of the eyebrows, the
positioning of the eyes (providentially not on top of the head like a crab’s), the wonder
of the natural windings of the ear, as well as the usefulness of the wax—it helps to keep
the voice intact, a result which at the same time aids the memory and is a source of
pleasure.” Ambrose 1963, 271–274.
67
Ambrose 1963, 279, 9. CSEL 1864 vol. 32 Part 1, 258, 9–12. intestinorum uero
circumplexi orbes et sine aliquot licit nodo sibi tamen inuicem nexi qid aliud nisi
diuinam prospicientiam creatoris ostendunt, ut non cito esca pertranseat et statim ab
stomacho decurrat?

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an intense awareness, both by personal observation and by dedicated

study, of the whole of nature. In fact in his understanding of sequenc-
ing, Gregory of Nyssa claims that the creation of the human being on
the last day of creation is providential68 in that the Scriptures call us
to a contemplation of nature as a seamless whole, from day one to the
sixth day. A like understanding is elaborated in the early sections of the
final homily of Ambrose. Ambrose defends the length of his discussion
on animal nature, in his final homily of the Lenten series:
Now let us turn our discussion to the origin of beasts and to the genera-
tion of men. I already hear some who murmur and say: how much time
are we to spend discussing matters alien to us, while knowing nothing
of what really concerns us? How long are we to learn of other living
creatures while we do not know ourselves? Let him tell me what is to be
for my benefit, that I may know myself. That is a just complaint. The
order that scripture laid down must be retained. We cannot fully know
ourselves without first knowing the nature of all living things.69
The comment that he corrects in his “murmurers” is that he is spending
the invaluable time of the final homily on the sixth day of creation on
“matters alien to us” specifically “other living creatures!” On his part,
Ambrose is undeterred from the focus of his commentary on the “living
creatures” of Gen. 1:24. In accord with Philo’s attention to “ordering”
and certainly with Gregory of Nyssa’s “sequencing” of the biblical nar-
ration, Ambrose reminds his hearers that “the order that scripture laid
down must be retained.” Even more telling is his final comment to these
“murmurers” before returning to the text of Genesis: “We cannot fully
know ourselves without knowing the nature of all living things.”
This observation is very significant for understanding the attitude
toward the natural world prevalent in early Christian thought. Whether
it is the great cosmic drama of salvation expressed in terms of the
Origenian perspective in the third century, or it is the vastness and
the marvelous range and variety of all living things explored in the

68
Turcescu 2008, 521. Like a good host, God invites his guests when everything
is ready.
69
Ambrose 1963, 229. CSEL 1864 32 Part 1, 205, 14–21. nunc age naturas bes-
tiarum dicamus et hominis generationem. audio enim iamdudem aliquos insusurrare
dicentes: “quamdiu aliena discimus et nostra nescimus, quamdiu de reliquis animan-
tibus docemur scientiam et nosmet ipsos ignoramus? illud dicat quodmihi prosit, ut
me nouerim ipsum.” et iustaest conquestio,sed ordo seruandus est, quem scriptura
contextuit, simil quia non possumus plenius nos cognoscere, nisi prius quae sit omnium
natura animantium cognouerimus.

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 two witnesses to the creator 111

four century commentaries of Basil and Ambrose, the human being is

immersed in nature. But it is more than immersion; it is a participation
where matter and spirit are eternally fused in the central paradox of
the Gospel, the Incarnation of the Word. Whatever their methodologi-
cal bias, this Gospel paradox remains the touchstone of orthodoxy for
Christian biblical commentators.

The Two Witnesses to the Creator:

Nature and Scripture

At first reading, the assertion in Ephraem’s teaching song that both

nature and Scripture are dual witnesses to the Creator, may seem a
poetic exaggeration. Yet, a careful reading of the biblical commentaries
on the six days of creation suggests that this is not the case. In fact, his
fourth-century contemporaries in the Greek and Latin speaking world,
Basil, Gregory, and Ambrose, in precisely formulated argumentation,
are found to be in full agreement with the Syrian exegete. In their
commentaries on the first chapter of Genesis, they insist that a study
of nature and Scripture is not only complementary, but indispensable
for recognizing the inherent dichotomy of divine revelation, which is
universal in nature and specific in Scripture. I would suggest that this
perspective is one that challenges the post-Enlightenment perception
of there being a kind of schism between understandings of nature and
Scripture.
Of course these communities, and their learned exegetes, did not
face the scientific data of immense geological ages, nor did they pos-
sess the kind of historical frame of reference that is an integral part
of modern critical thinking. But the sense of being immersed in a real
world of societal interaction where human choice and the consequences
of such choices can be observed and evaluated, did foster an awareness
of ‘historicity,’ in the precritical sense. Our lives are ‘storied’ and the
personal story is embedded in the larger story of God’s on-going action
in history. This explains why a number of early Christian commenta-
tors were extremely critical of methods of interpreting the Bible that
seemed to undervalue the ‘mundaneness’—in the best sense—of life
experience, even though there is abundant evidence in an exegete like
Origen of Alexandria of his insistence on the need to anchor biblical
interpretation in the littera, the text and the intentionality of the text.
However there was no disagreement in the whole range of biblical

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interpretation, that there was a shared significance of our lives, as lived

in the actualities of time and space, and the over-arching biblical nar-
rative. History was not an abstraction, but a vast current surging out
from a beginning in time toward an eschaton, an ‘End-time’ in which
time merges with eternity, in the sense that what is actualized in time
remains significant in the eternity of God’s love, as the psalmist declares
in repeating: “And his love remains forever” (Psalm 136). To think
concretely in terms of historical narrative, rather than mythically in a
devaluation of created life as a good in itself, was a constant correc-
tive for the early Christian communities, stemming from the reading
of the Scriptures. There is no doubt that such a perspective impacted
their reading of natural phenomena. Nature was not a hostile realm.
Humanity and all of nature shared the same benevolent origin. As
Ambrose argued, we are not alien to nature.
However, even within the confines of a short study, it is clear that
there is more at stake than a question of an accommodation of Scripture
to a reading of nature, and nature to a “reading” of Scripture. I suspect
that Basil, Gregory, and Ambrose would do more than “accommo-
date” their commentaries on Genesis to the shock of the visual images
of the universe beamed back to by the Hubble Telescope. Ambrose’s
congregation would probably have been treated to paroxysms of lyr-
ics, and both Basil and his younger brother, Gregory would no doubt
have found the challenge of speculations about the “dark energy” of
the cosmos, exhilarating! At least, these reactions would be directly in
line with their insistence that the contemplation of nature is revelatory
in itself. If so, nature is a revelation of the divine to which we can turn
confidently. In a recent article, entitled, “Raising Heaven,” National
Geographic science writer, Timothy Ferris argues,
the next time someone wonders aloud what use it is to spend billions
of dollars on space telescopes when we have ‘problems here at home,’
the answer may be that they help us understand just what and where
home is.70
Ambrose’s remark to his Milanese congregation: “We cannot fully know
ourselves without knowing the nature of all living things” still rings true.
It is a co-witness, and witnessing in truth that we are at home in the
vastnesses of nature, and, according to Ambrose, we learn who we are
when we know better the nature of all living things.

70
Ferris 2007, 148.

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 two witnesses to the creator 113

What then about the authority of Scripture, if, as Ephraem observed,

nature and Scripture are co-witnesses? The term “witness” conjures up
visions of juridical procedures and legal judgements. But what if the
forum within which the witness is presented is conceived of as a place
of dialogue with a shared ‘grammar’ of debate, referred to in Section
I? In this shared ‘grammar,’ the question of the authority of the two
witnesses, Scripture and nature, has to be clarified. Is there a ranking
in authority? In a recent publication, Rowan Williams has pointed to
the characteristics of the “grammar of religious language.” Refl ecting
on a tenth-century crucifix in the Cathedral of Cologne, he claims:
It makes no appeal to facile emotions, exerts no pressure, no blackmail; . . . It
is a plain fact in wood. “We have the news that has no value as a response
to everything.” We have the news of the death of God in the world of
religious meanings, is also the news of the life of God, who does not, after
all, live in religious meaning—or rather, God can only live in the grammar
of religious talk when the talk expresses God’s freedom from it. We have
something to say to human religiousness (our own included), but we are
not in the business of winning arguments for good and all.71
“We have the news that has no value as a response to everything.”
The parameters of the debate are circumscribed by the fact that neither
Scripture nor nature, or at least our understanding of Scripture and
nature, can claim to be a response to “everything.” What debate, what
conversation could fl ourish otherwise? The hermeneutical principle of
the ‘two witnesses,’ nature and Scripture, developed in the early Chris-
tian communities is one that may well contribute to an interdisciplinary
dialogue today, in providing a forum where a sense of wonder and
listening may set the tone for a renewed conversation.

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Brock, Sebastian. 1974. The Harp of the Spirit: Twelve Poems of Saint Ephrem. Intr. and Trans.
Studies Supplementary to Sobornost 4. Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius.
——. 1990. St. Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Paradise. Crestwood NY: St. Vladimir’s
Seminary Press. Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientatium, CSCO 174–5,
Hymns on Paradise 15 hymns, = Scriptores Syri, SS 78–9.
Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (CSEL). 1864–(Series begun). Vienna, Austria.
Coxe, A. Cleveland. 1995. The Stromata, or Miscellanies. In The Ante-Nicene Fathers,
Vol. 2: Fathers of the Second Century: Hermas, Tatian, Athenagoras,Theophilus, and Clement
of Alexandria (Entire), Ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Peabody, MA:
Hendrickson Publishers.
Dively Lauro, Elizabeth A. 2005. The Soul and the Spirit of Scripture within Origen’s Exegesis.
The Bible in Ancient Christianity vol. 3. Boston/Leiden: Brill.
Edwards, Paul, ed. 1967. Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New York: Collier and MacMillan.
Fahlbusch, E., Milic Lochman, J. Mbiti, J. Pelikan, L. Vischer, eds. 2003. Encyclopedia
of Christianity. Vol. 3. Leiden/Boston: Brill; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Ferris, Timothy. 2007. Raising Heaven. National Geographic: Oct., 148.
Hepburn, Ronald W. 1967. Philosophical Ideas of Nature. In Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
Ed. Paul Edwards. New York: Collier and MacMillan.
Hock, Ronald, F. 1996. The Infancy Narrative of James and Thomas. Intr., Notes and Original
text with New Scholars Version translation. Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press.
Holcomb, Justin, ed. 2006. Christian Theologies of Scripture A Comparative Introduction. New
York/London: New York University Press.
Howell, Kenneth J. 2002. God’s Two Book’s: Copernican Cosmology and Biblical Interpretation
in Early Modern Science. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
Kannengiesser, Charles. 2004. Spiritual Exegesis. In Handbook of Patristic Exegesis. Vol. 1.
Leiden/Boston: Brill, 206–212.
Loughlan, Gerard. 2006. Post Modern Scripture in Christian Theologies of Scripture. Ed. Justin
S. Holcolm. New York/London: New York University Press.
Markschies, Christoph. 2003. Gnosis: An Introduction. Trans. John Bowden. London/New
York: T & T Clark.
The New English Bible with the Apocrypha. 1976. Gen. Ed. Samuel Standmel. M. Jack
Suggs, New Testament ed. Arnold J.Tkacik, Apocrypha ed. Oxford Study Edition.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Origen of Alexandria. 1981. Homilies on Genesis and Exodus. Trans. Ronald Heine.
The Fathers of the Church series vol. 71. Washington, DC: The Catholic University
of America Press.
Otten, Willemien. 1989. The Anthropology of Johannes Scottus Eriugena. (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Amsterdam).
Pasquier, Anne. 2004. The Valentinian Exegesis. In Handbook of Patristic Exegesis, Charles
Kannengiesser. Vol. 1. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 454–470.

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Philo of Alexandria. 1929. Legum Allegoria. Allegorical Interpretation of Genesis II–III. Ed.
and trans. G.H. Whitaker. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Philo of Alexandria. 1953/1961. Questions and Answers on Genesis, Philo Supplement.
Trans. Ralph Markus. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: The Harvard
University Press.
Philo. 1929/1971. On the Account of the World’s Creation Given by Moses (On the Creation)
(De opificio mundi ). Philo I. Ed. and trans., F.H. Colson and G.H. Whitaker. The
Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Plato. 1929/1975. Timaeus, Critias, Cleitophon, Menexenos. Trans. R.G. Bury. The Loeb
Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Roberts, Alexander and James Donaldson, eds. 1995. Ante Nicene Fathers. Peabody, MA:
Hendrickson Publishers.
Savage, John J. 1963. Introduction. In Ambrose. Hexameron. Paradise and Cain and Abel,
Trans. John J. Savage. Fathers of the Church series vol. 42. Washington, DC: The
Catholic University of America.
Scaff, Philip and Henry Wace, eds. 1890. Eusebius: Church History, Life of Constantine the
Great, and Oration in Praise of Constintine. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. Reprint
1995. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1995.
Simonetti, Manlio. 1994. Biblical Interpretation in the Early Church. An Historical Introduction
to Patristic Exegesis. Trans. John. A. Hughes. Edinburgh: T & T Clark.
Sources Chrétiennes (CS). Paris: CERF. 600 volumes published since 1942.
Turcescu, Lucian. 2008. Gregory of Nyssa’s Biblical Hermeneutics in De opificio hominis. The
Reception and Interpretation of the Bible in Late Antiquity. Ed. Lorenzo Di Tommaso and
Lucian Turcescu. The Bible in Ancient Christianity. Boston/Leiden: Brill.
Viviano, Albert. 2004. The Life and Works of Mani and the Expansion of Manichaeism
(216–276). In Handbook of Patristic Exegesis, Ed. Charles Kannengiesser. Vol. 1.
Leiden/Boston: Brill, 649–669.
Williams, Rowan. 2000. On Christian Theology. London: Blackwell.

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 CHAPTER FOUR

NATURAL KNOWLEDGE AND TEXTUAL MEANING

IN AUGUSTINE’S INTERPRETATION OF GENESIS:
THE THREE FUNCTIONS OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY

Kenneth J. Howell

Lurking in the shadows of an untold number of debates in the history

of western science stands a man whose interest in all things natural
was at best marginal. This pastoral figure never wrote a treatise on
nature comparable to Aristotle’s Physics or Seneca’s Natural Questions.
Never did he systematically deliver on issues of cosmology or natural
philosophy, and in all probability he never read Ptolemy’s Almagest or
Galen’s Natural Faculties. Yet, whenever the specific doctrines of the
Christian faith encounter the claims of empirical science, this figure’s
infl uence stands unavoidably in the background. So, when Cardinal
Roberto Bellarmino received a letter in 1615 from a Carmelite friar
by the name of Paolo Foscarini defending the scriptural compatibility
of Copernicanism, the learned Cardinal found himself thrown back on
the resources of this fifth-century bishop whose name had been invoked
by Galileo Galilei to justify the independence of astronomy from the
Church’s judgment.1 In one sense, this dependence on the greatest of
the Latin church fathers is not surprising because it is not too much
of an overstatement to say that all of western theology is Augustinian.
And the context into which modern science was born in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries was formed by the theological discourse that
Augustine was central in shaping.
Aurelius Augustine (354–430), the bishop of Hippo in north Africa
in the early fifth century, was forced by his pastoral work and his intel-
lectual curiosity to address questions on the relationship of faith and
science that reverberate down to today. When the range of theologies
expanded greatly as a result of the Protestant Reformation, almost all
sides of the theological debate in the sixteenth century attempted to

1
On Foscarini see Finocchiaro 2008. My own views of Foscarini’s and Bellarmine’s
exchange are discussed in Howell 2002, 196–199.

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118 kenneth j. howell

claim Augustine as their forerunner. And when these theologies met with
new questions posed by the emerging natural sciences in the sixteenth-
and seventeenth centuries, Augustine’s infl uence was still discernible.
Considering his extensive infl uence in western intellectual history, it
seems valuable to have a clearer understanding of Augustine’s thought
regarding the interface of scriptural authority and natural philosophy in
the context of his own times and writings.2 The Augustinian corpus is
one of the largest to have survived Christian antiquity and none other
has exercised such an extensive infl uence on all subsequent philosophy
and theology.3
In this paper, I explore Augustine’s commentaries on Genesis to
elucidate the fundamental structures of his thought in interpreting the
creation story. By returning to the sources of his hermeneutical endeav-
ors, we may be in a better position to discern why his infl uence on
matters of faith and science became so pervasive. My focus here is on
Augustine in the fifth century rather than on how he was interpreted
later, but such a historical limitation may nevertheless afford a sharper
picture of his hermeneutics for future comparison with the use made
of him in the context of scientific debate. No use of Augustine would
have been possible had he not attempted in his largest commentary,
A Literal Commentary on Genesis, to interpret literally the Genesis creation
narrative. However, we shall see that what Augustine meant by ‘literal’
was in fact far from what is usually meant by that term today. With
ad litteram interpretation Augustine shows a greater fl exibility and open-
ness than we might be inclined to attribute to the term literal. At times,
we might be surprised by how unliteral Augustine’s literal interpreta-
tion can be.4

2
Evidence of how easy it is to misconstrue Augustine’s views on the interaction of
scriptural authority and scientific inquiry can be found in Jaki 1992. Jaki claims that
Augustine saw the Bible as a “scientific textbook” (88) because he imprudently occupied
himself with the “how” of creation. For Jaki, such an approach falls prey to literalist
concordism which he roundly condemns elsewhere in his book. Jaki’s preconception
as to what a proper exegesis of Genesis 1 ought to be prevents him from seeing the
subtleties and complexities in Augustine’s approach. This is especially egregious when
he ascribes the view Augustine is promoting to his opponents (89).
3
In terms of size, the only other patristic literary corpus comparable to Augustine’s
to have survived antiquity are Jerome’s biblical commentaries and John Chrysostom’s
extensive writings. Neither of them, however, addressed questions relevant to natural
philosophy like Augustine.
4
The most recent translator of De Genesi ad litteram into English notes the wide
meaning of ad litteram as used by Augustine (Hill 2002, 202, note 24).

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 natural knowledge and textual meaning in augustine 119

The purpose of this paper is to explore specifically Augustine’s uses

of natural truths and philosophy in his interpretation of Genesis to
discern patterns of interaction between natural knowledge and the
biblical text.5 This task entails asking whether Augustine thought that
natural philosophy was taught in the Bible and, conversely, whether
the Scriptures could be used to criticize various natural philosophies.
In Augustine’s exegetical labors at least three prominent functions of
natural knowledge in exegesis can be discerned: apologetic, eliminative
(stimulative), and explanatory. Before examining these uses, however,
it first may be valuable to gain a sense of Augustine’s hermeneutics as
it applies to knowledge from outside the Scriptures.

Augustine as Biblical Interpreter

Augustine maintained a lifelong engagement with the creation narra-

tives in Genesis. In addition to his three commentaries on Genesis, De
Genesi contra Manichaeos (388/389), De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber
(393), and De Genesi ad litteram, the Bishop of Hippo treated the ques-
tion of creation and its associated hermeneutics in Confessiones XI–XIII
(397–400) and De Civitate Dei XI (412–430).6 Augustine’s De Genesi contra
Manichaeos is a patently apologetic work in which his primary goal was
to exonerate Genesis from the accusations of untruthfulness leveled by
the Manichees. From his background in and former adherence to the
Manichean religion, Augustine knew well that the Manichees despised
the Old Testament as having an inferior cosmology and saw their own
cosmology and ethics as based on reason and scientific demonstration.7
His second foray into Genesis, De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber, is also
an apologetic work which was probably occasioned by his dissatisfaction

5
Harrison 1998, 11–33, has emphasized another aspect of Augustine’s interpreta-
tive labors, namely, his use of the higher or spiritual senses of Scripture, especially as
seen in the Confessions. The diversity of approaches used by Augustine should caution
us against seeing him as having one model of hermeneutics. Augustine could engage
in different types of exegesis necessitated by the occasion facing him.
6
On Augustine’s repeated attempts to understand Genesis see TeSelle 1970, 198.
Some aspects of this relation are treated in O’Meara 1980. More generally on Augustine
as New Testament interpreter see also Comeau 1930, Bonner 1970, 541–597.
7
We tend to regard Manichaeism as a separate religion today but Augustine viewed
it as an alternative form of Christianity and later of course as heresy. For a brief dis-
cussion of this point see Teske 1999a, 210–211.

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120 kenneth j. howell

with his earlier explanations.8 By far, Augustine’s most extensive com-

mentary on the creation narratives is De Genesi ad litteram which rep-
resents his mature thought as an exegete and philosopher. In this last
commentary, Augustine did not abandon apologetic concerns by any
means, but he did broaden his scope to deal with multiple misunder-
standings of the text.9
It is of the greatest importance to remember the general purpose for
Augustine’s writing the commentaries on the creation narratives. As was
true with most scriptural exegesis in the ancient church, Augustine’s
purpose was manifestly pastoral in its attempt both to protect the fl ock
against deception and to refute those who would lead them astray
through vain philosophy.10 Because of his active episcopal responsibili-
ties, this pastoral concern underlies all of Augustine’s interpretation of
Scripture. And as would become his bequest to all western Christendom,
his profound belief in the union of word and sacrament to build up the
faithful colored all his scriptural preaching and writing. This pastoral
context and orientation probably best explains why his expositions
tend to avoid technical philosophical language.11 Scripture is addressed
to the “little ones” and so his expositions always have that audience
in view.12 At the same time, this pastoral orientation did not cause
him to avoid addressing difficult theological and hermeneutical issues.
His experience as a Manichean “hearer” had convinced him that the

8
Augustine continued to fight against the Manichean notion of evil inherent in
things in De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber 1.3. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations
from the first two Genesis commentaries will come from the translation of Teske 1991.
Teske is one of the most knowledgeable scholars on Augustine’s Genesis interpretation.
See his short but insightful articles 1999b, c, d.
9
For a valuable translation of De Genesi ad litteram see Taylor 1983. Now we have
all three commentaries in one volume in the excellent translation of Hill. Unless oth-
erwise noted, quotations from De Genesi ad litteram and all of Augustine’s writings are
my own translations. Where applicable, I will cite other translations by the translator’s
last name.
10
See Augustine’s reference to Cicero’s Hortensius as exposing the dangers of phi-
losophy in fulfillment of Paul’s words in Col. 2:8, 9 in Confessions 3.4.7. We now have a
new translation of Augustine’s great autobiography by Maria Boulding. (Cf. Augustine
1997). I will cite this translation as Boulding.
11
For example, the kind of technical language he surely encountered in reading
Plotinus. However, as we will see below in the case of the rationes seminales, Augustine
did not completely eschew all technical terms.
12
Augustine explicitly says that his commentary De Genesi contra Manichaeos was
written for both the educated and the uneducated (1.1). For a discussion of the “Little
Ones” and Augustine’s pastoral concerns predating his ordination (391) see Teske
1991, 12–15.

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 natural knowledge and textual meaning in augustine 121

improper handling of abstruse topics could be destructive for the faith

of the “little ones” and therefore needed to be addressed.
Despite Augustine’s demanding pastoral work, he wrote extensively
on a wide range of topics bearing on interpretation. His approach to
Genesis shows discernible connections with his statements on hermeneu-
tics elsewhere.13 Probably the most theoretical discussion of hermeneutics
Augustine ever penned can be found in De Doctrina Christiana where he
outlined the role of extra biblical knowledge in the task of scriptural
exegesis.14 In one of his most famous passages Augustine points out the
value of extra scriptural knowledge:
Some who are called philosophers, especially Platonists, teach things that
are true and in accord with our faith. They should not only not be dreaded
but should be defended for our use against unjust accusers. The people
of Israel detested and fl ed from idols and graven images of the Egyptians
but they also secretly took with them for their own use articles of gold
and silver as well as clothing. They did not do this on their own authority
but by God’s command. The Egyptians unwittingly lent them because
they did not use them well. So also all the teachings of the Gentiles are
full of idolatrous and superstitious figments and grave lies in their work
which each of us should leave behind when we leave Gentile society and
follow Christ our leader. We should hate and avoid these things. But it
is no less true that the liberal disciplines contain truths fit for use and
very useful moral precepts. Even concerning the one God himself some
true things have been found. This is like their gold and silver. They did
not create these things. They are like the metals of divine providence. . . .
The Christian ought to adapt these for the right use of preaching the
Gospel. Also their clothing, that is human laws which are adapted for
human society and which we cannot do without, we should accept and
possess them for a converted Christian use.15

13
For an overview of Augustine’s hermeneutics see Pollman 1999, 426–429.
14
For insightful essays on De Doctrina Christiana see Arnold and Bright 1995. On
Augustine’s hermeneutical theory, especially as it affected medieval theory, see de
Lubac 1959, 177–187.
15
De Doctrina Christiana 2.40.60. Philosophi autem qui vocantur, si qua forte vera et
fidei nostrae accommodata dixerunt, maxime Platonici, non solum formidanda non
sunt, sed ab eis etiam tanquam injustis possessoribus in usum nostrum vindicanda.
Sicut enim Aegyptii non solum idola habebant et onera gravia, quae populus Israel
detestaretur et fugeret, sed etiam vasa atque ornamenta de auro et argento, et vestem,
quae ille populus exiens de Aegypto, sibi potius tanquam ad usum meliorem clanculo
vindicavit; non auctoritate propria, sed praecepto Dei, ipsis Aegyptiis nescienter com-
modantibus ea, quibus non bene utebantur (Exod. III, 22, et XII, 35): sic doctrinae omnes
Gentilium non solum simulata et superstitiosa figmenta gravesque sarcinas supervacanei
laboris habent, quae unusquisque nostrum duce Christo de societate Gentilium exiens,
debet abominari atque devitare; sed etiam liberales disciplinas usui veritatis aptiores,

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122 kenneth j. howell

Without a doubt, the Platonic philosophy was for him an example

of the gold and silver to be gleaned from ‘the Egyptians’ of his own
world. As he shows in book seven of the Confessions, his reading of the
Platonists lifted his mind to God and to his realization that God was a
spiritual substance.16 The natural knowledge that can be gained through
observation or through reading philosophy turns out to be a significant
part of that extra scriptural knowledge which Augustine highly valued.17
For all that, his use of natural knowledge in interpreting Scripture is a
relatively unexplored aspect of his thought.18 His knowledge of ancient
natural philosophy and his lifelong attempt to understand the text of
Genesis suggests that the intersection of these two facets of his thought
may prove illuminating.
Augustine brought the same assumptions to Genesis which he held for
all Scripture. As the quotation from book two of De Doctrina Christiana
suggests, God is the source and ultimate criterion of all truth so that any
particular truth discovered has its origin in God whether it comes from
the Scriptures or pagan philosophy. Since God is non-contradictory,
no two truths will ever contradict one another which naturally implies
that there are no errors in Scripture.19 One immediate consequence of
this belief was Augustine’s commitment to the public nature of truth.
Individual and subjective opinion must be submitted to the bar of
public adjudication.20

et quaedam morum praecepta utilissima continent, deque ipso uno Deo colendo non-
nulla vera inveniuntur apud eos; quod eorum tanquam aurum et argentum, quod non
ipsi instituerunt, sed de quibusdam quasi metallis divinae providentiae, quae ubique
infusa est, eruerunt, et quo perverse atque injuriose ad obsequia daemonum abutuntur,
cum ab eorum misera societate sese animo separat, debet ab eis auferre christianus ad
usum justum praedicandi Evangelii. Vestem quoque illorum, id est, hominum quidem
instituta, sed tamen accommodata humanae societati, qua in hac vita carere non pos-
sumus, accipere atque habere licuerit in usum convertenda christianum.
16
Confessions 7.9–10. The realization of God being a spiritual substance freed Augus-
tine from the Manichean materialism to which he had been attached. See Confessions
5.14.25 and the discussion by Teske 1999, 209.
17
Bonner rightly observed, “Indeed, Augustine takes this for granted [discrepancies
between biblical authors]; but he rejects any attempt to avoid exegetical difficulties by
the sacrifice of intellectual integrity.” Bonner op. cit., 556.
18
Among the older literature one may consult Maher 1945, 76–90 and Robbins
1912, 64–72. Other relevant studies include Tarabochia Canavero 1981. Some helpful
essays can be found in the heterogeneous collection of de la Bonnardière 1986.
19
Confessions 12.23. Cf. Also Epistles 28 (ca. 394), 40 and 82 (ca. 405) to Jerome. In
this last Epistle Augustine says, “I firmly believe that no author of these books com-
mitted any error in writing.”
20
Confessions 12.25.34 “Indeed, once it is true, it is no longer their property” (Bould-
ing 333).

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 natural knowledge and textual meaning in augustine 123

Augustine was keenly aware of alleged inconsistencies in Scripture

and criticisms based on them. A significant portion of his exegetical
writings are taken up with this concern. His hermeneutical method
always attempted to maintain the unity of truth within the Scriptures
themselves.21 This required two procedures of the exegete. One was to
reconcile different texts which seemed to contradict one another, the
task of the interpreter being to show that this alleged contradiction was
only a surface phenomenon which a deeper explanation could easily
reconcile.22 He does this when discussing two meanings of ‘judgment’
in Scripture. The meaning of ‘condemnation’ appears in John 5:24
where Jesus says that the believer will not come under judgment while
the meaning of ‘discrimination’ is intended in 2 Cor. 5:10 where it is
stated that “we all must appear before the judgment seat of Christ.”
This is a natural extension of his belief that the interpreter should strive
for contextual consistency within one passage of Scripture. Thus, in
treating the word ‘day’ in Genesis chapter 1, he argues that it cannot
bear the normal meaning because the same meaning must apply to
the first three days of God’s creative work as applies to the last three.
Since the luminaries (e.g., the Sun) by which we judge the meaning of
day were not made until the fourth day, it is evident that the mean-
ing of the day cannot be the normal one.23 Both textual reconciliation
of multiple texts and contextual consistency within one text illustrate
Augustine’s constant search for unity of truth within the Scriptures.
The assumption of the objective truth of the Scriptures did not,
however, insure the truth of all interpretations. How did Augustine
distinguish true interpretations from those that are not? Augustine
outlined a procedure which began with literal interpretation. The goal
of ad litteram interpretation is to discover the biblical author’s intended
meaning, but the best that can often be achieved is only finding true

21
See De Doctrina Christiana 3.26–28. 37–39 for a statement of his rule of interpreting
obscure passages by the clearer ones. A similar appeal is made to refute misunderstand-
ings of I Cor 3:15 in De Fide, Spe et Caritate ch. 57 and De Fide and Operibus ch. 15. It
should be stressed that Augustine recognized significant differences between biblical
authors involving order of narratives and quotations. See De Consensu Evangelistarum
2.12:29.
22
For those working in the Augustinian tradition, Harrison correctly emphasizes the
integral unity of scripture, “For those schooled in this tradition of exegesis, the meaning
of a particular passage lay in its interconnectedness with many apparently disparate
passages of scripture. The whole exegetical enterprise assumed that the sacred page
constituted a coherent unity.” Harrison 1998, 46.
23
De Genesi ad litteram 4.26.43.

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interpretations which are consistent with the text. Augustine suggested

the following procedure:
When we read the divine books in so many different ways that all true,
meanings that are drawn from a few words and built on the soundness
of the catholic faith, let us choose especially that which seems to be the
meaning of the writer we are reading. But if this is obscure, we should
certainly choose what does not contradict the surrounding context when
this agrees with a sound faith. But if the surrounding context of the Scrip-
tures cannot be studied or understood, we should especially choose only
that which a sound faith prescribes. For it is one thing not to recognize
the distinct meaning of a writer but quite another to depart from the
rule of religion.24
Because Augustine recognized the difficulties involved in discovering
the author’s intended meaning, he allowed for the adoption of any
interpretation that is consistent with the Christian faith. This explains
his reluctance to narrow the range of acceptable interpretations when
there are no compelling reasons to do so.25 Those who insist on their
own interpretations are sinning against the law of love which holds
diversity in the unity of faith.26 They also place their interpretations
above the authority of Scripture itself.27 This latitude of interpretation

24
De Genesi ad litteram 1.21. 41. Et cum divinos Libros legimus in tanta multitudine
verorum intellectuum, qui de paucis verbis eruuntur, et sanitate catholicae fidei muni-
untur, id potissimum deligamus, quod certum apparuerit eum sensisse quem legimus; si
autem hoc latet, id certe quod circumstantia Scripturae non impedit, et cum sana fide
concordat: si autem et Scripturae circumstantia pertractari ac discuti non potest, saltem
id solum quod fides sana praescribit. Aliud est enim quid potissimum scriptor senserit
non dignoscere, aliud autem a regula pietatis errare. Si utrumque vitetur, perfecte se
habet fructus legentis: si vero utrumque vitari non potest, etiam si voluntas scriptoris
incerta sit sanae fidei congruam non inutile est eruisse.
25
“The presumption of man ought to restrain itself whenever a question arises on an
unusual obscure subject on which no assistance can be rendered by clear and certain
proofs of the Holy Scripture . . . In this, I believe that the Holy Scriptures possess a most
clear authority, whenever a point arises, which no man can be ignorant of, without
imperilling the salvation which has been promised him.” De peccatorum meritis et remissione
2:59. See also De Doctrina Christiana 2.12.17 for the aid that diversity of interpretation
can be. Also “What evil is it if an exegesis he gives is one shown to be true by you,
light of all sincere souls, even if the author whom he is reading did not have that idea
and, though he had grasped a truth, had not discerned that seen by the interpreter?”
Confessions 13.18.27 (Chadwick 1991).
26
Confessions 12.30.41 and 12.31.42.
27
“When we read about obscure matters that are remote from our sight in the
divine writings where the faith we are instructed in is preserved, several opinions may
appear. Now we should not jump in one of them by some precipitous affirmation so
that we are destroyed if the truth, once it is discussed more diligently, should rightly
show us wrong. In that case, we would be fighting not for the meaning of the divine

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did not mean, however, that there were no boundaries. The quotation
above suggests that for Augustine the catholic faith provides the proper
boundary conditions. As long as an interpreter remained within those
boundaries there was no reason to reject variant interpretations.28

The Scriptures and Natural Knowledge:

A Delicate Balance

The dangers of insisting on an interpretation of Scripture that can-

not be demonstrated to be the only correct one are especially evident
in matters touching on natural philosophy and may even lead to the
discredit of Scripture when it is shown that certain interpretations are
inconsistent with well-founded knowledge possessed by non-Christians.
Augustine cautioned Christians against speaking presumptuously on
natural phenomena; they must realize that pagans have learned truths
from sense experience and from the light of reason with which the
Bible is consistent.
It happens that even a non-Christian knows some things about the earth,
heaven, and other elements of this kind, about the motion and rotation,
size and intervals of the stars, about the eclipses of the sun and moon,
about the orbits of years and times, about the animals, crops, jewels, and
other things of this kind in a such a way that he holds these by a most
certain reason and evidence. But it is a disgraceful and deadly thing—and
one most certainly to the avoided—that an unbeliever would hear a
Christian speaking about these things as if expounding Christian writ-
ings in some delirious manner so that by seeing him wrong about all of
heaven, he could scarcely keep from laughing. And it is not so annoying
that such a Christian errs but that those outside believe our authors [of
the Scriptures] were in fact saying such things.29

Scriptures but for our opinion that we want whereas our goal should be to have what
is in the Scriptures for our opinion.” De Genesi ad litteram 1.18.37. See also the discus-
sion by McMullin 1998, 292–293. Citing this very passage of De Genesi ad litteram,
McMullin sees a “principle of prudence” in Augustine which was relevant for the
resolution the issue of geokineticism in the seventeenth century. This principle simply
represents the caution that Augustine urged throughout his commentary.
28
See Contra Faustum 28:2 and Epistulae contra Manicheos 5:6 and Contra Academicos
3:20, 43 and on apostolic tradition De Baptismo 4:24, 31.
29
De Genesi ad litteram 1.19.39. Plerumque enim accidit ut aliquid de terra, de coelo,
de caeteris mundi hujus elementis, de motu et conversione vel etiam magnitudine
et intervallis siderum, de certis defectibus solis ac lunae, de circuitibus annorum et
temporum, de naturis animalium, fruticum, lapidum, atque hujusmodi caeteris, etiam
non christianus ita noverit, ut certissima ratione vel experientia teneat. Turpe est

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Believing that the Scriptures were consistent with knowledge from

outside the Bible motivated Augustine to show the unity of truth
between the Scriptures and known truths from the natural world. This
presupposed the historical veracity of Genesis which must, therefore,
be interpreted as a historical account: “The narration in this book
(Genesis) is indeed not a type of figurative speech, as in the Song of
Songs, but is completely of events as in the book of Kings and other
literature of this kind.”30
Because the Manichees insisted on contradictions between reason and
Genesis, Augustine was convinced that the literary genre of Genesis
required ad litteram interpretation. Some of Augustine’s fellow believers
contended that Genesis must be taken in a figurative sense to avoid
the charges of those who rejected the authority of the Scriptures. And
Augustine tells us in the Confessions that he felt liberated from an exces-
sively literal reading of the Old Testament when he heard Ambrose
giving spiritual interpretations of events or commandments over which
Augustine had stumbled.31 So while Augustine appreciated the allegori-
cal interpretation of Genesis, he was primarily concerned with ad litteram
interpretation because he thought that in some way the allegorical had
to be grounded in the literal. Excessive retreat to the allegorical, in the
case of the Genesis commentaries, represented an unnecessary aban-
donment of the historical sense. Later in his Retractiones, he explained
that ad litteram was not “according to allegorical significations” (non
secundum allegoricas significationes) but dealt with the actual events recorded
(secundum rerum gestarum proprietatem).32 Since there was no possibility that
Genesis could be proved false, Augustine felt compelled to show that
the historical meaning of Genesis was not contrary to known truths
of the world.33 Augustine could only defend the historical (ad litteram)
value of the Genesis creation account by showing that it did not con-

autem nimis et perniciosum ac maxime cavendum, ut christianum de his rebus quasi

secundum christianas Litteras loquentem, ita delirare quilibet infidelis audiat, ut, que-
madmodum dicitur, toto coelo errare conspiciens, risum tenere vix possit. Et non tam
molestum est, quod errans homo deridetur, sed quod auctores nostri ab eis qui foris
sunt, talia sensisse creduntur.
30
De Genesi ad litteram 8.1. 2. Narratio quippe in his libris non genere locutionis
figuratarum rerum est, sicut in Cantico canticorum, sed omnino gestarum, sicut in
Regnorum libris et hujuscemodi caeteris.
31
See Confessions 5.14.
32
See also Retractiones 2.24.1.
33
De Genesi ad litteram 8.1.4.

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tradict manifest reason and sense experience.34 Although Augustine the

Christian had to reject the Manichean claim that reason was a sufficient
source of truth, he still considered reason to have an essential place in
the exegesis of Scripture.
With his strong conviction of the historical veracity of Genesis, it
might be thought that Augustine would attempt to defend the cosmol-
ogy of Genesis against the Manichees, but this he does not do. The
Scriptures are not designed to give a natural philosophy or cosmology.35
In a rather illuminating passage in book two of De Genesi ad litteram,
Augustine again opines on the proper intent of Scripture:
It is customary to ask what our belief must be about the form and shape
of heaven according to Sacred Scripture. Many people engage in lengthy
discussions on these matters, but the sacred writers with their deeper
wisdom have omitted them. Such objects are of no profit for those who
seek beatitude, and, what is worse, they take up very precious time that
ought to be given to what is spiritually beneficial. What concern is it
of mine whether heaven is like a sphere and the earth is enclosed by it
on every side and suspended in the middle of the universe, or whether
heaven like a disc above the earth covers it over on one side? . . . But faith
in the Scriptures is at stake here, and as I have reminded you not once,
there is danger that a man uninstructed in divine revelation, discovering
something in Scripture or hearing from it something that seems to be
at odds with the knowledge he has acquired, may resolutely withhold
his assent in other matters where Scripture presents useful admonitions,
narratives, or declarations. I must say briefl y that in the matter of the
shape of heaven the sacred writers knew the truth, but that the Spirit of
God, who spoke through them, did not wish to teach men these things
that would be of no avail for their salvation.36

34
In this paragraph I have retained the Latin phrase ad litteram because it does not
correspond to the modern meaning of literal. The usual meaning of the English “literal”
excludes metaphorical and indirect reference which would have been considered still
ad litteram by Augustine. Many commentators have seen this wider usage in Augustine
including McMullin 1998, 337 note 68.
35
Cf. “Basil and Augustine tell us already that the Bible is not a book about natural
science, but nourishment for the human heart.” van Bavel 1990, 1–33.
36
De Genesi ad litteram 2.9.20. Quaeri etiam solet quae forma et figura coeli esse cre-
denda sit secundum Scripturas nostras. Multi enim multum disputant de iis rebus, quas
majore prudentia nostri auctores omiserunt, ad beatam vitam non profuturas discenti-
bus; et occupantes, quod pejus est, multum pretiosa, et rebus salubribus impendenda
temporum spatia. Quid enim ad me pertinet, utrum coelum sicut sphaera undique
concludat terram in media mundi mole libratam, an eam ex una parte desuper velut
discus operiat? Sed quia de fide agitur Scripturarum, propter illam causam, quam non
semel commemoravi, ne quisquam eloquia divina non intelligens, cum de his rebus tale
aliquid vel invenerit in Libris nostris, vel ex illis audierit, quod perceptis a se rationibus

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Concerning a possible contradiction between the biblical statements

on the form of the heavens and what may be known by observation
and reason, Augustine cautioned against defending something which
the Scriptures were not addressing. He distinguished between the
language used in the Bible and known truths ( perceptis rationibus) which
may appear to be contrary to the Bible. He warned his readers not
to conclude that the Bible is giving a natural cosmology because its
purpose is directed toward human salvation. Given that Augustine
wanted to defend the veracity of the Scriptures, his first step was to
determine from the language used the intent of the biblical author.
Attributing to the Scriptures something which they were not teaching
was as dangerous as the Manichean criticisms based on wrong read-
ings of the same text.
Augustine placed himself in a delicate position. The Scriptures are
true and that truth ought to be defended against the cavils of false
philosophy but one must not claim more for the Scriptures than they
really teach. If one did so, the Scriptures would most certainly appear to
be false. How can the true meaning of the biblical words be discerned
when those words touch on natural-philosophical matters? This entails
the delicate task of relating natural knowledge to the true meaning of
the biblical text.

The Apologetic Function of Natural Philosophy

Augustine tells us in the Confessions (5. 11.21) that when he was a Man-
ichee he did not think the Old Testament could be defended against
the Manichean criticisms. Perhaps more significantly, he even then
longed to discuss the meaning of scriptural texts with those who had
studied them thoroughly. When he returned to Genesis as a baptized
Christian, he sought to become a wise interpreter whose responsibility
was to defend the teaching of Scripture against its gainsayers. In De
Genesi contra Manichaeos Augustine attempted to answer denigrations
and to refute criticisms of the Genesis creation account. His attempts
to clarify the meaning of Genesis necessarily involved him in refuting

adversari videatur, nullo modo eis caetera utilia monentibus, vel narrantibus, vel pro-
nuntiantibus credat; breviter dicendum est de figura coeli hoc scisse auctores nostros
quod veritas habet; sed Spiritum Dei, qui per ipsos loquebatur, noluisse ista docere
homines nulli saluti profutura.

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misunderstandings of the biblical text but he knew that such refutations

were not equivalent to refuting the total system of philosophy which
lay behind those misunderstandings:
But we have not now undertaken to refute and prove such nonsense
wrong [ Manichean idea of darkness]. Our present goal is to defend, to
the extent that the Lord grants us strength, those things with which they
find fault in the Old Testament and to show in these matters that the
blindness of men can do nothing against the truth of God.37
Augustine did not seem to view the commentary as a proper format
to fully refute false philosophies because his purpose was to protect the
little ones by showing that there were answers available to withstand the
claims of the Manichees.38 The Manichean criticisms of Genesis rested
on their false philosophical views of nature and the human predicament.
His responses to the Manichees offered an alternative philosophy of
nature drawn mostly from Neoplatonism. Like most ancient religions
and philosophies, the Manichees developed both an extensive meta-
physics and a correlated ethics, at the basis of which was a universal
dualism of the cosmos. The Manichees held to a materialism which
taught the equal ultimacy of good and evil, of light and darkness. This
entailed the doctrine of evil and darkness as formative entities and
forces within the cosmos. The present struggle between good and evil
was thought to end in the final separation of these uncreated principles
which would in turn liberate the human struggle from its enslavement
to metaphysical evil.39
How did this false philosophy lead the Manichees to misunderstand
Genesis? In two closely related ways. First, the Manichees often iden-
tified the meaning of the words used in the Bible with the meanings
used in their philosophy. Then they criticized Genesis by comparing
their understanding of that concept with the manner in which Genesis
expresses it. Their fault lay in the misidentification of meanings. Their
criticism of Gen. 1:3 “let there be light” is a case in point. The Man-
ichees asked skeptically whence the darkness originated into which the
light was brought. Either the darkness was created or it was eternal. If
not eternal, why would the God of light create darkness? Such a question

37
De Genesi contra Manichaeos 1.4. Teske’s translation.
38
In contradistinction from the polemical writings against the Donatists and the
Pelagians where he attempts fuller refutations of positions he deemed heretical.
39
Among the many descriptions of Manichaeism see Teske 1991, 7–9.

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makes sense only on the Manichean assumption of darkness as a positive

reality. Augustine’s response involves the theory of privation accord-
ing to which darkness (as well as silence, nakedness, emptiness) is no
positive force but a negation of the light as a positive entity. Darkness
simply means the absence of light. The Manichees’ criticism rested
on a misidentification of the usage of darkness in Scripture with the
meaning of the same term in their own philosophy.40
A second problem was that the Manichees read Genesis in an
excessively literal fashion which led to absurdities. Augustine’s inter-
pretation of the word ‘beginning’ in Gen. 1:1 highlights this mistake.
The Manicheans had charged that the language of the Scriptures was
nonsensical when they said that God created “in the beginning.” What
was God doing before the creation? Why did God wait so long to create
the world?41 Augustine responded that to speak of “before and after”
there must be a succession of moments. It is meaningless to ask what
God was doing “before” the creation because there was no “before”
or “after,” i.e., intervals of time. In a more positive vein, this challenge
caused Augustine to consider what is in fact meant by principium. Draw-
ing on the systematic ambiguity of principium, Augustine identified it as
the foundation of created reality rather than the commencement of
the succession of moments. This foundation is none other than Christ
himself.42 In De Genesi ad litteram he expanded this line of thought by
taking the principium as the casual ground of creation rather than a
temporal order.43
It may seem prima facie that Augustine is abandoning the natural
sense of ‘beginning’ to avoid the conundrums evoked by the relation
of time and eternity. Such an evaluation would fail, however, to notice
the consistency between Augustine’s interpretation here and his broader
thinking. Augustine tended to believe that the causes for events were
pluriform. God and His will are the ultimate cause of all events in time
but this does not make the reality of secondary causes superfl uous. In
fact, Augustine’s use of the rationes seminales assumes that these ‘seeds’

40
De Genesi contra Manichaeos 1.3. This of course is similar to Augustine’s treatment
of sin as privation of good. See De Genesi ad litteram liber imperfectus 1.1. (See Teske
translation 1999c, 146).
41
These same objections are treated also in Confessions 11.10.12 and 11.12.14.
42
De Genesi contra Manichaeos 1.2.3 “His (Manichaeos) respondemus, Deum, in prin-
cipio fecisse coelum et terram, non in principio temporis, sed in Christo, cum Verbum
esset apud Patrem, per quod facta et in quo facta sunt omnia ( Jo. 1:1–3).”
43
De Genesi ad litteram 5.5.13 For a discussion see Gilson 1998, 253, 254.

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are causes of events taking place after the original creation.44 Augustine
can take principium as referring to both Christ and a causal foundation;
in the former case, the cause in the intelligible world is denoted while
in the latter case the cause in the material world is indicated. The
Manichees read “the beginning” in too narrow a sense.
A second example of excessively literal reading is the verb superfere-
batur of Gen. 1:2 (And the Spirit of God was borne over the waters).
This was taken by the Manichees to imply that God is contained in
something material, an idea which contradicted the view of catholic
Christianity. Through a careful analysis of language, Augustine shows
that the use of superferebatur with respect to the physical universe (the
Sun is borne over the earth) does not imply that one is contained in
the other. Why should it be interpreted so literally with respect to
the Spirit’s relation to the universe? One must show the greatest care
when applying physical language to nonphysical entities. The divine
Spirit’s “being borne over the waters” is not a statement of physical
truth but rather expresses the infinite power of God (“by the power of
its invisible grandeur”).45
Augustine saw a pattern to the Manichees’ misunderstandings of
the Genesis text which consisted of two factors. False natural philoso-
phy conjoined with a perverse desire to misconstrue biblical language
resulted in readings of the text which were absurd. These misreadings
became the basis of criticisms of a putative biblical cosmology which
was either nonexistent or profoundly misrepresented. The Manichees’
insistence on an excessively literal reading of the Genesis text acted as
a caution for Augustine to refrain from too quickly delivering on the
sacred author’s meaning. He realized that any putative meaning must
be tested against several criteria, one of which was its agreement with
known truths of the world. In the Confessions Augustine recounts how
hearing Ambrose expound a spiritual interpretation of the Old Testa-
ment made him realize that the Genesis text need not be viewed as
literally as he had thought when he was under the spell of the Mani-
chean philosophy. His growing appreciation of neoplatonic ideas had
led him to abandon Manichean materialism and embrace the spiritual
(nonphysical) content of Scripture. This in turn helped him see the
errors implicit in the Manichean reading of Genesis; their criticism

44
See the discussion of Markus 1991, 397–400.
45
De Genesi contra Manichaeos 1.5.8–9.

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of the sacred text was mistaken because they could not understand
the proper meaning of physical language when used with respect to
nonphysical things.

The Eliminative (Stimulative)

Function of Natural Philosophy

Augustine employed natural knowledge in a slightly more subtle man-

ner as well. Natural philosophy could exclude interpretations of a text
which are contrary to true knowledge of nature. Natural philosophy here
is only a specific example of the use of reason in general because in
Augustine’s mind one of the more important functions of reason was to
eliminate that which was not true. Since the Scriptures were true and
what was contrary to reason could not be true, falsehoods concerning
nature could not be in the Scriptures. Thus, one could use reason to
eliminate possible misunderstandings of Scripture if those interpreta-
tions were contrary to reason.46
The most programmatic statement of this eliminative function of
natural philosophy occurs in De Genesi ad litteram. When a confl ict arises
between the words of Scripture and a claim of human knowledge,
Augustine advises:
But someone may ask: “Is not Scripture opposed to those who hold that
heaven is spherical, when it says, who stretches out heaven like a skin?”
Let it be opposed if their statement is false. The truth is rather in what
God reveals than in what human weakness surmises. But if they are able
to establish their doctrine with proofs that cannot be denied, we must
show that this statement of Scripture about the skin is not opposed to the
truth of their conclusions. If it were, it would also be opposed to Sacred
Scripture itself in another passage where it says that heaven is suspended
like a vault. For what can be so different and contradictory as a skin
stretched out fl at and the curved shape of a vault? But if it is necessary,
as it surely is, to interpret these two passages so that they are shown not
to be contradictory but reconcilable, it is also necessary that both these
passages should not contradict the theories that may be supported by true
reasoning (veris illis rationibus), by which heaven is said to be curved on all
sides in the shape of a sphere, provided only that this is proved.47

46
See “True reasoning (vera ratio) convinced me that I should wholly subtract all
remnants of every kind of form if I wished to conceive the absolutely formless.” Confes-
sions 12.6.6 (Boulding 314).
47
De Genesi ad Litteram 2.9.21. Hill translates veris illis rationibus as “shown by rational
arguments to be true.” (Hill 2002). See also Confessions 12. xviii (Chadwick 1991, 259).

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This prescription for reconciliation is twofold. One is in accord with

what we observed in Augustine’s hermeneutics in general. When two
biblical texts seem to be contradictory or in tension, then the careful
interpreter must seek to reconcile the language of each passage with
the other.48 Now Augustine applies the same method to reconciling
scriptural texts with natural truths. This procedure is a double-edged
sword. On the one hand, those truths which are not demonstrated
or clearly false must be subjected to Scripture since divine authority
transcends human authority. Natural-philosophical reasoning can be
used to show claims about nature to be false. Thus are eliminated any
interpretations which are false and therefore inappropriate. On the
other hand, when natural-philosophical propositions are demonstrated
to be true, then the exegete has an interpretation of nature which must
be taken into account when formulating the teaching of a particular
passage.49 Augustine does not specify what constitutes a demonstrated
truth other than indubibility i.e., “such proofs that cannot be doubted”
(talibus illi documentis probare potuerint, ut dubitari inde non debeat). For him,
indubitable truths consists of true reasons (veris illis rationibus). This reli-
ance on indubitable truth does not necessarily require that the text in
question teach that natural truth but only that the interpretation of the
text not contradict such a truth. Augustine stresses that the exegete is
under obligation to reconcile passages with natural truths as much as
he is with other scriptural texts.50

Sed, ait aliquis, quomodo non est contrarium iis qui figuram sphaerae coelo tribuunt,
quod scriptum est in Litteris nostris, Qui extendit coelum sicut pellem (Psal. CIII, 2)?
Sit sane contrarium, si falsum est quod illi dicunt: hoc enim verum est quod divina
dicit auctoritas, potius quam illud quod humana infirmitas conjicit. Sed si forte illud
talibus illi documentis probare potuerint, ut dubitari inde non debeat; demonstrandum
est hoc quod apud nos de pelle dictum est, veris illis rationibus non esse contrarium:
alioquin contrarium erit etiam ipsis in alio loco Scripturis nostris, ubi coelum dicitur
velut camera esse suspensum (Isai. XL, 22, sec. LXX). Quid enim tam diversum et
sibimet adversum, quam plana pellis extensio, et camerae curva convexio? Quod si
oportet, sicuti oportet, haec duo sic intelligere, ut concordare utrumque, nec sibimet
repugnare inveniatur; ita oportet etiam utrumlibet horum illis non adversari dispu-
tationibus, si eas forte veras certa ratio declaraverit, quibus docetur coelum sphaerae
figura undique esse convexum, si tamen probatur.
48
On the reconciliation of biblical passages with one another, see De Doctrina
Christiana 3.27.38.
49
McMullin formulates Augustine’s view as the Principle of Priority of Demonstration and
cites De Genesi ad litteram 1.21 as evidence. See McMullin 1998, 294 and 337 note 76.
McMullin rightly stresses that for Augustine, as for Galileo, confl icts between Scripture
and natural truths can only be apparent, not real (1998, 294).
50
The question as to what constitutes a demonstrated truth would become a major
issue in the Galileo affair. In the Letter to Grand Duchess Christina Galileo claims that he

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How did Augustine apply his programmatic statements to the

exegetical task? Augustine combines natural truth obtained through
observation and the fides catholica to eliminate the possibility of some
coeternal and consubstantial matter. That God created the world ex
nihilo Augustine has no doubt because if this were not true, then there
would exist something equal to God. But since nothing can be equal to
God, there could not have been anything coeternal with God. Augus-
tine readily admits that this boundary is set by the fides catholica but he
also thinks that the existence of change, variation and coming-to-be
in the natural world indicates the dependence of the created order on
an Unchanging One.51 Those natural philosophies which hold that the
visible world is either consubstantial or coeternal with God are false
and therefore Scriptures could not be interpreted in light of these. In
fact, the Scriptures can be taken as truthful contradictions of those
natural philosophies. Thus, although Augustine allows several possible
interpretations of fiat lux (let there be light), he does not allow that this
could refer to the Eternal Light which is the Word of God.52 Similarly,
as discussed above, the meaning of principium (Gen. 1:1) was allowed a
wide range of possibilities but none which would allow for a coeternal
or coexistent matter. Any interpretation which is within the bounds of
truth is acceptable.53 Augustine has at least three tests in arriving at
what is within the bounds of truth: reason, agreement with other texts
and the regula fidei. As we saw above in De Genesi ad litteram (1.21.41),
Augustine’s primary goal was to discern the authorial intention of the
writer. His application of reason, as used in natural philosophy, allowed
him to exclude any putative intention of the author which contradicted
the firm conclusion of truth (veris illis rationibus).
Augustine also used natural truth as a stimulant to reconcile appar-
ently contradictory facts. He was confronted with three salient data.
Genesis chapter 1 taught that the universe was made in six days. Eccle-
siasticus 18:1 (Wisdom of Ben Sirah) taught that God created everything
simultaneously (creavit omnia simul). Finally, there was an obvious need to

is formulating the demonstrated truth of Earth’s mobility. Most historians recognize

that he was not successful in bringing forth such a demonstration. See the Letter to
the Grand Duchess Christina translated in Finocchiaro 1989.
51
Confessions 11.4.6 (Boulding 288) and 11.7.9 (Boulding 290–291) The creation
results from the coeternal Word see Confessions 12.20. See also De Genesi ad litteram
imperfectus liber 1.1.
52
De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber 1.5.19 (Hill 2002, 124).
53
Confessions 13.18.22 (Boulding 357–358).

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explain continual development and coming-to-be that can be observed

in the world. How could this last fact be reconciled with the notion of a
completed work of God? Augustine offers no definitive answer but one
possible solution invokes a non-literal understanding for the meaning of
day in the first chapter of Genesis. He clearly denies in any case that
the word could mean something equivalent to solar days since the Sun
was not created until the fourth day. If time and the celestial bodies by
which time is measured came into existence on the fourth day, then
the days prior to the fourth day cannot be solar days.54 Augustine also
opines that this non-literal interpretation of Genesis may be applied to
the total framework of the six days:
Or was this arrangement of days set forth according to what human frailty
is used to and by the law of narrating and of conveying exalted things
to the humble in a humble fashion? By this law the tale of the narrator
must have a beginning, middle and end.55
It might seem somewhat inconsistent to deny that the days of Gen-
esis are solar days while maintaining that the narration of Genesis
chapter 1 is historical (see note 30) but that is only because he has
a more subtle notion of the sensus litteralis (historicus) than the modern
notion. He believed that the events recorded in Genesis were historical
happenings but narrating a historical event did not require the writer
to always use a simple one-to-one correspondence between description
and event. As is characteristic of Augustine, he does not attempt to be
dogmatic on which exegetical solution is best but clearly his respect
for and cognizance of natural truth places upon him an obligation to
reconcile the notion of simultaneous creation with both the text of
Genesis one and observed realities. This obligation does not of course
explain of how there can be both simultaneous creation and coming-
to-be in the observable world. For that Augustine needed something
additional.

The Explanatory Function of Natural Philosophy

Although according to Augustine, the Scriptures were not designed to

teach natural philosophy, he also believed in the necessity of relating the

54
De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber 6.27–7.28 (Hill 2002, 129–130).
55
De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber 3.8 (Hill 2002, 117–118.)

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text of Genesis to what can be readily observed in the physical world.

This necessarily involved him in invoking observations and concepts
of natural philosophy, the most prominent of which is the (ultimately)
Stoic concept of rationes seminales (also called rationes causales), a concept
which provides an explanatory mechanism not mentioned in the Bible.
Scattered throughout De Genesi ad litteram, this concept shows itself to
play an important role in Augustine’s thought. For example, in his dis-
cussion of human formation, Augustine speaks of two kinds of causes:
those placed in the world at the simultaneous creation and those God
reserved to his own will.
Therefore, if all the future causes were placed in the world on the day
God made it, (i.e. when he created it simultaneously), then Adam, when
he was formed from the slime—as is more credible of his perfect man-
hood—was not made in any other manner than by those causes by
which God made man in the six days. It was not only that he could
come into existence like that but that he had to come into existence that
way. God did not work against a cause which he doubtlessly wanted to
institute any more than he makes anything against his will. But if he
did not pre-establish all the causes at the beginning but reserved some
of them in his will, then those which he kept in his will are not among
those which he created by endowing them with necessity. Nevertheless,
those which he reserved in his will cannot be contrary to those which
he established by his will because God cannot be contrary to himself.
So he arranged some of them in such a manner that what results from
the cause can happen but not by necessity while he hid others so that
something comes from them necessarily. From these he made it possible
to come into existence.56
While nothing occurs in the world without the divine will for Augus-
tine, the causes placed in the world at the instantaneous creation of all
things carry a kind of necessity of emergence according to their inherent

56
De Genesi ad litteram 6.18.29 where Augustine discusses the creation of Adam.
Quapropter, si omnium futurorum causae mundo sunt insitae, cum ille factus est dies,
quando Deus creavit omnia simul; non aliter Adam factus est, cum de limo formatus est,
sicut est credibilius jam perfectae virilitatis, quam erat in illis causis, ubi Deus hominem
in sex dierum operibus fecit. Ibi enim erat non solum ut ita fieri posset, verum etiam
ut ita eum fieri necesse esset. Tam enim non fecit Deus contra causam, quam sine
dubio volens praestituit, quam contra voluntatem suam non facit. Si autem non omnes
causas in creatura primitus condita praefixit, sed aliquas in sua voluntate servavit; non
sunt quidem illae quas in sua voluntate servavit, ex istarum quas creavit necessitate
pendentes: non tamen possunt esse contrariae quas in sua voluntate servavit, illis quas
sua voluntate instituit; quia Dei voluntas non potest sibi esse contraria. Istas ergo sic
condidit, ut ex illis esse illud, cujus causae sunt, possit; sed non necesse sit: illas autem
sic abscondit, ut ex eis esse necesse sit hoc, quod ex istis fecit ut esse possit.

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 natural knowledge and textual meaning in augustine 137

causal structure. Adam was created whether we see him as fully

formed at the moment of creation or as emerging from the inherent
causal forms placed in the world at the beginning. The latter pos-
sibility—Augustine’s explanation of Adam coming from the dust of
Earth—is still a divine act because the cause of the later event comes
from the divine will. With such a view it is easy to see why Augustine
saw a congruence between the biblical story of creation and a concept
like the rationes causales (seminales).
Like the meaning of the Stoic term logos spermatikos, Augustine inter-
preted the rationes as abstract principles, analogous to the rationes aeternae
in the mind of God.57 He illustrated the root meaning of seminales with
a very concrete example:
in the seed all those parts existed primordially, not in the dimensions of
bodily mass but as a force and causal power. . . . here exists in the tiny
grain that power more wonderful and excellent by which moisture was
mingled with earth forming a matter capable of being changed into
wood . . . with all parts developed into a well-ordered whole . . . In the seed,
then, there was invisibly present all that would develop in time into a
tree. And in this same way we must picture the world, when God made
all things together.58
These principles are abstract in the sense that they are not visible but
hidden within the internal structure of forms but they are concrete
in that they are not simply ideas in the mind of God. They are in
(insita) the structure of creation. God “grows” the world through the
act of placing these seeds within the structure of emergent forms. As
was evident in the quotation from De Genesi ad litteram 6.19.29, these
primordial forms have a certain necessity about their emergence. The
necessity latent in the rationes seminales arises freely from the divine will
and therefore is not some kind of inherent necessity that operates apart
from God, but once placed in (insita) the created order these rationes
become the explanatory principle behind emergence. The principle of
development can be discerned by observation and Augustine is cer-
tain that the causes of development reside in the “nature of the body

57
On Augustine’s use of rationes aeternae see Clarke 1982.
58
De Genesi ad litteram 5.23.44–45 (Hill 2002, 299–300) see also 2.15.30 (Hill 2002,
209–210) where Augustine discusses whether the Moon was created half or full, and
states that if an object develops into perfection, this was hidden within it because no
work created by God is perfected outside of God.

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itself.”59 The rationes seminales, though not visible, are nevertheless physi-
cal causal mechanisms latent in all undeveloped forms.60 What triggers
the actual development of the organism from seed form to perfected
form? The specific timetable for the emergence of perfected forms is
already given in the rationes seminales always subject of course to God’s
inscrutable will.61 This concept of the rationes seminales is clearly built
on a notion of natural law:
God has so established fixed laws (certas temporum leges) governing the
temporal development of the types and characteristics of things in nature
which develop from a hidden to an open state that His will might reign
supreme. Indeed, He gave numbers to his creation by his own power
but he did not bind that power by those numbers.62
Later in book nine Augustine states the idea of natural law even more
clearly:
The whole course of nature that we are so familiar with has certain
natural laws of its own, according to which both the spirit of life which
is a creature has drives and urges that are somehow predetermined and
which even a bad will cannot bypass, and also the elements of this material
world have their distinct energies and qualities, which determine what
each is or is not capable of, what can or cannot be made from which. It
is from these base-lines of things, so to say, that whatever comes to be
takes in its own particular time span, its risings and continued progress,
its ends and its settings, according to the kind of thing it is.63
This notion of natural law must not be confused with modern notions
such as we find in the philosophy of the Renaissance and later thought
because Augustine’s notion is much broader. Modern conceptions of

59
De Genesi ad litteram 6.16.27.
60
On the invisibility of the rationes seminales see De Genesi ad litteram 5.4.8–11 and
6.6.10–11 and 6.16.27.
61
Cf. “So it remains the case that creatures live in both modes, whether they go
through time in the usual manner or in that rare and miraculous manner, as it pleases
God to do what is agreeable to a specific time.” De Genesi ad litteram 6.14.25 (translation
mine). (See also Hill 2002, 315).
62
De Genesi ad litteram 6.13.23. Hill translates numerus as “numerical rhythms” (Hill
2002, 314). Ita enim certas temporum leges generibus qualitatibusque rerum in mani-
festum ex abdito producendis attribuit, ut ejus voluntas sit super omnia. [col. 349]
Potentia quippe sua numeros creaturae dedit, non ipsam potentiam eisdem numeris
alligavit.
63
See also a similar statement in 9.17.32 (Hill translation). In the next paragraph
Augustine says, “the formulae (rationes) for these and suchlike standards are not only
in God, but have also been inserted by him in created things and set fermenting in
them.” 9.17.32 (Hill translation).

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natural law would not include the possibility of miracles whereas for
Augustine the observed regularities of nature and those rapid changes of
nature called miracles (e.g., water becoming wine) are all encompassed
in the potentialities which God has placed in the world through the
rationes seminales. Augustine tends to see miracles as something remark-
able only to humans but not to God.64 In the first creation, God placed
everything that was necessary for both the ongoing development of the
world and the miraculous. Both are governed by law but in different
ways. The work of creation described in Genesis is complete because
God has placed into the world everything necessary and sufficient for
its subsequent development. In another sense, God’s creative work is
continuing since all the observable changes in the world are actualities
which have their origin in the creative potentialities placed in the world
in the first creative act of God.65
Why does Augustine invoke this concept? One of Augustine’s major
concerns seems to be that the rationes seminales are necessary to explain
how God is still actively involved in the perfection of new forms which
have emerged after the original creation. The concept allows him to
maintain divine providence without the necessity of posting ongoing
creative activity. God’s work is perfect and complete, but the rationes
seminales explain how it can be both complete and still emerging. The
principles instilled in the original creation explain the actual develop-
ment of the forms.
How does the concept rationes seminales function in exegesis? It allows
the interpreter to reconcile apparent contradictions in the text. This is
how Augustine explains the seeming contradiction between the words
“God finished his work” and the evident fact that new life forms did and
continue to emerge after the original creative week.66 It also allows him
to reconcile the differences evident between the two creation accounts.

64
De Genesi ad litteram 6.13.24 “When events like this happen, they do not happen
against nature except for us, who have a limited knowledge of nature, but not for God,
for whom nature is what He made” (Taylor 1983).
65
De Genesi ad litteram 6.14.25 “It can be rightly asked in what manner (quomodo) the
causal reasons were placed into the world when He first created it.” Augustine proceeds
to consider two possible answers and sees problems with both. Then he concludes “So
it remains the case that God used both means to create his creatures, whether following
the customary course of nature or by those rare and miraculous means which God
was pleased to conform to time.”
66
De Genesi ad litteram 5.23.46 “God, then, creates no new creatures, but He directs
and rules by His governance of the world all the things He made together, and thus He
works without ceasing, resting and working at the same time.” See also 5.20.40–41.

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Augustine takes Gen. 2:4–5 as a summary of the first account in which

God’s creative activity was the simultaneous creation of all things and
involved no passage of time (omnia simul sine ullis temporalium morarum
intervallis). Gen. 2:6 begins the temporal sequence of events which fl ow
from God’s administrative activity.67 It also aids in explaining why the
text has just the form that it does (including lacunae). Augustine takes
the repetition “God saw that it was good” (Deus vidit quod esset bonum) in
Genesis 1 as an expression of the perfection of the created entity which
implies no need for further development. This phrase is purposefully
absent from the opening verses of Genesis because the original creation
was in fact “formless and void” (1:1, 2). The above appellation could
not be applied to it because it was in need of further, extensive develop-
ment. The work of the “six days” consisted of drawing out what was
already present in the formless mass. The perfected forms derived from
the formless mass are present as rationes seminales.68
Augustine also applies the concept to a variety of problems where
the text of Genesis does not specify the kind of details which the inter-
preter would like to know. Augustine does not know whether Adam
was created as a man or developed into manhood through time. Yet
Augustine is sure that whichever is true, God has used the fixed laws
of development to bring about the end result.69 This concept also had
the unexpected benefit of providing a framework for how the catholic
doctrine of the participation of all humans in Adam’s sin could be
true. His famous interpretation of Rom. 5:12, though in many respects
faulty, points up his readiness to use natural-philosophical notions to
explain a wide range of texts which do not bear directly on issues of
natural philosophy.70

Conclusion: Augustine a Subtle Exegete

For Augustine, ad litteram interpretation involved asking questions of

how the text was related to the actual courses of events which the text
narrates. This is undoubtedly why he calls literal interpretation an
inquiry into the sensus historicus. To inquire into the historical course

67
De Genesi ad litteram 5.11.27–28.
68
See De Genesi ad litteram 1.17.35.
69
See De Genesi ad litteram 6.14.25.
70
See Bonner 1970 and 1968, 242–247.

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 natural knowledge and textual meaning in augustine 141

of events touched upon by the Genesis text required the interpreter

to know the extra textual history apart from what the narrative sug-
gested. Otherwise, one could not make evaluative judgments about the
relations between event and text. And this requisite knowledge raised
a monumental problem in the case of Genesis because the events of
creation were so unique that they were almost entirely beyond con-
clusive demonstration. Understanding Augustine’s problematic in this
manner makes sense of his tentativeness and inconclusiveness regarding
the meaning of Genesis. It also explains why his “literal” interpreta-
tion appears so unliteral at times. Literal does not mean that there is
a one-to-one correspondence (or even one-to-few) between text and
event. For Augustine, ad litteram meant only a framework for asking
questions, not a basis for making precipitous textual judgments. And
because it is so difficult to arrive at judgments about text and event in
the Genesis narrative, he finds that the only way to do so is to rely on
judgments about the history of creation which derive from outside of
Scripture. At best, the interpreter can narrow down the possibilities by
eliminating scenarios which contradict reason. When he is fortunate
enough to find concepts in natural philosophy (e.g., rationes seminales)
which help resolve difficulties in the text, then he can suggest these as
possible avenues of interpretation.
Noted Augustine scholars have seen in the Bishop of Hippo’s writ-
ings an attempt to counter the anti-intellectual tendencies in African
Christianity.71 This program is clear in Augustine’s insistence that there
can be no true contradiction between various parts of the Bible or
between biblical truth and true knowledge from outside the Bible. Of
course, such a concern with historical truth and the resultant claims
about the veracity of the Scriptures would have not arisen had he not
placed an emphasis on the ad litteram meaning of the text. In this respect,
Augustine’s emphasis became even greater in such central figures as
Thomas Aquinas who insisted that all higher or spiritual meanings had
to be rooted in the sensus litteralis.72 Like Augustine, the sensus litteralis
in medieval theory had a breadth of meaning which allowed for many
readings which moderns might be inclined to call non-literal.

71
See, for example, the comments of Pollmann 1999, 427.
72
Aquinas called the sensus historicus or litteralis the “first or primary sense” ( primum
sensum). See Summa Theologica Part 1, Question 1, Article 9 (Aquinas 1978).

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142 kenneth j. howell

My focus has been on understanding Augustine’s presentation of his

hermeneutics in the context of the fifth century, but his infl uence in
the early modern period is undeniable.73 Part of the reason, I suspect,
that Augustine became so infl uential in later cases where there seemed
to be confl ict between scriptural assertions and empirical knowledge
does not have to do so much with his specific interpretations of the
Genesis text as with his more general proposals about how to resolve
potential confl icts when they arise. Because Augustine did not address
the confl icts in a systematic treatise as some might have preferred, this
meant that later readers would have to comb through the De Genesi
ad litteram for clues as to how to handle the confl icts that faced them.
This, of course, is exactly what happened in the Letter to the Grand
Duchess Christina where Galileo artfully pieced together quotations from
the North African father to argue that he had patristic support for
his strategies of reconciliation. However, Galileo was not in any way
unique in this regard for many writers in the early modern period had
some knowledge of Augustine’s interpretative exercises.74 Augustine, as
transmitted through the medieval scholastics, was a central infl uence
for the hermeneutical setting in which figures like Bellarmine, Campan-
ella, Foscarini, and Galileo argued.75 In both Catholic and Protestant
realms of early modern Europe, Augustinian authority always lay in
the background. It consisted of the firm belief that there could be no
true confl ict between truths of the natural world and truths of Scripture
just as there could be no true confl ict between two passages within the
Scriptures which might seem to be in confl ict. Augustinian infl uence is
evident in the literature on astronomy and scriptural authority during
the Scientific Revolution.
Let me give two brief examples. One is the letter Cardinal Roberto
Bellarmino sent to the Carmelite priest Paolo Foscarini after reading

73
Even though Augustine viewed Manicheanism as an aberrant form of Christianity,
my scope has not been to address questions of defining orthodoxy and heterodoxy in the
fifth century. I have had to place such concerns as might interest church historians in
the background in order to focus on Augustine’s engagement with the Genesis text.
74
Mauro Pesce has suggested that a more thorough knowledge of the use of
Augustinian hermeneutics (and exegesis) in post-Augustinian interpretation would be
extremely useful in placing Galileo’s reliance on Augustine in context. See Pesce 2005,
110 and note 30.
75
Recently, Ponzio (2005, 131–143) has suggested that Galileo’s use of Augustine
may derive from the Barnabite priest of Pisa Pomponio Tartaglia who sent Benedetto
Castelli quotations for Galileo’s use which he could use in his defense of his Coper-
nican opinion.

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 natural knowledge and textual meaning in augustine 143

the latter’s attempt to reconcile Copernicanism and the Bible. Bel-

larmino tells Foscarini that he would be ready to reconsider those
passages in Scripture which seem to teach the immobility of Earth if
a demonstration of Earth’s motion could be shown to him. Although
Bellarmino does not delineate what he means by a demonstration, given
the common educational background that both he and Foscarini shared
in Aristotle, he mostly likely means a syllogism based on empirically
sound premisses. This definition of demonstration was never articulated
by Augustine to my knowledge, but one can readily see that Bellarmino
is relying on Augustine’s notion of the compatibility of Scripture and
nature as well as on the Augustinian dictum to interpret Scripture in
the light of sure knowledge of nature.76 The other example comes from
a treatise by the Lutheran astronomer Georg Joachim Rheticus in
which he appealed to Augustine to argue that natural questions should
be settled not by appeal to authority but by investigation.77 Rheticus
appealed to Augustine’s example to show that Christian theology never
tried to place an obstacle in the path of empirical research because
it affirmed, as did almost all parties in the Galileo affair, that all true
natural knowledge derived from the same Author who was the ultimate
source of the Scriptures.
In this paper I have attempted to show how careful reading of Augus-
tine’s commentaries on the Genesis creation narrative, especially De
Genesi ad litteram, reveals a threefold pattern in the fifth-century bishop’s
hermeneutics. Augustine held the Bible in the highest reverence and
sought to defend its truth against its critics. This apologetic function
could not be properly carried out, however, unless one assumed the
compatibility of true knowledge from outside the Bible with the Bible
itself. Such an assumption implied that refutation of natural claims had

76
“I say that if there were a true demonstration that the sun was in the center
of the universe and the earth in the third sphere, and that the sun did not travel
around the earth, but the earth circled around the sun, then it would be necessary
to proceed with great caution in explaining the passages of Scripture which seemed
contrary, and we would rather have to say that we did not understand them than to
say that something was false which had been demonstrated. But I do not believe that
there is any such demonstration; none has been shown to me.” Cardinal Bellarmine to
Paolo Foscarini April 12, 1615 in Favaro 1890–1909, 12:160. See the English trans. in
Finocchiaro 1989, 67–69.
77
Reijer Hooykaas claimed to have discovered Rheticus’s long lost treatise reconcil-
ing Scripture and Copernicanism though the document does not bear his name. In
view of the lack of contrary arguments, I have accepted Hooykaas’s attribution and
discuss Augustine’s infl uence on Rheticus in Howell 2002, 57–67.

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144 kenneth j. howell

to come from within natural inquiry since the sacred authors did not
have the construction of a natural philosophy as their aim, even when
they spoke about nature. This meant that true knowledge of nature
could act as a stimulant to investigate meanings of the biblical text
compatible with that knowledge. It was not only wrong but sacrilegious
to claim one’s interpretation of the Bible against manifest reason to
the contrary. When the Bible spoke about nature, it did not intend to
give the specific information that one might discover through natural
inquiry. In this way, Augustine thought that natural philosophy might
sometimes be properly used to fill in where Scripture had spoken in
generalities. For Augustine, the Bible was a source of truth but not
in competition with nature because the God of nature and the God
revealed in the Bible is one and the same Author of all Truth.

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of the Church, especially in Saint Augustine. The 1990 Saint Augustine Lecture.
Augustinian Studies 2: 1–33.

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 CHAPTER FIVE

ENTERING “THIS SUBLIME AND BLESSED

AMPHITHEATRE”: CONTEMPLATION OF NATURE
AND INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE IN THE
PATRISTIC PERIOD1

Paul M. Blowers

In his Homilies on the Hexaemeron, Basil of Caesarea summons his con-

gregation to enter the grand stadium or amphitheatre (theatron) of
creation and to explore with him there the profundities of nature. It is
not enough, says Basil, for Christians to remain mere spectators. Rather
they must become athletes or fellow contestants (synagônistai ) pledged to
the investigation (exetasis) and contemplation (theôria) of the mysteries of
the cosmos and to the discovery (heurêsis) of the truth: “You [too] can
fill up this sublime and blessed amphitheatre.”2
Basil’s striking metaphor here for contemplating the natural world
indicates that, by the fourth century, what was becoming an important
spiritual exercise within monastic communities was also being encour-
aged devotionally and liturgically among the faithful in the church. He
recommends that the contemplation of nature, like the interpretation
of scripture, necessitates existential and ascetical discipline on the part
of all Christians. As Basil would have it, Christians are to engross
themselves in creation as though they were in the middle of a grand
contest or drama still unfolding in time and space. Wonder or admi-
ration will not suffice. They must be players, engaged participants, in
solidarity not only with Basil himself, their guide, but with the Creator
who intends every intricate detail of the world—like every detail in the
scriptural text—to reveal his gracious and providential purposes. The
universe, this “ancient city” as Basil calls it, will ultimately yield its own
evidence of the tragedy of the fall, the salutary design of humanity’s

1
Response to Part 1.
2
Basil of Caesarea 2006, 324–6 (Hom. in hex. 6.1). Cf. ibid., 245 (Hom. in hex.
4.1), where Basil speaks on the opposite hand of the “theatre abounding in impure
spectacles” that captivates those who are infatuated simply with the pleasurable aspects
of the world. (Translations are my own unless otherwise noted.)

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true nature and vocation, and the foretastes of eternal beauty. And
yet the true starting point of this exploration and contemplation will
not be the tenets of human wisdom about the cosmos but the creation
narratives in Genesis—“what God taught his servant [Moses] when he
spoke with him in person, without enigmas.”3
Although writing in the fourth century, Basil’s perspective signals
much about the interface between the contemplation of nature and the
interpretation of the Bible in the broader patristic age. This chapter will
focus on four concurrent themes that elucidate that interrelation in some
representative early Christian thinkers: (1) the epistemic, interpretive,
and ascetical conditions of reading Scripture and nature in the mode
of spiritual contemplation (theôria); (2) the articulation of the analogy
of the “two books”—Bible and creation—in patristic hermeneutics; (3)
the mutual insinuation of the logoi of cosmos and Scripture in elicit-
ing a common metanarrative of creation and redemption; and (4) the
assumption of natural-philosophical issues and considerations into the
essentially contemplative reading of scriptural creation texts.
Basil’s claim, noted above, that the first principles (archai ) for exploring
creation lie in God’s revelation to the prophet Moses, not in worldly
wisdom (i.e., metaphysics or natural philosophy), is of more than pass-
ing significance. Looking back to the text sometimes called the premier
Christian treatise of physics, Origen’s De principiis (Peri Archôn, ca. 225),
a work certainly known by Basil, much debate has surrounded the
identification of the archai. Did Origen understand the archai according
to the Middle Platonism of his time, as the agreed-upon ontological
foundations of the cosmos? Numerous scholars have argued so, since
Origen’s treatise takes the form (in Books I–III) of a progressive analysis
of rudimentary truths concerning God, spiritual and material creation,
the embodiment of souls, providence and free will, the destiny of the
universe, and so on. Brian Daley has cogently argued, however, that
such is a premature explanation of the archai in the De principiis, a work
that culminates in a tour de force on the interpretation of the Bible
(Book 4). According to Daley, Origen looks to develop an integrated
body of Christian doctrine wherein the accepted philosophical axioms
concerning God and creation are actually preliminary to the archai
of biblical revelation, which are not interpretive methods per se but
principles concerning the intrinsic economy of Scripture and its overall

3
Ibid., 324–6 (Hom. in hex. 6.1).

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 nature and interpretation of the bible 149

purpose of elevating believers from carnal to spiritual understanding.

Origen’s priority is to vindicate (against Gnosticism and Marcionism)
the wholeness of biblical truth, and to identify the connecting links,
already previewed in the apostolic Rule of Faith, whereby the Bible
makes ultimate sense of the world as we view it in our own fragmen-
tary perception.4
Origen had undoubtedly found inspiration here from his Alexandrian
predecessor Clement. In Book IV of his Stromateis, Clement proposes
advancing toward the
doctrine of nature ( physiologia) of the Gnostic tradition in accordance
with the canon of truth,5 or rather initiation in that tradition based on
consideration of the origins of the cosmos and ascending thence to the
domain of theology proper (theologia).6
But as he further cautions, “it is right that we consider the beginning
(archê ) of this tradition the Genesis given us in prophecy.”7 Cosmogonic
theories may be initially helpful, but only Scripture itself, interpreted by
learned and spiritually mature authorities in the church, will determine
a genuinely theological understanding of the universe.8 Moreover, all
of Scripture—but especially Genesis in this regard—is prophetic in the
broad sense of gradually disclosing to Christians how God’s revelation
has been (and is still being) fulfilled in nature and in salvation history.
Both Clement and Origen portray the integrated interpretation of
nature and Scripture as an essentially contemplative exercise, and as
an ongoing heuristic journey from preliminary knowledge (epistêmê ) to
higher spiritual insight, or gnôsis.9 Along the way, the Logos himself

4
Daley 1998.
5
The “canon of truth” here is simply another designation of the Rule of Faith
(regula fidei ), which appears in various forms in Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Origen as a
digest of apostolic teaching in Scripture.
6
Clement of Alexandria 2001, 58–60 (Stromateis 4.1.3). Immediately beforehand
(ibid. 4.1.2), Clement states his intention of considering Greek and Barbarian physical
theories of the archai as a cursory foray into “theology” before moving on to matters
of prophecy, that is, the authoritative testimony of Scripture.
7
Ibid., 60.
8
On Clement’s precise understanding of physiologia and its transmission within a
“Gnostic tradition” of interpretation, see Rizzerio 1996, 39–99.
9
Clement of Alexandria 1954, 73–4, 94–5 (Strom. 2.11.48–49; 2.17.76–77); Origen
1980 304–8, 422–6 (De princ. 4.2.3; 4.4.9–10). For Clement’s grounding of the whole
epistemic quest in faith ( pistis), see Clement of Alexandria 1954, esp. 42–7, 73–6 (Strom.
2.4.12–19; 2.11.48–52).

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is the Pedagogue in the classroom of the universe.10 Only pupils well

trained in the archai of the cosmos and the superior archai of Scripture
will be in a position to advance toward transcendent comprehension.
The primary condition of revelation, and thus of knowledge, is the
abiding presence of the Logos, not intellectual aptitude, even if sanc-
tified intelligence also has a role. As Origen states in his Commentary
on the Song of Songs, the intimate visitation of the Logos (Bridegroom),
symbolized in what the Song evocatively calls the “kisses of his mouth”
(1:1), is instrumental to spiritual illumination.11 Because the Logos him-
self conditions and bestows insight, therefore, the whole interpretive
quest is also an asceticism, a rigorous spiritual paideia in which only the
virtuous and the diligent are granted knowledge. There simply will be
no ‘science’ of Scripture or of nature apart from the life of the soul,
which by its own origin, structure, and relation to the material body is
already thoroughly implicated in the cosmic story.
The contemplation (theôria) that Clement, Origen, and other later
patristic writers commend, with reference reciprocally to the “con-
templation of scripture” (theôria graphikê ) and the “contemplation of
nature” (theôria physikê ), is a unique, spiritual mode of understanding
that demands clarification of its precise scope.12 It would be wrong to
characterize it purely as pious speculation or mystical intuition devoid
of a critical or investigative component, since it can subsume the process
of meticulous exegetical analysis of the biblical text (of which Origen
is the classic exemplar) as well as close observation of the nature and
dispositions of created things. And yet theôria is essentially visionary.
It is a patient process of ever more refined discernment of the deep
structure of Scripture and cosmos as economies of revelation, having as
its ultimate purpose an intimate encounter with the triune Creator.
Theôria in the ancient exegesis of Scripture is less a method or even
purely a specific sense (though in some writers it becomes a synonym
for spiritual, as opposed to literal, interpretation13) than a disciplined
attention to the larger spiritual history into which a text or even an
individual word fits. Theôria presupposes that the Bible in its totality
points toward an overarching objective or skopos, the fullness of the

10
Clement of Alexandria 2002, 1–64 (Paedagogus, Bk. 1).
11
Origen 1991, 176. (Comm. on the Song of Songs 1.1).
12
For an excellent comprehensive analysis of the many dimensions of contemplation
(theôria) in patristic thought, see Lamaître et al. 1953; Olphe-Galliard, 1953.
13
E.g., Gregory of Nyssa 1991, 33 (De vita Moysis, Bk. 2).

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revelation of God in Jesus Christ.14 Recent studies have shown that,

despite the early Alexandrian preference for allêgoria and anagôgê, draw-
ing from the literal or historical sense of a text its higher spiritual
meaning, in tension with the Antiochene school and its proclivity for
theôria as a spiritual interpretation thoroughly anchored in the historical
sense (historia),15 exegetes from both of these broad traditions aimed at
readings that opened up the moral and spiritual horizon of biblical
texts for the church.16 An ancient event or figure ( typos) in the Bible,
as Origen and others recognized in Paul’s assertion in 1 Cor. 10:11,
could and should be interpreted for the present instruction of the
Christian faithful.17 Patristic exegetes, moreover, generally upheld the
prophetic potential of all Scripture, the ability of any and all texts to
point toward new fulfillments within the Christian dispensation, which
in their judgment was still unfolding in its fullness in the foreground
and eschatological purview of the church.18 As Henri de Lubac has
noted of patristic hermeneutics,
Everything culminates in a Great Fact, which in its unique individuality
has multiple repercussions; which dominates history and is the bearer of
all light as of all spiritual fecundity: the Fact of Christ.19
Frances Young has rightly argued that patristic exegesis is best under-
stood in terms of complex reading strategies that accommodated
multiple forms of interpretation serving such purposes as moral and
spiritual instruction, the decoding of prophecies, elaboration of doctrine,
or drawing out edifying images latent in biblical stories.20 Scriptural

14
On this patristic focus on the ‘mind’ or scope of the Bible as a whole, see Young
1997, 29–45; also O’Keefe and Reno 2005, 24–44.
15
E.g., Diodore of Tarsus 1980, 7 (Comm. on Psalms, prol.).
16
See Young 1997, 161–85; cf. also Böhm 2004.
17
Origen 1980, 320–2 (De princ. 4.2.6). Cf. Maximus the Confessor 1980, 355 (Qu.
Thal. 49): “For the historical past always stands as present fact mystically, through
spiritual interpretation (theôria).”
18
Origen (1903, 12) in fact speaks of three phases of revelation: “Law” (indicating
the Hebrew scriptural tradition in general), “Gospel” (the Christian fulfillment regis-
tered in the New Testament’s testimony to Christ), and “Spiritual Gospel,” indicating
the fullness of the revelation as an eschatological reality (Comm. on John 1:9). For all
of Scripture, Maximus the Confessor (1980, 111) speaks of “the power of the literal
meaning (historia) in the Spirit, which is constantly being realized and abounding into
its fullness” (Qu. ad Thal. 17). John Breck (1986, 102–4) has appropriately related theôria
to what the Christian tradition eventually called the sensus plenior, the fuller meaning of
Scripture unfolded under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in the church’s experience.
19
de Lubac 1968, 164.
20
Young 1997, 186–213.

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types, symbols, narratives—the resources both of allêgoria and theôria—

could open up different sorts of correspondences and constellations of
meaning. Melito of Sardis in the second century, for example, presents
relatively straightforward correspondences in his homily On Pascha,
demonstrating how numerous details in the ancient Passover story
have been fulfilled and perfected in their antitypes in the narrative of
the sacrifice of Christ, the true paschal lamb.21 Origen and later (espe-
cially monastic) exegetes who carry on his legacy delight in speculating
about aspects of the text that seem at first sight impervious to spiritual
interpretation. Personal names, place names, numbers, subtle intrica-
cies of scriptural syntax and grammar, scandalous or vulgar elements
all can be mined for their spiritual benefit (ôpheleia).22 In expounding
the Noah story (Gen. 6:8–8:22), for instance, Origen can find spiritual
significance even in the precise specifications of the ark, all of which
remain, however, under the controlling typology connecting Noah with
Christ and the ark with the church.23 Antiochene exegetes, so often
critical of the arbitrariness of their Alexandrian counterparts, instead
explore patterns of meaning from within the narrative consistency or
prophetic potential of biblical texts.24 They see the Apostle Paul as doing
this very thing when he develops the Hagar-Sarah “allegory” in Gal.
4:24ff. By no means dissolving the historical veracity of the original
story of Hagar and Sarah in Genesis, Paul simply opens up the new
horizon of meaning of this pair vis-à-vis the present captive Jerusalem
and the free heavenly Jerusalem to come. Paul’s allegory, Diodore of
Tarsus claims, is really theôria.25
Beyond these differences of approach, however, one finds the persis-
tent urge among major patristic exegetes to extrapolate from Scripture
a theological metanarrative, to unfold the grand drama playing out

21
See Melito of Sardis 1979.
22
See de Lubac 1950, esp. 113–25; cf. Origen 1983, 147–151.
23
Origen 1976, 94–112 (Hom. in Gen. 2.4–6). Origen begins with square planks of
the ark’s exterior as a symbol of the church’s leadership, which protects it from heresy.
The “length and breadth and height” of the ark recall the “length and breadth and
height” of the cross (cf. Eph. 3:18). The multiple decks indicate, in one moral-spiri-
tual interpretation, the different ranks of beings in the cosmos from the lowest to the
highest.
24
For a helpful review of Antiochene theôria, see Breck 1986, 49–92, esp. 64–92.
25
Diodore of Tarsus 1980, 7 (Comm. on Psalms, prol.); cf. Theodore of Mopsuestia
1880, 72–87 (Comm. in Gal. 4:22–31).

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 nature and interpretation of the bible 153

between the origins and the consummation of the cosmos. Allegories,

types, even the adventurous symbolisms of Alexandrian exegetes, do
not stand on their own but feed a larger vision of things—theôria.
Irenaeus of Lyons, for example, who accuses Gnostics precisely of
ripping the elements of Scripture out of their true theological meta-
narrative,26 develops the Adam-Christ typology as the broad context
of Scripture as a whole. Accordingly, the incarnation, death, and resur-
rection of Jesus Christ, the New Adam, constitute the central climax
of the cosmic drama, thereby recapitulating God’s plan for creation (cf.
Eph. 1:10), giving meaning to all that comes before and after Christ.
Origen’s metanarrative, by contrast, rehearses the original union of
preexistent spiritual beings to God, their fall through negligence, their
embodiment in diverse bodies adapted to the severity of their lapse, their
redemption through the work of Christ and the all-provident Trinity,
and their once-for-all restoration to unity and stability in God. One
need not read far into Origen’s allegorical interpretation of Exodus,
Numbers, or Joshua, to see that their narratives of Israel’s pilgrimage
are allegories of the gradual ascent of all rational creatures toward
heavenly glory. Nevertheless, for Irenaeus and Origen alike, the cosmic
drama revealed in the Bible as a whole provides the interpretive scheme
into which all scriptural texts, and the details within those texts, must
be fitted and integrated.
Let us now turn to the development of patristic views on reading
nature. As a spiritual discipline within monastic or ecclesiastical set-
tings, it is imperative to keep in view that the contemplation of nature
(theôria physikê) was never segregated from scriptural interpretation. As
early as Origen, we find the beginnings of the analogy of Scripture
and cosmos as dual books authored by God through his Logos. Com-
menting on the “fields white for harvest” ( John 4:35), Origen describes
how the Logos has made himself present both in the field of Scripture
and the field of created beings, both of which are worthy objects of
contemplation.27 Elsewhere Origen juxtaposes the Creator’s providential
skill, manifested in the details of created things, with the providence
that informs every letter of Scripture.

26
Irenaeus of Lyons 1979, 112–52 (Against Heresies 1.8.1–1.9.5).
27
Origen 1903, 267–9 (Comm. on John 13.42).

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For once one admits that these scriptures are from the Creator of the
world, one must also be convinced that whatever they discover, who
search for the meaning of creation, must also be true of the meaning
of scripture.28
In the fourth century, Athanasius declares that creation, “as it were in
writing, indicates and proclaims its master and maker.”29 Ephrem the
Syrian similarly declares that “the keys of doctrine, which unlock all
of Scripture’s books, have opened up before my eyes the book of cre-
ation.”30 Likewise Evagrius Ponticus, the prolific Origenist and monastic
theologian, evidences the two books analogy in monastic piety, quoting
a dictum of St. Antony: “My book, philosopher, is the nature of [cre-
ated] beings, and it is there when I want to read the words (logoi) of
God.”31 Elsewhere, in a scholion on Ps. 138:16 (LXX), Evagrius expands
this analogy for his monastic audience, indicating that the logoi of God
must, through contemplation, also be imprinted on the vigilant mind
as though it were itself a third kind of book:
The book of God is the contemplation (theôria) of bodies and incorpo-
real beings in which a purified mind (nous) comes to be written through
knowledge ( gnôsis). For in this book are written the logoi of providence and
judgment, through which book God is known as Creator, wise, provident,
and judging: Creator through the things that have come from non-being
into being; wise through his concealed logoi; provident through those logoi
contributing to our virtue and knowledge; and furthermore judge, through
the variety of bodies of the reasoning beings, and through the multiform
worlds and the beings who comprise those ages.32
This analogy of three parallel books is later expounded even more
vividly by another Greek monastic theologian, Maximus the Confessor,
in the seventh century.
He who “gropes after God” (Acts 17:27) properly has discretion. Therefore
he who comes upon the law’s symbols intellectually, and who contemplates
the phenomenal nature of created beings scientifically, discriminates within

28
Origen, Comm. on Psalms 1.3, Migne 1857–86, 12: 1081A–B), excerpted in Balthasar
1984, 90. All Greek patristic texts from the Patrologia Graeca series (see Migne 1857–86)
are cited by volume number, column(s), and section(s).
29
Athanasius 1971, 94–95 (Contra gentes 34).
30
Ephrem the Syrian 1989, 108 (Hymns on Paradise 6.1).
31
Evagrius 1971, 694 (Praktikos 92); trans. in Evagrius of Pontus 2003b, 112.
32
Evagrius, Scholia in Psalmos 138.16 (Migne 1857–86, 12: 1662), trans. in Dysinger
2005, 171–2 (slightly altered). The extension of the analogy to Scripture, world, and
soul also had precedent in Origen: de Lubac 1950, 346–55.

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 nature and interpretation of the bible 155

scripture, creation, and himself. He distinguishes, that is, between the let-
ter ( gramma) and the spirit ( pneuma) in scripture, between inner principle
(logos) and outward appearance (epiphaneia) in creation, and between the
intellect (nous) and sense (aisthêsis) in himself, and in turn unites his own
intellect indissolubly with the spirit of scripture and the inner principle
of creation. Having done this, he “discovers God.” For he recognizes,
as is necessary and possible, that God is in the mind, and in the inner
principle, and in the spirit; yet he is fully removed from everything mis-
leading, everything that drags the mind down into countless opinions, in
other words, the letter, the appearance, and his own sense experience . . .
If someone mingles and confuses the letter of the law, the outward
appearance of visible things, and his own sense with each other, he is
“blind and short-sighted” (2 Pet. 1:9) and suffers from ignorance of the
true Cause of created beings.33
Origen, Evagrius, and Maximus alike employ the image of the Logos
incarnating or inscribing himself in the three books, making himself
available through the logoi, a term simultaneously applicable to the
constitutive principles of all created things, the words or meanings of
Scripture, and by epistemological extension the reason (logos) implanted
in all rational beings (logikoi). The unifying strand in the various nuances
of the logoi, whether in cosmological, scriptural, or anthropological
contexts, is the immanence of the divine Logos, the Word who indwells
every medium of revelation.34 The sacramentality of the text of Scrip-
ture or the text of creation is such that the divine presence itself is
communicated, the Logos penetrating not only these material texts but
the subjective exercises of human contemplation and interpretation.
The personal presence of the Logos in the logoi, understood by some
writers as the very intentions (thelêmata) of God for the world,35 secures
the integrity and coherence of God’s revelatory plan in the economies
of creation and Scripture. The Logos mutually insinuates these two
economies such that they tell the same truth, as it were, though that
truth is arrived at only through intensive contemplation accompanied by
rigorous ascetical discipline.36 Maximus the Confessor vividly describes
the interchangeable relation of natural law (creation) and written law

33
Maximus the Confessor 1980, 225 (Qu. Thal. 32); cf. also Maximus, Ambiguorum
liber 33 (Migne 1857–86, 91: 1285C–1288A). Maximus’s critical appropriation of the
work of Evagrius has been abundantly documented.
34
See Blowers 1991, 117–30.
35
Cf. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, De divinis nominibus 5.8 (Migne 1857–86, 3:
824C); Maximus the Confessor 1980, 95 (Qu. Thal. 13).
36
See Dysinger 2005, 34–44.

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(Scripture) by suggesting that creation is a ‘bible’ just as the Bible is a

kind of ‘cosmos.’
I am thinking here, on the one hand, of the natural law, which is ordained
as uniformly as possible according to reason, and which, in the manner of
a bible, contains through its interrelated wonder the harmonious web of
the universe. This “bible” has, as its “letters” and “syllables,” the things
that are primary, immediate, and particular to us, and the bodies that
become dense through the conjunction of numerous qualities; its “words”
are the more universal of these things, which are distant and less dense.
The Logos, who reads this book, having wisely written on these things
and ineffably inscribed himself in them, completes the book, providing
us the idea only that God is, not what he is. He leads us through pious
accumulation of diverse appearances unto a single representation of the
truth, proportionately offering himself for us to behold through visible
things as their Creator. On the other hand, I also have in mind the written
law, which is ordained for our instruction. Through the things it wisely
dictates, the written law is constituted, like another “cosmos,” of heaven
and earth, and the things in between—that is, of ethical, natural, and
theological philosophy. It displays the unspeakable power to make known
its Dictator, and demonstrates that the two laws are interchangeably the
same in relation to each other: the written law is potentially identical
with the natural law, while the natural law is habitually identical with the
written law . . . For just as, when we call the words (logoi ) of holy scripture
the “garments” of the Logos, and interpret its ideas as his “fl esh,” we
conceal him with the former and reveal him with the latter, so too when
we call the visible species and external forms of created things “gar-
ments,” and interpret the principles (logoi) according to which they were
created as “fl esh,” we likewise conceal him with the former and reveal
him with the latter. For the Logos, who is Creator of the universe and
Lawgiver and by nature invisible, in appearing conceals himself, and in
hiding manifests himself . . .37
In the Latin patristic tradition as well, Augustine aligns scriptural
words and created entities as signs (signa) pointing us to the reality (res)
of revelation, which is at bottom the Trinity itself.38 This mutuality of
the words (logoi ) of Scripture and the principles (logoi ) of creation thus
established, nature is to be read in the same contemplative mode as
Scripture. A literal reading of creation would be only a starting point,
always bearing the danger of superficiality. After all, it could be based

37
Ambiguorum liber 10 (Migne 1857–86, 91: 1128D–1129C). On this text, see also
Blowers 1993, 145–9.
38
Augustine 1995, 12–16 (De doctrina Christiana 1.1.1–5.12). See also Otten 1995,
261–3.

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 nature and interpretation of the bible 157

on mere curiosity, a disposition which, though sometimes positive since

it can motivate investigation of natural evidences of the Creator, risks
deviating into the arrogant fixations of heretics or the presumptuous-
ness of the philosophers.39 Vain infatuation with nature, moreover, is a
primary ascetical vice and a threat to the progress of the spiritual life,
according to Augustine.40 On the other hand, as was noted earlier of
Basil in his hexaemeral homilies, wonderment (thauma) is legitimate,41
though alone inadequate. The literal or phenomenal order and beauty
of the world, given to doxology, is worthy in its own right, and Basil
explicitly resists adventurous allegorical interpretation of created
things.42 But this phenomenal order is always an inducement to deeper
exploration and contemplation, a point on which Basil is surpassed by
his younger brother Gregory of Nyssa. Gregory finds inspiration from
Ecclesiastes, understanding the Preacher’s expression of the futility
(Eccles. 1:2) of visible creation not as a disparagement but as a goad to
press the mind beyond the ephemeral to the true stability and goodness
of creation in God.43 Doing so, however, opens up numerous interpretive
complexities, and so, in his own Apologia in hexaemeron, Gregory provides
a kind of philosophical and theological supplement to the doxological
approach to creation taken in Basil’s homilies.44
What might a spiritual or contemplative reading of creation look like?
It would certainly serve the same ends (noted above) as contemplative
reading of Scripture, and be trained by the same concern to discern
an overarching metanarrative of God’s purposes in and for the world.
Already in Scripture, created things can indeed be crucial types (typoi )
and symbols in the divine economy, as early Christian exegetes observed

39
E.g., Tertullian 1957, 99–101, 107–8 (On the Prescription of Heretics 8, 14). Tertul-
lian explicitly mentions the heretics’ misappropriation of Jesus’s statement “Seek and
you shall find” (Matt. 7:7). Cf. Augustine 1992, 42–4 (De moribus ecclesiae catholicae et de
moribus Manichaeorum 1.21.38), who lambastes the Manichaeans’ “inquisitiveness and
eagerness” and “desire for vain knowledge” as tantamount to idolatry. On the patristic
assessment of curiosity, see Groh 2003, 77–8, 93–5. Specifically on Augustine’s view
of it, see Torchia 1999 and Blumenberg 1961.
40
See Augustine 1981, 182, 184–5 (Confessions 10.34.51; 10.35.54–55).
41
See Basil of Caesarea 2006, 284 (Hom. in hex. 5.2).
42
Basil of Caesarea 2006, 478–80 (Hom. in hex. 9.1).
43
Gregory of Nyssa 1986, 281–5 (Hom. in Eccl. 1.2). Here we have, in effect, a
cosmological counterpart of Origen’s view (see Origen 1980, 334–4) that Scripture is
replete with obstacles (skandala)—difficulties, obscurities, complexities, apparent falsi-
ties—that the Holy Spirit has intentionally implanted in the biblical text to cajole the
interpreter and encourage deeper research into its meaning (De princ. 4.2.9).
44
Gregory of Nyssa, Apologia in hexaemeron (Migne 1857–86, 44: 61–124).

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in Peter’s vision (theôria; horama) of the descending sheet replete with

‘unclean’ animals symbolizing the Gentiles ripe for conversion (Acts
10:9–17).45
A classic typological reading of water appears in certain early Syrian
Christian writers who—once more inspired by Scripture’s own typolo-
gies—expand on various correspondences among the ancient waters of
creation, the rivers of paradise, the waters of the Flood, the Red Sea of
the Exodus tradition, the waters of the Virgin’s womb, the Jordan River
in which Jesus was baptized, the water fl owing from the pierced side
of the crucified Christ, and the waters used in contemporary baptisms
in the church.46 Long before, Tertullian had suggested that the nature
and “pristine privilege” of the element of water in the divine economy
was to be an agent of creation and redemption, and he rehearses its
divine usages in significant detail. Tertullian would undoubtedly have
claimed that his is a literal reading of the logos of water, and yet the
analysis in his treatise On Baptism looks much like theôria, rehearsing
the spiritual history of water in creation and in Scripture, integrating
the rich typologies and symbolism of baptism from the New Testament
and Christian liturgical tradition.47
Moral and allegorical readings of the phenomena of creation appear
in a variety of early Christian sources. A classic case is patristic specula-
tion on the meaning of the legendary phoenix, the Arabian bird which
could allegedly live up to 500 years. The phoenix purportedly built itself
a casket of incense, myrrh, and aromatic plants, which it would enter
at death, only to rise alive again. Thus a number of patristic writers,
including Ambrose of Milan, interpreted the phoenix as a sublime
symbol of the mystery of resurrection.48 Basil (despite his aversion to
allegory!) and Ambrose in their respective hexaemeral homilies find
resurrection symbolism as well in a certain Indian worm known for its
dramatic transformation into a caterpillar and then a butterfl y.49 As in

45
See the interpretation of this text by John Chrysostom, Hom. in Acts 22 (Migne
1857–86, 60: 171–178). Chrysostom specifically mentions that Peter in this story has
been granted a spiritual vision (theôria).
46
On these typological connections see McDonnell 1996, esp. 101–10, 145–55,
209–17.
47
See Tertullian 1952, 67–79 (On Baptism 3–9).
48
Cf. Clement of Rome 2000, 142–4 (1 Clement 25.1–26.1); Ambrose of Milan
1897, 197 (Hexaemeron 5.23).
49
Cf. Basil 2006, 472 (Hom. in hex. 8.8); Ambrose of Milan 1897, 195–6 (Hex.
5.23).

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the third-century Physiologus, a Christian work allegorizing the virtues

and vices of animals, Ambrose discovered moral object lessons not only
in animals (fish, birds, mammals)50 but in irrational plant life, as we see
in an extended meditation on the palm tree:
Imitate the palm, man, so that it may be said also to you: “Your stature
is like a palm tree” (Cant 7:7). Preserve the verdure of your childhood
and of that natural innocence of youth which you have received from
the beginning, and may you possess the fruits, prepared in due time, of
what was planted along the course of the waters—and may there be no
fall to your leaf ! To this verdure of grace everfl ourishing in Christ, the
Church refers in saying: “I sat down under his shadow whom I desired”
(Cant 2:3). The Apostles received this privileged gift of verdure, whose
leaves could never fall, so as to provide shade for the healing of the sick
(cf. Acts 5:15). Their fidelity of heart and the superabundance of their
merits provided shade for bodily infirmities. Remain, therefore, planted in
the house of the Lord so as to fl ourish like a palm in his halls, whence the
grace of the Church may ascend for you and “the odor of your mouth
may be like apples and your throat like the best wine” so that you may
be inebriated in Christ (Cant. 7:8–9; 5:1).51
In ancient monastic literature, moral and allegorical interpretation
of creation took on even greater significance and sophistication. For
monks, of course, the temptation of infatuation with the whole visual
and sensual field of creation was unrelenting. Monastic theologians like
Evagrius consistently rail against the demonically inspired delusions
( phantasiai ) and errant mental representations (noemata) that derive from
shallow sense experience, fomenting illicit thoughts (logismoi) and passions
( pathê ) in the soul.52 These could, of course, arise even in the reading of
Scripture, itself a profusion of sensible images that might be dangerous
if not used well. In the desert, monks were regularly discouraged from
having written texts,53 including sacred Scripture, but even in worship
and meditation the imagination could be overcome with sensible images
from Scripture heard and memorized. An ironic hazard was that, over
and beyond distracting images of the world, even sensible images of
God could inhibit the ascetic in advancing toward sublime, imageless

50
See Ambrose of Milan 1897, 140–228 (Hex. 5.1–6.5). The Physiologus and Ambrose
provided precedent for later philosophers and intellectuals in the Western Christian
tradition; see Harrison 1998.
51
Ambrose of Milan 1897, 108–9 (Hex. 3.17); trans. in Ambrose of Milan 1961,
121–2 (slightly altered).
52
See e.g., Evagrius of Pontus 1998, 208–16 (On Thoughts 17–18).
53
E.g., Evagrius of Pontus 1971, 684 (Praktikos 92).

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prayer and knowledge ( gnôsis) of the Trinity.54 A whole psychosomatic

therapeutics was in force, as the monk worked unceasingly to purify
sensually-informed thoughts (logismoi ) and to train his or her eyes to
serve the higher spiritual vision of theôria.55
One of the strategies in this therapeutic and contemplative discipline
was thus to invert the world of created things—whether observed in
nature or in Scripture—into a veritable pageant of symbols of the
moral and spiritual life. In Evagrius we see an even more intensive
and sapiential form of allegorizing created objects than was exhibited
in Basil, Ambrose, and the Physiologus. Like Origen, he spiritually
internalizes their meaning. In his treatise On the Eight Thoughts, for
example, Evagrius sets out numerous epigrams with mimetic natural
symbols appropriate to monks living in the wilderness:
A fierce wind will not move a tower; irascibility cannot carry off a soul
free from anger.
Water is driven by the force of the winds; the irascible person is troubled
by senseless thoughts.
The angry monk, like a solitary wild boar, saw some people and gnashed
his teeth.
The forming of a mist thickens the air; the movement of irascibility
thickens the intellect of the angry person.
A passing cloud darkens the sun; a thought of resentment darkens the
mind.56
Indeed, Evagrius assumes that the author of the biblical Proverbs, and
David in the Psalms, were already modeling this natural symbolism.
In a scholion on Prov. 27:25 (“Tend pasture and cut hay in the plain,
and gather grass from the mountains”) he writes:
The text calls the mind (nous) a “plain,” and the potential virtues within
it are “pasture.” Those who “tend” it “cut hay,” which is a symbol of
the knowledge of God ( gnôsis theou), which is also called “grass from
the mountains.” The “grass of the mountains” is the knowledge of the

54
Cf. John Cassian 1886, 289 (Conference 10.3), where the issue is the fact that
Scripture itself calls the human creature the “image of God” (Gen. 1:26); Evagrius
of Pontus 2003b, 199–201, 205–6 (On Prayer 66–73, 113–120).
55
This rigorous process is a pervasive theme in Evagrius’s treatises On the Eight
Thoughts (De octo spiritibus malitiae), On Thoughts (Peri logismôn), Reflections (Skemmata), and
On Prayer (De oratione). See the excellent translations by Sinkewicz, with introductions,
in Evagrius of Pontus 2003b, 66–90, 136–216.
56
Evagrius of Pontus 2003b, 80 (On the Eight Thoughts 4.2–6). Cf. Maximus the
Confessor 1980, 399–403 (Qu. Thal. 51).

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holy powers, which is suitable to the more irrational state of souls.57 For
scripture customarily calls mountains holy. David in this same way lifts
his soul “to the mountains, whence his help comes” (Ps. 120:1 LXX),
and furthermore says, “The mountains skipped like rams, and the hills
like ewe-lambs” (Ps. 113:4 LXX) for the salvation of Israel. If the angels
rejoice over a single soul who repents (Luke 15:7), how much more do they
rejoice over a multitude who pass from wickedness to virtue. Wherefore
only knowledge of the holy angels feeds the virtues in us, whence the soul
puts on compassion, goodness, patience, humility (cf. Col. 3:12), faith,
self-control, love (cf. Col. 3:14) along with the good things they gener-
ate. That David too calls rational souls “plains” can be learned from the
following texts: “and your plains shall be filled with fatness” (Ps. 64:12
LXX), and a little further on, “the valleys shall abound with corn, they
shall cry out and indeed sing hymns” (Ps. 64:14 LXX). A “hymn” and
a “cry” can only be produced by a rational nature.58
This kind of symbolism, as Evagrius well knows, only modestly begins to
dig below the surface of the created order. Ascetics are called to a kind
of contemplation of the logoi of created things that the angels themselves
enjoy and exemplify. In one passage, he distinguishes between angelic,
demonic, and human thoughts concerning the logos of gold:
First, angelic thoughts are concerned with the investigation of the natures
of things and search out their spiritual principles (logoi ). For example, the
reason why gold was made and why it is sand-like and scattered through
the lower regions of the earth, and is discovered with much labour and
toil; how when it is discovered it is washed and delivered to the taber-
nacle, the incense burner, the censers, and the vessels (cf. Exod. 25:29,
31; 27:1–3) from which by the grace of the Saviour the king of Babylon
no longer drinks (cf. Dan. 5:1–30), but it is Cleopas who brings a heart
burning with these mysteries (Luke 24:32). The demonic thought neither
knows nor understands these things, but without shame it suggests only
the acquisition of sensible gold and predicts the enjoyment and esteem
that will come from this. The human thought neither seeks the acquisition
of gold nor is concerned with investigating what gold symbolizes; rather,
it merely introduces in the intellect the simple form of gold separate
from any passion of greed. The same reasoning can be applied to other
matters by mentally engaging the exercise of this rule.59

57
Evagrius means by this that the knowledge of the holy powers, or angels, is a
necessary food for the “more irrational” (i.e., “less rational”) state of souls. Souls need
to be instructed first by the angels in order to advance to that greater “rationality” in
which they can enjoy the more sublime knowledge of God.
58
Evagrius of Pontus 1987, 430 (Schol. in Prov. 341).
59
Evagrius of Pontus 2003b, 158 (On Thoughts 8). As Géhin and Guillaumont
(Evagrius of Pontus 1998, 179n.) and Sinkewicz (Evagrius of Pontus 2003b, 268n.) all

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In the famous tripartite division of ethical, natural, and theological

philosophy inherited from Clement and Origen,60 theôria physikê, the
contemplation of nature (alongside Scripture) is the crucial pivot
between concerns of moral or ascetical praxis—which are themselves
fully philosophical in the monastic sense—and the ineffable mysteries
of cosmology and theologia. Natural philosophy must, then, be care-
fully nuanced. First, it concedes only relative value to perspectives from
secular science. Evagrius explicitly distinguishes between the “knowledge
that comes externally” (i.e., profane learning) and the knowledge of the
logoi that comes inwardly by grace.61 Second, it is inextricably related to
ethics and to higher contemplation of the Trinity. Natural philosophy
or contemplation is a not a sheer midpoint on the way from ethics to
theologia, as if in simple chronological sequence. All three co-inhere.
As Evagrius explains in the context of scriptural interpretation, an
ethics text does not necessarily include an ethical contemplation, any
more than a nature text necessarily includes a natural contemplation.
Indeed, a nature text can hold an ethical meaning just as an ethics text
can have meaning for natural contemplation, and the same holds true
with respect to theology.62 Moreover, each created thing, says Evagrius,
contains not just one logos but multiple logoi (in view of its complex
relation to the universe as a whole).63
Third, natural contemplation is not a purely methodical intellec-
tion or mechanical extraction of the objective meanings of created
things. The “book of creation,” like the Bible, is a book of mysteries.
Contemplation means a patient, diligent, holistic process of discern-
ment engaging mind (nous), reason (logos), and even the lower affective
faculties of desire (epithymia) and aversion (thymos) that have the ability,

comment, gold is for Evagrius, in its dissemination throughout the earth and its potential
for refinement and purification, a subtle symbol of fallen, embodied spiritual beings
who are capable of transformation and restoration to their original perfection.
60
Clement of Alexandria 1951, 173 (Strom. 1.28.1); cf. Origen 1991, 128 (Comm. on
the Song of Songs, Prol. 3), where Origen applies a threefold distinction to the Wisdom
literature: ethics in Proverbs, physics in Ecclesiastes, and enoptics (invisible theologi-
cal mysteries) in the Song of Songs. See also Evagrius of Pontus 1987, 90 (Schol. in
Prov. 2).
61
Evagrius of Pontus 1989, 92 (Gnostikos 4); cf. Schol. in Ps. 118.85 (Migne 1857–86,
12: 1604A).
62
Evagrius of Pontus 1912, 548–9 (Gnostikos 20); see also Evagrius of Pontus 1989,
118–121.
63
Evagrius of Pontus 1912, 550–1 (Gnostikos 40); see also Evagrius of Pontus 1989,
164–5).

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when rightly used, to help stabilize and orient the soul.64 Still, natural
contemplation admits of internal developmental levels or dimensions,
of which Evagrius gives differing accounts. On the one hand, he notes
five contemplations (theôriai ) in descending order of sublimity but in
reverse (ascending) order with respect to progressive exercise. First is
the contemplation of the Trinity. Next are the paired contemplations
of incorporeal and corporeal beings, which, as we saw earlier, Evagrius
calls the “book of God.” Lastly are the paired contemplations of divine
providence and judgment in the world.65 Elsewhere Evagrius distin-
guishes more succinctly between the second natural contemplation of
the diversity of creation, and the first natural contemplation, which
looks toward the ultimate unity of all beings in God.66
Much of Evagrius’s instruction on natural contemplation centers
on the logoi, and especially the logoi of rational beings (logikoi ), whose
movements are the special object of God’s creative and redemptive
powers. Theôria physikê aims not just at creatures’ own natural logoi,
which hold the key to their constitution and teleology in the divine
plan, but the “logoi of providence and judgment,” the principles that
evidence God’s action in sustaining, reforming, and transforming his
creatures.67 The logoi provide a kind of map or grid to disclose (albeit
only gradually, and only to the worthy) God’s purposes and strategies
in the world. In the cosmic metanarrative that Evagrius shares with his
predecessor Origen, preexistent logikoi fell from their primordial unity
with God, who in turn created material bodies for their rehabilitation

64
Evagrius of Pontus 1971, 556, 676, 680 (Praktikos 24, 86, 88); Evagrius of Pontus
1931, 374 (Skemmata 8). Cf. Maximus the Confessor 1980, 47–9, 499 (Qu. Thal. 1; ibid.
55); also Maximus, Ambiguorum liber 6 (Migne 1857–86, 91: 1068A).
65
Evagrius of Pontus 1958, 28 (Kephalaia gnostica 1.27); cf. Schol. in Ps. 138.16 (Migne
1857–86, 12: 1662). By “incorporeal” beings Evagrius is thinking principally of the
angels, whose bodies are less dense (they did not fall so far from God!) and who are
important mediators, to lower corporeal beings, of the knowledge of God.
66
Evagrius of Pontus 1958, 122, 124, 133 (Keph. gnost. 3.61; 3.67; 3.87). On the
implications of these various natural contemplations, see Dysinger 2005, 37–43; also
Thunberg 1995, 343–47.
67
Evagrius of Pontus, Schol. in Ps. 8:16 (Migne 1857–86, 12: 1662); Evagrius of
Pontus 1993, 58 (Schol. in Eccl. 1); Evagrius of Pontus 1987, 90 (Schol. in Prov. 1). See
also Dysinger 2005, 171–95, for a full examination of the meaning of the “logoi of
providence and judgment.” “Providence,” for Evagrius, pertains mainly to God’s
provision of the remedial means for fallen rational beings (logikoi ) to return to unity
with him, while “judgment” bespeaks the divine healing and conversion of bodies
commensurate with that return.

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and restoration.68 The diversified world of bodies (angelic, human,

demonic) is the index of the origins and eschatological destiny of the
cosmos. Contemplative wisdom (Prov. 1:2) is thus precisely the “science
of corporeal and incorporeal beings.”69
We need emphasize again at this point that for Evagrius and other
writers of this period who describe natural contemplation, the logoi in
created bodies are thoroughly intertwined with the logoi in scriptural
texts. Altogether they represent God’s saving word in a world of rational
beings (logikoi ) who are already implicated in the tragedy of the fall yet
called to their original, now eschatological, destiny. As both Gregory of
Nyssa and Evagrius suggest in their reading of Ecclesiastes, the book of
‘physics,’ Christ the Logos is himself the true Ecclesiast (or Preacher),
the guide and teacher of divine wisdom in the ecclesia of creation.70
Similarly, Evagrius finds Christ behind scores of the Psalms, as the
revealer of their logoi, unveiling the drama of creation and redemption
embedded within the Psalter.71 Indeed, Christ possesses the logoi and has
the prior perfect knowledge of them.72 For Maximus the Confessor it
is most specifically the incarnate Logos (i.e., the Logos in virtue of his
historical incarnation in Jesus the Christ) who contains or inheres in the
logoi, upholding at once their unity and diversity in God’s revelatory
and salvific economy, and drawing all contemplation toward himself.
Much like Irenaeus before him, Maximus projects the theôria of the
universe through the lens of the advent, death, and resurrection of
the New Adam.
The mystery of the incarnation of the Logos holds the power of all
the hidden logoi and figures (typoi ) of Scripture as well as the knowledge
of visible and intelligible creatures. Whoever knows the mystery of the
cross and the tomb knows the logoi of these creatures. And whoever

68
Of particular importance here are the Kephalaia Gnostica of Evagrius (Evagrius of
Pontus 1958). See also Guillaumont 1962.
69
Evagrius of Pontus 1987, 92 (Schol. in Prov. 3).
70
Gregory of Nyssa 1986, 279–80 (Hom. in Eccl. 1); Evagrius of Pontus 1993, 58
(Schol. in Eccl. 1).
71
For exemplary texts from the Scholia on Psalms with discussion, see Dysinger 2005,
152–71; cf. also Driscoll, introduction to Evagrius of Pontus 2003a, 17–22.
72
Evagrius of Pontus 1931, 374 (Skemmata 1); cf. Evagrius of Pontus 1912, 550–1;
and Evagrius of Pontus 1989, 164–5 (Gnostikos 40), where Evagrius notes that of the
multiple logoi of a created thing, the primary logos of each is known solely by Christ.

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has been initiated in the ineffable power of the resurrection knows the
purpose (logos) for which God originally made all things.73
Thus for Maximus the metanarrative to which creation and Scripture
give testimony with their thoroughly integrated logoi, is the eschatologi-
cal outworking of God’s incarnate presence for, with, and in the world
in order to redeem and deify his creation. “Always and in all things,”
he writes, “the Logos of God, who is also God, wills to fulfill the
mystery of his embodiment.”74 Because Christ the Logos perennially
indwells the logoi, they all converge in this cosmic mystery.75 Maximus
proposes his own sophisticated outlines for theôria physikê and theoria
graphikê, which he regularly considers in tandem. In one discussion he
speaks of contemplating created being in terms of (1) “essence,” or
basic ontological integrity; (2) “motion,” relative to God as their tran-
scendent Cause and End; (3) “difference,” respecting their variegation
according to their proper constitutive principles (logoi ); (4) “mixture,”
having to do with the fusion of their wills with the virtues; and (5)
“position,” meaning their moral disposition vis-à-vis the divine Good.
Maximus recommends this as a disciplined means of inquiry into
the “providence and judgment” operative in the cosmos. Elsewhere,
he introduces ten modes of contemplation of the world of beings
mirrored within Scripture. They are to be envisioned in terms of (1)
place; (2) time; (3) genus, or kind; (4) individual person; (5) dignity or
occupation. These in turn contract into (6) practical, (7) natural, and
(8) theological philosophy. These further contract into (9) present and
(10) future, or type (typos) and fulfilling truth (alêtheia).76 Maximus sees
this as a way to move the contemplative vision progressively from the
profound diversity of beings in the grand theater of universal history to
the eschatological unity of all creation. Every particular created being
is understood to stand in a complex ontological and moral relation to
the one unifying logos/Logos of all things. Within this tenfold scheme,
Maximus has incorporated not only some of the Aristotelian categories
(the primary predicables of every being) but the Alexandrian pedagogic
triad of practical (ethical), natural, and theological philosophy, and the

73
Maximus the Confessor, Capita theologica et oeconomica 1.66 (Migne 1857–86, 90:
1108A–B).
74
Maximus the Confessor Ambiguorum liber 7 (Migne 1857–86, 91: 1084D).
75
On Maximus’s highly developed doctrine of the logoi, see Tollefsen 2008, 64–137,
also Dalmais 1952.
76
Maximus the Confessor, Ambiguorum liber 37 (Migne 1857–86, 91: 1293A–
1296D).

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classic hermeneutical distinction of typos and fulfillment, which sets all

of creation and Scripture into an eschatological frame of reference.77
To this point, we have dealt principally with the contemplative dimen-
sion of the parallel interpretation of the book of creation and the Bible,
for this is where the patristic conviction concerning their integral rela-
tion and ultimate unity is most evident. The church fathers, however,
were hardly naive to the differences between cosmos and Scripture as
revelatory economies. One might discern a common metanarrative
in both economies through the patient disciplines of theôria, but the
history of exegesis of Genesis 1–2 and other creation texts reveals
that if the scriptural account of the origins and character of created
nature is the authoritative basis for Christian cosmology, there are
significant silences and difficulties in that account demanding explana-
tion. In some cases patristic exegetes deferred, within critical limits, to
cosmological and natural-philosophical theories of their time to aid in
their expositions—a subject that reaches far beyond the scope of this
essay.78 Important for our purposes is the fact that, generally speaking
in patristic exposition of biblical texts pertaining to creation, there is no
clear-cut division between contemplative and analytical readings. The
overriding concern is interpretation that edifies the church by deepen-
ing its theological understanding of the origins, history, and destiny of
the cosmos, and providing metaphysical anchoring for the moral and
spiritual life of Christians.
This is evident, for example, in the way patristic interpreters handle
technical questions such as the nature of the beginning (archê ) of the
world or the material substratum of created things. Patristic exegesis of
Genesis 1 in the first four centuries rather consistently raises the issue
of whether the beginning of the world precedes time or is itself ‘in’
time. In the face of pagan theories of the cosmos being grounded in
three coeternal archai—God, the ideas, and matter—Christian authors
argued from such texts as Gen. 1:1, Prov. 8:22; John 1:1, and Rev. 21:6
(cf. 22:13) that the Logos (Christ) is himself the true beginning.79 For

77
For a thorough study of Maximus’s tenfold scheme of contemplation, see Blowers
2003, 408–26; also Blowers 1991, 137–45. Specifically on natural contemplation in
Maximus, see Harrington 2007, 191–212.
78
Among the more helpful and comprehensive studies in this regard, see Sorabji
1983; Winden 1997; May 1994; Callahan 1958, Osborn 1981; Crouzel 1962. For a
concise summary, see Lindberg 1986.
79
Cf. Theophilus of Antioch 1970, 38–40 (Ad Autolycum 2.10); Tertullian 1999,
132–4 (Against Hermogenes. 20.1–4); Origen 1976, 24 (Hom. in Gen. 1.1); Origen 1903,
20–5 (Comm. on John 1.16–20); Ambrose of Milan 1897, 13 (Hex. 1.4).

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them, the overriding concern is establishing the primacy of the role

of the Logos in mediating God’s creative and redemptive work. In this
capacity the Logos must transcend time as we know it, in which case
some writers propose that he is the beginning as being in a quasi-tem-
poral interval between God and creation,80 others that all temporality is
dissolved in the atemporal, instantaneous moment of divine creation.81
The contemplative vision of divine transcendence and immanence, sub-
ject to the larger Christian metanarrative of creation, incarnation, and
redemption, thus commands the patristic response to the philosophical
problem of the temporality of the creative act, not vice versa.
The same principle obtains in patristic interpretation of the material
substratum of creation in Gen. 1:2. What is the void out of which the
world is formed? Christian writers were thoroughly aware that clas-
sical pagan philosophers not only asserted (with Plato) the coeternity
of matter with God but (with Aristotle) rejected the possibility of any-
thing being created out of nothing,82 as in the Epicurean Lucretius’s
famous dictum “nothing comes from nothing (ab nihilo nihil).” As is
well attested, the early church opted for a doctrine of creatio ex nihilo,
with different writers contributing explanations of what the primeval
‘nothing’ is. For Tertullian, who quotes Isa. 44:24 (“I am the Lord
who made all things, who stretched out the heavens alone . . . ”) it is
a simple inference: God’s absolute transcendence and eternity is not
challenged by coeternal matter.83 For Irenaeus, the void was absolute
until God created matter, then fashioned it into a universe.84 Other
patristic thinkers, anxious to give theological definition to the noth-
ingness, explore other possibilities. Athanasius sees the nothing as the
vulnerability and corruptibility of creation in its dependence, from the
very outset, on the sustaining and transforming grace of the Creator.85
Augustine interprets it in terms of the formless matter that is virtually
nothing ( prope nihil ) until invested with forms, so that it is appropriate

80
Methodius of Olympus, De creatis 9, 11 (apud Photius, Bibliotheca, Cod. 235, Migne
1857–86, 103: 1138C–1148C).
81
Basil of Caesarea 2006, 110–12 (Hom. in hex. 1.6); Gregory of Nyssa, Apologia in
Hexaemeron. (Migne 1857–86, 44: 69A); cf. Augustine 1894, 131–6, 140–1, 145–7, 183–4,
189–92 (De genesi ad litteram 4.33.51–34.55; 5.3.5–6; 5.5.12; 6.11.18; 6.14.25–18.29).
Augustine consistently cites the text of Sirach 18:1: “He created all things simultane-
ously (simul ) . . . ”
82
See Sorabji 1983, 245–7.
83
Tertullian 1999, 94–6 (Against Hermogenes 6.1–3).
84
Irenaeus of Lyons 1982, 91 (Against Heresies 2.10.4).
85
Athanasius 1971, 140–6 (De incarnatione 3–5).

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to say that unformed matter is “concreated” with formed creatures.86

God gives formless matter reality and intelligibility through the rationes
seminales (= logoi ) he implants therein.87 Gregory of Nyssa too focuses
on the nothingness as eliciting the raw potentiality of creation. He also
posits the seemingly controversial view that creation ex nihilo is the same
as creation “from God.” He even speaks of a substratum (hypokeimenon)
preexisting the fully formed creation.88 Clearly, however, Gregory rejects
the Neoplatonic notion of creation emanating from the divine being,
and most likely understands the material substratum as logically (not
temporally) preexisting with the divinely bestowed forms or qualities that
give it reality.89 For Gregory, as for Augustine after him, the prevailing
concern is the simultaneity of God’s creative act, and the setting in
motion—from potentiality to actuality—of a providential and salvific
plan for the whole panorama of creation. The contemplative vision of
things, in which creation is inextricably interwoven with biblical salva-
tion history, again conditions the consideration of technical issues of
natural philosophy, not vice versa.
Augustine’s Commentary on the Literal Meaning of Genesis (De Genesi
ad litteram) is a classic model for observing how natural-philosophical
issues and considerations are drawn into what is still at bottom a con-
templative reading of scriptural creation texts. The literal meaning for
Augustine does indeed entail giving a careful account of what happened
in creation, especially in the context of refuting Manichaeans and others
who pervert the truth.90 Significant questions will need answering—the
origins of formless matter and of time, the nature of spiritual matter,
the character of the first light illuminating the universe, etc.—and yet
Augustine’s begins from the assumption that creation is a Trinitarian
action, and that the initial conception of the world is ontologically
simultaneous, the creation (conditio) and so too divine conditioning of
what is to unfold in time and space according to the rationes seminales.91

86
Augustine 1981, 218–19, 270–1 (Confessions 12.6.6; 13.33.48). cf. Augustine 1894,
56–8, 146 (De Genesi ad litteram 1.15.29–30; 5.5.13).
87
Augustine 1894, 13, 131–6, 183–5, 189–92 (Gen. litt. 1.9.17; 4.33.51–34.53;
6.11.18–19; 6.14.25–18.29).
88
Gregory of Nyssa, De hominis opificio 23–24 (Migne 1857–86, 44: 209B–213C).
89
So argues Alexandre 1976.
90
For further discussion of Augustine’s confuting of Manichaeism, see Howell
2008.
91
Augustine 1894, 10, 131–6, 145–7, 183–5, 189–92 (De Genesi ad litteram 1.6.12;
4.33.51–34.53; 5.5.12–16; 6.11.18–19; 6.14.25–18.29).

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The priority of Augustine’s literal reading—which actually takes the

form of a heuristic analysis of the text, proposing different angles of
approach and not always settling on a final solution to the interpre-
tive problems posed—is to provide an exposition that does justice to
the providence of God and that lends consistency to the Bible’s larger
narrative of sin and grace.
Unlike modern creationists treating Genesis as a virtual textbook of
creation science, the Fathers read the Genesis creation accounts within
the framework of a whole teleology of God’s purposes in and for the
world. Indeed they read them in light of the final consummation, or
telos, toward which they envisioned the world to be headed. Following
largely the example of Irenaeus, whose refutation of Gnostic cosmogo-
nies and cosmologies was formative, they looked at nature, through the
lens of Scripture, primarily as the theatre of divine action and of the
resourcefulness of God in guiding the universe through the tragedy of
sin toward a glorious healing and restoration.92

Conclusion

This essay cannot do justice to the complex interplay between biblical

interpretation and the interpretation of nature in the patristic period. Its
purpose has been, first and foremost, to map some of the terrain, and
to elucidate how certain representative Christian thinkers of this period
both conceptualized the hermeneutical relation between Scripture and
creation and developed it in their own interpretive practice.
As part of their larger understanding of God’s revelatory accom-
modation or condescension (syngkatabasis) to humanity, various patristic
theologians, in their respective contexts and writings, articulated the
analogy of the two books, an analogy destined to take on a life of its
own in the later history of Christianity.93 As we have noted, there were
really more than two ‘books’ in the analogy, for some of the Fathers
also see human nature, even the church, as scripted—inscribed with
the intentions or logoi of the Creator and embodying his salvific will.

92
On the patristic theme of the divine reformatio in melius in the cosmos, see Groh
2003, 60–88, 156–167, 175, 178, 200, 207.
93
For the legacy of this analogy in the Western tradition, see Otten 1995, 261–3,
267–84; van Berkel and Vanderjagt 2005; van Berkel and Vanderjagt 2006; and the
excellent monograph of Bono 1995. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, see Chryssavgis
2004, chap. 7 (“The Book of Nature,” 108–26).

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Origen is exemplary in this regard, and echoes of his deployment of

this analogy can be found in Athanasius, Antony, Evagrius, Maximus,
and numerous other writers. As Oliver Davies has observed,
The Origenist view of Scripture is one which placed the interpretative
act, as a modality of both human and divine knowing, at the centre of
Christian identity. The deep structure of that act was one which in turn
was informed by a systemic cross-fertilisation between Incarnation, Scrip-
ture, Church, and World. The logic of the first formed the coherence of
each of the following three, and all together formed an analogical unity
which set up a rich interplay between the different orders of existence.
At times that analogy takes on a distinctly corporal character, as Scrip-
ture, Church and World are imaged as ‘body’, as if participating in the
primal body of the incarnate Christ. But more fundamentally they are
organised together as domains or levels of interpretation, where semiot-
ics entails a coordination, even conformity, between the human mind
that interprets, the interpreted sign given by divine grace, and the divine
generative order itself which finds its fullest expression in the language
and image of Wisdom.94
Davies’ point is well taken. On the one hand, the analogy of the two
(or more) divinely authored books or embodiments of the Logos com-
plicates and problematizes the task of interpretation. On the other
hand, it supports an approach to divine revelation that seeks always to
account both for the multivalence of that revelation and its overarching
integrity and unity. Though the Logos, as ultimate Author and Wisdom,
remains transcendent, he is also by gracious condescension implicated
with text, world, and human subject in the work of interpreting—and
of being interpreted.
Theôria, which defies facile definition and requires careful nuancing
in order to appreciate its multiple dimensions in patristic hermeneutics,
was, we have argued, the primary mode of patristic interpretation for
grasping the multifarious connections and interplay between Scripture
and cosmos. Grounded in requisite ascetical disciplines meant to ren-
der the interpreter spiritually worthy of gaining deeper insight, theôria
was a patient process of discernment, the cultivation of a panoramic
vision of the complex interrelation between the logoi of Scripture and
creation. Though much of our analysis of theôria physikê and theôria
graphikê has concentrated on ascetical and monastic traditions, there
is overlap here with the larger ecclesial enterprise of interpretation in

94
Davies 2004, 43.

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Christian antiquity, as exemplified in episcopal exegetes like Basil of

Caesarea and Ambrose, who were adapting to their audiences disciplines
of reading Scripture and creation that were already coming of age in
monastic communities.
That this contemplative mode of interpretation appears foreign both
to modern scientific analysis and to the canons of historical-critical
approaches to the Bible goes without saying. Oliver Davies has argued
that the assumptions underlying pre-modern Christians’ conviction of
the theological coherence of the whole order of revelation run counter
to modern sensibilities and are now irretrievable—the example he uses
is Augustine’s equation of a religious and scientific reading of creation.
Davies adds, however, that this should not discourage—indeed it posi-
tively furnishes precedent for—the contemporary pursuit of a theologi-
cal understanding of the God-world relation that continues to engage
the insights of natural science while remaining thoroughly grounded in
“the eschatological decision to live our lives out in the encounter with
Christ and within the co–ordinates of a scriptural faith.”95 To this end,
Davies himself proposes a new conceptualization of the “textuality” of
the created cosmos for contemporary theology.96
In the final analysis, a forced reconciliation of ancient and contempo-
rary modes of interpretation is neither possible nor desirable. Acknowl-
edging that fact, however, does not release Christian interpretation of
the two books from the need to give continuing priority to the criteria
set by the Christian tradition itself.97 One of those standards, certainly,
will be the necessity, indeed inevitability, of an ecclesial and consensual
Rule of Faith to guide interpretation. Another will be the need for
models of interpretation that habitually move back and forth between
consideration of particular texts, or the analysis of particular natural
phenomena, and the envisioning (theôria) of God’s larger oikonomia, the
universal order and strategy of God’s self-revelation. Fortunately there
are Christian theologians rising to meet the challenge. One example
is the work of John Polkinghorne and others who develop a “kenotic”
cosmology that parallels in important ways the attempts of patristic
theologians to treat cosmogony and cosmology through the primary

95
Ibid., 98–9.
96
Ibid., 104–17, 117–19.
97
On this point, see the admonition in Augustine 1894, 30–1 (De Genesi ad litteram
1.21.41).

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172 paul m. blowers

lens of the doctrine of divine incarnation.98 Another recent example

from the Eastern Orthodox tradition is the work of Alexei Nesteruk,
who integrates patristic insights, including the doctrine of logoi, into
his sophisticated analysis of bridges between theology and scientific
cosmology.99
Despite the postmodern aversion to ‘totalizing’ perspectives, Chris-
tian interpretation must remain committed to the ongoing articulation
of a coherent and thoroughly theological worldview, but only with
appropriate humility, self-criticism, and spiritual imagination. The
ancient model of theôria sets a healthy example of openness to the
mysteriousness of God’s relation to the world. As Rowan Williams
writes of Augustine, his
theology of creation treats the world eminently seriously as the self-
communication of God; but like all God’s ‘rhetoric’, the world does not
simply offer a bland reproduction of recognizable and timeless truths. To
be serious about creation’s meaning and value is to weigh properly its
integrity as a moving and changing image, as a limited and fl uid whole
that is not God, yet is saturated with God.100
Christian interpretation must re-enter, again and again, this “sublime
and blessed amphitheatre”—to recall Basil of Caesarea’s metaphor—in
the hard quest for constantly more refined understanding of the triune
Creator’s purposes in and for the cosmos.

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Rizzerio, Laura. 1996. Clemente di Alessandria e la “ ΥΣ ΟΛΟ Α veramente gnostica”:
Saggio sulle origini e le implicazioni di un’epistemologia e di un’ontologia “cristiane.” Leuven:
Peeters.
Sorabji, Richard. 1983. Time, Creation, and the Continuum: Theories in Antiquity and the Early
Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Tertullian. 1952. On Baptism. Ed. R.F. Refoulé and M. Drouzy. Sources chrétiennes,
no. 35. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf.
——. 1957. On the Prescription of Heretics. Ed. R.F. Refoulé and Pierre de Labriolle.
Sources chrétiennes, no. 46. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf.
——. 1999. Against Hermogenes. Ed. Frédéric Chapot. Sources chrétiennes, no. 439.
Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf.
Theodore of Mopsuestia. 1880. Theodori episcopi Mopsuesteni in epistolas B. Pauli com-
mentarii: the Latin Version, with the Greek Fragments. Vol. 1. Ed. H.B. Swete. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

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176 paul m. blowers

Theophilus of Antioch. 1970. Ad Autolycum. Ed. with English trans. by Robert M.

Grant. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thunberg, Lars. 1995. Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus
the Confessor, 2d ed. Chicago: Open Court.
Tollefsen, Torstein. 2008. The Christocentric Cosmology of St. Maximus the Confessor. Oxford
Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Torchia, N. Joseph. 1999. Curiosity. In Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, Ed.
Allan Fitzgerald. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 259–61.
van Berkel, Klaas, and Arjo Vanderjagt, eds. 2005. The Book of Nature in Antiquity and
the Middle Ages. Leuven: Peeters Press.
——. 2006. The Book of Nature in Early Modern and Modern History. Leuven: Peeters
Press.
van Winden, J.C.M. 1997. Archê: A Collection of Patristic Studies. Leiden: Brill.
von Balthasar, Hans Urs. 1984. Origen: Spirit and Fire: A Thematic Anthology of His Writings.
Trans. Robert Daly. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press.
Williams, Rowan. 1994. ‘Good for Nothing?’ Augustine on Creation. Augustinian Studies
25: 9–24.
Young, Frances. 1997. Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

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 PART II

800–1450

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 CHAPTER SIX

INTERPRETING THE BOOKS OF NATURE AND

SCRIPTURE IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN
THOUGHT: AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY*1

Charlotte Methuen

Introduction

This article discusses the relationship between interpretations of nature

and of Scripture during the high medieval and early modern periods,
that is from the twelfth century until the dawn of the seventeenth. It
argues that this relationship must be seen as one expression of the more
fundamental relationship between knowledge of God and knowledge
of the world, and of the shifting understanding of how faith might be
informed by reason, or theology by philosophy. This is a key theme
of theology throughout the medieval period: scholastic theology was
deeply and centrally concerned with defining and understanding the
ways in which ‘natural knowledge’—the knowledge available to the
human mind through reasoning and in particular through the use of
philosophy and its methods—might be related to faith, understood
as the knowledge of God gained through revelation. The concern
of medieval theologians to understand and articulate the relationship
between theology and philosophy gave rise not only to a range of ways
of thinking about the natural world, but also to a range of strategies
for reading Scripture. Medieval exegetical strategies were varied, and
the famous fourfold scheme of literal, allegorical, moral, and ana-
gogical senses was only one expression of the search for the truth of
God’s revelation in Scripture. This article will sketch the trajectory of
developments in medieval theology and philosophy which gave rise to
this range of exegetical approaches.

* This article has benefited enormously from the comments of Jon Balserak, Jitse
van der Meer, Scott Mandelbrote and two anonymous readers, to whom I express
my thanks.
1
Introduction to Parts 2–4.

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Given the complexities of medieval exegesis, and in particular of

the relationship between literal and spiritual senses, it is not surprising
that a range of hermeneutical strategies also resulted from critiques
of them. Early modern exegesis reacted against medieval methods but
also contributed to their development. Renaissance humanism brought
with it a focus on language, rhetorical strategies, authorial context, and
indeed authorship, which affected the way in which all texts, including
Scripture, began to be read, and which demanded that more careful
attention be paid to establishing the true text and its content. Respond-
ing to the challenges of humanism, the Reformers developed a new
focus on ‘literal’ readings of Scripture, which should not, however, be
allowed to disguise the continuing use of a variety of spiritual readings
(often subsumed under a greatly expanded understanding of ‘literal’)
and the significant continuity between medieval and early modern
exegetical methods. Perhaps the most significant result of the Reforma-
tion for biblical exegesis was the increasingly close relationship between
ecclesiology and the interpretation of Scripture. In the course of the
process of confessionalization, ‘correct’ interpretations of Scripture
came increasingly to be defined by and bound to particular doctrinal
and confessional positions. Christendom, which had—at least in eccle-
siological terms—united the interpretative possibilities of the medieval
Church, fragmented into confessional churches, almost all of which took
measures to ensure a level of hermeneutic uniformity. The confessional
definition of hermeneutics was determined by doctrinal positions, which
themselves served to define confessional boundaries, and particularly
by specific interpretations of the Eucharist. These in turn governed
the limitations to acceptable interpretations of the natural world. At
the same time, appeal to the natural world became seemed to offer a
means of reading divine authority which, it was hoped, might not be
subject to the interpretative problems of textual interpretation.
Any attempt to consider these complex developments in such a com-
pressed space will inevitably tend to generalization and be susceptible to
counterexample. This article attempts nonetheless to offer a sketch of
the shifting relationship between faith and reason, revelation and nature,
which governs interaction between the interpretation of Scripture and
the interpretation of the natural world.

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 interpreting the books of nature and scripture 181

The Twelfth Century Beginnings of Scholastic Theology

Scholasticism was the method of thinking and structuring knowledge

which governed most academic thought from the mid-eleventh century
until into the sixteenth. Driven by Anselm of Canterbury’s quest for faith
seeking understanding ( fid e s q u a e r e n s i n t e l l e c t u m ), scholastic theology took
shape in the context of the ‘twelfth-century Renaissance,’ which, like its
successor and namesake, drew on a new interest in classical literature
and in particular a concern to discern the relationship between human
knowledge—as expressed in philosophy and the liberal arts2—and
language about God. Out of this concern arose conscious discussions
of the way in which the knowledge of God might be considered an
academic discipline—such as that taught in the schools—in contrast to
the contemplative l e c t i o d i vi n a of the monasteries.3 The context of these
discussions was the rise of the Schools—the forerunners of the later
universities—as places where knowledge of the divine should be taught,
and the consequent formalization of the courses and methodology of
study appropriate to theology, with associated discussions of the proper
place of theology in schemes of knowledge.4
The status of the a r t e s l i b e r a l e s in terms of their ability to contribute
to knowledge of God was central to this development. De Lubac sug-
gests that
until the eleventh century, the schoolmen in the cities remained by and
large absorbed by the teaching of the liberal arts. Typically they were
concerned with the preparation of their students for the study of Holy
Scripture rather than with direct application of the arts to its study.5
The fundamental question for eleventh-century thinkers was whether
such an application was possible. Were the a r t e s l i b e r a l e s —and in par-
ticular dialectics—to be understood as a gift of God through which the

2
The a r t e s l i b e r a l e s were traditionally taken to comprise the t r i v i u m (grammar, rhetoric,
and dialectics or logic) and the q u a d r i v i u m (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy).
3
There are many discussions of the establishment of theology as a discipline: see
for instance, Evans 1980; Southern 2001, 1–147; Otten 2004a, 1–44, 129–181. How-
ever, the suggestion that there is a radical break between the grammatical interests of
twelfth-century ‘humanism’ and the logical interests of thirteenth century ‘scholasti-
cism’ should not be overstated. See for instance, Minnis 1988, 3; Southern 1995, 21,
and de Lubac, 1998, 33.
4
For the rise and development of the universities in the Middle Ages, see, for instance,
de Ridder-Symoens 2001, Courtenay & Miethke 2000, Cobban 1975.
5
de Lubac 1998, 55.

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true, divinely created nature of things could be divinely revealed, in

which case they must find a place in theological thinking; or were they
a human product and therefore inappropriate to the study of divine
things?6 Evans suggests that this shifting understanding of theology is
the context of many of the theological differences which emerged in
the eleventh and early twelfth century:
The polemics of Peter Damian against the dialecticians, of Lanfranc
against Berengarius, of Bernard of Clairvaux against Abelard represent
the reaction of the older, monastic idea to the new, urban conception
of the teacher’s role.7
The disagreements between Bernard of Clairvaux (ca. 1090–1153) and
Peter Abelard (ca. 1079–1142) focused on the place of pagan writings
and of the a r t e s in the study of sacred Scripture. For Bernard, “pagan
and Christian authority have nothing in common,” so that the very
fact that Abelard makes use of pagan sources is problematic, whilst for
Abelard, “pagan philosophers can be in the service of the Christian
truth.”8 Similarly, William of Conches (ca. 1090–ca. 1154) was criticized
by William of St Thierry (1075–1148) for his application of dialectics
and physical knowledge to discussions of the divine. The two Williams,
like Bernard and Abelard, represent different modes of knowledge about
God: that of the monastery with its prayerful, contemplative l e c t i o d i v i n a ,
and the speculative knowledge which was emerging as the dialecticians
in the Schools began to think about how to apply logic to language
about God.9 The interests associated with the new milieu of the uni-
versity contrasted sharply with that of the monastery, with the result,
as several scholars of medieval exegesis have concluded, that “what we
have . . . is ‘scholarship’ scornfully rejecting ‘monastic practice’.”10

6
Evans 1980, 65.
7
Lohr 1982, 83.
8
Otten 2004b, 354, 362. Compare also Evans 1980, 79–90.
9
As French and Cunningham argue, this was to some extent a clash between under-
standings of knowledge as s a p i e n t i a and knowledge as s c i e n t i a (French & Cunningham
1996, 55–60). However, the term s a p i e n t i a was also used by some—for instance in the
Y s a go ge i n t h e o l o gi a m —to denote knowledge gained through the arts, that is to describe
a part of s c i e n t i a (Evans 1980, 16). As noted below, a sharper distinction seems to
develop in the context of the discussion of the relationship between speculative and
practical arts.
10
de Lubac 1998, 49, citing Smalley (introduction to first edition).

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 interpreting the books of nature and scripture 183

The new scholarship was fundamentally concerned to determine

the extent to which there could be continuity between the language of
philosophy and the arts and language about God, and to consider how
the terms and concerns of logic might be applied to language about
God and divine things.11 The form and content of their theology was
inevitably infl uenced by these interests:
As twelfth-century scholars speculated like philosophers about theologi-
cal problems, they began to fashion a speculative theology; to describe
it they adopted the terms s p e c u l a t i o and s p e c u l a t i v a which . . . were found
to meet a new need for a means of describing the processes of abstract
thought.12
Despite this focus on philosophical terminology, Scripture—the s a c r a
p a g i n a 13—remained the preeminent text for the scholars of the new
speculative theology, as it was for monks. That is, the s p e c u l a t i o t h e o l o go -
r u m was conceived as a way of studying and explaining Scripture and
not as some kind of abstract reasoning about theological problems.
Medieval theologians stressed the unique status of the Bible in com-
parison with other texts, and at the same time “they believed that the
budding exegete had to be trained in the liberal arts before he could
begin to understand the infinitely more complex ‘sacred page’.”14 Thus,
although its structure was infl uenced by the logical ordering used by
patristic anthologies of knowledge, Peter Lombard’s S e n t e n c e s (ca. 1150)
“retained a biblical character.”15 Indeed, Lombard insisted that “the
speculation of the theologians . . . if it is s t u d i o s a and m o d e s t a , will concern
itself primarily with the interpretation of Holy Scripture,” and with
the proper interpretation of the ‘signs’ which it contains.16 A century
later, Bonaventure (ca. 1221–1274) would still be writing of “sacred
scripture, which is called theology” (S a c r a S c r i p t u r a q u a e t h e o l o gi a d i c i t u r ),
and his bête noir, Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274) would refer in the
first q u a e s t i o of the S u m m a t h e o l o gi c a to “theology which is called sacred

11
Evans 1980, 90 and compare also her discussion of solutions to the problem
(ibid. 110–119).
12
Evans 1980, 91.
13
For a fascinating discussion of the terminology used to refer to Scripture during
this period, see Duchet-Suchaux & Lefèvre 1984.
14
Minnis 1988, 4, 33.
15
de Lubac 1998, 68.
16
Lombard [ca. 1150] (2007), Sentences, dist. 1, cap. 1–2: summarized by Evans 1980,
92. Lombard explains that the signs of which Scripture consists not only signify some-
thing, as all signs do, but are also capable of conferring something, by implication, grace.

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scripture” (T h e o l o gi a q u a e s a c r a S c r i p t u r a d i c i t u r ), treating the expressions

“sacred doctrine” (s a c r a d o c t r i n a ) and “sacred Scripture” (s a c r a S c r i p t u r a )
as equivalent.17 Nonetheless, by the mid-thirteenth century, lectures
on Lombard’s S e n t e n c e s had become the primary means of introducing
students to the ideas of theology, and the direct study of scriptural texts,
although in theory still desirable, had become less central. Moreover,
the concepts and arguments of speculative theology had become so
developed that when writing his S u m m a T h e o l o g i c a Aquinas was able
to draw on a massive body of theological discussion addressing “the
substantial problems at the very meeting point of theological and
philosophical knowledge.”18
As the l o c u s o p e r a n d i of theological refl ection moved from the mon-
astery to the university, new questions were asked of Scripture, giving
rise to new methods of studying it, so that “many of the problems with
which the new speculative theology was concerned arose out of difficul-
ties of textual interpretation and it continued to be tied very closely to
exegesis.”19 In the universities, the Bible was read not primarily for the
sake of spiritual edification—as in the monasteries—but as a source of
knowledge about God. Although ultimately both approaches sought to
reveal and comprehend the nature of God, the kind of knowledge they
sought, and their methods for acquiring it, were very different. “ While
monastic l e c t i o tended . . . toward meditation and prayer, ‘scholastic l e c t i o
tends towards the question and the disputation’.”20 Monastic methods
of reading Scripture had as their aim the c o n t e m p l a t i o of God, whilst the
Schools pursued s c i e n t i a of God by means of structured debate which
sought to distinguish truth from falsehood.21 These differences were
associated with different exegetical priorities, to the extent that Smalley
concludes that “religious l e c t i o d i v i n a implied the spiritual exposition; the
secular schools offered more scope for interest in and study of the lit-
eral,”22 although she concedes that literal interpretations were associated
also with allegorical ones.23 It would, however, be an oversimplification
to suggest either that monastic reading excluded the use of philosophy

17
de Lubac 1998, 27.
18
Evans 1980, 92.
19
Evans 1980, 92.
20
de Lubac 1998, 51–52, citing Leclercq & Wolter 1956.
21
On the shifting meanings of ‘disputation’ see de Lubac 1998, 52–55.
22
Smalley 1983, viii.
23
Ibid., viii–ix.

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 interpreting the books of nature and scripture 185

or the development of a system of theology,24 or that the Schools knew

no way of reading Scripture other than the literal. In the Schools as
well as the monasteries, the knowledge generated by Scripture “was an
approach to the depths of God. It was not a matter merely of a text
being explicated, but of mysteries being explained,”25 often (as in the
case of the Eucharist) by employing philosophical categories to clarify
theological mysteries.26
Scripture was a text which pointed beyond itself, and had to be read
as such. This was made possible by the use of multilayered strategies
of reading, the best known of which is the q u a d r i g a , or four senses of
Scripture, famously stated by Nicolas Lyra in the fourteenth century, but
attributed by de Lubac to the thirteenth-century Augustine of Dacia:
L i t t e r a ge s t a d o c e t , q u i d c r e d a s a l l e og r i a .
Mo r a l i s q u i d a ga s , q u o t e n d a s a n a og ig a .
The letter teaches events, allegory what you should believe
Morality what you should do, anagogy what you should aim for.27
The spiritual senses were frequently counted differently—scholars might
refer to only three senses, list the four named here in a different order,
or give them different names28—but the implications of these different
approaches to the text of Scripture were clear. The events which were
narrated in the Bible pointed beyond themselves to a deeper, divine
meaning and it was only by understanding that meaning—that is, by
grasping the spiritual implications of what was being narrated—that
the true meaning of the text could become apparent. Thus Hugh of
St. Victor (ca. 1127) had recommended that the ‘order of exposition’
of any text begin with ‘the letter,’ that is, the grammatical construction;

24
For instance, Rupert of Deutz developed a system of theology which was clearly
infl uenced by Aristotle and Boethius and by knowledge of contemporary debates, but
structured according to salvation history. Colish 1997, 3–4.
25
de Lubac 1998, I, 34.
26
This is, of course, true as early as the Council of Nicaea (325), which uses the
terms h o m o o u s i o s and h o m o i o u s i o s to explain the mystery of the Trinity. The doctrine of
transubstantiation employs the Aristotelian categories ‘substance’ and ‘accidence’ in
order to offer an explanation of how Christ’s body and blood can be present in the
bread and wine at the Eucharist—which is to say, it offers a philosophical exegesis of
Christ’s words “This is my body.”
27
Augustine of Dacia, a Dominican, cites it in a theological compendium compiled
“for the use of the simple” in ca. 1260, in a chapter D e i n t r o d u t o r i i s s c i e n t i a e t h e o l o gi c a e ,
which offers a summary of the teachings of Thomas Aquinas in the first Q u a e s t i o of
the S u m m a t h e o l o gi c a . de Lubac 1998, 1–2.
28
For a detailed discussion of different lists, see de Lubac 1998, 75–115.

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proceed to the s e n s u s or most obvious meaning; and finally seek the

s e n t e n t i a or deeper meaning.29 When approaching Scripture, it was a
small step from this approach to a distinction between ‘literal’ and a
set of multilayered ‘spiritual’ meanings.
The focus of the spiritual senses in the earlier period was on the
allegorical and anagogical, that is, on determining the deeper implica-
tions of the account given by a particular passage of Scripture. Taken
as a whole, the spiritual reading of the text was what “made the sacred
writings Christ-centered, unifying them and turning them into a history
of salvation and a guide to right living and mysticism.”30 In this sense,
Scripture was seen as quite different from a grammatical or dialectical
text, “in the divine page not only do the understandings and words
signify things, but the things themselves signify other things,”31 whereas
the reading of the texts of the liberal arts did not point beyond the
subject under consideration. Indeed, John of Salisbury (ca. 1115–1176)
commented that “in the liberal disciplines, where not things but words
are significant, whoever is not content with the literal sense seems to
me to err.”32 This comment must be read against the fact that by its
nature, the reading of any text proceeded from the literal level to its
profound and inner meanings, that is, from the words of the text to
its s e n t e n t i a e . Yet John’s comment indicates that some scholars were had
been seeking spiritual senses in texts other than Scripture, and, indeed,
William of Conches criticises those who sought s e n t e n t i a e in Plato.33
In contrast to the texts of the liberal arts, Scripture, as the Word of
God, reveals the history through which God’s purpose for the world
is revealed. Scripture was “doubly the Word of God, since God has
spoken to us in it in words about what he has spoken to us in deeds.”34
The sacred page must be read to reveal those deeds—the ge s t a of the
historical or literal sense—but their true import was revealed to the
reader through an understanding of the spiritual sense.

29
Minnis 1988, 14.
30
Smalley 1983, viii, summing up the contribution of Henri de Lubac.
31
S p e c u l u m d e m y s t e r i i s e c c l e s i a e , cited in de Lubac 2000, II, 88.
32
de Lubac 1998, II, 88.
33
Minnis 1988, 13–14.
34
de Lubac 1998, II, 88.

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 interpreting the books of nature and scripture 187

The Role of Nature in Scholastic Theology

What was true of God’s revelation in sacred writings might also be

true of God’s revelation in the created world. Indeed, not Scripture,
but also nature, played an important role in the emergent twelfth-
century theology. The speculative theology was rooted in the assump-
tion that the philosophical categories and methods of the a r t e s l i b e r a l e s
could legitimately be used in the search for knowledge of God. This
fundamental premise had a corollary, namely that the knowledge of
things, and particularly of the things of the natural world, to which
the a r t e s l i b e r a l e s gave rise, could itself yield fundamental insights about
God. The conviction that nature could be revelatory of the divine
nature had its roots in the understanding of God as Creator; it was
given fresh impetus in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries by
the theological concerns of those who sought to counter the Cathars
belief that the material world was inherently evil and had not been
created by God. This project was particularly important to members of
the Dominican order (founded 1216). It resulted in a theology which
sought to emphasize that matter had been created by God and was
consequently inherently good.35 The belief that there was a funda-
mental coherence between the natural, created world and theological
truth was founded upon the convictions, first, that “the human intellect
was created capable of understanding both the purpose of God in the
Creation and the structure of the whole created order”; second, that
“by the special revelation of God and by the efforts of inspired and
able scholars, the main outlines of the structure and development of
the universe had become accessible to human minds”; and third, that
“the means that God had used to redeem mankind by the incarnation
and sacrifice of Christ were also capable of being understood.”36 That
is, as Southern has argued,
mankind was created as the link between the natural and supernatural
orders, living in natural order, but with the ability to understand also the

35
This is the fundamental thesis of French & Cunningham 1996, but see especially
157–158, and compare also Evans 1980. Southern points to the intelligibility of nature
as a fundamental assumption of scholastic theology (1995, 30). In affirming the goodness
of nature, the Dominicans in particular drew on the newly rediscovered l i b r i n a t u r a l e s
of Aristotle, as discussed in the next section.
36
Southern 1995, 40.

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divine plan of Creation and ultimately to enter the universe of eternal

being.37
There was thus a continuity between the ‘natural knowledge’ of the
world, which was revealed by philosophy, and knowledge of God. This
‘natural knowledge’ tended to be derived from an explication of the texts
in which it was expounded rather than from a study of the phenomena
of the natural world; nonetheless, this approach considered knowledge
about nature to be useful in acquiring knowledge about God. Explain-
ing the true significance of natural knowledge was an important aspect
of the work of the theologians of the thirteenth century, who, Lohr
has suggested, saw their task as “to try to make the r e s , the transient
things of this world, shine in the light of the v o c e s the divine words as
the bearers of immutable truth.”38 The theological task was coming
to encompass a reading of nature which enhanced and was enhanced
by the reading of Scripture.
Defining ‘knowledge of nature’ is not simple, not least because the
term n a t u r a (nature) had a range of meanings. Na t u r a could refer to the
physical world created by God, worthy of contemplation and wonder
but not necessarily the subject of knowledge. It could function as a
Latin translation of the Greek p h y s i s , the organizing principle of the
natural world, often understood as a mediating term between God and
creation, and it could refer in the Aristotelian sense to the “nature of
a thing,” a meaning which became widespread during the thirteenth
century.39 Thus nature, like Scripture, could be read for c o n t e m p l a t i o or
for s c i e n t i a . Moreover, as understandings of nature progressed beyond
c o n t e m p l a t i o , two primary interpretative options presented themselves.40
Like Scripture, nature could be understood or ‘read’ for its own sake,
that is, ‘literally,’ seeking to discover the ‘nature of the thing’; or it could
be ‘read’ allegorically, as always pointing beyond itself to the divine,
in which case for nature, as for Scripture, the ‘literal’ reading was
only a preliminary to understanding the ‘true’ meaning of the natural

37
Ibid., 36.
38
Lohr 1982, 89.
39
French & Cunningham 1996, 81–88. For medieval understandings of n a t u r a ,
see Gloy 1995–1996, Schäfer & Ströker 1993, Picht 1989, Hager 1984, Hennemann
1975.
40
The terminology of literal and allegorical reading of nature is drawn from French
& Cunningham, although they do not (as far as I can see) give an adequate defini-
tion of their understanding of a literal reading of nature. See French & Cunningham
1996, e.g., 73–74, 76–79.

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world.41 As for Scripture, these readings of nature were not mutually

exclusive, and the view that the ‘reading’ of nature was essentially about
uncovering the ‘nature of a thing’ could be quite easily combined with
the understanding that God had created the world to so as to reveal
aspects of his nature.42 The understanding of nature in the sense of
p h y s i s , that is, as an organizing principle, could also be integrated into
the doctrine of creation by seeing p h y s i s as an aspect of God’s creative
activity, the active principle creating “the passive and material side of
‘nature’.”43 As the product of God’s active, creative nature, the natural
world pointed beyond itself to the principle which had created it, so
that knowledge of it could reveal aspects of the nature of God.
Discussions of nature in the schools of the thirteenth century were
“centrally to do with God, with man’s relations to him and man’s
attempt to live the good life as a Christian philosopher,”44 and accord-
ingly the acquisition of knowledge of nature was not thought to be
an independent intellectual enterprise. Teaching about nature in the
schools tended to be speculative, based on the writings of ancient
authors, which from the first half of the thirteenth century—and despite
the condemnations of some conclusions of Aristotelian philosophy in
Paris and Oxford—increasingly meant Aristotle. Practical theology and
philosophy tended to find their place in different social and intellectual
contexts, including in the case of the former monasteries or for the
latter courts.45 If the understanding of nature as organizing principle
was conducive to considering the relationship between the natural and
supernatural orders, nature in terms of the ‘nature of a thing’ tended
to be the approach which appealed to those such as the p h y s i c u s , or the
m e d i c u s who had a particular interest in the actual properties and use
of the natural world.46
Either of these approaches could leave nature susceptible to being
understood as an autonomous principle, independent of, or even in

41
Thus William of Thierry suggests that the p h y s i c u s looks at the ultimate nature
of things, whilst the p h i l o s o p h u s considers these in the light of creation. French & Cun-
ningham 1996, 77.
42
French & Cunningham 1996, 78.
43
Ibid., 79–80. As proposed by Hugh of St. Victor (1096–1141), here God acts as
the active principle which shapes nature (n a t u r a n a t u r a n s ), whilst the created world is
nature as shaped by that principle (n a t u r a n a t u r a t a ).
44
French & Cunningham 1996, 92.
45
Southern 1995, 38.
46
French & Cunningham 1996, 71–73.

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opposition to God. This danger had been apparent as early as the

dispute between William of Conches and William of Thierry. In the
latter’s opinion, the former’s appeal to dialectics and natural philosophy
tended to elevate nature to a generative and autonomous principle
which “contended with God in creation,” and came close to the dual-
ism of the Cathars.47 This could be countered by regarding nature as
a second means of revelation, complementary to Scripture: as early as
the ninth century, John Scotus Eriugena had “introduced the Greek
notion of Nature and Scripture as the double vestment of Christ,”48
and argued that either could act as a means by which God’s eternal
light could illuminate human reason. Both Scripture and creation could
be conceived as both sacrament and symbol; each had a
literal façade, a visible and sensible aspect, which we must work hard at
coming to know, but which we must also get beyond in order to attain, as
far as we can, the s p i r i t of the one and the r a t i o n a l i t y of the other. . . . For
‘the surface of the Scriptures’ and the ‘sensible forms of the world’ are
the two garments of Christ.49
This understanding of the natural world as sacramental and symbolic,
pointing to and revealing a truth which lies beyond it, exhibited strong
parallels to the allegorical exegesis of Scripture in which the events of
history were viewed as signs pointing beyond themselves. Augustine had
regarded words, including the words of Scripture, and created things
“as signs (s i g n a ) whose primary function was to point beyond themselves
to the only true thing (r e s ) which it was worthwhile to know, namely
the Trinity.”50 Similarly, for Aquinas, the author of Scripture is God,
“who has the power of signifying his meaning in words, as human
beings also do, but has the further power of giving meaning to things
themselves.”51 Although the “things” to which Aquinas here refers are
events in Scripture, they could also be events in nature. The reading
of nature therefore meant looking beyond it to understand the truth
it was intended to reveal.

47
Ibid., 77–78 (quote at 78).
48
Otten 2004a, 52.
49
de Lubac 1998, I, 76–77.
50
Otten 2004a, 51.
51
Thomas Aquinas, S u m m a T h e o l o g i c a I, qu. 1, art. 10; cited by Southern 1995,
114.

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Theology and the Philosophy of Aristotle

It will already be apparent that the contribution of Aristotelian phi-

losophy was of particular importance in articulating knowledge about
God and determining possible approaches to nature. Aristotle’s works
depended on an understanding of nature and of natural reason which
was perceived by some commentators as treading dangerously close
to asserting their autonomy. From the mid-twelfth century, the danger
was that “the yielding of Plato to Aristotle,” as Otten has described it,
could also be associated with a “divergence of Nature and Scripture.”52
At the University of Paris, this concern had in 1210 resulted in the
banning of lectures on Aristotle’s works of natural philosophy,53 a ban
which was renewed in 1215 and reaffirmed in 1231.54 Nevertheless,
by the 1230s there is evidence that the Me t a p h y s i c s , the Pseudo-Aris-
totelian L i b e r d e c a u s i s , and all Aristotle’s works on natural philosophy
were being taught at Paris,55 and in the revised University statutes of
1255, the Aristotelian corpus had been incorporated into the syllabus
of the Arts Faculty.56
The incorporation of Aristotelian philosophy into the curriculum
had consequences for both philosophers and theologians. Lohr sees
the 1255 statutes as the point at which
the arts faculty became what we might call a philosophical faculty, with
a new importance in its own eyes and a tendency to develop a teaching
independent of the theological faculty. Such a development was bound to
arouse violent reactions and a growing rivalry between the two faculties.57
Theologians had to determine the extent to which it was legitimate
to appeal to Aristotelian philosophy in their considerations of such
theological matters such as the resurrection of the body, the eternity
of the world, and the immortality of the soul. A significant proportion
of the propositions which were to be condemned in Paris in 1270 and
1277 sought to exclude Aristotelian categories from discussion of such

52
Otten 2004a, 128.
53
See, for instance, Dod 1982, 48, 71.
54
Dod 1982, 71.
55
Lohr 1982, 85.
56
Lohr believes that the 1255 Paris statutes mark an “official adoption” of Aristote-
lianism (1982, 87), but compare the more cautious interpretation of Dod 1982, 73.
57
Lohr 1982, 87.

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theological matters.58 These propositions demonstrate a continuing

uneasiness regarding Aristotelian ideas and methods which lasted
throughout the thirteenth century and which elicited a range of
responses.
At the University of Paris, interest in the Aristotelian corpus grew as
a result of the arrival of the Dominicans in 1221, for the Aristotelian
l i b r i n a t u r a l e s were an important tool in the Dominican defense of the
fundamental goodness of the material world: Aristotle’s knowledge
of nature and his theory of causality offered a way of incorporating
the natural world into the divine plan. His theory of causality also
offered a new approach to texts: Minnis observes the rise of what he
refers to as the “Aristotelian Prologue” in the early thirteenth century,
which introduced texts according to their efficient cause (c a u s a e f fic i e n s ):
the author; the material cause (c a u s a m a t e r i a l i s ): the literary material
available to the author; the formal cause (c a u s a f o r m a l i s ): the structure
or order imposed on the material by the author, and the final cause
(c a u s a fin a l i s ): the author’s end or objective, which for secular works was
“the philosophical import or moral significance,” and for Scripture
its “efficacy . . . in leading the reader to salvation.”59 As Smalley has
observed, this scheme
had the advantage of focusing attention on the author of the book and
on the reasons which impelled him to write. The book ceased to be a
mosaic of mysteries and was seen as the product of a human, although
divinely inspired, intelligence instead.60
Aquinas wrote of the need to identify the “truth of the letter” in order
to grasp the “intention of the author.”61 Grammar and dialectics sup-
ported this aim: grammar pointed to the exact meaning of words,
whilst dialectics revealed the necessary structure of the commentary
on the text.62
As the philosophy faculty developed and gained autonomy, a differ-
ent approach to philosophical texts developed, which viewed natural
philosophical texts not so much as authorities and witnesses to a deeper
truth, but rather as the opinion of a distinguished colleague63 which

58
Ibid., 87–88. Compare also Grant 1982, 537–539.
59
Minnis 1988, 28–29.
60
Smalley 1983, 297; compare also Minnis 1988, 39.
61
Verger 1984, 212.
62
Ibid., 213.
63
Lohr 2005.

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might assist in the understanding of Scripture, but which made no

claim to privileged knowledge. Lohr suggests:
The theologian sought to unveil a truth concealed; the philosopher
need not seek to conceal the errors in his sources. Since the work of
Aristotle . . . was for [the philosopher] neither a new dogma nor an infal-
lible guide, he need make no clerical attempt at harmonizing science
and the Bible.64
Truth was no longer contained in the philosopher’s text but had
become the goal for which the interpreter, helped in his quest by the
philosopher’s text, was searching. The consequence was a shift in
the understanding of the location of truth, and this is what “[made]
the exegesis of the masters of arts so novel in the development of
medieval thought.”65
This development infl uenced the theologians’ use of Aristotelian
philosophy. Thomas Aquinas accepted Aristotle’s philosophy as a
product of ‘natural reason’ given to humans by God and illuminated
by divine light.66 This allowed him to read Aristotelian texts as sources
of knowledge for the better understanding of divine revelation and,
with it, theological truth.
In the Aristotelian logic Thomas [Aquinas] found prescriptions for the
ordering of theological doctrines in a strict science. In the Aristotelian
metaphysics he found the principles for the demonstrations of truths such
as the existence, infinity, and omnipotence of God. In the Aristotelian
natural philosophy he found natural analogies to the hierarchical view of
the world which the clerical tradition had handed down.67
For Aquinas, moreover, theology could never be philosophically inco-
herent:68 theology and philosophy were fundamentally and inherently
compatible. Natural knowledge was analogous to knowledge of the
divine.
In affirming the role of natural knowledge, Aquinas was not advo-
cating an experimental approach to the world. However, alerted to
the discrepancies between the Aristotelian cosmology as taught in the
P h y s i c s , which was based on concentric spheres, and the eccentrics and

64
Lohr 1982, 90.
65
Ibid., 91.
66
Harrison 2008, 43–46. Compare also Southern 1995, 42–43.
67
Lohr 1982, 93.
68
Cross 1999, 159n 43.

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epicycles used in Ptolemy’s A l m a g e s t to predict astronomical observation,

he noted that a hypothesis is not true simply because it explains what
has been observed:
The [mathematical] hypotheses which [Eudoxus and later astronomers]
invented are not necessarily true. For even though such hypotheses should
save the phenomena, it is not right to say that they are true, because the
astronomical phenomena can perhaps be saved in some other way not
yet understood by men.69
Lohr notes that
although Thomas [Aquinas] thus formulated one of the most important
principles in the theory of science, he employed it to render harmless the
objections to his theological interpretation of Aristotle’s astronomy—in
the hope that some day a way might be found to make Aristotle’s theory
agree with experience.70
Aquinas’s use of Aristotle as a guide to theological truth assumes that
Aristotle has better knowledge of the truth than do those who observe
the world. This contrasts with the philosophers’ reading of Aristotle,
which used his works as tools in the search for an as yet unknown
truth, and which therefore allowed for the possibility of Aristotle’s
having erred. The growing independence of the arts faculty and the
tendency to draw on Aristotelian categories in defining theological truth
were an important factor in causing the condemnations of 1250 and
1277, which divided Thomas Aquinas from Duns Scotus and Henry
of Ghent.71 These developments also “made it possible for a [ Jean]
Buridan to devote his entire life to the problems of logic and natural and
moral philosophy,” and gave rise to “the new logical and mathematical
questions” which would be raised by Ockham in the early fourteenth
century, by Nicole Oresme in the later fourteenth century, and by Paul
of Venice and others at Padua in the fifteenth.72

Nature and Divine Contemplation

Alongside the Aristotelian tradition, some theologians continued to

understand nature as leading to contemplative knowledge of the divine.

69
Cited according to Lohr 1982, 94.
70
Lohr 1982, 94.
71
Cross 1998, 6.
72
Lohr 1982, 96.

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Whilst Thomas Aquinas understood “sensible, created things as evidence

of the Creator and his goodness,” the Franciscan tradition continued
to understand them rather as “stepping stones to mystical experience
of the Creator.”73 Light, for example, could function as a metaphor
in different ways. Bonaventure was just one of a number of friars to
express anxieties about the application of Aristotelian philosophy in
theology, “combat[ing] any suggestion that philosophy was self-suf-
ficient,” and arguing for “the need to maintain due balance between
faith and reason.”74 For Bonaventure, “the human thirst for knowledge
must be subordinated to the search for wisdom and holiness.”75 French
and Cunningham identify this more contemplative approach to nature
with what they identify as the “Franciscan” approach to light, optics,
and p e r s p e c t i v a shown by Robert Grosseteste (ca. 1168–1253), Roger
Bacon (ca. 1219–1292), John Pecham (ca. 1230–1292), and Witelo
(fl . ca. 1250–1273). Not all of these were actually Franciscans, but all
shared a conviction that nature was a source of quasi-mystical knowl-
edge of God and an understanding of light as “God in operation in
the world.”76 Bonaventure’s critique of Aristotle almost certainly infl u-
enced the restrictions on the use of Aristotle passed in Paris in 1270; he
infl uenced later Franciscans (including John Pecham) and contributed
to the creation of a climate which made it possible for Duns Scotus to
take these questions further.77

Nature and the Power of God

The condemnations of 1270 and 1277 sought to define the extent to

which philosophical or natural knowledge could have implications for
theological knowledge. One result of the condemnations was that natu-
ral philosophers, who were regularly confronted by Aristotle’s “explicitly
heretical principles” to make a radical separation between their theo-
logical speaking and their ‘speaking naturally’ (l o q u e n d o n a t u r a l i t e r ).78 The
fourteenth century therefore witnessed growing separation between faith
and philosophy, allied with a growing conviction that theology was “not
just one more science governed by laws which were applicable to all

73
French & Cunningham 1996, 224.
74
Robson 2001, 195, 187.
75
Ibid., 196.
76
French & Cunningham 1996, 247.
77
Robson 2001, 195, 197.
78
Grant 1996, 80.

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knowledge, for as founded on revealed truth, it was dependent on faith,

not natural experience.”79 Theologians such as Henry of Ghent (ca.
1219–1273), John Duns Scotus (1266–1308), and William of Ockham
(1270–1349) thought that its contingent nature meant that the created
world could not yield reliable knowledge of the nature of God, for “in
the full freedom of His will [God] could override all natural causality
and, with it, the finite order of things from which natural knowledge
was drawn.”80 At the root of these discussions were concerns about
the extent to which God’s power over the world could be said to be
in any way limited, that is, about the relationship of God’s p o t e n t i a
a b s o l u t a to his p o t e n t i a o r d i n a t a .81 The fourteenth-century emphasis on the
p o t e n t i a a b s o l u t a was directed against claims that the present order was
inviolable, so that “the exaltation of God’s absoluteness was the reply
to those who exalted the sovereignty of creation.”82 Infl uenced by the
Franciscan tradition, theologians began to revert from the conception
of theology as s c i e n t i a to seeing it as practical rather than speculative,
and as intended not so much to comprehend as to glorify God.
The growing autonomy of the thirteenth-century philosophers found
its place here, for in this new cosmological understanding,
physical attributes of beings become uppermost: where previously the
individual had scarcely gained more than passing attention e n r o u t e to the
universal, it now came to the forefront; it was treated in terms of its own,
measurable attributes, and not the other way around, as a manifestation
of universal essences.83
This development was associated with the concerns arising from the
thought of John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and others. In part
this was connected with a growing interest in probing the nature of
universals, and particularly of the nature of their existence,84 but this

79
Leff 1959, 88.
80
Leff 1959 88, and compare Leff 1961, 18–19.
81
Grant sees this as the underlying concern of the Paris condemnations of 1270
and 1277 (1982, 537–539).
82
Leff 1961, 21.
83
Ibid., 24.
84
For these discussions, see for instance, Adams 1982, 411–439. Ockham held that
“universals are nothing other than names—naturally significant general concepts pri-
marily, and secondarily the conventional signs corresponding to them” (ibid., 434); that
is, he “[identified] universals primarily with natural significant names (or concepts) and
not with conventional names” (ibid., 438–439). However, he does not clearly explain
the relation of natural signification, nor is he entirely clear about the ontological status
of concepts, and therefore of universals (ibid., 435–439). For the complexity of defin-

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in turn was related to a new concern with understanding meaning. The

ideas of Ockham and others gave rise to a new logic:
At the heart of terminist logic, in any form it took, was the belief that
linguistic structures were ultimately human creations used to think and
communicate ideas, and that the meaning of sentences or propositions
depended on how terms were being used in those propositions. Meaning
depended on linguistic and extra-mental contexts as well as on the inten-
tion of the one thinking, speaking, or writing. The dominant approach to
logic at Paris in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, however,
assumed that linguistic structures were part of the nature of things and
did not depend on human convention or on context . . . [which] took a
quasi-metaphysical approach to language and attempted to understand
reality and language through the ‘modes’ of being (m o d i e s s e n d i ), intellec-
tion (m o d i i n t e l l i ge n d i ), and signification (m o d i s i gn i fic a n d i ).85
For Ockham, this was also associated with a new understanding of phys-
ics, for he argued that only substances and qualities are real entities (r e s
p e r m a n e n t e s ), while the other Aristotelian categories are descriptions of
substances and qualities in particular states.86 This had consequences for
the relationship between theology and philosophy. While for Aquinas,
theology was by its nature philosophically coherent, Cross has argued
that for Scotus, although “the philosophical c o h e r e n c e of [theological]
claims is always of extreme importance to him,” he is nonetheless, for
instance in the case of transubstantiation, “prepared to accept what
he sees as a needlessly complex account over a simpler and (for this
reason) intellectually preferable account just because he thinks the
church teaches it.”87 Ockham would go a step further, accepting an
account he recognized to be philosophically incoherent if it had been
accepted by the church to be true.88
The distinction between the p o t e n t i a D e i a b s o l u t a , which describes the
possibilities initially open to God, as opposed to the p o t e n t i a o r d i n a t a ,
which refers to the possibilities inherent in the world as actually created
by God, meant that “God [was] no longer tied to creation by ‘deter-
ministic’ causation, but is related to it by volition, i.e., by his personal

ing ‘nominalist’ understandings of universals, see Courtenay 1974, and on the earlier
period, compare also Courtenay, 1995.
85
Courtenay 1987, 7.
86
Ibid., 8.
87
Cross 1999, 10.
88
Ockham argues, for instance, that “the doctrine of the Trinity appears philosophi-
cally incoherent.” Cross 1999, 159 n. 43.

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decision.”89 Consequently, “all metaphysical arguments based on nec-

essary causal links—as is indeed typical of the cosmology of Aristotle
and the vi a a n t i q u a of Aquinas—lose their cogency, if not their cred-
ibility.”90 Deprived of any a p r i o r i means of proof through appeals to
metaphysics, explanations of problems of natural philosophy had to be
tested and supported by experience. Similarly, in the realm of theology,
“metaphysics is shown to be sheer speculation when not verifiable in
God’s self-revelation,” that is, in Scripture and tradition.91 Ockham’s
development of the distinction between the p o t e n t i a D e i a b s o l u t a and
o r d i n a t a therefore provided motivation both for closer observation of
nature and for closer study of Scripture.92 Additionally, the variety of
theological and philosophical approaches which seem to have been
current by the late fourteenth and through the fifteenth century made
people increasingly suspicious of the ability of these methods to reveal
a unified and unifying truth. The rise of Renaissance humanism was
at least in part a response to this concern.

Humanism and the Renaissance

German universities of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries knew

two—or sometimes more—‘ways’ or v i a e which led to the study of
philosophy and theology: the vi a a n t i q u a or old way, which looked to
Thomas Aquinas, and the vi a m o d e r n a , or modern way, which looked
primarily to Ockham.93 The difference was in their methodology: the
former proceeding by “way of exposition,” lecturing on an authoritative
text, whilst the latter proceeded by “way of questions,” raising specula-

89
Oberman 1994, 28. Compare also Courtenay 1974, 39, and see the discussion
in Funkenstein 1986, 129–135.
90
Oberman 1994, 28.
91
Ibid., 28.
92
This is not to say that all ‘nominalists’ were engaged on the study of the natural
world. Indeed, Harrison (2002) argues that there was no simple causal relationship
between nominalism and empiricism. However, it remains the case that nominalism
left space for an interest in the world for its own sake.
93
Oberman (1994, 24) points out that some German universities might include not
only a vi a T h o m a e (way of Thomas) or a vi a S c o t i (way of Scotus) and a vi a O c c a m i (way
of Ockham), but other ways such as a vi a A l b e r t i (the way of Albert Magnus) or the
vi a G r e go r i i (the way of Gregory of Rimini).

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tive issues.94 Courtenay points to shifts in theological interests at Paris

and Oxford during the fourteenth century and particularly to a decline
in the number of biblical commentaries, which probably refl ect these
differences. Whilst in the thirteenth century “the prominent mendicant
theologians [were] as productive in biblical studies as they were in
epistemology, metaphysics, or theology,”95 the strong fourteenth-century
interest in logic, mathematics, and natural philosophy led to a “general
separation of biblical exegesis and speculative theology.”96 From the third
quarter of the fourteenth century, however, biblical commentaries again
began to be written, often by theologians in the northern universities,
and especially at Vienna, Prague, and Krakow.97 These commentaries
often considered New Testament rather than sharing the interest in the
Old Testament, and especially the Wisdom literature, found in the com-
mentaries of the earlier part of the fourteenth century. They focused
on practical piety, and formed a bridge between the more speculative
S e n t e n c e s commentaries and sermon literature. Commentaries began
to use a q u a e s t i o structure which made it possible for wide interests to
be explored, and which would remain popular until the late sixteenth
century. For the new generation of commentators, exegesis of Scrip-
ture offered the pathway to knowledge of God and the world: “these
commentaries became windows of the world as their authors saw it,
on nature and the society of the age that produced them.”98 Although
still in the scholastic mode, this wider, more integrative approach to
the knowledge that might be extracted via textual exegesis points to the
intellectual shifts which were already beginning to take place.
Late scholastic theology has generally been eclipsed by scholars’
concentration on the Italian Renaissance and the associated rise of
humanism, and seen through the critical voices of the new humanist
scholars, who condemned the ‘sophistry’ of logic and dialectics and
called for a revision of philosophy, and with it, theology, law, and medi-
cine. Vasoli argues that this period, especially in Italy, saw a shift in

94
Catto 2008, 110. Catto suggests, however, that “in practice the original thinkers
in German universities, above all Nicolas of Cusa and Gabriel Biel . . . ignored the
controversies of the W e ge s t r e i t ” (ibid.).
95
See, for instance, Courtenay 1985, esp. 177–178.
96
Courtenay 1985, 184.
97
Ibid., 185.
98
Ibid., 187.

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intellectual culture which mirrored a shift in social and political culture:

the lawyers, administrators, and chancellors of the new cities and com-
munes needed to be literate; they could also benefit from an awareness
of history, from literary and rhetorical polish, and from guidance as to
how their lives should be lived. In response to these needs, as early as
the thirteenth century in Padua, there was a growing appeal to classical
texts as “linguistic and stylistic models as well as rich sources of moral
example.”99 Early humanists criticized scholasticism for its “barbarous
jargon” and its dialectics as “irrelevant to genuine human concerns,”
and began to promote a new way of thinking, which promoted the
a r t e s as useful to civic life and applied them to the training of the new
intellectual classes.100
These new scholars appealed to ancient wisdom as a source not only
of rhetorical techniques, but also of models of exemplary living which,
it was hoped, would solve the political, ethical, and religious problems of
their times. This was not a new endeavor; indeed, Otten and Salemink
point out that throughout the Middle Ages it was “important to base
one’s religious identity on an established line of c o n t i n u i t y , a genealogy
of tradition which [could] be traced back to the very origin of the
Christian movement.”101 It fostered an interest in and awareness of the
past which was to shape sixteenth-century developments in theology
and philosophy as scholars sought to discern not only what the past
‘Golden Age’ might have to teach the present, but also the extent to
which contemporary developments must be constrained by or might
go beyond the knowledge of the ancients.
By the mid-fifteenth century, new methods of reading texts and of
philological commentary were emerging, stimulated by the study of the
numerous Greek manuscripts which had been introduced into Latin
Christendom after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, which alerted
scholars to textual problems in familiar sources and commentaries.
The call for the return a d f o n t e s ! —which was to become the humanist
rallying cry—refl ected scholars’ wish to return to the ancient texts as
measures and guides of literary style and morality. This expressed itself
in a renewed interest in rhetoric, supported by the development of a
simplified dialectics.102 However, the call to return a d f o n t e s also involved

99
Vasoli 1988, 58.
100
Ibid., 59–60.
101
Otten & Salmink 2004, 24.
102
For this development in Lorenzo Valla and Rudolf Agricola, see Mack 1993.

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a purely practical challenge: scholars became increasingly aware of the

necessity of determining the actual content—the actual words—of texts
which had for centuries been copied and recopied from the glosses,
s c h o l a e , postilles, and other commentaries which had come to be associ-
ated with them. Not every copyist or student had identified accurately
where the text ended and the commentary began, so that texts and
commentaries on them had become increasingly intertwined. Indeed,
Minnis suggests that for late medieval interpretations of texts,
one might go so far as to say that it is the original text t o ge t h e r with the
accompanying commentary (often, it must be remembered, written
around the text in the manuscript margin) that should be regarded as
the source.103
The first task for the humanist was therefore to disentangle the author’s
text from commentary on it, to move, as Bedouelle puts it “from the
glossed text to the naked text.”104 The availability of Greek manuscripts
alerted readers to this necessity; it also provided evidence of inaccuracies
in texts long known through Latin translations of Arabic translations
of the Greek; additionally, it alerted scholars to false attributions of
authorship. The establishment of accurate texts and authentic author-
ship produced new editions of texts which, thanks to the development
of printing, could be made available in multiple copies to interested
scholars (including students, who no longer had to take down the text
that was being commented on as well as their lecturer’s comments) and
anyone else who was capable of reading them. Although, as Smalley and
others have shown, medieval commentators had frequently sought to
establish accurate texts before embarking on interpretation, awareness of
the need for this methodological care was now more widespread.105
Establishing the correct text was the essential first step to establishing
the correct interpretation of that text. However, as demonstrated by
Valla’s D e e l e g a n t i a e l i n g u a e l a t i n a e (1471), the primary interest in the study

103
Minnis 1988, x. For examples of the effect of this in late medieval vernacular
translations of Scripture, see ibid., ix. Smith offers facsimile reproductions of the page
layout of medieval manuscripts including the g l o s s a o r d i n a r i a (2001, 43); for a reproduc-
tion of a page of an early printed g l o s s a o r d i n a r i a , see Lobrichon 1984, 102.
104
“Du texte glosé au texte nu”: Bedouelle 1989, 59.
105
For the complexities of the text of Scripture during the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, and particularly the standardization of the Vulgate text during the thirteenth,
see Light 1984, esp. 88–93.

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of Greek was often rhetorical: “this study of the v e r i t a s g r a e c a (Greek

truth) was intended to improve the accuracy and eloquence of the Latin
language.”106 At the same time, “the early fifteenth-century conception
of philosophy . . . was capable of reevaluating both past and present,”
for the application of linguistic and philological interests to texts made
it possible for scholars “to separate antiquity and its traditions from
myth and fable,” and thus resulted in “an increasingly radical critique
of metaphysical principles and concepts.”107 Authorial context became
important, for if knowledge was concerned “above all with what earlier
men had thought and written,” then texts must be read “in the light
of the fears and aspirations of their first readers.”108 This represented
a shift in approach to reading texts:
The scholastics had read their texts as structures, systems of interlock-
ing propositions that they tested for coherence as an engineer tests the
load-bearing parts of a building. The humanists read theirs as clouded
windows which proper treatment could restore to transparency, revealing
the individuals who had written them. The scholar could thus come to
know dead men as they had really been.109
Historical readings therefore became more important. At the same time,
however, the sense that a text and the events it portrayed might point
to a deeper meaning was not lost. Grafton has observed a variety of
patterns of reading, repeated across Europe:
One set of humanists seeks to make the ancient world live again, assuming
its undimmed relevance and unproblematic accessibility; another seeks to
put the ancient texts back into their own time, admitting that reconstruc-
tion of the past is difficult and that success may reveal the irrelevance of
ancient experience and precept to modern problems.110
Thus, whilst some humanists took the relatively novel approach of
seeking to understand how the texts they studied fitted into the larger,
historical development of ancient thought and writing, “allegorical
exegesis persisted longer—and infl uenced more fields of thought”
than has often been assumed.111 This was a new way of reading which
in many ways incorporated the old, and although Grafton suggests

106
Bedouelle 1999, 210.
107
Vasoli 1988, 65.
108
Grafton 1991, 8.
109
Grafton 1991, 8.
110
Ibid., 26–27.
111
Ibid., 30–32.

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“scholars have tended to seize upon only one of the two approaches
I have described as the one really characteristic of humanism,”112
most humanists in fact combined them: “no criticism of allegorical
principles . . . ever did away with allegorical practice—even on the part
of the critic himself.”113

Biblical Humanism and the Authorship of Scripture

Biblical humanism applied humanist methods to Scripture. However,

Scripture was recognized to be different from the classical texts of
the humanities (s t u d i a h u m a n i t a t i s ), since their author was not a human
figure, but God. Alongside the rediscovery of “the essential a u c t o r i t a s
of God’s word” as theology’s guiding principle114 (which was undoubt-
edly an important aspect of the new readings), it was necessary also to
consider the role of the human writers and their context. Study of the
biblical texts began to consider those texts in the original Greek and
Hebrew, a principle and methodology which were affirmed in North-
ern Europe and particularly the territories of the German Empire by
Wessel Gansfort (1419–1489), Rudolf Agricola (ca. 1443–1485), and
Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522).115 However, humanist scholars were
swift to recognize that the Greek of the New Testament was not as
elegant or rhetorically sophisticated as that of the classical authors.
Biblical commentators explained that God spoke in ways appropriate
for the minds, language, and context of the human writer, and that
divine truth was in this way accommodated to human needs. They
thus revived theories of accommodation which led them, like their
predecessors, to look beyond external form and seek the true, spiritual
message behind the text. Whilst Erasmus was clear that the true mean-
ing of the text was spiritual rather than literal, Protestant interpreters
of Scripture tended to identify this spiritual meaning as a part of their
literal reading of the text.116
As for classical texts, study of the biblical texts in their original lan-
guages brought awareness of the discrepancies between the manuscript
traditions and the Latin translation, in this case the Vulgate. Such

112
Ibid., 32.
113
Ibid., 37.
114
Vasoli 1988, 65.
115
See Vanderjagt 2008, 160–167; Mesguich 2008.
116
For Luther as an example of this, see Raeder 2008, 375.

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comparative textual methods were applied to the text of Scripture by

Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457), whose C o l l a t i o N o v i T e s t a m e n t i (1442–43)
offered a series of annotations to the Vulgate text of the New Testament
arising from its comparison with the Greek text.117 This work formed
the foundation for both the Polyglot Bible commissioned by Cardinal
Ximenes de Cisneros and Erasmus’ N o v u m I n s t r u m e n t u m . However, it also
attracted significant criticism. Rummel notes that Valla and Erasmus
were criticized by theologians who, firstly, did not consider philologists
qualified to comment on Scripture, who argued, secondly, that Jerome
had been working under divine inspiration, so that it was “blasphemous,
not to say heretical, to change or correct the Vulgate,” and who, thirdly,
viewed the Greeks as schismatics whose manuscripts were more likely
to have corrupted the text than to correct it.118
On the basis of their textual work, humanists hoped to achieve
clarity of doctrine. Valla’s comparative method had led his contempo-
rary, the Florentine Gianozzo Manetti (1396–1459), to attempt some
clarification of theological doctrine on the basis of better philological
understanding.119 Humanists hoped that the new methods of read-
ing texts would lead to deeper theological agreement than had been
experienced through the exegetical methods of later scholasticism, and
especially that they would demonstrate to the church hierarchy the
necessity of reform of the church, its practices, and the moral behavior
of its members, particularly those who were ordained, had taken reli-
gious vows, or otherwise held office. As for classical texts, the exegesis
of Scripture, and particularly preaching, the emphasis on clarification
of doctrine therefore developed hand in hand with an increased focus
on the moral sense of the text, although the latter was already to be
observed in the exegesis of, for instance, fourteenth-century Oxford.
Indeed, Catto argues that John Colet’s moral exegesis of Romans,
“which in retrospect seem to have opened a new era of biblical exegesis
cannot have appeared at the time exceptionally divergent from current
practice.”120 Such moral, ‘biblical’ exegesis was popular amongst not
only humanist scholars, but also lay people. From the late fifteenth
century, there were growing calls both from within the church hierar-
chy and from town councils for preaching “according to the Gospel.”

117
Bedouelle 1999, 210; Backus 1999, 213.
118
Rummel 2008, 218.
119
Bedouelle 1999, 210.
120
Catto 1992, 278.

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Indeed, town councils, the members of which were often drawn from
an elite of humanist educated citizens, began to appoint preachers to
do precisely that.

Plato and Platonism

The question of what people could know about the natural world and
the extent to which that knowledge could lead to God remained pressing,
not least because, as disputes about the true interpretation of Scripture
degenerated into violence, the natural world was seen by some as offering
an alternative, perhaps less controversial, route to understanding the
will of God. Mathematical Platonism, with its conviction that number
could represent attributes of the mind of God, seemed to offer a helpful
tool. Although Aristotle continued to be regarded as the philosopher
of the universities until well into the seventeenth century, Platonic
philosophy was an important infl uence on both the philosophy and the
theology of the Renaissance. Nicolas of Cusa (1401–1464) drew on the
writings of Meister Eckhart, Pseudo-Dionysius, and possibly Proclus in
arguing that the power of perception as “derived from a higher power:
it was a gift of God to human minds which were in a state of ‘neces-
sary ignorance’,” which followed from the “absolute disproportion of
the infinity of God to the limited capacity of the human intellect.”121
Human knowledge can therefore never fully comprehend God, and in
particular Aristotelian logic remains a logic of the finite, which must
always and necessarily fail in the contemplation of the infinite.122 The
only exception to this is mathematical concepts, which he thought were
known to the intellect independently of sensory perception: “numbers,
he was tempted to think, were images of the ideas of God.”123
Nicolas of Cusa had appealed to works of Pseudo-Dionysius which
had been translated by John Scotus Eriugena in the ninth century and
had been frequently commented on in the Latin West.124 Methodologi-
cally anchored in the scholastic tradition,125 Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499)
and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) drew on newly dis-
covered works of Plato, mediated through Plotinus’ E n n e a d s .126 Another

121
Catto 2008, 115, and compare Hopkins 1986.
122
See Cassirer 1927, 11–12.
123
Catto 2008, 116.
124
Allen 1999, 55.
125
Kristeller & Randall, 1948, 7–8.
126
For the dates of the discovery of Plato’s works in Italy, see Allen 1999, 55.

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important infl uence in the rediscovery of a Christian (neo)Platonic

worldview was Augustine, together with other Latin Christian works
which took up Platonic themes, such as those of Boethius.127 Renais-
sance Platonism “remains in essence metaphysical, . . . committed to a
metaphysical notion of Man made in the image and likeness of God
as the One and the Good.”128 Convinced that the created structures of
the world refl ected the mind of God—based on the assumption that
“as Plato said, God always geometrizes,” as Philip Melanchthon not
infrequently wrote129—Platonist scholars and observers such as Johannes
Kepler sought knowledge of God the Creator through knowledge and
contemplation of the world, sometimes to the extent of elevating the
authority of the natural world above that of Scripture.130

Aristotelian Method and the Critique of Aristotelianism

The importance of Platonism does not imply the eclipse of Aristotelian-

ism, which, as noted above, remained the primary means of teaching
philosophy. Indeed, Lohr has observed that “the number of Latin com-
mentaries of Aristotle composed during the century between Pompon-
azzi and Galileo exceeds that of the entire millennium from Boethius
to Pomponazzi.”131 The introduction of new manuscript sources of
Aristotle introduced scholars to “an Aristotle without Averroes” which
gave rise to a series of different “Aristotelianisms,”132 refl ecting different
philosophical and also theological interests. Aristotelian method conse-
quently governed thinking about the extent to which certain knowledge
could be gleaned from the world.
In Italy, Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525) had denied that philosophy
could demonstrate the immortality of the human soul, and discussed
questions of human freedom. Whilst he believed that the idea of immor-
tality was philosophically useful because it confronted people with the
prospect of eternal punishment and thus motivated them to behave
well, he maintained that philosophy and faith are two different activi-

127
Allen 1999, 55–56.
128
Allen 1999, 58.
129
Melanchthon 1535 (1835), 817. For the reception history of this phrase, see
Ohly 1982.
130
Methuen 2008, 77–93.
131
Lohr 1997, 372.
132
Ibid., 372, and compare also Lohr 1988.

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ties, arguing that “faith has its own proper procedures, revelation and
scripture,” which “separate faith from his philosophical project and make
it immune from criticisms of miracles, immortality and freedom.”133
Jacopo Zabbarella (1533–1589) sought to clarify Aristotelian methods
of demonstration, and in particular the reciprocal demonstrations ‘of
the fact’ and ‘of the reasoned fact’ which came to be known as the
demonstrative regress.134 His O p e r a L o g i c a was published in Basel in 1594
and became important for German philosophers and theologians; Georg
Calixt (1586–1656) used Zabarella’s method to support a distinction
between natural theology as a theoretical science and revealed theology
as a practical science.135 Like Pompanazzi, Zabarella was also deeply
interested in human nature and the soul, summing up
the best wisdom of the Humanists about human nature, about its natural
destiny and its high estate, combining a sober recognition of its finite
conditions with that lingering sense of immortality which is the charac-
teristic stamp of the humanist.136
In general, sixteenth-century Italian Aristotelians “maintained a secular
rationalism that kept philosophy independent of theology without inter-
fering with its dogmatic teachings.”137 In this context, considerations of
the natural world could be done without reference to God.
In Northern Europe, Rudolf Agricola (1443/44–1485) sought in his
D e i n v e n t i o n e d i a l e c t i c a l i b r i t r e s to simplify Aristotle’s dialectics, bringing
together dialectics and rhetoric in topics, or l o c i , which were organized
so as to provide a comprehensive theory of thinking and reasoning.138
Agricola’s work had wide infl uence on many sixteenth-century scholars,
including Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540), Erasmus and the critic of Aris-
totelian thought, Petrus Ramus (1515–1572). Ramus’s insistence that
the same method of reasoning could be applied both to questions of
logic and of rhetoric resonated with the renewed interest in rhetoric
and led to a revision of the way that logic and rhetoric were taught.
He believed that the first principles of method, stripped of ancient and
modern commentaries, would reveal ‘the truth’; this idea was bolstered

133
South 1999, 118.
134
Wallace 1999; compare also Mikkeli 1992; Mikkeli 1997; Jardine 1997.
135
Lohr 1997, 373–374.
136
Kristeller & Randall 1948, 13.
137
Ibid., 12. Pomponazzi taught a ‘double truth’ although there is some debate
about whether this was merely a formal distinction to aid proof.
138
Poel 1999, 19.

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by his observation of artisans, which convinced him that there must

be a connection between mechanical and philosophical theory. By the
1560s, the new logic and rhetoric, as defined by Ramus and by Omar
Talon (1510–1562),139 or by Martin Luther’s fellow Reformer Philip
Melanchthon (1497–1560),140 were being widely taught across Europe.141
This new methodology shaped not only the structuring of philosophical
knowledge, but also that of theological knowledge. Melanchthon’s L o c i
c o m m u n e s (originally published 1521) was the first of many theological
textbooks to be organized around themes or ‘commonplaces,’ in this
case those drawn from Melanchthon’s lectures on Paul’s Epistle to the
Romans.

Aristotle and Observation of the World

Aristotle’s works came under criticism not only on account of his

teaching of method. As voyages of discovery began to take Europeans
to new lands, they were confronted with previously unknown animals,
vegetables, and minerals, caught previously unknown diseases (possibly
including syphilis),142 and encountered peoples with different customs
and societies. People were discovered to be living in regions close to
the equator claimed by Aristotle to be uninhabitable because too hot,143
and regions believed by authorities such as Augustine and Lactantius
to be mythical were found to exist.144 Voyages of discovery resulted in
a broadening of knowledge which might be in confl ict with the claims
of ancient authorities,145 and revealed enormous gaps in the knowledge
of the natural world displayed by the ‘authorities.’
At the same time that questions were being raised about classical
knowledge of plants and animals, Aristotle’s understanding of the natu-
ral world was being brought into question on another front, through

139
At times, particularly after Ramus had been forbidden to teach or publish, his
work appeared under Tallon’s name.
140
For Melanchthon’s use of rhetoric and dialectics and their application in his
theology and natural philosophy, see Kusukawa 1995 and Maurer 1969/1970.
141
Knafl a & Moss 1999.
142
For attitudes to syphilis, see Arrizabalaga, Henderson, & French 1997.
143
See, for instance, Maestlin 1582, 161. Compare also Harrison 1998, 70, 82–84,
and Vogel 1993.
144
Howell 2002, 150.
145
Or bring them into confl ict with one another: for instance, that the tropics were
inhabited had been claimed by Ptolemy and Avicenna but denied by Aristotle.

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criticism of his cosmology. In the late sixteenth century, observations

of a nova (1572), and of comets (1577–78 and 1581) convinced some
astronomers that these phenomena must be supralunar, and not sub-
lunar, as Aristotelian cosmology taught that they must be.146 One of
the astronomers to draw this conclusion was Michael Maestlin, subse-
quently the teacher of Johannes Kepler. Fully aware of the audacity
of his conclusions with their implicit criticism of Aristotle’s cosmology,
Maestlin appealed to the Bible to justify his observations, explaining that
all people were commanded by God to praise the works of the Creator,
and that such praise included taking precise observations in order to
discover just how the created world functioned rather than relying on
the reports of others. Maestlin believed that knowledge gained through
precise observations of the heavens was knowledge to the glory of God;
it would enable the correction of the mistaken theories put forward
by ancient authors.147 Maestlin thus appealed to Scripture to justify
his criticism of Aristotle’s cosmology. Other observers of the nova of
1572, such as Casper Peucer, realized that it was above the Moon but
preferred to retain their faith in Aristotelian physics, explaining their
conclusions by reference to special providence: God had chosen in
this case to overrule the normal (Aristotelian) rules governing the cos-
mos and to introduce supralunar change by placing a new star in the
heavens.148 It was generally agreed that Scripture revealed a God who
had used astronomical phenomena, such as the star of Bethlehem, to
communicate with human beings in the past and who continued to do
so. Many observers interpreted the 1572 nova as a certain sign that the
end of the world was about to come.149 Whether they were regarded as
exceptions to a general rule, or as demonstrations of the fallibility of
received understandings of physics, the interpretation—and thus the
more precise observation—of newly observed phenomena was quite
easy to justify from the wisdom passages of the Old Testament. The
application of divine authority as revealed in Scripture could justify

146
For a range of approaches to the nova, see Weichenhan 2004 and compare
Methuen 1997 and Methuen 2008, 33–47. These may be compared to the responses
to the comet of 1577/78 discussed in Hellman 1944.
147
Maestlin developed these arguments in the preface to his considerations of the
comets of 1577/78 and 1581: see Methuen 1998, 171–77.
148
Methuen 1997, 508–511, and compare also Methuen 1999, 108–111 and now
Methuen 2008, 43–46, 55–60.
149
Methuen 1997, 504–506, 512–513 and compare now also Methuen 2008,
39–46.

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the revision of the Aristotelian world view according to new, more

accurate, observations.
Similar patterns of observation, which began within certain pre-
scribed limits but took on a dynamic of their own, emerged in the study
of the sublunar sphere. As Ogilvie notes, in natural history, as with
astronomy, observations of the natural world began as “the attempt to
restore the medical, agricultural, and philosophical knowledge of the
ancient world.” However,
the humanists’ approach to reconciling ancient descriptions and modern
observations led quickly to the formation of a new disciplinary community
whose motives were far more complicated than their pragmatic origins.
The resulting discipline “contributed to resolving problems in medicine,
agriculture and . . . natural philosophy, but it was not a part of any of
those disciplines.”150 One of the motivating factors for knowledge was
moral, which is closely allied to the spiritual. Thus Erasmus “under-
scored the importance of a c o r r e c t knowledge of nature, and natural
things, to aesthetic enjoyment and spiritual contemplation,” and both he
and Rabelais saw natural knowledge as “both personal and moral.”151 In
astronomy and in natural history, as in study of Scripture, correct and
accurate knowledge of what God had authored was seen as essential.
The concern to observe and understand actual phenomena appears
to show interesting parallels to the humanist endeavor to establish the
‘true text.’

Reading Scripture in and After the Reformation

Humanism had brought with it a heightened interest in questions of

what human beings could know. These questions took theologians into
discussions about anthropology in general and the soul in particular,
about natural reason and the effect of the fall, and about free will. The
question was not only what human beings could learn from the natural
world. There was also the question of what might be known through
Scripture itself, and how that related to knowledge of the world. On
the whole, the Protestant Reformers were agreed that knowledge of
God’s salvific work could be gained only from Scripture. They were less

150
Ogilvie 2006, 268.
151
Ogilvie 2006, 109–110.

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agreed about whether the natural world could offer reliable knowledge
about God as creator, with Melanchthon believing that it could, while
Luther and Calvin were less optimistic.152
In general, the Reformers’ methods of interpreting Scripture are
broadly in line with the humanist interest in establishing the original
meaning of the text. The strand of ‘literal’ interpretation which had
continued throughout the Middle Ages,153 and in particular the exegeti-
cal methods of Nicholas of Lyra,154 now came to the fore. However,
despite Luther’s often vitriolic critique of the interpretative strategies
of his scholastic predecessors, and his ostensible emphasis on the literal
interpretation of Scripture, none of the Reformers in fact abandoned
allegorical or spiritual interpretation. In particular, their interpreta-
tion of the Old Testament was often typological, seeing Old Testa-
ment figures as foreshadowing the Gospels.155 In this there was little
to distinguish between the methods of humanist-infl uenced Catholic
scholars and those of the Protestant Reformers. Similarly, Protestants
and Catholics alike drew on the interpretative methods and conclusions
of the church fathers, such as Origen, Chrysostom, Augustine, and
Jerome, all of whom had taught a spiritual as well as a literal mean-
ing. For Protestants, however, the spiritual understanding of the text, in
the sense of Christological or other typological interpretations, became
subsumed into its ‘literal’ meaning.
The most significant shift during the Reformation had relatively little
to do with methods of interpretation, which remained complex and
multifaceted. Instead, it refl ected the growing need to define particular
interpretative contexts in terms of the theology to which they gave rise.
In 1520, Luther had criticized the papacy’s claim to control the inter-
pretation of Scripture as the second of “three walls erected around the
papacy,” arguing that scriptural authority must be regarded as above
papal authority.156 However, as Erasmus almost immediately recognized,
this opened up the fl oodgates to a range of personal interpretations

152
See e.g., Harrison 2008, 54–66; compare also Methuen 2008, 7–18.
153
As shown by Smalley’s tracing of “the medieval study of the literal historical
sense” (1983, vii).
154
For a collection of studies of Lyra’s exegesis which investigate his emphasis on
a “literal-grammatical sense” and on words and their structure, see Krey & Smith
2000.
155
Backus 1999, 213.
156
Luther 1520 (1971), 18–22.

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of Scripture.157 By the end of the century, the Council of Trent had

reiterated the conviction that the correct interpretation of Scripture
must lie with the papacy.158 At the same time Lutheran exegetes were
beginning to remark on the need for a rule of faith (r e gu l a fid e i ) to help
define the proper interpretation of Scripture, and defining this by con-
fessional statements, including the Augsburg Confession (1530) and the
Formula of Concord (1577). A similar process was taking place within
Calvinism. The definition of confessional identity included a definition
of the proper reading of particular texts of Scripture—especially, but
not only—those relating to justification and the Eucharist. The cases of
both Galileo and Kepler show how the establishment of confessional
identity and the consequent definition of ‘correct’ exegetical conclusions
had consequences for what could be said, not only about Scripture,
but also about the natural world. The content of doctrine could play
an important role also: there is interesting evidence that the emphasis
on the real physical presence of Christ’s body in the elements, found
in both Roman Catholic and Lutheran eucharistic theology, affected
their openness to new theories of matter.159

Conclusion

Medieval exegesis was not monolithic. Throughout the period discussed

here, there are exegetes who focus on the literal meaning of the text
as well as those whose emphasis is on the spiritual meaning; and there
are students of nature who are interested in nature for its own sake and

157
“What am I to do when many bring diverse interpretations, about which each
swears he has the Holy Spirit?” Erasmus 1525 (1969), 46.
158
“Furthermore, in order to restrain petulant spirits, [the Council] decrees that
in matters of faith and morals which are relevant to the building up of Christian
doctrine, no-one should presume to interpret sacred Scripture, by relying on his own
skill and wresting the sacred Scripture to his own senses, in a sense contrary to that
which the holy mother the Church, to whom it falls to judge of the true sense and
interpretation of the holy Scriptures, has held and does hold. [Council of Trent 1546,
92: Second decree concerning the edition and use of the sacred books]. For a more
detailed discussion of Trent’s definition of the status of the Vulgate, see Wicks 2008.
Councils throughout the fifteenth century had sought to define the interpretation of
Scripture: see Skarsaune 2008.
159
This is particularly true of Roman Catholic theology, with its continuing teach-
ing of transubstantiation. For the confessional constraints on the development of
natural philosophy, and particularly the importance of Eucharistic theology, see, for
Protestant developments, Leijenhorst & Lüthy 2002 and Lüthy 2005, and, for Jesuit
natural philosophy, Hellyer 2005.

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others who see it as symbolic, pointing beyond itself to God. Moreover,

when considering the interpretation of nature and Scripture it is not
enough to look at the specific hermeneutical methods used; instead it
is necessary to understand the role of texts themselves. It is clear that
humanist and Reformation readings of Scripture preserved a spiritual
reading, and although the language of Reformation hermeneutics
focused on the literal meaning, the meaning of literal has here been
expanded to include the allegorical. Here the Reformers probably
follow Erasmus’s emphasis on the spiritual as the ‘truly literal.’ What
changed was not so much the way that texts were read, but the ques-
tion of what defined a text. The humanist concern to discover the
true sources—to return a d f o n t e s —was not simply a rallying cry, but a
refl ection of the fact that texts had become corrupt through the process
of transmission. The primary humanist endeavor was to discover what
actually belonged in the text. When carried over to the reading of the
book of nature, the concern to establish the ‘true text,’ and the cor-
rect reading of that text, gave rise to an entirely new focus on precise
observation. The significant change in the early modern period, was
not so much approaches to texts as the establishment of interpretative
communities which controlled the boundaries of ‘proper’ or ‘correct’
interpretation.

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Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.
Ohly, Friedrich. 1982. Deus Geometra: Skizzen zur Geschichte einer Vorstellung von
Gott. In T r a d i t i o n a l s h i s t o r i s c h e K r a ft : I n t e r d i s z i p l i n ä r e F o r s c h u n ge n z u r G e s c h i c h t e d e s fr ü h e r e n
Mi t t e l a l t e r s , Ed. Norbert Kamp and Joachim Wollasch. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1–42.
Otten, Willemien. 2004a. F r o m P a r a d i s e t o P a r a d i gm . Leiden: Brill.
——. 2004b. Authority and Identity in the Transition from Monastic to Scholastic
Theology: Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux. In R e l i g i o u s I d e n t i t y a n d t h e
P r o b l e m o f Hi s t o r i c a l F o u n d a t i o n : T h e F o u n d a t i o n a l Ch a r a c t e r o f A u t h o r i t a t i v e S o u r c e s i n t h e
Hi s t o r y o f Ch r i s t i a n i t y a n d J u d a i s m , Ed. Judith Frishman, Willemien Otten and Gerard
Rouwhorst. Leiden: Brill, 349–368.
Otten, Willemien and Theo Salemink. 2004. Prologue. In R e l i g i o u s I d e n t i t y a n d t h e
P r o b l e m o f Hi s t o r i c a l F o u n d a t i o n : T h e F o u n d a t i o n a l Ch a r a c t e r o f A u t h o r i t a t i v e S o u r c e s i n t h e
Hi s t o r y o f Ch r i s t i a n i t y a n d J u d a i s m , Ed. Judith Frishman, Willemien Otten and Gerard
Rouwhorst. Leiden: Brill, 3–27.
Picht, Georg. 1989. D e r B e g r i f f d e r N a t u r u n d s e i n e G e s c h i c h t e ( V o r l e s u n g e n u n d S c h r i f t e n ) .
Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.
Raeder, Siegfried. 2008. The Exegetical and Hermeneutical Work of Martin Luther. In:
H e b r e w B i b l e / O l d T e s t a m e n t : T h e H i s t o r y o f i t s I n t e r p r e t a t i o n , Ed. Magne Sæbø. V o l . 2 : F r o m
t h e Re n a i s s a n c e t o t h e E n l i gh t e n m e n t . Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 363–406.
Robson, Michael. 2001. Saint Bonaventure. In T h e M e d i e v a l T h e o l o g i a n s , Ed. R.R. Evans.
Blackwell: Oxford, 187–200.
Rummel, Erika. 2008. The Textual and Hermeneutical Work of Desiderius Erasmus
of Rotterdam. In H e b r e w B i b l e / O l d T e s t a m e n t : T h e H i s t o r y o f i t s I n t e r p r e t a t i o n , Ed.
Magne Sæbø. V o l . 2: F r o m t h e Re n a i s s a n c e t o t h e E n l i gh t e n m e n t . Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 215–230.
Schäfer, Lothar and Elisabeth Ströker, eds. 1993. Na t u r a u f f a s s u n ge n i n P h i l o s o p h i e , W i s -
s e n s c h a ft u n d T e c h n i k . V o l . 1: A n t i k e u n d Mi t t e l a l t e r . Freiburg: Alber.
Skarsaune, Oskar. 2008. From the Reform Councils to the Counter-Reformation—the
Council as Interpreter of Scripture. In He b r e w B i b l e / O l d T e s t a m e n t : T h e Hi s t o r y o f i t s
I n t e r p r e t a t i o n , Ed. Magne Sæbø. V o l . 2: F r o m t h e Re n a i s s a n c e t o t h e E n l i gh t e n m e n t . Göt-
tingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 319–328.
Smalley, Beryl. 1983. T h e S t u d y o f t h e B i b l e i n t h e Mi d d l e A ge s . 3d ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
South, James B. 1999. Pietro Pomponazzi. In E n c y c l o p e d i a o f t h e Re n a i s s a n c e , Ed. Paul F.
Grendler. Vol. 5. New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 116–118.
Southern, Richard W. 1995. S c h o l a s t i c H u m a n i s m a n d t h e U n i fic a t i o n o f E u r o p e . V o l . 1 :
F o u n d a t i o n s . Oxford: Blackwell.
——. 2001. S c h o l a s t i c Hu m a n i s m a n d t h e U n i fic a t i o n o f E u r o p e . V o l . 2: T h e He r o i c A ge . Notes
& additions Lesley Smith and Benedicta Ward. Oxford: Blackwell.
Smith, Lesley. 2001. Ma s t e r s o f t h e S a c r e d P a ge : Ma n u s c r i p t s o f T h e o l o g y i n t h e L a t i n W e s t t o
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van der Poel, Marc. 1999. Rudolf Agricola. In E n c y c l o p e d i a o f t h e Re n a i s s a n c e , Ed. Paul
F. Grendler. Vol. 1. New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 18–20.
Vanderjagt, Arjo. 2008. A d f o n t e s ! The Early Humanist Concern for the He b r a i c a v e r i -
t a s . In He b r e w B i b l e /O l d T e s t a m e n t : T h e Hi s t o r y o f I t s I n t e r p r e t a t i o n , Ed. Magne Sæbø.
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154–189.
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o f Re n a i s s a n c e P h i l o s o p h y , Ed. Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner. Cambridge
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and Guy Lobrichon. V o l . 4: L a Mo y e n A ge e t l a B i b l e . Paris: Beauchesne, 199–232.
Vogel, Klaus A. 1993. Das Problem der relativen Lage von Erd- und Wassersphäre
im Mittelalter und die kosmographische Revolution. M i t t e i l u n g e n d e r Ö s t e r r e i c h i s c h e n
G e s e l l s c h a ft fü r W i s s e n s c h a ft s ge s c h i c h t e 13: 103–144.

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Wallace, William A. 1999. Jacopo Zabarella. In E n c y c l o p e d i a o f t h e Re n a i s s a n c e , Ed. Paul

F. Grendler. Vol. 6. New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 337–339.
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Ü b e r wi n d u n g d e r a r i s t o t e l i s c h e n K o s m o l o gi e . Texte und Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der
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Wicks, Jared. 2008. Catholic Old Testament Interpretation in the Reformation and
Early Confessional Eras. In He b r e w B i b l e /O l d T e s t a m e n t : T h e Hi s t o r y o f i t s I n t e r p r e t a t i o n .
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 CHAPTER SEVEN

THOMAS AQUINAS ON SCIENCE,

SACRA DOCTRINA, AND CREATION

William E. Carroll

Recently there has there been increasing attention paid to Thomas

Aquinas’s biblical exegesis,1 the result, in part, of seeing Thomas more
as a theologian than a philosopher, or, at least, of coming to emphasize
more Thomas’s theological interests. Thomas’s understanding of the
relationship between science and Scripture, the subject of this essay,
provides evidence for the relationship between philosophy and theology
in his work. Since Thomas recognized the unity of knowledge, based
on both faith and reason, he was always ready to bring the insights
available to reason to his study of God and God’s revelation. His own
work occurred in the midst of a significant intellectual revolution in the
Latin west, the result of the introduction of the thought of Aristotle
into the discourse of philosophers2 and theologians. Dante, through
the voice of Vergil, will call Aristotle “il maestro di color che sanno”
(the master of those who know), and it is difficult to underestimate the
transformation in thinking3 which the knowledge of Aristotle’s works
brought to the West.
The revival of learning in the Latin west was well underway when
translations of Aristotle appeared. The cathedral school of Chartres
was of special importance in this regard; scholars there, such as Thierry
of Chartres (d. ca. 1156), sought to use Platonic cosmology (found in
the Timaeus) in the reading of the creation account in Genesis.4 New

1
In particular, see Van Nieuwenhove and Wawrykow 2005; Dauphinais and Levering
2005; Levering 2004; Ryan 2000; and Candler 2006.
2
I use the word “philosophy” to include what sometimes Thomas will call the “philo-
sophical sciences,” that is, the whole range of knowledge accessible to reason alone.
3
Already in the Muslim world, which came to the texts of Aristotle before these
texts were available to the Latin west, Aristotelian thought was the occasion for new
discussions about the relationship between the heritage of the Koran and that of
ancient Greece. See D’Ancona 1996.
4
Lindberg 1992, 190–197. William of Conches (d. after 1154) is a good example
of the increasing tendency to affirm the importance of the study of nature. In his

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translations from Greek and Arabic sources would, by the end of the
twelfth century, provide the impetus for the acceleration of this intel-
lectual revival and would transform it in important ways. Scholars such
as Dominic Gundissalinus and Gerard of Cremona contributed to the
translation of most of the Aristotelian works in the natural sciences.
In the thirteenth century Robert Grosseteste5 and William of Moer-
beke6 helped to produce even better translations of Greek texts. Between
1200 and 1209, Grosseteste (at Oxford) produced the first full exposition
of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, a text which John of Salisbury, in the
previous century, described as having as many barriers to understanding
as there were chapters. By 1220 Averroes’s commentary on Aristotle’s
text appeared in Latin. It is difficult to underestimate the importance
of the Posterior Analytics in Western intellectual history since it represents
Aristotle’s systematic understanding of the nature of science and of the
role of demonstration in acquiring knowledge of nature. By the late
1260s and early 1270s, both Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas
had completed their own commentaries on this work.
The reception of Aristotelian thought in the Latin Middle Ages is a
complex story, and that reception plays a crucial role in Thomas Aqui-
nas’s understanding of the relationship between science and Scripture.
The curricula of the newly established universities, especially at Oxford
and Paris, would eventually be revolutionized by the infl ux of the new
learning. There were various attempts at both universities to prohibit
the teaching of Aristotle, especially his natural philosophy, since there

Philosophy of the World, William attacks those who too readily appeal to direct divine
intervention in the world: “Because they are themselves ignorant of nature’s forces and
wish to have all men as companions in their ignorance, they are unwilling to investigate
them, but prefer that we believe like peasants and not inquire into the [natural] causes
[of things]. However, we say that the cause of everything is to be sought. . . . But these
people . . . if they know of anybody so investigating, proclaim him a heretic.” Andrew of
St. Victor, discussing the interpretation of biblical events, cautioned that “in expounding
Scripture, when the event described admits of no natural explanation, then and then
only should we have recourse to miracles.” Quoted in Lindberg, 200.
5
Grosseteste (ca. 1175–1253) was first chancellor of Oxford University and then
bishop of Lincoln from 1235 until his death in 1253. In addition to his role as trans-
lator of Aristotle, he was a major political, ecclesiastical, scientific, and philosophical
figure in his own right. Lohr 1982, 61. Lohr provides a useful table of all the transla-
tions, 74–79.
6
Moerbeke, a Dominican and friend of Thomas Aquinas, was born in Belgium
around 1215. He travelled extensively in Greece and was likely a member of the
Dominican priory established at Thebes at least since 1253. He served in the papal
court at Viterbo, and in 1278 he was named Archbishop of Corinth in Greece, where
he died in 1286. See Lohr 1982, 62–3.

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appeared to be fundamental incompatibilities between Aristotle’s views

on subjects such as the eternity of the world and the mortality of the
human soul, on the one hand, and established Christian doctrine, on
the other. Although the focus of this essay is the thought of Thomas
Aquinas, we need to guard against thinking that his position on the
value of Aristotelian philosophy for an understanding and explication
of Christian faith was the norm in the thirteenth century. As Alain de
Libera has argued, we should avoid the view that Thomas represents
the summit of the intellectual tradition of the medieval Latin west.
Thomas and Albert the Great were infl uenced by Muslim thinkers
such as Avicenna and Averroes in their defense of an autonomy for
philosophy with respect to theology, and some of the relative distinc-
tions between these disciplines which they set forth were condemned
by the ecclesiastical censure of 1277.7 Of course, the question of a
historical judgment concerning the importance of Thomas’s thought
in the thirteenth century is different from a philosophical analysis of
its cogency.
A new approach to the study of Scripture was especially evident in
the work of Peter Lombard (ca. 1095–1160), who brought together a
systematic collection of patristic texts designed to explore the central
tenets of the Christian faith. Lombard taught at Paris for more than
twenty years and by 1157/58 he completed the final version of his
Sentences.8 In addition to texts from the church fathers, Lombard also
drew upon biblical texts to assemble a four-part work organized around:
1) the Trinity; 2) God as Creator and angels and men as creatures;
3) the Incarnation of the Word and Christ’s work of redemption; and
4) the doctrine of the sacraments.9 In the preface to his work, Lombard
said that his aim was to present sacred doctrine
in a small volume consisting of patristic views (Patrum sententias) together
with their testimony so that the inquirer would not have to search through
numerous tomes, for the synthesized brevity which he seeks is offered
here without much labor.

7
de Libera 2003. A recent work on the Parisian ecclesiastical censures of 1277 is:
Piché 1999.
8
There were several collections of such “sentences” in the early twelfth century,
originating largely from the school of Laon.
9
A modern edition of Peter Lombard’s Sentences has been edited by Ignatius Brady:
Lombard 1971–1981. The most extensive treatment of Peter Lombard is the work of
Colish 1994. See also: Roseman 2004.

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Lombard’s work is representative of a movement toward conceiving

theology as a science; the systematic treatment of which (especially in
the form of disputations) distinguishes it from the traditional collatio of
the monastic schools.10 The newly founded Dominican order which
Thomas had joined emphasized an approach to the reading of Scrip-
ture which was somewhat different from the contemplative goal of the
monastic lectio divina. The latter was a practice of contemplation: each
monk was encouraged to immerse himself in the text in order to be
transformed by it and thus advance on a road towards greater holiness.
As Nicholas Healy points out:
The visible surface of the text, its ‘literal sense,’ was regarded as of sec-
ondary importance compared with its invisible depths, for it was in the
latter [that] the true meaning of the text lay, through which one might
ascend towards God. The monks thus tended to read through or around
the literal meaning of the words in order to discern their more significant
‘spiritual’ meaning.11
Some theologians attacked Lombard and other authors of sententiae for
preferring scholastic thinking to the simplicity of the Bible. One such
defender of tradition was Abbot Rupert of Deutz, who asked rhetori-
cally why “men would drink out of mere cisterns [of the new scien-
tific learning] when already they had the living fountain of Christ.”12
Nevertheless, by the early thirteenth century Lombard’s four books of
sentences had become a standard text at the new University of Paris
and, as a result, they were the subject of lectures and commentaries.
This was the case for the young Thomas Aquinas. After returning to
Paris from Cologne (where he had accompanied Albert the Great),
Thomas began his teaching career in theology (in the early 1250s) as
baccalarius Sententiarum.13 In this capacity, Thomas would read aloud a
passage from the text, which he then analyzed. He explained briefl y the
meaning of the points made and then addressed a question or series of
questions arising from the subject of the text. In four years of teach-
ing from the text of Peter Lombard, Thomas compiled a commentary
known as Scriptum super libros Sententiarum. His work with the writings of

10
For a discussion of this transition, see Chenu 1968.
11
Healy 2004, 7. Analyses of the history of exegesis in the Middle Ages can be
found in Smalley 1964; de Lubac 1959–1964; and Dahan 1999.
12
Chenu 1968, 302–3.
13
For a discussion of Thomas’s life and thought, see: Weisheipl 1983; Davies 1992;
Torrell 1993 and 1996; O’Meara 1997; and Stump 2003.

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 thomas aquinas on science, SACRA DOCTRINA, and creation 223

Peter Lombard becomes the foundation of his theological refl ection,

and I shall return to that work later in this essay. By 1256, Thomas
Aquinas is magister in sacra pagina (master of the sacred page) in Paris
and as such he gave detailed expositions of Scripture.
Before Thomas Aquinas (and to some extent Albert the Great14 and
a few others in the thirteenth century), biblical exegetes operated in
the intellectual context of Neoplatonism and sought, accordingly, to
look for exemplar and final causality.15 The visible world and human
history were viewed as symbols of spiritual realities known through
illumination. Matthew Lamb points out that
Aquinas’ appropriation of Aristotle introduced a different perspective
from which to examine God’s Word. For Aquinas, human knowing is
not possible without sense and imagination. Efficient and formal causal-
ity receive greater recognition. The world and history take on their own
value; they are not just symbolic of a higher realm.16
Thomas’s position on the importance of the literal sense of Scripture
puts him at odds with those who would see the text as merely a veil
which had to be lifted in order to get at the inner and nobler spiritual
message.17
An important reason for the new emphasis on the literal or histori-
cal sense of Scripture was the institutional setting in which Scripture
was studied: the university. In a community of scholars, the goal was
to probe the text, not so much to discover a spiritual meaning which

14
See Olszewski 2001. Olszewski points out the differences between Albert’s
emphasis on the literal sense and the views of Franciscan masters, such as Alexander
of Hales, 474.
15
Chenu, who studied the development of theology in the twelfth century, points
out that the new masters of that century employed “Neoplatonic metaphysics based
on Augustine or pseudo-Dionysius, [and] maintained a more spontaneously religious
orientation than their successors [in the thirteenth century], who were equipped with
Aristotle as their guide to reason and eventually also their guide to an understanding
of nature and of man himself.” Chenu 1968, 302–3. Marcia Colish also describes the
development of systematic theology in the twelfth century and the place of scholastic
sentence collections as an innovative genre of theological literature: Colish 1994, vol. 1,
33–90. A similar analysis can be found in Aillet 1993, 3–40.
16
Lamb 1966, 6.
17
Origen (185–254) was famous in this respect. He compared the literal sense to
the human body and the spiritual senses to the soul and the spirit. He thought that
the literal sense contains “stumbling blocks . . . and impossibilities” and obvious errors,
designed to help the reader “move away from the letter” to appreciate the “divine
element.” De principiis 4. 1. 4 and 4. 2. 9. Origen 1936.

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was somehow veiled by the literal and which would enhance one’s own
religious experience.
Rather, the aim was to use reason and logic to raise difficulties and ques-
tions that, once resolved, would deepen understanding of the text. Dialec-
tical inquiry—the formulation of objections and their solutions to issues
arising within or prompted by the text—clarified Scripture’s meaning and,
it was believed, would result in better preaching of the gospel.18
Thomas, in his inaugural lecture as a regent master in 1256, referred
to Scripture itself to validate the way in which he was to transmit the
knowledge of God: “Of these three offices, namely, to preach, to lec-
ture, and to dispute, it is said in Titus 1:9, ‘that he may be able both
to exhort in sound doctrine and to confute opponents.’ ”19
As I have already noted, Thomas’s intellectual life has as its focus the
enunciation and elucidation of the truths of Christian faith. Augustine
and Pseudo-Dionysius were important to him in this enterprise, but he
also drew from a wide variety of sources outside the Christian tradi-
tion: from Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman philosophy to the insights of
Muslim and Jewish philosophers and theologians. It is, of course, one
of the great accomplishments of Thomas Aquinas to find common
ground between the “new learning,” derived ultimately from Aristotle
(but informed as well by the commentaries of thinkers such as Avi-
cenna, Averroes, and Maimonides), and the fundamentals of Christian
revelation. As he remarks in many places, reason and faith—and hence
science and theology—have their source in God. Since the Author of
truth is one, there can be no contradiction between the truths which
reason discovers and those which are revealed in faith. In this essay, I
propose to look at two interrelated features of Thomas’s understand-
ing of the relationship between science and Scripture: 1) his claim that
sacra doctrina is a science (understood in terms of his own grasp of what

18
Healy, 9. Peter Chanter, a master of theology in Paris in the last quarter of the
twelfth century, described his task in a way which would refl ect the views of Thomas
Aquinas: “Engaging with Scripture (exercitium sacrae scripturae) requires three elements:
reading (lectio), disputation (disputatio), and preaching ( praedicatio) . . . Reading is, as it
were, the foundation and basement for what follows, for through it the rest is achieved.
Disputation is the wall in this building of study, for nothing is fully understood or
faithfully preached, if it is not first chewed over by the tooth of disputation. Preach-
ing, which is supported by both [of ] the former, is the roof, sheltering the faithful
from the heat and wind of temptation. So we should preach after, not before, the
reading of Scripture and the investigation of doubtful matters by disputation.” Cited
in Smalley 1964, 208.
19
Quoted in McInerny 1998, 15.

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 thomas aquinas on science, SACRA DOCTRINA, and creation 225

Aristotle means by science), and 2) his analysis of creation in the light

of Aristotelian metaphysics and natural philosophy and a consequent
reading of the opening of Genesis. Thomas’s claim that sacra doctrina
is a science guides his reading of everything in the Bible. His analysis
of creation, understood both philosophically and theologically, offers
an excellent example of how he approaches the reading of biblical
texts.

SACRA DOCTRINA as Science

Thomas opens his Summa theologiae with a preparatory question concern-

ing the nature and extent of sacra doctrina.20 In examining Thomas’s
treatment of this question, we must remember that by science (scientia
in Latin; episteme in Greek) Thomas has a very special sense of the
word in mind, the sense set forth by Aristotle in the Posterior Analytics:
knowledge of what is so in terms of the causes which make it so, and
knowledge which is necessarily so. This conception of science is quite
different from later conceptions which either limit science to mathemat-
ics and the empirical sciences or consider science to be only hypothetical
reasoning or the construction of models and paradigms. We need to
be careful, as well, with respect to how we think of sacra doctrina. Too
often it has been seen to be identical with scholastic theology, but for
Thomas it has a much broader sense: it includes the whole content
of revelation. Thus, when he asks in the first article of the first ques-
tion of the Summa whether besides philosophy any further doctrine is
required, he is asking whether what reason tells about reality (included
in what he terms “philosophical science”) is all that we need to know,
and he is also pointing to a kind of knowledge which goes beyond what
reason alone can disclose: knowledge which is to be found in divine
revelation. That such knowledge includes the content of the Bible is
apparent in the final two articles of the first question which examine
whether it is appropriate to use metaphors in Scripture and whether
words in the Bible may have several senses. That these latter topics
are part of an examination of what Thomas means by sacra doctrina is
a good indication that one should not equate it with the discipline of

20
Thomas poses the topic this way: De sacra doctrina qualis sit et ad quae se extendat.

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scholastic theology.21 Sacra doctrina can only be called “theology” in a

very broad sense of the term.22
In arguing for the need for some doctrine beyond the domain of reason
itself, Thomas does not seek to demonstrate that revealed truth exists;
rather, working from the given of revelation, Thomas says that from
the fact that man has a supernatural end one can show the necessity
of revelation. As James Weisheipl wrote:
This is a propter quid demonstration by way of final causality. Granting that
man has a supernatural end, it follows that the way to that end must be
revealed, which revelation must be accepted by man through faith. Both
the cause (ultimate end) and the conclusion (existence of revelation) are
truths of faith, but there is a necessary connection between them. This
argumentation alone shows that sacra doctrina is a science.23
In good scholastic fashion, Thomas begins by arguing that there is a
subject to be examined, and then in the second article he shows how
precisely one should consider sacra doctrina to be a science. The next
five articles (three through seven) involve a refinement of what it means
to call it a science: whether it is intrinsically one (article 3);24 whether
it is both practical and speculative (article 4); whether it is the highest
knowledge (article 5) and wisdom (article 6). By article seven he is ready
to conclude that God, properly speaking, is the subject of this science.
The final three articles (eight through ten) concern the modalities proper
to this science: viz., it employs arguments (article 8), is metaphorical

21
“All the commentaries on St. Thomas’s Summa I, q. 1, including Cajetan, inter-
pret article one in terms of articles two through eight, which seem to be about the
intellectual habit of scholastic theology structured along systematic lines of human
science. All the commentators also agree that article one is somehow about revealed
truth that is necessary for salvation, and that scientific theology is not necessary in the
same way.” Weisheipl 1974, 61.
22
Jean-Pierre Torrell observes: that we should understand “sacra doctrina comme le
‘milieu vital’ dans lequel s’enracine la theologia pratiquée par lui. Reçue par et tenue
dans la foi, cette sacra doctrina comporte une theologia que est elle-même en dependence
étroite de la foi et meme inseparable de la doctrine révélée.” Torrell 1996, 374.
23
Weisheipl 1974, 68–69. An extensive recent analysis of the use of scientia in Thomas’s
discussion of sacra doctrina, which takes issue with some of what Weisheipl argues, is:
Jenkins 1997, especially part one. See also White 1948; Van Ackeren 1952; Persson
1970; Ernst 1974; O’Brien 1977; Patfoort 1977; Patfoort 1985; Sparrow 1992; Rogers
1995; Johnson 1991; Johnson 1999; Donneaud 1998; Shanley 1997; Donohoo 1999;
Torrell 1996; Martin 2001; Te Velde 2003; Baglow 2004; and Berger 2004. Berger,
like Jenkins, differs from Weisheipl and sees the first question of the Summa theologiae
“as a portal to the ‘cathedral’ of the Summa, from which one can survey the complete
ensemble of architectonic motifs which constitute this cathedral.” Berger, 659.
24
Since it seems to deal with both God and creatures.

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and poetic (article 9), and it embraces several senses even though the
foundational sense is the literal sense (article 10).
As Thomas sets forth his claims for sacra doctrina’s being a science
he has Aristotle’s understanding of science in mind; but he employs
that understanding analogically to the subject at hand. Thus, in article
two, he uses Aristotle’s distinction between two kinds of science to
locate how sacra doctrina can be correctly understood in Aristotelian
categories. One type of science proceeds from principles “known by the
natural light of intelligence, such as arithmetic, geometry and the like.”
As Aristotle showed in the Posterior Analytics, for there to be scientific
knowledge—the result, that is, of demonstrations—there must be first
principles immediately known (what in Latin, Thomas will call per se
nota) by the human intellect. Hence, a geometer starts with points, lines,
and planes, whose definitions one comes to know immediately (that
is, not mediated by a demonstration), and from such starting points
is able to demonstrate conclusions in the science of geometry. There
are other sciences “which proceed from principles known by the light
of a higher science.” Following Aristotle, Thomas refers to the science
of perspective which finds its principles in geometry, and music which
finds its principles (concerning proportion, for example) in arithmetic.
Thomas then draws the conclusion that, in a way similar to perspec-
tive and music,
sacra doctrina is a science because it proceeds from principles established by
the light of a higher science, namely the science of God and the blessed.
Hence, just as the musician accepts on authority the principles taught
him by the mathematician, so sacred science is established on principles
revealed by God.25
Earlier, in the prologue to his Writings on the Sentences of Peter Lombard,
he writes of this type of subalternation, but refers to theologica scientia
as being quasi subalternata to God’s knowledge (divinae scientiae).26 As
Jean-Pierre Torrell observes, the term “quasi” indicates that Thomas

25
“Et hoc modo sacra doctrina est scientia, quia procedit ex principiis notis lumine
superioris scientiae, quae scilicet est Dei et beatorum. Unde sicut musica credit principia
sibi tradita ab arithmetico ita sacra doctrina credit principia revelata a Deo.” (Aquinas,
Summa theologiae I, q. 1, a. 2.)
26
In I Sent. Prol., a. 3, sol 2. For a recent critical edition of the prologue, with com-
mentary, see Oliva 2006.

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was aware of the limitations of the example from Aristotle.27 The phrase
“science of God and the blessed” (scientia Dei et beatorum) often presents
difficulties for readers of the text since they do not recognize the kind
of genitive construction it is. Thomas is not referring to God as the
object of the word science; rather he is referring to the knowledge,
quite literally the “science,” which God possesses and which, to some
degree those who share in the beatific vision also possess. Ultimately, of
course (and elsewhere), Thomas will distinguish between what it means
for God to know and what it means for creatures to know, but here
he is using “science” in a broad sense to include God’s knowing and
human knowing. The very fact that Thomas thinks that he can make
such a comparison is an indication that human reason can provide
some insight about God.28
Thomas recognizes that, by nature, human beings seek to know
God, but such knowledge, based exclusively on man’s natural capaci-
ties, comes only though created things. Man’s true end, however, is to
enjoy the immediate vision of God. In discussing faith, later in the
Summa theologiae, Thomas observes:
The perfection of a rational creature consists not only in what is fitting
for him by his nature, but also in what is attributed by a kind of super-
natural participation in God’s goodness (ex quadam supernaturali participatione
divinae bonatitis). . . . [Thus] man’s ultimate beatitude consists in a certain
vision that surpasses the natural. No one can attain this vision of God
except by being a learner with God as his teacher (non potest nisi per modum
addiscentis a Deo doctore).29

27
Also, the lumen gloriae of the blessed in heaven allows for a vision of the truth dif-
ferent from the lumen fidei which serves as the rule for theologians. Torrell 1996, 388.
28
Thomas makes the same point in his Commentary on Boethius’ ‘De Trinitate’, q. 2, a. 2.
In this earlier work, he mentions this argument of subalternation of the sciences only
in response to objections; in the Summa theologiae it becomes the key point in the second
article of the first question. In the Commentary, Thomas uses the expression scientia divina
instead of sacra doctrina. Armand Maurer, translator of Thomas’s commentary, notes that
“sacred doctrine is the teaching revealed by God in sacred Scripture. More generally,
it embraces ‘whatever pertains to the Christian religion.’ (Summa, prol.)” Maurer 1987,
ix. Corbin 1972 argues for a gradual development in the way Thomas understands
sacra doctrina; see esp. 64–107.
29
“Perfectio ergo rationalis creaturae non solum consistit in eo quod ei competit
secundum suam naturam, sed in eo etiam quod ei attribuiter ex quadam supernatu-
rali participatione divinae bonitatis. . . . [Q ]uod ultima beatitude hominis consistit in
quadam supernaturali Dei visione. Ad quam quidem visionem homo pertingere non
potest nisi per modum addiscentis a Deo doctore.” (Aquinas, Summa theologiae II–II,
q. 2, a. 3.) In De veritate, he writes “From its very beginning human nature was destined
for blessedness; not as though this were an end due to man in terms of his nature, but

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As he says in De veritate,
God never proposes through the Apostles and the prophets anything
that is contrary to what reason indicates (aliquid quod sit contrarium his quae
naturalis ratio dictat), although He does propose what exceeds the power of
reason to comprehend (aliquid quod comprehensionem rationis excedit).30
The objections with which article two in the Summa theologiae begins—
that every science proceeds from self-evident principles and that sci-
ence deals with universals and not individual facts (with bumble bees,
for example, not a particular bumble bee)—are drawn from Aristotle’s
conception of science.31 And the replies to the objections do not involve
an abandonment of Aristotelian principles, but rather employ them in
such a way that Thomas can affirm both that sacra doctrina differs from
all human sciences in that it requires faith and that it still can properly
be called scientific. In an important sense, for Thomas, sacra doctrina is a
science not in spite of its being grasped by faith, but precisely because
(as one grasps by faith) its source is God’s knowledge.32
By article eight, when he asks whether sacra doctrina is a matter of
argument (sit argumentativa), he is ready to point out fundamental features
of his understanding of the relation between reason and faith. Thomas
observes that the science of metaphysics “can dispute with one who
denies its principles, if only the opponent will make some concession;
but if he concede nothing, it can have no dispute with him, though it
can answer his objections.” There is no argument without some com-
mon ground between those in disagreement. Similarly,

solely because of God’s liberality. And therefore there was no need that the resources
of nature should themselves suffice to reach that end; but they were enhanced by gifts
given out of God’s liberality.” (Aquinas, Questiones disputate de veritate xiv, 10 ad 2.)
30
“. . . quod per apostolos et prophetas nunquam divinitus dicitur aliquid quod sit
contrarium his quae naturalis ratio dictat. Dicitur tamen aliquid quod comprehensionem
rationis excedit.” (Aquinas, Questiones disputate de veritate q. 14, a. 10, ad 7.)
31
For a sustained analysis of the tension between an Aristotelian science, with its
emphasis on universal and necessary truths and the singularities with which Scripture
and theology are concerned, see Lee 2002. Lee is keen to show the superior insights of
Ockham to Aquinas in this respect. For Lee, Aquinas’ attempt to treat sacra doctrina as
a science is a failure because individuals ultimately have no ground beyond the plan of
God, created and implemented through his inscrutable will. “For the rational ground is
a demand the we place on singulars—it does not belong to their own mode of being. . . .
Once existing singulars are referred to the divine will rather than the divine intellect,
the failure of reason to grasp their ground becomes evident.” Lee, 117.
32
For a discussion of this point, see Te Velde 2006, 26–28.

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Sacred Scripture . . . can dispute with one who denies its principles only
if the opponent admits some at least of the truths obtained through
divine revelation; thus we can argue with heretics from texts in Holy
Writ, and against those who deny one article of faith we can argue from
another.33
Such argument is only possible because sacra doctrina is truly a science: it
is an intelligible whole in which one can discover necessary connections
amongst its parts, even though a recognition of the ultimate truth of
revelation depends on faith. Thomas continues drawing the analogy
with metaphysics,
if our opponent believes nothing of divine revelation, there is no longer
any means of proving the articles of faith by reasoning [that is, from one
article of faith proving the truth of another, as following necessarily from
the first], but only of answering his objections—if he has any—against
faith. Since faith rests upon infallible truth, and since the contrary of a
truth can never be demonstrated, it is clear that the arguments brought
against faith cannot be demonstrations, but are difficulties that can be
answered.34
For Thomas faith perfects reason, so sacra doctrina can perfect all other
sciences. Such perfecting is not an elimination or destruction of these
sciences; it is rather a recognition that human reason has limits to its
scope. One of Thomas’s favorite phrases is applicable here: grace does
not destroy nature but perfects it.35 In the sixth article, in discussing
in what sense sacra doctrina is a wisdom, Thomas shows how it is an
ordering wisdom which not only adds supernatural knowledge to what
reason concludes, but also “reorders all that can be known naturally in
light of the triune God as our beginning and supernatural end.”36 Sacra

33
“Unde sacra Scriptura . . . disputat cum negante sua principia, argumentando
quidem si adversarius aliquid concedat corum quae per revelationem divinam haben-
tur, sicut per auctoritates sacrae doctrinae disputamus contra haereticos, et per unum
articulum contra negantes alium.” (Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 1, a. 8.)
34
“Si vero adversarius nihil credit eorum quae divinitus revelantur, non remanet
amplius via ad probandum articulos fidei per rationem; sed ad solvendum rationes,
si quas inducit, contra fidem. Cum enim fides infallibili veritati innitatur, impossibile
autem sit de vero demonstrari contrarium, manifestum est probationes quae contra
fidem inducuntur non esse demonstrationes, sed solubilia argumenta.” Ibid.
35
Marc Aillet summarizes Thomas’s understanding of sacra doctrina, “tant comme
expositio que comme disputatio, trouve sa source dans l’habitus fidei qui reçoit la Révéla-
tion: c’est la foi qui veut saisir son objet conformément aux modes de comprehension
de la raison humaine qu’elle perfectionne.” Aillet 1993, 39.
36
Levering 2004, 31. Levering seeks to describe the interplay between nature and
grace that one finds in the relationship of Scripture and metaphysics in Aquinas’s

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 thomas aquinas on science, SACRA DOCTRINA, and creation 231

doctrina explores the new intelligibility of all of reality as it is revealed

by God, who is its beginning and end. All knowledge based on reason
alone can only provide an incomplete (but certainly not a false) view
of reality. “The formal object of sacra doctrina is the intelligibility of
the world as spoken by God. Sacra doctrina is a sharing in God’s unified
view of the whole as an impressio divinae scientiae.”37 Thus, one is able to
have a new view of reality that results from faith’s encounter with God
revealing. As Thomas says: sacra doctrina “treats principally of God and
then of creatures insofar as they are related to God as their principle
and end.”38 As Brian Shanley notes,
it belongs to sacra doctrina to bring the partial perspectives [of the vari-
ous sciences] into the unified whole disclosed by divine revelation; it is a
new binding together of God and the world in the light of God’s own
perspective on the whole.39
In his earlier work, the Commentary on Boethius’ ‘De Trinitate,’ Thomas
says that there is a three-fold role for reason (and hence for the sci-
ences which are based on reason alone) in matters of faith. Reason can
demonstrate certain truths, such as the existence and oneness of God,
which serve as preambles to faith; reason can defend what is believed
against all claims that the content of faith is irrational or contains
contradictions; and reason can show certain similitudes between what
is believed and the truths reason discovers about nature and human
nature. The analysis of sacra doctrina as a science leads Thomas to

theology of a triune God. For Levering, “metaphysics is not extrinsic to Scripture,

insofar as the inspired authors of Scripture contemplated the mystery of God.” (33
n. 40). Levering wishes to counter the arguments of Karl Rahner and others for whom
Thomas’s use of metaphysics “compromises Aquinas’s ability to speak about God as
experienced in salvation history” (35). Referring to Thomas’s exegesis of the Gospel
of John, especially concerning how to think of God and to avoid idolatry, Levering
notes that “for Aquinas . . . the evangelist is a model for the theologian; Scripture, as
the revelation of God against the idols, cannot be understood without attending to
the metaphysical questions that belong to its heart. . . . In the light of the widespread
critique that Aquinas’s approach obscures ‘God as experienced in salvation history,’ I
have suggested that Aquinas’s theology of God should be understood as an exercise
in sapiential contemplation, which requires that sacra doctrina integrate the intellectual
virtue of wisdom. In such a framework, metaphysical tools are seen to be integral to
salvation history. . . . (45)” Of course, for Thomas, metaphysics depends in important
ways on natural philosophy, i.e., the sciences of nature.
37
Shanley 1997, 177.
38
“Dicendum quod sacra doctrina non determinat de Deo et creaturis ex aqueo,
sed de Deo principaliter, et de creaturis secundum quod referentur ad Deum, ut ad
principium vel finem.” (Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 1, a. 3, ad 1.)
39
Shanley 1997, 178.

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232 william e. carroll

conclude that the content of revelation is inherently intelligible and

thus is susceptible to investigation in a way similar to the scientific
investigation of any subject.40
In the tenth and final article of the first question of the Summa,
Thomas provides an outline of some of his principles of biblical
interpretation (within the context of his already admitting the scientific
character of revelation).41 Thomas observes that the
author of Holy Writ is God, in whose power it is to signify His meaning
not by words only (as man also can do), but also by things themselves. So,
whereas in every other science things are signified by words, this science
has the property that the things signified by the words have themselves
also a signification.42
The first signification—that of the words themselves—is the literal or
historical sense; whereas there is a further, threefold kind of significa-
tion whereby the things, which the words signify, can themselves have
a signification. This latter, threefold category, Thomas refers to as the
spiritual sense of Scripture. One objection to Thomas’s position is
that if there is such a plurality of senses to the words in Scripture we
cannot really have a science of sacra doctrina, “for many different senses
in one text produce confusion and deception and destroy all force of
argument.” So, if we grant, as traditionally was granted, that Scripture
has a plurality of senses, either we must reject its being a science or we
must reject the very idea that there are several senses in Scripture.
The response Thomas offers is important for how he approaches
the interpretation of Scripture. First, he notes that a plurality of
senses of the sacred text does not necessarily result in confusion and
equivocation, “since these senses are not multiplied because one word
signifies several things, but because the things signified by the words
can themselves be types [that is, can signify in different ways] of other

40
Aillet observes that “la nouveauté de la question 1 réside dans la definition du
mode argumentatif de la théologie; le saint Docteur a en effet établi la validité d’un
travail de la raison à l’intérieur du donné révélé. . . .” Aillet 1993, 42.
41
For discussions of Thomas’s biblical hermeneutics, see Reyero 1971; Ebeling,
1964; Synave 1923; Synave 1926; Torrance 1962; Froehlich 1977, especially 34–37;
Johnson 1992; Pandolfi 1993; Santi 1994; and Vera 2003.
42
“. . . auctor sacrae Scripturae est Deus, in cuius potestate est ut non solum voces ad
significandum accommodet (quod etiam homo facere potest) sed etiam res ipsas. Et ideo,
cum in omnibus scientiis voces significent, hoc habet proprium ista scientia quod ipsae
res significatae per voces etiam significant aliquid.” Summa theologiae I, q. 1, a. 10.

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things.”43 All the many senses of Scripture, he says, “are founded on

one—the literal—from which alone can any argument be drawn (ex quo
solo potest trahi argumentum), and not from those intended in allegory.”44
As Thomas often remarks, the author of the Bible is God and it is
his authorial intention which constitutes the truth of the literal sense.
Wilhelmus Valkenberg observes:
The words of Scripture according to the intention of the secondary author
([for example] St. Paul) refer to the intention of the primary Author. . . . As
God is the primary author of Scripture, everything obscurely stated in
Scripture is clearly explained elsewhere in Scripture.45
Thomas was a firm adherent to the medieval principle that “Scripture
is the interpreter of Scripture.”
As we can see in the first question of the Summa, Thomas would
reject any kind of biblical literalism since, for him, the literal sense
contains metaphors, similes, and other literary forms. The “parabolic
sense,” he writes in article ten,
is contained in the literal, for by words things are signified properly and
figuratively. Nor is the figure itself, but that which is figured, the literal
sense. When Scripture speaks of God’s arm, the literal sense is not that
God has such a member, but only that which is signified by this member,
namely, operative power. Hence it is plain that nothing false can ever
underlie the literal sense of Holy Writ.
In De potentia Dei, Thomas points to two dangers in the interpretation
of Scripture:
One is to give to the words of Scripture an interpretation manifestly
false: since falsehood cannot underlie the divine Scriptures which we have

43
“. . . sensus isti non multiplicantur propter hoc quod una vox multa significet, sed
quia ipsae res significatae per voces aliarum rerum possunt esse signa.” Summa theologiae
I, q. 1, a. 10.
44
Thomas adds an interesting caveat: “Nevertheless, nothing of Holy Scripture
perishes on account of this, since nothing necessary to faith is contained under the
spiritual sense which is not elsewhere put forward by the Scripture in its literal sense.”
Art. 10. Although Thomas attributes the view that arguments can only be based on
the literal sense to Augustine (and elsewhere to Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite), Peter
Lombard seems more likely to be the proximate source. In distinction 11 of Book III
of the Sentences, Lombard refutes the Arian use of certain scriptural passages which
appear to argue that Christ was created: “But the correct procession of an argument
is not out of tropical expressions (Sed ex tropicis locutionibus non est recta argumentationis
processio). It is a tropical expression by which Christ is called a creature. . . .” See Rorem
1980, 429–34.
45
Valkenberg 2000, 180 n. 126.

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234 william e. carroll

received from the Holy Spirit, as neither can there be any error in the
faith that is taught by the Scriptures. The other is not to force such an
interpretation on Scripture as to exclude any other interpretations that
are actually or possibly true: since it is part of the dignity of Holy Writ
that under the one literal sense many others are contained.46
Sacra doctrina does not depend for its truth on any of the sciences based
on reason because its principles come from God as revealed in Scripture.
Our apprehension of that truth and our need to have a clearer sense
of what is revealed are served by the various sciences (from metaphysics
to the natural sciences) based on reason. As Thomas says in article five:
sacra doctrina in a sense does depend upon the philosophical sciences,
but not as though it stood in need of them, but only in order to make
its teaching clearer (ad maiorem manifestationem). The method Thomas
employs in his various biblical commentaries is an excellent example
of this making clearer what sacra doctrina affirms.
As we have seen, the Bible is the center of theological education in
the new universities. Students attended an early morning course in which
young scholars read through and discussed briefl y the sacred text. Later
in the day a master (magister) would offer an in-depth analysis of a text
from the Bible. In 1257, now as a master of theology in Paris, Thomas
began to teach the Gospel according to Matthew, and in the following
year on one of the books of the Old Testament (mostly likely Isaiah).
Later, in Italy, he wrote his Commentary on the Book of Job.47 He started
his commentaries on the letters of St, Paul, which he continued when
he returned to Paris, where he wrote his commentary on the Gospel of
John. He also composed the Catena aurea, a verse by verse commentary
on the four Gospels, in which he used exegetical passages from Greek
and Latin church fathers. Later, in Naples, he commented on the first
fifty-four psalms. Throughout his analysis of Scripture, Thomas divides

46
“Quorum primum est, ne aliquis id quod patet esse falsum, dicat in verbis Scrip-
turae, quae creationem rerum docet, debere intelligi; Scripturae enim divinae a spiritu
sancto traditae non potest falsum subesse, sicut nec fidei, quae per eam docetur. Aliud
est, ne aliquis ita Scripturam ad unum sensum cogere velit, quod alios sensus qui in se
veritatem continent, et possunt, salva circumstantia litterae, Scripturae aptari, penitus
excludantur; hoc enim ad dignitatem divinae Scripturae pertinet, ut sub una littera
multos sensus contineat.” De potentia Dei, q. 4, a. 1.
47
Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, in comparing Maimonides and Aquinas on their respective
exegeses of Job, writes: “According to both . . ., it is knowledge which guards against
intellectual pride, a wisdom (sapientia) possessed by those who acknowledge the natural
limitations of human reason (scientia) and which manifests man’s provident participation
in divine providence and government.” Dobbs-Weinstein 1989, 120.

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 thomas aquinas on science, SACRA DOCTRINA, and creation 235

and subdivides the text (diviso textus), much as he does in his commen-
taries on Aristotle’s works. Such a method of analysis presupposes
that there is an order and intelligibility to the text which can be made
clear by a proper method of presentation. Once the subdivisions are
in place, the meaning of different passages is set forth, often by appeals
to parallel passages found elsewhere in Scripture.48
Since Thomas thought that all theological refl ection must begin from
the literal sense of Scripture, his task, and often a formidable one, was to
identify that sense in any passage. The sections of his theological works
which concern the interpretation of the opening of Genesis, especially
the hexaemeral analysis in Summa theologiae I (questions 65–74), as well as
his biblical commentaries, incorporate what he would consider the best
science of his day, including the best metaphysics.49 This is especially
apparent in his analysis of creation.

Creation and Genesis

Aquinas addressed the topic of creation in a magisterial way four times50

and each time he noted that it is important to distinguish between
creation and change; or as he would say: creatio non est mutatio (creation
is not a change). The natural sciences study the world of changing
things, and a self-evident principle for such a study is that something
cannot come from nothing: all change requires an underlying material
reality. Creation, however, is a concept in metaphysics and theology; it
is a topic on which the natural sciences are not themselves competent
to comment. Aquinas thought that to create means to be the complete
cause of all that is. Creation refers to a total metaphysical dependence
in the order of being: were God not causing all that is, no things would
exist. As Thomas remarks in his treatise, De substantiis separatis:

48
The recourse to other biblical texts “is the method of medieval exegetes who
knew many long passages by heart. Their vocabulary, their style, and the images they
use are borrowed quite naturally from the Bible; the vocabulary and imagery of the
Bible form part of their thought.” Spicq 1944, 223.
49
On philosophy and Thomas’s biblical commentaries, see Stump 1993. For a
wide-ranging and incisive discussion of metaphysics in Thomas’s theology, see Levering
2004.
50
In II Sent., dist. 1, q. 1; Summa contra Gentiles II, cc. 6–38; Questiones disputate de potentia
Dei, q. 3; Summa theologiae I, qq. 44–46. Extensive discussions of Thomas’s understanding
of creation can be found in: Aersten 1988; Burrell 1994; and Kretzmann 1999.

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236 william e. carroll

Over and above the mode of becoming by which something comes to

be through change or motion, there must be a mode of becoming or
origin of things without any mutation or motion, through the infl ux of
being.51
Thomas drew heavily upon the analysis of Avicenna, who carefully
distinguished between the ways in which metaphysicians and natural
philosophers discuss agent (or efficient) cause:
the metaphysicians do not intend by the agent the principle of movement
only, as do the natural philosophers, but also the principle of existence
and that which bestows existence, such as the creator of the world.52
Avicenna distinguished between two kinds of agent causes: an agent
which acts through motion, and a divine agent which is “a giver of
being.” Such an agent needs only the power to create and nothing
else. On the basis of the ontological distinction between essence and
existence, Avicenna argued that all beings other than God (in whom
this distinction disappears) require a cause in order to exist. Since exis-
tence is not part of the essence of things, it needs to be explained by
a cause extrinsic to the thing which exists; and, ultimately, there must
be an Uncaused Cause. David Burrell has emphasized the importance
of Thomas’s reading of the Liber de causis in the development of his
understanding of the Creator as cause-of-being.53 Although Thomas
will come to differentiate his own position on essence and existence
from that of Avicenna,54 he too thought that the science of metaphysics
is able to demonstrate that all things depend upon God as the cause
of their existence. As he wrote in his commentary on the Sentences of
Peter Lombard: “Not only does faith hold that there is creation, but
reason also demonstrates it.”55 Thomas even went so far—indeed many
scholars would say he went too far—in arguing that it is on the basis of

51
“. . . supra modum fiendi quo aliquid fit per mutationem vel motum, esse aliquem
modum fiendi sive originis rerum absque omni mutatione vel motu per infl uentiam
essendi.” De substantiis separatis, c. 9.
52
al-Shifa’: al-Ilahiyyat, translated in Georges Anawati, La Métaphysique du Shifa’ (Paris,
1978), VI.1; quoted in Hyman and Walsh 1983, 248.
53
Burrell 2003.
54
Aquinas develops the notion of radical dependency in such a way that creaturely
existence is understood not as something which happens to essence (as it does for
Avicenna) but as a fundamental relation to the Creator as origin. See Burrell 1993,
esp. 69–70.
55
“. . . quod creationem esse non tantum fides tenet, sed etiam ratio demonstrat.”
In II Sent., dist. 1, q. 1, a. 2.

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Aristotelian principles alone that we can demonstrate that the universe

is created. In fact, he attributes such a conclusion to Aristotle, himself.56
Indeed, the immense achievement of Aquinas is to have explained so
much of the Christian teaching on creation in philosophical terms.
Aquinas distinguished between the origin of the universe and the
beginning of the universe. A key for Aquinas was to separate the ques-
tion of the universe’s being created, that is, having its very existence
originate from God, from the question of the universe’s being temporally
finite, that is, its having a beginning. Although he thought that reason
alone can demonstrate that the world is created, that is, has an origin,
he did not think that reason can conclude whether or not the world is
temporally finite. On this topic, he set himself apart from some Muslim
and Christian thinkers who thought that, on the basis of what reason
tells us, one could indeed conclude that the world must have a temporal
beginning. Following the tradition of the church fathers and the decree
of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215),57 he accepted as a matter of
faith that the world is temporally finite; nevertheless, he argued that
a created, eternal world would involve no logical contradictions. Here
he pointed to the limits of the natural sciences: in principle, they can-
not conclude whether or not the world has a temporal beginning. He
specifically rejected Aristotle’s claim that it is demonstrably true that
the world is eternal.58 He also warned believers to avoid using faulty
scientific arguments which purport to prove the temporal beginning
of the world.
Although recognizing that God possesses an infinite power to produce
beings ex nihilo, Aquinas did not think that such absolute power elimi-
nates real secondary causes operating in nature: causes which it is the

56
Among the places in Thomas which we find such an attribution are: De potentia Dei
3.5; In VIII Phys. 2.4–5; De substantiis separatis (9). As he writes in the last text, Aristotle
does not deviate from the faith by affirming that the world is uncreated, but only in
supposing that it has always existed. See Carroll 1994; Dewan 1994.
57
“We firmly believe and simply confess that there is only on true God, . . . one origin
[ principium] of all things: Creator of all things, visible and invisible, spiritual and corpo-
real; who by His own omnipotent power from the beginning of time [ab initio temporis]
all at once made out of nothing [de nihil condidit] both orders of creation, spiritual and
corporeal, that is, the angelic and the earthly . . .” Denzinger 1932, 199. For a recent
analysis of this text from the Fourth Lateran Council, see Rainini 2007.
58
For most of his career Thomas, following Maimonides, did not think that Aristotle
thought that it was demonstrably true that the world is eternal. It was only when he
came to comment on Aristotle’s Physics that Thomas came to the conclusion, perhaps
reluctantly, that Aristotle did in fact make such a claim.

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238 william e. carroll

function of the natural sciences to discover. Aquinas did not think that
one must choose between affirming God’s complete causality of all that
is and the existence of other causes—a dilemma which vexed both the
Muslim kalam theologians and Averroes. Only by understanding divine
transcendence, and that God is a cause in a way radically different from
the way creatures are causes, was Aquinas able to defend the view that
both God and creatures are the complete causes of what occurs in the
world. Aquinas, thus, was able to affirm both a robust notion of divine
agency and a natural order susceptible to scientific understanding in
terms of causes discoverable from within that order. It was precisely
such a perceived dichotomy which led Averroes (in defense of the sci-
ences of nature) to deny the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, and which
led others, like al-Ghazali (in defense of divine omnipotence) to reject
any search for necessary causal connections in nature.59
We can take Thomas’s earliest discussion of creation, in his Writ-
ings on the ‘Sentences’ of Peter Lombard,60 as a particular good example
of how he uses natural philosophy and metaphysics to examine what
is ultimately for him a question in biblical exegesis and theology. He
divides his treatment of creation into six articles. It is a division of the
problem done in typical scholastic fashion (as we have already seen in
the analysis of sacra doctrina in the first question of the Summa theologiae).
The first question, an sit, is whether there is creation, to which he adds
some preliminary proofs of creation (article one); next, the question quid
sit, the definition of creation (article two); and then the question(s) de
modo, how does creation proceed (articles three, four, and five). Article
six, the final article, is the culmination of the entire quaestio: the first
five articles elaborate the philosophy and the theology needed for an
exposition of the first line of Scripture, which exposition is given in
article six. Thus, the entire question may be seen as a good example
of the use of the scholastic method for the exposition of one line of
Scripture: In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram.
The first article is devoted to establishing that there is only one
absolutely first principle ( primum principium simpliciter) of all that is.
Thomas is addressing the old Manichean problem: the fact that there
are both good and evil in the world seems to indicate that there must
be two ultimate principles of things, one supremely good and the other
supremely evil; and the fact that there are contrariety and diversity in

59
See Kogan 1985.
60
My analysis here follows what is laid out in Baldner and Carroll 1997.

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the world suggests that there should be a multitude of first principles

from which such diversity and contrariety fl ow. For either reason, or
for both, it would seem that one must affirm that there is more than
one first principle of the world. The responses Thomas offers, after
he distinguishes between two different senses of “first” (first in some
category or in some order, and first absolutely speaking), involve brief
arguments in metaphysics and natural philosophy. These arguments
for a single, absolutely first principle are but sketches in comparison to
those he will set forth in later treatises. Also, his opponents here do not
deny that there is some sort of first principle, some sort of transcendent
cause or source of the world; they do not, however, recognize that there
is only one, absolutely first cause of all. It is interesting that one of the
arguments he advances begins with the order of the universe, an order
he thinks would be impossible unless all the parts of the universe sought
or serve one ultimate principle. Aquinas would have thought about the
movements of the heavenly bodies which, according to him and to his
objectors, are moved not randomly, but intelligently and, therefore, by
intelligent movers. As these movers are intelligent creatures, they move
for the sake of ends; as the end of the universe is one and not many,
for the motions of the heavens are all coordinated, there must be one
end, and not many.61
In the second article, Thomas sets out several objections to the intel-
ligibility of creation ex nihilo, many of which begin with the presupposi-
tion that creation is a kind of change. He begins his response in this
article with a radical philosophical statement: “Not only does faith hold
that there is creation, but reason also demonstrates it” (which I have
already cited) and immediately offers a brief metaphysical argument,
similar to that found in the first article, about degrees of perfection
in the category of being, and consequently the existence of a single
source of being.62 His conclusion is that to create is “to produce a
thing into being according to its entire substance,” and hence “it is
necessary that all things proceed from the first principle by way of

61
The details of this argument depend upon a particular understanding of the
cosmos, but, in principle, the argument is not so different from those in the twenty-first
century which proceed from the claim that there is a precise coordination of the laws
of physics which discloses a degree of order, and hence of intelligibility, and which
thus affirms an underlying purpose in the universe.
62
In its abbreviated form in this article—and perhaps in any form—this is a com-
plex argument which depends on the notion of the analogy of being. My purpose in
this essay is not to make (or to defend) the argument, but to show how Thomas uses
metaphysics and natural philosophy to understand biblical and theological truths.

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240 william e. carroll

creation.” In helping to clarify his argument, Thomas shows that the

expression “ex nihilo” is really a denial of any kind of material causal-
ity in what it means to create. Furthermore, in affirming that what is
created is said to have being after nonbeing, Thomas shows that the
core sense of “creation” (the sense understood in metaphysics), does
not require that the order of nonbeing to being (in the thing which is
created) be an “order of duration” but only an “order of nature.” It is
metaphysical dependence, not temporal sequence, which is the key to
understanding creation. Following Maimonides,63 Thomas is critical of
Muslim theologians who sought first to demonstrate that the world has
an absolute temporal beginning64 and then to argue for the existence
of God as Creator. Thomas’s analysis of creation is also different from
that of Albert the Great and Bonaventure, both of whom thought
that to be created necessarily meant to have being after nonbeing,
and that “after,” in this context, could only mean that the created being
has a temporal beginning. Thus, both rejected as impossible a world
that is both created and eternal.65 By distinguishing between “order of
nature” and “order of duration” and by recognizing the primacy of
the former in his analysis of creation, Thomas was able to argue that
there is no contradiction in the world’s being both eternal and created.
In De aeternitate mundi, written near the end of his career, he argues that
an agent cause need not precede its effect in duration and, as he had
noted in the second article discussed above, the fact that the creature
is said to be made out of nothing does not mean that “nonbeing”
precede it in duration.66

63
Maimonides 1963, Book I, 71, 96a–97b.
64
Such arguments were often based on the impossibility of different actual infinities:
e.g., if the world were eternal there would be an actual infinity of past days and, since
it is impossible to traverse an actual infinity, one could not arrive at the present from a
day infinitely distant in the past. Muslim thinkers such as al-Ghazali also argued that
for creation to be the act of an agent, even a divine agent, it could not be eternal,
it had to have a beginning of its existence. See Davidson 1987; Sorabji 1983; Dales
1990; Bianchi 1984; and Michon 2004.
65
Baldner and Carroll 1997, 27 and 53 n. 95. For Albert’s view on the necessity
of understanding “out of nothing” as “after nothing,” see Albert, Summa theologiae
Pars 2, trans. 1, q. 4 [Opera Omnia, ed. E. Borgnet. Paris: Vives, 1890–99, vol. 32]; for
Bonaventure, see Commentaria in libros Sententiarum P. Lombardi, Book II, dist. 1, pars 1,
a. 3, q. 1 (resp. and ad 7m). See Baldner, 1989.
66
For a translation of De aeternitate mundi, see Baldner and Carroll, Appendix B,
114–122.

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Having explained that the created world did have a temporal begin-
ning (known only in faith) and that it is impossible to demonstrate
such a temporal beginning67 (article five), Aquinas observes in the final
article that the opening line of Genesis does indeed affirm a temporal
beginning, and much more. Aquinas takes in principio to mean “in the
beginning of time,” but he also accepts the traditional gloss that it means
in Filio Dei (in or through the Son of God). He explains this gloss by
saying that the notion of efficient causality is appropriated to the Father,
the notion of exemplar causality is appropriated to the Son, and the
notion of conservation is appropriated to the Holy Spirit. Creation,
however, is properly the work of the entire Trinity, and thus in principio
also means in uno principio effectivo. In addition, the fact that God created
both the heavens and the earth in principio means that God did not cre-
ate, as some have thought, material beings through the mediation of
spiritual creatures.68 The revelation of in principio, therefore contradicts

67
In article five he also shows that all arguments which propose to demonstrate
that the world is eternal fail (a good example of reason’s defeating rational objections
to what is believed). When he addresses the subject of demonstrating the temporal
beginning of the world in the Summa theologiae, the reason he advances is that the world
itself offers no grounds for demonstrating that it had an absolute temporal beginning.
“For the principle of demonstration is the essence of a thing;” and every science, since
its subjects are universals and not particulars, “abstracts from here and now. . . . Hence
it cannot be demonstrated that man or the heavens or a stone did not always exist.”
Summa theologiae I, q. 46, a. 2. Or, as he remarks in De potentia Dei, when examining the
question of whether the universe is eternal, time like place is extraneous to things. “It is
clear then that the appointment of a fixed quantity of duration for the universe depends
on the mere will of God . . . [and] we cannot come to a clear conclusion about the dura-
tion of the universe so as to prove demonstratively that the world has always existed.”
De potentia Dei, q. 3, a. 17. We must remember that for Thomas, following Aristotle, a
demonstration, properly speaking, concludes necessarily that such and such is the case.
He thinks that there are two types of demonstrations: a demonstration in terms of why
[ propter quid] what is is the way it is, and a demonstration that [quia] something is the
case. The first type of demonstration starts from the essence or intrinsic nature of a
thing and, as he says, time and place are extrinsic to things and are thus not subject
to demonstrative arguments. Furthermore, nothing in the nature of God necessitates
that He choose to create a world with a particular temporal duration or of an eternal
duration. God is not somehow better off, his goodness or perfection not enhanced, by
his creating anything. Since there is no necessity in God’s creating the universe, there
is no basis for a demonstration as to what or how he must create.
68
In article three of the text I have been discussing, Thomas addresses directly the
question of whether God can communicate the power of creating to creatures. In this
article and a little later in his De veritate (1256–57), he allows that it is philosophically
possible for God to use some creatures as intermediaries or instruments in the cre-
ation of other creatures. Thus, he admits the philosophical possibility of some form
of emanationism, although he recognizes that it is contrary to the faith to hold this

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242 william e. carroll

three errors about creation: the error of those holding the eternity of
the world; the error of those holding that there is more than one first
principle of the world (e.g., the error of Manichees); the error of those
holding that material beings were created through the mediation of
spiritual beings (the error of the emanationists). Thus, Thomas’s preced-
ing discussions of the eternity of the world, of Manicheanism, and of
emanationism have prepared the way for the exegesis of in principio. The
first five articles constitute the philosophical and theological preparation
necessary for understanding the first line of Genesis.
The fact, accepted only in faith, that human beings are creatures in
a world that has been brought into being ab initio temporis69 means that
we are beings with a story. For believers, this is not merely a story; it
is sacred history, the history of a relationship to the God who gave us
meaning and destiny from the beginning, who has intervened decisively
in human history. For the believer, the temporal beginning, which is
essential to salvation history, is fundamental to the understanding of
creation. In an important sense, it is true to say that the notion of
“creator” does not mean the same to philosophers and to theologians.
But the fact that philosophers and theologians approach the question
of creation differently does not mean that they are not referring, or
cannot be referring, to the same reality. Reason alone does not allow
us to see that the realities are the same; it is by faith that we know
that they are one and the same. Denys Turner cites an argument from
Giles of Rome who
explained that the God of the philosophers is known as it were by ‘sight,’
and the God of the theologians by ‘touch’ and ‘taste;’ for the philosophers
know God ‘at a distance’ and intellectually across a gap crossed not by
means of direct experience but by means of evidence and inference, and
so through a medium, as sight sees; whereas, through grace and revela-
tion, the theologian is in an immediate and direct contact with God, as
touch and taste are with their objects—touch and taste being analogies
for the immediacy of love’s knowledge.70

position. In later works (Summa contra Gentiles 2.20–21, De potentia Dei 3.4, and Summa
theologiae I. 45.5, for example), Thomas argues that it is philosophically impossible for
God to communicate such power to creatures since, among other reasons, the work of
creation is a work that requires infinite power and since all creatures are, by nature,
finite, they cannot receive, even instrumentally, the infinite creative power.
69
This is the phrase used in the decree of Fourth Lateran Council (1215) to affirm
the temporal beginning of the world.
70
Turner 2004, 18–19.

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Turner writes of different modes of knowing, one appropriate to phi-

losophers, the other to theologians.
Each time Thomas discusses creation in an extensive way in his
writings, he employs Aristotelian natural philosophy and metaphysics
to examine what it means to be a first principle, what change is (as
distinct from creation), how to understand cause (including analogical
senses of cause and distinctions between God as primary cause and
secondary causes), and questions concerning the proper senses of
infinity in arguments concerning the possibility or impossibility of
the eternity of the world. Ultimately, as I have already indicated, in
De aeternitate mundi, Thomas will present his most mature argument
that there is no contradiction in the notion of a universe both created
and eternal. Throughout, Thomas exhibits his skills in using natural
philosophy and metaphysics to make clear what is believed about the
origin of the universe.
Elsewhere in his Writings on the ‘Sentences,’ Aquinas sketches the debate
between two traditions, one favored by Albert the Great, the other by
Bonaventure on: “whether all things were created simultaneously and
as distinct species.” In his reply, he observes:
There are some things that are by their very nature the substance of faith
(substantia fidei ), as to say of God that He is three and one, and other
similar things, about which it is forbidden for anyone to think otherwise. . . .
There are other things that relate to the faith only incidentally . . . and, with
respect to these, Christian authors have different opinions, interpreting the
Sacred Scripture in various ways. Thus with respect to the origin of the
world (circa mundi principium), there is one point that is of the substance
of faith, viz., to know that it began by creation (mundum incepisse creatum),
on which all authors in question are in agreement. But the manner and
the order according to which creation took place concerns the faith
only incidentally (non pertinet ad fidem nisi per accidens), in so far as it has
been recorded in Scripture, and of these things aforementioned authors,
safeguarding the truth by their various interpretations, have reported
different things.71

71
“Quaedam enim sunt per se substantia fidei, ut Deum esse trinum et unum, et
huisimodi: in quibus nulli licet aliter opinari . . . . Quaedam vero per accidens tantum . . .,
et in his etiam sancti diversa senserunt Scripturam divinam diversimode exponentes.
Sic ergo circa mundi principium aliquid est quod ad substantiam fidei pertinet, scilicet
mundum incepisse creatum, et hoc omnes sancti concorditer dicunt. Quo autem modo
et ordine factus sit, non pertinet ad fidem nisi per accidens, inquantum in Scriptura
traditur, cuius veritatem diversa expositione sancti salvantes, diversa tradiderunt.” In
II Sent., dist. 12, q. 1, a. 2.

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244 william e. carroll

Thomas’s approach to reading Scripture, heavily infl uenced as it is by

his commitment to principles of Aristotelian thought, does not result in
the subordination of Scripture (nor of Christian faith, for that matter) to
the categories of rational analysis. As he points out in his commentary
on the Epistle to the Hebrews,
the teaching of Sacred Scripture holds that it hands on not only matters
to be speculated on, as geometry does, but also matter to be approved by
the affective powers. . . . Hence in other sciences [i.e., other than the science
of sacra doctrina] it is enough that a man be perfect in his intellect; in this
it is required that he be perfect both in intellect and in affection.72
And, when referring to what reason alone can tells us of God, he
writes:
The knowledge of God which is had by other sciences enlightens only
the intellect, showing that God is the first cause, that He is one and
wise, etc. But the knowledge of God had through faith both enlightens
the mind and delights the affections, for it not only tells us that God is
the first cause, but also that He is our Saviour, that He is our Redeemer,
that He loves us, that He became incarnate for us, and all this infl ames
the affections.73
The approach Thomas takes to Scripture, and, in particular, the way
he uses the philosophical resources available to him, is an excellent
example of his general commitment to the complementarity of faith
and reason. Citing Aristotle in his own exposition of Scripture is, for
Thomas, no more unusual than citing the views of the church fathers.
Thomas is able to distinguish what reason alone can know about nature,
human nature, and God from what faith reveals. But, as we have seen,
faith completes, perfects, and orders what reason knows. Because he is
a biblical exegete and theologian, Thomas is a philosopher, including a
natural philosopher. He could not imagine the former without the latter.

72
“Hoc enim habet sacrae Scripturae doctrina, quod in ipsa non tantum traduntur
speculanda, sicut in geometria, sed etiam approbanda per affectum. . . . In aliis ergo
scientiis sufficit quod homo sit perfectus secundum intellectum, in istis vero requiritur
quod sit perfectus secundum intellectum et affectum.” In Heb. 5.2.
73
“Nam notitia de Deo quae habetur per alias scientias, illuminat intellectum
solum, ostendens quod Deus est causa prima, quod est unus et sapiens, et cetera. Sed
notitia de Deo quae habetur per fidem et illuminat intellectum et delectat affectum,
quia non solum dicit quod Deus est prima causa, sed quod est salvator noster, quod
est redemptor, et quod diligit nos, quod est incarnatus pro nobis: quae omnia affectum
infl ammant.” Super 2 Cor., cap. 2, l. 3.

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 CHAPTER EIGHT

SCIENCE AND THEODICY IN QUR N 2:6/7

Robert G. Morrison

Introduction

Though comparatively understudied, the discipline of tafs r (exegesis

of the Qur ān), is one of the most central Islamic disciplines.1 It is,
perhaps, the most fascinating, as commentators brought the full range
of their erudition to bear upon the task of elucidating Islam’s foun-
dational text.2 Premodern Qur ān commentators could and did adopt
and blend approaches to the Qur ān that refl ected concerns of Islamic
law, literary theory, sectarian polemic, the ad th traditions that tell of
the life and words of Mu ammad, Sufism, and kalām, a speculative
discourse into the nature of God.3 But fl ourishing along with those
religious disciplines in premodern Islam was an enterprise of natu-
ral science and of philosophy in the Hellenistic tradition.4,5 Unless I
specify otherwise, with a term such as ‘religious science,’ I mean by
science not the attempt to construct a religious cosmology, but rather
the enterprise of natural science that drew on the scientific heritage

1
Saleh 2004, 1–5. See also Rippin, pp. 83–8. Rippin (83) explained that the word
tafs r refers both to the genre of literature and to the process of commentary.
2
Fudge 2003, 5–8.
3
I borrow my definition of kalām from Sabra 1994, 5–11, and 21. For an account
of the origins of kalām that makes kalām out to be more than just apologetics, see
Frank 1992, 7–37.
4
Arabic: falsafa.
5
These traditions of natural science and philosophy in the Hellenistic tradition
depended on the Translation Movement of the first, second, third, and fourth Islamic
centuries. For an account of the Translation Movement, the rise of Islamic science,
and its later history, see Saliba 2007. For a different perspective on the Translation
Movement and the rise of Islamic science, see Gutas 1998. Gutas discussed the transla-
tion of philosophical texts in particular into Arabic (119–20 and 141–50). Translation
of philosophical texts arose elsewhere in the book, too, due to connections between
science and philosophy. For an older account, one which argued for the intellectual
imperative for the study of philosophy and science from non-Muslim civilizations, see
Rosenthal 1970. Sabra 1996 considered the implications of the terms ‘Arabic science’
and ‘Islamic science’ (654–70).

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of pre-Islamic civilizations.6 Religious scholars in Islamic civilization

had different levels of interest in this scientific enterprise; to the extent
that some were conversant with science and natural philosophy, this
material also entered Qur ān commentaries. In this chapter I describe
the interpretation of a theologically problematic verse that has also
been read scientifically. My goals are to establish what interpreters
expected to gain from involving science in Qur anic exegesis and what
the theological implications of the use of science were.
Scientific readings of the Qur ān are always found amongst many
other concerns addressed in tafs r. Indeed, it is difficult to label any
single commentary as ‘scientific.’ For instance, the Qur ān commenta-
tor Ni ām al-D n al-N sāb r (d. ca. 1330), whom this article will find
to be most sympathetic to the use of science in Qur ānic exegesis, was
also quite concerned with matters of literary theory, f thought, and
Islamic law.7 Commentators routinely adopted more than one style of
commentary in a single tafs r. As a result, past categorizations of com-
mentators and modes of commentary are not accurate.8
The existence of scientific readings amongst this multiplicity of
concerns in tafs r can be understood not only as a component of the
intellectual biographies of the commentators, but, more importantly, as
a reaction to questions posed by the text of the Qur ān itself. Even the
science-minded commentators that this article presents did not draw
on scientific material equally throughout their commentaries. They did
so only when science was relevant to the questions posed by a given
passage. Conversely, the omission of scientific material did not imply
the rejection of science but rather a commentator’s position that his

6
On the attempt to construct a religious cosmology, see Heinen 1982.
7
A recent monograph on N sāb r ’s tafs r has argued (al-Jallād 2000, 25–31) that
the tafs r contained clear evidence of N sāb r ’s Sunn (and not Sh ) leanings. Though
I disagree with this argument, the existence of such an argument shows that science
was far from N sāb r ’s only concern. On the broad concerns of N sāb r ’s tafs r, see
Morrison 2007, 37–62 and 95–145.
8
For a classic work on Qur ān commentaries that categorized Qur ān commentators
and modes of exegesis, see Goldziher 1920. Saleh 2004, 17 has criticized Goldziher’s
classification of modes of exegesis into grammatical, doctrinal, mystical, sectarian,
and modern. Rippin (2000, 84) remarked that even the attempt to categorize tafs rs as
depending upon either the authority of the community or the intellect is insufficient:
“This separation does not, however, provide a sufficient analytical tool by which one
may characterise the wide variety of books and approaches which are contained within
the broadly-defined genre of tafs r, since it concentrates on a superficial understanding
of the form of the works with little attention to their underlying substance.”

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 science and theodicy in qur qn 2:6/7 251

understanding of science yielded no additional insights into the Qur ān.

In addition, compared to the Bible, the Qur ān said little that confl icted
with the science circulating in Islamic civilization. Terms for figurative
language9 and direct or literal speech10 did circulate in premodern
Islamic civilization, and, interestingly, it was the development of the
term for figurative speech that effected the definition of the term for
literal speech.11 Discussions of direct and metaphorical speech, however,
had little to do with perceived confl icts between science’s descriptions
of nature, and the Qur ān’s description of nature.
Rather, the development and discussion of these terms was inextri-
cably connected with the concerns of kalām and eliminating perceived
logical difficulties in the text of the Qur ān. Any use of science to
determine a meaning or the meaning of a given Qur ānic passage
had implications that went beyond determining whether or not God
was speaking literally in the Qur ān.12 The issue for commentators was
discerning the implications of a scientifically-informed reading of the
Qur ān for all dimensions of God’s relationship with humankind.
With these matters in mind, the role of philosophy in the Hel-
lenistic tradition, science and kalām in tafs r has been explored in the
past.13 This work has focused on the issue of whether certain tafs rs’
scientific portrayals of nature refl ected the epistemological concerns of
the mutakallim n (practitioners of kalām).14 That is, Ash ar mutakallim n
questioned the explanatory force of scientific explanations that involved

9
Arabic: majāz.
10
Arabic: aq qa.
11
Heinrichs 1984, 111–40 at pp. 137–8. “But for the classical theory the opposite
movement occurred. Majāz affected the meaning of its counterpart aq qa. Since majāz
had been used as a term describing the idiomatic use of certain words and construc-
tions, it was all but natural that aq qa, when coupled with majāz, should gradually be
wrested from its ontological moorings and acquire a secondary, linguistic meaning.”
See also Abu-Deeb 2000, 334–5. The commentator to whom Abu-Deeb devoted
most of the article, al-Shar f al-Ra (fifth century A.H.), “goes beyond the general
problems of anthropomorphism and free will and predestination to tackle issues would
would cause serious doubts and create problems for the very notion of a divine order
and purposefully constructed universe if read in a non-metaphorical way.”
Earlier important articles on metaphorical and direct or literal speech in tafs r are
Wansbrough 1970, 247–66 and Almagor 1979, 307–26. Both of these articles have
now been reprinted in Rippin 1999.
12
Heinrichs 1984, 139.
13
See Dallal 2004, 540–58, and Morrison 2007, 95–145.
14
Dallal 2004.

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causality.15 Such an approach to understanding the Qur ān did erect

a fence around God’s omnipotence, as nothing competed with God’s
role in the causation of natural events. But restricting the explanatory
power of science in order to enhance humans’ appreciation of God’s
omnipotence meant that science was less able to communicate the glory
of God’s creation to humans.16
The Qur ān’s numerous references to the natural world and to God’s
role as creator and as master over natural processes, references that
science could explain, are central to the Qur ān’s arguments for God’s
existence and power (and God’s existence and power were particular
concerns of kalām). And intimately connected to the Qur ān’s discussions
of God’s omnipotence are the implications of God’s omniscience.17 If
God is omniscient and omnipotent, it is conceivable that God would
behave in ways that are beyond human comprehension. For these rea-
sons, the concerns of kalām, science, and natural philosophy can be very
difficult to disentangle.18 In particular, even when a comment on a verse
might seem to have been purely scientific, the debate between natural
philosophy and kalām over causality lurked just beneath the surface.19
One area in which the concerns of a scientific description of cre-
ation clearly overlapped with those of kalām was the matter of God’s
creation of sin. Did God’s role as creator extend to sins? The Qur ān
frequently describes God as the judge of human conduct and the cre-
ator of everything. Was God’s standard of justice comprehensible on
human terms? These very questions were posed in Q2:6/7:
As for the unbelievers, alike it is to them whether thou hast warned them
or hast not warned them, they do not believe. God has set a seal on their

15
For an early Ash ar criticism of the philosophers’ doctrine of causality, see al-
Juwayn 2000, 128–9.
16
Morrison 2005, 201–2. Early Mu tazil mutakallim n also developed a physics to
compete with that derived from natural philosophy in the Hellenistic tradition. See
Frank 1966 and Dhanani 1994. For an early occasionalist critique of causality in Ash ar
kalām, see al-Juwayn 1950, 230–4. For the response of an Islamic philosopher to this
occasionalist critique of causality, as presented in Ghazāl ’s Tahāfut al-falāsifa (The Inco-
herence of the Philosophers; see al-Ghazāl 1997, 166–77), see Kogan 1985.
17
See Q 31:16: “ ‘O my son, if it should be but the weight of one grain of mustard
seed, and though it be in a rock, or in the heavens, or in the earth, God shall bring it
forth.’ ”All translations of passages from the Qur ān are taken from Arberry 1955.
18
On the mingling of natural philosophy, science, and kalām, see Sabra 1994,
1–42.
19
Morrison 2002, 132–6.

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 science and theodicy in qur qn 2:6/7 253

hearts and on their hearing, and on their eyes is a covering, and there
awaits them a mighty chastisement.
This was a verse that piqued the curiosity of, among early Qur ān com-
mentators, al- abar (d. 923).20 By examining how several commenta-
tors interpreted this verse, we will gain insight into the debate among
Qur ān commentators over the value of a scientific interpretation for
the interpretation of the Qur ān. And because this verse does not have
to be understood to refer to the natural processes, we will get a better
sense of what was at stake when commentators chose to incorporate
scientific explanations.
This chapter is interested in the way in which certain Qur ān
commentators balanced the prerogative of divine omnipotence with
the extent to which divine justice might be comprehensible. Q2:6/7
challenged readers attuned to the theological questions posed by the
Qur ān. In particular, the verse attributed the infidels’ dismissal of
Mu ammad’s warnings to the seal that God placed on their hearts and
hearing, and the covering that God placed upon their eyes. Readers
attuned to theological issues might ask whether it was just for God to
seal the hearts of the unbelievers, thereby dooming them to eternal
damnation? And did the verse simply mean that God could doom the
unbelievers, or was there some value in investigating the sealing of the
hearts in a physiological sense?
In this chapter, I will contrast two commentators noted for their par-
ticular attention to the concerns of kalām (e.g., why might God inhibit
the unbelievers from saving themselves or why God was not actually
predestining the unbelievers to unbelief ) with two commentators noted
for their attention to matters of science and falsafa (philosophy in the
Hellenistic tradition). Though the two kalām-minded commentators
disagreed with each other, both understood the Qur ān metaphorically;
their commentaries differed over whether God would actually prevent
the unbelievers from saving themselves. The two science-minded com-
mentators, however, considered how God might actually place a seal on
someone’s heart. By accepting the possibility of reading the Qur ān in
its direct sense, the science-minded commentators moved to the issue
of whether the reader might gain further insight into why God would
do such a thing. To our kalām-minded commentators, though, the

20
al-Rāz vol. 2, 55. These motivations had to be due to God (see vol. 2, 52) lest
one deny God’s existence. See also Shihadeh 2006, 34.

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question of whether God would seal the infidels’ hearts was more impor-
tant than the question of how God would seal the hearts. I begin with
the kalām-minded commentators because their debate began first.

KAL M-Minded Commentators

Al-Zamakhshar
The first kalām-minded tafs r I examine is entitled al-Kashshāf, by Jār
Allāh Ma m d ibn Umar al-Zamakhshar (d. 1144).21 The Kashshāf has
a reputation as a Mu tazil tafs r; Mu tazil kalām held that God and Islam
conformed to the strictures of human reason. While Zamakhshar was
indeed Mu tazil , and while the position Zamakhshar took on Q 2:6/7
was basically Mu tazil , the Kashshāf was much more than a repository
of Mu tazil ideas.22 I have chosen the Kashshāf, as well, because both
of the scientific commentators, Rāz and N sāb r , cited it frequently.
Regarding Q 2:6/7, Zamakhshar wrote that the Qur ān’s expression
of God sealing the hearts of the unbelievers was majāz (speech that the
reader should not take literally).23 One could understand this passage, if
taken as indirect speech, either as a metaphor24 or as a simile,25 but one
was not to conclude that God actually sealed the hearts of unbelievers
in any physiological sense. Zamakhshar adduced linguistic evidence for
taking the passage in its indirect sense. He made a comparison with the
expression ārat bih al- anqā (the griffon carried him off ), to indicate an
extended absence, or sāl bih al-wād (the wadi fl owed excessively with
him), to indicate that one was beset by catastrophe.26
As for understanding the verse as a metaphor, it is that the unbeliev-
ers’ hearts are made27 so that the truth does not reach their consciences
due to the absence of their belief in God, or their opposition to God,

21
I am not alleging that Zamakhshar never drew on scientific material (on that see
Dallal 2004, 543). Rather I am saying only that Zamakhshar ’s commentary on this
passage did not draw on scientific material.
22
As oppposed to the Ash ar school, the earlier Mu tazil school held God’s actions
to be intelligible to human reason. Sin, for example, was the result of humans’ free
choice. On Zamakhshar ’s tafs r, see Lane 2006.
23
al-Zamakhshar vol. 1, 26.
24
Arabic: isti āra.
25
Arabic: tamth l.
26
al-Zamakhshar vol. 1, 28. It is interesting that one of these examples involved a
bird whose existence was only mythical.
27
Arabic: an tuj al qul buhum.

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or their arrogance. The unbelievers are complicit in truth’s absence

from their consciences. If the expression (“God has set a seal on their
hearts”) were taken as a simile, a seal on one’s heart would be as if
there were a curtain rendering the unbelievers unable to benefit from
the things with which they were created in order to fulfill religious obli-
gations.28 But regardless of how one understood the indirect sense of
the process of sealing, any implication of the passage’s indirect sense,
for an understanding of divine justice, depended on whether the seal-
ing was attributed to God.29
Zamakhshar held God to be exalted beyond all abomination, so
Zamakhshar was not inclined to say that taking the passage as indi-
rect, nonliteral speech could, nevertheless, mean that God caused
sin.30 Though Bay āw , Zamakhshar ’s erstwhile opponent, would not
object to understanding the sealing itself as a form of indirect speech,
Bay āw accepted only interpretations of the sealing that attributed the
sealing to God.31 Zamakhshar , in order to show that God could not
be responsible, at least directly, for the placement of that seal, cited
passages from the Qur ān such as Q7:28 (“God does not command
indecency”).32 The purpose of Q2:6/7 was, rather, to blame the infidels
for their own despicableness,33 a despicableness that was innate,34 not
accidental.35,36 The unbelievers were, no matter what, to blame for their
own state. True, the sealing was attributed to God in a metaphorical
sense inasmuch as God empowered37 all, including Satan, but Satan
was the one who directly sealed one’s heart. Yet another possibility38
was to say that there was no way that infidels would believe of their
own volition. Rather, the only way they would believe would be if God
compelled them. But God would not compel them, for that would

28
al-Zamakhshar vol. 1, 26.
29
al-Zamakhshar vol. 1, 26–7.
30
al-Zamakhshar vol. 1, 27.
31
al-Bay āw 1988, vol. 1, 22–3.
32
al-Zamakhshar vol. 1, 27.
33
Arabic: samāja.
34
Arabic: khilq .
35
Arabic: ara .
36
Another passage from the Qur ān that Zamakhshar cited along with Q7:28 was
Q50:29 (“I wrong not my servants”). Much depends on how one understands ab d;
were the infidels from among the ab d ? Or might their infidelity have excluded them
from being from among the ab d ?
37
Arabic: aqdarah wa-makkanah.
38
Arabic: wajh.

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contradict the point of commanding39 humans to do God’s will which

is that humans are free to choose to obey or disobey.40 According to this
line of interpretation, then, sealing41 is a metaphor for God’s refusal
to compel the infidels to do good and for their persistence42 in pursu-
ing a path of wrongdoing despite clear commands to the contrary.
The infidels attributed, mistakenly, their infidelity to a power that they
alleged was beyond their control. They refused to grasp that they had
free choice.
A final possibility was that the Qur ān was quoting literally43 what
the infidels were saying to excuse themselves. Perhaps the infidels were
scorning Islam by saying that God made them sin by covering their
eyes.44 Part of the covering of the eyes, according to this interpretation
based on the inscrutability of divine motives, may have been the eyes’
blindness toward God’s signs.45 Thus, unbelievers ignore God’s mes-
sage and choose to sin. Zamakhshar commented that the essence46 of
their punishment was known only to God inasmuch as their blindness
towards God’s signs was caused by a type of covering not known to
humans. Zamakhshar explained that this was the covering of those
who pretended to be blind.47,48
That final remark is fascinating because Zamakhshar has suggested
that only God would understand the nature of the infidels’ blindness;49
aspects of the infidels’ blindness would not be evident to humans. Thus,
the infidels’ choice to be blind may have been free but was not fully-
informed. This argument, then, in a reputedly Mu tazil commentary,
intended to preserve the transparency of God’s justice, relied, in the
end, on the inscrutability of certain things (the unbelievers’ blindness

39
Arabic: takl f.
40
al-Zamakhshar vol. 1, 28. Zamakhshar did not address the question of why God
commanded humans, but since God commanded humans, there would be no point in
unconditionally compelling humans to follow the divine will.
41
Arabic: khatm.
42
Arabic: ta m m.
43
Arabic: ikāya.
44
al-Zamakhshar vol. 1, 28. This comment resembled N sāb r ’s interpretation
of the Qur ān Q63:1 passage in which the infidels said that Mu ammad was God’s
apostle.
45
al-Zamakhshar vol. 1, 29. This resembles N sāb r ’s point about why God would
send revelations toward those who are doomed not to believe.
46
Arabic: kunh.
47
Arabic: ghi ā al-ta ām .
48
al-Zamakhshar vol. 1, 29.
49
Arabic: wa-huwa naw min al-agh iya ghayr mā yata ārafuh al-nās.

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and punishment) signified by the text of the Qur ān.50 Now, since this
blindness was a feigned blindness, then the blind could be understood
to have some role in their own blindness. But this blindness must not
have been perceivable to those who could perceive God’s signs (e.g.,
perhaps, readers of the Qur ān).51 Even for Zamakhshar , whose desire
to attribute all evil to humans’ free choice rested on his conviction that
God could not be responsible for evil, there were limits to the human
intellect’s ability to understand God’s actions.

Al-Bay āw
Reasoned arguments for the plain sense of the Qur ān were the basis
of the Ash ar school of kalām, a foundation of Abd Allāh ibn Umar
ibn Mu ammad al-Bay āw ’s (d. 1286?)52 Qur ān commentary entitled
Anwār al-tanz l. Bay āw ’s aim in writing was to purge Zamakhshar ’s
Mu tazil views while preserving the rest of the content of his tafs r. In
addition to his Qur ān commentary, Bay āw also wrote on Islamic law,
grammar, and kalām ( awāli al-anwār min ma āli al-an ār).53 With regard
to Q 2:6/7, Bay āw rebutted the Mu tazil s’ seven (the bulk of which
derive from the Kashshāf ) interpretations which advocated a metaphori-
cal interpretation intended to avoid any insinuation that God was the
proximate cause of humans’ sins and infidelity. In Bay āw ’s opinion,
attributing the sealing to Satan or to the infidels simply begged the ques-
tion. If God empowered Satan and/or the infidel to sin via a sealing
of the heart, then the action had to be attributed to God in the end.54
To take the position that God was responsible for the sealing, Bay āw
argued for attributing the effect to the cause;55 if God had wanted to
attribute the action to Satan, the Qur ān could have said that. It is
possible that Bay āw coopted aspects of the philosophers’56 defense of

50
This is distinct from the Mu tazil position on divine attributes. Or, as Lane 2006,
145 has suggested, Zamakhshar was not consistently Mu tazil .
51
al-Zamakhshar , Kashshāf vol. 1, 29. Zamakhshar did explain that this was the
blindness of the hypocrites.
52
For al-Bay āw ’s death date, see Robson 1960.
53
Robson 1960.
54
al-Bay āw vol. 1, 23. Bay āw ’s comment needs to be understood in the context
of the Ash ar occasionalist denial of intermediate causes in favor of, in their view, the
only true cause: God. Al-Ash ar (d. 935) [see McCarthy 1953, 43, 57, and 61] himself
portrayed God as the only cause, but did not provide a full critique of causality.
55
Arabic: isnād al-fi l ilā al-musabbib.
56
Arabic: falāsifa.

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intermediate causes as Islamic against the rationalist arguments of the

Mu tazil s that contended that the proximate cause of sin (i.e., human
free will) was more important.57 Thus, Bay āw ’s argument that the first
cause is infinitely more important than the intermediate cause might
refl ect the historical process in which Ash ar kalām appropriated the
methods and content of falsafa for kalām’s own ends.58
That use of a philosophical argument for kalām’s purposes helps us
begin to understand Bay āw ’s valorization of kalām over science. Once
Bay āw saw science and natural philosophy as subservient to kalām, he
could use a verse such as Q2:164, with its scientific allusions, as part
of an argument for God’s majesty and greatness.59
Surely in the creation of the heavens and the earth and the alternation
of night and day and the ship that runs in the sea with profit to men,
and the water God sends down from heaven therewith reviving the earth
after it is dead and His scattering abroad in it all manner of crawling
thing, and the turning about of the winds and the clouds compelled
between heaven and earth—surely there are signs for a people having
understanding.
Bay āw did not, as earlier Ash ar s had, qualify descriptions of natu-
ral processes with references to the occasionalist principle of habit.60
According to Bay āw , the boat was mentioned before the rain because
the ocean is the source of the rain.61 Later on in his comments, he
explained that the subjugation of the winds is their fl uctuation in
accordance with the will of God. There seemed to be no need to go
through occasionalist arguments via āda to explicate precisely how the
winds were subjugated to God’s will.62 One can conclude that if the
Qur ān’s statements about the natural world were to be taken as evi-
dence for God’s greatness, those statements could not be understood
metaphorically. So, when should a statement in the Qur ān be taken
metaphorically as opposed to in its direct sense?

57
For the philosophers’ argument that God, despite the existence of intermediate
causes, was the most important causes, see S nā 1992, vol. 2, 91–4.
58
Bay āw ’s own kalām text awāli al-an ār was seen by Ibn Khald n as similar
(Sabra 1994, 13) to A ud al-D n al- j ’s (d. 1355) Kitāb al-mawāqif, the main source
for Sabra’s article, in its mingling of kalām and falsafa. Indeed, amidst Bay āw ’s dis-
cussion of the various types of bodies, he discusses the heavenly bodies (al-Bay āw
1991, 139–41).
59
Arabic: wa-’l-qa d bih ilā al-istidlāl bi-’l-ba r wa-a wālih.
60
Arabic: āda.
61
al-Bay āw , Anwār al-tanz l, vol. 1, 97.
62
For a classic example of such an argument, see al-Ghazāl 1997, 166–77.

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The significance of that question is heightened when we consider

Bay āw ’s interpretation of the Qur ān’s statement that there is a veil on
the sight. Bay āw wrote that the veil63 on the sight might in fact refer
to the eye in that the eye was the most susceptible to being covered.64
Bay āw did not pursue the matter perhaps because one could make
the case, echoing the previous paragraphs, that if the Qur ān intended
for there to be a veil on the eyes, then the Qur ān could have said just
that. Bay āw ’s overriding interest was in proving God’s greatness; that
theological position was what led him to read the verse literally. He was
certainly not interested in understanding through the use of science how
God operated. That is, he was not denying prima facie the possibility of
interpreting the passage in its direct sense; rather, that type of scientific
detail did not concern him. In his comments on Q 2:164, Bay āw pro-
vided nothing like the wealth of scientific information that the scientific
commentators (e.g., N sāb r and Rāz ) provided because the references
to the natural world, upon which he did not expound, were sufficient
for Bay āw ’s purposes. His real concern here was not that there might
be a confl ict between science and the literal sense of the Qur ān, but
rather the question of whether science was reliable enough to tell the
reader anything not found in the text of the Qur ān.
We see elsewhere in his tafs r that Bay āw could be downright
skeptical of what science was saying. Consider his comments on
Q2:29 (“It is He who created for you all that is in the earth, then He
lifted Himself to heaven and levelled them seven heavens; and He has
knowledge of everything”), a verse that includes a reference to seven
heavens. Bay āw was clearly interested in arguing how the most basic
conclusions of astronomy were, nevertheless, insufficiently certain to be
used as a basis for interpreting the Qur ān’s references to nature. He
commented that one might note that observational astronomers65 had
found nine orbs.66 This was probably a reference to the seven orbs for

63
Arabic: ghishāwa.
64
al-Bay āw 1988 vol. 1, 23. He added that the heart might be the seat of knowl-
edge (ma a l al- ilm), but, again, Bay āw said nothing more.
65
Arabic: a āb al-ar ād.
66
al-Bay āw 1988 vol. 1, 48. Bay āw has elided the distinction between the orbs
and heavens to make a point about science’s lack of credibility. The scientists of
Bay āw ’s time proposed nine orbs. There was an orb for the Sun, the Moon, Venus,
Mercury, Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, the fixed stars (that made up the constellations), and
the daily motion. Bay āw ’s point was, at best, rhetorical. First, there were serious
scientific proposals for a cosmos of only seven orbs (see al-Sh rāz (d. 1311) fol. 168r.)
Second, on a less technical level, one could take the orb of the Moon as the bound-

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the five planets plus the Sun and Moon, an orb for the fixed stars (the
stars that form constellations), and one more orb for the cosmos’ daily
motion. The implication of the argument that Bay āw introduced
was that the Qur ān might be interrogated on the basis of science. For
Bay āw , though, such a line of interpretation would be mistaken. He
wrote that there were doubts about what the astronomers said,67 and
that there is nothing in the verse that prevents there being more than
seven celestial orbs. He had little confidence in science, in this case, to
elucidate that verse.68 Hence it is not surprising that Bay āw , in his
eagerness to expunge Zamakhshar ’s Kashshāf of Mu tazil kalām, still
resorted to metaphorical interpretation.69 He had no confidence in the
tools necessary to probe the passage’s direct sense. He was concerned
only with a metaphorical interpretation of Q2:6/7 from a particular
point of view in kalām, that humans were entirely responsible for their
own sins even if God caused the sin. The question of when meta-
phorical interpretation was necessary was a secondary concern. On a
methodological level, both Zamakhshar and Bay āw prioritized the
mutakallim n’s debate over whether God could cause sin over the use of
science to probe how and why God might (or might not) cause sin.

Science-Minded Qur qn Commentators

Science-minded Qur ān commentators entertained the possibility of

approaching Q2:6/7 as direct speech, but as type of direct speech that
could be rationalized. Ahmad Dallal’s lengthy and authoritative article,
“Science and the Qur ān,” in Encyclopaedia of the Qur ān, concluded that
the commentaries of Fakhr al-D n al-Rāz (d. 1210) and Ni ām al-D n
al-N sāb r (d. ca. 1330) were the premodern Qur ān commentaries that

ary between the celestial and terrestrial realms, and count the orb responsible for the
daily motion of the heavens as something other than a ‘heaven’ because there were
no visible celestial bodies embedded in that orb.
67
Arabic: f mā dhakar h shuk k.
68
Although not in his comments on Q2:6/7, where the science of psychology was
part of an argument in favor of an Ash ar interpretation, I have found that Fakhr al-
D n al-Rāz limited the epistemological power of astronomy so as not to confl ict with
Ash ar kalām’s position on causality. See Morrison 2002.
69
On Bay āw ’s position on Zamakhshar ’s Kashshāf, see Robson 1960. See also
Lane 2006, 110: “If the metaphorical interpretation of the Qur ān were something
specifically Mu tazilite, one would hardly be expecting al-Bay āw of all people to
be making use of it.” See also Larkin 1995, 73; the Ash ar al-Jurjān acknowledged
metaphorical interpretations.

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included the most substantive scientific material.70 Therefore, Rāz and

N sāb r ’s tafs rs are the ones to which I have chosen to devote my atten-
tion. Much about the inclusion and presentation of scientific material in
these two commentaries can be attributed to the intellectual biography
of the commentator, be it Rāz or N sāb r , who wanted the reader
of the commentary to appreciate fully God’s power in the cosmos.71
N sāb r ’s use of science, in particular, refl ected his independence from
both the Mu tazi and Ash ar positions.72 Both commentators’ positions
on the use of scientific material certainly made sense in the context of
their overall programs of literary hermeneutics. For instance, N sāb r ’s
literary hermeneutics, found in his Shar Miftā al- ul m noted the value
of rhetoric for elucidating the Qur ān’s metaphorical meaning, but also
that metaphorical interpretations did not have to supplant the passage’s
direct sense.73 In Gharā ib al-Qur ān (his tafs r), he explained that avoid-
ing the direct sense of a passage (e.g., in Q2:6/7) was permissible only
if the passage made sense no other way.74 Tariq Jaffer’s study of Rāz
has shown how Rāz ’s tafs r followed the format of a kalām text, a kalām
text that had appropriated the approach of the natural philosophers.75
More important, a greater openness to scientific explanations gave
Rāz and even more so N sāb r a particular type of insight into the
thorny theological problem of whether to interpret Q2:6/7 according
to its literal sense.

Al-Rāz
Given what Zamakhshar wrote, Rāz ’s initial attention to the passage’s
theological implications in al-Tafs r al-kab r is not surprising. The first
lengthy matter76 that Rāz raised was the extent to which the pas-
sage (“God has set a seal on their hearts”; Arabic: khatam Allāh alā
qul bihim . . .) implicated God in humans’ evil deeds.77 But then, in the
twelfth and final matter, Rāz introduced science and natural philosophy
into his consideration of whether punishing the infidels suited God.78

70
Dallal 2004, 543.
71
Morrison 2002, 115–38.
72
Morrison 2007, 54–62 and 105–25.
73
Ibid., 127–8.
74
Ibid., 127–8.
75
Jaffer 2005, 36–7 and 49–52.
76
Arabic: mas ala.
77
al-Rāz vol. 2, 49–52.
78
Arabic: alā annah ya sun min Allāh ta ālā ta dh b al-kuffār.

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Rāz wrote that if there was a use79 in punishing the infidels, then it
would be possible for God to send that use without the punishment.
Conceivably, there might be no benefit in God sending that punish-
ment.80 Since a wise81 God does not do something ignoble,82 the truth
must be that God must charge the infidels with the commanded duty83
to believe so that their punishment, when it comes, will be deserved.
But then the command would appear to be the cause of the punish-
ment.84 In order to avoid that consequence, one of two things must be
true. Either the command must not exist, or that the existence of the
command alone did not bring about the punishment.85 In his pursuit
of a better interpretation, Rāz argued forcefully for the use of one’s
intellect in understanding this passage, noting that the intellect was
the origin of the transmitted86 sciences.87 While Rāz had no problem
with the traditionalist position that accepted the literal meaning that
God could seal the hearts of the unbelievers, intellectual evidence for
its own sake (as opposed to intellectual arguments for the transmitted
sources) was best.88 The root cause of certain humans’ disobedience
was, really, the dispositions of humans’ characters.89
Rāz ’s psychological explanation of how God caused sin refl ected
the content and terminology of psychology, part of falsafa.90 God was
the creator of certain motives91 that could lead to disobedience.92 The
emergence of an action depended on the joining93 of a motive94 with

79
Arabic: manfa a.
80
al-Rāz vol. 2, 54–5.
81
Arabic: ak m.
82
Arabic: qab .
83
Arabic: takl f.
84
al-Rāz vol. 2, 55.
85
See also al-Rāz vol. 2, 57. Here, at the end of a number of examples, Rāz
concluded once again that punishment was not simply the result of disobedience.
86
Arabic: manq l.
87
al-Rāz vol. 2, 57.
88
For the traditionalist position, see see al- abar 1987, 105–16
89
al-Rāz vol. 2, 56.
90
For a discussion of voluntary and involuntary motion within the context of medi-
eval Islamic philosophy’s view of the soul, see Ibn S nā 1975, 27ff.
91
Arabic: dawā in.
92
al-Rāz vol. 2, 55. These motivations had to be due to God (see vol. 2, 52) lest
one deny God’s existence. See also Shihadeh 2006, 34.
93
Arabic: in imām.
94
Arabic: dā iya.

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a capability.95,96 Rāz had noted, in his comments on an earlier part of

the passage (“As for the unbelievers, alike it is to them whether thou hast
warned them or hast not warned them”) the difficulty of understand-
ing unbelief as a coerced97 motion.98 Rather, it was the variations in
these motivations that refl ected God’s role in the creation of humans’
characters. After all, knowledge could be a more important part of
one’s motivation than belief and humans could certainly vary in their
knowledge.99 By reframing the question from questioning why God
would cause sin to explaining how God could cause sin without direct
coercion, Rāz meant that there was nothing intellectually repugnant
about a literal interpretation of the passage in which God created the
motivations for unbelief.
Rāz probed the individual’s role in causing sin by asking why two
otherwise equivalent people would hear the same command, and one
would obey while the other would violate the command. People were
not equal in their characters. But Rāz concluded that there is no
human characteristic, such as intelligence, or even a group of human
characteristics, that correlated with obedience to divine commands.100
Ultimately, there remained the very difficult question of how, exactly,
did God create humankind?101 Rāz questioned whether there was
justice in how God stoked the anger of some but not others in oth-
erwise identical situations. Though Rāz did not proceed further with
that line of inquiry, he wondered, implicitly, whether sinfulness could
correlate with being hot-headed.102,103 Would hot-headedness truly cor-
relate with sinfulness? Would not a just God judge people according

95
Arabic: maqdara.
96
See Shihadeh 2006, 21. Shihadeh, drawing on Rāz ’s al-Ma ālib al- āliya, explained
that the recognition of the role of motivation in actions was a departure from Rāz ’s
earlier, more Ash ar position, in which only the power (qudra or maqdara) mattered.
See “Al-Rāz maintains that motivation is not only necessary for action, it necessitates
actions . . . With respect to unconscious action, he argues that the act will not occur
unless the agent intends (qa ada) it.” (27)
97
Arabic: i irār .
98
al-Rāz vol. 2, 44.
99
Shihadeh 2006, 21.
100
al-Rāz vol. 2, 56. Elsewhere (see Shihadeh 2006, 33), Rāz wrote that voluntary
actions were much less predictable than chains of natural causes.
101
al-Rāz vol. 2, 55–6.
102
Cf. his reference to cool-headedness—al-bārid al-ra s.
103
al-Rāz vol. 2, p. 56.

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to their abilities?104 Rāz questioned whether continuing to punish the

obstinate perpetually would convince people of God’s wisdom. In
other words, as Rāz wrote earlier in his comments, when we disobey,
we cause ourselves to pass over God’s promises and benefits that God
has provided for us.105
Rāz considered what God’s promises might actually represent. God,
for example, commands one to pray even though God knows that one
might die early the next day. Such a command would be impossible
to fulfill but nevertheless valuable because it was a reminder of an
individual’s enduring connection to God.106 God’s promise of a reward
is necessary, while God’s promise of a punishment is not necessary.
In other words, there is nothing in the Qur ān about God refusing
to reward one for commanded deeds, but a great deal about God’s
mercy. By way of comparison, Rāz noted that parents frequently
lighten punishments; removing promised rewards would open them to
deserved criticism.107 This use of empirical evidence argues that the
appropriate reading is one in which the whole theological debate was
not to prove that God can lead humans into evil but to show that an
acknowledgment of God’s endless power should serve to prevent one
from being overconfident in one’s own analysis of human behavior.
Moreover, the use of science and, to an extent falsafa, in defining divine
justice has shifted the outlook from that of of any single human to a
cosmic outlook as a whole. Rāz ceded the fact, just as we will see that
N sāb r would, that individuals may be punished unjustly while retain-
ing a cosmos that can be rationalized. Bay āw wanted to rationalize
only that God could seal hearts.

Al-N sāb r
N sāb r , in the introduction to his Gharā ib al-Qur ān, cited Rāz ’s
al-Tafs r al-Kab r as an important source, and in many places N sāb r
reproduced sections of al-Tafs r al-Kab r virtually verbatim.108 N sāb r

104
Rāz ’s style of exegesis throughout al-Tafs r al-Kab r was intimately connected with
questions of kalām. See Jaffer 2005 49–52.
105
al-Rāz vol. 1, 56.
106
al-Rāz vol. 1, 57.
107
al-Rāz vol. 1, 57–8.
108
See, for example, the passages from al-Tafs r al-Kab r and Gharā ib al-Qur ān
discussed in Morrison 2002.

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continued Rāz ’s trend of privileging intellectual109 arguments and

investigated how God could actually seal a heart, implying throughout
that God’s doing so was reasonable. N sāb r spent more time than any
other commentator in defining the word qalb (heart).110 He wrote that in
one sense it could be the pine tree-colored fl esh placed in the left side
of the body cavity, being the locus of the animal soul and the source
of feelings, and this soul is carried to the rest of the body through the
veins and the arteries.111,112 In another sense, the heart could be the
graceful divine part that makes humans human, enabling one to carry
out divine commandments and to observe divine prohibitions. The
heart could also be the rational soul or the spirit.113,114 At any rate, the
heart could not be understood only biologically, because it was, for N sāb r ,
the source of adherence to commands.115
God, according to Q2:6–7, placed a seal on the hearing of the unbe-
lievers, and on their sight. Rāz had taken this verse in its metaphorical
sense.116 N sāb r first defined hearing as a power arrayed in the hole
of the ear perceiving the form of that which is conducted towards it
by vibrations through the air. These vibrations touch the nerves in the
ear and hearing occurs.117 N sāb r attributed this information to Ibn
S nā. N sāb r then gave an account of vision, following Ibn S nā’s
definition.118 Vision is a power119 arrayed120 in perceiving the forms in

109
Arabic: aql .
110
al-N sāb r 1992 vol. 1, 143. Rāz had a physiological definition of the heart in
al-Tafs r al-Kab r ( Jaffer 2005, 210–3), but it did not surface in the course of his com-
ments on this passage.
111
Arabic: bi-tawassu al-awrida wa-’l-sharāy n.
112
al-N sāb r 1992 vol. 1, 143.
113
Arabic: r .
114
al-N sāb r 1992 vol. 1, 143.
115
Morrison 2007, 141.
116
al-Rāz vol. 2, 52.
117
al-N sāb r 1992 vol. 1, 143.
118
The more sophisticated eleventh-century Kitāb al-Manā ir of Ibn al-Hay-
tham came to be fully-known in the Islamic East only in N sāb r ’s lifetime with
Kamāl al-D n al-Fāris ’s (d. 1320) Tanq al-Manā ir (Rectification of the Optics). See
Sabra 2007, esp. 120. There, Sabra noted Rāz ’s citation of Ibn al-Haytham’s
Kitāb al-Manā ir in al-Tafs r al-kab r, but added that there was no evidence of
Rāz ’s acquaintance with the contents. My research on N sāb r (2007 268–9, n.
46; see also n. 35) uncovered no evidence that N sāb r knew of Kamāl al-D n’s
work. For an English text of the Optics and its situation in the history of Islamic
science, see Sabra 1989. On lxxiii–lxxv, Sabra discussed the medieval Latin
translation of The Optics that occurred either at the end of the twelfth or early thirteenth
century (i.e., before Kamāl al-D n al-Fār s wrote).
119
Arabic: quwwa.
120
Arabic: murattaba.

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the firm damp air.121 N sāb r mentioned that Ibn S nā’s opponents
advocated an extramission theory of vision, in which rays emerged
from the eye.122 N sāb r seemed to incline against the extramission
position when he wrote that when many people are assembled together,
things do not get any brighter.123 Clearly, humans did not all have equal
powers of perception. He wrote that
attributing vision to the eye is attributing perception to the heart and
belonging to both the heart and the eye is a light. The light of the eye is
impressed in it [ i.e., the eye] because it is from the world of creation and
it is a partial light and that which perceives it is partial. As for the light
of the heart it is separate because it comes from the world of command
and it is a total light and that which perceives it is total. Both perceptions
mean that the perceiver falls in that light.124
While N sāb r ’s scientific information did not claim that God physi-
ologically seals the heart in the same manner in which God places a
covering on their eyes, the scientific information did provide a better
way for understanding of how the passage was direct speech. There
was nothing at all metaphorical about the heart being the locus of one’s
intimate contact with God; he has blurred the biological and religious
definitions of the heart. After all, if the eyes were the locus of the sight,
how appropriate it would be for the more noble heart to be the locus
of the more noble vision.125 The covering of the eyes and the sealing

121
Arabic: al-ru ba al-jal diyya.
122
al-N sāb r 1992 vol. 1, 143. al-Zamakhshar (vol. 1, 29) considered definitions
of vision, too. He wrote: “Vision (al-ba ar) is the light of the eye and it is that through
which the viewer sees and perceives ( yudrik) visible things (al-mar iyyāt) just as mental
perception (al-ba ra) is the light of the heart (al-qalb), it being that through which one
ponders and refl ects ( yastab ir wa-yata ammal ) as they [i.e., the light of the eye and the
light of the heart] are two refined essences (jawharān la fān) that God created as instru-
ments for vision and refl ection.”
123
al-N sāb r 1992 vol. 1, 143. I have discussed N sāb r ’s understanding of the
heart’s perception being more powerful than that of the eye, but did not investigate
the value of the scientific information in the context of the entirety of his comments
(Morrison 2007,141–2).
124
al-N sāb r 1992 vol. 1, 143. The Arabic reads: “Wa-’l- aqq ind anna nisbat al-
ba ar ilā al- ayn nisbat al-ba ra ilā al-qalb wa-li-kull min al- ayn wa-’l-qalb n r. Amā n r al- ayn
fa-mun aba f hā li- annah min ālam al-khalq fa-huwa n r juz wa-mudrikuh juz . Wa-amā n r
al-qalb fa-mufāraq li-annah min ālam al- amr wa-huwa n r kull wa-mudrikuh kull . Wa-idrāk
kull minhā ibāra an wuq mudrikuh f dhālik al-n r.”
125
Ibid., 143. N sāb r ’s discussion of the heart’s role in perception has, at the least,
nuanced Goldziher’s (1920, 239 n2) characterization of Gharā ib al-Qur ān as a tafs r
that made a distinction between literal and allegorical exegesis.

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of the heart are not metaphors for the fact that God could cause sin,
but rather explanations for how God might do so.
Though Bay āw , for example, did not dispute the possibility of the
heart being the locus for knowledge,126 N sāb r ’s much greater atten-
tion to science gave him a new way to reject the Mu tazil position of a
complete refusal to attribute evil to God in any way.127 Solving a problem
that had stumped Rāz , N sāb r used the case of tremors to show that
involuntary sin was possible; thus, involuntary sin was conceivable.128
Humans simply did not control all of their physiological functions. But
N sāb r had to reconcile the fact that, in his opinion, there was no
doubt that God was free from all shameful actions,129 with how such
an understanding of God had, nevertheless, to preserve God’s position
as the starting point for everything on earth.130
N sāb r , as Rāz had, took an empirical look at how God might
actually affect one’s future actions and, thus, one’s future salvation.
During the period of gestation in one’s mother as a clot of blood,131
God sends an angel with four words specifying one’s deeds,132 fixed
term133 and sustenance.134 After this point, God could do nothing that
would merit the further attribution of oppression135 and shameful
actions.136 N sāb r wondered why, when a king made one person a
minister proximate to the king, and others sweepers, people did not
consider that to be an evil action. Alluding to the need for opposites,
N sāb r added that both sweepers and ministers were necessary for
the functioning of the kingdom. Yet, God’s creation of predilections
in humans before birth is seen to be evil. God’s creation of the Sun,
along with blind people, was for N sāb r evidence that God did not

126
al-Bay āw (1988 vol. 1, 23) acknowledged that the heart could be the locus of
knowledge and that ‘sights’ could be a metaphor for the member (i.e., the eye) because
the eye was susceptible to being sealed and covered.
127
al-N sāb r 1992 vol. 1, 145.
128
al-N sāb r 1992 vol. 1, 147. See also al-N sāb r 1992 vol. 3, 141 and al-N sāb r
1992 vol. 8, 4. Q6:111 (‘We shall turn about their hearts and their eyes, even as they
believed not in it the first time; and We shall leave them in their insolence wandering
blindly.’) was another place where N sāb r argued that God caused unbelief.
129
Arabic: munazzah an kull al-qabā i .
130
al-N sāb r 1992 vol. 1, 146.
131
Arabic: mu gha.
132
Arabic: amalah.
133
Arabic: ajalah.
134
Arabic: rizqah.
135
Arabic: ulm.
136
al-N sāb r 1992 vol. 1, 146–7.

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intend for everyone to have the same fate. God could and did send
revelations to people among whom were those God created the leaning,
at least, towards unbelief.137
In his explanation of how blind people were unable to see the cre-
ated Sun, N sāb r used an instrument of simile,138 meaning that effect
of the loss of the light of revelation on a sealed heart was not exactly
the same thing as the blind person being unable to see the Sun.139
Likewise, the blind, according to N sāb r , might not be aware of what
they are lacking. N sāb r ’s probing of how God would seal the heart
led him to an inductive approach to the question of human free will
and responsibility. N sāb r ’s use of rational sciences, paralleling Rāz ’s
use of psychology, has begun to show that a literal interpretation of
Q2:6/7, an interpretation at first blush offensive to reason, was actu-
ally reasonable.
Then, N sāb r used the relativity of evil to separate the accidents of
qub (ignobility) from its essence. He said that if one derived use140 from
something ignoble,141 then God would certainly be capable of sending
that benefit without the necessary intermediation of the ignoble thing.
What was perceived as ignoble might not really be such; thus, God was
divested of142 anything ignoble, but could still be the origin of all.143
In addition, N sāb r explained that the existence of divine grace144 is
sound145 only through the existence of divine ill-treatment.146 Things
become clear only through their opposites.147 In other words, nothing
could be perceived as ignoble unless it could also be seen as fine148
from another perspective. Metal, for example, could be used for both
horseshoes and for swords, and inasmuch as something is used for a
purpose with no redeeming value, the ignobility should be attributed to

137
al-N sāb r 1992 vol. 1, 147.
138
Arabic: ka.
139
al-N sāb r 1992 vol. 1, 147. “As for the benefit of the sun for those whose hearts
have been sealed, it is like (ka) the benefit of the sun for the blind.” Arabic: “wa-amā
fā idat al-shams bi-’l-nisba ilā al-makht m alā qul bihim fa-ka-fā idat n r al-shams bi-’l-nisba
ilā al-akmah.”
140
Arabic: manfa a.
141
Arabic: qab .
142
Arabic: munazzah an.
143
al-N sāb r 1992 vol. 1, 148.
144
Arabic: lu f.
145
Arabic: ya a .
146
Arabic: qahr.
147
al-N sāb r 1992 vol. 1, 146.
148
Arabic: asan.

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the relative distance of that result from God. This is an interesting step
in N sāb r ’s reasoning, because he has implied that while everything
can be attributed to God, humans might be the proximate cause of
certain acts of evil. There is also a difference between human evil and
God’s apparent evil which could actually serve some good.
The advance that N sāb r has made has been to show that while
God could be responsible for what humans perceive to be evil, God’s
responsibility for evil did not entail God’s capriciousness. God’s role
in evil served a purpose. Such a conclusion was both the result of
N sāb r ’s rationalist argument and a general implication of the use
of science. Human science can explain events on earth; so, preserving
the rationality of events on earth, such as sin, did not mean the denial
of the literal sense of the Qur ān. In other words, N sāb r broke new
ground in the interpretation of Q2:6/7 by accepting the validity of
scientific epistemology. Conversely, we have seen that Bay āw was
more skeptical of science. That meant that while kalām had appropri-
ated falsafa and science (cf. Rāz ’s tafs r) by the time Bay āw wrote,
Bay āw did not avail himself of science’s findings in his arguments
in favor of a literal exegesis of the passage. He was a mutakallim who
remained wary of science’s findings; or, he concluded that science’s
methodology threatened his understanding of God.149 Indeed, I would
speculate that the inductive (rather than deductive) nature of N sāb r ’s
conclusions, and of science’s conclusions, was central to why Bay āw
rejected N sāb r ’s approach, and why Bay āw rejected using science to
the extent that N sāb r did to interpret the Qur ān. Bay āw ’s outlook
preferred exegesis on the basis of deductions from the Ash ar principle
of divine omnipotence to inferring God’s omnipotence from empirical
data. Because N sāb r was even more sympathetic to science than Rāz ,
N sāb r was able to do more to answer the questions that Rāz had
posed about how and why God would cause humans to sin.

Conclusion

Q2:6/7 has been a challenge for Qur ān commentators because while

the direct sense of the verse is elusive, the overriding message about
God’s role in humans’ commission of evil acts forces refl ection on the

149
See, again, al-Bay āw 1988 vol. 1, 48.

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issues of free will and human responsibility. Zamakhshar ’s Kashshāf

met those challenges by attributing all evil actions to humans’ free
choice, not to God. Given that Zamakhar ’s explanation challenged the
Qur ān’s description of God as omnipotent, Bay āw ’s Anwār al-tanz l
would seem to be the obvious response to the Kashshāf: God could seal
the hearts of the unbelievers. But between those two commentaries a
new approach emerged, an approach which refl ected changes in the
study of kalām and in the role of science and falsafa in religious educa-
tion. That approach, which incorporated material from science and
falsafa, gave commentators a way to understand how God might actu-
ally seal one’s heart and how one might commit involuntary actions.
This chapter has shown that some Qur ān commentators included
science in their commentaries not to resolve apparent contradictions
between the text of the Qur ān and science, but rather to elucidate how
God’s power operated in the natural world. In particular, N sāb r ’s
acknowledgment of what humans’ scientific investigation could and
could not tell us meant that he was not painting in broad strokes when
he induced ways in which God seemed to create evil but, in fact, acted
with humanity’s best interests in mind. The use of science in exegeses
of Q 2:6/7 directed the discussion away from the question of whether
God could force humans to commit evil acts and towards the question
of why God would do such a thing.

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 PART III

1450–1700

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 CHAPTER NINE

THE HERMENEUTICS OF NATURE AND SCRIPTURE IN

EARLY MODERN SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY1

Kenneth J. Howell

A comprehensive history of biblical hermeneutics with respect to nature

between ca. 1500 and 1700 is still to be written.2 One of the most
understandable reasons for this lacuna is the sheer volume of writings
that would need to be mastered to produce such a study. The Bible was
alluded to and quoted in treatises ranging from alchemy to astronomy,
from classics to chemistry, from medicine to metallurgy, and from theoria
to theology. It is difficult for people in the twenty-first century to grasp
how infl uential the Bible was in early modern Europe. The Scriptures
were not viewed as simply a religious book which was thereby limited
to human salvation and conduct. The Bible was considered a source
of truth about history, geography, nature, human origins, and what-
ever else its words happened to touch. The Bible was, as the Marxist
historian Christopher Hill once remarked, universally believed to be
the word of God in 1600.3 This meant that it carried an authority far
greater than even the most expert treatises in many fields.
In this chapter, I can do little more than illustrate the diverse uses of
the Bible in a natural-philosophical context. Even in a highly selective
survey, however, the vastly different hermeneutics employed by the early
modern people become evident. First, we examine some of the attempts
of well known astronomers to read the books of nature and Scripture
in harmony as they adopted the emerging cosmological realism that
gained ascendency in this period. Then, what can be cautiously cast

1
Introduction to Part 3.
2
To my knowledge there is still not a comprehensive study of biblical interpretation
in the major figures of the Protestant and Catholic reformations for these two centuries
though there has been a decided increase in the study of the interpretative methods of
the magisterial Reformers. See Steinmetz 1990 and Muller & Thompson 1996.
3
See Hill 1994.

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276 kenneth j. howell

as a ‘hermetic’ approach to nature and Scripture is illustrated by the

writings of two German thinkers, Valentine Weigel and Daniel Czepko.
These latter figures display a hermeneutic that seems very distant from
the standard astronomers. They sought to tie the biblical stories to the
structure of nature in a much more intimate fashion. Finally, we look at
two late seventeenth-century figures in England (William Whiston, John
Ray) who desired as much as the previous writers to display the glory of
the Creator from the operations of nature but whose science was now
premised on the truth of heliocentrism and whose hermeneutics bear
the marks of something quite divergent from the hermetic tradition.
One reason for the importance of the Bible had to do with the meta-
phor of the books of nature and Scripture which early modern people
inherited from the ancient and medieval engagement with the problems
of faith and reason. The complexities of this history are beyond our
scope here, but it is fair to say that almost all early moderns endorsed
the idea of an ultimate compatibility between the two books. Two of
the most prominent expressions of this view in earlier centuries came
from the pens of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Augustine (354–430)
sought to counter the Christians of his own day (early fifth century) who
tended to dismiss non-Christian knowledge as tainted with paganism.
Even the Manichees, who Augustine came to despise, had some true
things to say. Such truth ultimately comes from the hand of God in his
view and so should not be rejected by men. In the thirteenth century,
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1275) developed and refined this Augustinian
view with the added power of an intimacy with the Aristotelian cor-
pus. Summarizing Aquinas’s complex view is difficult, but it did share
with Augustine the confidence that no two truths could contradict one
another. Thus, when the doctrine of double truth was espoused by such
Averroist philosophers as Siger of Brabant, Thomas countered with
arguments in his On the Unity of the Intellect. Like Augustine, Aquinas
viewed natural-philosophical truth as complementary to theological
truth. No true contradiction could exist.
Thus very few in the sixteenth century would have found Alain of
Lille’s (ca. 1128–1202) twelfth-century poetic rendition of this compat-
ibility problematic:
Omnis mundi creatura,
Quasi liber, et pictura
Nobis est, et speculum.
Nostrae vitae, nostrae mortis,

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Nostri status, nostrae sortis

Fidele signaculum.4
Nor would anyone have disagreed with the late sixteenth-century Ital-
ian Protestant Girolamo Zanchi (1516–1590):
There are two sorts of divine books in which God Almighty has thought
it worthy to speak to us and through which he has wanted to inform us,
first, about his eternal essence and, then, about his best will and high-
est love towards us. Of these we may call one the Book of Creatures or
Works, the other that of the sacred writings, or words of God. If you
care to compare these a little, you will see that, even though they are
different, however, they act in unison especially with regard to the thing
that we are interested in, whether it is to exhibit the knowledge of God
or that of our happiness.5
Zanchi is careful to say that these two books are different but they both
share the same goal of declaring the glory of God to humanity. Such a
view would have been very comfortable to medieval theologians who
were careful to distinguish between the methods of natural philosophy
and theology. Veteran historian of medieval science, Edward Grant,
summarized the predominate scholastic view after the first half of the
twelfth century:
If theologians at the universities had chosen to oppose Aristotelian learning
as dangerous to the faith, it could not have become the center of study at
the university. But medieval theologians interrelated natural philosophy
and theology with relative ease and confidence, whether this involved the
application of science and natural philosophy to scriptural exegesis . . .6
So the confidence of natural philosophy to confirm or at least to be
compatible with the doctrines of the Christian faith became the inheri-
tance of all educated people in the sixteenth century. As many new

4
Migne 1844–1905 vol. 210, col. 579. Translation: every creature of the world to
us is a picture or mirror, a faithful sign of our life, our death, our state, our destiny.
5
Zanchius 1591. Hi sunt diuini illi libri, iique duûm generum in quibus Deus Opt.
Max. nos alloqui dignatus est, déque sua tùm aeterna essentia, perfectissimáque natura,
tùm optima voluntate, summoque erga nos amore, certiores facere voluit: quorum
vnum Librum Creaturarum seu Operum: alterum sacrarum literarum, seu verbi Dei,
possumus appellare. Quos si paulùm comparare libeat, videas eos, tametsi diuersos,
egregiè tamen id, de quo quaeritur praestare, siue in finem illum, cognitionis Dei, ac
beatitudinis nostrae conspirare.Translation mine.
6
Grant 1997.

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scientific disciplines emerged, they all seemed to hold the promise of

enhancing the glory of God.
Believing in the compatibility of God’s two books, however, did
not answer questions about how those two volumes should be related.
Should the teachings of the biblical text be expected to be found in the
natural world? Or, are the content of the Bible and that of a particular
science completely distinct even if noncontradictory? Should references
to natural things in the Bible be expected to have the same truth value
as, say, hortatory passages with obvious moral overtones? These ques-
tions and more would face the early moderns as they sought to relate
the book of nature to the book of Scripture.
Over a half-century ago, the literary scholar Arnold Williams showed
how widely the Bible was honored and used in English literature during
the Renaissance, but his treatment also explored the development of
the hexaemeral tradition which crossed national boundaries.7 Williams
showed that “there was a widespread disposition to harmonize Genesis
with the findings of science which for most of the commentators meant
Aristotelian science.”8 This is why they tended to explain the creation
narratives without reference to miracles. Nevertheless, the degree to
which Genesis was taken as an authority on natural philosophy by the
commentators varied widely. For almost all exegetes Genesis was the
fountain from which a right knowledge of nature fl owed but how that
belief worked itself out in the actual interpretation of the text appeared
very different in different commentators. The commentators all had
access to numerous interpretative strategies (e.g., accommodation) but
their use of them depended on several factors. One was the degree of
knowledge which the exegete possessed. Girolami Zanchi and Marin
Mersenne (1588–1648) had considerable knowledge of scientific disci-
plines and sought to employ it in their exegetical work. Williams did
note that Genesis was taken far more literally in the Renaissance than
ever before or after.9
Although a complete assessment would require extensive docu-
mentation from the Genesis commentaries of this period, these facts
suggest that Peter Harrison may have been on the right track when
he proffered the turn toward the literal as a factor in the emergence

7
Williams 1948.
8
Ibid., 23.
9
Ibid., 174.

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of modern science.10 I have suggested elsewhere, however, that the

notion of sensus litteralis was not a simple or straightforward concept for
the early moderns.11 If Catholic interpreters also showed a tendency
to engage the sensus litteralis more than their predecessors, it would
have been understandable given the primacy of the literal sense in
Thomas Aquinas.12 That might also imply that focusing on the literal
sense cannot be exclusively or even too closely linked with the Prot-
estant notion of sola scriptura. In my conclusion, I will suggest that the
hermeneutical variety and to some extent confusion, may be due to a
deeply felt need for a new natural philosophy which of course had to
be consonant with Genesis.
Before embarking on a selective survey of primary sources spanning
two centuries, it is important to have some focal point for our under-
standing. Perhaps the broadest category for understanding the complex
interrelationships between Scripture and nature in early modern Europe
is that of cosmology. This category, however, must be understood in
its historical context without importing later definitions back into it.
For example, since at least the beginning of the twentieth century, the
term cosmology tends to refer to physical astronomy and especially
to astrophysics, to research into the origins and development of the
cosmos. This usage, of course, has some roots in the physical version
of Copernicanism that Johannes Kepler developed in his monumental
Astronomia Nova (1609), but for Kepler and for virtually everyone else
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, cosmology would not have
been limited to one or a few scientific disciplines. For them, cosmologia
encompassed every form of knowledge that might bear on the ultimate
form and constitution of the universe: mathematica, physica, chemica,
metaphysica, theologica et al. Over the course of the seventeenth century
many disputes and disagreements would arise as to how these different
sources of knowledge contributed to the ultimate picture of the world
(Weltbild), but these early moderns tended not to exclude prima facie
any source which might illumine their ultimate goal of understanding.
Among these sources was the Bible. Still in the late seventeenth century,
Isaac Newton’s Opticks could raise fundamental questions about divine
presence and governance of the universe.

10
Harrison 1998.
11
Howell 2002.
12
Aquinas. 1978, part 1 art. 10.

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Another proviso about the early modern period has to do with

the epistemology of nature. One sometimes reads in semi-popular
literature written by practicing scientists that cosmology evolved from
a quasi-religious and philosophical quest into an empirical scientific
discipline with the advent of modern (twentieth century) astrophysics.
This is usually meant to imply that the unverifiable speculations of
philosophers in the past have been forced to yield to the empirically
testable knowledge of contemporary science. Aside from the unverifiable
pontifications about epistemology which such statements imply, most
early modern thinkers would have found such affirmations ludicrous.
For example, they were perfectly aware that the verifiable predictions
derived from the equation F = MA did not in any way inform us
about what that F (= force) is. The early moderns were as committed
to empirical verification as any later practitioner of science. What they
did not do was to equate predictability with knowledge, the arguments
over Copernicanism being a classic example.

Cosmology Among the Astronomers: Caspar Peucer,

Tycho Brahe, and Johannes Kepler

If we return to the beginnings of the astronomical revolution in Coper-

nicus, we encounter a well-trodden path since the professionalization
of the history of science during and after World War II. Over thirty
years ago Robert Westman and several other scholars began to elucidate
the subtleties of astronomy in the sixteenth century by speaking of a
‘Wittenberg interpretation’ of Copernicus which distinguished clearly
between heliocentrism as a mathematical device used for prediction and
a physical realism which claimed truth for itself.13 Since this distinction
can be found in many astronomers and theologians of the period who
had nothing to do with Luther’s Wittenberg (e.g., Robert Bellarmine),
it cannot be limited to one or another locale or pedagogical tradition.
However, the distinction was well established in the astronomical
tradition that Copernicus and others in his wake inherited. Andreas
Osiander’s expression of this difference in his anonymous preface to
De Revolutionibus was not revolutionary or truth-denying. It was simply,

13
See Westman 1975 and 1980.

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as a careful reading of his language suggests, an appeal to a long

established tradition.
The revolution in astronomy that occurred over two centuries lay
precisely in a move from this bifurcated view to one where mathemati-
cal and physical reality were seen as united. It was once thought that
Johannes Kepler was the great revolutionary in this respect and there
is no question but that he was its greatest representative but seeing the
physical world primarily through mathematical lenses was a develop-
ment that took place in many locales and contexts. It is well known
among historians how Galileo ignored Kepler’s work but he nevertheless
embraced a similar realism: In Il Saggiatore (1623) Galileo says,
Philosophy is written in that grand book, the universe which stands con-
tinually open to our gaze. But it cannot be understood unless one first
learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is
written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and the characters
are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which it is
not humanly possible to comprehend a single word.14
Later, toward the end of the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton’s
mathematization of mechanics was a further extension of this emerging
insistence on mathematics as the linguistic key to unlocking nature’s
secrets.15
The origins of this mathematization of nature in the sixteenth—and
possibly the fifteenth—century are still to be explicated but there is
no doubt that the Wittenberg tradition had something to do with this
change. As I have argued elsewhere, Tycho Brahe represented a move
toward mathematical realism in astronomy when he was no longer con-
tent with the business of prediction.16 Below, I will describe the search
for a true astronomy in three figures whose education and intellectual
formation were distinctly Wittenbergian: Caspar Peucer (1525–1602),
Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630). Unlike
Galileo, however, these three figures’ search for a true cosmology
involved an extensive use of biblical texts. It is enlightening to observe
their common assumptions and hermeneutical differences.
Caspar Peucer, who was Philip Melanchthon’s (1497–1560) son-in-
law, taught astronomy at Wittenberg in the 1550s after the death of

14
Galilei 1890–1909 vol 6, 232; trans. in Drake 1957, 238.
15
For a description of Newton’s work see Dear 1995, 6–7, 219–220. Dear also
discusses Jesuit anticipations of Newton’s methods.
16
Howell 2002, ch. 3.

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Erasmus Reinhold (1511–1553). In line with Melanchthon’s emphasis

on astronomy and mathematics for the advancement of the doctrine of
divine providence, Peucer’s astronomical work was deeply motivated
by religious commitments.17 Peucer represents a view that had at least
some currency in the Wittenberg tradition in that, like Brahe later,
Peucer argues that the patrimony of astronomical knowledge includes
the biblical patriarchs. Later Kepler would offer a rather different
picture of the origins of astronomy in which the Old Testament fig-
ures played no role at all.18 If one believes that the biblical patriarchs
knew the true astronomy, the question arises as to how and why such
knowledge was lost to the later history of Israel and not recorded in
the Bible. Even more significant for our purposes, is the question as to
whether Peucer’s inclusion signals his belief that the Bible, or at least
the history behind it, contains astronomical knowledge. As revealed in
his correspondence with Tycho Brahe, Peucer certainly believed in the
relevance of the Bible to astronomy.
Peucer’s interpretations of the Bible with respect to the question of
the celestial matter are even more important. Miguel Granada and I
have argued that Peucer and Brahe disagree over the proper relation
between natural philosophy and biblical information on the heav-
ens.19 Both Lutheran figures believed in the relevance of the Bible to
cosmological issues but they differed on the extent to which Scripture
contained a natural philosophy. Peucer seems to have been more ready
than Brahe to claim that the Bible’s language contained a cosmology.
As Granada says, Brahe was willing to admit that a certain amount of
accommodation occurs in the Bible whereas Peucer tended to take the
biblical language as a rather straightforward description of the actual
construction of the heavens.20
There is still much work to be done on Tycho Brahe’s cosmology.21
By way of illustration, let me give an example. There are passages in

17
For a discussion of Melanchthon’s advancement of natural philosophy, including
astronomy, see Kusukawa 1995.
18
See Jardine 1984.
19
See Granada 2008 and Howell 2002, ch. 3.
20
See Howell 2002, 105,106.
21
For years historians of science contented themselves with the citations of Brahe’s
scriptural opposition to terrestrial motion without studying his full-fl edged use of the
Bible in a cosmological context. Historians of astronomy virtually ignored his chemical
researches in the basement of Uraniborg but Jole Schakelford’s work has revealed some
interesting connections in Brahe’s work which deserve to be integrated into a holistic
picture. See Shakelford 1992. See also more recently Mosley 2007.

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Brahe’s extensive correspondence which suggest that he was seeking

to find the connections between the terrestrial and celestial realms.
Against Christoph Rothmann (ca. 1550–ca. 1600) Brahe argued for
a real distinction between the matter of both regions. While reaffirm-
ing the ultimate inscrutability of the heavens, Brahe argues against
Rothmann’s contention that the celestial realm is made up of air, an
element that is only appropriate for the sublunar realm.22 Brahe avers
that if any elementary nature would be permitted in that realm, it
would most likely be fire as Paracelsus maintained (or at least an igne-
ous element like fire). Although he was quite sure that “the substance
of the heavens” was “an aetherial matter that is highly liquid, very
pure, and far superior to any natural elements,”23 he did not exclude
the possibility that the superior realm might contain something akin to
this earthly element. This would at least explain how the stars and the
celestial fires appear to be burning. Although Brahe does not consider
the Paracelsian fire to be a well established opinion, he does endorse the
notion that the bodies of Earth draw their life and sustenance from the
mumia of Earth:
From this [igneous element], stars, luminous bodies and celestial fires
appear. And it would be fitting that any bodies participate in the Iliadus
by the analogy of their nature as we see is the case in this lower world.
Animals which live on the earth live from the mumia of the earth, birds
who live in the air from the mumia of the air, fish from the mumia of the
water and so also other things. It would appear more probable that the
sun and the stars, which represent a kind of incombustibility, operate
their revolutions in an igneous and incombustible aether. So also among
the Greeks the term aether was considered a burning or fire because it
was perpetually inconsummable. But to me, not even this opinion is well
established, however more rational (rationabilior) it is than the assumption
of air.24
Whatever the precise meaning of mumia, Brahe clearly intends it as a
substance that provides appropriate sustenance for a life form that dwells
in one of the various regions of the elementary world. Brahe suggests
the same is true for the celestial world. Here Brahe reveals his belief

22
In fact, Brahe never calls the sublunar realm by that term. He always calls it the
“elementary” realm (elementaris) precisely because it contains the four elements, none
of which could exist in the celestial world.
23
Brahe to Rothmann 21 February 1589. Brahe 1913–29, vol. 6, 166. See also
Brahe’s letter 17 August 1588. Ibid., 140.
24
Brahe to Rothmann 21 February 1589. Ibid., 167.

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in local principles in which each portion of the universe has entities

and processes peculiar to itself. At the same time there is a correspon-
dence with principles which cut across the supralunar/sublunar divide.
Brahe’s cosmos may be bifurcated but it is not without multiple relations
between the two regions. Brahe cautiously introduced the possibility of
celestial fire as an explanation of the luminaries (e.g., the Sun, stars)
because of the Paracelsian analogy between the celestial and terrestrial
worlds. If terrestrial inhabitants were nourished by the mumia of their
respective environments, Brahe thought it “more rational” to conclude
that the luminaries must have their own mumia than to suppose with
Rothmann that air was the common medium of both worlds.
Why does Brahe argue for a distinction in the matter of the supra-
lunar and sublunar realms and at the same time seek correspondences
and an underlying unity between them? Although this is difficult to
answer textually from Brahe’s corpus, I suggest that his view was pos-
sibly infl uenced by his reading of the Bible. His belief in the transcen-
dence of God united with the Aristotelian distinction drawn from his
education would have urged him to keep the two realms distinct, but
his Christian belief in the imminence of God (e.g., as manifested in the
Incarnation of the Son of God) would have also encouraged him to
see some form of communication and nurture between the two realms.
His was a search for deeper principles, a search that connected God
with the world through the mechanisms appropriate to each level of
the universe.
Brahe’s ideas and work would be eventually eclipsed by his suc-
cessor, Johannes Kepler.25 As the new mathematician for the Holy
Roman Emperor, Kepler inherited a wealth of astronomical data from
Brahe and surpassed the great Dane’s cosmological views by his stun-
ning mathematical achievements. For many years Kepler scholarship
focused almost exclusively on the Astronomia Nova (1609) and especially
on his two laws of celestial motion (e.g., the area law = 2nd law). In
the seventies and the eighties, scholars began to open up new aspects
of Kepler’s thought (e.g., his ‘mysticism’) which did not fit readily into
strict scientific concerns. In the last decade of the last millennium, Peter
Barker and Bernard Goldstein began to argue for more thoroughly

25
It should be noted that the Tychonic system enjoyed great popularity well into
the seventeenth century especially among the Jesuits.

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theological underpinnings of Kepler’s astronomy.26 In my judgment,

this intuition is fundamentally correct. If one studies the larger Kepler
corpus, one comes away with the distinctive impression that Kepler
framed his entire research program in an explicitly theological, even
doxological, context. The choice of the term ‘program’ is not too strong
because Kepler seems to have had a consistent goal from the Mysterium
Cosmographicum in 1596 to the Harmonice Mundi in 1618 of revealing to
the world the plan of the cosmos hidden in the mind of God. As I
have argued elsewhere, Kepler had a kind of sacramental view of the
cosmos in which the presence of the Trinity was embodied in the very
organization of the cosmos.27
Kepler was careful in the Astronomia Nova to say that the Bible does
not teach astronomy. I suspect that Kepler’s statements were taken by
scholars to carry the same force as Galileo’s argument in the Letter to the
Grand Duchess Christina against dragging the Bible into a physical inquiry.
On the other hand, in other writings Kepler does what Galileo never
did, namely, to frame his astronomical research as providing evidence
for the Trinity in nature. He would in other contexts regularly invoke
the Bible to ground his astronomy on a foundation that was decidedly
Christian. For him, his life’s ambition of becoming a theologian was
fulfilled in becoming a “priest of nature.”
Let me offer some little noted evidence of Kepler’s theological cos-
mology. In the preface to his first major work, Mysterium Cosmographicum
(1596), Kepler frames his announcement of the divine plan for the
universe (in the five regular solids) in doxological tones:
Is this labor [moles] pleasing? Nothing in all the world is greater or more
illustrious. Is honor desired? Nothing is more precious, nothing more
beautiful in this brightest [lucidissimo] temple of God! What secret is pleas-
ing to grasp? There is or was nothing more hidden in nature. But in this
respect not all are satisfied because its usefulness is obscure to those who
do not understand. But here is that book of nature, celebrated especially
in the sacred words which Paul set forth to the Gentiles, in which they
contemplate God, whether the sun in water or in a mirror. For why
would we Christians delight ourselves any less in this contemplation? It is
appropriate for God to be celebrated, venerated, admired in true worship.
That will be with a more devout mind the more rightly we understand
what and how much God has made.28

26
Barker and Goldstein 2001.
27
See Howell 2002, ch. 4.
28
Kepler 1938b, 5, lines 18–29.

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Kepler compels himself in this preface to respond to his potential critics

who claim that the only proper use of astronomy is for prognostication.29
Why does Kepler appeal to worship to argue against his critics? After
all, astronomy was a well-established discipline that did not need to
be justified. I suggest that Kepler wanted to elevate astronomy above
its most common connections with prognostication and to endow it
with a higher purpose than mundane affairs. And in the early modern
period, what better way to argue for the exaltedness of a particular
kind of knowledge than to link it with worship of God? Kepler knew
that no one could argue against the highest human obligation of divine
worship. His critics would not want to be accused of impiety, and so
he links astronomy, not to practical utility that is only of earthly good,
but to piety that leads to worship. This is the highest possible ground
for astronomy. He displays an awareness that contemplatio has as its root
templum when he ties this contemplation to true worship (vero cultu). Man
as contemplator stands inside the temple of God to cast his gaze upon
the fullness of divine wonder. He also implies a distinction between
Christians and nonbelievers by alluding to St. Paul’s reference to the
Gentiles (gentibus).30 Then he asks by way of contrast, “For why would we
Christians delight any less in this contemplation?” The true Christian,
according to Kepler, will see that astronomy serves the highest end of
human happiness, which is to “celebrate, venerate, and admire God.”31
So, for Kepler, astronomy has a contemplative dimension because it
terminates in the worship of God. I think Kepler found a happy coin-
cidence between his Platonism in philosophy and his Trinitarianism
in theology. The ancient Greek tradition encouraged not only visual
investigation of the cosmos but had a deeper sense of seeing the forms
instilled by divine action and presence as windows into the mind of God.
For Kepler contemplatio had both theoretical and practical consequences,
consequences which were at once natural and redemptive.
Another example has to do with literary form. Consider the literary
form of the Epitome of the Copernican Astronomy. This work was published
in 1618 as an instructional piece to summarize the main outlines

29
The opening lines of the preface speak of fulfilling his promise to offer something
that is “to be preferred far more than annual prognostications” (longe praeferendum annuis
prognosticis).
30
Kepler is alluding to Acts 17 (Paul’s speech on the Areopagus) or Rom. 1: 18ff.
31
This context needs to be at looked more because there is more in this preface
about the Bible.

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of Copernicanism. The work, however, is not limited to technical

astronomy nor is it concerned primarily with the question of Earth’s
motion. It addresses a wide range of topics in a question and answer
format which presumably was designed to be memorized or at least
thoroughly digested. As far as I know, no such format was ever used
in an astronomical or cosmological work prior to Kepler. Why did
he choose to use a question and answer format? One possible answer
may lie in the practice of catechisms in early modern Protestantism.
Children and neophytes were instructed in religious beliefs through the
memorization of short answers designed to inculcate biblical knowledge.
Could it be that Kepler’s own experience in this regard was transferred
from a religious to a natural-philosophical context because he wanted
everyone, both learned and unlearned alike, to understand the plan of
God for the cosmos? If he believed that his researches had revealed the
truth of God’s plan for the cosmos, it would have been very natural for
him to want to inculcate that knowledge at an elementary level. In doing
so, he would become a faithful instructor of his fellow Christians.
Many more examples could be adduced from the Kepler corpus but
these examples suggest that there is a much wider historical perspective
on Kepler that needs investigation. Peter Barker has pointed the way
with his contention that Kepler had not only a theological dimension
to his work, but that even his technical work in astronomy was under-
stood in a thoroughly Christian frame of mind that was permeated by
biblical categories.

Biblical Truth in Nature: The Hermetic Quest

If we limit our scope to astronomers in the Scientific Revolution, we

will surely miss another interpretative approach which pervaded much
of the alchemical and astrological literature of this period. Astronomers
like Brahe and Kepler had of course to practice astrology but their own
words witness to their greater commitment to the cosmological task.
If in their cosmological quest the proper interpretation of the Bible
had to be carefully negotiated, the proponents of a more extensive
astrology saw the relations of natural and scriptural truth to be much
more intimate. An example is the Lutheran minister Valentine Weigel
(1533–1588).
Weigel, who lived a quiet life as a Lutheran pastor in Albertine
Saxony, wrote numerous works that negotiated the border between

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orthodoxy and heterodoxy in sixteenth-century Lutheran theology.

Well after his death, in 1649, his Astrology Theologized was published.
The subtitle confirms what the pages of this small volume contained,
namely, “the spiritual hermeneutics of Astrology and Holy Writ being a
Treatise upon the infl uence of the stars on man and on the art of ruling
them by the law of grace.”32 It would be wrong to suppose that Weigel
was an unqualified advocate of astrology. He clearly distinguished the
purposes of astrology (for this life) and theology (for the next life) while
using the terms astrology and philosophy interchangeably.33 To study
astrology is to inquire into the whole “light of nature” by scrutinizing
the hidden virtues “lying in external, corporal and visible things.”
Weigel invoked many of the standard alchemical doctrines, pre-
eminent among which was the macrocosm-microcosm correlation.
Because human beings (the microcosm) were taken from the great
whole of nature (the macrocosm)—a point in complete agreement with
Genesis—“the study of all kinds of sciences, arts, faculties, and indus-
tries” are necessary. As the fruits of the earthly elements (fire, earth,
air, water) nourish the human body because it was taken from those
elements, so the human soul is nourished by knowledge of nature to
bring it to perfection. Weigel is certain that human beings must digest
knowledge much the same way that they digest food, or as he put it
succinctly, “the light of nature is made man in man”:
Every knowledge, science, art, industry, and faculty passeth into the nature
of man, penetrates him, occupies him, possesseth him, tincts him, is agglu-
tinated to him, united to him, and perfected in him, and he in it.34
As in previous hermetic and alchemical treatises, Weigel explains this
therapeutic effect of knowledge by contending that “whatsoever is
without a man, the same is also within him.”35 This meant not only
that there is continuity between human and nonhuman nature, as
a modern person might be willing to admit, but also that the whole
universe beyond man is also inside of him. That meant knowledge of
nature was necessarily knowledge of self. For the Christian, so Weigel
argues, this natural or astrological knowledge must be supplemented by

32
I use the English translation by Kingsford 1886.
33
See for example Kingsford 1886, 49 and 54.
34
Ibid., 57.
35
Ibid., 58.

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theology so that the natural is ruled by the law of grace. Thus astrol-
ogy must be theologized.
Weigel’s interpretation of creation as an alchemical and hermetic
process was further explained in his Fourfold Interpretation of Creation.
The authenticity of this manuscript has been strongly debated, but
Andrew Weeks has recently pointed to strong internal evidence that this
manuscript mostly likely does come Weigel’s hand. Its spirit is certainly
Weigelian.36 As Weeks carefully demonstrates, the author of the Fourfold
Interpretation is seeking to place himself squarely in the Lutheran tradition
both in his extensive translation of Luther’s commentary on Genesis
and in his attempt to summarize past exegetical opinion. Still, Weigel
does not limit himself to standard Lutheran categories. An example of
his method is found in his application of the microcosm-macrocosm to
Gen. 2:7. Forming man (adam) “from the dust of the ground” means
that each human being carries within himself or herself the elements
of the universe and that each is made able to explore and understand
its various parts because of this sameness between the macrocosm and
microcosm.37 For our purposes, we should take note of how Weigel was
simultaneously attempting to stay within the boundaries of Lutheran
orthodoxy (e.g., Formula of Concord in 1580) and to overcome literalistic
tendencies of interpretation which he observed in those who slavishly
followed Luther. These literalistic (buchstablich) theologians miss the
deeper significance of the biblical meanings. Weigel’s program was to
show how thoroughly the biblical truths underlying the literal meaning
are suffused throughout creation and therefore how the truly Christian
philosopher must penetrate into the depths of the created order.
Daniel Czepko von Reigersfeld (1605–1660) showed similar propensi-
ties as Weigel in the seventeenth century when he saw the underlying
unity of nature and redemption in the “Holy Triangle.”38 A symbol
pregnant with meaning for both pagan (e.g., Platonic and Pythago-
rean) and Christian antiquity, the triangle for Czepko was the key to
the structure of all reality.39 As Haas has explained, Czepko sought to
extend the geometric ‘mysticism’ of the Pythagorean tradition which
found abundant expression in the Italian (fifteenth century), Span-
ish (sixteenth century), and French (seventeenth century) mystical

36
Weeks 2005.
37
Ibid., 11.
38
Czepko 1989, vol. 1.
39
See Haas 2005.

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movements by fixing on the Trinitarian overtones of the triangle in

contrast to earlier writers who tended to place the circle at the center
of such mysticism. The threefold cosmos corresponds to the triangu-
lar configurations of “Signs, Characteristics, and Impressions.” The
evidence of these triangular configurations are everywhere. There are
three times in particular (the triduum of the death of Jesus Christ) in
which a transition from nature to grace, from time to eternity, from
the individual to the whole takes place. The trichotomies of the soul
(will, understanding, memory) and of the body (breath, blood, bones)
complete the creation through the triangle whose meaning is that it
shows itself to be a holy triangle through “the triangular unity and
the unified threeness.” He bases these correlations on the revelation
of nature and the Christian confession.40
Czepko was no natural philosopher but like the Paracelsians in gen-
eral and Weigel in particular he was searching for some concept which
could unify the cosmic and the human in a Christian framework. For
him, as for them, God had left unmistakable traces of his divinity in the
very structure of the creation. The triadic structure of reality is at once
redemptive (the triduum of Jesus Christ) and natural (human life). Both
are manifestations of the underlying form of the triangle that God placed
into reality. Though Kepler chose another shape (the sphere), he, like
Czepko, adhered to an underlying geometrism which carried multi-level
truths for him. If these multiple meanings of geometric forms had not
been developed in pagan antiquity, I doubt that Christian thinkers like
Kepler and Czepko would have had such confidence in their truth. But
they both probably saw Greek thought as having a happy coincidence
with Christian truth and therefore exploited the Greek tradition to its
fullest. Something profound was driving Brahe, Kepler, Weigel, and
Czepko to unveil an underlying union of the transcendent God and
the immanent creation. The particulars of specific biblical texts were
less important than the realities to which those texts pointed, but for
them all, those realities were truths which could not be divorced from
the natural world in which humanity was situated.

40
See Haas 2005, 663.

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Nature and Scripture: The Need for Apologetics in England

Toward the end of the seventeenth century there was little or no abate-
ment of interest in the relationship of nature and Scripture among
European intellectuals, especially among the English. As Richard S.
Westfall’s now classic study of science and religion once claimed,
English science moved from the backwater of scientific achievement
at the commencement of the century to being its undisputed leader by
the century’s end.41 And if that same century represented any increas-
ing secularization, one could not detect it from the published writ-
ings of England’s natural philosophers. Perhaps it is true, as Westfall
suggested, that the ground had shifted from the assumed truth of the
Christian religion to a need to defend it against sceptics. William Whiston
(1667–1752), Newton’s successor in the Lucasian chair of mathematics
at Cambridge, sought to vindicate the truth of the Christian religion
by the concordance of astronomy and Scripture. Although Whiston’s
theological views were far less than orthodox, he was just as intent
as his predecessor on marshaling any evidence he could to prove the
truth of Christianity as he conceived it. After rehearsing the system of
the world known from astronomy, Whiston did not hesitate to enter
into a hortatory mode:
Since it has now pleased God, as we have seen, to discover many noble
and important truths to us by the light of nature and the system of the
world, as also he long discovered many more noble and important truths
by revelation in the sacred books, it cannot now be improper to compare
these two divine volumes . . . I mean of revelation as relates to the natural
world and wherein we may be assisted to judge better by the knowledge
of the system of the world about us. For if those things contained in
Scripture be true and really derived from the Author of nature, we shall
find them, in proper cases, confirmed by the system of the world.42
John Ray (1627–1705), Anglican clergyman and keen observer of the
fl ora and fauna of England, shared with Whiston the desire to vindi-
cate God’s glory by use of the natural world even if he differed from
Whiston in his theological orientation. Ray was ejected from Trinity
College, Cambridge during the restoration of the monarchy under
Charles II, and took up residence with the independently wealthy

41
Westfall 1964.
42
Whiston 1725, pt. VII.

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but like minded Francis Willugby who left Ray an annuity upon his
death.43 In the last fifteen years of his life, Ray brought together much
of his acquired knowledge to publish The Wisdom of God Manifested in
the Works of Creation in 1692. Ray took Ps. 104:24 (How manifold are
your works, O Lord, in wisdom you made them all) as his point of
departure to show both the variety and precision of the created order.
Ray’s survey of the creation, however, was not a simplistic recounting
of the obvious; he is conversant with the advancements of knowledge
during his century (e.g., Copernicanism) and the various philosophical
accounts of nature (e.g., Cartesianism). Ray explicitly identified Des
Cartes’ exclusion of final causes as tending toward Epicurean atheism
while professing theism.44
From the widest expanse of the heavens to the details of the human
body Ray saw a world trumpeting the existence and wisdom of the
Creator. He is, however, aware of the cavils that may be raised against
his laudatory claims:
There are indeed supernatural demonstrations of this truth but not
common to all persons or times . . . these truths taken from effects and
operations exposed to every man’s view, not to be denied or questioned
by any, are most effectual to convince all that deny or doubt of it.45
Even though no one in the seventeenth century had any possibility of
the knowledge of other planets encircling other fixed stars, Ray con-
fidently asserted, as did his contemporary the Rev. John Wilkins, that
there must be other inhabited worlds. But whether on solid ground or
in speculation, Ray was absolutely convinced that the universe pointed
to the existence and sagacity of its Maker. This confidence explains how
Ray could move so freely between descriptions of the physical world and
the words of Scripture in his Three Physico-Theological Discourses published
after his death.46 The Three Discourses spanned the entire history of the
universe from creation to consummation with an elaborate treatment of
the Noahic deluge along the way. Ray’s interest in how the world will
end (consummation) can only be explained against the background of
millenarian movements among the English in the seventeenth century.
Since the science of his day had so little to say about this subject, Ray

43
Ray’s biography is treated in Mandelbrote 2004. Raven 1942.
44
Ray 1722, Preface, 38.
45
Ibid., x.
46
Ray 1713.

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draws upon any and all evidence he can from Scripture and the patristic
tradition to answer this question. What is particularly interesting to us
is his contention that the universe will end in a natural way by fire as
suggested by 2 Pet. 3:7.47 This all-consuming fire must begin from the
surface of Earth rather than from its interior because of the necessity
of air to feed fire. This illustrates the confl uence of natural knowledge
and scriptural teaching that characterized English thinkers like Whiston
and Ray. Theirs was a method of gathering whatever information they
could from whatever source was at their disposal. They desired to show
forth the Creator’s wisdom by referencing scientific knowledge of the
natural world as well as showing the veracity of biblical revelation by
appealing to natural means to accomplish what the Bible predicted. It
seems that John Ray was not at all peculiar in his desire or freedom
to see the confl uence of truth in nature and Scripture. For him, as
for the majority of his contemporaries in England, the two books still
proclaim the praise of the Creator that Zanchius had written of in at
the beginning of the century.

Conclusion: Contextualizing Hermeneutics and Science

I began this essay by observing the harmony of the books of nature

and Scripture which was the universal inheritance of the early mod-
ern natural philosophers. That harmony would be sorely tested in the
course of two centuries and require different hermeneutical strategies
to deal with the problems that arose. For a long time historians of sci-
ence believed that those problems were due to the confl icts arising from
the mounting empirical evidence against the biblical cosmology based
on a literal reading of the text. The diversity and complexity of the
exegetical arguments evident in the primary sources has convinced me
that this analysis is too superficial. I rather think that it was the more
broadly felt crisis in natural philosophy which stimulated a diversity
of exegetical strategies. Naturally, empirical discoveries and theoretical
shifts were an essential part of that crisis but there was more to it than
this specific scientific evidence (e.g., moons of Jupiter) contradicting
that specific biblical text. Let me illustrate this general conclusion by

47
Ibid., Discourse III ch. 6, 388.

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reviewing how the attempts to reconstruct a natural philosophy occa-

sioned hermeneutical strategies.
Most all thinkers in the early modern period believed that the biblical
record spoke factually about its history. They did not engage in modern
forms of critical literary analysis which reconstructs biblical history from
rearranged textual collages. However, these same figures did not thereby
have a uniform approach to the literal sense of Scripture. In some
sense, they were searching for a new natural-philosophical framework
which would be consonant with their understanding of biblical truth.
Some found it in a revived Platonism that focused on the mathemati-
cal aspects of the ancient sage (Kepler) while others sought help in
a Platonic tradition filtered through hermetic sources like Paracelsus
and Hermes Trismegistus (Valentine Weigel). The Paracelsians wanted
to show how nature directly refl ected the hermetic truths found in
Genesis and throughout Scripture while Kepler wanted to show how
the theological truths expressed in Scripture were consonant with a
mathematized Platonism. It would be a severely reductionistic early
modern reading of Kepler to view him as interested only in astronomy.
His focus was a cosmology that incorporated every possible form of
bona fide knowledge including the truths underlying Scripture (e.g.,
the Trinity). He never confused exegesis with astronomy but he did
attempt to show that the truths expressed, even obliquely, in Scripture
were part and parcel of the universe. What conjoins the efforts of fig-
ures like Brahe and Kepler with the likes of Weigel and Czepko is a
vague but real sense that a deeper cosmology was needed. By ‘deeper’
I mean that they all seemed to think that the natural philosophies with
which they were acquainted lacked insight into the God who created
this vast array of natural wisdom. Brahe sought that deeper cosmology
in some kind of union of Paracelsian and astronomical truths. Kepler
sought it in a Christianized mathematical Platonism. Weigel sought it
in the chemical processes resident in the creation and in the delicate
balance between nature and grace, a tension made stronger by some
of the uncertainties of that relation in Lutheranism.
Perhaps it was the advent and spread of Cartesianism in England
that forced a more apologetic dynamic onto late seventeenth century
thinkers like Ray and Whiston.48 The tone of their writings no longer
smacks of wrestlings with natural-philosophical uncertainties as was

48
See Ray 1713 above for evidence of Ray’s attempt to answer to Cartesianism.

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the case in earlier figures like Brahe and Weigel. They confidently
proclaim that the achievements of the past one hundred and fifty years
signal no less than before the glory and wisdom of the Creator. I am
inclined to think that this shift toward natural apologetics could only
become necessary against the background of an underlying separation
of the two books.
All the thinkers we have surveyed were obliged to wrestle with the
kinds of meaning contained in the biblical texts that described and
referred to nature. Here careful thinking is demanded. Against Peu-
cer, Brahe was not inclined to the see an exhaustive cosmology in the
Bible, and Kepler even less so. This did not mean, however, the com-
plete irrelevance of the Bible. Brahe held the long-standing Christian
assumption that the texts of the scriptural book would not contradict
the truths of the natural book. Kepler certainly realized more than
Brahe that the biblical language contained much accommodation.
But from another angle Kepler’s cosmology owed more to the Bible
than Brahe’s. The truths expressed in the Bible (e.g., Trinity, man as
imago Dei) were for him an essential part of cosmology. The view once
predominate among historians of science that Kepler’s ‘mysticism’ was
an unnecessary overlay on his astronomy or a vestigial inheritance of
his Christian culture that was irrelevant to astronomy fails to recognize
the theological framing of his astronomical labors. Given the textual
evidence adduced earlier, I am convinced that Kepler did not see
his astronomy and his Christian theology as incompatible or even in
tension.49 There is a curious similarity between Kepler and Valentine
Weigel. Both were seeking to show that biblical truths were resident
in the creation but their very different hermeneutics were a result of
very different natural philosophies which they employed. The truths of
creation in Kepler’s hermeneutics and philosophy were presupposed by
the Bible without being taught in the Bible. For Weigel, natural truths
were hidden in the biblical stories which only a hermetic hermeneutics
could discover. Weigel and Kepler were united in their confidence in
the compatibility of the two books but separated by different notions
of how God expressed his glory in the creation.
With the amount of work that has been done on the history of
science and hermeneutics in the last twenty years, one might reach

49
The evidence from Kepler’s writings presented in this chapter may be considered
an extension of the argument in Howell 2002, ch. 4.

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the conclusion that we have a better collective understanding of how

biblical interpretation and empirical investigation interacted in the
course of western science. That would be an all too hasty conclusion
for two reasons. One is the sheer volume of writings still to be analyzed
within the period we call the Scientific Revolution, much less earlier
or later periods. The work of Peter Barker, Miguel Granada, Maurice
Finocchiaro, Peter Harrison, and myself is only a mere beginning of
the vast primary literature of this period.50 The second reason has to
do with the questions asked of those primary sources. While the last
twenty years have produced a number of works which address the
problems of hermeneutics vis-à-vis science, I suspect we still need to
refine the kinds of questions that are historically and conceptually
important. There seems to be an interesting parallel happening in the
history of the church and of theology. There has also been an increased
level of interest in the history of biblical hermeneutics, especially in
the patristic period, which bear very little on the questions of scientific
knowledge. Why there should now be these parallel developments of
scholarship is a curiosity, but we can certainly say that both seem to
be motivated by two impulses. One is the perceived need for greater
contextualized understanding of the Bible, not only in its original
historical emergence but also in the reception of its teaching. Second,
underlying both scholarly developments is the problem of continuity.
Historians of science would like to know how science has affected and
been affected by biblical hermeneutics. Historians of hermeneutics would
like to know how interpretation has changed or not changed over the
roughly two thousand years of interpretation since the formation of
the Christian Bible.

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Leiden: Brill, 585–603.

50
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Barker, Peter and Bernard Goldstein. 2001. Theological Foundations of Kepler’s

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 CHAPTER TEN

THE TWO BOOKS AND ADAMIC KNOWLEDGE:

READING THE BOOK OF NATURE AND EARLY MODERN
STRATEGIES FOR REPAIRING THE EFFECTS OF THE
FALL AND OF BABEL

James J. Bono

From Ficino in the late fifteenth century to Newton in the late seven-
teenth, students of nature and the Scriptures generated a variety of
narratives concerning the ‘book of nature’ in the attempt to redefine
the relationship of that book to its divine author. Such thinkers did so
in light of religious beliefs and theological understanding of the effects
of the Fall. In particular, attention to the biblical stories of the expulsion
from the Garden of Eden, the destruction of the Tower of Babel, and
the Pentecost resulted in a variety of claims concerning humankind’s
postlapsarian access to knowledge of God, his Word, and his creation.
Such narrative re-workings of foundational biblical stories prompted
students of nature to construct a variety of hermeneutic principles
for ‘reading’ the book of nature that refl ected shifting and confl icting
religious views of the nature of God, man, nature, and the relation-
ship between words and things. Hence, this essay argues that the early
modern turn to the study of ‘natural particulars’—and ultimately a
related, but not identical, turn to the ‘literal’—was inseparable from
just such biblical narratives. Further, this thesis regarding religion, the
Bible, and the Scientific Revolution suggests that the emergence of
the literal in science was neither conditioned by narrow confessional
commitments, nor the outcome of exclusively Protestant practices of
literal interpretation of the Bible. In turn, such stories and hermeneutic
principles produced an array of different interpretive strategies and
material practices among such figures as Paracelsus, Fernel, Galileo,
Harvey, Bacon, Gassendi, Descartes, Charleton, Boyle, and Newton.1

1
See Bono 1995. Among recent work on the book of nature, see in addition, Berkel
and Vanderjagt 2005; 2006; Bennett and Mandelbrote 1998.

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The Book of Nature and the Alphabet of Nature

The trope of nature as a book fostered seemingly endless playful specu-

lation in which the relationships among God, humans, and nature were
figured in linguistic terms as the semantic, grammatical, and material
operations and consequences of the divinely creative Word. Given
longstanding traditions in which nature was seen as, for example, a
mirror of the Divine, as testament to his majesty and providence, as
repository of those hidden footsteps through which pious humans could
trace their way back to God, much was at stake in the various read-
ings that early modern interpreters attributed to the book of nature.
Whether concerned with fostering piety among Christian believers
through proper understanding of Scriptures and God’s role in the
world, with expressing the fundamental truths of the Christian God
and his creation in a universal philosophical vocabulary to persuade
and convert the ‘infidel,’ or eventually, with teaching the unlettered
‘heathen’ in the new world the truths of Christianity accessible to the
fallen intellect through God’s visible works, the trope of nature as a
book held considerable power and utility.
Consider an example from the seventeenth-century English natural
historian, Edward Topsell. For Topsell, God had commanded Noah to
preserve all animals from the destructive effects of the Flood to ensure
that postlapsarian humans would have access to a source of knowledge
that might permit Adam’s progeny some measure of material and
especially spiritual progress: “it was for that a man might gaine out of
them much devine knowledge, such as is imprinted in them by nature,
as a tipe or spark of that great wisdome whereby they were created.”2
As creator, God was nature’s author; as God’s visible and material
Book, nature was that
Chronicle which was made by God himselfe, every living beast being a
word, every kind being a sentence, and al of them together a large his-
tory, containing admirable knowledge & learning, which was, which is,
which shall continue, (if not for ever) yet to the world’s end.3
As fundamental units of the very language of nature, firsthand knowl-
edge of animals—Topsell’s living beasts—was essential to apprehending
the divine order in the created universe and therefore to understanding

2
Topsell 1607, from the Dedicatory Epistle, no pagination.
3
Ibid.

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the meaning of the book of nature. Topsell goes further: knowledge

of the book of nature holds the key to explaining numerous passages
in Scriptures where fundamental lessons about the essential spiritual
significance and consequences of human beliefs, models, and actions
were at stake. Thus, Topsell points toward the Bible’s telling use of
animals in such comparisons as that of the “Divell to a Lyon; . . . false
prophets to Wolves; . . . Heretickes and false Preachers to Scorpions.”4
Postlapsarian man remained, of course, cutoff from direct and unme-
diated knowledge of God’s Word that Adam enjoyed in his unfallen
state in the Garden of Eden—including that very insight that allowed
true and illuminating denomination of all creatures by their proper
names. Nonetheless humans could turn to two sources for grasping
divine knowledge and thus recapturing Adam’s prelapsarian state and
the perfection of Adamic knowledge and wisdom. The first was the
divine Word itself, namely the Holy Scriptures, bequeathed to human-
kind in historic time since Moses. The second was the refl ection of the
divine Word itself in God’s Works, in his created and originary book of
nature. (For some, a third source existed in traces of the lost Adamic
language scattered and hidden within the surviving post-Babylonian
languages of man.) In his rendering of this story, Topsell insists that the
“names, figures, and natures” of animals are “in the Creator himself
most Devine” and that from God as “fountain” they fl ow as “streams
yssuing . . . into the minds of men” to repair where possible the loss suf-
fered by humankind at Babel.5 The question, of course, for Renaissance
and early modern religious thinkers and students of nature was, how?
Topsell himself suggests a multifaceted process, combining the scouring
of ancient texts—“what the writers of all ages have herein observed”
and have verbally inscribed in stories, images, and emblems—with
firsthand experience of the variety of beasts laid out by God in each
page of his book of nature. Topsell’s book is dedicated to enabling
access to knowledge of beasts. Such knowledge will serve postlapsarian
humans as an “Interpretor” and key to that unfamiliar (divine) language
needed to guide them on their path—thus providing them with the aid
necessary for their journey toward paradise and salvation.6

4
Ibid.
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid.

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Other answers to this question were indeed entertained and debated

in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In what follows, I shall survey
and summarize some alternative answers, noting in particular ways in
which contemporaries understood the relationship between the book of
nature, divine knowledge, mortal human minds, and salvation. I shall
save for a later section consideration of the implications and significance
of this story and of subsequent developments.
How might humans repair the loss suffered at Babel of a single uni-
versal language with the promise it fostered of coherent, common, and
potentially unifying understanding? Further still, how might humans
recapture that perfect coincidence between words and things experi-
enced by Adam before the Fall, and with it Adam’s mastery of the true
nature of all God’s creatures and his divinely authorized dominion over
nature? Topsell’s book offers but one, rather confident and optimistic,
answer to such questions. Focusing upon uncovering the very alphabet
by means of which the divine Author composed his book of nature,
his answer, as we’ve noted, stresses wellsprings of a repaired human
understanding stemming from several sources—intellectual, empirical,
and religious. Beyond Topsell, however, alternative proposals depended
upon precisely how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century figures under-
stood stories such as those of the Fall and of Babel, their consequences,
and their implications.

Biblical Narratives, Divine and Human Languages,

and the Book of Nature

The losses experienced by Adam and Eve and their progeny—losses

resulting from the Fall and, later, from the confusion of tongues meted
out to humans as punishment for prideful construction of the Tower
of Babel—were the subject of frequent commentary and reformist
schemes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Such commentar-
ies—ranging from full scale readings of Genesis to brief paraphrases
coupled with barely more extensive interpretive remarks—provided
authors and readers alike with provisional diagnoses of the nature of
the damage suffered by postlapsarian and post-Babylonian humans and
now in need of repair. Reformist schemes, in turn, sought to bring about
the best possible prognosis by developing strategies for repairing such
originary losses appropriate to and consonant with specific diagnoses. In
the wake of Humanism, Neoplatonism and occultism, the Reformation,

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and neoscholasticism, diagnoses of such biblical losses and their effects

proliferated, and with them subtle, variegated, and at times innovative
schemes for their repair.
At risk of simplifying a complex story, at the crux of such diagnoses,
and schemes were a range of speculative answers to pressing interpre-
tive questions about the fate of Adamic knowledge and/or the Adamic
language (Table 1). These answers shaped the very retelling of biblical
stories of the Fall and Babel. By doing so, they enabled different think-
ers in the late Renaissance to plot multiple trajectories for projecting
humankind’s postlapsarian future. Most centrally, such narrative recast-
ings of the Fall and of Babel confront the related questions, What
happened to the Adamic language? and What are the prospects for
recovering lost Adamic knowledge? While the Adamic language in its
pristine prelapsarian integrity was by all accounts lost to human use
and understanding, the question remained whether, in some indirect,
hidden, or shadowy form, rudiments of that language—some trace of
its now lost integrity—remained for humans to search out and uncover?
If so, might the possibility then exist that postlapsarian humans could
archeologically reconstruct that lost language during their earthly wan-
derings through God’s visible and material world while on their way
to his invisible and spiritual realm? For Topsell, the answer to both
questions was a resounding Yes. As we shall see, not all his sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century contemporaries agreed; those that did, often
advanced significantly different diagnoses leading to quite different
strategies for repairing the effects of the Fall and of Babel.7

Recovering the Adamic Language (1): The Role of Post-Babylonian Languages

Consider first the possibility that actual rudiments of the Adamic
language survived (Table 1: #1). The prospect of such survival raised
hopes for enacting a strategy for the recovery of prelapsarian language
and the knowledge lost with it. That strategy would require intensive
philological and comparative study of post-Babylonian languages
coupled with rigorous scrutiny and exegesis of human and sacred
texts. Where were such rudiments to be found? If found, how might
fallen man apprehend them? Among the languages of man, vari-
ous candidates were advanced as direct descendants of the Adamic

7
On the effects of the Fall and early modern science, see Bono 1995; Harrison 1998a;
Harrison 2001; other works by Harrison cited elsewhere; now also Harrison 2008.

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language. The most common candidate was Hebrew, often followed by

other ancient Semitic and/or Old Testament languages, and then by
ancient languages such as Greek and Latin. Within the agonistic culture
of emergent early modern nation-states, however, scholars proposed
with some frequency a host of post biblical languages—French, Ger-
man, Swedish, Danish, and Chinese to name a few. Among linguists
and scholars, such claims to direct descent from the Adamic language
were tempered by considered caution: since the Babylonian confusion
of tongues, if not from the very moment of Adam and Eve’s expulsion
from the Garden of Eden, the pure, uncorrupted language with which
our first parents conversed with God and named his various creatures
had been subject to corruption. Such corruption was the result of
divine edict as well as the consequence of humankind’s descent into
difference, the divisiveness of antagonistic communities, and, in short,
history itself. Beyond the inherent linguistic corruption experienced by
any such candidates, theologians and other learned commentators alike
trumpeted the fact that Adam and Eve’s fall had, to some considerable
if disputed degree, weakened the human intellect so that it was at best
ill-suited for, and at worst simply incapable of, direct and unmediated
apprehension and full understanding of even the uncorrupted, originary
Adamic language.8
Nonetheless, the prospect that the Adamic language—howsoever
corrupt and fragmented—might have survived beyond the confusion
of tongues prompted linguists, theologians, philosophers, occultists, and
others to seek out strategies for identifying and interrogating traces of
that language from the inherited languages and fragments of texts that
presented themselves as likely candidates.9 This desire was among the
factors that fueled a number of inquiries and discourses: The rise of
comparative linguistics in the sixteenth century (Bibliander and Gessner).
The Humanist adaptation of its signature rallying cry—ad fontes—to
the Hebraic and biblical past, especially among the Christian Human-

8
For an account of early modern discussions concerning the original Adamic
language, its survival and/or disappearance, and the claims of Hebrew and other
languages, see Bono 1995, chap. 3, 48–84. See the primary sources cited there as well
for specific evidence and nuances of such views and debates. In addition, on questions
related to the nature of humankind’s fallen intellect, see Harrison 2002.
9
Among those who claimed that the Adamic language survived both the Fall and
Babel, one can count such sixteenth- and seventeenth-century figures as Johannes
Buxtorf, Meric Casaubon, Claude Duret, Benedictus Pererius, and John Webb. See
Bono 1995, esp. 60–64.

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ists of the North exemplified by Reuchlin and Lefèvre d’Etaples. The

Neoplatonist search for a prisca theologia and prisca scientia and the key
to the union and concord of all traditions of philosophy and theol-
ogy (notably Ficino, Pico, Lefèvre, and Bovelles). The application of
allegorical, emblematic, and exegetical techniques to the interpretation
of ancient texts of philosophy, medicine, natural history, moral philoso-
phy, and other genres in order to recover pristine, originary meanings
only shadowily grasped and conveyed by pagan, Jewish, and Christian
authors. And the renewed enthusiasm for the Cabala and cabalistic
interpretation of texts among Christian cabalists such as Reuchlin,
Agrippa, and Postel.10
Conviction that traces of the lost Adamic language haunted surviving
languages of man and texts produced by ancients and moderns—pagans
and believers alike—was thus instrumental in encouraging many note-
worthy intellectual quests of the period. As we shall see later, these
beliefs and practices proved infl uential not only among theologians
and antiquarians, but especially among certain students of nature and
natural phenomena in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For now,
we will first continue exploring the import of still other convictions and
assumptions relating to the question of what happened to the Adamic
language and Adamic knowledge.

Recovering the Adamic Language (2): The Role of the Book of Nature
as Supplement
For such figures as Paracelsus, Conrad Gessner, Ulisse Aldrovandi,
Claude Duret, and Oswald Croll, if not for most of those who dreamed
of uncovering traces of the lost Adamic language, attention to surviving
languages and texts alone was simply inadequate to achieve the lofty
goal of recovering lost Adamic knowledge.11 Instead, we find other
strategies emerging and contending with one another. Among them,
a second strategy for reconstituting lost prelapsarian knowledge—and
very possibly the Adamic language itself—proved notable: one based

10
Bibliander 1548. Gessner 1974. For others mentioned here, see: Sika 1976;
1976–77; Celenza 2001; Dan 1998; Rice 1972; Copenhaver 1977; Allen and Rees
2001; Wirszubski 1989; Victor 1978; Nauert 1965; Lehrich 2003; Bouwsma 1957;
Kuntz 1981; Petry 2004.
11
For these figures, see Bono 1995, 123–24, 177–179, 183 (Aldrovandi), 140–66
(Croll), 61 (Duret), 123–24, 177–79, 183, 186–87, 189–190 (Gessner), 129–140
(Paracelsus).

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on the conviction that subjecting the book of nature to exegesis could

reveal the symbolic meanings and veiled affinities of things in nature
(Table 1: #2). Such knowledge wrested from the alphabet of nature
itself could supplement learned study of languages, texts, and Scripture
in the search for the Adamic language. Here, in particular, we see a
strong speculative link forged between the very idea of language and
that of the two divine books of Scriptures and nature. While some
undoubtedly believed with the likes of a Joachim Perion or John Wilkins
that all traces of the Adamic language had been forever erased, more
common was perhaps the opinion that whatever survived of the origi-
nary language had suffered considerable diminution of its integrity. As
Edward Leigh noted, post-Babylonian languages were subject to drastic
and continual linguistic changes seriously compromising their links to
pre-Babylonian Hebrew.12 In short, in all probability the likelihood
that traces of an Adamic language surviving after Babel would yield
clear and adequate access to that originative language was decidedly
a minority view. Moreover, if the postlapsarian intellect is, in itself,
inadequate to discern remnants of the original divine language from
among existing languages of man, nor able to grasp the meaning of
such shadowy traces—as Luther believed—humans may nevertheless
by God’s grace turn to the book of nature itself for clues and guidance.
As Luther himself proclaims, “Now we observe the creatures rightly,
more than popery does . . . . by God’s grace [we] are beginning to see his
glorious work and wonder even in the fl ower . . . We see the power of
his word in the creatures.”13 Building upon this and related convictions,
the fact that God is author of both Scripture and nature, entailed that
his divine Word—the purported basis for the biblical Adamic language
itself—can be found in both books.
Yet, whereas the Scriptures contain God’s message, its divine Author
relied upon human instruments to convey that message to Fallen human-
ity through the vehicle of postlapsarian and post-Babylonian languages.
Hence, while the Scriptures indisputably contain God’s message shaped
and framed by and as his Word, some degree of uncertainty—some

12
Leigh 1656. More generally on early modern discussions of the Adamic language,
see Bono 1995, 53–79.
13
“Introspicimus nunc penitius creaturas quam olim sub papatu. . . . Nos vero gra-
tia Dei magnalia Dei ve ex fl osculi consideratione incipimus cognoscere . . . . in ipsius
creaturis cognoscimus potentiam verbi ipsius” (Luther 1967, 573–574). The translation
is from Aarsleff unpublished, 23–24. (Quoted from a copy owned by the Library of
The Warburg Institute, London.)

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 the two books and adamic knowledge 307

gap between the divine message and its human, material medium—
nonetheless exists, requiring interpretation as the means for grasping
the sensus germanus of Scriptures.14 The book of nature, by contrast, is
not written in a human language. Some argued, instead, that nature
as God’s Work was a direct manifestation of his Word. (Of course,
nature as ‘text’ represented a material instantiation of the immaterial
divine Word and therefore presented that Word in a mediated form
that humans had first to see through, as it were, in order to discern its
meaning clearly and immediately.) Whereas human languages were cor-
rupted by the Fall and by Babel, nature—at least in the view of some
thinkers—remained pristine and pure and was hence an uncorrupted
source of divine Wisdom and scientia.15 Thus, to supplement the study
of human languages—even such a sacred language as Hebrew, not to
mention Greek, Latin, and vernacular tongues—in the quest for traces
of the lost Adamic language, the book of nature could and for some
did provide a means to identify the correct and proper names of things
and to discern their true meanings. Those who were convinced (as
Topsell appears to be) of the need to seek help in understanding the
meaning of Scriptures and in separating the chaff of human artifice
and history from the kernel of divine, Adamic wisdom in the surviving
languages of man, readily and even enthusiastically turned to God’s
second book, nature, and to the creatures and things it contained for
guidance. Nature and texts, in this view, were in their own distinctive
ways complementary and were to be subjected to rigorous exegesis as
parallel sources of scientia and sapientia.

Recovering the Adamic Language ( 3): Prioritizing the Exclusive Role of Nature
However, not all accepted this view of the relationship between language
and the book of nature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Some railed against the corrupt, fallen, and even pagan nature of
all human languages and texts—thereby placing the Holy Scriptures
as divine text in a wholly separate category. Adherents of this view
scorned learned fetishization of pagan authors like Aristotle and Plato

14
On the sensus germanus, Erasmus, and interpretation of the Bible, see Cave 1979,
90, 101.
15
An interesting example is discussions of the language of animals in the Renais-
sance. See Dubois 1970; Gray 1990, 149–159; Ormsby-Lennon 1988; Serjeantson 2001.
Among those who, by contrast, spoke of nature as corrupted by the Fall, see the great
English poet of the seventeenth century, John Milton (Milton 2005, X: 641–719).

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and with it the slavish attention lavished on human texts, whether

pagan or Christian, as distracting and impious. Such radical critics of
learned traditions envisioned yet a third strategy for recovering lost
prelapsarian knowledge and wisdom: one that pinned their hopes on
the light provided by direct and exclusive attention to nature alone
(Table 1: #3). Later, we’ll see a fourth possibility: one typically less
severe in its denunciations of texts and pagan traditions, but entailing
more thoroughgoing questioning (to the point, indeed, of profound
skepticism) of key views used to legitimate recovery of the actual, lost
Adamic language.
Among those most dismissive of mere human texts and languages,
Paracelsus16 stands out as paradigmatic together, arguably, with the
Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim17 of De incertitudine et vantitate
scientiarum atque artium. Thus, Paracelsus professed to turn from books
to God’s works themselves, despite his own deep indebtedness to
bookish traditions of philosophy, theology, occultism, and medicine.
While clinging strongly to the presence and power of the Word and
Scriptures, a figure like Paracelsus championed direct engagement
with material things as the one sure path that might lead the pious to
divine wisdom and knowledge. In so doing, Paracelsus purported to
read the book of nature as a highly symbolic text whose pages were
stamped by God with occult if unmistakable marks or signatures, the
signatura rerum, that provided the key to unlocking Adamic knowledge
and mastery of nature for the pious student of nature.18 While few
railed against bookish traditions with the fervor of a Paracelsus, the
later sixteenth century did witness increasing attention to the role of
experience—experientia—in understanding the book of nature.19 More
specifically, many focused upon the reading of natural particulars as
symbols pointing to a vast and wondrous network of correspondences
and sympathetic affinities among the diverse array of created things—all
God’s Works—in both the microcosm and the macrocosm. 20 Such

16
On Paracelsus, see Pagel 1982; Bianchi 1987; Grell 1998; Weeks 1997.
17
For Agrippa, see above, n. 10.
18
Thus, Paracelsus would continually proclaim that the art of reading such signs
stamped by God upon the book of nature puts postlapsarian man in contact with the
kind of knowledge Adam possessed before the Fall, “die kunst signata leret die rechten
namen geben allen dingen,” Paracelsus 1928, 397.
19
Schmitt 1969; Bono 1995.
20
Bono 1995; Findlen 1994; Long 2001; Park and Daston 1998; Smith and Findlen
2002; Smith 2004; Grafton and Siraisi 1999.

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 the two books and adamic knowledge 309

views of the book of nature profoundly infl uenced a wide assortment

of natural philosophers, and especially natural historians, alchemists,
and medical authors, many of whom remained wedded to traditional
texts, university training, and the learned culture of ancient, medieval,
and Renaissance studies of nature. Indeed, just such a combination of
empirical investigation, direct experience of nature, reading the book
of nature as a symbolic divine text, and a conviction that nature was
itself a vast network of correspondences characterized what William
Ashworth Jr., has aptly described as the “emblematic world view.”21
(While sharing with Paracelsus belief in the value of nature as a source
of symbolic meaning necessary to ferreting out lost Adamic wisdom
and language itself, proponents of an emblematic world view such as
Gessner and Aldrovandi typically embraced the second strategy noted
in the previous section.) The latter, contrary to Paracelsian ideology,
explicitly embraced the full range of literary, mythological, philosophical
and, in short, human texts, both ancient and modern, in its attempt to
unlock the key to nature’s emblems and symbols. Thus, we can identify
two views of the book of nature among those who still clung to the pos-
sibility of recovering the Adamic language as key to repairing the effects
of the Fall and of Babel. One view accepted nature as a supplement
to study of texts and philology; the other, exemplified by Paracelsus,
touted direct engagement with the light of nature as the exclusive path
to lost wisdom. (See Table 1, numbers 2 and 3 respectively.)

Recovering the Adamic Language (4): Questioning Key Assumptions

As we can now see, even among those seeking to recuperate lost Adamic
wisdom and prelapsarian language, there was considerable disagree-
ment. At times, such disagreement led to profound criticism of one or
more assumptions animating that quest. The question thus arises, at
what point did strategies questioning fundamental assumptions shade
over into outright skepticism concerning the possibility of recovering
the Adamic language (Table 1: #4)? What, then, were the implications
of questioning one or more premises underwriting the notion that
the Adamic language—whether intact or profoundly corrupted and
fragmented—survived the Fall and Babel? Or, further, that it could be
recuperated by postlapsarian Christians through some combination

21
Ashworth 1990.

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of philological scrutiny, exegesis of texts, and attention to the light of

nature directed toward discovering and understanding such surviving
traces? Three different, if often related, assumptions came under scrutiny
(compare Table 1, assumptions 4–6). The first was the assumption that
the Adamic language had in any way, shape, or form survived beyond
the confusion of tongues at Babel. The second was the assumption that
the postlapsarian intellect was indeed capable of grasping in direct and
unmediated form Adamic wisdom—that is to say, knowledge of the
proper names and/or essential natures of all creatures in the divine
book of nature—simply through its inherent powers of abstraction
and ratiocination. (This assumption encouraged belief in the power
of the unaided reason to recover Adamic knowledge from language,
texts, and/or nature.) The third was the very assumption that, as verbal
materialization and manifestation of the divine and creative Word, the
Adamic language was itself a direct refl ection of the divine Mind and,
additionally, that the perfect understanding and description of the book
of nature contained in the Adamic language was therefore also a mir-
ror of God’s Mind and of his nature. Put more precisely, beliefs about
the nature of the Adamic language were usually bound up with the
assumption that nature—God’s works, his visible book—was a product
of his intellect; that, as such a product, the order and plan described by
the book of nature was not in the least arbitrary and that there could
not be any other order and plan; and, finally, that the book of nature
directly and necessarily mirrored the divine mind and nature precisely
because God was constrained by his ideas to conceive and create only
one possible world.
This last assumption—or cluster of assumptions—about the divine
mind, the book of nature, and God’s intellect came under direct and
sustained criticism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.22
This assumption was rooted in a cosmology that interpreted God’s
creation in hierarchical and symbolic terms wedded to Platonic visions
of a dichotomous universe: one juxtaposing parallel spiritual and mate-
rial realms. Furthermore, by seeing the act of creation itself as akin
to the Neoplatonic cosmogonic emanation of Being (or divine ideas)
into material forms, this assumption incorporated a doctrine of God
and Creation (a product of the twelfth century) that refl ected a pro-

22
Bono 1995.

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 the two books and adamic knowledge 311

foundly Greek, necessitarian metaphysics.23 Stressing the gap between

an autonomous, omnipotent God and his creation, the strain of vol-
untarism gathering force in late medieval nominalism, mysticism, and
related movements witnessed a strong resurgence that, in the wake of
the Reformation, led to profound transformations.24 Rather than limiting
God as divine Author to composing the book of nature according to
one strictly prescribed, formulaic script, select authors, like Sir Francis
Bacon, under the sway of voluntarist thought—including natural phi-
losophers, physicians, and natural historians—reconceived nature as
God’s ordained book, the contingent product of his will rather than
necessary refl ection of his intellect. Nature, then, was contingent in the
limited, but important, sense that it was utterly dependent upon God’s
will, both for its very existence and for the order it displays and the
peculiar characteristics and relationships exhibited by created things.
For some, the contingency of nature carried an added implication:
that, as one of many possible rational orders that God in his absolute
power might have created, nature from the perspective of humankind’s
limited intellect could not be fully or reliably known through abstract
reasoning alone. Indeed, planted in the rich soil of early modern culture,
the late medieval roots of voluntarism with their denial of the reality
of universals nourished and contributed to the fl owering of attention
to particulars in the study of nature. Particularly in concert with other
factors encouraging the wedding of head and hand in the exploration
of the materiality of things, events, and processes in nature, such vol-
untarist perspectives helped to refocus the very study of the book of
nature itself. In the new narratives of creation stimulated by voluntarist
and related perspectives, relationships between God, man, and nature
were rethought with profound implications for early modern culture
and for an emergent ethos of ‘science’ with its distinctive re-readings
of the book of nature.25

23
Chenu 1968; Walker 1958; Yates 1964. For Lull, see Hillgarth 1971; Rossi 1961;
Yates 1982; for Renaissance Neoplatonism, see above n. 10.
24
See, for example, Courtenay 1984; 1990; Oberman 1963; 1986; Trinkaus and
Oberman 1974.
25
See, for example, Bono 1995; Deason 1986; Dobbs 1991; McGuire 1972; 2000;
Oakley 1984, esp. chap. 3; Osler 1994. For an important critique of claims about vol-
untarism and science, see Harrison 2002a; see my comments below on this article.

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Table 1. Repairing the effects of the Fall and of Babel: sources

and assumptions
Recovering the Adamic Are Postlapsarian Humans Assumptions: Implications
Language: Sources and Capable of Recovering for Repairing Effects of
Limitations the Adamic Language? the Fall and Babel
1. Rudiments of Adamic Yes—but few optimistic 1. Intellect weakened
language survive in post- that goal achievable by the Fall, but humans
Babylonian languages without other sources, in theory capable
schemes, strategies of recovering lost
meanings through
intensive philological and
comparative study of
language and texts
2. Nature complements Yes—exegesis of 2. Uncorrupted book of
Scripture and human symbolic meanings of nature refl ects Divine
texts things in nature enable Mind: hence nature
humans to repair lost supplements partially
knowledge and wisdom corrupted, fragmentary,
from a variety of sources and obscured linguistic,
philological, and textual
sources
3. Nature only source: Yes—reading divine 3. As products of mere
human languages and texts signatures directly in fallen reason, post-
cutoff from book of nature Babylonian languages and
Adamic wisdom replicates Edenic texts are no substitute for
knowledge leading to God’s Word and Works:
recovery of Adamic by engaging his Works
language directly, the light of
nature supplements the
unaided intellect
4. All sources fl awed No—sources for recovery 4. Adamic language did
and therefore suspect of Adamic language not not survive the Fall and
available and accessible Confusion of Tongues
to human intellect 5. Postlapsarian (unaided)
intellect—mere reason—
unable to recover Adamic
knowledge from nature
6–A. Adamic language
does not refl ect divine
knowledge.
6–B. Nature—God’s
Works/Visible Book—
does not refl ect divine
knowledge

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Questioning Key Assumptions: Consequences and Limitations

Let me consider the immediate consequences of questioning the three
assumptions enumerated above before turning to larger and enduring
implications. First, some of those who sought to recover prelapsarian
language and knowledge believed this goal could be achieved by a
second strategy: namely, by turning our attention to careful reading
of the book of nature. While this strategy emphasized reading nature
in concert with intensive scrutiny of post-Babylonian languages and
texts, Paracelsus, among others, pursued a not wholly unrelated third
strategy. Thus, he turned to direct, hands-on study of nature on the
one side, while divorcing his approach from just those bookish efforts
that remained central to champions of the second strategy, such as the
naturalist Aldrovandi. Although their differences are consequential, pro-
ponents of either strategy might well share the belief that the Adamic
language could not be recovered from the book of nature by unaided
reason. Thus, both strategies remain receptive to a symbolic-exegetical
hermeneutic for reading the book of nature as vehicle for fulfilling the
hope of rediscovering prelapsarian wisdom and language; again, both
either insist upon, or in the case of the second strategy may prove com-
patible with, the need to supplement the fallen intellect through the aid
provided by the light of nature. For Paracelsus, rediscovering that lost
Adamic legacy required rejecting prideful pagan and scholastic belief in
the inherent power of postlapsarian man’s unaided mind—particularly
the much vaunted and puffed-up powers of abstraction and ratiocina-
tion—in favor of embracing the concrete majesty and wonder of God’s
created things with their visible, if veiled, signatures. Experience and
knowledge of the latter required not man’s prideful reason, but his pious
intellect turned with rapt attention upon the wondrous variety of the
book of nature in all of its palpable materiality to receive in all of its
brilliance the lumen naturale, the very light of nature that alone brings
understanding and, with it, the prospect of the new Adam.26
Such rejection of the ability of the unaided postlapsarian intellect
to recover prelapsarian knowledge from nature entailed a reconfigura-
tion of the diagnosis, prognosis, and repair of the losses experienced
by postlapsarian humankind. Hence, looking beyond Paracelsus and

26
For the divine Word, Christ, the new Adam, and the light of nature, see Para-
celsus 1929, esp. 395–399.

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his reorientation of exegesis from texts to nature itself, 27 rejection of

dreams of any simple and direct rediscovery of the lost Adamic lan-
guage and/or prelapsarian knowledge required that criticism of the
second assumption asserting the adequacy of the postlapsarian intellect
to that task be coupled with criticism of one or more of the remaining
assumptions noted earlier. That is to say, the mere fact of the weak-
ness and inadequacy of the postlapsarian intellect—reason, alone and
unaided—was in itself not sufficient to dash all hope of recovering the
Adamic language and knowledge of nature. For that hope could, and
frequently did, rest on further assumptions: namely, that the Adamic
language had in some fashion survived the Fall and Babel; that it
was in its origin a repository of divine wisdom and knowledge; and/
or that nature itself unproblematically reflects the Divine Mind
(Table 1: assumptions 4,6).
The actual variety of viewpoints and practices produced by ques-
tioning of these three assumptions is far too large to survey in this
essay. Instead, I shall highlight only some of the more important and
dramatic of their consequences. To begin, those who questioned the
assumption that, at the very least, traces or corrupted fragments of the
Adamic language survived the Fall and confusion of tongues include
a wide range of thinkers, from humanists to reformers. Some human-
ists treated the languages of man as thoroughly historical, social, and
therefore human artifacts, while reformers like Luther effectively saw
the Adamic language as irretrievably lost to postlapsarian humans.28
Such rethinking of language as historical versus transhistorical phe-
nomenon had an impact upon the study of nature. Take, for example,
the contending views regarding the role of blood and spirits in the
human body espoused by the renowned sixteenth-century physician
Jean Fernel (1497–1558) and the famous seventeenth-century physician
and physiologist, William Harvey. Fernel favored a medical humanism
that belonged to the branch of humanist thought that continued to
view language as repository of transhistorical wisdom like a Reuchlin
or a Lefèvre. Hence the meaning of the term spirit in his theory of

27
For exegesis, see the discussion of what I call an “exegetical hermeneutics of
nature” and its relationship to “de-in-scriptive hermeneutics of nature” throughout
Bono 1995.
28
See Bono 1995, esp. 64–72. In his commentary on Babel and the confusion
of tongues, Luther notes the survival of the Adamic language in the family of Eber
(Heber), but only in its barest, external form. In effect, it is of no use and consequence
to postlapsarian humanity. Luther 1960, 215.

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spirits is derived from a Christian interpretation of ancient Stoic and

Platonic texts. In contrast, Harvey preferred sociohistorical views of
language like those of the humanists Valla, Poliziano, and Erasmus.
Thus, rather than fetishizing transhistorical, symbolic meanings of the
term spirit, he found its meaning in critical scrutiny of its uses in rela-
tion to the phenomenon of blood. Their difference turned precisely, as
I’ve argued, on Harvey’s unwillingness to regard ancient medical texts
and their invocation of the language of spirits as veiled references to
a pristine, Adamic and Christian wisdom couched in symbolic form.
Rejecting Fernel’s dream of reviving, through exegesis, ancient learning
and wedding it to Adamic wisdom, Harvey instead looks to words—to
the act of naming things—as a thoroughly historical, conventional, and
necessary practice central to the techn of reading and describing the
book of nature.29
The view of a reformer like Luther was that the Fall had reduced
the mental capabilities enjoyed by our first parents in their prelapsarian
state. The unaided human intellect had lost its ability to penetrate the
secrets of a now opaque nature through abstraction and words alone.
Hence, the key to understanding of and dominion over nature lay not
in the past, not in fanciful and quixotic quests for traces of Adamic
knowledge and power, but rather in engaging the world in the present
and future. The pious Christian must look not to a lost Golden Age
but to the coming of a new order.30 In short, such changed assumptions
worked increasingly to turn the attention of contemporaries (Protestant
and Catholic alike) from the past and from nearly exclusive preoccupa-
tion with texts and words to pious study of the divine book of nature
as itself a source of knowledge of nature, of God’s Providence, of his
plan for man and nature, and of humankind’s future dominion as sign
of God’s grace.
The third set of assumptions (compare Table 1, 6 A & B) was that
divine knowledge was manifest both in prelapsarian language and in
nature and could be recovered from these sources. Criticism of this
assumption further reinforced, deepened, and clarified the consequences
just noted of the assault on the first two assumptions, while providing
philosophical and religious groundwork for a new vision of nature and

29
Bono 1995, chap. 4, 85–122. This chapter is a slightly altered version of Bono
1990.
30
Bono 1995, esp. 64–72, 185–192, and chap. 7, 199–246 (the latter on Bacon).
See also Céard 1980.

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of human access to nature’s secrets. Baldly put, new emphases placed

upon the primacy and majesty of God’s Will, omnipotence, and sov-
ereignty over nature led increasingly to the conviction that the book of
nature was the contingent (some might even imply arbitrary) product
of his creative and unfathomable Will. God’s absolute power did not
limit him to creation of the universe according to only one rational and
necessary plan, but entailed instead his ability and freedom to create
any number of possible orders, all equally rational, and all potentially
bespeaking his Majesty, Wisdom, and Providence. Thus, in providential
love for humankind, God has seen fit to ordain a single, regular, and
lawful order, and, as part of his covenant with man, to maintain and
sustain that order until the end of time.
This voluntarist vision of God and nature might, and in a number
well known instances did, provoke formative new assumptions and impli-
cations. First, for many such as Bacon, Boyle, Descartes, and Newton
nature could no longer be thought of as a mirror of God’s Mind, nor
as revealing his divine nature. While God’s plan—his power, majesty,
and providence—could be glimpsed through the wondrous order of
his Works, his nature remained beyond human comprehension and
was thus unfathomable. Sir Francis Bacon’s words aptly characterize
this viewpoint:
For as all works show forth the power and skill of the workman, and not
his image; so it is of the works of God, which show the omnipotency
and wisdom, but do not portray the image of the Maker. And therefore
therein the Heathen opinion differs from the sacred truth; for they sup-
posed the world to be the image of God, and man the image of the
world; whereas the Scriptures never vouchsafe to attribute to the world
such honour as anywhere to call it the image of God, but only the work
of his hands (Bacon 1858, 341).
Indeed, since his Works—the very furniture of the universe and the crea-
tures inhabiting it—could have been conceived and created according
to a quite different template, no one of the many possible worlds God
could have created could possibly refl ect, let alone exhaust, the infinite
capaciousness of his nature and mind. The world as humans can come
to know it was, in this sense, radically contingent and dependent upon
the divine Will. Second, precisely because of the radical contingency of
the universe stemming from voluntarist conceptions of the relationship
between God and nature, nature was not, and could not be, fathomed
by reason alone. Unlike pagan Greek conceptions of a single rational
order necessary to, and characteristic of, the universe, God’s Will and

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absolute power entailed the possibility of many different rational orders.

The specific rational plan imposed upon the created order by God must
be encountered and studied in all of its rich and diverse empirical detail
in order to be known and grasped by reason. Thus, in concert with the
nominalist critique of universals, noted earlier, such voluntarist beliefs
encouraged the turn toward natural particulars31 Third, as a result
of God’s absolute power and the radical contingency of his Works,
postlapsarian man, unlike Adam in the Garden of Eden, must rely on
experience, observation, and hard work—the labor, the very sweat of his
brow, that is a mark of his postlapsarian condition—in order to know,
understand, and gain dominion over nature and its creatures. To do
otherwise—to leap from things to abstractions—would be to substitute
a picture of man’s making for the actual pattern of the world as God
created it: human “fictions” for the regular, orderly, and contingent
“matters of fact” ordained by God’s Will.32

Implications and Significance: the Book of Nature and

‘Technologies of the Literal’

In his Valerius Terminus (ca. 1603), Sir Francis Bacon proclaims in no

uncertain terms what the “true ends of knowledge” should and must
be for the pious, if fallen, Christian:
And therefore it is not the pleasure of curiosity, nor the quiet of resolution,
nor the raising of the spirit, nor victory of wit, nor faculty of speech,
nor lucre of profession, nor ambition of honor or fame, nor inablement
for business, that are the true ends of knowledge; some of these being
more worthy than other, though all inferior and degenerate: but it is a
restitution and reinvesting (in great part) of man to the sovereignty and
power (for whensoever he shall be able to call the creatures by their true
names he shall again command them) which he had in his first state of
creation.33

31
Unlike Harrison 2002a, I argue that the thesis connecting voluntarism and empiri-
cism does not require that voluntarists be radical empiricists: it is simply enough that the
rational order of God’s creation cannot be fully grasped and asserted as true without
some empirical supplement to intellectual knowing. I shall elucidate this argument and
criticism of Harrison in vol. 2 of my Word of God project.
32
See Bono 1995, 199–246, on Bacon. For more on “facts” and “matters of fact”
as emergent categories and preoccupations in the seventeenth century, see Park and
Daston 1998; Shapin and Schaffer 1985; Shapiro 2000.
33
Bacon 1859, 222.

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Here Bacon gives notice of his own ambition to set the course of
human knowledge on its proper path. For Bacon the reform or advance-
ment of knowledge constitutes the very instrument through which
humankind can hope to repair the damage suffered by the Fall, which
was in turn further complicated by the confusion of tongues. Hence,
his ambitions to establish a Novum Organum—a “new instrument”—as
centerpiece of the reform of knowledge, as the mechanism that will
constitute the foundation for that Great Instauration: the “restitution” to
humans of those very powers to know, to faithfully “call the creatures
by their true names,” and therefore to “command them” once again.
For Bacon it was the “power” of knowledge that Adam and his prog-
eny lost as a result of the Fall, and only by repairing that power to
“its perfect and original condition”34 could humans set themselves on
a path for salvation.
What Bacon feared, and what he criticized in those who attempted
to understand nature before him, was the universal tendency of pride-
ful humans to ignore the very effects of the Fall by exalting the powers
of the human mind—especially the powers of mere ratiocination and
abstraction—beyond their capacity. Such pride and foolhardy reliance
on those corrupted and weakened faculties of the human intellect
had led, and could only lead, to the propagation and multiplication
of falsehoods, and with them to false and abortive pathways through
the labyrinth of nature. Thus, Bacon’s continual tone of pained, weary
criticism and cajoling in the midst of what is also an astonishing opti-
mism and hope for the future:
For God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination
for a pattern of the world; rather may he graciously grant to us to write
an apocalypse or true vision of the footsteps of the Creator imprinted on
his creatures [ac veram visionem vestigiorum et sigillorum creatoris super creaturas
scribamus].35
How to avoid prideful imposition of a false pattern of the world? For
Bacon the answer was to turn to Adam, to understand the nature of the
knowledge Adam had, its connection to his divinely authorized domin-
ion over God’s creatures, and to seek to reconstitute that knowledge
through full and fundamental awareness of the different state of our
Fallen intellect compared to that of the prelapsarian Adam. While we

34
Bacon 1860a, 7.
35
Bacon 1860b, 32–33.

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can—given enough time and effort—reconstitute Adam’s lost knowledge,

we cannot hope to do so easily and quickly. We must, Bacon pleads,
abandon the false and prideful hope that reason alone, that imagina-
tion alone, that language alone can provide us as postlapsarian humans
anything more than further occasions for advancing prideful and false
images—patterns—of the world:
If therefore there be any humility towards the Creator, any reverence for
or disposition to magnify His works, any charity for man and anxiety to
relieve his sorrows and necessities, any love of truth in nature, any hatred
of darkness, any desire for the purification of the understanding, we must
entreat men again and again to discard, or at least set apart for a while,
these volatile and preposterous philosophies, which have preferred theses
to hypotheses, led experience captive, and triumphed over the works of
God; and to approach with humility and veneration to unroll the volume
of Creation, to linger and meditate therein, and with minds washed clean
from opinions to study it in purity and integrity. For this is that sound and
language which went forth into all lands, and did not incur the confusion
of Babel; this should men study to be perfect in, and becoming again
as little children condescend to take the alphabet of it into their hands,
and spare no pains to search and unravel the interpretation thereof, but
to pursue it strenuously and persevere even unto death.36
Not unlike Topsell, for Bacon that “sound and language which went
forth into all lands” uncorrupted by the Fall and by the “confusion
of Babel” was the very creatures—things themselves—that God has
inscribed within the book of nature. However, unlike Topsell, Bacon’s
turn toward things, his insistence on proper reading of the book of
nature as the means to repair the effects of the Fall, looked to God’s
Works not as providing symbols (or Paracelsian signatures) through
which the Adamic language and understanding could be uncovered.
For Bacon, as for Luther and many others, that originary language and
understanding was lost forever. Instead, Bacon’s incitement to “unroll
the volume of Creation”—to turn to things themselves—was a call to
study and master those traces, those marks, that “alphabet” of nature
through man’s toil. Only human labor, the time-consuming work and
effort that was humankind’s postlapsarian destiny, could “unroll” the
pages of the book of nature through the hard work of observation
and experimentation: Bacon’s new instruments replacing the weak and

36
Bacon 1858, 132–133.

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prideful “old instrument” of Aristotle’s logic, the scholastics’ beloved

Organon.37
Bacon’s ambitious work encapsulates many of the changed attitudes,
assumptions, and implications regarding the Adamic language, the
book of nature, and the Scriptures that I have been charting in this
essay. Although he champions what many have praised as the turn
from ‘words’ to ‘things’ in the seventeenth century, I have argued
elsewhere that this characterization of such a purported turn is both
too simple, and fundamentally misleading. Bacon turns toward things
precisely in order to learn how to name things properly: for Bacon,
the dream of reconstituting the lost Adamic language is still very real.
What has changed, and what Bacon himself so pointedly recognizes,
is that the Adamic ability to name the creatures in God’s book of
nature must come in this postlapsarian condition from hard-earned
work, labor, observation, and experimentation. It must come, in short,
from recognizing that knowledge, for postlapsarian man, is not a mere
abstraction, not something to be imagined or fathomed rationally.
Rather, as Bacon famously notes: knowledge is power. Knowledge is
dominion: the ability to control nature and God’s creatures. It derives
then from the practical ability and know-how—the ‘Art’ or techn —that
humans can only acquire, and have slowly and arduously begun to
acquire, through intimate, pious, and embodied engagement with
God’s Works: knowing as ‘making’ and doing.38 While for the first Adam
dominion over all creatures derived directly and immediately from his
inherent ability to name them properly, for the new Adam yet-to-come
the order must be reversed: first dominion, first the ability to mimic
and master nature’s operations. Only by working to uncover and then
mimic (through Bacon’s “natural and experimental histories”) the very
actions of natural things themselves can the new Adam glimpse their
true natures and, once again, have it in his power to frame and create
their proper names, thus returning to the mysterious operation of the
creative Word in God’s book of nature. Only thus can man’s mind be
restored to “its perfect and original condition,” the effects of the Fall

37
Bono 1995, 199–246.
38
For more on the emergence and significance of the refiguration of ‘knowing’
as a form of making and doing, and for the tendency toward convergence of scientia
and techn , see Bono 1995; and important recent works by Long 2001; Smith 2004.
On the intersections of learned, artistic, and craft and technical cultures, see also
Grafton 2000.

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and of the destruction of Babel repaired, and the millenarian prospect

of man’s reunion with God in paradise be anticipated.
When thus turning his attention to this formidable reparative task,
Bacon therefore frames a project for a Great Instauration that can
no longer hope to proceed through intensive philological scrutiny of
post-Babylonian languages and mere human texts. In its stead, Bacon
advocates a turn toward things, thus enjoining idolatry of mere words.
His rejection of the seductive lure of rhetoric and ornate tropes, and
his insistence on judicious restriction to the barest and least puffed-up
uses of language as humanly possible, are not to be dismissed lightly:
But the more difficult and laborious the work is, the more ought it to be
discharged of matters superfl uous. . . . First then, away with antiquities,
and citations or testimonies of authors; also with disputes and controver-
sies and differing opinions; everything in short which is philological. . . .
And for all that concerns ornaments of speech, similitudes, treasury of
eloquence, and such like emptinesses, let it be utterly dismissed. Also
let those things which are admitted be themselves set down briefl y and
concisely, so that they may be nothing less than words.39
Many of his followers in the seventeenth century took his cautions with
utmost seriousness, insisting as did the Royal Society and its historian,
Thomas Sprat, on a simple style eschewing all ornament and rhetoric
in favor of the literal sense.40

39
Bacon 1860a, 254. While Bacon eschews the uses of philology for the specific
purpose of the laborious work of repairing the effects of the Fall and of Babel, he
nonetheless retains a role for philology in other spheres. Just as he rails against scho-
lasticism as leading the mind astray with over hasty abstractions when studying nature,
while nonetheless acknowledging its value for training the mind to discriminate dif-
ferences, so, too, he may, without contradiction, reserve a place for philology. Thus,
in his essay, “Of Studies,” Bacon counsels his readers that “If his wit be not apt to
distinguish or find differences, let him study the schoolmen, for they are cymini sectores
[splitters of hairs]” (Bacon 1861, 498).
40
I shall address questions of the literal in early modern science and the Scientific
Revolution in volume 2 of my Word of God project and a related project on “Technolo-
gies of the Literal.” While Bacon accompanied this turn to the literal with rejection
of some traditional misuses and excesses of philology and of rhetoric—for him a
mark of prideful attention to the works of man’s weak and Fallen intellect, rather
than, properly, to God’s Works—philology itself could, and did, still have a place for
subsequent natural historians in pursuit of literal descriptions of nature. On the role
of language in the production of natural history, see recent work by Ratcliff 2004.
For a brief summary of controversies concerning the uses and misuses of language
in natural history and the desire for an accurate and plain descriptive vocabulary, see
Koerner 1999. More generally, on the commingling of natural inquiry and learning,
see Grafton 1991; Pomata and Siraisi 2005. On Sprat and this aspect of the Baconian

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In this last section, I want therefore to refl ect on what I see is at stake
for accounts of the ‘Scientific Revolution’ and the refiguration of the
relationship (linguistic and otherwise) between the two books of nature
and Scriptures in this purported ‘turn’ toward the ‘literal.’ At the very
end, I shall remark on what I see as the key and problematic status of
the literal itself, and on how I believe we should, as historians, think
of and with this category. But first, a number of points together with
a brief, if preliminary, history.
The ‘literal,’ as an aspiration, pervades so much of seventeenth-cen-
tury, especially English, natural philosophy from Bacon to Boyle and
the Royal Society. As with Bacon, in certain senses this turn toward
the literal represents a reaction against, and an antidote for, much
that was regarded as the excesses of an imaginative view of nature
as itself poetic: a world where “nature’s fecundity and poetic artifice”
were captured by human efforts to catalogue its variety and complex,
symbolic intertextuality within books and museums. That world was
one in which nature was still a book, and Europeans still sought to
recapture in language the creativity of the original Divine Word and
the perfect knowledge of nature and its web of fecund meanings that
Adam—that true namer of creatures—enjoyed in his prelapsarian
Garden of Eden.41 Language was a tool—for some the tool—of scientia,
of knowledge, and specifically knowledge of nature; and the book of
nature was written in a divine language of things, knowledge of which
depended upon the successful decoding of the alphabet of nature and
interpretation of its hidden, symbolic meanings. Nature was poetic in
its origins (having been created by God through the mysterious agency
of his divine Word); in its fecundity and playfulness;42 and often in its
mode of presentation to and apprehension by humans.43
Much of the explosion of knowledge that we associate with the
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution depended,
in part, upon either the exploitation of poetic and symbolic webs of
association linking together natural objects and a whole range of liter-
ary, philosophical, and emblematic resources, or struggles to define new,

legacy, see Hunter 1981; Shapiro 1983, esp. chap. 7; Shapiro 2000, esp. chap. 6; Still-
man 1995; Wood 1980.
41
For this story and for more detail on what follows below, see Bono 1995.
42
See Findlen 1990.
43
See, for example, Freedberg 2002, 2–3, who notes just such poetic forms of pre-
sentation and apprehension of knowledge of nature in Cesi and others.

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and radically different, relationships between nature and the poetic. If

Aldrovandi may be taken as an example and exemplar of the former,
Bacon, Galileo, and Newton present diverse instances of the latter. As
we have seen, Bacon decries traditional uses (more especially, misuses
and abuses) of philology and etymology as bases for knowledge of
nature, but does so through a rhetorically charged recasting of classical
myth and biblical narratives.44 Galileo’s famous redescription of nature
as a ‘book’ written in geometrical characters explicitly contrasts poetry
with his new science, but in so doing elides his own metaphorization of
both nature and mathematics.45 Newton presents yet a more complex
picture, one which I have discussed elsewhere.46 In sum, nature and
poetry—the poetic—were forcibly separated. No longer would nature
be a mirror of the Divine; no longer would nature be playful, a web
of sympathies and hidden harmonies. Matter, in this account, was
henceforth to be seen as naked and law-abiding.
How, then, was nature under this new regime to be grasped, captured,
interrogated, and understood? A host of students of nature—assuming
both well-established and newly emergent identities, from natural phi-
losopher and physician to virtuosi experimenter and systematic natural
historians—felt compelled to look beyond timeworn methods. They
looked, that is, beyond the mere abstraction of the scholastic natural
philosopher; the simple empiricism of the empiric; or the exegesis of
the bookish scholar, emblematic natural historian, and occultist or
alchemist. What they looked toward was human ingenuity—understood
as artifice and techn —to become the means to interrogate nature, to
hunt down her secrets, to forcibly lay bare her intricate workings, to
pin down her blind, if sovereign, laws. In short, ‘art’ in the form of
techn —technologies for the discovery and reproduction of nature’s

44
See Bono 1995, 199–246, for Bacon, his reform of language and science, and
for further references. See note 40 above for more on philology, natural history, and
natural inquiry in early modern Europe. While we may take Bacon as symptomatic
of an explicit desire to demarcate the ‘poetic’ from ‘nature,’ this fact does not mean
that philology as such, let alone rhetoric and tropes, were in fact banished from the
discourse and practice of science in this period. More significantly, such symptoms ought
interest us to disclose those cultural and historical processes manifesting themselves in
the very formation of such a desire. On early modern culture and fascination with (or
aversion to) rhetoric, the literal, and related issues, see more generally Struever 1970;
Alpers 1983; Vickers 1985.
45
Bono 1995, 193–198, for Galileo, the book of nature, and further references. See
also Biagioli 2003; and now, Biagioli 2006, esp. chap. 4.
46
Bono 1999.

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effects—become the key to reading this new world properly: a world

stripped of all poetic ornament, inhabited by unadorned brute matter,
and therefore a world to be read literally.47
This turn to human art—to techn —as key to knowledge of nature
was risky. The risk was precisely that art would add to nature—that
it would become not a true, but a false mirror; that it would generate
not a faithful mimesis or picture, but a distorted image: an “Idol” in
Bacon’s felicitous turn of phrase, not nature unadorned but instead
nature as mere refl ection of humankind’s image. To avoid trafficking in
such counterfeits—in improper rather than proper names and knowl-
edge—proponents of human ingenuity and art, techn , as the means to
uncover nature’s secrets had to insist that their techniques could, in fact,
reveal the intricate networks of brute, naked matter. To make such a
claim, their art had to be decisively and forcibly distinguished from the
Art of Rhetoric. Its product was not mere persuasion; rather, this art
produced the literal: the unadorned truth of particulars that sought to
become a new form of scientia, a knowledge or science of particulars!
Henceforth, the world as product of naked and lawful matter was
properly grasped and understood through unadorned artifice—technolo-
gies—that plainly and transparently described and inscribed nature’s
intricacies and operations as they literally existed.
Yet this world, and these technologies of the literal, were themselves
the product of yet another permutation of the trope of nature as a
book! No longer a mysterious, poetic romance symbolically mirroring
the divine nature, the book of nature was (as I’ve been arguing) trans-
formed into a contingent, nonsymbolic text refl ecting God’s power and
will, invested with law-like order and regularity, but utterly separate
from the divine nature itself. Rather than poetic romance, this newly
imagined book might, at times, resemble more closely a carefully filled
ledger. If ultimately transparent, nature as ledger required of post-

47
Profound questions were raised about the capacity and limitations of the human
mind in the wake of the revival of philosophical skepticism (see Popkin 2003; Schmitt
1972), changing views of man and of God’s nature, and the Reformation. As attention
hence turned increasingly to “natural particulars,” the ideal of knowledge as knowledge
of ‘universals’ began to lose its appeal. Merging with claims for the dignity and cog-
nitive legitimacy of art and artisanal knowledge and redefinitions of the relationship
between scientia and techn , the stark contrast between nature and art—natural things
and human artifice—became muted. By the seventeenth century, what we have come
to call the ‘new science’ represents less traditional Aristotelian science (scientia) than
what Aristotelians would have considered ‘art,’ as Charles Lohr has repeatedly noted.
See Lohr 1999a; 1999b; 2002.

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lapsarian humans laborious effort to read its individual entries (things

themselves) and equally industrious, focused attention to catalogue and
categorize them, and then to grasp the law-like principles accounting
for the order and interrelations of individual parts and the networks
they comprised.

Conclusion

Here then is a key point: human art—technologies of the literal—was

and were required to isolate, identify, describe, record, array, and prop-
erly order the elements—things—within this newly imagined book of
nature. Hence, by the seventeenth century, all kinds of technologies
were adopted—or adapted48—to produce the literal as an object of
knowledge and cultural authority. Among the technologies that we
should, I argue, explore are: reading (books and the book of nature);
visual technologies and the function of images; mapping, diagramming,
and modeling; the production of tables, lists, and other methods of
storing, organizing, and retrieving (literal) information; mathematical
representation; laboratory practices; instruments as technologies for
accessing, documenting, and producing specific and precise realms of
the literal; the use of museums, cabinets of curiosities, and natural
history to construct ‘objects’ as literal constituents of a natural world;
classification techniques; and botanical gardens.49
Conventionally, the emergence of modernity and the rise of modern
science in the seventeenth century have been underwritten by the turn
from the symbolic to the literal. Whether favoring a simple, unadorned
descriptive language or insisting upon the concrete visual representation
of natural phenomena, the sciences and medicine sought—utilizing
technologies such as those just mentioned—to reproduce and exhaus-
tively catalogue the literal in nature as a foundation for the production
of knowledge. I have already suggested that this turn to the literal was
itself fueled by metaphoric reconfiguration of nature as a new kind
of book. Furthermore, the very notion of the literal emerges from a

48
For earlier periods, see Long 2001; Smith 2004; Grafton 2000. For examples of
practices newly adapted to different contexts and purposes, see now the brilliant new
book by Turner 2006.
49
For an appreciation of the related contexts out of which preoccupation with
literal understanding of the book of nature grew, see Bono 1995; Harrison 1998;
Clark 1997.

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bookish culture of exegesis and rests upon foundational acts of inter-

pretations—fictions, if you will—that it seeks to mask and elide.50
Galileo serves as a good example of how the literal emerges from
bookish culture: Galileo’s fiction of a book of nature written in a geo-
metric and mathematical language attempts to deny the very status of
practices that read nature as mathematical as itself interpretation.51 Peter
Harrison’s important book, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural
Science, argues that the literal and empirical approaches to nature—the
new focus on particulars and knowledge of particulars—owes much
to Protestant practices of literal interpretation of the Bible.52 There is
much to value in this argument. Nonetheless, the study of particulars
predates the Reformation, particularly in the medical tradition, as
many scholars have observed. In Wonders and the Order of Nature, Daston
and Park have also noted the rise of intense interest in particulars and
some of its sources in pre- and post-Reformation contexts, the latter
not restricted to Protestant sources. One can also point to Human-
ism (including humanist emphasis upon critical and empirical textual,
philological, and historical examination of sources and truth claims), to
the renewed emphasis upon literal interpretation of classical allegory,
and to other factors as contributing to the turn toward the literal. As
Kenneth Knoespel has argued, the tradition of allegorical interpreta-
tion had by the early sixteenth century already expanded to include a
renewed emphasis upon the literal as pointing to the world: an emer-
gent practice that leads from Raphael Regio’s humanist edition of and
commentaries on Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Newton’s reinterpretations of
ancient myth and allegory.53

50
Bono 1995; also volume 2 and my book on “Technologies of the Literal,” both
in progress.
51
See Bono 1995, 193–198.
52
Harrison 1998.
53
I am indebted to Kenneth J. Knoespel for sharing with me drafts of his book in
progress, The Limits of Allegory, including the chapter on “Raphael Regius and Ovid’s
Metamorphoses.” Knoespel’s important work describes the trajectory of allegory and
with it, the “recalibration of the literal,” from Regio in the fifteenth century to Newton.
With Knoespel, I wish to affirm the continuing practice of allegorical reading, even
within a Protestant context, while noting as well its complex transformations, including
the embrace of a larger role for the literal. If one can also speak, in the context of the
study of nature in the seventeenth-century, of a trajectory from allegorical modes of
expression to descriptive ones, such a claim does not entail the demise of allegorical
reading more generally, nor its utter banishment from depictions of nature. For the
complexity of seventeenth-century English poetics, uses of language, and symbols, see
the classic work by Lewalski 1979.

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My own view is that Protestant practices of literal interpretation of

the Bible are but one aspect of a much larger picture: one historically
composed by many hands, eclectic in nature, and exhibiting variegated
stylistic and thematic elements as marks of multiple confessional and
professional orientations. In analyzing such elements, I am inclined to
credit all the sources of the growing reorientation toward natural par-
ticulars noted by Daston and Park, by Knoespel, by recent scholarship
on Humanism and erudite empiricism,54 and by studies of such arts as
alchemy,55 anatomy, natural history,56 and both traditional and reform-
ist (or even radical) medical practices.57 What’s more, I am strongly
inclined to credit such reorientations toward particulars, in most if
not all cases, to the transformative effects wrought by contemporary
reinterpretations of biblical narratives of the Fall, the Tower of Babel,
and the Pentecost58 upon precisely these sources for the turn toward
particulars and the literal. The challenge of such reformist re-readings
of biblical narratives—though without doubt sharpened and at times
stimulated by the Reformation and its aftermath—affected numerous
students of nature of all stripes and persuasions before and after Luther
and Calvin. More precisely, such strong reinterpretations of the Fall,
Babel, and the Pentecost forced Catholic, Protestant, and heterodox
readers of the book of nature to reconsider their implications when
attempting to calibrate the very tools with which they proposed to read
the book of nature. Indeed, such biblical narratives carried enormous
weight—the weight of cultural and religious authority—when assessing
the true power of the human intellect and senses: their limitations as
well as their genuine capacities. Thus, pregnant with implications for
humankind’s ability to penetrate the secrets of nature, such narratives
both demanded and fostered new practices for engaging and interpreting
nature that include literal interpretation and the turn to particulars.
The turn to particulars coupled with the call to literal interpretation
of the book of nature can, I argue, best be understood as aligned with
newly emerging ways of using allegory and description as modes of
apprehending nature. Such rethinking, I argue, entailed the collapse of

54
Pomata and Siraisi 2005.
55
Newman 2004; 2006; Smith 2004; Moran 2005.
56
See Findlen 1994 Shackelford 1999; Ogilvie 2006.
57
For more on this reorientation toward particulars, including within the arts of
medicine and anatomy, see Bono 1995. See also Harkness 2007; Turner 2006.
58
Céard 1980; also, Ormsby-Lennon 1988.

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dichotomized and hierarchized spaces—originally fostered in the Latin

west by the symbolic and allegorical mentality arising from twelfth-
century cosmology and cosmogony—in the seventeenth century. This
led, in turn, to the dramatic proliferation of relatively autonomous, if
contiguous and metonymically stacked and arrayed, spaces that are
characteristic of so much of seventeenth-century medicine and the
new ‘science.’ What these developments lead to are precisely the effort
to describe and characterize the immanent ‘laws’ of specific natural
spaces and domains as opposed to attributing the order and unity of
nature to hierarchized and allegorized systems of correspondences. Such
efforts to explore the immanent characteristics of a multitude of differ-
ent natural spaces, I argue, required the development of technologies
of the literal to produce them.59
Thus, while Sir Francis Bacon and others narratively legitimated
the turn toward the literal in nature as a consequence of humankind’s
postlapsarian nature and the necessity of endless work, this turn
required an elaborate apparatus underpinning literal interpretation.
What I call ‘technologies of the literal’ provided just such an appara-
tus and were therefore central to the new science of the seventeenth
century. Where did such technologies come from, and how might they
be understood in relation to religion and traditions of hermeneutics
and language that we have been discussing? Despite claims of a radical
break from words to things, and from books to laboratories, it is worth
remembering that the so-called new science remains an offspring of
bookish culture, as I’ve argued at length elsewhere.60 Hence, we must
not forget the close connection between technologies of reading and
the Scientific Revolution.
Students of nature during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
were readers of books and of the book of nature. As I suggest in The
Word of God and the Languages of Man, habits of reading books, includ-

59
By ‘immanent,’ I refer to the idea that each domain of natural phenomena (e.g.,
the body; the solar system; the system of plants and animals) can be understood as
containing their own principles, rules, and causes without the need for any external
agent, save for the sustaining presence (and in some accounts continuing activity) of
God. Such an immanentist perspective rejects the presence of and need for interme-
diaries between God and natural things: it is compatible with both mechanical and
nonmechanical explanations of natural processes. (Here we may cite William Harvey’s
formulations regarding the operations of living or working matter as paradigmatic of the
latter.) Immanent in this use of the term, need not be incompatible with a voluntarist
understanding of God and God’s Works, the created order of nature.
60
Bono 1995.

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ing the Bible, were transferred to the reading of nature: nature was
subjected to elaborate exegesis—to techniques deployed by scholars
(“intensive readers”) steeped in texts and dedicated to tracking down
the most elusive of meanings and intertextual filiations.61 In the turn
toward reading the book of nature literally, habits of reading books
continued to provide models and techniques without, of course, imply-
ing a necessary or frictionless application of such techniques to nature.
Thus, the turn from moral and symbolic allegory to the reading of
classical texts and myths as physical—indeed, literal—allegories (again
see Knoespel’s Regio and his new readings of Ovid) provided one sort
of technology of the literal that, in the hands of a Bacon or a Newton,
contributed to literal readings of the book of nature. Both Bacon’s
advocacy of “natural and experimental histories” and emerging prac-
tices of natural historians drew upon such techniques for reading texts
literally and for describing, arraying, and grouping plots, and languages
themselves, to reveal the literal meanings and interconnections of God’s
book. Lorraine Daston, in her inspiring History of Science Society
Distinguished Lecture, “Reading the Book of Nature in Early Modern
Europe,” noted numerous ways in which students of nature in early
modern Europe cultivated habits and practices of attention—that is,
of attending intensively and minutely to particulars in nature in order
to describe them selectively. For Daston, who elsewhere identifies them
as central to a new early modern “Cult of Attention,” such habits and
practices typically characterize the recently emerged “extensive reader”
of the sixteenth and seventeenth century touted by historians of read-
ing.62 A whole array of such practices—such as the habit of keeping
commonplace books studied by Ann Blair and others—contributed to
what I have called technologies of the literal.63
Such habits and practices of reading books suggested technologies for
observing and recording details of God’s intricate and endlessly various
book of nature. What I have in mind here are first, the arts and artifice
associated with emergent seventeenth-century laboratory practices and
experimentation; the use of instruments; natural history; and related
techniques. Closely linked to these observing practices are technologies

61
Daston 2002.
62
Daston 2002. For “The Cult of Attention,” see Daston 2004; 2004a. More
generally on reading, books, and related matters, see Carruthers 1990; Grafton 1999;
Chartier 1994; Johns 1998.
63
Blair 1992; 2000; 2003; 2004. See also, Andersen and Sauer 2001.

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for recording and describing details, data, physical characteristics, and

related observations and observed materials: notebooks; lists; tables; and
other devices for storing, organizing, and retrieving information that
might contribute to the construction of literal knowledge of nature and
natural phenomena.64 An interesting example of a recording technology
that also shaped observing practices are the centralized production of
forms and written instructions provided to such long-distance travelers
as the Spanish pilots of the sixteenth-century who were charged, in the
course of their regular duties, to make specific astronomical observa-
tions, or, for example, to collect natural historical specimens.65 Tellingly
for my argument regarding religion, science, and the turn toward the
literal, such technologies were not restricted to pursuit of natural phi-
losophy as a form of purportedly secular knowledge of nature. Indeed,
attending to and generating practices to record and track the most
homely of material and historical details proved central both to pious,
pansophic theology and to the defense and literal interpretation of the
Holy Scriptures in the work, for example, of Jan Amos Comenius and
Robert Boyle, respectively.66 We need to keep such parallels and con-
nections in the foreground if we are to assess properly the multivalent
religious and cultural roots of the very motives, habits, and practices

64
Essential here is discussion of the impetus for and implications of such technologies
(in my sense) as the making of tables and lists found in the important book by Campbell
1999, esp. 78–85, “Catalogues and Tables: Iteration.” Campbell’s suggestive account
complements my own insistence on the striking habit of articulating new, multiple spaces
defined by kinds of natural particulars, phenomena, and processes demanding their
own immanent orders and principles. Studying and mastering such proliferating and
immanent spaces require the use of a fl exible and ever expanding toolkit of arts, of
technologies. Campbell stresses Walter Ong’s emphasis on a reorientation of thinking
toward the visual precipitated by what I would point to as a habit of spatializing nature,
things, representation, and knowledge. She intriguingly suggests that “If the objects of
knowledge are most properly visible things, . . . then certain features of the world will be
more salient to educated men than others. The invention of scientific instruments to
reduce other aspects of phenomena to visibility (the thermometer and barometer, for
instance) will increase the diversity of those features. But still the emphasis objectifies,
constructing a ‘theatrum’ of knowledge” (84). See Ong 1958.
65
Sandman 2001; 2002; 2001a; Barrera 2001; Shapiro 2000, 136. Also, see Harris
1998.
66
Comenius 1969; Boyle 1999. Comenius proposes as the art, or technology, suitable
to the plotting of literal knowledge of the world, what he calls “Inventories,” which
prove crucial to his pursuit of pansophic knowledge. In drawing parallels between
reading the books of nature and Scriptures; the use of sophisticated arts or technolo-
gies to uncover, record, and plot salient material and historical details, or particulars;
and seventeenth-century efforts to repair lost knowledges, it is worth thinking about
Comenius’s and Boyle’s respective efforts in light of Miller 2001.

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characterizing the new science. Among these habits and practices, we

must, finally, not forget the familiar forms in which nature was com-
monly encountered and experienced: printed scientific books with the
images, illustrations, graphs, diagrams, maps, mathematical formulae
and geometrical figures that either populated such books along with
words, or circulated independently of them; museums; cabinets of
curiosities; and botanical gardens. These material artifacts constituted
representational and ordering technologies. As technologies of the lit-
eral, they served a dual function: at once constituting and re-presenting
of the world of nature itself, while displaying God’s creation in all its
wondrous grandeur.67
With all of these technologies of the literal, we find clear examples
of what Lorraine Daston has noted as defining habits of the emer-
gent ethos of early modern science: habits, that is, associated with
what she has called “framing” and “focus,” or “attending.” These are
habits that privilege and incorporate in the early modern student of
nature—through the inculcation of disciplined, embodied practices of
observing, recording, and representing—the selection of circumscribed
aspects of natural phenomena, and intense attention to the most minute
and exacting of their details.68 Emerging from religiously motivated
narrative reworkings of stories of the Fall, Babel, and the Pentecost, the
ethos and objectives of this new early modern regime, those technologies
of the literal just identified, and others like them, play a critical role in
the shaping of early modern scientific practices and in the construction
of the full array of new sciences themselves.
While seventeenth-century proponents of the literal couch their
advocacy in terms of encouraging extended encounters with the various
operations of ‘naked matter,’ they purport as well to embrace the literal
as mimesis, as the true representation of nature—of the operations of
such naked matter—itself. Attention to those technologies that actually
produce what such actors call the literal suggests a very different pic-
ture. For one thing, descriptive practices rarely, if ever, rely on perfect
identification of words and things, that is, of words as true and natural

67
Here it is fitting to cite some literature, much of it recent, that points toward the
development and cultivation in the seventeenth century of material-semiotic practices
contributing to at least a few of the technologies of the literal that form the subject of
my own ongoing work as advertised in this essay. Mulligan 1992; 1996; Baffetti 2005;
Hunter 2007; Wilding 2006; Yeo 2007.
68
See Daston 2002, 2004a, 2004b.

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names of things. If anything, such identification smacks of the occult

or magical, harboring the prideful fantasy (for some) that mere words
themselves carry the power attributed to things. Such convergence of
words and things forever eludes postlapsarian man, and for the likes
of Bacon mere human words remain thoroughly conventional, social,
and historical. Although the desire to avoid rhetorical ornamentation in
the use of descriptive language concerning matter and the operations
of nature may seem to encourage the notion of a literal and therefore
mimetic language, this must not be mistaken for anything other than
an arbitrary and highly artificial use of language: the so-called plain
style is, nonetheless, a style. Second, if the literal is not vested in human
language, in names, as such, where then was it conceived to be? In one
sense, the divine and creative Word produced a language of nature
whose literal components were things themselves. Hence, we witness
in the seventeenth century a tendency to identify the literal with things
themselves, with brute, naked matter and its configurations. Yet, human
access to things was, for Bacon and other proponents of the literal,
always mediate: mediated, that is, by method, by his novum organum or
new instrument(s). The literal, then, was to be located in the ‘notions’
of things produced by such instruments: by techn , or human art, by
technologies of the literal. The literal was then not so much linguistic
as it was simultaneously material and notional: captured—better yet,
embodied—in the very performance of descriptive, ordering, visual-
izing, and operative technologies designed to produce and reveal the
literal. Stepping outside the idioms of such seventeenth-century actors,
and following instead the work of contemporary metaphor theorists
and the cognitive approach to metaphor—including my own recent
work69—the literal itself must be seen as a form of metaphoric com-
pression:70 as the selective concresence71 of experience into salient, if

69
Bono 2001; see also, Bono 1990a; 1995a; 1999a; 2004.
70
I borrow the term, compression, from Turner and Fauconnier 2000.
71
The allusion to Whitehead, and his notion of concrescence, is deliberate: White-
head 1978. Whitehead is currently experiencing a renaissance, particularly with respect
to science studies. See Stengers 2002; Latour 2004; and Whitehead Now, a special issue
of Configurations 13:1 (2005) devoted to Whitehead and science studies, which includes
my essay, Bono 2005. As a key term for Whitehead, the renowned developmental
and evolutionary biologist C.H. Waddington provides an especially apt and succinct
elucidation of the significance of concrescence: “Definiteness of the Whiteheadian
objects in an event implies that, although the event has some relation to everything
else past or present in the universe, these relations are brought together and tied up
with one another in some particular and specific way characteristic of that event . . . .

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 the two books and adamic knowledge 333

concrete, components exhibiting the very contours and configurations of

a thing now re-presented as description, table, graph, formula, diagram,
illustration, map, and so forth. Far from the antithesis of metaphor, the
literal shares with the metaphorical a desire for the concrete, which it
approaches, or constructs, through various trials, or compressions. As
the product of such compression, the seventeenth century pursuit of
the literal was the offspring of postlapsarian humankind’s imaginative,
if carefully controlled, poetic capacity.
Language as an engine of the literal was itself an ‘inventive inter-
section’ fostering the early modern co-production of techn and scientia,
technology and science, through the deployment of such technologies
of the literal, including technologies of visualization, among which we
count images.72 What we find in the literal economy of images of the
new science of the seventeenth century are just such visual compres-
sions—better yet confl ations and juxtapositions—of discrete elements
of the observed world. The new world of the literal is filled with
images—and other artifacts, representations, and objects—as material
metaphors.

Bibliography

Aarsleff, Hans. Language, Man and Knowledge in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries (Program in the History and Philosophy of Science, Princeton University.
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Allen, Michael J.B., and V. Rees, eds. 2001. Marsilio Ficino: His Sources, His Circle, His
Legacy. Leiden: Brill.
Alpers, Svetlana. 1983. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Andersen, Jennifer, and Elizabeth Sauer, eds. 2001. Books and Readers in Early Modern
England: Material Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

For this tying-together of universal references into knots with individual character,
Whitehead used several different phrases at different periods in the development of
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72
I take the phrase ‘inventive intersection’ from a workshop held in Amsterdam in
September 2004. See Roberts, Schaffer, and Dear 2007.

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 CHAPTER ELEVEN

HERMENEUTICS AND NATURAL KNOWLEDGE

IN THE REFORMERS1

Peter Harrison

Any attempt to identify a distinctively Protestant approach to biblical

hermeneutics in the early modern period is complicated by a number
of factors. First, the sixteenth-century movements for religious reform
were initiated from within Catholicism by individuals who had been
baptized into the Catholic Church, educated within its institutions,
and inspired by existing elements of that tradition. What we might
be tempted to identify as specifically Protestant emphases were thus
almost invariably incipient within medieval Catholicism. Second, while
it is possible to identify some characteristic features of what might be
called a Protestant approach to Scripture, there were important differ-
ences amongst the reformers themselves on the issue of the interpreta-
tion of Scripture. Indeed, as was the case with liturgical and doctrinal
matters, the attitude of some Protestants towards the interpretation
of Scripture was closer to Catholic positions than to the attitudes of
certain other Protestants. By way of contrast, given the degree of cen-
tral control that existed within post-Tridentine Catholicism, there was
much greater uniformity within the Catholic Church on questions of
biblical interpretation. Third, in the sixteenth century, the reading of
Scripture took place in a wide variety of contexts—doctrinal, devotional,
liturgical, critical, and controversial—and was constrained by a range
of external factors to do with literacy rates, access to printed texts, and
the availability of suitable translations. To speak in this context simply
of hermeneutics, understood as the theory of interpretation, is to over-
look significant aspects of how the Bible functioned in both religious
and ‘scientific’ contexts. Related to this is the fact that there could be
significant slippage between the theories of interpretation espoused by
various authors and their actual exegetical practices. Moreover, it can

1
I am grateful to the two anonymous referees of this chapter for their helpful and
insightful comments.

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342 peter harrison

be argued that Protestant readings of certain passages of Scripture

motivated scientific inquiry, and hence that the content of Scripture,
as rendered by particular interpretative strategies, was as important as
those hermeneutical strategies themselves. Finally, when we introduce
to this complex picture the question of ‘natural knowledge,’ we are
then faced with the inconvenient fact that the major reformers, Phillip
Melanchthon excepted, exhibited little, if any, interest in the pursuit
of formal knowledge of the natural world.2
In light of these considerations, offering a comprehensive account
of hermeneutics and natural knowledge in the Reformers in the span
of a brief chapter is simply not possible. What is possible, however, is
to point to some features of the approaches to Scripture of the major
reformers and suggest ways in which, in certain contexts, these may
have facilitated new approaches to the study of nature. Because of
the variety of viewpoints amongst Protestants on these questions, this
chapter will focus primarily on the ideas of Luther and Calvin, and
on their explicit statements about the theory of biblical interpretation
(rather than their exegetical practices or their readings of particular
passages of Scripture). Given that neither Luther nor Calvin was seri-
ously engaged in the study of nature, the question of natural knowledge
is better discussed in the context of whether new approaches to the
reading of the book of Scripture associated with these reformers had
an infl uence—intended or otherwise—on the way in which subsequent
thinkers may have come to read the book of nature. What I hope to
demonstrate in this chapter is that in the early modern period the inter-
pretation of Scripture was closely associated with the study of nature
and that, inevitably, changes in the sphere of hermeneutics had impor-
tant implications for natural history, astronomy, natural philosophy, and
other disciplines concerned with the natural world. More particularly,
Protestant critiques of some traditional medieval methods of biblical
interpretation gave rise to conditions that favored the development of
new ‘scientific’ approaches to the study of nature.3

2
On Melanchthon, and more generally on relations between sixteenth Lutheranism
and the study of nature in the sixteenth century, see Kusukawa 1995; Methuen 1998;
Kessler et al. 1997; Barker and Goldstein 2001.
3
Some elements of this thesis, in more nuanced form, have been set out in Har-
rison 1998. Further elaborations may be found in Harrison 2007b; Harrison 2007a;
Harrison 2005.

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Allegory and the Literal Sense

If there is one widely known generalization about the approach of the

Protestant reformers to hermeneutics, it is that they emphasized in an
unprecedented way the literal sense of Scripture.4 This common view
is confirmed by the reformers themselves. Martin Luther, for example,
wrote that the literal sense is “the highest, best, strongest, in short the
whole substance nature and foundation of the holy scripture.” The
Scriptures, he insisted, were to be understood “in their simplest mean-
ing as far as possible.”5 John Calvin likewise asserted that the exegete
should seek the historical or literal sense of the text, which he again
identified with the simple meaning of the words (simplici verborum sensu).6
This position was endorsed by all of the major reformers, although
Zwingli occasionally deviated from it. The literal or historical sense of
Scripture was typically contrasted with the allegorical sense. Luther
wrote that allegorical interpretations were the product of weak minds
and idleness, while Calvin insisted that allegorical interpretation was to
be used only for those cases in which the nature of the text demanded
it. All other readings were corruptions. Calvin summed up the position
in this way:
Scripture, they say, is fertile and thus bears multiple meanings . . . But I
deny that its fertility consists in the various meanings which anyone may
fasten to it at his pleasure. Let us know, then, that the true meaning of
Scripture is the natural and simple one, and let us embrace and hold it
resolutely. Let us not merely neglect as doubtful, but boldly set aside as
deadly corruptions those pretended expositions that lead us away from
the literal sense.7
Both Luther and Calvin associated allegorizing with the Alexandrian
Father, Origen, who was singled out as the originator of this dubious
method of biblical interpretation.8
Although sixteenth-century exegetes were often inclined to assert the
novelty of their approach to the biblical texts, it must be conceded that

4
For overviews of the hermeneutics of the Reformers see Thompson 2004; McKim
2006; McGrath 1987, ch. 6; Pelikan 1996; Muller and Thompson 1996; Kraus 1977;
Hendrix 1983; Parker 1993.
5
Answer to the Hyperchristian Book. Luther 1970, 177.
6
Hazlett 1991; de Greef 2006.
7
Calvin 1964, 84f. Cf. Calvin 1960, vol. 1: 339f.
8
Luther 1970, 146, 241. See McGrath 1987, 186; Thompson 2004, 63, 67f.

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their emphasis on the literal sense was not unprecedented. A number

of medieval thinkers had expressed similar reservations about the
extravagant use of allegory, and had pointed to the literal sense as the
foundational one.9 It would also be a mistake to interpret the Reform-
ers’ understanding of literal sense or historical sense in light of either
the historical critical method or more recent manifestations of funda-
mentalism. In order to understand what the reformers meant by literal
sense, it is necessary to briefl y consider the medieval practices of biblical
interpretation to which this notion of literal sense was opposed. To a
degree, Luther and Calvin were correct to attribute the introduction of
allegorical reading into the church to Origen. It was he who declared
that Scripture had three senses: “For as a man consists of body, soul,
and spirit, so in the same way does Scripture.” According to Origen,
the most basic level, the ‘body’ of Scripture as it were, was the literal
sense. The soul of Scripture was the moral sense, which taught how life
was to be lived. The most elevated meaning of scripture, however, was
to be found in the allegorical sense, which taught timeless theological
truths.10 This layered understanding of Scripture evolved into the four-
fold method of interpretation known as the quadriga. The four levels of
interpretation recognized throughout the middle ages were the literal,
tropological, anagogical, and allegorical. The interpretative division of
labour between the various levels is set out in this medieval verse:
Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria,
Moralis quid agas, quid speres anagogia.11
“The letter teaches what has happened, the allegory what you should
believe, The moral what you should do, the anagogical what you should
hope for.” The three higher levels of interpretation, sometimes collec-
tively known as the spiritual sense, were also linked to the theological
virtues. The tropological (moral) sense pertained to charity, the anagogi-
cal (prophetic) sense to hope, and the allegorical sense to faith. The

9
Smalley 1952, 356–67.
10
Origen 1989, 359; Origen 1990, 89.
11
For the more common four-fold system, see John Cassian, Colationes, xiv.8 (Migne
1844–1905 49, 962–5); Gregory the Great, Homilia in Ezechielem 2.9.8 (Migne
1844–1905 76, 1047B); Eucherius, Liber Formularum spiritualis intelligentiae, preface
(Migne 1844–1905 50, 727f.). On the verse see de Lubac 1959–64, I: 1, 23ff. For gen-
eral references in medieval literature to three- or four-fold interpretation see Guilbert
of Nogent, Quo ordine sermo fieri debet (Migne 1844–1905 156, 25D); Hugh of St.
Victor, Didascalicon V.2; Bonaventure, De Reductione artium ad theologiam, 5 (Hyman
and Walsh 1974, 424f.); Aquinas 1964–76, 1a. 1, 10; 1a. 113, 7; 1a2ae. 102, 2.

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four-fold method of interpretation was thus not simply a technique for

rendering meaning from a text—it was also an important component
of moral and spiritual formation.
The allegorical sense is of particular interest because it provided
a means of linking the words of Scripture with the things of nature,
and it thus underpinned the connection between the book of Scripture
and the book of nature. This understanding of allegory is explicit in
Augustine’s theory of signs. For Augustine, we understand the literal
sense when we connect the word with the thing to which the word refers.
We understand the allegorical sense when we connect the objects with
the other objects that they signify.12 The order of allegorical interpreta-
tion thus requires the literal sense to be established first—a word acts
as a sign (signum) which refers to a thing (res). Only then are we free
to speculate the allegorical sense, which is about the meanings of the
things referred to by the signs.13 Allegory was thus intimately related
to a particular conception of the cosmos and its meanings—a way of
thinking that was deeply indebted to Platonism and in particular to
Plotinus’s idea that the world was one great “sacrament.”14 Nature,
according to this Neoplatonic conception, mediates the experience and
knowledge of God.
It follows that allegory, thus understood, is as much about structures
of meaning in the natural world as it is about texts. The multiplicity
of meanings provided by allegorical readings thus arises not from the
ambiguity of the words, but because the objects to which they refer
bear multiple meanings. Thomas Aquinas was later to summarize this
approach in the following way:
These various readings do not set up ambiguity or any other kind of
mixture of meanings, because, as we have explained, they are many, not
because one term may signify many things, but because the things signi-
fied by the terms can themselves be the signs of other things.15
Patristic and medieval allegory could thus be a practice that linked texts
to the natural world. Theological meanings could be read into nature,
and indeed, the primary theological significance of nature was given

12
Markus 1972; Jackson 1972; Williams 1989.
13
Augustine 1958, 8f. Also see Bruns 1992, 141 and passim.
14
Armstrong 1967, 15. See also Crouzel 1962, 215.
15
Aquinas 1964–76, 1a, 1. 10. Cf. Quaestiones Quodlibetales VII.6.15; Hugh of St.
Victor 1961, V.2–3.

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in its theological meanings. The infl uential theologian and philosopher

Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1141), uses the two books metaphor to make
this point:
For the whole sensible world is like a kind of book written by the finger
of God—that is, created by divine power—and each particular creature
is somewhat like a figure, not invented by human decision, but instituted
by the divine will to manifest the invisible things of God’s wisdom. But in
the same way that some illiterate, if he saw an open book, would notice
the figures, but would not comprehend the letters, so also the stupid and
‘animal man’ who ‘does not perceive the things of God’, may see the
outward appearance of these visible creatures, but does not understand
the reason within.16
Hugh clearly believed that as part of his creative activity, God had
instituted a symbolic order in nature in which each creature had a
role to play by communicating some important theological truth. The
truths embedded in the natural world extended even to those tenets
of Christian faith usually considered to be revealed truths. Franciscan
theologian and doctor of the church, St. Bonaventure (1221–1274),
thus wrote in this connection that “the creature of the world is like a
book in which the creative Trinity is refl ected, represented, and writ-
ten.”17 Indeed, in the fifteenth century, the Catalan theologian Ramon
Sibiuda was to go so far as to suggest that the book of nature was a
mirror image of Scripture, and that nature, properly interpreted, not
only communicated something of God’s triune nature but provided
knowledge sufficient for salvation.
It is also important to understand that during the middle ages allegory
was more than simply part of a hermeneutical framework which, when
applied to specific texts, would facilitate the distillation of their mean-
ing. Allegorical reading was intimately related to medieval contempla-
tive practices, as Hugh of St. Victor’s writings make abundantly clear.
It could thus be a devotional activity in which the reader engaged in
an act of refl exive contemplation. Hugh of St. Victor contended that
there were three possible objects of contemplation—the creatures, the
bible, and the moral life. Allegory provided the necessary connections
between the contemplation of the creatures and the contemplation
of the text of Scripture. (Tropology linked Scripture with the moral

16
Hugh of St. Victor 1961, De tribus diebus 4, (Migne 1844–1905 122, 176.814
B–C). Translation mine.
17
Bonaventure, Breviloquium II.12.

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life.) Describing this general approach, Brian Stock writes that during
the middle ages allegory was “one of the privileged partners of silence
and contemplation.”18 For this reason, sixteenth-century criticisms of
allegory were not unrelated to new conceptions of the religious life, in
particular those advocated by Luther and Calvin, which emphasized
the importance of mundane activity and the earthly vocation.19
What should by now be abundantly clear is that allegory was not, as
we might imagine, simply a literary device. It had significant ontological
implications and was embedded in a particular ideal of the religious
life. When allegory is censured by Luther and Calvin, their target is
not the figurative and typological language and tropes of Scripture. It
is rather what they regarded as the practice of illegitimate allegoriza-
tion—one that vested religious authority in the imagination of the
individual interpreter or in the natural world—that is rejected. One way
of understanding the reformers’ preference for literal reading, then, is
in terms of what it negated—namely, the possibility of allegorizing in
the sense we have just described. Scripture was no longer thought to
provide a key for interpreting the religious meanings of nature. How-
ever, this denial of allegory did not necessarily rule out other aspects
of the interpretation which, strictly speaking, seem to go beyond pure
literalism. When we read the biblical commentaries of Luther and
Calvin we frequently encounter morals being drawn from the text
and we certainly encounter ‘typological’ readings of Old Testament
narratives that provide future-oriented prophetic references to New
Testament figures or even to contemporary historical events. However,
these readings are now included within the literal sense.
In this respect, the exegetical practices of the reformers resemble
those of Nicolas of Lyra (ca. 1270–1349), who had distinguished
between two kinds of literal sense: the literal-historical sense, which is the
more or less straightforward meaning of the narrative, and the literal-
prophetic sense, which has a future reference. For example, the classic
account of the suffering servant in Isaiah 53 can be read as referring
both to Israel (literal-historical sense) and to Christ (prophetic-historical
sense).20 In a similar fashion, Adam was understood as a type of
Christ. In Protestant readings of Scripture, typological interpretations

18
Stock 2001, 17; cf. 62–70.
19
Harrison 2007a.
20
See, e.g., Steinmetz 1997. Cf. Burnett 2004.

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such as these were common. Indeed, if anything, with the demise of

allegory, typology became more prevalent.21 While it may seem perverse
to claim that these typological readings were contained in the literal
sense, the more important issue for our purposes is to understand the
crucial difference between allegory and typology. The first assumes
that God communicates in a direct way through the creatures; the
second supposes God’s self-disclosure in historical events. The idea
that Christianity was above all else a historical religion was a major
emphasis of the reformers. God’s activities were thus to be discerned
in events rather than natural objects. This new emphasis, as we shall
see, was to strip the theological meanings from natural objects, thus
enabling the natural world to be invested with alternative principles of
intelligibility that were relatively independent of theological concerns.
Denial of allegory, then, has direct implications for how the order of
nature is perceived.
There was another way in which Luther and Calvin may be regarded
as having departed from a strict literalism, and that was in their applica-
tion of the principle of accommodation.22 According to this principle,
God had accommodated his self-revelation to the limited capacities of
human minds.23 Applied to the interpretation of the Bible, this gave
rise to the principle scriptura humane loquitur—Scripture speaks in human
language. It was this principle, for example, that enabled Calvin to assert
that when Moses had spoken in Genesis of the Sun and the Moon as
“two great lights,” he was not asserting some philosophical truth, but was
rather adapting his discourse to the common usage.24 Calvin’s student
Lambert Daneau (1530–1595), who occupied the chair of philosophy at
the University of Geneva, expressed a similar view, stating that Moses
“applied himself to the capacity of ourselves” and that his style was
“bare and simple.”25 Accommodation had long been an integral part
of the interpretative strategies of biblical exegesis and thus considered
by itself does not provide a way of distinguishing between Catholic and

21
Korshin 1982, esp. 31, 68f. For examples of typological readings in England see
Hill 1994, 103, 109–25. On the important differences between allegory and typology
see Harrison 1998, 129–137; Holder 2006, 129f.
22
See Hornig 1971; Benin 1993; Funkenstein 1986, 213–21.
23
It is frequently claimed that for Calvin the Incarnation was the ulitmate instance
of divine accommodation. For a critical survey of the literature on Calvin’s conception
of accommodation in relation to this claim see Balserak 2006, esp. 1–10, 163–84.
24
Calvin 1984, p. 87; cf. 256f; Calvin 1960, 1: 162; Luther 1995, 58.
25
Daneau 1578, fols. 9r–10v.

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Protestant approaches to exegesis. There was an important difference

in who was deemed qualified to apply the principle, however.
In sum, when we speak of Luther’s and Calvin’s preference for the
literal sense, this is not to be understood as an advocacy of crude lit-
eralism but rather an approach that sought to locate the most obvious
and simple meaning of the text, and which by no means excluded all
non-literal reading. Accommodation and typology were both widely
accepted ways of going beyond the bare literal meaning of the words.
As already noted, in certain respects this approach had precedents in
medieval hermeneutics—first, in the long-standing principle that the
literal sense was foundational and the only sense to which appeal could
be made in the realm of theological controversy; second, in Nicolas
of Lyra’s distinction between two kinds of literal sense; third, in the
traditional notion that the divine word was accommodated to human
capacities. However, in their explicit denial of allegory, the reformers
were rejecting a hermeneutical approach that closely linked the read-
ing of Scripture and the interpretation of nature. As we shall see, this
made a crucial difference.

Hermeneutics in the Age of the Reformation

In order to make the case that the Protestant Reformation made possible
a major hermeneutical shift, more is required than the identification of
specific ways in which Protestant exegesis differed from the interpreta-
tive practices of medieval Catholicism. After all, the kinds of changes
advocated by Luther and Calvin may have been paralleled by similar
developments within Catholicism. For this reason it is worth taking a
brief look at trends in sixteenth-century Catholic hermeneutics. The
first thing that can be said on this point is that in Catholicism, too,
there does seem to be a tendency to move towards a more simple and
literal exegesis of Scripture.26 To some degree this is not surprising. The
sixteenth century was an era of unprecedented theological controversy,
and given that theological debate was to be informed by the literal sense
alone, a renewed focus on the literal meaning of relevant passages of
Scripture is to be expected. Moreover, there is no obvious reason why
the humanist preference for the historical sense of the Bible would

26
Kelter 1995.

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not have infl uenced Catholics as well as Protestants. That said, it is

interesting that we still find amongst prominent Catholic writers of the
period an endorsement of the medieval view that passages of Scripture
can bear multiple meanings. Thus, Robert Bellarmine, in his Disputations
on the Controversies over Christian Faith (1586–1593), insisted that Scripture
had two levels of meaning: “the literal or historical, and the spiritual or
mystical.” The literal sense is further subdivided after the manner of
Nicolas of Lyra, while the spiritual sense is said to include the allegori-
cal, tropological, and anagogical.27 In short, Bellarmine endorsed the
medieval quadriga. Bellarmine was not an isolated case, and it is safe
to assume that allegorical readings of Scripture persisted for longer in
the Catholic Church than in the Protestant confessions.
Furthermore, even if there had been no in principle difference
between Catholic and Protestant on the question of how the Bible
was to be interpreted, there remained a vital division between the two
camps, formalized during the fourth session of the Council of Trent.
Here it was determined that authority to interpret Scripture was vested
not in individuals, but the Church:
. . . no one relying on his own judgment shall, in matters of faith and
morals pertaining to the edification of Christian doctrine, distorting the
Holy Scriptures in accordance with his own conceptions, presume to
interpret them contrary to that sense which holy mother Church, to whom
it belongs to judge of their true sense and interpretation, has held and
holds, or even contrary to the unanimous teaching of the Fathers. . . .
This position was reasserted and amplified by Bellarmine in his Con-
troversies: “The judge of the true meaning of Scripture,” he argued,
“is the Church, that is, the pontiff with a council.” Bellarmine went
on to explicitly contrast this view with that of Luther, Melanchthon,
and Calvin, who were said to vest authority to interpret Scripture in
“individual persons.”28
Restricting the authority to interpret Scripture to the Church—the
Pope, the councils, and the Fathers—was one of the basic issues that
divided Catholic and Protestant. Even if there were a trend within
sixteenth-century Catholicism towards a new literalism, or towards
readings of Scripture that were more consonant with developments in
natural philosophy, these exegetical tendencies were likely to be held

27
Bellarmine 1991, 187–193. For Blackwell’s account of Bellarmine’s hermeneutics,
see Blackwell 1991, 33–5.
28
Ibid.

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in check by an inherently conservative bias towards traditional inter-

pretations. Because of their commitment to a cumulative interpretative
tradition, Catholic exegetes were forced to contend with patristic and
medieval readings of Scripture that their Protestant counterparts were
free to ignore if they so chose. And because allegorical readings were
part of that tradition, they remained a present reality within contem-
porary Catholic exegesis.29 Similarly, even though accommodation
was part of the exegetical apparatus of both Catholic and Protestant
scholars, whether a specific passage of Scripture had been accommo-
dated or not was determined for Catholics by the Church, and not the
individual reader.
One way of seeing the impact of these issues is to consider the
case of Galileo. When Galileo reported his discovery of the moons of
Jupiter in Siderus nuncius (1610), the promising young scholar Francesco
Sizzi responded in a small work entitled Dianoia astronomica (1611). Sizzi
pointed out that Scripture teaches the existence of but seven celestial
orbs (the Sun, Moon, and five visible planets), for all of the Fathers had
agreed that the seven lamps of the golden candelabra referred to in
Ex. 25.37 and Zech. 4.2 symbolize the heavenly bodies.30 The patristic
consensus on a particular allegorical interpretation thus told against
Galileo’s new vision of the cosmos. Equally, however, the literal sense
also counted against the heliocentric view.31 While Galileo made an
eloquent appeal to the principle of accommodation in his Letter to the
Grand Duchess Christina concerning the Use of Biblical Quotations in Matters of
Science (1615), this too was rejected—not because of any difficulty with
the principle itself, but because it was not Galileo’s place to determine
when the principle was to be applied.32 Francesco Ingoli (1578–1649)
in De situ et qiete terrae contra copernici systema disputatio (unpublished, ca.
1615) thus dismissed Galileo’s appeal to accommodation by pointing
to the consensus of the Fathers:

29
Even the biblical text itself, in the Glossa ordinaria, was surrounded with the glosses
and comments of the Fathers and later biblical commentators. These provided an
interpretative web in which the text was physically embedded. Harrison 1998, 92f;
Bruns 1992, 139.
30
Blackwell 1991, 57. Drake 1978, 467.
31
The biblical passages typically used against Galileo were these: Gen. 1:17, Josh.
12:10, 1 Chron. 16:30, Ps. 104:5, Prov. 8:25, 27:3, 30:3, Isa. 40:12, Job 26:7, Eccles. 1:5.
32
Galilei 1957, 175–216. Specifically on accommodation see 182, 199. Also see
McMullin 1998, 271–347; Brooke 1991, 77–81.

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Replies which assert that Scripture speaks according to our mode of

understanding are not satisfactory: both because in explaining the Sacred
Writings the rule is always to preserve the literal sense, when that is pos-
sible, as it is in this case; and also because all the Fathers unanimously
take this passage to mean to that the sun which was moving truly stopped
at Joshua’s request.33
What these examples show is that whatever the stated principles of
exegesis of a particular group, equally important is the question of who
has the authority to apply them, and who it is that ultimately determines
if the principles have been correctly implemented. There was a major
difference between the various Protestant confessions and the Catholic
Church on these issues. The principle of the priesthood of all believ-
ers effectively removed the control of interpretation of Scripture away
from the Magisterium of the Church, empowering alternative groups
or individuals to read and interpret Scripture for themselves. Playing
a supporting role were the Protestant critiques of implicit faith and
their attempts to make the Bible more widely available to lay persons.
More generally, the anti-Aristotelian rhetoric of many Protestants also
led to an environment that was more accepting of alternative philo-
sophical approaches.34 Slavish adherence to tradition, in the sphere of
the interpretation of Scripture or of nature, could be regarded as a
sign of timorous papism. This intellectual environment, in turn, led to
a hardening of resolve on the part of Catholic authorities in relation
to particular issues in the realm of natural philosophy. Thus Galileo
had the misfortune to be claiming exegetical authority for himself at
precisely the historical moment during which those entrusted by the
Church with the task of exegesis found their own position most under
threat, primarily by Protestant controversialists.35 Differences in herme-
neutical principles alone, while they may be significant, do not tell the
whole story of what distinguishes Protestant from Catholic approaches
to Scripture. Church polity and conceptions of ecclesiastical authority
are also important elements of the equation.
All of this suggests that it is plausible to argue that there were sig-
nificant differences between Catholic and Protestant on hermeneuti-
cal issues, both in terms of the substantive content of the exegetical
principles they espoused, and in the manner of their application. On

33
Galilei, Opere V, 411, quoted in Blackwell 1991, 63; Cf. Brooke, 97f.
34
For specific examples see Heyd 1982, 81–6.
35
McMullin 1998, 274f.

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this latter point, we have briefl y seen some of the ways in which the
issue of who has the authority to interpret Scripture has implications
for natural philosophy. In the third and final section of this paper I
want to consider the former question, viz., how the different emphasis
of Protestant hermeneutics, and in particular the rejection of allegory,
indirectly infl uenced the study of nature.

Hermeneutics and the Natural World

The basic claim to be set out in this section is that the rejection of
allegory necessitated the development of a new understanding of the
relationship between words and things. Given that for Augustine and
Aquinas allegorical meaning resided in things (rather than words), criti-
cism of allegory amounted to a rejection of the idea that the natural
world was to be interpreted, in tandem with the words of Scripture,
as a book that symbolized transcendental theological truths. This point
is directly related to the well-known reformation motto—sola scrip-
tura. For the reformers, the Scriptures provided a sufficient basis for
Christian faith, and thus there was no need to search elsewhere. 36
Allegory, as traditionally understood, actually directed the reader
away from the words of Scripture to the things of nature. Allegorical
interpretation, conducted as the quest for the symbolic meanings of
natural objects, thus contradicted one of the fundamental principles
of the Reformation. The book of nature did not refl ect revealed truths
of Christianity, and knowledge of God could be gleaned from the
study of nature only in an indirect fashion. Thus, nature could not,
as Bonaventure and Ramon Sibuida had thought, bear traces of the
triune nature of God.
Luther and Calvin, as noted earlier, had priorities other than the
study of nature. Nonetheless, the hermeneutical revolution to which
they contributed, in combination with their insistence on the primacy
of scriptural authority, had major implications for natural history and
natural philosophy and made an important contribution to the revo-
lutionary changes that took place over the course of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Some indication of the momentous nature of
this change in the conception of the natural order can be gleaned from
the way in which book of nature metaphors begin to change in the

36
On the sufficiency of Scripture for the Protestants, see Frei 1993, 163.

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period following the Reformation.37 In seventeenth-century England,

for example, Francis Bacon agreed that there were two books, but he
went on to point out that the objects of nature show “the power and
ability of their maker, but not his image.” The study of nature does
have religious significance, but we no longer discover in the natural
world refl ections of the triune nature of God. Rather we infer, from
what we discover there, truths about God’s power and wisdom. Bacon
also insists on the relative independence of the two spheres. The
study of God’s works is properly the realm of philosophy; the study
of his words, the realm of theology. These two subjects should not be
“unwisely mingled” or “confounded together.”38
Freed from the specifically theological enterprise of hermeneutics,
the natural world was now able to be reconfigured according to other
principles. In essence, the order of nature no longer resided in the
similitudes which natural objects bore to theological truths, but instead
was found in mathematical or taxonomic order.39 For those concerned
with astronomy, mechanics, or kinematics, the book of nature was writ-
ten in mathematical language. Johannes Kepler thus announced in the
Preface to his Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596) that God had written on
the pages of the book of nature in the language of geometry. Galileo
similarly wrote that “philosophy is written in this grand book, the uni-
verse.” In order to interpret it we must understand that it is “written
in the language of mathematics.”40 In the sphere of natural history, the
physico-theologian and pioneer of taxonomy, John Ray (1627–1705),
was similarly to insist that works on plants, animals, and birds, must
now discard the older symbolic interpretations that had hitherto been
an integral part of the study of living things. He proudly declared in
the preface of a work on ornithology that he and his co-author had
wholly omitted what we find in other Authors concerning Homonymous
and Synonymous words, or the divers names of Birds, Hieroglyphics, Emblems,
Morals, Fables, Presages or ought else appertaining to Divinity, Ethics, Gram-
mar, or any sort of Humane Learning.

37
For a more detailed account of such changes, see Harrison 2005.
38
Bacon 1857–74, III, 350. Bacon still asserted that there were two books however.
See Bacon 1974, I.vi.16; I.i.3.
39
Thus Michel Foucault on order in the early modern period: “When dealing with
the ordering of simple natures, one has recourse to a mathesis, or which the universal
method is algebra. When dealing with the ordering of complex natures . . . one has to
constitute a taxonomia. . . .” (1987, 72).
40
Kepler 1999, 53f., 123, 125 n. 2; Galilei 1957, 237–238. Cf. Galilei 1962, 3.

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The reader is presented instead “only with what properly relates to

their Natural History.”41 For Ray, tropological and allegorical readings
of the book of nature were no more admissible than were such read-
ings of the book of Scripture.
Because the meanings of nature could now no longer be read off
the surface appearances of things, there developed more aggressive
ways of ‘interpreting’ natural things. Instead of a quiescent ‘contem-
plation of the creatures,’ more active and invasive techniques such
as experimentation and dissection were now thought to be necessary.
Robert Boyle, for example, argued that experimentation provides the
natural philosopher with the means to “read the stenography of God’s
omniscient hand.”42 Boyle believed that, like Scripture, the book of
nature had a relatively simple message that was clear and unambigu-
ous. God, he believed, had accommodated the language of the book of
nature so that its most basic messages could be read from the surfaces
of things. Yet, as in the case of Scripture, there were also aspects to
nature that were difficult to understand. Interpretation of these more
obscure aspects called for the more intensive methods of investigation
that characterized the experimental philosophy:
. . . for as (such is God’s condescension to human weakness) most of the
texts, to whose exposition physiology is necessary, may be explicated by
the knowledge of the external, or at least more easily observed qualities
of the creatures; so, there are divers not to be fully understood without
the assistance of more penetrating indagations of the abstrusities of
nature, and the more unobvious properties of things, an intelligent and
philosophical peruser will readily discern.43
Astute readers may have noticed that I have enlisted the Catholic Gali-
leo amongst those whom I am claiming as exemplars of the new way
of reading the world that was prompted in part by a new Protestant
hermeneutics. This need not constitute a major embarrassment for the
thesis that I am sketching out here. After all, if the advent of Protes-
tantism contributed to the demise of the ‘symbolist’ mentality of the
Middle Ages, there is no obvious reason why this change would respect
the somewhat arbitrary boundaries of the confessional divisions of
early modern Europe. Moreover, in a certain sense, in insisting on his

41
Ray and Willughby 1678.
42
Boyle 1772, II: 62–63. See also Boyle 2000, xiii.
43
Ibid., 20.

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356 peter harrison

prerogative to interpret Scripture according to his own lights, Galileo

was adopting the position espoused by the Reformers. His assertion of
the independence of the natural philosophy and theology is similarly
consistent with the Protestant view. Not surprisingly, he attracted the
attention of the Holy Office and, famously, was found to be “vehemently
suspected of heresy.”44 For this reason Bellarmine might be the better
choice as an exemplar of Catholic science than Galileo. That said, it is
not entirely satisfactory simply to characterize prominent seventeenth-
century natural philosophers as Protestant simply by virtue of their
progressive and reforming stance. The case that Protestant hermeneu-
tics made a specific contribution to the emergence of early modern
science would be stronger if it could be demonstrated that those who
retained elements of the more traditional (i.e., Catholic) approach to
the interpretation of Scripture also took a different approach to the
study of nature.
This is not the occasion to embark upon the kind of comparative
exercise that would provide a full vindication of my general claim and,
as is well known, previous attempts to align Protestantism and science
have met with significant objections. There are, however, instructive
examples that can be drawn from the scientific activities conducted at
the Jesuit Collegio Romano that might lend some general credence to
the suggestion that hermeneutical commitments are relevant to scientific
endeavors. The polymath Athanasius Kircher was the best known Jesuit
naturalist of the seventeenth century. He assembled a famous museum
at the Collegio Romano—where he taught for several years—and on
account of his vast learning he has been plausibly designated “the last
Renaissance man.” His works, however, defy precise characterization,
seemingly combining ‘scientific’ and esoteric elements in a puzzling
amalgam. One possible explanation for his apparently idiosyncratic
eclecticism is to interpret elements of his works as still refl ecting the
symbolic and meditative exegetical traditions associated with medieval
allegory. In a recent study of Kircher’s Mundus subterraneus (1664)—which
provides an account of the subterranean structure of the earth—Mark
Waddell suggests that what we encounter in Kircher’s ostensibly geologi-
cal work is “a series of figurative and emblematic images of the natural
world.” The style and purpose of those images, he suggests, “can be
linked with specific meditative traditions present within the Society of

44
Finocchiaro 2005, 7–15.

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 hermeneutics and natural knowledge in the reformers 357

Jesus.”45 Kircher’s approach to the study of nature bears lingering traces

of the contemplative approach to the natural world which linked the
moral and theological messages of Scripture with those symbolized in
the created order. In England, however, Fellows of the Royal Society
found this approach perplexing and at odds with their more austere
observational and experimental approach.
We might add to these observations the case-study of Jesuit science
conducted by Rivka Feldhay and Michael Heyd. In a volume of Science
in Context devoted to the Merton Thesis they suggest that the Jesuits
operating within the Collegio Romano during the seventeenth century
retained an interpretative ‘hermeneutics’ of nature in their astronomical
studies and that to this extent they differed from their Calvinist coun-
terparts at the University of Geneva. “Unlike the Jesuits,” they write,
Continental Reformed philosophers such as [ Jean-Robert] Chouet were
deeply suspicious of any ‘symbolic’ approach to nature, an approach
which to them savored of magic, occultism, and mysticism. In their view,
the meaning of phenomena taken as ‘signs’ would necessarily be outside
the realm of nature.46
As we have seen, this suspicion of symbolic readings of nature also
characterized the natural history of John Ray and his associates. If
the findings of Waddell, Feldhay and Heyd in relation to the Collegio
Romano could be shown to characterize ‘Jesuit science’ more gener-
ally, this would lend further credence to the claim that the Protestant
rejection of allegorical interpretation made an observable difference to
the manner in which natural philosophy was conducted.
A further difference between Catholic and Protestant approaches
might be said to lie in the possibility of retaining multiple meanings
for both books of nature and Scripture. It is a commonplace amongst
historians of early modern science that one of the distinctive features
of the ‘new’ astronomy was an increasing insistence that mathemati-
cal astronomy be granted real rather than instrumental status. On the
instrumentalist view, more than one mathematical hypothesis could
“save the phenomena.” In short, this enabled multiple astronomical
readings of the same phenomena. On the realist account, however,

45
Waddell 2006.
46
Feldhay and Heyd 1989, 133. For the role of symbols and emblems in Jesuit
scholarship see Scaglione 1986, 89.

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358 peter harrison

there could be only one true physical explanation.47 Part of what was
at issue was the status of mathematical astronomy in relation to natural
philosophy, and the related question of the Aristotelian-Thomist orga-
nization of the sciences. Again, the analysis of Feldhay and Michael
Heyd is suggestive. They point to the contrasting approaches of the
Jesuit Franciscus Eschinardus and the Calvinist Jean-Robert Chouet
in their presentation of the rival astronomies of Ptolemy, Tycho, and
Copernicus. It is their contention that:
Unlike Eschinardus, Chouet did not present the three hypotheses as three
alternative and equally plausible meanings of the astronomical ‘signs’ at
our disposal. He was clearly committed to the Copernican hypothesis,
and . . . the term ‘hypothesis’ had a very different meaning for him than
it did for Eschinardus.48
Chouet wished to argue for a single reading of the celestial phenomena,
while his Jesuit counterpart was happy to entertain multiple readings.
Irving Kelter has suggested, along similar lines, that in the early decades
of the seventeenth century the Jesuit commitment “to teach according
to the authority of Aristotle in philosophy and Aquinas in theology”
militated against mathematical astronomy achieving the more elevated
(and realist) status accorded to natural philosophy.49
These developments hint at the intriguing possibility that an unequi-
vocal reading of the book of nature went hand in hand with a new
emphasis on realism in astronomy. There are, of course, other factors
associated with the tendency towards realism in astronomy, but the gen-
eral alignment of a Protestant insistence of the univocality of Scripture
and an insistence of there being one true explanation of astronomical
phenomena is at the very least suggestive.50

47
On instrumentalism in astronomy see Westman 1980. But cf. Barker and Gold-
stein 1998.
48
Feldhay and Heyd 1989, 135f.
49
Kelter 1995, 282. On the relative status and organization of the sciences in the
middle ages, see Weisheipl 1965; McKirahan, Jr. 1978; Lennox 1986.
50
This had been a key issue in the Galileo affair, and in the Dialogue, Galileo had
disingenuously suggested that the heliocentric view was only one possible model. Galilei
1962, 464. See also Shea 1986, esp. 131.

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 hermeneutics and natural knowledge in the reformers 359

Conclusion

What I have argued in this chapter is that some of the distinctive

features of Protestant approaches to the interpretation of Scripture in
the sixteenth century had important implications for the way in which
nature was to be studied. To deny the possibility of allegory, as Luther
and Calvin did, was to facilitate the erosion of religious meanings from
the natural world, and allow for the possibility of new ways of read-
ing the book of nature that were independent of the interpretation
of Scripture. Thus, even though Luther and Calvin were not directly
concerned with the study of nature, some aspects of their approach
to Scripture indirectly made possible new natural histories and natural
philosophies. To function as a robust category of historical explanation,
however, Protestant hermeneutics needs to be considered in a broader
context. This includes not merely the authority structures within which
hermeneutical principles operated but also a range of other features
of the Protestant Reformation not considered in any detail in this
essay. The Protestant attitude to symbols generally, evidenced in new
approaches to the sacraments, liturgy, images and icons, played a role
in the demystification of nature, again making room for alternative,
non-religious ways of ordering the world. The Calvinist and Lutheran
preference for the active life also rendered medieval meditative reading
less relevant, and promoted a reading of certain passages of Scripture
that underscored the importance of the earthly vocation. This could
promote an active engagement with the natural world, as opposed to a
more passive contemplative approach. Also important was the Protestant
emphasis on divine sovereignty, which arguably helped promote the
idea that nature was governed by externally imposed laws, rather than
being driven by the internal properties of natural objects. In a sense,
the stripping away of the inherent meanings of natural objects which
was the consequence of the Protestant repudiation of allegory was
paralleled in the sphere of natural philosophy by the evacuation of the
inherent Aristotelian causes from matter. The corpuscular philosophy,
the idea of laws of nature, and the tendency towards occasionalism in
conceptions of causation—developments that can plausibly be associ-
ated with theological developments—may be regarded, together with
Protestant hermeneutics, as having promoted the desacralization of the
world. By so doing, they inadvertently encouraged the emergence of
those distinctive early modern approaches to nature that play so central
a role in the genealogy of modern science.

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360 peter harrison

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 Nature and Scripture in the
Abrahamic Religions: Up to 1700

Volume 2

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Brill’s Series in
Church History
Edited by
Wim Janse, Amsterdam

In cooperation with
Theo Clemens, Utrecht/Antwerpen
Olivier Fatio, Genève
Alastair Hamilton, London
Scott Mandelbrote, Cambridge
Andrew Pettegree, St. Andrews

VOLUME 36

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Nature and Scripture in the
Abrahamic Religions:
Up to 1700
Volume 2

Edited by
Jitse M. van der Meer
Scott Mandelbrote

LEIDEN • BOSTON
2008

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On the cover: Painting from the Ultimate Realities collection by Wilhelmina Kennedy.
Photo by Edwin Amsden. Used by kind permission.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

ISSN 1572-4107
ISBN 978 90 04 17187 9 (volume 1)
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 Dedicated to the Jackman Foundation
in grateful acknowledgment of support
through the Reverend Edward Jackman

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 CONTENTS

VOLUME 1

Acknowledgements ..................................................................... xi
Notes on Contributors ................................................................ xiii
List of Illustrations ...................................................................... xvii

INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS

Chapter One Introduction ...................................................... 3

Jitse M. van der Meer and Scott Mandelbrote

Chapter Two On the Concept and History of Philosophical

Religions .................................................................................. 35
Carlos Fraenkel

PART I

100–800

Chapter Three Nature and Scripture: The Two Witnesses to

the Creator .............................................................................. 85
Pamela Bright

Chapter Four Natural Knowledge and Textual Meaning in

Augustine’s Interpretation of Genesis: The Three Functions
of Natural Philosophy ............................................................. 117
Kenneth J. Howell

Chapter Five Entering “This Sublime and Blessed

Amphitheatre”: Contemplation of Nature and Interpretation
of the Bible in the Patristic Period ......................................... 147
Paul M. Blowers

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viii contents

PART II

800–1450

Chapter Six Interpreting the Books of Nature and Scripture

in Medieval and Early Modern Thought: An Introductory
Essay ........................................................................................ 179
Charlotte Methuen

Chapter Seven Thomas Aquinas on Science, Sacra Doctrina,

and Creation ........................................................................... 219
William E. Carroll

Chapter Eight Science and Theodicy in Qur ān 2:6/7 ......... 249

Robert G. Morrison

PART III

1450–1700

Chapter Nine The Hermeneutics of Nature and

Scripture in Early Modern Science and Theology ............... 275
Kenneth J. Howell

Chapter Ten The Two Books and Adamic Knowledge:

Reading the Book of Nature and Early Modern Strategies
for Repairing the Effects of the Fall and of Babel ................ 299
James J. Bono

Chapter Eleven Hermeneutics and Natural Knowledge in the

Reformers ................................................................................ 341
Peter Harrison

VOLUME 2

Chapter Twelve God, Scripture, and the Rise of Modern

Science (1200–1700): Notes in the Margin of Harrison’s
Hypothesis ............................................................................... 363
Jitse M. van der Meer and Richard J. Oosterhoff

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 contents ix

Chapter Thirteen Sacred Philosophy, Secular Theology:

The Mosaic Physics of Levinus Lemnius (1505–1568) and
Francisco Valles (1524–1592) ................................................. 397
Kathleen M. Crowther

Chapter Fourteen “Horrible and Blasphemous”: Isaac la

Peyrère, Isaac Vossius, and the Emergence of Radical
Biblical Criticism in the Dutch Republic .............................. 429
Eric Jorink

Chapter Fifteen Thomas Burnet, Biblical Idiom, and

Seventeenth-Century Theories of the Earth .......................... 451
Kerry V. Magruder

Chapter Sixteen “Not in the Language of Astronomers”:

Isaac Newton, the Scriptures, and the Hermeneutics of
Accommodation ...................................................................... 491
Stephen D. Snobelen

Chapter Seventeen Creation, Time, and Biblical

Hermeneutics in Early Modern Jewish Philosophy ............... 531
T.M. Rudavsky

PART IV

COPERNICAN DEBATES AND SCRIPTURE

Chapter Eighteen Tycho Brahe, Caspar Peucer, and

Christoph Rothmann on Cosmology and the Bible ............. 563
Miguel A. Granada

Chapter Nineteen Kepler and Melanchthon on the Biblical

Arguments against Copernicanism ........................................ 585
Peter Barker

Chapter Twenty The Debate on the Motion of Earth in the

Dutch Republic in the 1650s ................................................. 605
Rienk H. Vermij

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Chapter Twenty-One The Biblical Argument against

Copernicanism and the Limitation of Biblical Authority:
Ingoli, Foscarini, Galileo, Campanella .................................. 627
Maurice A. Finocchiaro

Chapter Twenty-Two “Our Mathematicians Have Learned

and Verified This”: Jesuits, Biblical Exegesis, and the
Mathematical Sciences in the Late Sixteenth and Early
Seventeenth Centuries ............................................................ 665
Volker R. Remmert

Chapter Twenty-Three “In the Language of Men”: The

Hermeneutics of Accommodation in the Scientific
Revolution ............................................................................... 691
Stephen D. Snobelen

Index ........................................................................................... 733

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 CHAPTER TWELVE

GOD, SCRIPTURE, AND THE RISE OF MODERN SCIENCE

(1200–1700): NOTES IN THE MARGIN OF
HARRISON’S HYPOTHESIS

Jitse M. van der Meer1 and Richard J. Oosterhoff

Harrison’s Hypothesis

Something as complex as natural science could not have emerged unless

many conditions were fulfilled. Most important among them, Peter
Harrison has proposed, was a new conception of the natural order that
emerged between the twelfth and the seventeenth centuries, in which
symbolic relations between things were replaced with causal relations.
As Huizinga observes: “The symbolic mentality was an obstacle to the
development of causal thought, as causal and genetic relations must
needs look insignificant by the side of symbolic connexions.”2 In this
chapter we assume, with Huizinga and Harrison, that the symbolic
view of nature diverted attention away from nature to God and that
the rise of modern science required a focus on nature for its own sake.
Within this framework, however, we question his explanation of why
and when this decline of nature symbolism occurred.
To understand why Harrison thinks the turn from symbolic to causal
thought was an important condition for the rise of modern science
we need to sketch some details of nature symbolism. In the symbolic
or emblematic view of the world things, like words, have meaning.
As Augustine says, God speaks not only the language of words, but
also the language of things. This contribution from early Christianity
merged with the Neoplatonic tradition originating in Alexandria. Its
guiding idea was that God brings about material things, events, and
persons as symbols pointing to eternal spiritual realities. In describing

1
Corresponding author <[email protected]>.
2
Huizinga 1924, 204–05. The idea that nature symbolism diverts attention away
from nature for its own sake has also been suggested by Gilson 1944, Ch. 5; Eco 1986,
53 and Eco 1988, 140–41.

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the legacy of the hermeneutics of Augustine to the medieval world

Harrison writes:
physical objects themselves came increasingly to be obscured by those
transcendental truths which they were supposed to represent . . . . if the
meaning of nature was determined by the meaning of scripture, the
symbols which were to be found in the physical world could not of
themselves constitute any intelligible pattern. Their ordering principles
lay beyond them, embedded in the eternal truths of the spiritual or
intelligible world.3
After the twelfth century this ‘vertical’ orientation of symbolism was
complemented by a growing emphasis on ‘horizontal’ similarities
between objects of nature due to an increasing attention to nature.
Up until now resemblances had served in the main to connect material
entities with eternal verities. . . . Now, while material things still signify
transcendental realities, they have a new significance which arises out of
their relatedness to other things. . . . [F ]or the first time in the Christian
era, this world was to be invested with its own patterns of order, pat-
terns which were based on similitudes perceived to exist among material
things themselves. [Yet,] Absent from these assumed connexions . . . is any
sustained treatment of the resemblances which can be found amongst
physical things themselves. It is not that these are completely denied, . . . .
However, such resemblances were not explored for their own sakes, but
used in an instrumental fashion to serve the purposes of theological or
moral edification.4
Thus Harrison suggests that despite the new ‘horizontal’ relationships,
nature continued to be contemplated not for itself, but for God’s
sake. This blocked the development of science. Moreover, the poly-
semy of things continued to render the meaning of Scripture texts
indeterminate.
The removal of this block, which Harrison has proposed as a con-
dition for the rise of modern science, started with a reformation of
Scripture interpretation.
The most direct challenge to the powerful symbolic universe was to come
not from new discoveries in the empirical world, but from a new approach
to the interpretation of texts, one which would lead to an irrevocable
divide between . . . words and things.5

3
Harrison 1998, 31, 32.
4
Ibid., 41–42, 43.
5
Ibid., 92.

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 god, scripture, and the rise of modern science 365

The problem for the Protestant reformers, Harrison argues, was the
indeterminacy of meaning of texts in Scripture that came with the
symbolic world view. A word in Scripture can refer unequivocally to a
material object (literal sense). But in a symbolic worldview an object in
Scripture refers to another object which may represent a spiritual or a
nonspiritual reality (allegorical or symbolic sense). As a result a word
in Scripture had at least two meanings—a literal meaning as well as
an allegorical or spiritual one.6 There were several kinds of spiritual
meaning corresponding with different kinds of spiritual realities. Applied
to the interpretation of Scripture by the church fathers this eventually
resulted in the so-called Quadriga, the principle that each word or text
in Scripture has a fourfold meaning: the literal sense and three spiritual
senses. For instance, the word Jerusalem is understood literally as the
city of the Jews (literal-historical sense). Spiritually, Jerusalem is under-
stood as the church of Christ (allegorical sense), as the heavenly city
(anagogical sense), and as the individual soul (tropological sense). The
literal sense refers to what exists in nature and history. The spiritual
sense refers to three spiritual realities: what you believe in (allegorical
sense), what you hope for (anagogical sense), and what you ought to
do (tropological or moral sense). The four senses apply to both Scrip-
ture and nature because Scripture as well as nature are interpreted in
terms of vertical similitudes between material and spiritual realities. In
characterizing the medieval Quadriga, Harrison observes:
The medieval assertion that the literal sense was the foundation of all
interpretation was thus consistent with the view that biblical texts were
equivocal. Over all, evidence from medieval commentaries supports
Chenu’s assertion that throughout the Middle Ages systematic allegori-
zation had universally destroyed the literal text of scripture. By way of
contrast, when the reformers championed the literal sense their concern
was to deny the indeterminacy of meaning of canonical texts, and thus to
insist that each passage of scripture had but a single, fixed meaning.7

6
In the literature terminological chaos reigns. In the language of things ‘allegory’
refers to all three spiritual meanings of things together as well as to one of the three
spiritual senses (what you believe in). We define these two as allegory in the broad sense
and allegory in the strict sense. Allegory or spiritual meaning broadly speaking thus
comprises the three spiritual senses that things, events and persons can have. Since
each of the three nonliteral senses is concerned with the spiritual meaning of things a
simple distinction between literal and spiritual sense is frequently used in the literature
and we will follow this usage as much as possible.
7
Harrison 1998, 111.

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Thus the problem for the Protestant reformers, as Harrison sees it, lay
in the indeterminacy of meaning of the text of Scripture. But Harrison
notes that the ambiguity of Scripture texts is due to the indeterminacy
of things of nature. In other words, it is not the ambiguity of language,
but the ambiguity of things of nature that is the problem. As Harrison
explains,
According to Augustine, multiplicity of meaning is a function of things,
and not words. There exist different layers of meaning in scripture not
because the words used are equivocal, but because the things to which the
words refer bear multiple meanings. Origen’s scheme of interpretation
was thus recast: the literal sense of scripture is to be found in the univo-
cal meaning of the words; the spiritual sense, in the various meanings
of the objects to which the words refer. This conception of the multiple
meanings of scripture was universally received in the Middle Ages. As
Aquinas was later to express it: ‘These various readings do not set up
ambiguity or any other kind of mixture of meanings, because, as we
have explained, they are many, not because one term may signify many
things, but because the things signified by the terms can themselves be
the signs of other things.’8
Harrison concludes:
Multiple meanings emerge from allegorical readings of texts because
the things to which the words literally refer have themselves further
multiple references. . . . The multiplicity of meanings which arises out of
allegorical readings is thus a function of the reader’s view of the nature
of objects.9
Thus indeterminacy of meaning does not lie in the text, but in the
things the text refers to because these things symbolize other things.
Hence Harrison’s conclusions that a rejection of nature symbolism not
only solved the Protestant reformers’ problem of ambiguous Scripture
texts, but also allowed attention to nature without it being diverted to
God. This attention to nature made room for a nonsymbolic concep-
tion of the order of nature.
Harrison proposes that the Protestant reformers instigated this rejec-
tion of nature symbolism:
when the reformers championed the literal sense their concern was
to deny the indeterminacy of meaning of canonical texts, and thus to
insist that each passage of scripture had but a single, fixed meaning. . . .

8
Ibid., 28.
9
Ibid., 28–29, 114; see also 4, 113, 123; Chenu 1968, 136.

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 god, scripture, and the rise of modern science 367

It was always possible that . . . the single sense of some biblical passage
was not, strictly, its literal sense, as for example in the parables of Jesus,
or the prophecies of Revelation. Protestant ‘literalism’ thus needs to be
broadly conceived as an assertion of the determinacy of meaning of
biblical texts, a meaning which usually, though not invariably, lay with
the literal sense.
In contrast, Harrison points out, medieval exegesis used the literal
meaning as the structural basis for other meanings, and the latter
were more important spiritually than the former. Protestant exegetes,
he claims, rejected meanings other than the literal meaning because
they were concerned with denying indeterminacy of meaning. The
literal meaning favored by the Protestant reformers, Harrison indicates,
was the quadrigal literal sense: “the principle adopted by the reform-
ers—that only the literal sense of scripture was of use in matters of
theological disputation—had been a long-standing rule in the Roman
Church. . . .”10
Given that Harrison defines allegory as a symbolic relationship
between things, rejection of allegory entails rejection of the symbolic
view of things in the world. This limited, Harrison believes, the alloca-
tion of meanings to words:
To insist . . . that texts be read literally was to cut short a potentially endless
chain of references in which words referred to things, and things in turn
referred to other things. A literal reading of scripture was one in which
the previously open-ended process of deriving a series of references from
a single word was terminated once a word had performed its basic task
of referring to a thing.11
Harrison argues that this ended the plurality of interpretations of
Scripture sustained by the symbolism of things. He draws out, as
an unintended byproduct of this change, that things in the world no
longer referred to God, which meant that they could be explored for
their own sake. Note that this rejection of allegory does not concern
literary allegory, but applies only to factual allegory.12 Harrison believes

10
Harrison 1998, 110–11.
11
Ibid., 114.
12
Allegory is a category both in the language of words (literary or verbal allegory)
and in the language of things (factual allegory). In a literary allegory a word refers
to an imaginary thing, event or person—it is part of the literal sense. In contrast, in
a factual allegory a real corporeal thing, event, or person refers to or symbolizes a
spiritual reality. Since Harrison’s hypothesis concerns the language of things we do
not refer to literary allegory.

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that the literal reading of Scripture affected natural philosophy, natural

history, and the study of anatomy.13
The assertion of the primacy of literal reading . . . entailed a new, non-
symbolic conception of the nature of things. No longer were objects in
the natural world linked to each other by sets of resemblances. As an
inevitable consequence of this way of reading texts nature would lose
its meaning, and the vacuum created by this loss of intelligibility was
gradually to be occupied by alternative accounts of the significance of
natural things—those explanations which we regard as scientific. In the
new scheme of things, objects were related mathematically, mechanically,
causally, or ordered and classified according to categories other than those
of resemblance.14
In sum, according to Harrison the problem for the Protestant reformers
was the indeterminacy of meaning of Scripture texts caused by the
symbolism of things, events, and persons in Scripture. A rejection of
indeterminacy of meaning of Scripture (ambiguity) required a rejection
of symbolism of things, events and persons in Scripture. The latter led
to a rejection of symbolism of things, events and persons in nature
because nature was studied to understand Scripture and the interpreta-
tion of both was a unified endeavour.15 Protestant reformers, Harrison
argues, differed from Roman Catholic Scripture interpreters in that
they rejected the allegorical meaning of Scripture as understood in
the Quadriga. They restricted themselves mostly but not entirely to the
quadrigal literal meaning of Scripture. In contrast, Roman Catholics
are implied to have continued using all four levels of interpretation of
the Quadriga, with the literal meaning continuing as a foundation for
the three spiritual meanings.
In contrast, we propose that the decline in the symbolism of nature
did not depend on the fate of symbolic, i.e., spiritual interpretation of
Scripture. First, with Harrison we see the reason for the literal turn in
the humanist realization that texts have a history and that the focus
ought to be on “what an author had originally written and meant
to communicate.”16 But we show that the focus on discerning divine
authorial intent began with religious reformers in the Middle Ages
rather than in the Protestant reformation. Secondly, we ask how an

13
Ibid., 4, 53.
14
Ibid., 114–115.
15
Ibid., 114.
16
Ibid., 113.

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 god, scripture, and the rise of modern science 369

appeal to divine authority17 can entail the rejection of the symbolism

of things if, as Augustine held, God also spoke through things, events
and persons? We show that strategies were developed to reject only
unauthorized symbolic interpretation of Scripture, but to accept divinely
authorized symbolic interpretation. As a result of the focus on divine
authorial intent, late medieval religious reformers replaced the literal
sense of the Quadriga with a new literal sense that included authorized
symbolic interpretation in it. This new literal sense was the sense
adopted and developed by the Protestant reformers, showing that they
did not reject allegory. Finally, the overall reduction of unauthorized
spiritual interpretation of Scripture uncovered linguistic ambiguity as
another source of disagreement about the interpretation of Scripture.
This caused natural philosophers to turn to nature as a clearer source
of knowledge of God.

Transformation of the Literal Sense of Scripture

If the problem for the Protestant reformers was indeterminacy of

meaning of Scripture texts and this was seen as the result of factual
allegory, then the solution would have been the rejection of indeter-
minacy of meaning (allegory). We now review how, starting in the
late Middle Ages, the interpretation of Scripture increasingly focussed
on understanding divine authorial intent. As a result factual allegory
was accepted when intended by the divine author and rejected when
contributed by the human interpreter. The latter reduced arbitrary
speculation. Further, factual allegory became part of a new literal sense
that emerged before the Protestant reformation.18 These developments
are at odds with Harrison’s hypothesis.
Attempts to reduce multiple meanings of Scripture are perhaps the
most enduring feature of the history of Scripture interpretation. Well
into the Middle Ages, nature and Scripture were read for the same
purpose—to know God—using the same strategies of interpretation.
These strategies were underwritten by Augustine’s idea that God spoke
the language of words as well as the language of things. Hence the

17
Ibid., 113.
18
Between the twelfth and the sixteenth century several developments encouraged
a literal interpretation of Scripture: Bray 1996, 151–154; Farley 1995, 70; McGrath
1987, 154–55.

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370 jitse m. van der meer and richard j. oosterhoff

metaphor of the two books.19 Augustine held that if God’s intention

was not clear from the text, the rule of charity limits plurality of
meaning. This meant that “the meaning of any part cannot contradict
the meaning of the whole.” This was a strategy within which many
imaginative readings of Scripture remained possible.20 But the church
fathers had additional strategies for reducing multiple meanings. They
took Scripture as their main source for determining the symbolic
meanings of objects of nature. This restrained ambiguity in two ways.
It reduced the number of symbols to those authorized by Scripture
and it reduced ambiguity because the meaning intended by the divine
author was usually ascertainable. This reduction of ambiguity also
applied to the interpretation of nature to the extent that its spiritual
meaning was derived from Scripture, as is the case in the Physiologus
and the bestiaries.
The thirteenth century saw further efforts to limit multiple meanings
in the interpretation of Scripture by referring to the role of the divine
author. Taking God as the principal author of Scripture, Albert the
Great (ca. 1200–1280) and Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274) practiced
a distinction in which the meaning of words is attributed to the human
author while the meaning of things and events is given by God.21
Words constitute the literal (historical, grammatical) meaning. Things,
events, and persons then have spiritual (factual allegorical) meanings,
as intended by God. This nonliteral meaning is threefold because the
things, events, and persons to which words in Scripture refer can have
three different kinds of spiritual meaning.22 Thus Aquinas tried to limit
spiritual meanings of the text of Scripture to those intended by the
divine author. Significantly, things, events, and persons not mentioned

19
Augustine explicitly reifies nature as a book: see Confessiones, Book XIII, 15,
16–18; Contra Faustum, XXXII, 20; Enarrationes in Psalmos 45, 7; Sermones, 68,
V, 6. Cited from Mayer 2000.
20
Markus 1996, 16–22.
21
Lubac 1964, 304; Reyero 1971, 76–77, 120; Copeland 1993, 3–11; Smalley
1964, 298–300.
22
Lubac 1964, 273–274, 277, 291; Reyero, ibid.; Funkenstein 1986, 55–56; Cope-
land 1993; Minnis 2000, 231–256. There is disagreement about Aquinas’s grounds
for the unity of literal and spiritual meaning. Some locate the ground in the unity
of body and soul (Bray 1996, 152–54). Others refer to authorial intent. There is also
disagreement about why the literal sense became dominant. Some find the reason in
Aristotle’s theory of interpretation with its emphasis on univocity. Others believe that
precise language was required by the development of a rational theology under the
infl uence of Aristotle.

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 god, scripture, and the rise of modern science 371

in Scripture are denied symbolic meaning. “Strictly speaking, every

science which has been invented by human industry yields a literal
meaning only.” Thereby Aquinas provided a theoretical basis for the
decline of nature symbolism.23
While literal meaning became more prominent its boundaries moved.
For instance, Andrew of St. Victor (ca. 1110–1175) states that Nathan’s
prophecy about the future of the house of David applied to the time
that Solomon reigned. But Nicholas of Lyra (ca. 1270–1349) applies
Nathan’s prophecy also to Christ. As Lyra explains, “if we understand
the prophetic meaning as something intended by the speaker himself,
then the meaning belongs to the literal sense.” Not only was the literal
meaning of the text now defined as the one intended by the divine
author, but it also included the spiritual meaning which was constituted
by the symbolic reference of Solomon to Christ. Lyra applies the same
expanded literal sense in his exegesis of the books of II Samuel and
Genesis 1–3.24 He interprets Aquinas’s distinction between the literal
and the spiritual sense as a double literal sense: the divine and human
sense are both literal senses.25 A similar distinction was developed by
the Spanish bishop Paul of Burgos (ca. 1351–1435).
The relationship of the double literal sense to authorial intent
may be understood in terms of the medieval distinction between the
person responsible for a text and the person writing the text. While
this distinction applied to any book, in the case of the Bible it helped
to distinguish between the divine author, who is responsible for what
is asserted in the text, and the human author, who is responsible for
reporting what is asserted. On this basis, Lyra distinguishes between a
literal-historical sense, which is intended by both the human and the
divine author, and the literal-allegorical sense intended only by the
divine author. This allowed Lyra to say that God intends both literal
senses of Nathan’s prophecy, but the reporter intends and understands
only the literal-historical sense.26
Others conceived of the two literal senses as a single literal sense. A
gradual adoption of the three spiritual meanings as part of the literal
meaning spanning the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries has been
revealed in a comparison by David Steinmetz of interpretations of

23
Aquinas. 1949, VII, 6, 3c.
24
van Liere 2000, 73; Patton 2000, 39.
25
Minnis 1975, 4–5.
26
Ibid., 11–13, 19.

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372 jitse m. van der meer and richard j. oosterhoff

Jacob’s ladder in Genesis 28. Hugh of St. Cher (1200–1263), Nicholas

of Lyra (ca. 1270–1349), Denis the Carthusian (1402/3–1471), and
Martin Luther (1483–1547) agree that the ladder symbolizes Christ.
Hugh sees this as its spiritual meaning while Nicholas and Denis sub-
sume this under the literal meaning of the text. Luther gives the lad-
der a literal meaning as well as a tropological and an allegorical one
(strict sense).27 A similar migration is revealed in a comparison of the
interpretation of Jacob’s struggle with the angel on the banks of the
Jabbok. Denis and Luther agree that the angel who fights Jacob is God.
For Denis this is the spiritual sense of the text, but Luther subsumes
it under the literal-historical meaning. Luther and Calvin (1509–1564)
agree that Jacob is an example for all faithful and tested believers. For
Luther this is the spiritual sense, but for Calvin it is an application of
a literal-historical reality.28 In sum, the literal meaning of the ladder
for Nicholas and Denis is that it symbolizes Christ. Likewise, for Calvin
the literal sense of Jacob is that he symbolizes the community of tested
believers, the church, while Luther refers to this interpretation as the
spiritual sense (Denis keeps the two senses separate). The three spiri-
tual senses of the fourfold sense have migrated into the domain of the
literal sense. As a result the literal sense of the Quadriga is transformed
into a new literal sense.
Richard Fitzralph (ca. 1295–1360) and John Wyclif (ca. 1328–1384)
also employ this new literal sense, but they could not be included in
the comparison because they did not comment on the texts compared.
However, for them as well as for Lyra, information is available showing
that each in his own way justifies this transformation explicitly in terms
of authorial intent.29 Thus we see a dawning realization across Europe
that the literal interpretation of a text can have a spiritual meaning.
This realization becomes first explicit in Wyclif. In Spain Alfonso de
Madrigal (ca. 1410–1455) also absorbed a spiritual sense (typology)
into the literal sense.30 Thus the new literal sense emerged before it
was later adopted by the Protestant reformers, and it did not entail a
rejection of factual allegory, i.e., of nature symbolism.

27
Steinmetz 2002, 143–155.
28
Ibid., 156–167.
29
Minnis 1975, 8–13, 25; Copeland 1993, 15–16.
30
Minnis 2000, 244–247.

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 god, scripture, and the rise of modern science 373

In the first decades of the sixteenth century the Catholic Parisian

master Lefèvre d’Étaples (ca. 1455–1536) interpreted Scripture accord-
ing to a two-fold literal sense. One historian remarks that
Lefèvre’s Evangelical Commentary (1522) and French New Testament (1523)
bear unmistakable signs of the infl uence of the historical and gram-
matical exegesis of Erasmus’ great work. On the other hand, a better
understanding of the literal sense of scripture was never an end in itself
for Lefèvre but always a means toward a purer understanding of its
Christological significance.31
Lefèvre’s exegetical stance thus also made space for two senses in
Scripture: the literal-historical (events), and the literal-prophetic (Chris-
tocentric meaning of events).32
First and second generation Protestant reformers Ulrich Zwingli
(1484–1531), Luther, Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560), Heinrich Bull-
inger (1504–1575), and Calvin continued to resort to authorial intent
to reduce speculation. Their strategies were diverse, but the result was
much the same. We highlight three aspects of it. Firstly, the recogni-
tion that the spiritual senses properly belong to the literal sense became
tradition among the Protestants. As Lyra and Burgos had done before,
Luther, Melanchthon, William Tyndale (ca. 1492–1536), and Calvin
absorbed the spiritual senses into one single literal sense.33 Zwingli’s
use of both the concept and the term allegory is too broad to discern
whether it is part of the new literal sense.34 There were differences in
the categorization of the three spiritual senses, and in their relative
importance. Luther stressed the Christological sense—a kind of typo-
logical sense in which texts in the Old Testament not only apply to that
time (the literal-historical sense), but also to Christ (the literal-prophetic
sense). The view of the new literal sense held by Melanchthon and
Calvin is broader than that of Lefèvre because it includes all possible
spiritual senses, not just the Christological sense. These and other dif-
ferences refl ect how the new literal sense included meanings intended
by the divine author, rather than mere reader-imposed interpretations.
Luther is the exception because he combines the two literal senses of

31
Heller 1972, 55.
32
Bedouelle 1978, 133–43.
33
McGrath 1987, 157 (Lefèvre d’Étaples), 159 (Luther); Sick 1959, 25 (Melanchthon);
Davis 1972, 31 (Tyndale); Thompson 2000, 31–53 (Calvin); Thompson 2004, 58–73
(Calvin); Hansen 1998, 235 (Calvin); Blacketer 1999 (Luther, Calvin).
34
McGrath 1987, 169–71.

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Lefèvre d’Étaples with the four medieval senses to produce no less

than eight senses.35 He is also arbitrary in his designation of the sense
of a text.36
The second aspect of attempts to reduce speculation by focussing
on the divine author was that the symbolic meaning of things was
respected if it was given by the divine author of the text, but unauthor-
ized symbolism was rejected. Lefèvre, Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin
all justified spiritual interpretation by reference to the guidance of the
Holy Spirit.37 This was a stronger emphasis in Lefèvre,
Without altogether giving up the use of tropologies, analogies, and
anagogues, Lefèvre nevertheless was able to curb the indiscriminate use
of these devices which tended to isolate passages of scripture from their
context.38
Luther introduced authorial intent explicitly to limit the many mean-
ings that were authorized by Augustine’s theory of interpretation, but
not curbed by his rule of charity:
The Holy Spirit is the simplest writer and speaker in heaven and on earth.
This is why his words can have no more than the one simplest meaning
which we call the written one, or the literal meaning of the tongue.39
Luther’s Christological emphasis changed the quadrigal spiritual senses
of Scripture: the allegorical sense came to refer to God’s acts in the
church and the tropological sense to God’s acts in the individual
believer.40
If authorial intent is the criterion for filtering out human speculation,
then it becomes important to establish what God meant in ways that
are not speculative. One strategy prominent in Lefèvre, Melanchthon,
and Calvin was the use of rhetorical analysis to establish the spiritual
meaning intended by the divine author.41 Another strategy was com-
parison of a text with other texts and with the larger context. To see
how this works we look at Calvin’s interpretation of the burning bush

35
Ibid., 158.
36
Steinmetz 2002, 143–55, 156–67.
37
McGrath 1987, 157; Thompson 2004, 58–73; Schneider 1990, 153, 179; Hansen
1998, 115–83, 307–45.
38
Heller 1972, 54.
39
Luther 1970, vol. 39, 178–179.
40
McGrath 1987, 162, 164.
41
McGrath 1987, 157; Thompson 2004, 58–73; Schneider 1990, 153, 179; Hansen
1998, 115–83, 307–45.

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 god, scripture, and the rise of modern science 375

in Ex. 3:2 as a symbol for the trials of Israel—an interpretation not

given by the text itself. Yet he identifies the allegory as the one intended
by God using two rules: he requires the interpretation to be supported
by a comparison with another narrative that has similarities, and the
symbolism must be implied in the literal sense of the other text. Thus
the bush, the fl ame, and the survival all correspond with the larger
narrative of Exodus with the bush pointing to the people of Israel, the
fl ame to its trials and the survival of the bush to the endurance of the
Israelites. This symbolic meaning is the literal meaning of Genesis 15:
7–17 (God’s people would go into slavery and God would help them),
and of Psalm 46: 5 (God helps his people in times of trial). Thus
allegory is legitimate when underwritten by authorial intent, and this
intent is determined by comparison between a text and other texts as
well as the larger context.42 In such cases the text is allegorical and its
interpretation literal.
Thirdly, in attempting to keep Scripture interpretation within the
bounds of divine intent, Luther, Melanchthon, Tyndale, Calvin, and
the Geneva-born biblical scholar Jean Le Clerc (1657–1736) explicitly
locate the problem with allegorical interpretation in its arbitrary, specu-
lative character rather than in allegory itself. In the words of Le Clerc,
“. . . . Allegory . . . wholly depends upon the Fancy of the Interpreter.”43
This point received general acceptance. Accordingly, Zwingli, Luther,
Melanchthon, Martin Bucer (1491–1551), Tyndale, and Calvin con-
tinued to use the symbolism of things, events, and persons if intended
by the author of the text, but criticized allegory imposed by interpret-
ers.44 Calvin’s continued use of the symbolism of things as part of the
literal sense has escaped attention because the strategic nuances in his
attitude toward allegory have been overlooked. This is because when
Calvin accepts allegory he calls it anything but allegory to avoid asso-
ciation with speculation. Thus he refers to the symbolism of things,
events, and persons as types, examples, pictures, analogies, similitudes,

42
Hansen 1998, 227–37.
43
Le Clerc 1696, 143f., cited from Harrison 1998, 109 n. 171.
44
McGrath 1987, 169–71 (Zwingli, Bucer); Davis 1972, 30–31 (Tyndale), 35 (Luther),
40–41 (Calvin); Schneider 1990, 82–83, 154 (Melanchthon’s acceptance of allegory),
32, 46n43, 78, 79, 82–84, 120 (Melanchthon’s scepticism about allegory); Greene-
McCreight 1999, 101–102 (Calvin); Zachman 2007, 167–8 (Calvin);Thompson 2000,
51 (Calvin); Hansen 1998, 1, 197–200, 204–13, 217, 227–37 (Calvin).

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shadows, etc.45 Sometimes he redefines allegory.46 His categorization is

founded more in polemic concern than in any real difference in how he
views the mechanics of typology or allegory; for Calvin, it frequently
appears, a bad reading was allegory, while a good reading was typology
or ‘literal anagogy.’47 Finally, contrary to the received view of Calvin’s
distaste for visual images, he uses them extensively.48 In these images,
things, events and persons have symbolic meaning, i.e., they function
as allegories. Calvin’s self-presentation as the enemy of allegory con-
tinues to obscure the underlying reality that this enmity was directed
at undisciplined symbolic interpretation, not at symbolic texts.
In sum, not only was the revaluation of the medieval practice of
fourfold exegesis more complex than a rejection of all but the literal-
historical meaning of texts, it also preceded the Protestant reformation.
Religious reformers before, during, and after the Protestant reformation
shared a desire to understand divine truth and eliminate arbitrariness
from the interpretation of Scripture. This passion drove the gradual
recovery of the importance of the intentions of the divine author which
we reviewed, beginning with Aquinas. There was a move from reader-
oriented interpretation which was a source of speculation to author-
oriented interpretation which was restrained by a desire to understand
divine authorial intent. We note two consequences. Firstly, the focus
on the divine author meant that the symbolic meaning of things was
respected if it was intended by the text’s author, but unauthorized
symbolism was rejected. As a result, allegorical interpretation of texts
in which meaning was imposed by the reader was slowly replaced with
interpretation of allegorical texts in which the allegory originates with
the divine author. This reduced the overall frequency of allegorical
interpretation which is compatible with Harrison’s weaker claim that
determinacy of meaning was the goal of the Protestant reformers.
Secondly, the three spiritual meanings of the medieval Quadriga were
gradually subsumed under a new literal sense.49 Divinely authorized
symbolism was not rejected—the meaning of symbols in Scripture can
be unambiguous when the intentions of the author are clear, and there
were ways of establishing the meaning intended by God. Harrison

45
Greene-McCreight 1999, 98; Thompson 2000, 35, 46; Balke 2003, 119–120.
46
Thompson, 2000: 34–35.
47
Green-McCreight 1999, 98; Also: Thompson 2000, 35; Blacketer 1999, 40.
48
Zachman 2007.
49
Steinmetz 2002, 148.

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misses this point when he develops the role of authorial intent.50 Thus,
historically, the strong claim that the allegorical sense was rejected by
the Protestant reformers is incorrect. Rather, allegory was subsumed
under the literal sense. Theologically, the Protestant reformers could not
have rejected allegory because this would have entailed the rejection
of all symbolic relations and anthropomorphic descriptions of God in
Scripture without which Christian theology could not exist. This new
literal sense cannot be equated with the literal meaning in the Quadriga
because the former includes allegory while the latter excludes it.51
To conclude, the Protestant reformers did not reject allegory, but
included it in their literal sense, this inclusion started before the Prot-
estant reformation, and was driven by a passion to understand divine
truth. The gradual absorption of spiritual meanings within a new single
literal meaning parallels the return to authorial intent. In fact, the for-
mer may be seen as a result of the latter because the new literal sense
was authorized by the divine author’s intent. As Jon Whitman states,
In the development of scholastic interpretation from the late Middle Ages
to the Reformation, for example, the repeated emphasis on an underlying
authorial ‘intention’ and the frequent identification of the ‘literal’ sense
with it tends gradually to blur the very distinction between the ‘literal’
sense of a text and its divinely ‘intended’ meaning, its ‘spiritual’ sense;
at times, the ‘letter’ virtually modulates into the ‘spirit.’52
Likewise, Joseph Goering states,
one finds increasingly, after 1300, that the spiritual senses of scripture are
derived from the “letter” (i.e., the text and its context) rather than from
the “things” that the letter signifies, as in the older interpreters. The result
of this shift is a gradual reduction in importance of the spiritual senses,
as they come to be seen as mere rhetorical ornaments rather than as the
bearers of the heart and soul of biblical revelation.53
As a result the new literal sense gained prominence in the pew as well
as in the pulpit and in academic theology. We conclude with Harrison
that indeterminacy of meaning was the problem Scripture interpret-
ers faced, but that it was due to reader-imposed speculation and not
to symbolism-associated indeterminacy. Thus the solution was not the
rejection of nature symbolism.

50
Harrison 1998, 113–14.
51
Steinmetz 1997; 2002, 143–55, 156–67; 2006, 285.
52
Whitman 2000a, 56 with additional references.
53
Goering 2003, 200.

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Ambiguity of Nature in the Middle Ages

According to Harrison indeterminacy in the interpretation of Scripture

originates in indeterminacy in the interpretation of nature because
as symbols things, events, and persons in nature were polysemous,
and because the interpretation of nature and Scripture was a unified
endeavour. To see whether indeterminacy of meaning of nature was
the problem we review the significance of indeterminacy in the inter-
pretation of nature in the Middle Ages as found in the Physiologus, the
bestiaries, and the sermons based on them. For this purpose ambigu-
ity or indeterminacy of meaning is understood as a property not only
of language, but also of things understood symbolically as language.
While definitions of ambiguity of language vary in detail, they agree
that ambiguity arises when there is not enough information to choose
between multiple nonequivalent meanings of a word or sentence.54
We will see that while in the symbolic world view a thing can have
multiple meanings, a single meaning is fixed by the context in which
a thing occurs.
The reason for ambiguity in the Middle Ages has been seen in the
symbolic mode of thought. In it two things are linked not by cause
and effect, but because they share an essential property. For instance,
the lion symbolizes the Christ because they share the property of king-
ship. But the lion also symbolizes Satan because both are predators.
Satan in turn is symbolized by the serpent which also symbolizes the
spiritually prudent man in that both undergo purification by fasting
followed by the replacement of the old skin with a new one. But the
serpent also symbolizes the Christ in that both were raised high on a
tree, a copper serpent by Moses in the desert and the Christ on a cross.
This illustrates and partly explains how a network of meaning relations
was woven in the symbolic mind of medieval people. Further, “[e]ach
thing may denote a number of distinct ideas by its different special
qualities, and a quality may also have several symbolic meanings.”55
For instance, the lion is described as having three characteristics. He
covers his tracks upon smelling a hunter, he sleeps with open eyes, and
a lion cub rises from the dead upon hearing the father’s roar. These
three characteristics are three allegories. Just as the lion hides his tracks,

54
Tuggy 1993; Geeraerts 1993; Dušková 1995; Monz 1999; Dunbar 2001.
55
Huizinga 1924, 190.

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Christ hides his divinity by assuming a human form (Incarnation). Just

as the lion sleeps with his eyes open, Christ’s body may sleep, but he is
ever watchful in his divinity (Death). Just as the father lion arouses the
lion cub with his roar, the omnipotent Father revived Christ (Resur-
rection). These three allegories illustrate that a single thing can have
multiple meanings. Finally,
Christ and His divinity were symbolised by a vast number and variety of
creatures, each signifying His presence in a different place—in heaven,
on mountain tops, in the fields, the forests, and the seas. The symbols
used included the lamb, the dove, the peacock, the ram, the gryphon,
the rooster, the lynx, the palm-tree, even a bunch of grapes: a polyphony
of images.
Other symbols of Christ include the unicorn and the pelican.56 As
Huizinga (1924) observes, “Symbolist thought permits an infinity of
relations between things.”57 Ambiguity, Huizinga and Harrison agree,
is due to the polysemy of things.58
The potential ambiguity of things as symbols arises from the realistic
nature of this network. Consider that a similarity between two things
has symbolic meaning only if the middle term connecting the two
terms of the symbolic concept expresses an essence common to both.
For instance, to say that the lion and Satan are both predators is based
on the essence of the symbolic concept of the predator that is found
in a biological predator—the lion—and in a spiritual predator—Satan.
Likewise, the symbolic concept of purity has an essence found in the
snake which does not eat before it sheds its physical skin as well as in
the person who fasts in order to shed the sinful nature. In the Platonic
realism of the Middle Ages, symbolic concepts such as the predator and
purity were conceived as essences, that is as realities, and as abstract
realities they were connected to concrete realities in the cosmos such as
the serpent and the Christ. Without this Platonic realism the concepts
that express essential commonalities between things would disappear
and the network would unravel.

56
Eco 1986, 55–56.
57
Huizinga 1924, 198.
58
Ibid., 198; Harrison 1998, 4, 28, 113, 123. In the words of Dante Alighieri,
the allegorical significance of the animals was polysemous (Letter to Con Grande,
quoted in Armistead 2001, 11); Other examples of animal and plant symbolism and
polysemy in Crowther-Heyck 2003; on ambiguity see Harrison, 1998: 4, 28, 113, 123
and Chenu 1968, 136.

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To combat ambiguity in Scripture interpretation, Harrison has

proposed, the Protestant reformers rejected the allegorical sense that
depends upon the polysemy of things, that is on the symbolism of
things. But we question Harrison’s assumption that the symbolism of
things led to ambiguity in the contexts in which symbolism is found.
For instance, the meaning of the symbols in the Physiologus and the
bestiary tradition are not indeterminate. Some animals have a single
meaning. The phoenix, for instance, is a symbol of the death and
resurrection of Christ.59 The meaning of other animals such as the
lion and the serpent has been considered ambiguous either because a
single animal has several meanings in a given edition or because the
meaning of a kind of animal shifts between versions or redactors.60
But in all the editions of the Physiologus and the bestiaries the spiritual
meaning of each of the more than ten animals symbolizing the Christ
is explained unambiguously often in a section designated for that
purpose and entitled Significacio. These features established a tradition
of unambiguous moral and spiritual meanings for every animal that
figured in an allegory.
The history of preaching confirms that such meanings were widely
disseminated and stable through time. Preaching was a means of
spreading knowledge about nature symbolism among the uneducated
masses. Bestiaries were used for education including that of preachers
who used animals in sermons,61 assuming familiarity with the symbol-
ism. Stability of meaning was encouraged by the use of sermon manu-
als from which preachers got their examples.62 These examples came
from the Physiologus and the bestiaries, but also from other sources. For
instance, the ship as symbol of the church lasted from the eleventh
to the fourteenth century.63 The castle symbolized the church from
the eleventh to the fifteenth century.64 The meanings of animals and
artifacts were so familiar through stories and sermons that they needed
no explanation.
Furthermore, moving to the different context of mammals, medieval
herbals contradict the notion that ambiguity pervaded the interpreta-

59
Mermier 1989.
60
Armistead 2001, 5–6.
61
White 1954, 26; Owst 1961, 188, 197–204; Clark and McMunn 1989, 3, 6;
Baxter 1998, 62, 188, 190, 209.
62
Owst 1961, 87.
63
Ibid., 68–70.
64
Ibid., 77–85.

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tion of nature because plants did not have symbolic meaning and did
not suffer polysemy. Medieval herbalists described plants in specific
literal-natural terms which included their causal power of healing spe-
cific illnesses. Medieval manuals for hunters, fishermen, farmers, and
veterinary doctors show detailed nonsymbolic knowledge of animals.65
Whether or not such sources were based on direct observation or cop-
ied from ancient authorities, indeterminacy was not the problem. And
while later Renaissance herbals could add a spiritual interpretation to
the natural one this did not introduce ambiguity.66
In sum, Harrison sees the problem for the Protestant reformers in
the indeterminacy of meaning of texts in Scripture that came with
the medieval symbolic worldview. But we found that ambiguity or
indeterminacy of meaning does not characterize nature symbolism in
the contexts in which it manifests itself, that is in the Physiologus, the
bestiaries, and the sermons using them. In the monastic tradition and
among the clergy there was no question about the meaning of animal
symbols and this applied also to the general population who absorbed
animal symbolism from them. The situation among the scholastics is
more complex. Scholars at the universities were exposed to the fixed
meanings of animal symbols by their preachers and teachers in the
cathedral schools because these instructors came from the monaster-
ies. But among these scholars the existing causal mode of thought was
reinforced by the emphasis on logic and causality that came with the
rediscovery of Aristotle. We do not know how the co-existence of the
symbolic and causal modes of thought played out. But in the sixteenth
and seventeenth century there were plenty of scholars who practiced
both side by side, which makes nature symbolism seem less of an
impediment to modern science than suggested by Harrison.67
We conclude that, while in the abstract the meaning of symbols
may be inherently ambiguous, the symbolic meaning of things in
nature is fixed by the context of the Physiologus and the bestiaries. In
our examples, when the symbol is derived from Scripture its meaning
is fixed by divine authority. The meaning intended by God is either
self-evident or derived from the context of Scripture. In other cases it
is fixed by human authority and the context of tradition. Therefore,

65
Stannard 1978, 429–460, esp. 432–443 on animals and 443–449 on plants.
66
Crowther 2008, 21.
67
van der Meer and Oosterhoff 2009.

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the problem Scripture interpreters had with indeterminate meaning did

not originate in nature symbolism as such. The Protestant reformers
recognized that ambiguity originated in speculation, not in nature
symbolism. The cure was the rejection of speculation, not of nature
symbolism. Thus, Harrison’s explanation of the decline of nature
symbolism fails because things in nature had a determinate symbolic
meaning. This is consistent with our earlier conclusion that an appeal
to divine authority in Scripture interpretation did not entail the rejec-
tion of nature symbolism. Harrison himself suggests as much when he
writes that “Protestant ‘literalism’ thus needs to be broadly conceived
as an assertion of the determinacy of meaning of biblical texts, a
meaning which usually, though not invariably, will lie with the literal
sense.”68 This point, we suggest, is far more important than Harrison
acknowledges.

Nature: a Superior Source of Knowledge of God

There are two different phenomena to explain: the decline of nature

symbolism and the rise of modern science. So far we have argued that
nature symbolism did not decline on account of its rejection by late
medieval and Protestant reformers because they did not reject nature
symbolism. Here we describe one way in which Scripture interpretation
might have affected the rise of science directly and independently of
the fate of nature symbolism. The strategies used to determine autho-
rial intent in Scripture not only excluded interpreter-imposed specula-
tion, but also uncovered the ambiguity originating in verbal language.
Linguistic ambiguity manifested itself in many disagreements on the
meaning of Scripture texts. We show that theological disagreements
elicited a mixed reception of the Protestant reformation throughout
Europe. Natural philosophers listed among the reasons for disagreement
properties of language such as ambiguity and the corruption of an
originally divine language of creation. This explains why many turned
to the study of nature as a source of knowledge of God superior to
the text of Scripture.
The Protestant reformers failed to achieve agreement on the inter-
pretation of Scripture texts on important theological issues. They could

68
Harrison 1998, 111.

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reach no consensus with the Roman Catholics while both could argue
from the Fathers equally well. This was not surprising because there
was no consensus among the patristic writers either. “[G]ood exegesis
produced, as Catholic critics warned it might, competing theologies.”69
In the fourteenth century, appeal to tradition often failed to determine
authorial intent because the saints disagreed.70 The rules of Aquinas
and Calvin for finding authorial intent did exclude extra-scriptural
symbolisms from Scripture interpretation. But they did not eliminate
multiple meanings within the confines of Scripture. The approach to
justifying allegory used by Augustine for the burning bush produced
competing readings in Lyra and again in Calvin.71 Protestants diverged
between as well as within European nations and even within different
national schools of thought.
Europe-wide, there were the controversies about the Lord’s Supper,
notably between Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli. Later, the central theme
of the Protestant Reformation, namely the inability to bring about one’s
own spiritual salvation, gave rise to the controversy between Remon-
strants and Contra-Remonstrants. There were widespread attempts
to restore the prelapsarian state.72 Arminians and Socinians used the
same Scripture as the Reformed Orthodox, but came to very different
conclusions.73 According to Harrison, typology is the only unambiguous
form of symbolism in which Old Testament things, events, and persons
symbolize those in the New Testament. Therefore, he argues, it was
not affected by attempts to reduce speculation and it could continue
to function in Scripture interpretation without creating ambiguity.
But typology was also associated with ambiguity. For instance, interpret-
ers could only speculate on what was foreshadowed by the beasts in
the book of Daniel. Further, Harrison’s view assumes that theologians
had a clear distinction between the symbolism of typology and that
of other spiritual senses. But religious and secular interpreters from
Zwingli to Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) “habitually confuse typol-
ogy with emblems, parables, signs, symbols, and hieroglyphs in their
terminology.” Moreover, the meaning of scriptural types was routinely

69
Steinmetz 1997; on interpretive disagreement within the Wittenberg reformation,
see McGrath 1987, 166.
70
Minnis 1975, 24.
71
Hansen 1998, 238–48.
72
Harrison 1998, 226.
73
Trueman 2004, 225, 230.

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applied beyond the bounds of scriptural history to one’s own time and
to the future. Arbitrary speculation reigned when Protestants said Scrip-
ture foreshadowed contemporary situations, for instance, to denounce
Roman opponents, or foreshadowed the future (millenarianism).74
In the Dutch Republic, disagreement about Copernicanism depended
in part on matters of Scripture interpretation. For instance, Philip Lans-
bergen (1561–1632), Gisbertus Voetius (1589–1676), Johannes Coccejus
(1603–1669), Christopher Wittichius (1625–1687), Balthasar Bekker
(1634–1698), and Bernhardinus de Moor (1709–1780) all accepted that
some Scripture texts required a nonliteral interpretation because they
were accommodated to a limited human understanding. Voetius would
characterize a text as accommodated only on scriptural-theological
grounds while the others also accepted this characterization on scien-
tific grounds. Accordingly, Voetius rejected Copernicanism because it
contradicted Scripture. Other Calvinists accepted Copernicanism, but
for different reasons. For instance, Lansbergen and de Moor argued
Copernicanism could be true astronomically because the Bible presents
things from the perspective of unrefl ected observation. Coccejus was
open to nonliteral interpretation because he acknowledged historical
progression in divine revelation with its associated typological, i.e.,
nonliteral interpretation of texts in the Old Testament. Wittichius
appealed to authorial intent—the Bible is a book of faith, not a source
of science. Voetius did not have these options because to him the Word
of God was timeless, universal and self-explanatory.75 The Cartesian
question also revealed disagreements between leading Calvinists such
as Voetius and Bekker over Scripture interpretation in part because
they assigned different roles to reason and revelation.76 Thus disagree-
ment on Scripture interpretation within Calvinism becomes intelligible
in light of different views of the nature and authority of Scripture as
well as about the scope of the principle of accommodation and the
conditions under which it can be applied. Failures to reach agreement
in the Germanic realm have been attributed to the hermeneutic of
Melanchthon. It features a factionalism that is associated with

74
Sick 1959, 72–74; Frei 1974, 46–50; Korshin 1982, 6, 12, 31–37, 63–66; Low-
ance, Jr., 1972, 222; McDermott 2003, 127–137.
75
Vermij 2002, 247–51; Goudriaan 2006, 133–41; Jorink 2006, 58, 60. For more
examples, see: Vermij 2008.
76
van Asselt, Pleizier, Rouwendal, Wisse 1998, 123–24.

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 god, scripture, and the rise of modern science 385

any theory which presumes that ‘theologies’ can be proved both biblical
and true through logical devices, that there is not a deeper epistemic
mystery in interpretation that calls for greater subservience to tradition
and ancient consensus.77
This deeper mystery is that multiple meanings arise not only in lan-
guages of things, but also in languages of words.78
Natural philosophers from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century
understood that disagreement about the meaning of Scripture texts
was to blame for theological divisiveness. In Germany, Johannes Kepler
(1571–1630) experienced it in connection with the Lord’s Supper.79
Copernicans in Protestant and Roman Europe knew about interpretative
disagreements related to the motions of the planetary system.80 In the
Dutch Republic, René Descartes (1596–1650) was familiar with literal
and metaphorical interpretations of the creation story in the book of
Genesis.81 In England, Isaac Newton (1642–1727) kept his theological
studies private to avoid controversy about his anti-Trinitarian interpreta-
tions.82 The failure of the Protestant reformers to impose determinacy
of meaning on the interpretation of Scripture was widely perceived
among natural philosophers.
Many seventeenth-century natural philosophers located the plurality
of interpretations that produced the destructive religious controversies
after the Reformation precisely at the misuse and misunderstanding of
ordinary verbal language.83 Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), arguing that
scriptural language about nature conformed to ordinary spoken use,
also wrote that passages of Scripture “may have some different meaning
beneath their words,” but “Nature, on the other hand, is inexorable
and immutable.”84 He drove this point home by offering two different
literal interpretations of Joshua showing “that the very notion of literal
interpretation is problematic, for verbal language is ambiguous by its
very nature.”85 Robert Hooke (1635–1702), another natural philosopher
with an interest in language, wrote that,

77
Schneider 1990, 108.
78
For contemporary examples, see: Whitman 2000b, 262–63.
79
Hübner 1975.
80
Howell 2002.
81
van Ruler 1995, 255–57.
82
Snobelen 2001, 2008.
83
Coudert 1978, 57–58, 98–99.
84
Galilei 1957, 183. Cf. pp. 187, 199.
85
Palmerino 2006, 32.

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Rabbins find out Caballisms, and Enigmas in the figure, and placing of
Letters, where no such thing lies hid; whereas in Natural forms there are
some so small, and so curious, and their design’d business so far removed
from the reach of our sight, that the more we do magnify the object, the
more excellencies and mysteries do appear.86
When Robert Hooke claims that the aim of the natural philosopher is
to read the book of nature, this exercise is not to be performed with
verbal skills.87 A century later Noël Antoine Pluche (1688–1761) wrote
of the book of nature that “we neither find Errors nor different Opin-
ions, nor Controversy, nor Prejudice, not Contentions.”88 As a result,
nature came to be seen as a less ambiguous source of knowledge of
God than Scripture.89
Some theologians agreed with this assessment by the natural phi-
losophers. For instance, John Sparrow (1615–1665) argued in the
introduction to one of Jacob Boehme’s works that the language of
nature “doth show in every ones Mother tongue the Greatest Mysteries”
while the meaning of Scripture is “vayled by Doubtfull Interpretations,
Expositions, Inferences and Conclusions.”90 Natural philosophers and
natural historians expected more clarity in the book of nature than in
the book of Scripture because it was not written in a verbal language.
Thus, the ambiguities of Scripture interpretation encouraged people
to look towards nature as a less ambiguous source for the knowledge
of God.
In conclusion, when strategies used to determine authorial intent in
Scripture reduced interpreter-imposed speculation, they also uncovered
the ambiguity originating in verbal language. This linguistic ambiguity
manifested itself in many disagreements on the meaning of Scripture
texts. By the seventeenth century many natural philosophers located
the origin of the disagreements in the ambiguity of verbal language.
In response, they turned to the study of nature as a source of knowl-
edge of God superior to the text of Scripture.91 By now most natural

86
Hooke 1665, 8. The same sentiments were expressed by Kepler 1938, Vol. I,
p. 6.
87
Hooke 1705, 338.
88
Pluche 1770, Vol. III, 115.
89
De Grazia 1980.
90
Boehme 1648, Sig. A3r; Mandelbrote 2001; Sir Kenelm Digby, a theologian
and a natural philosopher, based his attempts to heal the religious divide in natural
philosophy: Janacek 2000, 116–17.
91
Buckley 1987 describes the preference for natural philosophy as a way of know-
ing God.

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 god, scripture, and the rise of modern science 387

philosophers took the mode in which nature refers to God no longer to

be symbolic. This was one of the conditions that allowed the turn to
nature to become one of the causes of the rise of modern science.

Discussion and Conclusions

In this chapter we assume with Harrison that the symbolic view of

nature diverted attention away from nature to God and that the rise
of modern science required a focus on nature for its own sake. Within
this framework we have questioned his explanation of when and how
nature symbolism declined. Harrison has proposed that the rejection
of symbolism in Scripture interpretation by the Protestant reformers
was the cause of the decline of nature symbolism more generally, and
that the literal turn in Scripture interpretation was the most important
reason for the decline of nature symbolism. We found, however, that
Scripture interpreters did not turn from spiritual to literal interpreta-
tion, but from reader-imposed speculation to author-intended mean-
ing. The latter included symbolism because the problem for religious
reformers was not the symbolism of things, events, and persons, but the
multiple arbitrary meanings of the Scripture text. To combat the latter,
unauthorized symbolism was rejected together with other products of
human imagination, but divinely authorized symbolism was accepted.
Since the symbolism of things was not the rationale for the rejection
of allegory and was not rejected across the board, we conclude that it
could not have been the primary cause of the decline of symbolism in
the interpretation of nature.
Three observations underwrite our conclusion that religious reformers
did not see the problem of indeterminacy of meaning in the symbolism
of things, but in arbitrary speculation. Firstly, the literal sense of the
Quadriga was not retained, but transformed to include all spiritual senses.
Thus the allegorical sense was not rejected without further qualification.
Secondly, although in the abstract things, events and persons found in
Scripture, the Physiologus and the bestiaries have multiple meanings,
nevertheless within their respective contexts the symbolic meaning of
things, events, and persons is unequivocal because it is specified. In the
case of Scripture interpretation religious reformers explicitly identified
the problem of ambiguity with arbitrary speculation characteristic of
allegorical interpretation. They did not associate ambiguity with the
symbolism of allegorical texts because in the context of Scripture

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388 jitse m. van der meer and richard j. oosterhoff

symbols had a specific meaning. This explains the third observation,

namely that instead of a rejection of allegory across the board there
has been a rejection of reader-imposed allegory, but an acceptance of
divinely authorized allegory in Scripture. As a side effect the frequency
of allegorical interpretation of Scripture declined.
In bringing these observations to bear upon Harrison’s hypothesis we
have taken him to claim that the infl uence of the Protestant reforma-
tion was indirect, even diffuse in the sense that it created a condition
for the rise of modern science92 which needs to be complemented by
direct causes for its explanation, but that among other conditions that
paved the way for modern science, the literalist mentality introduced by
the Protestant reformers was “central,” “a major catalyst,” and “most
significant.”93 On balance, Harrison presents the condition created by
the Protestant reformers as a pursuit of the quadrigal literal meaning
and a rejection of symbolic meaning of things, events, and persons.94
But there was no rejection of symbolism because the quadrigal literal
sense was transformed during the late Middle Ages and came to include
authorized allegorical meaning.
Twice, however, Harrison makes the weaker claim that the Protestant
reformers were pursuing determinacy of meaning primarily though
not exclusively by means of literal interpretation.95 This implies that
nonliteral meanings were sometimes accepted provided they were
determinate. We have made the same observation in that the new literal
sense included divinely authorized allegory. But while the pursuit of
divine authorial intent reduced interpreter-imposed speculation, it also
uncovered linguistic ambiguity as another unrelated source of multiple
meanings of Scripture texts. The religious reformers could not reduce
the ambiguity of texts because it is in the nature of language. Once
arbitrary interpretation was reduced by removing unauthorized allegory,
the ambiguity of language itself became manifest in the interpretive
disagreements unrelated to allegorical texts. This, we argue, was one
of the causes that drove scholars to nature. They considered nature as
God’s clearest revelation because it did not have the ambiguity inherent
in language and texts.

92
Harrison 1998, 5–8, 107, 113, 266.
93
Ibid., 5, 8.
94
Ibid., 113, 114, 116–117, 122, 205, 208 (pursuing literal meaning), 122, 129,
185 (rejecting allegory).
95
Ibid., 111, 113.

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 god, scripture, and the rise of modern science 389

We propose, therefore, that primarily in scholarly circles the source

of ambiguity was not seen in the symbolism of things, events and per-
sons popular in late medieval and early modern society, but in rampant
speculation and arbitrary interpretation. These fueled a hunger for truth
and reality. In the case of Scripture this was a hunger for the empirical
reality of the words and sentences, for “intellectual precision and clar-
ity of speech.” In the case of nature this was the empirical reality of
the stars in heaven and the animals on earth.96 We offer this veridical
stance as a working hypothesis that can make sense of the observations
we have used to assess Harrison’s hypothesis. For instance, a focus on
truth and reality is not unique to the Protestant reformations, because
it emerged late in the Middle Ages and persisted afterwards. Therefore,
it can help us to understand the rise of science on both sides of the
confessional divide between Protestants and Catholics. Also, since truth
was identified with its divine source, a focus on truth can explain the
acceptance of divinely authorized allegory and the rejection of unau-
thorized allegory. For the time being we limit our working hypothesis
to the professional study of nature and Scripture. A history of the
long-term fate of nature symbolism outside of the professional study
of nature remains to be written.
An emerging veridical stance can also explain that disagreement
over the interpretation of Scripture inspired a turn to nature for clarity
in the knowledge of God. Whereas the veridical stance in Scripture
interpreters manifested itself in the attention shifting from allegorical
interpretation to the text itself, interpreters of nature made a parallel
move from allegorical interpretations of nature to nature itself—a par-
allelism Harrison describes as recognized at the time by Francis Bacon
(1561–1626) and Thomas Sprat (1635–1713).97 They turned to the
causal mode of thought in which two things may be linked unambigu-
ously as cause and effect. This turn to nature was possible because it
had ceased to function as a symbol referring to God, but this did not
depend on a rejection of nature symbolism by religious reformers.
Two other explanations have been offered for the decline of nature
symbolism. “In the later Middle Ages,” writes Huizinga,
the decline of [the symbolic] mode of thought had already long set in. . . .
Symbolism . . . shows a tendency to become mechanical. [It became] a

96
Obermann 1986, 195; Minnis 2000, 252.
97
Harrison 1998, 103–05.

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product, not of poetical enthusiasm only, but of subtle reasoning as well,

. . . causing it to degenerate.
Moreover, “The symbolic mentality was an obstacle to the development
of causal thought, . . .” which, Umberto Eco has pointed out, was part of
a nonsymbolic view of the natural order introduced with the rediscov-
ery of Aristotelian science. “When the medievals began to discover the
ontological and formal reality of things . . . the symbolical universe lost
something of its substance.”98 Thus, among the forces that began the
disintegration of the symbolic order of nature in scholars like Aquinas,
we find the rising importance of reason relative to imagination and of
the causal order of nature relative to the symbolic order. But nature
symbolism continued among the mystics.
The pursuit of truth required that the reduction of arbitrary specula-
tion in the interpretation of nature follow a different path than that of
Scripture because they require different truth criteria. Multiple mean-
ings of Scripture are reduced by rule-governed comparison of texts
the outcome of which is taken to be the intent of the author which is
fixed in creeds. Multiple meanings of nature are gradually confined by
the development of a host of procedures now referred to as scientific
methodology and that include a variety of theoretical strategies such as
paradigms, research programs and theories. As Harrison has pointed
out this development started with failed attempts to develop a perfect
universal language of nature—an attempt that according to him “sig-
nifies an awareness of the absence of ordering principles in nature.”99
Instead we believe that a comprehensive causal order of nature was
available for whoever wanted to consider Aristotelian, Baconian or
Cartesian strategies. However that may be, these strategies for the
interpretation of nature changed with time and discipline and they
left no room within the professional study of nature for the symbolic
meaning of things in nature.100 Their spiritual significance could not be
part of these strategies because they were aimed at explaining nature
in natural terms.
We offer the veridical stance as one among several infl uences that
have inspired different ways of reading the book of Scripture and the
book of nature. Various forms of ‘Mosaic philosophy’ also stimulated

98
Huizinga 1924, 199, 204–05; Eco 1988, 140–41.
99
Harrison 1998, 263.
100
For a sketch of changing strategies, see Fisch (these volumes).

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 god, scripture, and the rise of modern science 391

new and productive thought about nature.101 Interpreters of Scripture

such as William of Conches (ca. 1080–ca. 1154), Thierry of Chartres
(ca. 1100–ca. 1150) and Marin Mersenne (1588–1648) applied the idea
of a grammar of Scripture to the other book. So did Robert Hooke.102
After all the two books were written by the same author and could,
therefore, be expected to follow rules even if they were different. This
encouraged the study of the rules of nature even though the phenom-
ena governed by these rules continued to be seen as “a tissue of figures
and images which must be read like a literary text, . . .”103 A text that
“involves and embodies a transcendent form of rhetoric.”104 Further,
as Harrison suggests, the use of accommodated language in scriptural
references about nature made it obvious that truth about nature required
investigation of nature itself.105 This need to understand nature in order
to determine the meaning of nature passages in Scripture extended to
nonaccommodated passages as well.
There are two different phenomena to explain: the decline of nature
symbolism and the rise of modern science. Their causes do not have to
coincide. The former has been plausibly associated with the rediscov-
ery of Aristotle. By the thirteenth century the works of Aristotle had
fostered a scholarly climate in which literal meaning was preferred over
allegorical sense. This applied both to the interpretation of Scripture
and to the interpretation of nature.106 Developments in Aristotelianism
reduced interest in neoplatonism and its symbolic language of things.
Both recovered in fifteenth-century Florence and started another slide
by the year 1600.107 Aristotle emphasized that words are not intrinsi-
cally linked to objects, but are conventional and this undermines the
symbolic view of nature.108 Moreover, Aristotle had also provided a
comprehensive causal order of nature. The infl uence of Aristotelian-
ism on both natural philosophy and theology as well as its emergence
before the Protestant reformation suggest that the decline of nature
symbolism can be explained better by the rise of Aristotelianism and

101
Cf. Blair 2000.
102
Cited in Ormsby-Lennon 1988, 326–7.
103
Wetherbee 2000, 221; on Mersenne: Bono 1995, 263.
104
Cadden 1995, 10.
105
Harrison 1998, 78–81, 137.
106
Minnis 2000, 243 (interpretation of Scripture); Funkenstein 1986 35–37 (inter-
pretation of nature).
107
Singer 1989, 51.
108
Ashworth 1990, 323.

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the decline of neoplatonism than by a turn to literalism in Scripture

interpretation.
As for the rise of modern science, the combination of form and
matter in Aristotelian substances drew attention to natural things for
their own sake because they had meaning in themselves rather than
in a spiritual realm. But while the rediscovery of Aristotle was one
major contribution to the decline of nature symbolism while the rise
of modern science had to wait until scholars moved from the study
of what Aristotle had written about nature to exploring what Aristotle
had explored—nature itself.

Acknowledgements

We thank Maggie Vandermeer and an anonymous reviewer for their

thoughtful and critical readings of drafts of this chapter.

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Hermeneutics. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 75: Section C, No. 1, 1–31.
——. 2000. Quadruplex sensus, multiplex modus: scriptural sense and mode in medieval
scholastic exegesis. In Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period, Ed. Jon
Whitman. Leiden: Brill, 231–56.
Monz, Christof. 1999. Modeling Ambiguity in a Multi-Agent System. Proceedings of the
12th Amsterdam Colloquium (AC ’99), Ed. P. Dekker. Amsterdam: Institute for Logic,
Language and Computation, 43–48.
Oberman, Heiko A. 1986. The Dawn of the Reformation: Essays in Late Medieval and Early
Reformation Thought. Edinburgh: T & T Clark.
Ormsby-Lennon, Hugh. 1988. Rosicrucian Linguistics: Twilight of the Renaissance
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Palmerino, Carla Rita. 2006. The Mathematical Mharacters of Galileo’s Book of
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Pluche, Noël Antoine. 1770. Spectacle de la Nature: or Nature Display’d. 5th ed. rev. and
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Sick, Hansjörg. 1959. Melanchthon als Ausleger des Alten Testaments. Beiträge zur Geschichte
der biblischen Hermeneutik 2. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck).
Singer, Thomas C. 1989. Hieroglyphs, Real Characters, and the Idea of Natural
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Smalley, Beryl. 1964. The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages. Notre Dame, IN: University
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——. 2008. “Not in the Language of Astronomers”: Isaac Newton, the Scriptures, and
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——. 2002. Luther in Context, 2nd ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic.
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 CHAPTER THIRTEEN

SACRED PHILOSOPHY, SECULAR THEOLOGY:

THE MOSAIC PHYSICS OF LEVINUS LEMNIUS (1505–1568)
AND FRANCISCO VALLES (1524–1592)

Kathleen M. Crowther

In the second half of the sixteenth century, a new kind of writing

about the natural world emerged, one that was explicitly Christian.1
Its proponents wanted to create an understanding of the natural world
that was not only congruent with the Bible, but actually grounded
in Scripture. This new genre was often called “Mosaic philosophy”
or “Mosaic physics” because of its close connections to the story of
creation in the book of Genesis. Throughout this paper I will use the
term Mosaic physics. The term physics, deriving from the Greek word
physis, meaning “nature,” had a much broader meaning in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries than it does today. A physicist could be a
student of all of nature, from plants to planets.2 The term Mosaic
physics thus captures the wide range of natural objects and natural
phenomena that were connected to Scripture and scriptural exegesis.
The term Mosaic physics is also appropriate because it cuts across the
contemporary categories of natural philosophy, natural history, and
medicine,3 any or all of which might be incorporated into a work of
Mosaic physics. As I will demonstrate, this was actually an extremely
heterogeneous type of literature. Mosaic physicists shared a common
agenda but differed substantially in their ideas about nature. Mosaic
physics was based both on a close reading of biblical passages dealing
with the natural world and engagement with a wide variety of natural
philosophical writers and ideas. In this literature, the Bible was used to
adjudicate between competing views of the natural world. However, it

1
The fullest discussion of this new kind of natural philosophy is the recent article
by Blair 2000. The rest of this paragraph follows Blair’s article.
2
Lindberg 1992, 281.
3
On these categories, see Ogilvie 2006, especially the introductory chapter.

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was also the case that natural knowledge was used to explicate difficult
passages in the Bible.
As a genre, Mosaic physics fl ourished in the last decades of the six-
teenth century and the first half of the seventeenth. By the eighteenth
century, it had fallen into disrepute and was considered an improper
mingling of science and theology. In the present day it has descended
into almost complete oblivion. Despite the lively and ongoing inter-
est in the relations between religion and science in the early modern
period, historians of science have largely ignored Mosaic physics. In this
paper, I analyze the writings of two sixteenth-century Mosaic physicists,
Levinus Lemnius (1505–1568) and Francisco Valles (1524–1592). Lem-
nius and Valles were among the earliest, the most prominent and the
most widely read Mosaic physicists.4 Both produced hybrid texts that
were at once theological and natural philosophical. In 1566, Lemnius
published a work on plants entitled, Clear Explanation of the Comparisons
and Parables Concerning Herbs and Trees Which Are Selected from the Bible.5
Valles’s contribution to Mosaic physics was first published in 1587: Of
The Things Which Are Written About Natural Philosophy in the Holy Scrip-
tures: or, Of Sacred Philosophy.6 Both of these works were reprinted many
times, and later Mosaic physicists frequently cited Lemnius and Valles
as important predecessors.7 The two books obviously differ in subject
matter: Lemnius’s Concerning Herbs and Trees deals exclusively with plants
whereas Valles’s Sacred Philosophy covers a much wider array of natural
objects and phenomena. Lemnius and Valles also connect natural
knowledge and biblical exegesis in very different ways, demonstrating
that Mosaic physics was by no means a unified project. However, con-
temporaries saw both of these books as exemplars of Christian natural
philosophy. In fact, the two books were often published together.8 My

4
See Blair.
5
Lemnius 1596. Lemnius’s Concerning Herbs and Trees was translated into English in
1587. In this paper, I have followed the English translation, but included references to
the 1596 Latin edition in the notes.
6
Valles 1592. I have used an edition published in Lyon in 1592 with Lemnius’s
Concerning Herbs and Plants.
7
For publication information, see below. On later Mosaic philosophers citing Lem-
nius and Valles, see Blair.
8
When they were published together, a third book was included: Franciscus Rueus’s
De gemmis aliquot, iis praesertim quarum divus Iohannes Apostolus in sue Apocalypsi meminit.
Franciscus Rueus, or François de la Rue, was a French Catholic physician. His book,
whose title could be translated as On a number of gems, especially those which St. John the
Apostle mentioned in Revelation, deals with gems and their divine natures and properties

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discussion of the work of Lemnius and Valles is intended to suggest

that an analysis of Mosaic physics more generally could provide new
insights into the richness and complexity of the relationships between
science and religion in the early modern period.

Biblical Exegesis and Natural Knowledge

In recent decades, early modern historians of science have ceased to

view the relationship between science and religion as an inevitable con-
fl ict between untrammeled freedom of thought and the evidence of the
senses on the one hand and oppressive dogmatism and the authority of
ancient texts on the other.9 More recent work has detailed a far more
nuanced and complex relationship between the various forms of Chris-
tianity and natural knowledge in the early modern period. Historians of
science are now more likely to see the infl uence of religion on science
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as beneficial rather than
detrimental.10 In addition, this newer work challenges the assumption
that science (or natural philosophy) and religion were separate and dis-
tinguishable domains.11 My analysis of the texts of Lemnius and Valles,
in which biblical commentary and natural knowledge were densely
intertwined, further contributes to our understanding of the contested
nature of the boundary between science and religion in early modern

(divinas . . . naturas & proprietates). Rueus takes as his starting point thirteen gems from Rev.
21:19–21. This passage describes a vision of the heavenly city of Jerusalem. The city
is made of pure gold; it is surrounded by twelve walls, each adorned with a different
kind of gem, and it is entered through gates made of pearl. The thirteen gems referred
to in the title are those on the twelve walls plus the pearls of the gates. The book was
first published in Paris in 1547. It was subsequently published in Conrad Gesner’s De
rerum fossilium genere gemmis lapidibus metallis et huiusmodi libri aliquot plerique nunc primum
editi (Zurich, 1565) and later in combination with the works of Valles and Lemnius
discussed in this essay. Rueus’s book on gems and its publication history are described
in Thorndike 1941, 303–306. There is also a brief mention of Rueus’s account of
creation from De gemmis in Adams 1938, 306. I am grateful to Kerry Magruder for his
assistance in tracking down information on Rueus.
9
The classic statements of this view are Draper 1874 and White 1896. For an
introduction to more recent approaches to the historical relations of science and
Christianity, see Lindberg and Numbers 1986 and Brooke 1991.
10
See for example Barker 2000, 59–88; Bennett and Mandelbrote 1998; Cunning-
ham 1991, 377–392; Harrison, 1998; Howell, 2002; Kusukawa 1995; and Nutton,
1993, 11–32.
11
On this point see, in addition to the authors cited in the previous note, Brooke.

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Europe. In commenting on the classic distinction between “internal”

and “external” in the history of science, Jan Golinski notes,
The problem is not simply to find ways of linking what is taken to be
part of science to what is taken to be outside it, but to scrutinize the ways
in which the boundary has been drawn historically and traffic across it
managed.12
Mosaic physics presents historians of science and historians of religion
with a hitherto unexplored site in which early modern intellectuals
redefined the categories of natural philosophy and Christian theology
and redrew the boundaries between them.
In the sixteenth century, natural philosophers and theologians agreed
that both the book of nature and the book of Scripture were authored
by God. The metaphor of the two books had profound implications
for understanding of the natural world. James Bono has argued that
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, “the same techniques used
to read God’s Book of Scriptures could be, and were, transferred to
reading His other book, nature.”13 A commentary on the Bible and a
commentary on nature employed the same hermeneutical methods.
Each passage of the Bible had multiple layers of meaning and was
embedded in discursive networks that connected it to other biblical
passages, to the writings of the church fathers, medieval theologians and
ancient philosophers, to theology, doctrine and tradition. Each passage
was part of a rich tapestry in which threads of past, present and future
were densely interwoven.14 Similarly, natural objects, phenomena and
processes had multiple layers of meaning and were seen “as participat-
ing in a vast intertextual network of words, fables and things.”15
Both the exegesis of the Bible and the exegesis of the natural world
underwent dramatic transformation in the sixteenth century.16 Historians
of religion have explored the wide range of exegetical methods available
in the sixteenth century and argued that this diversity refl ects the impact
of both humanism and Protestantism.17 Historians of religion also have

12
Golinski, 1998, 54.
13
Bono 1995, 12.
14
On sixteenth-century biblical exegesis, see Steinmetz 1997.
15
Bono 1995, 20. See also Ashworth 1990.
16
Bono 1995 and Steinmetz 1997. See also the essays in Pomata and Siraisi 2005.
17
On the diversity of exegetical methods in the sixteenth century, see Steinmetz
1990; Muller and Thompson 1996; Kolb 1990, 243–258; and Hagen 1990, 13–38.

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 the mosaic physics of lemnius and valles 401

pointed to the renewed centrality of biblical exegesis to theology in the

sixteenth century. Indeed, the sixteenth century has been described as
the golden age of biblical commentary.18 In a recent article, Amos has
argued that the “explosion of commentaries” in this period refl ects a
significant shift in theological method and emphasis.19 The scholastic
theology of the late Middle Ages was systematic. This meant that
theological questions were addressed in a logical, orderly fashion and
biblical passages were assembled according to their relevance to these
questions. The standard text of systematic theology of the late Middle
Ages was Peter Lombard’s Book of Sentences.20 In the late fifteenth and
early sixteenth centuries, humanist scholars, most notably Desiderius
Erasmus (1467–1535), criticized this systematic method.21 Humanists
argued that scholastic theological method distorted the meaning of
biblical passages by taking them out of context and rearranging them
in a structure they saw as arbitrary and artificial rather than logical and
orderly. For Erasmus and other humanists, theological questions ought
to be addressed as they arose in reading and commenting on the Bible.
According to Amos, “Exegesis did not just contribute materials for the
construction of theology—exegesis itself was regarded by [humanists]
as the central theological task.”22 Humanists also argued that this
‘exegetical’ method was the one followed by the church fathers. In sum,
‘doing’ theology in the sixteenth century meant reading and comment-
ing on the Bible. The connections between biblical commentary and
natural knowledge are particularly evident in the work of Lemnius and
Valles. Both produced books on the natural world that were at the same
time biblical commentaries. Indeed, they seem to have collapsed the
boundary between physics and theology.
If both Lemnius and Valles were attempting to create kinds of “sacred
philosophy,” they were also engaged in the production of “secular
theology,” a term I borrow from Amos Funkenstein.23 According to
Funkenstein, secular theology was a new type of literature that arose
in the sixteenth century, fl ourished in the seventeenth and had all but

18
The phrase “golden age” comes from Steinmetz 1997, 2. See also Williams,
1948.
19
Amos 2003, 39.
20
Ibid., 42–43.
21
Ibid., p. 48. On the humanist infl uence on theology, see also Evans 1985 and
Rummel 1996.
22
Amos 2003, 39. Emphasis in original.
23
Funkenstein, 1986, esp. 3–9.

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402 kathleen m. crowther

died out by the eighteenth. It was secular, “in that it was conceived
by laymen for laymen” and “in the sense that it was oriented to the
world, ad seculum.”24 Funkenstein attributes the rise of secular theology
to the erosion of the professional boundaries around theology caused
by the combined onslaught of humanism and Protestantism, the spread
of printing and lay literacy and the rise of courts as alternative intel-
lectual centers rivaling the universities. According to Funkenstein, such
canonical figures of the Scientific Revolution as Galileo Galilei, Isaac
Newton and René Descartes were engaged in writing secular theology.
“Never before or after,” writes Funkenstein, “were science, philosophy,
and theology seen as almost one and the same occupation.”25 In sum,
the Mosaic physics of Lemnius and Valles came out of a period of
profound intellectual, social and religious crisis in which traditional ways
of understanding the Bible and the natural world were challenged on
many grounds. In different ways, each sought to make meaning out of
this crisis and to rethink the relationship between natural knowledge
and religious piety.

Levinus Lemnius (1505–1568)

Levinus Lemnius was born in 1505, in the port city of Zierikzee in

the province of Zeeland in the Netherlands.26 He was educated at
Latin schools in Zierikzee and Ghent, and he entered the University
of Louvain in 1521. At Louvain he studied philosophy, theology, and
medicine. He took a medical degree in Italy in 1526, and then returned
to Zierikzee in 1527, where he married and established a successful
medical practice. Lemnius’s family was certainly Catholic. Religious
controversies reached Zeeland only toward the end of Lemnius’s life.
His religious views appear to have been very similar to Erasmus’s. He
remained Catholic and expressed deep distaste for the violence of reli-
gious controversy. Late in life, after his wife died, he entered holy orders,
becoming a canon in the church of Zierikzee. He died in 1568.
Despite the fact that Lemnius spent his life in the provincial city
of Zierikzee, and despite the fact that his name and work are almost

24
Ibid., 3.
25
Ibid.
26
The best source of biographical information on Lemnius is van Hoorn 1978. See
also van Hoorn’s earlier article on Levinus Lemnius and his son Willem: 1971. For a
brief biography and partial bibliography in English, see Lindeboom 1984.

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 the mosaic physics of lemnius and valles 403

unknown today, he was hardly an obscure figure in the intellectual

world of his day. In addition to managing a successful medical prac-
tice, Lemnius published extensively. The majority of his books were
on medical topics.27 Lemnius’s Concerning Herbs and Trees was one of
his most successful books. It went through sixteen editions, including a
translation into English. In many of these editions it was printed with
Valles’s Sacred Philosophy.28
Lemnius dedicated Concerning Herbs and Trees to Thomas Thield,
abbot of St. Bernard, a Cistercian abbey located about six miles from
Antwerp.29 In this dedication, he identifies himself as a physician, but
also as a “student of sacred letters.”30 He acknowledges that there might
be readers who disapprove of a physician meddling in theological mat-
ters. But to those who would say, “let the cobbler stick to his last,”31
he answers that it is physicians, not theologians, who have studied the
properties of plants. Thus when plants figure in the Bible as metaphors,
similes and other figures of speech, it is entirely appropriate that a
physician such as himself should interpret these passages. Indeed, a
physician, by reason of his training, is better equipped to interpret
these particular biblical passages than is a theologian who “scarcely has

27
For a partial bibliography, see Lindeboom 1984.
28
Concerning Herbs and Trees was published by itself in Antwerp in 1566, 1568, and
1569; Erfurt, 1581 and 1584; Frankfurt, 1591, 1596, 1608, and 1626; and Lyon in
1588, 1594, 1622, and 1652. The English translation by Thomas Newton, An Herbal
for the Bible was published in London in 1587. Concerning Herbs and Trees was published
with Valles’s Sacred Philosophy in Turin, 1587; Lyon, 1588, 1592, 1595, 1622, 1652; and
Frankfurt, 1667. All of those editions also included Franciscus Rueus’s De gemmis. In
addition, Concerning Herbs and Trees was published many times with Rueus’s book but
not Valles’s Sacred Philosophy. There were editions of Lemnius and Rueus published in
Frankfurt in 1591, 1596, 1608 and 1626; Lyon, 1594; and Venice in 1772, 1774, and
1785. Many of these versions also include a third work by Lemnius on astrology. I
have used the publication information from Blair 2000, 43, n. 22, and supplemented
it by searching the Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog, which searches the holdings of most
major European libraries. (I am grateful to one of the anonymous referees for sug-
gesting that I check this database, which turned up many more editions than I had
originally identified.) While I make no claim to have found every edition of Lemnius’s
book or to have unraveled its complex publication history, the numbers of editions that
I have found certainly support my argument about the popularity of the book and its
importance for early modern readers.
29
Lemnius’s dedication reads: “D. Thomae Thieldio Divi Bernardi in confiniis
Antuerpianis ad Schaldam, Antisti cum primis reverendo.” Lemnius 1592, 1. On the
abbey, see Shahan, 1907.
30
He refers to himself as “Levinus Lemnius Medicus Zirizaeus sacrarum literarum
studiosus.” Ibid.
31
“ne sutor ultra crepidam,” ibid., 4.

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any knowledge of even the most common, well known and familiar
plants.”32 But he does not suggest that the work is only for theologians,
who might need to consult it when explicating sections of the Bible in
which specific plants are mentioned. Instead he proclaims that the study
of nature (naturae investigatio), including the study of plants, can engender
religious piety: “it [the study of nature] arouses one to contemplation
of divine things and kindles knowledge, love and admiration of their
maker.”33 But these benefits to investigating nature can be derived from
reading his book as well, and Lemnius expresses hope that any honest
reader (candidum Lectorem) will receive both enjoyment and profit from
reading his book.
In the introductory chapter he elaborates further on his purpose in
writing. Throughout the Bible, the authors of the Old and New Testa-
ments use similes, metaphors and other figures of speech drawn from
plants. On the one hand, Lemnius asserts that these botanical similes
and metaphors “adorne their sermons, & garnish their matters withall,
to make the same by such familiar meanes the easier to be conceived,
and the readier to be beleeved.”34 In other words, similes, metaphors,
parables, and other figures of speech drawn from plants can be used
to make difficult points clearer and easier to understand. The very
familiarity of plants made them useful pedagogical devices for the
writers of Scripture. However, Lemnius also asserts that the authors
of biblical texts were “most exquisitly also furnished with the entire
knowledge of all things naturall.”35 Their knowledge of the natural
world came directly from God, not through reading or observation.
They were capable of using examples of “things fetched out of the
very secrets and bowells of Nature.”36 In other words, sacred writers
had deeper and more complete knowledge of nature than ordinary
human beings. In some cases, their use of plants was familiar. In
other cases they referred to hidden or obscure virtues of the plants. In

32
“ac vix vulgatas passimque obvias herbas cognitas, perspectasque habeant,”
ibid., 5.
33
“ad contemplandas etiam res divinas erigit, ad Opificis notitiam eiusque amorem
atque admirationem infl ammat.” Ibid.
34
Lemnius 1587, 4. “ex iis Prophetae appositissimas similitudines, scitasque &
concinas comparationes desumant, quibus conciones exornant, ac fidem narrationi
adstruunt.” Lemnius 1596, 2.
35
Lemnius 1587, 6. “in naturae rebus exquisite versatos,” Lemnius 1596, 4.
36
Lemnius 1587, 6–7. “ex intimis atque arcanis naturae similitudines & compara-
tiones desumant,” Lemnius 1596, 4.

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 the mosaic physics of lemnius and valles 405

order to understand these passages, the reader had to better acquaint

himself with the virtues and characteristics of plants, through personal
observation and reading of natural philosophy. Fuller understanding of
the Bible was only possible with fuller understanding of nature, so the
search for fuller comprehension of the Bible should lead to a search
for fuller comprehension of nature.
In addition to describing knowledge of plants as pious, Lemnius
describes it as noble. Throughout history, he writes, kings and princes,
“have beene studiously addicted and singularly delighted in the serch
and knowledge of the nature of Plants and Herbs.”37 The study of plants
was pleasing and provided solace and relief from duties of state. It was
also an activity befitting the dignity of monarchs and aristocrats,
And by this kind of studie . . . their fame and memories became as glorious
and renowmed [sic], and their honorable magnificence as highlie digni-
fied, as by anie other their woorthie acts, noble conquests, or triumphant
victories whatsoever.38
The reader can be assured that he is delving into a subject that is both
pious and refined, and whose benefits are spiritual and emotional as
well as material.
After the introductory chapter, there are forty-nine chapters, each
dealing with a plant that appears somewhere in the Bible. There are
chapters on various herbs, including mandrake, wormwood, mint,
and rosemary; fruits, including pomegranates and oranges; vegetables,
including cucumbers and gourds; trees, including the olive, willow,
fig, and oak; and fl owers, including hyacinths and roses. There is no
discernible order to these chapters. In each chapter, Lemnius gives the
reader a physical description of the plant and an account of its medical
uses. For example, the chapter on wormwood begins:
There be three sorts of Wormwood. The first is called Wormwoode
Romane or Ponticum, which is planted in Gardens, and hath somewhat a
pleasant smell. The seconde is Sea Wormewoode, growing in Salt water
creeks and Sea shores. The third is our common Woormewood, being

37
Lemnius 1587, 1. “studiose olim excoluisse rem Herbariam, ac stirpium cognitione
cum primis fuisse delectatos,” Lemnius 1596, 1.
38
Lemnius 1587, 2. “Hac enim quum animi, tum corporis cultura non minus celebris
facta est illorum memoria, non minus illustratus nominis splendor & magnificentia;
quam rebus aliis praeclare gestis, aut hostibus vel subactis, vel ad internecionem dele-
tis.” Lemnius 1596, 1.

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exceeding bitter in taste, and is a most soveraigne and present remedie

against woorms.39
For each plant, Lemnius assembles biblical passages in which the
plant appears. Some of the plants in Concerning Herbs and Trees are only
referred to once in the Bible, but most are found in multiple passages.
In the chapter on wormwood, Lemnius cites Jeremiah, Amos, Isaiah,
Ezechiel, Hosea, Lamentations, Psalms, Proverbs, and Revelation.40
According to Lemnius, in the Bible wormwood serves as a metaphor for
“heavie, noisom, hurtfull, bitter, cruel, and lamentable dealings.”41 As,
for example, when God, speaking through the prophet Jeremiah, rails
against the wicked, “Beholde . . . I will feede this people with Woorme-
wood.”42 Solomon warns young men that, “the lips of an harlot . . . drop
as an honie combe . . . but the end of hir is bitter as Woormewood.”43
And in the book of Revelation:
the Angell blowing the Trumpet, there fell a great Starre from heaven,
burning like a Torch . . . and the name of the Starre was called Woorme-
wood; and it fell into the third part of the rivers, and into the fountains
of waters: wherefore the third part of the waters became Woormwood:
and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.44
At first glance this appears to be a rather disparate collection of quo-
tations, held together mainly by their common reference to the herb
wormwood. But all refer to sin and punishment for sin. The bitter taste
of the wormwood serves as a metaphor for the bitterness of divine
wrath. And yet, the fact that Lemnius joins these scriptural passages to
an account of the usefulness of wormwood as an antihelminthic sug-
gests another layer of meaning. It suggests a connection between the
purgative powers of wormwood, its effectiveness at expelling corruption
from the body, to the redemptive, restorative, corrective powers of divine

39
Lemnius 1587, 100. Wormwood is one of the shorter chapters. Other entries
include more detailed physical descriptions and more extended discussions of medical
uses. Not all chapters begin with this information. The variant spellings of wormwood
are in the original.
40
Lemnius 1587, 101–105. Jer. 9:15, 23:15, 5:26, 13:15; Am. 5:7 and 6:12; Is. 5:20,
10:1, 51:17; Ez. 22:7 and 25:4; Hos. 10:4; Lam. 3:5 and 3:15; Ps. 60:1; Prov. 5:3 and
7:5; Rev. 8:10.
41
Lemnius 1587, 105.
42
Jer. 9, 15; Lemnius 1587, 101.
43
Prov. 5, 3 and 7, 5; Lemnius 1587, 104–105.
44
Rev. 8,10; Lemnius 1587, 105.

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punishment. Just as wormwood is a violent but effective and necessary

purgative, so too the wrath of God is difficult to endure but heals the
soul of corruption.45 Lemnius’s earlier insistence that the sacred writers
had special knowledge of nature and drew figures of speech from the
“secrets and bowells of Nature” implies that Jeremiah, Solomon, and
John had the medicinal qualities of wormwood in mind when they
used it metaphorically. Wormwood is one of the simpler entries in
this book, but it indicates some of the ways in which Lemnius linked
natural knowledge and biblical exegesis.
A more complex example is the chapter on wild lettuce.46 As this
example will show, Lemnius not only cites relevant scriptural passages,
but also expounds on them, at least briefl y. He often takes opportunity
to embark on mini-homilies on certain topics or exegesis of certain
passages. Also, he does not confine himself to citing biblical passages
that explicitly mention the plant in question. Rather, he freely draws
on related passages of the Bible.47 Finally, this example will show that
natural objects, like biblical passages, had multiple layers of meaning.
Although the chapter on wild lettuce is longer than the chapter on
wormwood, Lemnius actually cites only one biblical passage that con-
tains a reference to wild lettuce: the description of the Passover meal
as lamb eaten with “sower Herbes, or wilde Letuce” in Ex. 12:5.48
However, this is a singularly important passage in the Bible, because
the sacrifice of the Paschal lamb prefigures the sacrifice of Christ
at the Crucifixion, and the Passover meal prefigures the Eucharist.
Expounding on this passage allows Lemnius to discuss the relationship
between the Old Testament and the New and between Mosaic law and
Christian grace. Lemnius begins with a general statement about God’s
goodness toward mankind, and notes that, in order to remind men of
his goodness and stir them to appropriate gratitude, “the Lorde God
instituted diverse rites, and sundrie solemne ceremonies, not onely in
the olde Law wherein all thinges concerning Christ and his Kingdome

45
For an account of the links between purgation of bodily corruption and exorcism
of demons in the sixteenth century, see Eamon 1994, 189–193.
46
Lemnius 1587, 27–33; Lemnius 1596, 15–18.
47
This is also true in the chapter on wormwood. Several of the passages Lemnius
cites in this chapter do not mention wormwood but are about the wrath of God and
his punishments of the wicked.
48
Lemnius 1587, 29. “cum lactucis silvestribus, sive herbis amaris,” Lemnius 1596, 16.

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were typicallie shadowed, but also in the Gospell.”49 God assures men
of his love and forgiveness of their sins “by certain Signes, Tokens,
Seales, or Sacraments, visible to the eie, and apparently subject to
outwarde senses.”50 Baptism is one such sign, and its institution in
the New Testament was prefigured in the Old Testament by the rite
of circumcision and by the passage of the Israelites through the Red
Sea.51 After these preliminaries, Lemnius works his way around to the
passage from Exodus where wild lettuce is mentioned. First he notes
that just as baptism has replaced the rite of circumcision, so “in place
or steede of the eating of the Paschall Lamb, we have now the holy
Communion of the bodie and blood of Christ.”52 The crucifixion of
Christ was prefigured not only by the sacrifice of the Paschal lamb,
but also by Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac.53 Not only
does the Passover meal prefigure the Eucharist, but also the escape of
the Israelites can be read as
most wholesome instruction and comfortable direction, unto us living
in the troublesome wildernesse of this miserable world; to admonish us
of our passage toward our heavenly Countrie, and blessed dwelling of
immortalitie.54
By this point, it may seem that Lemnius has forgotten all about the wild
lettuce, but at length he returns to it. The wild lettuce is not a trivial
detail, but a crucial part of the story. According to Lemnius:
This Lambe was commanded to be eaten with sower Herbs, or wilde
Letuce: for that, in this our wretched life, all things are bitter, trouble-
some, greevous, and full of calamitie, having in it a great deal more Aloe
than Honie, that is, much greater store of miserie and mischiefe, than
of joy and tranquillitie.55

49
Lemnius 1587, 28. “Atque huius rei causa certos ritus ac statas solemnesque
ceremonias instituit, non solum in veteri Lege, in qua omnia de Christi eiusque regno
typis adumbrata sunt, sed etiam in Evangelio . . .” Lemnius 1596, 15.
50
Lemnius 1587, 28. “Sic signis quibusdam, certisque symbolis ac sacramentis quae
sub sensum cadunt ac sunt visibilia,” Lemnius 1596, 15.
51
Lemnius 1587, 28. Lemnius 1596, 15.
52
Lemnius 1587, 28. “In agni vero Paschalis esum surrogata est Synaxis, hoc est,
corporis & sanguinis Christi communio,” Lemnius 1596, 15.
53
Lemnius 1587, 29. Lemnius 1596, 16.
54
Lemnius 1587, 30. “. . . (apto appositoque ad huius aevi decursum vocabulo),
qui nobis in hac mundi impedita ac vasta solitudine, ad immortalitatem ac caelestem
patriam sedesque beatas sit transitus.” Lemnius 1596, 16.
55
Lemnius, 1587. “Praecipitur autem edendus agnus cum lactucis silvestribus, sive
herbis amaris. Siquidem in huius saeculi curriculo omnia amara sunt, acerba, tristia,
calamitosa, & quae plus aloes quam mellis habeant.” Lemnius 1596, 16.

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In the second half of the chapter, Lemnius discusses the various kinds
of wild lettuce and their medicinal properties. Wild lettuce is generally
useful in curing obstructions of the liver (hepatis obstructionibus),56 tertian
fevers, and jaundice.57 Wild lettuce is also a nourishing and healthful
food, and especially tasty when cooked with oil, vinegar, and pepper.58
Lemnius cites the classical authors Virgil, Columnella and Cicero on
the benefits of wild lettuce.59
This chapter thus combines scriptural exegesis with an account of
the physical properties and medical and nutritional usefulness of wild
lettuce. Lemnius employs some typical hermeneutical strategies. First,
he interprets events of the Old Testament as prefigurations of events
in the New Testament. Second, he attributes multiple levels of mean-
ing to biblical passages, both literal and spiritual. So, for example, the
Passover is an important episode in Jewish history but it also refers to
the soul’s journey to heaven through the trials and tribulations of this
world. Both of these strategies were well established by the sixteenth
century and were utilized by both Catholics and Protestants. Lemnius’s
interpretation of Exodus 12:5 is not in any way novel either. What
does seem to me interesting and worthy of comment about this chap-
ter is that it suggests that Lemnius saw natural objects—in this case
wild lettuce—as having multiple layers of meaning, both literal and
spiritual. Wild lettuce was healthy and nourishing to the body just as
it was healthy and nourishing to the soul to follow the rites and rituals
laid down in Scripture. The bitterness of wild lettuce symbolized the
pain and misery of earthly existence just as the Passover symbolized
the soul’s journey through this world. The meanings of the plant were
comprehended by understanding the scriptural references but also by
understanding its physical properties. And conversely, the scriptural
passages are rendered more meaningful by understanding the proper-
ties of the plant.
Lemnius’s confidence as an educated lay person to comment on
the meaning of scriptural passages, as well as his interest in the moral
and spiritual meanings of natural objects (in this case plants) are most
likely connected to the infl uence of Erasmus. Concerning Herbs and Trees
is reminiscent of Erasmus’s dialogue, “The Godly Feast,” in which a
group of friends meet at the country home of Eusebius. They wander

56
Lemnius 1587, 30. Lemnius 1596, 17.
57
Lemnius 1587, 31. Lemnius 1596, 17.
58
Lemnius 1587, 33. Lemnius 1596, 18.
59
Lemnius 1587, 31–32. Lemnius 1596, 17.

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through the large and attractive garden, discoursing over the moral
and spiritual lessons to be drawn from plants and animals. Over lunch,
the friends discuss selected biblical passages, and one of them explicitly
defends the legitimacy of this activity for laymen:
Eusebius: I wish we had a good theologian here who not only understood
these matters but had prudence as well. I don’t know whether it’s permis-
sible for us simple laymen to discuss these topics.
Timothy: It would be permissible even for sailors, in my opinion, provided
there is no rash attempt at formal definition. And perhaps Christ, who
promised to be present wherever two men are gathered together in his
name, will help us, since we are so many.60
Concerning Herbs and Trees puts these two pious activities-talking about
plants and talking about Scripture-together. Perhaps Lemnius’s text
might be seen as a similar literary walk through a garden in which
every plant has lessons to impart. Understood this way, the lack of
apparent order, the refusal to put the plants in alphabetical order or
to organize them by type, makes sense. The text may be intended to
evoke the pleasure of meandering through a garden, in the same way
that Eusebius’s guests do. It may also be intended to evoke those other
famous biblical gardens, Eden and the hortus conclusus in the Song of
Songs.
The fact that Lemnius dedicated his work to an abbot and that he
explicitly defended his project to this religious leader indicates that he
might have anticipated criticism on grounds that he was trespassing on
theological territory. It is worth noting that the book was published in
1566, the year of the failed Dutch revolt against Hapsburg rule. In the
aftermath of the rebellion more repressive measures, including stricter
censorship, were enacted to combat the threat of political subversion
and ‘heresy’ (defined as any deviation from orthodox Catholicism).61
It is possible that if Lemnius had written this book just a few years
later, in the very different climate of the 1570s, he might have been
more circumspect.
While Lemnius’s Concerning Herbs and Trees hardly seems modern, it
is important to recognize that it differed substantially from medieval
writing on the natural world. Although Lemnius’s understanding of
plants as having multiple meanings, literal as well as symbolic and

60
Erasmus 1997, 184.
61
Israel 1995, 137–168.

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allegorical, resembles the discussions of animals in medieval bestiaries,

the differences are greater than the similarities. A brief comparison of
Lemnius’s book with medieval bestiaries can clarify the novel aspects
of his approach. Medieval bestiaries ascribed religious significance to
animals, but they linked animals to specific Christian doctrines rather
than to particular biblical passages in which the animal appeared. For
example, pelican mothers were reported to nourish their offspring by
striking their own breasts and feeding the young on their own blood.
In this noble and self-sacrificing behavior humans were to see an alle-
gory of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.62 Unlike Lemnius, the authors
of bestiaries did not claim that knowledge of natural objects (animals
or plants) could be useful to biblical exegesis.63 When one compares
Lemnius’s Concerning Herbs and Trees with medieval writing on plants,
the contrast is even more striking. Medieval herbals, unlike bestiaries,
focused exclusively on the medicinal uses of plants, and did not ascribe
symbolic or allegorical meaning to these medicinal properties.64 Medi-
eval painters and sculptors invested certain plants, especially fl owers,
with religious significance. But again, this iconographic tradition linked
plants to specific Christian doctrines, not biblical passages. For example,
the lily was used in many depictions of the Virgin Mary to symbolize
her chastity, referring to the doctrine of the miraculous virgin birth of
Christ.65 These iconographic conventions remained separate from the
herbal tradition, with little evidence of mutual interaction. I am not
aware of any author before Lemnius who ascribed spiritual and religious
meanings to the physical properties and characteristics of plants. Com-
menting on the difference between medieval and Renaissance writing
on the natural world, Brian Ogilvie points out that, while the authors
of bestiaries used animals as moral exemplars, they never “displayed
any concern for the truth of the exempla they drew from nature.” By
contrast, Renaissance humanists and naturalists insisted that facts about
natural objects and phenomena be verified before they drew morals
from them.66 Lemnius’s Concerning Herbs and Trees is clearly closely related
to this humanist mode of writing on the natural world. But unlike

62
For examples of medieval bestiaries see Curley 1979 and White 1984. On the
medieval bestiary tradition see Clark and McMunn 1989.
63
For a more extended discussion of the differences between medieval and early mod-
ern writing on animals, see Ashworth 1990 and Kathleen Crowther-Heyck 2003.
64
Stannard 1978, esp. 443–449.
65
Koch 1964.
66
Ogilvie 2005, 87.

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the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century naturalists whose work Ogilvie

analyzes, Lemnius was interested not only in drawing moral lessons
from nature, but also in using accurate information about nature to
correctly interpret particular passages of the Bible.

Francisco Valles (1524–1592)

Francisco Valles was born in 1524 in Covarrubias, Spain.67 He studied

medicine at the University of Alcalá, where he received his degree in
1553 and was a professor from 1554 to 1572. He obtained the first
chair in medicine in 1557. In 1572, he gave up his university position
to become the personal physician of King Philip II. He earned the
gratitude of this monarch, and the sobriquet “the Divine,” by curing
him of gout. He was one of three scholars appointed by Philip II to
establish a library in the Escorial. At the end of his life he retired to
an Augustinian monastery in Burgos, where he died in 1592.
Like Lemnius, Valles is an extremely obscure figure today. But like his
Dutch contemporary, in his own day, Valles was an eminent and highly
respected humanist scholar and physician. He published extensively on
a range of topics, although the majority of his works were on medical
subjects.68 He wrote commentaries on several works of Hippocrates,
Galen, and Aristotle. One of his most successful works was his Contro-
versiarum medicarum et philosophicarum libri decem. Originally published in
1556 in Alcalá, it went through nine more editions published in France,
Germany and Italy.69
Toward the end of his life, Valles turned from medical and natural
philosophical subjects to Mosaic physics. In 1587, he published his
Sacred Philosophy.70 The book went through at least twelve editions and

67
Biographical information from Chinchilla 1841, 220–233; Morejón 1843, 57–83;
and Ferreira 1995, 58–64. There is a short biobibliographical entry on Valles in
Schmitt et al. 1988, 839. I am grateful to Luis Cortest for drawing this piece to my
attention.
68
For the most complete bibliography of his books see Solana 1941, 298–347. Unfor-
tunately, Solana only lists the first edition of each work. Morejón has a less complete
list of Valles’s books, but for the books he lists, he provides information on the dates
and places of publication of (some but not all) subsequent editions.
69
Siraisi 1997, 55; and Schmitt et al. 1988, 232–33.
70
Valles 1592. I have used an edition printed in Lyon in 1592. The first edition
was printed in Turin in 1587. There is virtually no modern scholarship on this text.
Descriptions of its contents can be found in Chinchilla, Morejón and Zanier 1983,
20–38.

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was often published with Lemnius’s Concerning Herbs and Trees.71 Like
Lemnius’s Concerning Herbs and Trees, Valles’s Sacred Philosophy brings
together natural philosophy and biblical exegesis. However, there are
some significant differences between the two books. First, and most
obviously, Lemnius’s Concerning Herbs and Trees deals exclusively with
plants, while Valles’s Sacred Philosophy deals with any and all aspects of
the natural world mentioned in the Bible. Valles covers a truly breath-
taking array of topics. Not surprisingly, many are medical in nature.
He discusses, for example, topics relating to sex and reproduction,
including signs of virginity, the role of semen and menstrual blood in
reproduction, maternal imagination, the formation of the fetus in the
womb, and the infusion of the soul. He devotes attention to various
diseases, including leprosy, ulcers, melancholy, and blindness. But Valles
does not confine himself to medical topics. He also discusses animals
and plants, the composition of the heavens, the infl uences of the stars,
the formation of rainbows, and whether it is possible for demons to
have sex with human beings. In sum, the subject matter covered in
this book includes medicine, botany, zoology, cosmology, meteorology,
astrology, and demonology.
A second difference between Lemnius’s Concerning Herbs and Trees
and Valles’s Sacred Philosophy is the way they explain and justify their
respective projects in their introductions. While Lemnius extols natural
knowledge as both noble and divine, and asserts that natural knowl-
edge can be used to better understand the Bible, Valles is more cau-
tious, even diffident in his claims. According to Valles, many passages
of Scripture deal in some way with the natural world, but the Bible
does not set forth a comprehensive account of natural phenomena or
a fully coherent natural philosophy. Much of what Scripture relates
about nature is obscure and incomplete. In the Bible, God “set forth
all things relevant to the salvation of our souls”72 and He did it in such
a way that those things necessary for salvation could be understood
“by the judgment of both philosophers and even ordinary people.”73
Attaining natural knowledge was irrelevant to attaining eternal life:

71
De sacra philosophia was published in Turin in 1587; in Lyon in 1588, 1592, 1595,
1622, and 1652; and in Frankfurt in 1590, 1600, 1608, 1619, 1667, and 1677. Publica-
tion information from Morejón and the Karlsruhe Virtueller Katalog.
72
“omnia ad salutem animarum referens . . . proposuerit,” Valles 1592, 5.
73
“iuxta humanas sententias, Philosophorum, aut etiam vulgarium hominum,”
ibid.

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“For God did not wish to teach us the natural causes and origins of
things, since this would certainly not lead us to eternal salvation.”74
Far from claiming that knowledge of God’s creation could lead to
more profound knowledge of God Himself or to deeper piety, Valles
appears ready to dismiss natural knowledge and curiosity about the
natural world entirely. “And yet,” he adds, “while it is not necessary to
eternal salvation to know the natural causes of things, still it does not
harm anyone.”75 Faint praise indeed! We seem to be a long way from
Lemnius’s claim that the great kings of old spent their leisure time
studying plants and gained renown through this activity no less than
through their military and political exploits.
However, while Valles acknowledges that the Bible does not speak
clearly on natural philosophical matters, he asserts that it does not speak
falsely on such matters: “Nevertheless, when certain things concerning
nature are woven into the very structures of the discourses, I believe
that they are all very true, since they were declared by the truest spirit
of God. . . .”76 God certainly did not intend the Bible as a work of
natural philosophy, “but when He touched on something [about the
natural world] in passing, why should He deceive us?”77 Again, this
seems like a fairly weak justification for a book “on the things that are
written about natural philosophy in the Holy Scriptures” especially
compared with Lemnius’s assertion that natural knowledge can aid in
interpreting the Bible.
At this point, Valles makes a different kind of claim. “All other learn-
ing that is true,” he writes, “including natural learning, is contained in
these divine books.”78 Thus all learned men, whatever their areas of
expertise, could learn more about their disciplines by studying the Bible.
He himself is an expert on natural philosophy, having “now completed
commentaries on the natural works of Aristotle and the medical texts
of Hippocrates and Galen.”79 But he believes that his knowledge of

74
“Noluit enim nos Deus naturales rerum causas, & ortus docere, utpote quas, nos
certo scire non adeo referat ad aeternum salutem.” Ibid., 6.
75
“Atqui naturales rerum causas scire, ut non est ad salutem aeterum necessarium,
ita neque quidquam laedit.” Ibid.
76
“Tamen, cum quaedam in ipso sermonum ductu texantur naturalia ea omnia
verissima esse existimo, utpote quae, a summe vero Dei spiritu, dictata sint. . . .” Ibid.
77
“sed cum obiter aliquid attingit, cur nos decipiat?” Ibid.
78
“Ob haec ego mihi persuadeo atque omnibus persuasum volo, vt omnem aliam
doctrinam, quae vera sit, ita naturalem, in his diuinis libris contineri. . . .” Ibid.
79
“perfectis iam in omnes Auditorios Aristotelis de Natura, & quam plurimos Hip-
pocraris [sic], & Galeni de re medica, libros, commentariis,” ibid., 6–7.

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the natural world will be increased by study of the Bible. “Until now,”
he writes, “I have written philosophically, for opinion, but [this book]
is written for truth.”80 Valles in no way repudiates any of his earlier
work and study of ancient natural philosophers. Throughout the Sacred
Philosophy he cites ancient (and some medieval and contemporary) phi-
losophers extensively.
Valles’s introduction seems to refl ect a greater anxiety about crossing
over disciplinary boundaries into the domain of theologians than does
Lemnius’s. Valles concludes by promising that, in his commentary on
biblical passages, “I will depart as little as possible from physical things.
For I greatly approve this saying: let the cobbler stick to his last.”81 Here
Valles uses the same phrase Lemnius used in his dedication, ne sutor ultra
crepidas, to entirely opposite effect. Valles stays away from more purely
theological topics like the sacraments or the relationship between the
Old Testament and the New, areas where Lemnius did not fear to tread.
In addition, Valles takes pains to point to his own religious orthodoxy
in a way that Lemnius does not. Valles refers to himself as “a pious
son of the Catholic Church,”82 and asserts that there is “nothing in
[this book] or in any of my other works that is not approved by the
holy Roman Church, in which truth and wisdom reside.”83
Sacred Philosophy is organized as a biblical commentary. That is, each
chapter takes a verse or verses from the Bible that touch on some aspect
of the natural world and expounds on them. Throughout the text, Valles
brings together natural philosophical knowledge and biblical exegesis in
different ways. Sometimes he uses a natural philosophical author or text
to clarify a particular passage of the Bible. For example, in chapter 12
he comments on Genesis 34:25: “now it came about on the third day,

80
“scripta esse mihi hactenus Philosophica, ad opinionem, haec autem scribi ad
veritatem,” ibid., 7.
81
“vt a physicis quam minimum recedam; mihi enim magnopere probatur illud: ne
sutor vltra crepidas.” Valles 1592, 7.
82
“pius, & catholicae ecclesiae filius,” ibid., 6.
83
“testor ante omnia, nihil me in hoc, aut vllo alio meorum operum asserere, nisi
quatenus probetur a sancta Romana Ecclesia, penes quam veritas est, & sapientia.”
Ibid., 7. Apparently, Valles’s anxiety was not misplaced. According to Solana, the Sacred
Philosophy was corrected and expurgated by the Spanish Inquisition in 1613. In Rome,
the work was prohibited, “donec corrigatur” by a decree of July 3, 1618. It remained
on the Index librorum prohibitorum until 1900. (Solana 1941, 307) The 1587 Turin edition
in the History of Science Collections of the University of Oklahoma has a handwrit-
ten note on the title page: “Et iuxta Indicem Expurgatorium castigatus.” Parts of the
text have been expurgated and corrected.

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when the pain of wounds is gravest, that two of Jacob’s sons, Simeon
and Levi, Dinah’s brothers, each took up his sword and came upon the
city.”84 The context of this passage is the rape of Dinah, the daughter
of Jacob, by Shechem. After Shechem rapes Dinah, he asks her father
and brothers for permission to marry her. Jacob and his sons agree to
the marriage, on the condition that Shechem and all the men of his
tribe be circumcised. This, however, is simply a ploy to get revenge.
Once all the men of the city are weakened by their wounds, Dinah’s
brothers Simeon and Levi enter the city, slaughter all the men, steal the
livestock, rape the women, and loot the houses. Valles’s commentary
focuses on the phrase, “on the third day, when the pain of wounds
is gravest.” Why, he asks, would Dinah’s brothers attack Shechem
and his kinsman on the third day after their circumcisions? Why not
immediately after? Why not on the second day or on the fourth day?
Why is it that the pain from a wound is most severe on the third day?
To answer these questions, he turns to one of the Hippocratic surgical
texts. Valles quotes the Hippocratic text Fractures:
For, to speak summarily, the third or fourth day is the very last on which
any lesion should be actively interfered with; and all probings as well as
everything else by which wounds are irritated should be avoided on these
days. For, as a rule, the third or fourth day sees the birth of exacerbations
in the majority of lesions, both where the tendency is to infl ammation
and foulness, and in those which turn to fever.85
Valles explains that, according to Hippocrates, the third day is a crucial
day in the healing of wounds, a time when the patient is particularly
vulnerable. When a person is first wounded, “the pain usually is only
from the division of the fl esh itself,”86 and this pain is relatively quickly

84
“Et ecce die tertio, quando grauissimus vulnerum dolor est, arreptis duo filii
Jacob, Simeon & Leui fratres Dinae, gladiis, ingressi sunt vrbem.” (Valles 1592, 142)
My translation follows that of the New American Standard Bible, with one crucial
exception. The NASB translates the clause “quando grauissimus vulnerum dolor est”
as “when they were in pain.” The King James Version translates this phrase as “when
they were sore.”
85
“tertio & quarto die vulnera omnia minime sunt exagitanda, & vt in summa
dicam specilli quoque omnes admotiones vitandae his diebus sunt, omniaque alia
quibus vulnera irritantur: in totum enim tertius & quartus dies in plerisque vulneribus
exacerbationes parit, & quae in infl ammationes & sordes incitantur, & quaecunque in
febres tendunt.” Valles 1592, 142. Here I use the translation of Fractures by Withington
1978, 304.
86
“prima enim die, qua quis vulneratus est, dolor tantum esse solet ex ipsa carnis
divisione. . . .” Valles 1592, 143.

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alleviated. After the first day, the affl icted part begins to attract humors
to itself and “from this [infl ux of humors] infl ammation, or much foul-
ness and sometimes even fever arises.”87 So by the third day, the patient
is weaker and in greater pain than on the first day, and this explains
why Simeon and Levi chose to attack Shechem and his kinsmen on
the third day following their circumcisions.
Thus Valles uses his extensive knowledge of the Hippocratic writ-
ings to clarify a potentially obscure biblical passage. Unlike Lemnius,
he does not explicitly refer to or intervene in any purely theological
or religious issue. Indeed, this chapter is a good example of the way
in which Valles departs “as little as possible from physical things” in
the Sacred Philosophy. By the sixteenth century, the story of the rape of
Dinah had a long and richly developed exegetical literature. Dinah was
usually seen as a cautionary example of what could happen to young
women who roamed around too freely away from parental supervi-
sion. She was almost always seen as complicit in the rape, which was
generally understood as a seduction. For other commentators, Dinah
represented the soul, and her story was about the dangers lurking in
wait for the soul that strays from God. Valles’s commentary on Gen.
34: 25 completely sidesteps this literature.88
However, Valles does something else in this chapter. After reviewing
the argument in Fractures about the dangers of disturbing a wound on
the third day of healing, he expresses dissatisfaction with this text. While
agreeing that it is the infl ux of humors that causes a wound to be more
painful after the first day, he notes that neither Hippocrates, nor Galen
in his commentaries on Hippocrates, actually explain why the third day
is so crucial. Why do the humors not arrive at the affected part sooner
or later than the third day? Valles undertakes to provide this explana-
tion himself. According to Valles, humors move toward wounded or
affl icted parts of the body in a particular order. “On the second day
phlegm fl ows in, [and phlegm is] a mild, moderate, minimally irritat-
ing humor.”89 The infl ux of phlegm does not cause particular pain.
However, on the third day, yellow bile fl ows toward the wound. Yellow

87
“succrescat infl ammatio, aut sordes multa, atque ob haec nonnunquam etiam
febris,” ibid.
88
On medieval and early modern interpretations of Genesis 34, see Schroeder
1997.
89
“infl uet die secundo pituita, succus mitis, moderatus, minimeque irritans,” Valles
1592, 144.

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bile is “a sharp, biting, exceedingly hot humor”90 and “it brings pain
and heat.”91 The pain and heat attract blood to the wound, and this
in turn “produces infl ammations and fevers.”92 If the patient is not
disturbed, these humors recede and the pain, fever and infl ammation
subside, but not in less than twenty-four hours.93 And this, finally, is
the reason Shechem and his men were so vulnerable on the third day.
What begins as a commentary on an unclear biblical text becomes a
commentary on an unclear Hippocratic text. Valles makes his exegesis of
Gen. 34:25 the occasion for elucidating an aspect of human physiology
(the healing of wounds) not explicitly discussed by either Hippocrates
or Galen. Unlike Lemnius, who brought known facts about the natural
world to his biblical exegesis, Valles uses biblical commentary as a start-
ing point for questioning and critiquing received natural philosophical
knowledge and for engaging controversial issues. His familiarity with
the Hippocratic corpus, and in particular with Hippocratic surgical
texts, put Valles in the vanguard of late sixteenth-century medical
humanism.94 Valles was one of a number of elite Spanish physicians
interested in Hippocratic surgical texts.95
An even more striking example of the ways in which Valles combines
natural philosophy and biblical exegesis is his commentary on Job 37:18:
“Can you [ Job], with Him [God], spread out the skies, strong as a
molten mirror?”96 In his discussion of this verse, Valles addresses two
main questions: are the heavens solid or fl uid? and of what substance
are the heavens composed? As might be expected, since the verse in
question describes the heavens as solidissimi, Valles presents a series of
arguments about why the heavens must be solid rather than fl uid. The
best (optimis) ancient philosophers, including Pythagoras, Parmenides,
Plato, and Aristotle, held that “the celestial realm is composed of a
certain very firm and solid substance.”97 One set of evidence for this
comes from the motion of the stars. If the stars moved through the
heavens like birds fl ying through the sky, then “by no means could they

90
“succus acer, mordax, & impense calidus,” ibid.
91
“dolorem . . . infert & calorem,” ibid.
92
“paritque phlegmones & febres,” ibid.
93
“sed cum citissime intra viginti quatuor horas,” ibid.
94
Nutton 1989 and Siraisi 1994.
95
Gurlt 1964.
96
“Tu forsitan cum eo fabricatus es coelos, qui solidissimi quasi aere fusi sunt.”
Valles 1592, 395.
97
“coelum substantia quadam constare firmissima & solidissima,” ibid.

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be carried always at the same speed, and neither could they always
follow the same path.”98 And yet we see that the movement of the stars
is regular and not random. This demonstrates that, far from moving
through the heavens by some force of their own, they are carried around
on solid orbs. Only in this way could their courses be as orderly and
predictable as observed. These orbs in turn must be “more solid than
adamant,”99 otherwise they could be broken apart by the great speeds
at which they travel.
Just as in his interpretation of Gen. 34:25 Valles displays an aware-
ness of contemporary interest in and debates about the merits of
Hippocratic medicine, in his interpretation of Job 37:18 he displays a
familiarity with contemporary controversies over the nature and com-
position of the celestial realm. He was certainly well aware that many
astronomers of his day had challenged the concept of the solid celestial
orbs. Only a few years before the publication of the Sacred Philosophy,
another Spanish author, Muñoz, had argued that the heavens were
fl uid rather than solid.100 In general, the fact that Valles feels compelled
to refute the notion that the heavens are made of some kind of very
pure, fine liquid substance through which the stars and planets move
demonstrates his awareness of Stoic ideas.101 Even his characterization
of Pythagoras, Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle as the best ancient
philosophers makes clear that he knew not all ancient philosophers
agreed about the solidity of the heavens.
At this point, it is tempting to view Valles as at best a conservative
thinker, clinging to an essentially Aristotelian cosmology, and at worst
selectively invoking natural philosophical authority to buttress his sim-
plistic and naive reading of the Bible. There are two reasons I think
Valles should not be dismissed so easily. First, most early modern natural
philosophers believed that the Bible was relevant to understanding the
natural world and were at pains to demonstrate that their theories were

98
“haud quaquam possent ferri eadem semper celeritate, neque eidem viae semper
insistere,” ibid., 396.
99
“Constat orbes tanto solidiores esse adamante.” Ibid., 395–396.
100
Granada 1997. I am grateful to Miguel Granada for bringing this essay to my
attention. For further discussion of sixteenth-century debates about the nature of the
heavens, see Granada 2002. On Tycho Brahe’s critical response to this chapter of
Valles’s Sacred Philosophy, see Howell 2002, 97–108.
101
On the pervasiveness and importance of Stoic cosmological ideas in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, see Barker 1991.

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consonant with Scripture.102 Second, after asserting the solidity of the

heavens, Valles goes on to propose an unusual theory of the composition
of the celestial realm, one that challenges the traditional Aristotelian
idea that the heavens were made of a single, unique substance known
as quintessence or ether. He argues that the heavens must be made of
four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. However, these are not the
same four elements that make up the terrestrial realm, but separate
and distinct celestial elements.103 It is hard to see a way in which this
theory is drawn from a ‘literal’ reading of Job 37:18 (or indeed any
part of the Bible). Valles does not cite scriptural evidence in favor of
this theory, though he does argue that it is congruent with what the
Scriptures say about the celestial realm.
Valles notes that the celestial realm “does not seem to be a simple
body,”104 since the stars appear different than the surrounding heav-
ens. He quotes Plato: “nothing can be seen without fire, nothing can
be touched without solidity, nothing without earth is solid.”105 So the
celestial realm, because it is both visible and solid, must contain the
elements fire and earth. And if fire and earth are in the heavens, water
and air must be there as well, because fire and earth cannot be joined
together without the mediation of water and air. He concludes:
Therefore, just as [the heavenly realm] requires earth for solidity, it needs
water for continuity. But water and fire will be poorly fit together without
the medium of air, and without [air the heavenly realm] will not have
transparency. If therefore the celestial realm is solid, compact, transparent
and visible, it will be composed of earth, water, air and fire.106
This explains, according to Valles, why we can see the stars, while the
surrounding heavens appear transparent: the stars are composed of

102
Howell 2002 and Blair 2000 both make this point.
103
According to Steneck 1976, the fourteenth-century theologian Henry of Langen-
stein proposed a similar theory of the composition of the heavens in his hexaemeral
commentary. And Steneck notes that, although the Aristotelian idea of the quintessence
was widely accepted by medieval theologians and natural philosophers, it did not go
unchallenged (59–62). Thus, although Valles does not cite specific sources, his theory
of the celestial realm is certainly not completely unique or original.
104
“non videtur esse corpus simplex,” Valles 1592, 397.
105
“Sine igne videri nihil potest, nihil sine solido tangi, solidum sine terra nihil.”
Ibid.
106
“Igitur ut ad soliditatem terra, ita ad continuitatem indiget aqua: aqua vero &
ignis male aptabuntur sine medio aëre, neque sine eo habebit diaphanitatem. Si igitur
coelum est solidum compactum, diaphanum, & aspectabile, constabit terra, aqua aëre,
& igne.” Ibid., 398–398.

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more fire and less air and the surrounding heavens are composed of
more air and less fire.
Valles notes a possible objection to this theory of the composition
of the heavens. If the heavens were made of four elements instead of
being one homogeneous substance, this would imply that they were
corruptible, because, as Plato says in the Timaeus, “everything that is
bound together can be unbound.”107 He answers this objection in two
ways. First, he asserts that the elements that compose the celestial realm
are not the same as those that compose the terrestrial realm. Celestial
earth, air, fire, and water are superior to terrestrial earth, air, fire, and
water because “they lack the opposition of active qualities, namely heat,
cold, wetness, and dryness.”108 It is these contrary qualities that bring
about change, and because the elements that make up the heavens lack
these opposing qualities, “they are incorruptible and not dissoluble since
they lack the origins of natural corruption.”109 Second, having argued
that the celestial realm is not naturally corruptible, Valles declares that
the heavens can and will be changed by God:
Though certainly since the celestial realm lacks active qualities it can not
naturally be destroyed, it is nevertheless (since it was brought together)
dissoluble and changeable, by Him, of course, by whom it was made,
namely by God.110
Then he cites several biblical passages that speak of the heavens passing
away at the end of time111 Valles uses these passages to indicate that his
theory is compatible with the Bible, and in particular with the biblical
account of the end of the world. He does not indicate that he derived
his theory of celestial substances simply from reading the Bible.
Valles claims that a heaven made of four elements fits better with
observation than a heaven composed of a single, special substance, the
quintessence. But he also implies that a heaven made of four elements
is in better accord with the Bible than a heaven made of quintessence.
Scripture describes a celestial realm that was created by God and would

107
“Omne siquidem quod vinctum est (ut inquit Timaeus) solui potest.” Ibid., 399.
108
“contrarietate qualitatum activarum, caloris inquam, frigoris, humoris & siccitatis
carent,” Ibid., 398.
109
“Incorruptibile tamen, neque dissolubile, quia caret principiis naturalis cor-
ruptionis,” ibid.
110
“Verum etsi quia actiuis qualitatibus caret, naturaliter corrumpi non potest
coelum, est tamen (compositum cum sit) dissolubile, & commutabile, ab eo videlicet a
quo compactum est, puta a Deo.” Ibid., 399.
111
Mark 13:31, Ps. 102:26–27, 2 Pet. 3:13 and Job 14:12.

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eventually be destroyed by him. Four elements that had been brought

together by divine fiat could be dissolved again by the same power.
The Aristotelian quintessence, by contrast, was a single, unchanging,
incorruptible substance. Although I doubt Valles would have denied the
proposition that God was omnipotent and could, if He so chose, make
and unmake a quintessence, this passage exemplifies his tendency to shy
away from wholly supernatural or miraculous explanations whenever
he can, while still maintaining that his views of the natural world are
congruent with Scripture.
Although Valles claims that he will focus exclusively on physical
matters, he is bolder and more provocative than Lemnius, both in his
natural philosophical claims and in his willingness to enter into contested
areas where theologians and natural philosophers might disagree on who
could speak authoritatively.112 When he argued that the heavens were
solid he was deliberately engaging in a debate that he knew involved
both natural philosophers and theologians. Although this passage was
never censured, other parts of the book, for example passages that
appeared to reject the possibility of miracles, were later deemed offen-
sive.113 Valles’s delight in novelty and controversy can be explained by
the fact that Sacred Philosophy was a patronage gift, dedicated to Philip
II. As Mario Biagioli cogently argued in his analysis of Galileo’s work,
courtly patrons expected to be amused and entertained by novelty and
viewed intellectual debates as the occasion for displays of wit and bril-
liance. Erudition had to be married to formidable rhetorical skills for
a courtier to be successful.114 All the evidence suggests that Valles was
indeed a very successful courtier, one who retained the favor of the
most powerful monarch in Europe for almost twenty years.

Conclusion

I began this paper by commenting on the almost total neglect of

Mosaic physics by historians of science. My analysis of the work of

112
In characterizing Sacred Philosophy as bold and provocative, I differ from Granada
and Howell, both of who see the book as conservative and even reactionary. But
Granada and Howell are only concerned with Valles’s cosmological views, which were
anti-Copernican. However, as I have indicated, cosmology was only a small part of
Sacred Philosophy and an exclusive focus on these sections of the book is misleading.
113
For example, Valles 1587, 435.
114
Biagioli 1993.

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Lemnius and Valles attempts to redress this neglect. Further, I sug-

gest that Christian natural philosophers both shaped and refl ected the
complex relationships between Scripture and nature, between bibli-
cal exegesis and natural knowledge, and between religious piety and
natural philosophy in a period of escalating religious and scientific
controversies. Although both of their books fall into the broad category
of Mosaic physics, Lemnius and Valles seem to have been engaged in
quite different projects. In his book on plants, Lemnius aims to con-
nect natural knowledge—specifically botanical knowledge—to biblical
exegesis. He argues that knowing the properties of plants leads to fuller
and clearer understanding of many passages in the Bible, but there is
also a sense in which understanding the passages in the Bible in which
plants figure brings more complete knowledge of the plant. In other
words, a physical description of a plant should be complemented by
an understanding of its spiritual significance. Judging by the number
of editions, Lemnius’s book on plants achieved a wide readership in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an audience that included both
Catholics and Protestants.
Although the combination of botany and theology seems distinctly
odd to a modern reader, interest in understanding the spiritual signifi-
cance of natural objects was actually widespread in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. One thinks, for example, of Jan Swammerdam’s
study of the mayfl y, which combined microscopic analysis of the insect
with meditations on the brevity of life.115 But sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century theologians also attempted to connect natural knowledge to
Christian doctrine. This was common in commentaries on the story of
creation from Genesis where accounts of the creation of various animals
often served as the occasion for discussing their spiritual significance.
To take just one of the many possible examples: David Chytraeus
(1531–1600), a theology professor at the University of Rostock in the
second half of the sixteenth century, engages in extensive commentary
on the spiritual significance of animals in his Genesis commentary. In
his discussion of the creation of birds, he asserts that God created them
(and all animals) as “images of virtues and vices, that they might attract
us to virtue and dissuade us from vice.”116 He gives several examples

115
On Swammerdam and on the connections between natural history and moral
edification more generally, see Cook 1993, 45–61.
116
“simulacra virtutum & vitiorum . . . ut nos ad virtutem invitarent, & a vitiis dehor-
tarentur,” Chytraeus 1557, 52.

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of each: storks are examples of filial love, kingfishers of marital love,

doves of chastity and faithfulness, martins of prudence and frugality.117
On the side of the vices: peacocks are examples of pride, cuckoos of
ingratitude.118 In addition, Chytraeus explains a reference to ravens in
Ps. 147:9, and a reference to swallows in Matt. 10:29. He asserts that,
“contemplation of the nature of animals sheds light on many speeches
of Christ and the prophets.”119 That is, deeper knowledge of nature
leads to deeper knowledge of the Bible. This is precisely the claim
that Lemnius makes in the introduction to his work on plants. Seen
in the context of contemporary natural philosophical and theological
works, Lemnius’s combination of botany and theology appears more
comprehensible. He was not alone in his sense of nature as pregnant
with spiritual meaning.
Chytraeus was a Lutheran theologian, but similar examples could
be drawn from Catholic and Calvinist theologians. Many theologians
and preachers found spiritual readings of natural objects persuasive,
but perhaps more importantly, useful for pedagogical purposes. Natural
objects provided lively, striking and memorable illustrations for lectures
and sermons. Accordingly, I suspect that one of the major audiences
for Lemnius’s book on plants was preachers.
Francisco Valles seems to be engaged in a very different project.
Whereas Lemnius joins known facts about the natural world to biblical
exegesis, Valles actually uses biblical exegesis to intervene in natural
philosophical debates and to put forward novel natural philosophical
ideas. That is, the biblical passages he selects for comment pertain—or
he makes them pertain—to controversial, or at least unsettled, problems
in natural philosophy and medicine. Valles claims that the purpose of
the Bible is not to teach natural philosophy because knowledge of nature
is not essential for salvation. However, unlike some figures more familiar
in the history of science, such as Galileo and Kepler, Valles does not
claim that the language of the Bible on natural things is ‘accommodated’
to the vulgar and uneducated masses. Quite the contrary, it requires a
skilled interpreter, widely and deeply read and experienced in natural
philosophical and medical matters to understand what the Bible has
to teach us about nature. To the extent that the Bible uses language

117
Ibid.
118
Ibid., 53.
119
“Sic multis Christi & Prophetarum concionibus lucem adfert consideratio naturae
animantium. . . .” Ibid.

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accommodated to the understanding of ordinary folk it does so only

when treating matters essential for salvation, not when dealing with the
natural world. Valles’s Sacred Philosophy thus reminds us of the diversity
of hermeneutical strategies available in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries to those who would read the book of nature.
Finally, having emphasized the differences between Lemnius and
Valles, I will end by commenting on the common ground they shared.
They were united in believing that certain parts of the Bible require
natural philosophical expertise to interpret. Therein lay their justifica-
tion for engaging in biblical exegesis, traditionally the domain of the
theologian.

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Crowther-Heyck, Kathleen. 2003. Wonderful Secrets of Nature: Natural Knowledge

and Religious Piety in Reformation Germany. Isis 94:2, 253–273.
Cunningham, Andrew. 1991. How the ‘Principia’ Got Its Name or, Taking Natural
Philosophy Seriously. History of Science 29: 377–392.
Curley, Michael J., trans. 1979. Physiologus. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Draper, John William. 1874. History of the Conflict between Religion and Science. New York:
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Eamon, William. 1994. Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and
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Erasmus, Desiderius. 1997. The Godly Feast. In Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 39.
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Toronto Press, 171–243.
Evans, G.R. 1985. The Language and Logic of the Bible: The Road to Reformation. Cambridge:
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Ferreira, Ana Isabel Martín. 1995. Francisco Valles. In El Humanismo Médico en la
Universidad de Alcalá (Siglo XVI) Alcalá: Servicio de Publicaciones Universidad de
Alcalá, 58–64.
Funkenstein, Amos. 1986. Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the
Seventeenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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libri aliquot plerique nunc primum editi. Tiguri [Zurich], Excudebat Jacobus Gesnerus,
1565–1566.
Golinski, Jan. 1998. Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science
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Granada, Miguel A. 1997. Cálculos cronológicos, novedades celestes y expectativas
escatológicas en la Europa del siglo XVI. Rinascimento 37: 357–435.
——. 2002. Sfere Solide e Cielo Fluido: Momenti del Dibattito Cosmologico nella Seconda Metà
del Cinquecento. Milan: Guerini e Associati.
Gurlt, E. 1964. Geschichte der Chirurgie und ihrer Ausübung, Bd. 3. Hildesheim: Georg Olms
Verlagsbuchhandlung, 381–417.
Hagen, Kenneth G. 1990. What Did the Term Commentarius Mean to Sixteenth-Century
Theologians? In Théorie et pratique de l’exégèse: Actes du troisième colloque international sur
l’histoire de l’exégèse biblique au XVI e siècle (Genève, 31 août–2 septembre 1988), Ed. Irena
Backus and Francis Higman. Geneva: Droz, 13–38.
Harrison, Peter. 1998. The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Howell, Kenneth J. 2002. God’s Two Books: Copernican Cosmology and Biblical Interpretation
in Early Modern Science. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.
Israel, Jonathan Irvine. 1995. The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806.
Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
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70–77.
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Genesis Commentary of Martin Luther. In Théorie et pratique de l’exégèse: Actes du troisième
colloque international sur l’histoire de l’exégèse biblique au XVI e siècle (Genève, 31 août–2 septembre
1988), Ed. Irena Backus and Francis Higman. Geneva: Droz, 243–258.
Kusukawa, Sachiko. 1995. The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip
Melanchthon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lemnius, Levinus. 1587. An Herbal for the Bible. Trans. Thomas Newton. London:
Edmund Bollifant.
——. 1592. Similitudinum ac parabolarum quae in Bibliis ex herbis atque arboribus desumuntur
dilucida explicatio. Lyon: In Officina Q. Hvg. à Porta, apud fratres de Gabiano.
——. 1596. Similitudinum ac parabolarum quae in Bibliis ex herbis atque arboribus desumuntur
dilucida explicatio. Frankfurt: Ex Officina Palthenians, sumtibus viuae Petri Fisceri.

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Lindberg, David. 1992. The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradi-
tion in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450. Chicago:
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Lindeboom, G.A. 1984. Lemnius (Lemse), Levinus (Lieven). In Dutch Medical Biography:
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Morejón, Antonio Hernández. 1843. Francisco Valles. In Historia bibliográfica de la
medicina española. Antonio Hernández. Vol. 3, 57–83. Reprint, New York: Johnson
Reprint Co., 1967.
Muller, Richard A. and John L. Thompson, eds. 1996. Biblical Interpretation in the Era
of the Reformation: Essays Presented to David C. Steinmetz in Honor of His Sixtieth Birthday
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Theorie—Praxis—Tradition, Ed. Gerhard Baader and Rolf Winau. Stuttgart: Franz
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——. 1993. Wittenberg Anatomy. In Medicine and the Reformation, Ed. Ole Peter Grell
and Andrew Cunningham. London and New York: Routledge, 11–32.
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Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, Ed. Gianna Pomata and Nancy Siraisi.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press., 75–103.
——. 2006. The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Pomata, Gianna and Nancy Siraisi eds. 2005. Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early
Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rueus, Franciscus. 1547. De gemmis aliquot, iis praesertim quarum divus Iohannes Apostolus in
sue Apocalypsi meminit. Parisiis: Ex Officina Christiani Wecheli.
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petency Between Humanists and Theologians in the Renaissance. Catholic Historical
Review 82:2, 187–203.
Schmitt, Charles B. Quentin Skinner, and Eckhard Kessler eds. 1988. The Cambridge
History of Renaissance Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schroeder, Joy A. 1997. The Rape of Dinah: Luther’s Interpretation of a Biblical
Narrative. Sixteenth Century Journal 28:3, 775–791.
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Robert Appleton Company.
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Renacimiento (Siglo XVI), vol. 2. Madrid: Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas
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Exegetical Tradition in the Sixteenth Century. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern
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——. ed. 1990. The Bible in the Sixteenth Century. Durham/London: Duke University
Press.
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Thorndike, Lynn. 1941. A History of Magic and Experimental Science. Vol. VI. The Sixteenth
Century. New York: Columbia University Press.
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Avgvstae Tavrinorvm, Apud hæredem Nicolai Beuilaquæ.
——. 1592. De iis quae scripta sunt physice in libris sacris, sive de sacra Philosophia. Lyon: In
Officina Q. Hvg. à Porta, apud fratres de Gabiano.
van Hoorn, Carel Maaijo. 1971. Levinus Lemnius en Willem Lemnius, twee zestiende-
eeuwse medici. Archief: mededelingen van het Koninklijk Zeeuwsch Genootschap der Wetenschap-
pen, 37–86.
——. 1978. Levinus Lemnius 1505–1568: Zestiende-eeuws Zeeuws geneesheer. Amsterdam:
J. Duerinck-Krachten.
Williams, Arnold. 1948. The Common Expositor: An Account of the Commentaries on Genesis,
1527–1633. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Zanier, Giancarlo. 1983. Il de Sacra Philosophia (1587) di Francisco Valles. In Medicina
e Filosofia tra ’500 e ’600. Milan: Franco Angeli Editore, 20–38.

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 CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“HORRIBLE AND BLASPHEMOUS”:

ISAAC LA PEYRÈRE, ISAAC VOSSIUS AND THE
EMERGENCE OF RADICAL BIBLICAL CRITICISM
IN THE DUTCH REPUBLIC

Eric Jorink

Introduction

On 2 November 1655, in the heat of the Dutch debate over Coperni-

canism, the Utrecht minister and professor of theology Gisbertus Voetius
went to the city magistrate in order to make a formal complaint about
the recent publication of a book entitled Praeadamitae.1 Voetius, the
extremely infl uential leader of the orthodox Nadere Reformatie (Further
Reformation) and sworn enemy of Descartes, handed over a report
written by members of the Faculty of Theology.2 They noted that
the book contained “many dangerous propositions, and also some
false and scandalizing pieces” such as that man had lived thousands
of years before Adam “without having knowledge of God’s existence
and law, living like animals, without sin.” According to Praeadamitae’s
author, “the Flood that occurred during Noah’s life was not universal,
but only restricted to the land of the Jews.” By far the most shocking
idea propagated in this book was that the original books of the Bible,
“as inspired by God” were lost, men possessing “only some dark, con-
fused and outworn copies contradicting each other.”3 In other words,
the author questioned the authenticity of the present text of the Bible,
and denied Moses’ authorship of the Pentateuch. The book openly
challenged the authority of Scripture.
Voetius cum suis did not know the identity of the author of this out-
rageous work, but noted from hearsay that it was a Frenchman who

1
[ la Peyrère] 1655). I used the 12° edition (see note 6).
2
‘Advis der Theologische faculteijt tot Utrecht, over het tractaet genoemt Praea-
damtiae.’
3
As quoted in Kleerkoper and van Stockum, 1914–16, 216.

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recently had visited the Dutch Republic in order to discuss his ideas
“with some learned men in neighboring places.”4 The Utrecht city
magistrate wasted little time, and banned the book from the city the
very next day.5 However, this decision, although unusually vigorous by
contemporary Dutch standards, did not satisfy Voetius. The book, which
he knew was published by the Amsterdam company of Daniel Elsevier
in no less than three different editions (quarto, octavo, and duodecimo),
threatened to damage the whole of Christianity.6 The Utrecht profes-
sor accordingly addressed the highest political authority of the Dutch
Republic, the Staten Generaal, and the highest juridical council, the Hof
van Holland. These institutions, both of which had a justified reputation
for being lax in banning books, reached a decision within three weeks.7
On 16 November the court banned the Praeadamitae on the basis that
the book contained many “dangerous propositions” which were deemed
“in violation of the Word of God and the foundations of Christian
religion.”8 A week later, the Staten Generaal reached the same verdict,
underlining the fact that this “horrible and blasphemous” book could
easily “divert from Christianity both the citizens of this State and all
other people.”9 Both judgments were published as placards, and tacked
on billboards at town halls and other public spaces. Every Dutch citizen
might take notice of the existence and outline of this horrible work,
and the fact that it was forbidden to sell, buy, or circulate copies of it.
As was to be expected, refutations were published by Dutch professors
of theology, and subsequently new editions were printed. A Dutch
translation of the Praeadamitae appeared in 1661.10 By that time every
intellectual in Europe knew its author was Isaac la Peyrère (1596–1676),
a French Calvinist in the service of the prince of Condé.11 Shortly after
the Amsterdam publication of the Praeadamitae, in February 1656, la
Peyrère was arrested in Brussels and brought to Rome. In the presence

4
As quoted in Kleerkoper and van Stockum, 1914–16, 217.
5
Kernkamp 1936–1940, I, 316.
6
In fact, the book was published in five editions: see Doedes 1880, 238–242.
7
Kleerkoper and van Stockum, 1914–16, 303; Groot Placaet-boeck inhoudende de pla-
caten ende ordonantien van de Hoogh-Mog. Heeren Staten Generael der Vereenigde Nederlanden, II,
nrs. 2224, 2225; Resolutiën van de Heeren Staten van Hollant ende West-Friesland in de jaren
1544–1794 [s.l., s.d.], 390, 396. On censorship in the Dutch Republic, see Weekhout
1998.
8
Groot Placaet-boeck, nr. 2224.
9
Resolutien van de Heeren Staten van Hollant ende West-Friesland, 390.
10
[la Peyrère] 1661.
11
Popkin 1987.

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 the emergence of radical biblical criticism 431

of Pope Alexander VII he abjured and recanted his book, went over
to Catholicism, and wrote an apology.
It was Richard Popkin who drew attention to the curious life and
works of la Peyrère, and who, among other things, underlined the
importance of the Praeadamitae for the emergence of radical biblical
criticism in the seventeenth century.12 La Peyrère’s questioning of the
Bible’s authority had a tremendous impact, both on religion and on
science. La Peyrère rejected the traditional Biblical chronology, argued
that there were men before Adam, that the Pentateuch was only the
account of Jewish history, questioned the universality of the Flood, and
asked disturbing questions about the origins of peoples and animals
living in the New World. The result was a monumentally heretical
doctrine. “He was regarded as perhaps the greatest heretic of the age,”
Popkin noted, “even worse than Spinoza, who took over some of his
most challenging ideas.”13 Indeed, Spinoza owned a copy of la Peyrère’s
notorious work. While the infl uence of the Praeadamitae on the Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus (1670) and Spinoza’s other works remains a topic for
further investigation, Popkin is certainly right in comparing the reputa-
tion of the two notorious biblical critics. And, seen from the perspective
of contemporary Dutch intellectual culture, it is rather telling to note
that the Praeadamitae was forbidden within a few weeks after its publica-
tion, while it took the Dutch authorities no less then four years to ban
the Tractatus (prohibited together with Lodewijk Meijer’s Philosophia S.
Scripturae interpres and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, in 1674).14
In this chapter, I intend to describe in some detail the Dutch intel-
lectual context of the publication of the Praeadamitae. The book, which
had been circulating in manuscript form for at least thirteen years, was
issued at the climax of the Dutch controversy on Cartesianism and
Copernicanism. Some of the many pamphlets published in this war
of ideas stated that a remarkable similarity existed between Cartesian

12
See also Popkin 1976, 272–280.
13
Popkin 1987, 1.
14
Cf. Israel 1996, 3–13; Weekhout 1998, 385–386. The story of the publication of
the Tractatus is fascinating, which explains the rather odd citation in the bibliographi-
cal entry. The official imprint on the front page of the book is Hamburg: Künrath.
However, as contemporaries soon discovered, this was a ficticious printer to conceal
the identity of both printer and author, since it was expected that the Tractatus would
infuriate people (interogating printers to reveal the identity of anonymous authors was
not uncommon). Later historians have found evidence that Riewertsz of Amsterdam
printed the book.

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and preadamite ideas, and it was suggested that a certain “great Car-
tesian” had been instrumental in the publication of la Peyrère’s book.15
To Voetius, the champion of biblicism, it seemed clear that it was the
new, rationalist philosophy of Descartes that threatened the authority
of Scripture. The orthodox party, as well as many later historians,
viewed the growth of radical biblical criticism in the Dutch Republic
as essentially the result of an external force called philosophy.16 Seen
from this perspective, the authority of the Bible increasingly came
under attack with the advance of a new and very powerful rationalistic
philosophy of nature, of which Descartes and Spinoza were the most
infl uential defenders.
However, in this chapter, I would like to look at this development
from a somewhat different angle. I hope to show that the emergence
of biblical criticism in the seventeenth century Dutch Republic was a
result of many infl uences. Philosophy, in this case Cartesianism, was
just one factor. There was also a rather disturbing tendency, from the
orthodox viewpoint, within the group of intellectuals engaged in biblical
scholarship, which included not only theologians but also philologists.
These scholars were working in the tradition of humanism, and the
object of their scholarship ranged from linguistics to chronology, and
from ancient geography to biblical zoology. They were not interested
in the Bible for dogmatic reasons, but considered it as just one of the
many ancient sources concerning nature—a problematic source to be
sure. Starting with Joseph Scaliger at Leiden University between 1593
and 1609, scholars found it increasingly difficult to reconcile the estab-
lished text of Scripture with other ancient and contemporary sources,
such as Egyptian and Chinese chronologies, non-European accounts of
a fl ood, and descriptions of the peoples and animals from the East and
West Indies. Little research has been done on this theme, since most
accounts on the emergence of radical biblical criticism in the Dutch
Republic take the work of Spinoza and his sympathizers as their point
of departure.17 It could be argued, however, that the publication of la
Peyrère’s Praeadamitae, which incorporated ideas by Scaliger’s successor
in Leiden, Claude Saumaise, and provoked a questionable refutation

15
The pamphlet was published under a pseudonym, the author being a member
of the Voetian camp: Suetonius Tranquilius 1656, 7. I owe this reference to Rienk
Vermij.
16
See Vermij 2008. See also Vermij 2002, Israel 2001.
17
Cf. Jorink 2009.

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 the emergence of radical biblical criticism 433

by one of Saumaise’s students, Isaac Vossius, was at least as important.

Seen from this perspective, the publication of Spinoza’s Tractatus was not
the revolutionary start of a new era, but merely one stage in a much
broader and increasingly public debate on the authority of Scripture
with regard to nature, history, and chronology.

La Peyrère and the Dutch Intellectual Context

Isaac la Peyrère certainly was not a great scholar. The French bibli-
cal critic Richard Simon (1638–1712) immediately noted la Peyrère’s
inability to read Hebrew and Greek. More recently, Anthony Grafton
aptly described la Peyrère as a man who, had he lived in the twentieth
century, might have haunted public libraries, combing the plays of
Shakespeare for evidence of Bacon’s authorship.18 Indeed, la Peyrère’s
pioneering and infl uential work was based more on intuition than on
erudition. According to his own testimony, his Praeadamitae was the result
of a question he asked himself in his early childhood. Eve gave birth to
Cain and Abel. Cain rebelled against Abel his brother, and slew him.
And then Cain knew his wife. But where did Cain’s wife come from?
For many years, la Peyrère was fascinated by this intriguing question,
and started to elaborate on the preadamite theory. La Peyrère assumed
that, if there were men before Adam, not only exegetical questions
could be answered, but also some other problems might be solved
which increasingly puzzled early seventeenth-century scholars, such as
the origin of the American peoples. From about 1640, la Peyrère had
been working on a manuscript about the preadamites. It was circulated
and discussed in the lively world of the Parisian académies and had an
almost immediate impact on Dutch intellectual culture. I will focus here
on two scientific themes la Peyrère speculated upon. The first concerns
biblical chronology, the second the status of the peoples, fl ora, and
fauna of the New World.
As is well known, the great innovator in the vast and difficult disci-
pline of chronology was Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609), who worked at
Leiden University from 1593 until his death in 1609.19 Scaliger had no
obligations to teach, although he privately tutored a small but brilliant
circle of students, including the young Hugo Grotius. Scaliger spent

18
Grafton 1991, 204–213.
19
Grafton 1983–1993; de Jonge 1979, 71.

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most of his time in Leiden reworking his earlier De emendatione temporum

(1585) into the Thesaurus temporum (1606). Whereas earlier chronologers
had based their work exclusively on the text of the Bible, Scaliger used
nonscriptural sources as well, including ancient astronomical tables and
pagan chronologies. In other words, Scaliger neither made a distinction
between sacred and pagan history, nor between biblical and nonbiblical
accounts. “For Scaliger,” Grafton notes,
Chronology is to some extent no longer subservient to religion. It aims not
to find a moral order in the past, but simply to reconstruct that past; it
employs not merely the one divinely inspired source, but all sources. Most
important, it is based on a philological method which applies equally to
Hebrews and to Greeks, to the Bible and to the ancient historians.20
One particularly disturbing source was the Tomoi by the Egyptian
priest Manetho (third century BC), containing a list of the reigns of
the subsequent pharaohs which went further back in time than the
accepted date of Creation. Scaliger considered this a reliable source,
but in his published work he did not draw the obvious conclusion.
However, to intelligent observers it must have been clear that the his-
tory of ancient non-Jewish civilizations could be potentially damaging
to biblical chronology. This was indeed the turn things would take. La
Peyrère apparently only skimmed Scaliger’s monumental work, picking
up information which seemed to support his own conception of world
history—such as the claim made by some Chinese that their empire
had begun some 870,000 years before Christ, a statement the Leiden
professor found absurd. Strangely enough, la Peyrère missed the point
of Manetho’s Tomoi.
While la Peyrère was only slightly familiar with Scaliger’s work, he
was on friendly terms with a scholar who might be considered the
great chronologer’s successor in Leiden, Claude Saumaise (1588–1653),
who was appointed in 1632. Publishing an impressive range of books
and editions of classical texts, and always eager to engage in learned
controversies, Saumaise was one of the most famous philologists of
his time.21 In 1648 he published a vast attack against ancient astrology
and numerology, De annis climactericis et antiqua astrologia diatribe, which

20
Grafton 1975, 169–170.
21
On Saumaise see Leroy 1983, 33–52; Blok 2000.

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 the emergence of radical biblical criticism 435

was based on an impressive knowledge of classical sources.22 With the

assistance of a young and promising scholar named Isaac Vossius, Sau-
maise went through all the available Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, Persian,
and Latin sources concerning astronomy and astrology. He concluded
that the ancient astronomical observations and astrological works were
corrupted by translators and copyists in the course of the centuries—as
was nearly any source from antiquity, of course. Hence, contemporary
astrological predictions lacked any scholarly or scientific basis. What is
interesting for our theme is the fact that Saumaise referred to Berosus,
the Babylonian priest who had supposedly transmitted Eastern wisdom
to ancient Greece, and who claimed that the Chaldean astronomers
had a tradition of no less then 470,000 years of observation. Saumaise
discussed this stunning claim, and other material concerning ancient
chronologies that might be far older than the biblical one, with la
Peyrère, who visited the Dutch Republic in 1646. To la Peyrère, who
was then reworking the manuscript of the Praeadamitae, the information
provided by Saumaise offered the most convincing evidence that the
pagan world had existed long before God created Adam. From nearly
all the astronomical and historical data that he knew via Saumaise,
la Peyrère drew the conclusion that the ancient chronologies of the
Chaldeans, the Babylonians, and the Egyptians, went back to a time
before Adam. In the printed version of the Praeadamitae, la Peyrère
proudly referred to his late friend Saumaise, and in a private letter of
1661, he even boasted that the Leiden scholar had been the midwife
of the preadamites.23
However, the arguments derived from ancient chronologies were not
the only tools la Peyrère used to buttress his fantastic theory. Besides
textual evidence, he also based his theory on material evidence, namely
on all kinds of artifacts brought in to Europe from previously unexplored
countries. Recent research has stressed the important role these collec-
tions of curiosities played in early modern scientific culture.24 Collections
of curiosities were not only intended to show wealth and status, but
were the nucleus of a community of discourse. In the Dutch Republic,
with its trading companies, a lively culture of collecting emerged.25 In

22
Salmasius 1648.
23
Popkin 1987, 179 n. 44.
24
See, for example, Findlen 1994; Bergvelt and Kistemaker 1992.
25
Jorink 2006, 267–320.

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cabinets of curiosities both known and previously unknown material

was observed, discussed, and compared with other sources of infor-
mation. In one of the earliest Dutch cabinets, owned by the physician
Bernardus Paludanus (1550–1633), many items referring to Scripture
were on display, including a stone of Solomon’s temple, a sample of the
pitch and sulphur which destroyed Sodom and Gomorra, and pieces
of wood from the Cross. One of the more spectacular items was an
Egyptian mummy, dated by Paludanus’s friend Scaliger on the basis of
Gen. 50:24. This tendency to illustrate biblical history was even more
apparent in the anatomical theatre of Leiden University, which was
by far the most famous in northern Europe. Professor Otto Heurnius
(1577–1652), its keeper from 1617 to 1650, spent large sums on mum-
mies, idols, stuffed crocodiles, lentils, Nile reed, and so on, with the
explicit aim of retelling the story of the life of Israel’s children under
the wise Pharaoh. But with the infl ux of previously unknown creatures
the collections became increasingly instrumental in testing old science
against the new. These collections played a crucial role in weighing the
writings of the Bible, of Aristotle, Pliny, and Dioscorides against material
evidence. Did birds of paradise really have no feet? Was the long horn
many collectors possessed really the horn of a unicorn? Which animal
was meant by ‘Behemoth?’ Due to the voyages of discovery and the
growing importance of empiricism, the status of bookish knowledge
became increasingly problematic.
One of the more pressing problems was that of the origin of the
inhabitants of the New World.26 Were the Indians descendents of Noah
or, more specifically, one of the lost tribes of Israel? Did the language
they spoke have its origin in Hebrew? Had the ancients known the
lama, the sloth, or the armadillo? How did those creatures come there?
Had they been in Noah’s company in the Ark, or were they remote
survivors of the Flood? These were questions of a most disturbing
kind. As early as 1625, the Leiden polyglot, geographer, and director
of the Dutch West-Indian Company, Johannes de Laet (1582–1649)
decided that “the New World was not known to the Ancients, as we
must conclude from their writings.”27 De Laet, a staunch defender of
Reformed orthodoxy, did not answer the thorny question of whether
the books of Moses had to be counted among those sources.28

26
Grafton 1992; Schmitt 2001.
27
de Laet 1630, **/r.
28
On de Laet’s orthodoxy, see Florijn 1998.

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Some fifteen years later, in 1642, la Peyrère took a much more

outspoken position. No, the Americans were neither descendents of
Noah, nor of Moses, nor Adam. Their existence in general and their
chronology in particular proved that they had been on Earth long
before God created Adam, as la Peyrère wrote in his manuscript. This
work-in-progress was circulated by Marin Mersenne, and came into
the hands of a Dutch scholar and biblical critic then living in Paris,
Hugo Grotius.29 Grotius recognized the disastrous consequences of
the preadamite theory for the whole of Christianity: the polygenetic
hypothesis undermined the authority of the Bible. He immediately
wrote a refutation, De origine gentium Americanarum dissertatio, published
in Paris and Amsterdam in 1642. In this book, the first work directed
against la Peyrère’s preadamite theory, and anticipating the work itself
by thirteen years, Grotius gave an explanation of the origins of the
Americans which was in accordance (or at least not in contradiction)
with the Bible. Basing his argument on hearsay concerning the language,
culture, and history of the Americans, Grotius unfolded an ingenious
scheme, according to which the Americans originated from Scandinavia
and Germany and, hence, from Noah and Adam. For example, did not
the Mexican ending “lan” (Cimatlan, Coatlan, Quazutatlan) show a striking
similarity with the Germanic “land” (Island, Grönland, Estotiland)?
While la Peyrère felt offended by Grotius’s attack on him in print
on the basis of an unpublished manuscript, an intelligent and well-
informed refutation appeared from an unexpected quarter. In 1643
the aforementioned Johannes de Laet published a Notae ad dissertationem
Hugonis Grotii, in which he virtually destroyed all the arguments of his
fellow Dutchman.30 De Laet knew what he was talking about. Being a
director of the West Indian Company, he had access to the overwhelm-
ing stream of information and artifacts coming in from the Americas.
De Laet was, like Grotius, one of Scaliger’s brightest pupils, and he
excelled in exotic languages. Moreover, de Laet was a lifelong friend of
Saumaise, with whom he shared an appetite for ancient manuscripts
and the natural history of the New World. De Laet was an ardent col-
lector of information, artifacts, and curiosities from the New World,
ranging from Maya inscriptions to anteaters and from Eskimo canoes
to coral. He gave many of his curiosities to his good friend, Ole Worm
(1588–1655), professor of medicine in Copenhagen and the pioneer in

29
Popkin 1987, 6.
30
Rubies 1991; Schmitt 1998; Nellen 2006, 553–554.

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the decipherment of runes.31 It was the same Worm whom la Peyrère

visited on his trip to Northern Europe in 1646. The surviving corre-
spondence between la Peyrère and Worm indicates that the two men
supported de Laet’s rejection of Grotius’s theory on the origin of the
American peoples. De Laet did not offer an alternative theory; he only
detailed the evidence that could be used against Grotius’s monogenetic
theory. However, this evidence was subsequently used by Worm and la
Peyrère for their own purposes. Without being aware of it, the ortho-
dox, pious de Laet had helped to foster the preadamites and to create
a fertile ground for the polygenetic theory. He died in 1649 before he
could see the way in which la Peyrère used his information, and his
diatribe against Grotius, to support his own theory.32

Voetius and His Enemies

What prompted la Peyrère to publish his book in 1655 is not entirely

clear. It has been suggested that Queen Christina of Sweden financed
the project.33 Moreover, it should be noted that the book was published
by the Amsterdam company of Daniel Elsevier, who was notorious
for his slightly heterodox (and best-selling) list. Elsevier simultaneously
issued no less than five editions, obviously expecting great profit from
the whole affair. Be this as it may, seen from a publisher’s point of view,
the date of publication was well-chosen. Dutch reformed orthodoxy
was at this time in a permanent state of alarm due to the Cartesian
crisis. The synods noted with horror that “the power of Scripture
was under attack.”34 Consequently, the Voetian party suggested that
‘a leading Cartesian’ had been instrumental in the publication of the
Preadamitae.
How correct this assessment was might be questioned. Was the pre-
adamite theory really a branch of the Cartesian philosophical tree? Was
Cartesian rationalism the only danger to the authority of Scripture?
At first sight, Voetius was right. In a quasi-innocent way, la Peyrère
claimed that the central argument of his book was only a theory. He
compared his hypothesis with the Copernican theory which, he claimed,

31
Schepelern 1971; Schnapp 2006.
32
[ la Peyrère] 1665, 251–255.
33
Pintard 1943, 399.
34
Knuttel 1910, III, 517.

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did not change anything in the world—but only changed how one looked
at things. Needless to say this argument infuriated Voetius, who listed
this comparison among the other offensive points of the Praeadamitae.35
To many contemporary observers, the publication of the Praeadamitae
seemed the next step in the Cartesian crisis, in which the debate on
Copernicanism played such an important role.
However, at a deeper level, Voetius was certainly wrong in identifying
the preadamite theory with Descartes’ philosophy. What both seemed
to have in common was that they challenged Voetius’s ideas on the
authority of Scripture. According to Voetius, the Bible was the alpha
and omega of all knowledge, including natural philosophy and natural
history. Voetius was an heir to the ‘Mosaic physics,’ which took the Bible
literally in matters physical.36 The subject of physics had no other use
than to explain the Mosaic text. In an oration held in 1636, Voetius
called the Bible “the book of all sciences, the sea of all wisdom, the
academy of academies.”37 The word of God was timeless, universal, and
self-explanatory. In exegetical matters, Voetius was extremely reluctant
to use nonscriptural tools such as philosophy. “Scripture was the source
of its own authority” one observer writes,
in the same sense that light was both the principle of visibility and of the
act by which we see illuminated objects. The analogy indicates that Voet
found scriptural interpretation as unproblematic as the act of seeing.38
Voetius’s point is that taking Scripture literally is as much an axiom of
natural philosophy as of natural theology. Indeed, everything Voetius
wrote on nature testifies to his biblical literalism. Voetius vehemently
rejected the idea that the Bible in some instances spoke according to
the understanding of the multitude (ad captum vulgi). If the Bible stated
that the Sun moved, this was simply the truth. According to Voetius,
Scripture was both the source of and the key to science.
Seen from this perspective, it becomes possible to understand why
Voetius saw both Descartes and the author of the preadamite theory
as dangers for the authority of Scripture. As Vermij notes, Voetius
preferred to pose simply as the defender of the Bible. However, he was
entirely wrong in his analyses of the forces at work. Descartes aimed

35
Kleerkooper and van Stockum 1914–16, 216. Cf. Vermij 2008.
36
Cf. Blair 2000.
37
Voetius 1636, 16.
38
McGahagan 1976, 64.

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at something different from la Peyrère, and used a different strategy as

well. One of the more radical characteristics of Descartes was that he
worked completely outside the biblical tradition. He did not feel any
urge to reject the Word of God in physical matters; he simply ignored
it. Descartes presented the universe as being just matter in motion,
without mentioning the biblical account of Creation in Genesis. In
other words, Descartes implicitly stated that the Bible had nothing to
say in matters physical, thereby undermining Voetius’s credo of strict
biblicism and literalism. Voetius maintained that by leaving the Bible
out of his account of nature, Descartes denied the authority of Scrip-
ture. It is certainly no coincidence that the battle between Voetians and
Cartesians mainly dealt with physical phenomena and their exegetical
problems: the motion of Earth, the nature of mules, or the significa-
tion of comets.39
In the eyes of Voetius, la Peyrère’s work was an offspring of Des-
cartes’ rationalistic speculations. He missed the crucial point that the
former, in his rather eclectic and chaotic manner, had revealed some
serious problems which lay at the root of exegesis itself: in particular,
the question of the authority of the biblical text. While Descartes had
tried to move Scripture to the periphery of the scientific enterprise, la
Peyrère put it at its centre. As Popkin noted:
The force of La Peyrère’s challenge was two-fold, one outside the con-
fines of the Bible, taking pagan history and the new information of the
explorers seriously, and the other, inside the Bible, showing that one did
not have to take everything in the biblical text at face value since Moses
did not write it.40
The results of la Peyrère’s speculations were perhaps even more disas-
trous to orthodox conceptions of nature and Scripture than Descartes’.
What was the relation between the stories of the Bible and contem-
porary, pagan sources? How to explain the contemporary results from
the voyages of discovery in the light of the Pentateuch? How to answer
common sense questions, like that of the origin of Cain’s wife, on the
basis of a literal reading of the Bible? Why should the Bible not have
fallen victim to the same process of tradition and corruption as other
texts handed down from Antiquity? One of the many disturbing claims
made in the Praeadamitae was the idea that the Pentateuch could never

39
Cf. van Ruler 1995; Vermij 2002.
40
Popkin 1987, 73–74.

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have been written by Moses, and that the received text was entirely
corrupt. Although this might have looked liked like a philosophical
speculation, this was a problem of a philological nature, with far-
reaching implications.

Isaac Vossius and His DE VERA AETATE MUNDI

As could be expected, the banning of la Peyrère’s work only succeeded

in drawing more attention to the preadamite theory. At least three
Dutch theologians published a refutation of the work: Antonius Hulsius,
professor at Leiden University, his colleague Hilpertius from Franeker,
and Samuel Maresius from Groningen.41 The latter was particularly
well-informed and described in detail how he heard the first rumors
of a book about the preadamites coming from the Dutch province of
Zeeland. Maresius is considered la Peyrère’s strongest opponent.42 The
three professors were all staunch defenders of reformed orthodoxy, and
their arguments against the Praeadamitae were rather predictable: this
was an outrageous book, intended to destroy the authority of Scripture.
All of these authors supported Voetius’s point of view: the Bible was
the infallible word of God, the foundation of both faith and science.
Orthodox theologians swore by dogmatic certainty and abhorred any
textual adaptation whatsoever. In their view, this procedure might be
applied to classical sources, but could never be used with the Bible
because of its sacrosanct status.43
Seen from this point of view, it is hardly surprising that by far the most
original answer to la Peyrère’s book was not written by a professional
theologian, but by a philologist. Isaac Vossius (1616–1689) was the only
surviving son of the great classical scholar, philologist, and theologian
Gerardus Johannes Vossius (1577–1649). While the elder Vossius was
a pious Christian (although not a member of the orthodox, Calvinist
party represented by Voetius and others, but, like Grotius, sympathetic
to the Arminian theology of the Remonstrants), the young Vossius was
to become notorious for his freethinking.44 He had been Grotius’s secre-
tary in the 1640s, an assistant to Saumaise for his research for De annis

41
Hilpertus 1656; Hulsius 1656; Maresius 1656.
42
Popkin 1987, 34.
43
van Rooden 1989, 144.
44
On Gerardus Johannes Vossius see Rademaker 1981. On Isaac see Lebram 1975;
Katz 1993; Blok 2000; Jorink and van Miert 2009.

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climactericis, and he subsequently served as librarian to Queen Christina

of Sweden from 1649 to 1655. From early childhood, the younger Vos-
sius was fascinated by eccentric classical texts, especially those dealing
with geography. In 1639, at the age of twenty-one, he had published an
edition of the Periplus, a geographical description attributed to Scylax
of Caryanda. Vossius was definitely aware of la Peyrère’s work on the
praeadamite theory at an early stage. And, unlike la Peyrère, he was
a skilled philologist and a polyglot, able to read not only Hebrew and
Greek, but a host of other languages as well. In other words, Vossius
was an intellectual, entirely capable of reaching a critical evaluation
of the Praeadamitae. And he did just that. In 1659, Vossius published a
book entitled De vera aetate mundi qua ostenditur natale mundi tempus annis
minimum 1440 vulgarem aeram anticipare.45 Both the form and the content
of the work were remarkable.
To start with the first: while several earlier works on chronology,
especially for and against the preadamite theory were vast, erudite,
and hardly readable, De vera aetate looked like a pamphlet, indeed it
was a pamphlet.46 Within a year, it was translated into Dutch (that is, a
year before the Praeadamitae itself was translated into the vernacular).47
Moreover, the booklet was dedicated to the States of Holland, thereby
underlining the fact that it was addressed to the general public.
As for its contents, De vera aetate could best be described as a double-
edged sword. Although Vossius did not explicitly write that it was
intended as a refutation of la Peyrère’s Praeadamitae, the reader could
easily come to the conclusion that this was the Dutch scholar’s noble
motive. Indeed, in De vera aetate, Vossius tried to make an effort to
reconcile new information about nonwestern chronologies with tradi-
tional biblical chronology, thereby eliminating the need for preadamite
peoples. However, his method was highly controversial and certainly
unorthodox. In the end, it proved to be even more damaging to the
authority of the Bible than la Peyrère’s work. Vossius’s strategy was
based on a critical evaluation of all available sources, both scriptural
and nonscriptural.
Earlier chronologers had based their calculations on the traditional
Masoretic Hebrew version of Scripture. Scaliger had fixed the date

45
Vossius 1659.
46
I owe the importance of this observation to Anthony Grafton.
47
Vossius 1660.

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of Creation on Sunday 25 October 3950 BC. Although the results

of other chronologers differed slightly (in terms of years or decades),
nobody contested Scaliger’s method. However, Vossius realized that, in
order to neutralize the preadamites and to incorporate the problematic
chronologies of, for example, the Egyptians, more drastic methods
were required. Vossius made use of another version of the Old Tes-
tament, the Septuagint, the translation produced by Greek-speaking
Jews between the third and first centuries BC. For chronologers like
Vossius, the Septuagint proved very helpful, since besides some 6000
minor textual differences, the lives of the Patriarchs in this version are
much longer. For example, according to the Masoretic version, Adam
fathered Seth at the age of 130; according to the Septuagint he was
230.48 Textual differences like these enabled Vossius to project the date
of Creation back in time about 1440 years—a lengthening of world
history by more than 37 percent. The monogenetic theory was saved
or so it seemed.
It could be claimed, however, that the introduction of the Septuagint
in the battle of the chronologers was like rolling in a Trojan horse.
The Hebrew text of the Old Testament was the foundation of the
Protestant sola scriptura. It was considered the sole channel of divine
inspiration, codified by Moses: both the word of God, an account of
the earliest days of mankind, and a repository of sanctity of maybe
even greater importance than the four gospels. As the Synod of Dort
explicitly stated: “Hebrew is the original text, the original language.”49
To orthodox Protestants like Voetius, the text of the Bible in itself was
entirely unproblematic, being the timeless and transcendent Word of
God. Vossius vehemently rejected this conviction. Why should this
particular text have escaped the fate of other ancient sources and thus
have escaped corruption, he maintained. In a daring statement, Vos-
sius wrote that Moses’ original text was burned during the destruction
of the Temple (70 AD). He openly ridiculed “contemporary Jews and
Christians” who believed that the known Hebrew text “comes straight
from heaven.”50 What we posses is a copy of a copy of a copy. The
Septuagint was corrupted as well, but Vossius claimed that this Greek

48
Vossius 1660, 12–14.
49
Bakhuizen van den Brink 1976.
50
Vossius 1660, 22.

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version came closer to the original text than the received Hebrew one.
“The exhortations and threats of many do not frighten me.”51
Vossius’s apparent intention to undermine the preadamite theory can
certainly be questioned. Throughout his life, Vossius had a reputation for
being a freethinker, and his later patron, King Charles II even remarked
that he would believe anything, if only it were not in the Bible.52 Be
this as it may, with the publication of his Vera aetate Vossius became
one of the pioneers of biblical criticism. In the years after the publica-
tion of his book, he accordingly started to be engaged in a variety of
confl icts that gave him the opportunity to elaborate his arguments in
much more detail.53 The impact of Vossius’s work, however, was much
greater than simply a defense for the Septuagint or a contribution to
the emerging discipline of biblical criticism. It was also instrumental
in altering peoples’ views on the age of Earth, the origin of languages,
and the spread of peoples, fl ora, and fauna with new and erudite data,
contributing to a permanent and dramatic change in people’s views
of these ideas. Imitating la Peyrère, Vossius repeated that the Bible
contained not the history of the world, but only recorded the history
of a certain tribe in the Near East. The chronologies of the Egyptians,
Persians, and Arabs went back in time some 7000 years. Moreover, Vos-
sius introduced a new and very powerful weapon in the battle of the
chronologists: Chinese history.54 Having access to the recently published
writings about Chinese history and geography by the Jesuit Martino
Martini, the Atlas sinensis (1653) and Sinicae historiae (1658), Vossius was
able to buttress his theory on the age of Earth. Despite knowing no
Chinese, Vossius enthusiastically praised the Chinese, Chinese history,
thought, and culture as one of the greatest achievements of humanity.
“The Chinese,” Vossius wrote, “have among their writers some who
are elder then Moses.”55 This claim was in itself startling enough for
orthodox Protestants. But, Vossius continued, since Chinese historians
did not mention the Flood, it was impossible that the universal Deluge
described in Genesis ever took place—it was only a local incident. In

51
Vossius 1660, 17.
52
Katz 1993, 142.
53
Vossius 1661 elaborated on this theme; Vossius 1663.
54
On the importance of China for European intellectual culture see Pinot 1932;
Weststeijn 2007; Israel 2007.
55
Vossius 1660.

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the same way, he reasoned that not all languages could originate from
ante Dilivium Hebrew.
As could be expected, Vossius was attacked by theologians.56 In a
manner similar to Grotius’s diatribe against la Peyrère, the German
historian and Leiden professor Georg Hornius (1620–1670) tried to
refute Vossius’s scheme of world history in several pamphlets (1659) and
in a learned book called Arca Noae (1666). Vossius was accused—with
some justice, one is tempted to think—of being a secret follower of
the preadamite theory.57 Vossius vigorously rejected Hornius’s accusa-
tions.58 This was the next stage in a long and fierce debate on the
increasingly pressing problem of the origin of non-European peoples,
fl ora, and fauna.59 The traditional scheme of the Creation, the Flood,
and the dispersion of peoples from the Tower of Babel increasingly
came under attack. While Scaliger’s exercises in chronology were only
known to a small and very learned circle, the works by la Peyrère and
Vossius generated discussion among a more general audience. As Graf-
ton notes in his New Worlds, Ancient Texts: “‘Strong wits’ across Europe
gossiped enjoyably about the origins of Cain’s wife and the authorship
of the report of Moses’ death in Deuteronomy. The most powerful of
texts had tumbled down.”60 The Word of God had lost its undisputed
universality, both with respect to history and to nature.

Conclusion

In his monumental Radical Enlightenment, Jonathan Israel has underlined

the importance of the emergence of radical biblical criticism in the
Dutch Republic. According to Israel, the origin of the “revolutionary
transformation in European culture,” the “making of modernity” lay in
the “rise of powerful new philosophical systems, rooted in the scientific
advances of the early seventeenth century.”61 According to Israel, by
far the most important thinker in this respect was Spinoza:

56
Coccejus 1662; Hulsius 1662; Schotanus 1662.
57
Hornius 1659, sig. 2r. See Bennett and Mandelbrote 1998, 196–8.
58
Vossius 1659b, 1659a.
59
See, for example Rossi 1984, 145–152.
60
Grafton 1992, 242.
61
Israel 2001, 14.

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The key feature of the tradition of Bible interpretation instituted by

Spinoza, and elaborated by Meyer, Koerbagh, Isaac Vossius, Goeree
and later Toland . . . was precisely its strictly philosophical character, its use of
philosophy not just to uncover discrepancies in the Biblical text or eluci-
date perplexing passages in the light of historical context, but to assess
its significance, thereby completely detaching our view of Scripture from
any theological grounding and ecclesiastical authority.62
Recent research has confirmed the important role the Dutch Republic
played in what Paul Hazard has aptly called “la crise de la conscience
européenne.”63 The emergence of a new world picture, in which
science was established as a new and powerful discipline, relatively
independent of theology, was fostered by the lively intellectual culture
of the Dutch seventeenth century. The role of the Bible as a source
of knowledge of and as the clavis interpretandi to nature was no longer
self-evident. Descartes, who spent most of his life in the Netherlands,
played an important role in this respect. It should be noted, however,
that the rise of a new and powerful philosophy, which we might call
Rationalism, was not the only factor involved. The traditional Aristo-
telian and biblical world view was not only challenged by Descartes
or the Copernican hypothesis, that is to say by external forces, but it
was also undermined by forces from within. The humanist culture of
philology, contacts with previously unknown countries, the culture of
collecting exotic specimens and artifacts, the study of the histories on
non-European peoples all contributed to a hermeneutic crisis. Having
re-evaluated the surviving texts by Aristotle, Ptolemy, Pliny, Dioscorides,
and a host of others, it was only a matter of time before scholars would
start corroding the authority of the Book of Books. The conviction
that the Word of God had been preserved in one sacral, perfect, and
transparent source gave way to a growing awareness of a complicated
transmission in a plurality of texts. A historical, philological approach
to the Bible, rather than a scholastic and dogmatic reading of it, was
loath to bring about a drastic and irreversible break with orthodoxy.64
Seen from this perspective, Spinoza’s Tractatus, in which he claimed that
the Pentateuch could not have been written by Moses, and that the Old
Testament was not a record of world history but just an account of the
people of Israel, was the outcome of a process that had started nearly

62
Ibid., 449, my italics.
63
See for example, van Bunge 2001 and Cook 2007.
64
Nellen 2008.

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a century earlier. Scaliger’s chronological exercises, the culture of col-

lecting, the voyages of discovery, and the curiosity of a new generation
of philologists, all had the unexpected result of raising questions about
the authority of the Bible with regard to history and nature. Were all
men descendents of Adam? What was the status of Chinese history?
Where did the Americans come from? Was the Flood a universal event,
or merely a local accident? Had there also been sloths, anteaters, and
lamas among the passengers of Noah’s Ark? What was the meaning
of fossilized remains and of the gigantic bones found on mountaintops
or deep under the earth? These were heavily debated questions. The
key texts in this respect were la Peyrère’s Praeadamitae, published in
Amsterdam in 1655, and Vossius’s half-hearted response to it, De vera
aetate mundi, published in The Hague in 1659.
There is currently a lively debate between Evolutionists and Cre-
ationists on the origins of the earth and of mankind, a debate in
which appeals are made to the theories of Darwin and to the letter of
the Bible. Whatever we might think of this discussion, it is important
to realize that it has been going on for more than three and a half
centuries. Long before the publication of On the Origin of Species (1859)
the role of the Bible as the key to the understanding of creation was
already being questioned.

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Doedes, J. 1880. Vijf drukken van Is. De la Peyrères Praeadamitae, uit het jaar 1655.
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Hulsius, A. 1656. Non-ens prae-adamiticum: sive confutatio vani & socinizantis cujusdam somnii.
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——. 2009. Reading the Book of Nature in the Dutch Golden Age. Leiden: Brill.
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Lebram, J. 1975. Ein Streit um die hebräische Bibel und die Septuaginta’. In Leiden
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——. 1987. Isaac la Peyrère (1596–1676). His Life, Work and Influence. Leiden: Brill.
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van Rooden, P. 1989. Theology, Biblical Scholarship and Rabinical Studies in the Seventeenth
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——. 1663. Appendix ad librum de LXX interpretibus. Continens responsiones ad objecta aliquot
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 CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THOMAS BURNET, BIBLICAL IDIOM, AND

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY THEORIES OF THE EARTH

Kerry V. Magruder

Introduction

In the seventeenth century, a sustained tradition of critical debate

emerged about the nature and history of the Earth, a contested print
tradition often referred to as “Theories of the Earth.” This population
of hundreds of published texts spanned the era between the Printing
Revolution and the later emergence of geology as a discipline and
provided a public arena for diverse writers to contest the nature of
the Earth and to debate the kinds of evidence from various technical
traditions that might best resolve the enigmas of Earth’s history.1
In this contested print tradition, biblical idiom became a useful
raw material for the development of ideas, and a currency for their
exchange across various disciplinary divides. Historians have gener-
ally assumed that writers of Theories of the Earth invoked Genesis
primarily authoritatively to underwrite their theories, and that they
were motivated to produce theories that conformed to its testimony.
However, these assumptions are confining and sometimes misleading.
They are confining when they obscure questions about the significance
of biblical language for print communication about the Earth before
the emergence of geology as a discipline, and they are misleading if
they fail to discriminate between the various uses of biblical language
by writers with such disparate aims and methods as, for example,

1
On Theories of the Earth as a contested print tradition see Magruder 2006;
Magruder 2000, 7–8. Other interpretations are Roger 1973; Rudwick 1976. In this
chapter I use “Theory of the Earth” (initial uppercase) to refer to any work published
in the historical tradition. That is, a “Theory” was a book and a “theory” is an idea,
although in actual practice these two meanings may be combined. In addition, lowercase
“earth” refers to a type of mineral, or a small region of land, while “the Earth” is used
for reference to Earth as a whole, with respect to some general aspect such as continents
or mountains which might provide evidence for the manner of its formation.

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452 kerry v. magruder

René Descartes (1596–1650), Nicolaus Steno (1638–1686), Thomas

Burnet (ca. 1635–1715) or Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon
(1707–1788). Surely some Theorists did regard the Bible as especially
authoritative and some were involved in apologetic enterprises; but
the language of the Bible also shaped theorizing in more subtle ways.
Biblical vocabulary offered a source of proto-terminology, much of it
carrying affiliated conceptual resources. Biblical turns of phrase and
narrative structures, such as the gathering of the waters and the pattern
of the six days, offered a cognitive scaffolding for the development and
communication of ideas about the history of the Earth regardless of the
specific content of the theories and regardless of a writer’s individual
area of technical expertise.
Theories of the Earth take their name from the work of the same
title by the English scholar Thomas Burnet, first published in 1681 as
Telluris Theoria Sacra. The title pages of all English editions published
in Burnet’s lifetime refer to the work simply as The Theory of the Earth,
omitting the “Sacra” of the Latin title to emphasize the leading role of
reason rather than Scripture in this work of natural philosophy. Never-
theless, in his opening words Burnet explained why his book should be
considered more than just speculative natural philosophy as he outlined
the work’s epic sweep from creation to consummation:
This Theory of the Earth may be call’d Sacred, because it is not the
common Physiology of the Earth, or of the Bodies that compose it, but
respects only the great Turns of Fate, and the Revolutions of our Natural
World; such as are taken notice of in the Sacred Writings, and are truly
the Hinges upon which the Providence of this Earth moves; or whereby
it opens and shuts the several successive Scenes whereof it is made up.2
Burnet’s Theory of the Earth was ‘sacred’ not because it proved Scripture
or derived its authority from Scripture, but because of the significance
of the events it addressed. Burnet’s Theory would calibrate the grand
sweep of human history from the Creation to the apocalypse with an
equally expansive view of the natural history of the Earth, involving
the whole Earth as opposed to its parts or mineral constitution, and

2
Burnet 1684, “Preface to the Reader,” a1r. The first Latin edition (1681) included
the first two books, as did the first English edition (1684). The last two books appeared
in English in Burnet 1690a. Portions of this description of Burnet are adapted from
Magruder 2000, and Magruder and Taylor 2003. Thomas Burnet the Theorist should
not be confused with his contemporaries Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, or Thomas
Burnett, a friend of John Locke; cf. Magruder 2003.

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 thomas burnet and theories of the earth 453

the entire march of time as opposed to one particular epoch such

as the present. That Burnet would employ sacred history to identify
the “great Turns of Fate, and the Revolutions of our Natural World”
involved in shaping the “successive Scenes” of the globe as a provi-
dentially-ordained theater of the world refl ects his ambition to weave
the testimony of nature, Scripture and antiquity together into a single
integrated story.
How did Burnet’s Theory of the Earth, published during the penultimate
decade of the century, draw together diverse strands of seventeenth-
century discussions about the Earth? What features of Burnet’s Theory
enabled it to become a key point of departure for scholarly communica-
tion in this new discourse about the Earth? What was the role played
by biblical language in the constitution of Theories of the Earth as
a contested print tradition? This chapter will explore these questions
in relation to Burnet’s emphasis upon diluvial and apocalyptic motifs
in preference to the language of the creation week, and how Burnet’s
use of both biblical and classical idiom helped establish Theories of
the Earth as a “hermeneutical conversation” in which participants
sought understanding in part through the employment of a “common
language.”3
The “several successive Scenes” in Burnet’s history of the globe were
depicted in the striking frontispiece to the Theory prepared for the 1684
edition (Figure 1). This visual representation is so effective a summary
of Burnet’s Theory that his views frequently are described simply by
reference to this engraving. A globe depicting Earth’s present form and
condition, located at the bottom of the frontispiece, features recogniz-
able continents and oceans of the eastern hemisphere. Three scenes
descend clockwise from the foundation of the world to the present: “The
Original of the Earth” in Chaos; Paradise; and the Deluge. Likewise,
three scenes ascend clockwise from the present to the end of time: “The
Confl agration” or “Burning of the World”; the New Heavens and the
New Earth in the Millennium; and the “Consummation of all Things.”
Burnet dedicated the English translation of his work to King Charles II
with a verbal counterpart to the frontispiece, promising that his Theory
would “connect the parts, and present them all under one view, that

3
The phrase “hermeneutical conversation” is from Gadamer 1996, 388. Cf.
Gadamer’s comments on the mediating role in understanding played by a linguistic
tradition, particularly 383–405.

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454 kerry v. magruder

Fig. 1. Thomas Burnet, Theory of the Earth (London, 1684). The frontispiece
was prepared for the 1684 English translation. Once created it became a
very durable form of visual rhetoric, and thereafter slightly modified versions
adorned all seventeenth- and eighteenth-century editions. Clockwise, from top
right, the seven globes depict a plurality of worlds over time: Chaos, Paradisia-
cal Globe, Deluge, the present Earth, Confl agration, Millennium, Consum-
mation. Three of these globes show worlds of longer duration: Paradise, the
present Earth, and the Millennium. The other four globes represent relatively
rapid transformations leading to or from the major three. Image courtesy the
History of Science Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries; copyright
the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma.

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 thomas burnet and theories of the earth 455

we may see, as in a Mirrour, the several faces of Nature, from First to

Last, throughout all the Circle of Successions.”4
Burnet believed in a plenitude of life throughout the universe, like
many other writers of Theories of the Earth who also contributed
to the tradition of the Plurality of Worlds.5 Indeed, Burnet verbally
asserted that the changes through which a planetary body passes over
time are of greater magnitude than the differences between any two
bodies separated by mere space:
And I am apt to think that some two Planets, that are under the same
state or Period, do not so much differ from one another, as the same
Planet doth from itself, in different periods of its duration. We do not
seem to inhabit the same world that our first fore-fathers did, nor scarce
to be the same race of men.6
One and the same planetary body constitutes a plurality of worlds in
a temporal dimension, as depicted on the frontispiece.
As contested print traditions, Theories of the Earth and the Plural-
ity of Worlds resembled one another in several respects. Both evolved
without a fixed textual base, unlike commentary traditions. Neither
were subsumed under or coextensive with natural philosophy, natu-
ral theology, natural history, or classical history. Neither represented
an established field, discipline, vocation, or literary genre, but both
traditions were heterogenous and contested, open to participants with
diverse perspectives, varied methodologies, and rival sources of pre-
ferred evidence.
Theories of the Earth also overlapped considerably with the meteo-
rological tradition. Yet in at least two respects Burnet’s Theory of the
Earth posed a striking contrast to Aristotle’s theory of the Earth in the
Meteorology. First, while Aristotle conceded that sublunar phenomena are
subject to chance and therefore lie outside the domain of demonstrable
knowledge, Burnet followed Descartes by insisting that a natural phi-
losophy should be judged by its success or failure in accounting for the
history of the Earth.7 In a century of disorienting changes in natural
philosophy accompanied by the rise of skepticism, biblical criticism,

4
Burnet 1684, “Epistle Dedicatory.” Two extended analyses of the frontispiece are
Gould 1987, ch. 2, and Magruder 2000, ch. 5.
5
Burnet 1684, 312ff. (bk. 2, ch. 11).
6
Burnet 1684, 185 (bk. 2, ch. 2).
7
Aristotle Meteorology 338a27–b5; Aristotle 1952, 5; Descartes 1644, articles 204–206;
Magruder 2006, 244.

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456 kerry v. magruder

and deism, the possibility of understanding the history of the Earth

came to play a significant role in achieving a renewed epistemic confi-
dence. Second, while Aristotle held to a concept of an eternal Earth,
characterized over time by cyclical processes and fl uctuating conditions,
Burnet followed Descartes by adhering to a directionalist sensibility,
where the structure and character of the Earth changes over time in
an irreversible series of unique events.8 Thus the theories of Burnet
and Aristotle represent opposite ends of the spectrum with respect to
both temporal sensibilities and epistemic postures.
Theories of the Earth in the seventeenth century displayed the full
gamut of positions on these and other issues. For example, Steno com-
bined a directionalist sensibility with epistemic modesty. Other Theo-
ries of the Earth were elaborations of non-directionalist Aristotelian
meteorologies. And although Burnet mirrored Descartes’ directionalism
and epistemic certainty, he did so for different reasons and by mobiliz-
ing different kinds of evidence. In other words, no temporal sensibility,
epistemic posture, nor any single work or author, could be said to typify
the diverse and heterogenous seventeenth- and eighteenth-century popu-
lation of writings that after Burnet came to be referred to as Theories
of the Earth. Nevertheless, in at least two ways Burnet may serve as a
prism to illumine some critical aspects of the contested tradition in light
of the significance of continuing debate over his Theory for establishing
the new discourse as a recognized print tradition.
First, Burnet emphasized diluvial and apocalyptic motifs in preference
to the language of the creation week. Historians of early modern geol-
ogy often have granted diluvialism a monopoly of attention, especially
when a geologically-significant deluge was defended for apologetic
purposes. In this regard, Burnet often serves as a paradigmatic diluvial
apologist.9 Nevertheless, such historiography neglects the significance
of biblical texts other than the Deluge and obscures the more fun-
damental roles played by biblical language in the development and
communication of theories. Even Burnet developed his diluvialism on
the basis of biblical texts other than the Noachian account; as we shall
see, Burnet’s defense of a global deluge was developed in tandem with
apocalyptic musings related to the second epistle of Peter. In contrast

8
A classic description of the directionalist synthesis is Rudwick 1971; various tem-
poral sensibilities are discussed in detail in Magruder 2000, 6–43.
9
But even so, the term diluvialist conceals far too many disparate ideas to be gener-
ally helpful; cf. the cautionary warning of Rappaport 1997, 5.

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 thomas burnet and theories of the earth 457

to Burnet, most writers on the Deluge regarded the natural processes

it involved as similar in kind to those that operated during the creation
week, particularly in the separation of the mountains and the seas on
the third day. The infl uence of the hexameral account, or Genesis 1,
with its more gradual, cumulative progression of changes over succes-
sive days, proved more durable and pervasive but is not as commonly
recognized by historians, often going unnoticed in surveys of early ideas
about significant pre-human events in the formation of the Earth. The
idiosyncrasy of Burnet lay in his (largely unsuccessful) attempt to wrest
the discussion away from Genesis 1 to the Flood in light of 2 Peter.
Second, Burnet’s use of both biblical and classical idiom helped
establish Theories of the Earth as a “hermeneutical conversation”
with a “common language.” The importance of attending to biblical
idiom is analogous to that of recognizing the cognitive significance of
visual illustrations, a dimension of printed works that has become less
neglected in recent decades. One of the features of early Theories
of the Earth that helped to establish a recognizable print tradition
was the emergence of conventions for depicting the Earth as a globe.
Didactic modes of visual representation facilitated a public discourse
by providing common ground for disputation between Theorists with
widely disparate areas of technical expertise.10 In a similar way, shared
linguistic conventions facilitated the establishment of Theories of the
Earth as a hermeneutical conversation between diverse Theorists, a
contested print tradition employing a shared language in which writers
could present their confl icting theories. Like the conventions for visual
representations, the common idiom provided scaffolding for the devel-
opment and presentation of ideas in a way that would be accessible
to others outside a given writer’s area of technical expertise. Three
simultaneous developments—the idiom, the visual conventions, and the
new contested interdisciplinary discourse—reinforced one another, and
were not coincidental. This chapter will explore how a shared biblical
and classical idiom, which Burnet and other writers wove into the fab-
ric of their texts, functioned as a linguistic commons in which various
Theorists developed, presented and exchanged disparate views.11

10
Magruder 2006.
11
A complementary essay explores the significance of hexameral idiom for the
exchange of ideas in Theories of the Earth; Magruder 2008.

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While the cognitive content of idiom is less definable and more

versatile than a specific interpretation that may elaborate upon it, the
contrast between idiom and interpretation is not black and white. Just
as there is no abrupt dividing line between language and thought, so
there is a continuum from idiom to interpretation. The term “idiom” is
not meant to exclude all aspects of interpretation, but it encompasses a
range of pre-theoretical and conceptual resources inherent in language
that facilitate or dispose one toward particular interpretations, although
not exclusively. Because idiom is less specific than interpretation, its use
was consistent with many writers’ concern to adhere to a principle of
multiple possible interpretations as well as with relatively modest, com-
patibilist epistemic aims regarding the role of biblical data in natural
philosophy. But even when advocates of opposing interpretations clashed
most fiercely, they often employed a shared idiom that was neither
exclusive nor short-lived. Just as similar visual representations could
be employed to advance contradictory purposes, so a common biblical
and classical idiom could be incorporated into successive, contradictory
concordist schemes. In such a public tradition, a vigorous contest of
theories was not aberrant. Idiom, like visual representations, provided
a resource enabling any theorist to engage the common discourse and
make his own expertise and ideas accessible and relevant to the com-
mon debate.
In this chapter “concordist” or “concordism” refers to attempts to
identify detailed correspondences between, on the one hand, biblical or
classical texts, and, on the other hand, complex scientific theories, dem-
onstrations of natural philosophy, recent discoveries, or the operation
of hidden causes. Concordism rather than mere compatibility occurred
when these correspondences became sufficiently detailed to exclude mul-
tiple interpretations, so that a concordism like Burnet’s was a stronger
use of natural philosophy to interpret Scripture than a compatibilist
use of idiom as found in, for example, Descartes or Steno.

Burnet’s Petrine Theory of the Earth

Apocalyptic idiom, especially several key phrases found in the second

epistle of Peter, provided Burnet with critical conceptual resources
for developing and presenting his interpretation of the history of the
Earth. To see how this was so, we will consider first the contents of
the work and the context of its publication, especially in relation to
the intellectual milieu of Cambridge Platonism.

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Fig. 2. Burnet 1684, 135. Global hemisection showing the formation of an

ocean basin. A smooth layer that originally connected points A and B of the
outer surface developed a fissure (shown with lighter stippling) and then col-
lapsed into two fragments that hinged downward into a subterranean abyss,
opening the ocean to the sky. Image courtesy the History of Science Collec-
tions, University of Oklahoma Libraries; copyright the Board of Regents of
the University of Oklahoma.

Burnet’s Theory of the Earth (1684) contained two books devoted, respec-
tively, to Noah’s deluge and to the paradisiacal world. The first book
explained the mountains and seas as the result of catastrophic crustal
collapse during the Mosaic deluge, illustrated in Figure 2.12 The second
book explained how a paradisiacal globe with a uniformly smooth crust
formed naturally from the condensation of vapors and other materials.
The first four global views of the frontispiece (Figure 1) represented
this geogony connecting chaos and paradise (as in book 2), along with
the crustal collapse at the Deluge leading to the present world (as in
book 1). Burnet’s geogony and crustal collapse employed the physi-
cal mechanisms proposed by Descartes in Principia Philosophiae (1644),
reconciled with biblical history and aided by corroborating evidence
from classical texts.

12
Magruder 2006.

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The corroborating evidence from classical texts took on special

significance in part because many early modern scholars believed that
the ancients possessed a pristine wisdom, a prisca sapientia, through
which they understood the order of nature profoundly enough that
contemporary discoveries were but a restoration of formerly-known
truths. Burnet believed that the ancients encoded that knowledge in
emblems and myths that were passed down to their descendants long
after the original truths had been lost or forgotten. This belief was not
restricted to scholars ignorant of new developments in science; even
Isaac Newton (1642–1727) believed that the plan of the Solomonic
Temple demonstrated that Solomon had grasped his inverse square
law for the force of universal gravitational attraction.13 Burnet similarly
thought that the temple plan confirmed the three discontinuous forms
of the Earth entailed by his theory: the paradise, present Earth, and
millennium.14 Such attempts to decipher the prisca sapientia encoded in
ancient texts were inculcated by Cambridge Platonists such as Henry
More (1614–1687) and Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688) who molded
Burnet during his college years, although it was staunchly resisted by
scholars such as Richard Bentley (1662–1742) and the Restoration theo-
logian Bishop Edward Stillingfl eet (1635–1699).15 Burnet’s commitment
to the Cambridge Platonism of More and Cudworth was expressed
in the premium he placed on textual evidence from antiquity, both
sacred and secular, and in his dependence upon the evidence he could
discern from the prisca sapientia. By this route he came to affirm that the
original surface of the globe must have been smooth and uniform.16
Despite the critics of prisca sapientia, many writers of Theories of the
Earth appealed to it, including William Whiston (1667–1752) who held
that “Arts and Sciences were invented and improved in the first Ages

13
Walker 1972; Rattansi and McGuire 1966; McKnight 1991.
14
Burnet 1684, 282 (bk. 2, ch. 9): “I have often thought also, that their first and
second Temple represented the first and second Earth or World; and that of Ezekiel’s,
which is the third, is still to be erected, the most beautiful of all, when this second
Temple of the world shall be burnt down.”
15
Cf. More 1662; Cudworth 1678; Stillingfl eet 1662; Hutton 2002; Hutton 1992.
Grafton writes of Bentley and Stillingfl eet (Grafton 1991, 19): “These men used his-
tory and philology to prove the uniqueness of Christianity and the soundness of the
Bible, not to confl ate all texts and dispensations. They disliked More’s dissolution of
historical boundaries as much as Spinoza’s dissolution of Revelation.”
16
Nicolson 1959 remains the best overall account of Burnet and explains the aes-
thetic appeal in England, particularly among Cambridge Platonists, of an originally
smooth surface of the globe.

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of the World, as well as they since have been.” Like Burnet, Whiston
also linked the plausibility of the prisca sapientia with the need to prove
that the Deluge was universal, since a global catastrophe neutralized
the force of “the greatest Objection against this Proposition,” viz., “the
Ignorance and Barbarity of the Ages after the Deluge.”17
Burnet’s belief in the prisca sapientia fostered an attention to biblical
idiom in search of a “fuller” meaning of the text, a literal sensus plenior
(as some now call it) that lay hidden, latent in the primary meaning.18
In some ways this belief was analogous to traditional interpretations
of prophetic passages as containing both a short-term meaning, intel-
ligible to the original hearers, and a long-term signification that might
be discerned with hindsight. While the primary meaning was accom-
modated to common capacities, a fuller sense might remain as a riddle
for the educated reader to solve. The encoding of readers’ riddles in
prophetic passages provided precedent to encourage scholars like Burnet
to discern remnants of ancient wisdom encoded in various biblical and
ancient texts, hidden within apparently nonspecific idiom. For example,
with respect to the phrase that “it had not rained upon the earth” in
Gen. 2:5, Augustine had wondered whether “perhaps Sacred Scripture
in its customary style is speaking with the limitations of human lan-
guage in addressing men of limited understanding, while at the same
time teaching a lesson to be understood by the reader who is able.”19
Similarly, Henry More explained in his “fourth rule” governing the
use of reason in defense of religion that if principles of philosophy
were to be adopted in defense of religion, they should receive veiled

17
Whiston 1696, 264. This argument that the prisca sapientia was lost at the Deluge
has an ancient lineage, and echos of it may be found in Josephus (whose works Whiston
edited); cf. Antiquities of the Jews, bk. 1, ch. 2. Advocates of the eternity of human life
on Earth, such as Philo and Seneca, argued analogously, invoking cataclysms of fire
or water to explain the present existence of barbarity and apparent lack of progress
of civilization in historical time.
18
After surveying the history of interpretation, Brown 1955 proposes the term sensus
plenior to refer to any deeper meaning of a text (therefore closer to the literal rather
than to the typological sense) that was fully understood by the divine author but not
by the original hearers. By deepening the literal meaning of a text, the sensus plenior
illumines its hidden potential, rather than creating unrelated multiple meanings. I use
sensus plenior to refer to any hidden or fuller meaning that an actor might discern in
a text and defend as a literal sense. Many actors inferred that if further revelation
could make clear a prophetic sense that was already latent in the biblical text, then in
the same way further discoveries of reason might illumine similarly hidden physical
significations of the text. Belief in a prisca sapientia provided added incentive for seeking
sensus plenior interpretations. See also Howell 2002.
19
Augustine 1982, 1:157 (bk. 5, ch. 6).

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but actual approval from Scripture itself, “as being glanced at in some
short passages in the very Letter itself.”20
Burnet affirmed the prisca sapientia, was a millenarian, was concerned
to interpret the Bible in light of the discovery of the inhabitants of
the New World, and was opposed to inter-racial marriage as one of
the offenses that precipitated the Deluge. These views coincided with
positions held by Isaac de la Peyrère, or Pererius (1596–1676), author
of Prae-Adamitae (1655).21 Yet Burnet parted from la Peyrère’s belief in
a geographically-limited deluge. In this respect, la Peyrère has been
identified as the target of Burnet’s Theory of the Earth, but there were
others. Amidst rising suspicions that the Deluge had been only regional
in extent, scholars such as the librarian to the Queen of Sweden, Isaac
Voss (1618–1689) and the Nonconformist commentator Matthew Poole
(1624–1679) represented a vocal minority who argued for a limited
deluge. Largely because of biogeographical evidence from the New
World, they held to an anthropologically-universal catastrophe, assuming
that humans did not spread so far as animals in the antediluvian world.
Among such advocates of a regional deluge, however, Burnet’s chief
opponent was the orthodox Stillingfl eet, who defended the veracity of
the Bible while discrediting the scholarly basis for prisca sapientia.22 For
Burnet, the universal deluge represented a splendid instance of agree-
ment between Scripture and ancient literature, achieved through prisca
sapientia interpretation, that could not easily be let go.23 Stillingfl eet’s case
could be nullified, and evidence for a global deluge from prisca sapientia
defended, by appropriating the weight of arguments from natural phi-
losophy which Burnet found in Cartesian cosmogony. Burnet’s Theory
appropriated the general causes of Cartesian cosmogony, interpreted
as the expression of natural providence, to rehabilitate the testimony of
the prisca sapientia contained within both Scripture and antiquity.24

20
Quoted in Hutton 2006, 198.
21
Cf. Burnet 1690a, 220 (bk. 4, ch. 10); Popkin 1987. Most controversially, La
Peyrère also asserted that Gentiles lived before Adam, who would then have been the
father only of the Jews.
22
Stillingfl eet 1662. Cf. Young 1995, ch. 4; Popkin 1971; Carroll 1975; Browne
1983.
23
Vitaliano 1973, ch. 7, illustrates some of the prisca sapientia evidence for a uni-
versal deluge.
24
Burnet referred to natural regularities as “general causes” rather than as “laws
of nature,” refl ecting a providentialist orientation in which the divine government of
the natural world was effected through both ordinary providence (general causes) and
extraordinary providence (e.g., the preservation of Noah in the Ark). Both kinds of

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The universal deluge was not only supported by the prisca sapientia,
but also highly congruent with apocalyptic perspectives. Many Theories
of the Earth written in Britain in the late seventeenth century displayed
explicit apocalyptic concerns, including those of Isaac Newton, John
Ray (1627–1705), and William Whiston.25 Similar interests occupied
the Cambridge Platonists in the years immediately preceding Burnet’s
Telluris Theoria Sacra (1681).26 Likewise, Burnet employed an apocalyptic
approach to Scripture that may be discerned in the upper portion of
the frontispiece.27 Above the scenes of globes a robed figure spans the
beginning and the end of Earth history. Over his head is written “I am
the Alpha and the Omega;” or, to complete the quotation attributed to
Christ in Rev. 22:13, “the beginning and the end, the first and the last.”
The figure is neither inert nor unbalanced, but dynamic and active.
Foreseeing all at the beginning of Earth history, Christ’s left foot rests
upon a ball of chaos, a globe “without form and void,” under the cap-
tion Apo Kataboles Kosmou, “From the Foundation of the World.”28 This
biblical idiom recalls the Creation but also resonates with apocalyptic
overtones, as do similar phrases such as “from the beginning of the
creation.” The latter phrase appears in one of the most quoted pas-
sages in the New Testament regarding the destiny of the Earth, 2 Pet.

occurrences were aspects of providence, although not necessarily of natural law; Burnet
1684, 108 (bk. 1, ch. 9): “But ’tis hard to separate and distinguish an ordinary and
extraordinary Providence in all cases, and to mark just how far one goes, and where
the other begins.” See Vermij 1998.
25
William Whiston envisioned a future cometary confl agration in his New Theory
of the Earth (1696); cf. Whiston 1706. John Ray’s Miscellaneous Discourses Concerning the
Dissolution and Changes of the World (1692) was a revision of a sermon on the millennium
given at Cambridge in the late 1650s concerned exclusively with the future dissolution
of the world and the millennium. See Kubrin 1968, 13–14, 35, 184.
26
More 1680; More 1681; Hutton 1994.
27
Jacob and Lockwood 1972 demonstrate that English scholars still displayed a
great interest in the apocalypse in the late 1680s and 1690s. However, by focusing
exclusively upon the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as the immediate political setting for
the publication of Burnet’s two last books, their analysis does not address the fact that
Burnet had planned to include the two last books from the beginning, as is clear from
the two first books and from the frontispiece. Jacob and Lockwood’s interpretation of
Burnet’s manuscript annotations has also been challenged by Mandelbrote 1994. Bettini
1997 explores the reception of Burnet’s apocalyptic approach in Italy.
28
Ten New Testament references to Apo Kataboles Kosmou or Pro Kataboles Kosmou
include John 17:24 and 1 Pet. 1:20. I thank Mack Roarck, personal communication,
for paleographical assistance with this caption and other lettering on the engraving,
especially with the form of beta in Kataboles and the genitive noun ending of Kosmou
where the upsilon is written above the omega in an omega-upsilon ligature. For similar
examples, see Van Groningen 1963 and Metzger 1981.

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3:3–13, which is the primary allusion behind Burnet’s caption. After

an entire chapter replete with warnings about false teachers that will
arise in the last days, the epistle of 2 Peter admonished:
Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking
after their own lusts. And saying, Where is the promise of his coming?
for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the
beginning of the creation. For this they willingly are ignorant of, that
by the word of God, the heavens were of old, and the earth consisting of
water and by water. Whereby the world that then was, being overfl owed with
water, perished. But the heavens and the earth that are now, by the same
word, are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment,
and perdition of ungodly men. . . . The day of the Lord will come as
a thief in the night, in which the heavens shall pass away with a great
noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat; the earth also and
the works that are therein shall be burnt up. Nevertheless we, according
to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth
righteousness.29
This translation is as Burnet quoted it, affirming its “plain sence,
according to the most easie and natural explication.”30 The “plain” and
“easie” sense of this passage, as Burnet read it, spoke of three utterly
different worlds, the “world that then was”; the “earth that [is] now”;
and “a new earth” that is to come. Burnet’s frontispiece featured these
three worlds, as identified by the apostle, to refute the latter-day scoff-
ers who denied a universal deluge. As it turned out, the text was not
quite so “plain” or “easie” as Burnet would have it, and his translation
emended the text of verse 5 from the Authorized Version’s “standing
out of ” to the alternative reading “consisting of,” in accordance with
the Vulgate (de aqua et per aquam consistens).31 Nevertheless, because Peter
established apocalyptic discontinuities between past, present, and future
Earths, Peter was of greater importance than Moses for deciphering the
“whole Circle of Time and Providence.”32 Burnet repeatedly invoked
this passage to defl ect criticisms raised on the basis of Genesis 1 and

29
Translated by Burnet 1690b, 9; italics added.
30
Burnet 1690b, 9.
31
“Standing out of ” was often interpreted as referring to the separation of the
mountains and the sea in the creation week, which was impossible for Burnet’s Theory
to accommodate. Burnet devoted a long paragraph in the first Latin edition to a
grammatical examination of the Greek text supporting the consistens reading; Burnet
1681, 200–201.
32
Burnet 1684, 3 (bk. 1, ch. 1).

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to justify his work as a literally-true Petrine philosophy of the Earth.

Peter’s passage provided the
Sacred Basis upon which the whole Theory stands . . . concerning the Triple
Order and Succession of the Heavens and the Earth. That comprehends
the whole extent of our Theory: which indeed is but a large Commentary
upon St. Peter’s Text.33
While other commentators might gloss over the differences between
Peter and Moses, Burnet’s Petrine idiom of the apocalyptic succession
of three discontinuous worlds clashed with hexameral idiom and the
more gradual, cumulative progression of events over a succession of six
days.34 In effect, Burnet laid down a hermeneutical challenge: priority
must be given to the later rather than the earlier, the New Testament
rather than the Old; therefore the cryptic sayings of Moses must be
accommodated to the clear affirmations of Peter in order to solve the
riddles and conundrums of biblical interpretation. If his Petrine gambit
were to succeed, the new discourse of the Theory of the Earth would
displace hexameral commentary as the primary locus for discussing
the history of the Earth.
Because of Burnet’s eschatological rather than hexameral emphasis,
the frontispiece remains Christocentric even though the Incarnation, the
greatest event in the history of the world, occurred in the lowest stage
of the globe, a scene of humiliation. Yet by depicting Christ after his
glorification, Christ’s right foot is placed upon the Earth as it is trans-
formed into a star at the final consummation of all things. With the word
Tetelesai, meaning “You have been completed,” the figure declares to the
Earth that it has fulfilled its providential destiny in much the same way
as he spoke of himself at the completion of his own earthly mission.35
Once transfigured into a new star, with its inhabitants transported to
Heaven, the former Earth would ascend to an exalted place among the
fixed stars, perhaps becoming the habitation of angels or other spiritual

33
Burnet 1690b, 8.
34
Note, however, that either idiom could encourage a directionalist sense of the
history of the development of Earth.
35
For identification of Tetelesai as the second person singular perfect tense of teleo
(to complete, perfect, finish), and particularly for help deciphering the script of the
second tau and the alpha-iota ligature of Tetelesai as it is engraved on the frontispiece,
I again thank Mack Roarck, personal communication.

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beings: “This translation of the Earth . . . makes it leave its place, and,
with a lofty fl ight, take its seat amongst the Stars.”36
Christendom was traditionally represented by a scepter which had
one end shaped into a ball modeling Earth, topped with a cross sym-
bolizing the dominion of Christian kings. In Burnet’s frontispiece, the
banner of Christendom in Christ’s hand designates him as King of
Kings at the end of time. He stands not merely on one globe, but on a
complete circle of seven globes in the eschatological fulfillment of the
kingdom of God.37 A more explicit visual declaration of Christology in
a theoretical work on Earth history cannot be found. As original Creator
and ultimate Ruler, in full view of cherubim longing to look into these
things, Christ governs all scenes of global history from creation to the
Apocalypse, making the Earth his footstool.38
Thus Burnet’s theories of the Deluge and paradise, so often regarded
as mere copies of Descartes, were expressed through apocalyptic idiom
such as that found in the frontispiece. Believing that this idiom encoded
a prisca sapientia, Burnet developed a specific interpretation of 2 Peter
entailing the three discontinuous forms of the Earth. The presentation
of Burnet’s concordist interpretations of 2 Peter depended upon the
apocalyptic idiom embedded in the work both verbally and in visual
representations.

Idiom and Interpretation: The Priority of Nature

Just as the Anglican tradition rested upon the three pillars of Scripture,
reason, and tradition, so Burnet’s Theory of the Earth would rest upon
nature, Scripture, and antiquity, in that order—nature or reason taking
the leading role from Scripture because of the obscurity of the latter
when it refers to natural phenomena, and antiquity trailing in the rear

36
Burnet 1690a, 224 (bk. 4, ch. 10).
37
There is a scene in Revelation where Christ stands in his temple among seven
candlesticks; similarly, in the frontispiece, Christ stands in the universe amidst the seven
globes. But the image is not merely spatial, it is temporal, for the seven globes represent
seven stages in history just as, in the Book of Revelation, the seven seals represent the
secret plan of history opened by Christ; Burnet discussed these seals in Burnet 1690a,
bk. 4, ch. 4, passim. The number seven represented completeness, especially for Platonists
from the time of Philo’s commentary on Genesis.
38
Cf. Ps. 45, 110. Citing these and other Scriptures (e.g., Burnet 1690a, bk. 4, ch. 5,
passim), Burnet frequently conveyed his vision of Earth with a wealth of eschatological
biblical idiom.

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because it lacked the authority of Scripture. “Reason is to be our first

Guide,” he wrote, since the Theory chiefl y concerns philosophical rather
than theological matters.39 With confidence in the unity of truth, Bur-
net aimed for concord between reason (Cartesian natural philosophy),
Scripture (apocalyptically interpreted), and antiquity (suitably decoded).
A true theory would disclose an unexpected consilience between the
three, a detailed concordism rather than mere compatibility.
For Burnet, reason was required to illumine the obscure portions of
Scripture because general causes are not directly taught by the Scriptures
themselves, nor was it the purpose of Scripture to do so.40 Therefore no
point of natural philosophy should be regarded as an article of faith.
But for Burnet, natural philosophy provided a key to the meaning of
obscure passages in Scripture that are “incompleatly deliver’d, so as to
awaken and excite our thoughts rather than full resolve them.”41 That is,
Scripture at times alludes to secret natural knowledge that may become
clear with further advances in natural philosophy.
Burnet asserted that when a passage of Scripture has several compet-
ing literal interpretations, one needs a competent theory to determine
which one is actually true and eliminate the others. Moreover, a new
theory receives added confirmation when it can establish a novel literal
interpretation of a passage that was formerly obscure. For example,
Burnet asserted that the way his theory required discontinuities between
the three worlds of Peter clarified the biblical text:
So as, all things consider’d, what might otherwise be made an exception
to some of these Texts alledg’d by us, viz. that they are too obscure,
becomes an argument for us: as implying that there is something more
intended by them, than the present and known form of the Earth. And
we having propos’d another form and structure of the Earth, to which
those characters suit and answer more easily, as this opens and gives light
to those difficult places, so it may be reasonably concluded to be the very
sence and notion intended by Holy Writers.42

39
Burnet 1684, 6 (bk. 1, ch. 1): “This Theory being chiefl y Philosophical, Reason
is to be our first Guide; and where that falls short, or any other just occasion offers
itself, we may receive further light and confirmation from the Sacred writings. . . . As
for Antiquity and the Testimonies of the Ancients, we only make general refl ections
upon them, for illustration rather than proof of what we propose; . . . .”
40
Burnet 1684, 70 (bk. 1, ch. 6).
41
Burnet 1684, 180 (bk. 2, ch. 1).
42
Burnet 1684, 94 (bk. 1, ch. 7).

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For Burnet the Scriptures offered new opportunities to show the fruit-
fulness of a theory that asks new questions of Scripture passages and
opens up previously hidden meanings and unsuspected interpretations.
In another example, Burnet claimed that his theory of the Earth enabled
one to ascertain the true physical meaning of the reference to the rain-
bow after the Flood, in contrast to previous exegetes whose imaginations
were held captive to their impoverished physical understanding:
Nor ought we to wonder, that Interpreters have commonly gone the
other way, and suppos’d that the Rainbow was before the Flood; This I
say, was no wonder in them, for they had no Theory that could answer
to any other interpretation: And in the interpretation of the Texts of
Scripture that concern natural things, they commonly bring them down
to their own Philosophy and Notions: . . . .43
Therefore, for Burnet, theories provided boundaries for the interpreta-
tion of Scripture, not vice versa.
Burnet’s confidence in the competence of reason to determine the
correct interpretation of Scripture left him vulnerable to changing views
of nature. Ironically, Burnet had berated Augustine for not heeding his
own warning against linking Scripture too tightly with any particular
view of nature lest the latter be shown defective. For other Theorists,
Scripture might claim equal authority with nature when it spoke of
natural phenomena accompanying major historical events. Yet by
adopting Descartes’ conception of a theory as a chain of reasoning
from general causes, Burnet elevated the relative competence of reason,
making reason the arbiter of the language of Scripture. For writers
as varied as Augustine or Steno, the versatility of idiom that allowed
multiple competing literal interpretations of Scripture refl ected an
epistemology of limited certainty; for Burnet, idiom without a definitive
interpretation signaled a deficiency of reason, a lack of a true theory.
Because of his emphasis on the perspicuity and expansive competence
of reason, Burnet subordinated the interpretation of Scripture to natural
philosophy in a detailed concordism, constructing specific interpretations
that went far beyond the implications of the idiom.
For Burnet, natural philosophy explicated the causes underlying great
and wonderful phenomena, whether the phenomena were derived
from Scripture or nature, and thereby served as “the Key that unlocks

43
Burnet 1684, 238 (bk. 2, ch. 6).

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 thomas burnet and theories of the earth 469

those secrets.”44 And just as natural philosophy unlocked the secrets of

Scripture, it promised to do the same for antiquities.45 Indeed, Burnet
argued that a theory of the Earth is necessary adequately to interpret
antiquity, as well as Scripture. When introducing a cross-section of the
Earth designed to show its resemblance to an egg, Burnet explained:
These, and such like notions which we find in the writings of the Ancients
figuratively and darkly deliver’d, receive a clearer light, when compar’d with this
Theory of the Chaos; which representing every thing plainly, and in its
natural colours, is a Key to their thoughts, and in allustration of their obscurer
Philosophy, concerning the Original of the World. . . .46
Theory, then, served both Scripture and antiquity as a key to unlock
their hidden secrets and a light to clarify their dark obscurities.
In one of the most important applications of this approach, Burnet
explained that his Theory showed how Peter’s apocalyptic discontinuities
in the history of nature could be taken literally.47 For in the grip of
a false natural philosophy, passages like Peter had become enigmatic,
or worse, appeared to err. Indeed, Burnet recounted several patristic
writers (including Didymus Alexandrinus, a teacher of Jerome) who,
assuming that the heavens and the Earth were the same now as at the
beginning, argued against the canonicity of the epistle:
And all this because it [ Peter] taught that the Heavens and the Earth had
chang’d their form, and would do so again at the Confl agration; so as
the same World would be Triform in success of time. We acknowledge
his Exposition of St. Peter’s words to be very true, but what he makes
an argument of the corruption of this Epistle, is rather, in my mind, a
peculiar argument of its Divine Inspiration.48
For want of a good theory, the plain sense of Scripture was misinter-
preted, brought down to common notions that were subtly but errone-
ously read into the text.
Indeed, Burnet argued even more strongly that some passages of
Scripture are so obscure that they cannot be rightly interpreted until
one has come upon the correct theory:

44
Burnet 1684, 145 (bk. 1, ch. 11).
45
Burnet 1684, 274–275 (bk. 2, ch. 8).
46
Burnet 1684, 64 (bk. 1, ch. 5), italics added.
47
Burnet 1684, 62–63 (bk. 1, ch. 5).
48
Burnet 1684, 164–165 (bk. 1, ch. 12).

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we cannot but repeat what we have partly observ’d before, How necessary
it is to understand Nature, if we would rightly understand those things in
holy Writ that relate to the Natural World. For without this knowledge,
as we are apt to think some things consistent and credible that are really
impossible in Nature; so on the other hand, we are apt to look upon other
things as incredible and impossible that are really founded in Nature.
And seeing every one is willing so to expound Scripture, as it may be to
them good sence, and consistent with their Notions in other things, they
are forc’d many times to go against the easie and natural importance of
the words, and to invent other interpretations more compliant with their
principles, and, as they think, with the nature of things.49
It is perhaps ironic for modern readers to observe that the author of
the Theory of the Earth that was most saturated with biblical idiom
actually rejected a “Bible-only” approach to the natural world as not
only wrong-headed but impossible. For Burnet, even a literal interpre-
tation of the Bible could not be achieved without the light of reason.
Burnet read nature, Scripture, and antiquity together in a concordist
fashion, yet not on equal terms: in natural philosophy, reason rather
than Scripture provided definitive resolution of confl icting interpreta-
tions and determined the specific meaning of any idiom.

Decoding the Riddle of the Mundane Egg

Burnet’s interpretation of the Earth involved a collation of not two but

three books, which promised to illumine one another in a mutually-
clarifying narrative. Armed with Cartesian geogony, ready to interpret
Scripture apocalyptically by giving Peter primacy over Moses, and
equipped to resolve the riddles of antiquity on the basis of classical
textual scholarship seasoned with the prisca sapientia of Cambridge
Platonism, Burnet could read the three texts of nature, Scripture, and
antiquity as mutually confirming, each re-telling the same story in its
own distinctive way. Burnet’s arguments for the “Mundane Egg,” the
ovoid figure of the paradisiacal Earth, provide an illuminating example
of how, to construct an integrated reading of the three books, he
developed his natural philosophy in terms of the idiom of Scripture
and antiquity.
The use of biblical idiom in a general way was not unusual. For
example, in the Principia Philosophiae (1644), Descartes referred to the

49
Burnet 1684, 221–222 (bk. 2, ch. 4).

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outer boundary of the Sun’s vortex as the firmament, and to the whirl-
ing fl uid of any vortex as the waters above or below the firmament.50
Descartes’ use of biblical idiom shows that at that time he read the two
books of nature and Scripture together. For Theorists like Descartes, the
use of idiom to suggest a compatibility between natural philosophy and
Scripture was necessary to legitimate a new theory, although multiple
interpretations remained possible because the natural philosophy and
biblical idiom were not inextricably joined. In the Prodromus (1669), Steno
introduced a minor role for a third book, the voice of antiquity, whose
possible utility was compromised by obscurity and unreliability.51 Yet for
Burnet, a detailed concordism between all three books was essential.
Indeed, antiquity became as important as Scripture, a point illustrated
by a tabulation of citations from the first English edition of The Theory
of the Earth (1684) in which Burnet cited ancient sources 102 times and
Scripture 101 times.52 Burnet developed the idiom of Scripture and
antiquity in very specific concordist interpretations.
Burnet differed from Descartes by asserting the need for reasoning
from evidence of actual effects rather than from causes alone.53 If so,
from where was that evidence to come? For Burnet as for many early
modern scholars, much relevant evidence came from texts. Anthony
Grafton has shown that the habits of humanist scholarship continued
to impact the new science long after the Renaissance. James Bono has
refuted the Baconian claim that in the seventeenth century an emerg-
ing scientific culture abandoned the bookish culture of exegetical and
commentary traditions and abruptly replaced it with an altogether
different approach.54 Practices and metaphors associated with textual
scholarship were prominent in natural history, as naturalists regarded
evidence obtained or questions formulated from antiquities, philology,

50
Descartes 1644, article 131.
51
Steno 1669. Steno repeatedly commented that nature and Scripture agree, or that
one affirms while the other is silent, occasionally noting the ambiguity of ancient secular
records. For example, Steno 1969, 208–209: “Nature demonstrates . . . while Scripture
does not contradict . . .; . . . Scripture is silent, and the history of nations regarding the
first ages after the deluge is regarded as doubtful by the nations themselves….”
52
For comparison, Burnet cited sources representing reason only five times; Magruder
2003, ch. 3.
53
Magruder 2003, 62–64, 93, 105; Magruder 2006, 245–252. Magruder 2006, 252:
“Burnet opened the door to reasoning from effects, and once opened, knowledge of
these effects might potentially come from any evidential source, whether classical texts,
astronomy, natural history, or local observations.”
54
Cf. Grafton 1991; Bono 1995.

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ancient geography, and classical literature as most significant for their

own endeavors. In a pioneering essay, Cecil J. Schneer described the
“rise of historical geology” as a “fusion of historical and antiquarian
interests with collecting and classifying of natural objects.” Kenneth
L. Taylor has discussed the significance of antiquarian inquiry for the
development of historical interpretations of the Earth. Rappaport has
shown that late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century natural-
ists ‘read’ evidence from field observations and cabinet specimens in
tandem with textual evidence and antiquarian artifacts such as coins
and monuments.55 Burnet was not a collector of specimens in natural
history, but as a scholar he did collect fragments of texts, both sacred
and secular. For Burnet and other Cambridge Platonists, belief in a
prisca sapientia made the Scriptures of Christian revelation not entirely
unique. In Burnet’s “Sacred” Theory of the Earth, both holy Scrip-
ture and a pagan revelation encoded in ancient texts spoke with a
harmonious voice, when properly interpreted, because they came from
a common source. Although the rhetoric of the prisca sapientia outlived
Cambridge Platonism, the prestige of the ancient texts made its idiom
useful even to writers who did not share a degree of confidence equal
to Burnet’s. In this way Burnet’s integration of the books of antiquity,
Scripture and nature stimulated the approach to texts of naturalists
such as Robert Hooke (1635–1703) and John Woodward (1665–1728)
in England and Johann Jakob Scheuchzer (1672–1733) and others on
the continent. A century later, evidence from ancient texts, both sacred
and secular, continued to be prominently cited as late as the works of
Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) and Charles Lyell (1797–1875).
To explicate the original formation of Earth from chaos, we have
already noted that Burnet relied upon Descartes’ account of the forma-
tion of planets from comets and stars. In a Cartesian-inspired global
section (Figure 3, bottom), Burnet transposed the Cartesian regions of
the Earth into a depiction of Earth as a mundane egg. This analogy
comparing Earth with an egg, not found in Descartes’ Principia, played
a substantive role for Burnet because it provided a means to elucidate
the character of the paradisiacal globe by integrating evidence from
the three guides of reason, Scripture, and antiquity. In the figure the
central yolk was of fire (A), with a membrane around it forming the

55
Schneer 1954; Hooke 1705, 334–335; Taylor 2001; Rappaport 1982; Rappaport
1997.

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 thomas burnet and theories of the earth 473

outer layer (B) of the interior region. The exterior region included the
watery abyss as the white of the egg (C), and the outer crust as its
shell (D). According to Burnet the globe was not precisely spherical
but egg-shaped, with the polar diameter greater than the diameter at
the equator. Burnet’s global view (Figure 3, top) was depicted with a
greatly exaggerated scale in contrast to the corresponding view of the
paradisiacal globe in the frontispiece, all in order to convey the signifi-
cance he attributed to the idea of Earth as a mundane egg.
The ovoid figure of the Earth, elongated pole to pole, was put to
work in Burnet’s theory of the paradisiacal world. At that gentle time,
he argued, water vapors rose at the equator because of the intense heat
of the Sun.56 Because of the vigorous motion of their heated state the
vapors pushed toward the cooler poles, condensing there in an unin-
terrupted mist.57 In Burnet’s theory the liquid water condensing in the
polar lakes fl owed downhill toward the equatorial zones, which lie closer
to the Earth’s center. If the figure of the Earth were not elongated
at the poles, Burnet’s antediluvian water cycle would be impossible.
Because Burnet’s Theory of the Earth thus entailed an elongated figure
of the Earth, it helped popularize the notion that Descartes’ cosmology
required it as well.
The figure of the Earth as an egg-shaped globe, or prolate spheroid
elongated from pole to pole, was controversial but not essential to the
Cartesian system. Descartes himself seemed to favor it, and it was
endorsed by later vortex theorists such as Johann Bernoulli (1667–1748)
and Dortous de Mairan (1678–1771).58 Jacques Cassini (1677–1756)
and Jean-Dominique Cassini (1748–1825) empirically determined to
their satisfaction, on the basis of geodetic measurements in France, that
the Earth was elongated at the poles. While consistent with Descartes’

56
Burnet argued that the paradisiacal Earth diurnally rotated on its axis perpendicu-
larly to the plane of its revolution around the Sun, so that the equator coincided with
the ecliptic (i.e., the apparent path of the Sun). The present obliquity of the ecliptic
resulted from the crustal collapse at the Deluge. The tilting of Earth destroyed the
former world’s uniform climate, in which antediluvians had enjoyed a perpetual spring
without seasonal variations. Cf. Tuan 1968.
57
Thus there was no rain (or rainbow) before the Deluge, confirming Burnet’s
interpretation of the covenant of the rainbow in Gen. 9:13. In Burnet’s view, his
antediluvian water cycle was corroborated by the “mists” described in Gen. 2:5–6
(interpreted as a subterranean river gushing forth by Steno 1969, 205).
58
There was plausible physical reasoning for this conclusion involving the down-
ward pressure exerted by the vortex matter at the equator; cf. Descartes 1644, articles
23, 27.

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474 kerry v. magruder

Fig. 3. Burnet 1681, 46. Global view (top) and global section (below). The
Earth’s axis is horizontal, with poles on the sides. Image courtesy the History
of Science Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries; copyright the Board
of Regents of the University of Oklahoma.

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 thomas burnet and theories of the earth 475

assumptions this conclusion was not rigorously derived from Cartesian

cosmology, so it was not inevitable that the figure of the Earth would
come to play a crucial polemical role in debates over Cartesian natu-
ral philosophy.59 Moreover, in 1680 Isaac Newton raised no objections
to Burnet’s ovoid figure of the Earth.60 Yet by the appearance of the
Principia six years later, Newton’s physics unquestionably specified that
the Earth must be an oblate spheroid, fl attened at the poles.61 After
the Principia, British Newtonians found a conspicuous polemical foil
in Burnet’s advocacy of a prolate spheroid in the name of Cartesian
cosmology. William Whiston and John Keill (1671–1721) mounted
blistering attacks upon Burnet’s Theory by marshalling what evidence
was then available to argue that Earth was an oblate spheroid, hoping
to kill the two birds of Cartesian cosmology and Burnet’s world-making
with one Newtonian stone.62
Burnet’s evidence for his antediluvian water cycle in the prolate spher-
oid of the paradisiacal globe depended not only upon his appropriation
of Cartesian geogony but upon his integrated reading of all three texts.
One of several lines of evidence from ancient texts was the classical
image of the world as a cosmic egg, which he believed offered valuable
testimony corroborating his Theory from ancient wisdom. Despite the
promise of ancient testimony describing the universe as a mundane egg,
Descartes’ universe of indefinite extent and seemingly endless vortices
turned out not to be shaped like an egg. Therefore a new interpreta-
tion of ancient allusions to a mundane egg must be sought, Burnet
argued, by which the three books (nature, Scripture, and antiquity)
could be reconciled. Burnet’s solution to this hermeneutical riddle was
to transfer the metaphor of the mundane egg from the figure of the
universe to the figure of the Earth. Burnet regarded this metaphorical
transfer as a “general key” to unlock the true meanings of a variety of

59
The Cartesian philosopher Christiaan Huygens predicted that the Earth was
instead an oblate spheroid, fl attened at the poles and bulging around the equator. See
Aiton 1972; Greenberg 1996; Terrall 2006.
60
Kubrin points out that Newton did not object in 1680 to Burnet’s prolate sphe-
roidal figure of the Earth. After learning of Hooke’s arguments for a larger equatorial
than polar diameter, Newton’s views changed. Kubrin documents that Hooke and John
Aubrey believed that after 1680 Newton obtained the idea of the oblate figure of the
Earth from Hooke; Kubrin 1968, 162–165.
61
Newton 1687, 421–422 (bk. 3, proposition 18).
62
Keill 1698, ch. 6. For the analogous effect of Maupertuis’s rhetoric in joining
Cartesian physics and the elongate spheroid in France see the works of Greenberg
and Terrall cited above.

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ancient sayings about the world. Once this principle is granted, Burnet
continued, “do but refl ect upon our Theory of the Earth . . . and you
will need no other interpreter to understand this mystery. . . . we have
truly found out the Riddle of the Mundane Egg.”63 In the Latin edition
Burnet put his “general key” to work upon a large collection of classical
texts, showing to his satisfaction that ancient philosophers had regarded
the Earth, rather than the universe, as an oval.64 Even Moses subtly
hinted at the doctrine of the mundane egg, Burnet suggested, with the
description in Genesis 1 of the Spirit hovering over the water-covered
Earth like a brooding bird, as if it were incubating the generation of
the globe from chaos like an egg.65
The ancients wrote in a cryptic mode, as obscure as prophecy, Burnet
believed, and therefore interpretations of them are more prone to err
than either the conclusions of reason or the interpretation of didactic
passages of Scripture. We have seen that, for Burnet, a proper theory
must be obtained before one can make a fuller sense intelligible from
encoded idiom and the fragmented and puzzling statements of the
ancients or the obscure portions of Scripture. Yet a detailed concord-
ism of nature, Scripture, and antiquity should be possible if one has
hit upon the correct theory, and such a happy consilience was achieved
with his solution to the riddle of the mundane egg:
And considering that this notion of the Mundane Egg, or that the World
was Oviform, hath been the sence and Language of all Antiquity, Latins,
Greeks, Persians, Egyptians, and others. . . . Which being prov’d by Rea-
son, the laws of Nature, and the motions of the Chaos; then attested by
Antiquity, both as to the matter and form of it; and confirm’d by Sacred
Writers, we may take it now for a well-established truth, and proceed
upon this supposition. . . .66
The ability of Burnet’s Theory to unlock the secrets of Scripture and
antiquity provided two independent strands of evidence to assure
readers that his interpretation of the paradisiacal globe, which went

63
Burnet 1684, 270 (bk. 2, ch. 8); cf. Burnet 1681, 232.
64
Burnet 1681, 277 (bk. 2, ch. 10); cf. Burnet 1684, 65 (bk. 1, ch. 5). To show that
this was the view of the Orphic philosophers, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, and the
Persians, Burnet surveyed a collection of ancient writers, including Eusebius, Plutarch,
Bacchicis, Athenagoras, Achilles Tatius, Aratus, Varro, Proclos, Plato, Zoroaster, Leucip-
pus, Anaxagoras, Parmenides, and Diodorus Siculus, repeatedly referring to Phoenician
Theology. Burnet 1681, 283.
65
Burnet 1681, 286.
66
Burnet 1684, 65 (bk. 1, ch. 5); cf. 274 (bk. 2, ch. 8).

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 thomas burnet and theories of the earth 477

considerably beyond Descartes’ geogony, was not speculative but a

“well-established truth.” So powerful was Burnet’s presentation of
paradisiacal Earth as the mundane egg that even critics like Whiston
and Hooke conceded the scheme. While the Newtonian Whiston
adamantly denied that the figure of the Earth was a prolate spheroid,
he endorsed Burnet’s egg-like correspondences with Earth’s structure,
notwithstanding the implicit Cartesian geogony.67 Hooke also envisioned
an egg-like structure for the Earth, like Burnet, giving considerable evi-
dential value to ancient testimony critically deciphered.68 In this sense
the idiom of the mundane egg formed a linguistic commons shared
by rival theories during the immediate reception of Burnet’s Theory of
the Earth. Nor were later writers averse to such considerations. Prisca
sapientia traditions which emphasized the evidential role of ancient texts
retained a powerful appeal to many writers through the eighteenth
century, as can be seen as late as the Theory of the Earth of John
Whitehurst (1713–1788) in 1778, an example all the more interest-
ing because of the deist character of Whitehurst’s circle.69 Invocation
of the prisca sapientia to support sensus plenior interpretations proved a
nearly irresistible lure, encouraging concordist attempts to find detailed
correspondences between interpretations of Earth history and ancient
sacred and secular idiom. Burnet himself repeatedly read the three
books as an integrated account; the mundane egg was only one of
several similar arguments by which Burnet integrated the testimony
of the three books to support his theory of the paradisiacal globe.70
This integration set a formidable precedent: to engage the Theory on
its own ground, Theories of the Earth after Burnet needed not only to
unlock the secrets of nature and Scripture, but also to better illumine

67
Whiston 1696, 258–259. For Whiston’s Burnetian-style ovoid-Earth diagrams,
see Magruder 2000, 593ff.
68
Hooke 1705, 413. Kubrin wryly characterizes Hooke’s reliance upon literary
sources as an Omnium in Verba methodology in contrast to the alleged Nullus in Verba
motto of the Royal Society; Kubrin 1968, 152.
69
Whitehurst 1778; on Whitehurst’s use of prisca sapientia see Magruder 2000, 668ff.
Although not as openly, Hooke’s circle also included deists and discussions of deistic
ideas; cf. Poole 2006, 41–57.
70
For example, another argument correlated ancient testimony of climatic zones
and the antipodes with recent observations of the bandedness of Jupiter, which Burnet
reasoned might still persist in an unfallen state. See Magruder 2006, 248–249.

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the mysteries of antiquity, reading all three books as an integrated

account of the history of the Earth.71
Burnet’s use of natural philosophy in both the geogony and water
cycle of the paradisiacal globe to draw out a fuller sense of the idiom
of the mundane egg illustrates how a widely accepted idiom could
facilitate the development of certain theories in particular directions.72
Burnet’s account of paradise as the mundane egg was not simply a case
of Burnet’s natural philosophy being driven by theological conceptions
or belief in prisca sapientia, for Burnet gave priority to nature in the
interpretation of the three books, as we have seen. Rather, it illustrates
how he could extend the reach of natural philosophy by creating a
linguistic commons where new concepts could be formed as a common
language was applied to new contexts.73 Burnet decoded the idiom of
Scripture and antiquity by using natural philosophy to elaborate the
idiom into specific interpretations. The integration of familiar idiom
with a novel idea in natural philosophy made the latter more accept-
able, even when successive Theorists explained the idiom using differ-
ent underlying natural philosophies. The fact that the idiom could be
co-opted by successive Theorists shows how the idiom contributed to a
hermeneutical conversation, a contested print tradition, that could be
engaged by various writers. The common idiom provided a scaffolding
anyone could climb, in order to contribute to the new project of the
Theory of the Earth, even to lay down bricks of different kinds.

The Resurgence of Hexameral Idiom in the

Burnet Controversy

By invoking cosmological considerations such as Cartesian geogony,

appealing to apocalyptic interpretations of Scripture, writing in the
idiom of ancient texts, and defending a global deluge, Burnet has
seemed to later readers as paradigmatic for pre-geological thinking about
the Earth. However, to his British contemporaries Burnet’s idiosyncratic
neglect of hexameral idiom in preference for apocalyptic idiom was far

71
For a survey of the lures and perils of concordist explanations of the Noachian
deluge from the seventeenth century to the present see Young 1995.
72
Gadamer 1996, 401 explains: “language forces understanding into schematic
forms which hem us in.”
73
Gadamer 1996, 403. Gadamer notes that in the hermeneutical task “Interpretation
begins with fore-conceptions that are replaced by more suitable ones” (1996, 267).

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 thomas burnet and theories of the earth 479

from typical.74 In the ensuing controversy, they definitively rejected his

Petrine gambit, favoring literal readings accommodating Peter to Moses
rather than vice-versa. Where Burnet argued that his Petrine Theory
uniquely illumined Scripture, critics voiced their conviction that multiple
interpretations were possible, so long as each of them incorporated the
idiom of Genesis 1. To dismiss a literal interpretation of Genesis 1 in
order to defend a universal deluge seemed to them to play into the
hands of the very scoffers Burnet had set out to confound.
In many cosmological interpretations of the first chapter of Gen-
esis, the firmament which separated the waters was interpreted as the
sphere of fixed stars. A more phenomenalistic and equally traditional
interpretation regarded the firmament as the expanse of the sky, with
the clouds as the waters above and the seas as the waters below.75 For
Burnet, neither of these two interpretations was acceptable. Rather,
Burnet developed his apocalyptic Theory of the Earth apart from the
cognitive constraints of the hexameral idiom of the firmament and
the gathering of the waters that others regarded as most relevant to the
creation. Yet despite Burnet’s preferential use of apocalyptic idiom, he
still employed hexameral idiom in his own idiosyncratic way: for Burnet,
the ‘firmament’ was the hard, outermost layer which became the surface
of the Earth, forming a uniformly smooth, mountain-free mundane
egg (layer D in Figure 3, bottom). The waters gathered beneath it
constituted a primordial subterranean abyss, closed to the sky.76 This
arrangement expressed Burnet’s sensibility that mountainous disorder
should characterize an awful ruin; consequently, mountains necessar-
ily were utterly foreign to paradise.77 Such an aesthetic ran counter
to traditional hexameral discourse which envisioned the formation of
mountains and an open sea as a consequence of the gathering of the
waters on the third day. For example, both before and after Burnet,
biblical illustrations of the creation week, maps of the location of the
Garden of Eden and landscape depictions of Adam and Eve typically

74
Magruder 2003, 92; Magruder 2008.
75
For example, both interpretations of the firmament are found in Aquinas, who
suspended judgment between multiple possible interpretations on many occasions; cf.
Summa Theologiae 1a. 68, 3; Aquinas 1967, 10:85.
76
Although Burnet did occasionally refer to the starry heavens as the firmament, he
employed the traditional idiom loosely and only in contexts divorced from discussion
of Genesis 1. When discussing the interpretation of Genesis 1, Burnet exclusively used
firmament only to refer to the outer layer of Earth.
77
Nicolson 1959.

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depicted mountains as part of the primeval world.78 Despite a hand-

ful of antecedents, Burnet’s interpretation of the Earth as a mundane
egg was in fact a radical departure from the hexameral commentary
tradition and proved difficult to square with the hexameral idiom of
the firmament and the gathering of the waters.
The gathering of the waters and associated interpretations of the
firmament occupied much attention in Theories of the Earth both
before and after Burnet. For those steeped in the hexameral tradition
it was almost inconceivable that one could discuss the Deluge without
regard to the third day. Indeed, most hexameral commentators quite
economically employed a single mechanism for the gathering of the
waters and the Deluge. This diluvial symmetry consisted of either a
parallel repetition or a reversal of the same mechanism: either the
gathering of the waters was replayed a second time to account for how
the fl ood water drained off the face of the land, or the same natural
process operating in reverse provided a source of the fl ood water, or
both. A theoretical symmetry between the work of the third day and
the Deluge was manifest not only in the commentators, but also in
many Theories of the Earth which treated it, including the works of
Steno, Whiston, Woodward, and Hooke.79
Burnet’s dis-integration of the Creation and the Deluge represented
a conspicuous exception to the usual diluvial symmetry, and this left his
account decidedly less satisfying to readers accustomed to hexameral
idiom. Early in the first book, Burnet attempted to defend his atypical
emphasis upon the Deluge and paradise at the expense of the works
of the days:
And though we shall give a full account of the Origin of the Earth in
this Treatise, yet that which we have propos’d particularly for the Title
and Subject of it, is to give an account of the primaeval PARADISE,
and of the universal Deluge: Those being the two most important things
that are explain’d by the Theory we propose.80
Indeed, reversing the chronological order by discussing the Deluge
before treating paradise further downplayed the works of the six days.
In response to critics, Burnet admitted that the language of the cre-

78
For example, see the map of the Garden of Eden in the 1560 Geneva Bible.
79
Cf. Magruder 2000, 192–194. One interesting example of diluvial symmetry is
Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, 1:33–34 and 1:75, in which Augustine employed
the same mechanisms not only for the third day and the Deluge but also for 2 Peter.
80
Burnet 1684, 8 (bk. 1, ch. 2).

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ation week held no substantive content, as it was accommodated to

the capacities of the vulgar and never intended as a literal account:
“Certainly there can be nothing more like a Vulgar style, than to set
God to work by the day, and in Six-days to finish his task: as he is
there represented.”81 As a consequence, Burnet’s use of hexameral
idiom bore little relation to Genesis 1. In an interpretive twist that was
more radical than asserting an extended duration of the days, Burnet
set aside attempts to achieve a literal interpretation of the hexameral
account by adopting a purely figurative interpretation of Genesis 1,
assigning the Cartesian crustal collapse to the deluge instead of the
creation week.
Without attempting to summarize the complex and long-lived contro-
versy over Burnet,82 we may note the representative early responses of
Isaac Newton and Herbert Croft. They illustrate three objections com-
monly urged against Burnet: the implication that oceans did not exist
until after the deluge, given Burnet’s interpretation of the firmament;
Burnet’s apocalyptic interpretation of Peter with its radical discontinui-
ties between three different forms of the Earth; and the exclusivity of
Burnet’s claims that only his theories could explain Scripture, contrary
to a less restrictive use of biblical idiom consistent with a principle of
multiple interpretations.
Before its release, Burnet presented Newton with a copy of Telluris
Theoria Sacra (1681). Writing a long letter in reply, Newton expressed
some sympathy for Burnet’s explanation of the present world, yet he
balked at the Theory’s inconsistency with the account of the third day.
Newton urged Burnet to compromise the smoothness of his paradi-
siacal globe by allowing enough irregularities in surface topography
to accommodate shallow oceanic basins.83 Newton insisted that any
theory must accommodate the account of the third day: “in ye third
day for Moses to describe ye creation of seas when there was no such
thing done neither in reality nor appearance, me thinks is something
hard. . . .”84 Affirming that the Creation was complete at the end of the

81
Burnet 1690b, 45; cf. Burnet’s discussion of Genesis 1 (43–46).
82
See, for example, Kubrin 1968; Macklem 1958.
83
The letter is reprinted as Appendix 6 in Brewster 1855, 2:447–454; cf. 450: “a
sea might be made above ground in your own hypothesis before the fl ood, besides the
subterranean great deep, and thereby all difficulty of explaining rivers and the main
point in wch some may think you and Moses disagree might be avoyded.”
84
Brewster 1855, 451.

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six days, Newton took exception to Burnet’s implication that God must
have created whales and other ocean life only after the deluge.85
In a critical work published in 1685, the year following the first
English edition of Burnet’s Theory of the Earth, Herbert Croft, Bishop
of Hereford, railed that Burnet must be affl icted with lunacy, a “grave
and sober madness.”86 Unimpressed with Burnet’s deployment of Car-
tesian natural philosophy and altogether repudiating a prisca sapientia,
Croft was most alarmed by Burnet’s abandonment of Genesis 1: “I
had not meddled with this man’s Theory, unless he had given me great
offence to see the Sacred Scriptures so abused, as to be made props to
support such a rotten tottering building, as his Theory.”87 Turning first
to Burnet’s crucial exposition of 2 Peter, Croft denied that the epistle
taught a major discontinuity between the antediluvian Earth and the
present one. Rather, Croft insisted, “here is nothing mentioning any
such diversity or opposition in the former Earth to the present Earth,
no more than in the former Heavens to the present Heavens.”88 Accord-
ing to Croft, Peter asserted a difference only for the form of judgment
they received: one by water, the other by fire. Indeed, he argued that
Peter glossed Genesis 1 and, taken literally, contradicted Burnet because
according to the epistle the antediluvian globe “stood part out of the
water, and part in the water,” as the Authorized Version stated, rather
than merely “consisting of ” water as Burnet had emended it.89 However,
the purpose of Peter was not to teach natural philosophy, and when
referring to “earth” he probably intended no more than the world of
the ungodly.90 Burnet remained free to try to establish his Petrine theory,
but he should not regard biblical texts as confirming it. Rather, reaf-
firming the relevance of the hexameral account, Croft emphasized that
there was simply no way to reconcile the gathering of the waters on the

85
Newton explained (Brewster 1855, 451): “if before ye fl ood there was no water
but that of rivers, that is, none but fresh water above ground, there could be no fish
but such as live in fresh water, and so one half of ye fift [sic] day’s work will be a non
entity, and God must be put upon a creation after ye fl ood to replenish one half of this
terraqueous globe wth whales, and all those other kinds of sea fish we now have.”
86
Croft 1685.
87
Croft 1685, 1.
88
Croft 1685, 31. Croft devoted his first forty-two pages to dispatching Burnet’s
“principal Text.”
89
Croft 1685, 33–34.
90
Croft 1685, 7, 22. Burnet pleaded for a literal interpretation of 2 Peter, but even
the literal interpretation of “earth” in that passage was ambiguous. Croft’s interpretation
was also literal, and there were others who interpreted “earth” in a figurative sense as
the Church, e.g., Fox 1722, 2: 993.

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 thomas burnet and theories of the earth 483

third day with Burnet’s description of the smooth paradisiacal globe:

“Is not this a rare Romantick way?”91 Like Newton, Croft wondered
where on his paradisiacal world Burnet would have put the whales.92
For many readers, Burnet’s rehabilitation of the universal deluge was
not worth the price of scotching the first chapter of Genesis. In this
respect Croft was typical of readers who could not square Burnet’s
paradisiacal world with the textual account of the third day.
The alarm over Burnet’s break with Moses expressed by readers
like Bishop Croft was only exacerbated with publication of Burnet’s
Archaeologiae Philosophicae in 1692, the year Burnet became chaplain to
William III.93 In this work Burnet sought to defend the prisca sapien-
tia against the critics of the Theory of the Earth, but even for him the
debate was no longer framed in terms of the paradisiacal world and
the Deluge, but centered upon the first chapter of Genesis. Burnet not
only conceded that his Theory contradicted the hexameral account, but
openly abandoned any attempt at a literal interpretation by arguing
that Moses wrote fables because of the vulgar capacities of the Jews.
From this time Burnet was branded an unbeliever by many. Croft had
already suspected that Burnet had “very ill Principles, contrary to the
Religion we profess . . . cloaked . . . under his Theory,”94 but Burnet’s
notorious association with irreligion was just beginning. Because of the
controversy over Archaeologiae Philosophicae, Burnet was forced to resign
his position as chaplain to the king.
With opportune timing, Charles Blount’s deistic manifesto Oracles
of Reason (1695) appropriated two chapters of Burnet’s Archaeologiae
Philosophicae, translating them into English for greater distribution.95
Despite lengthy arguments against atheism in the Theory of the Earth,
despite the affirmation of a global deluge, despite the Christology of the
frontispiece and the prominent emphasis upon miracle in the preserva-
tion of Noah’s Ark, and despite the illumination of Scripture and the
vindication of prisca sapientia achieved through Cambridge Platonism,
Burnet was never thereafter able to dissociate himself from deism. One
of the chapters translated by Blount consisted of Burnet’s argument

91
Croft 1685, 114.
92
Croft 1685, 153.
93
Burnet 1692. A partial translation into English, consisting of bk. 2, chs. 7–10,
appeared the same year; complete English translations appeared after his death in
1729 and 1736.
94
Croft 1685, Preface.
95
Blount 1695.

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that “the Original of Things inanimate, and the Universe, as Moses

describes it in the First Chapter of Genesis, seems no less contrary to
the Theory of the Earth.”96 That is, Blount trumpeted the fact that
Burnet’s Theory refuted Genesis 1, coopting Burnet’s eloquence and
erudition to undermine all biblical authority. This is not the place to
examine the significance of deist controversies for Theories of the Earth
after Burnet, as a Cambridge Platonist who sought to defend the faith
by interweaving the testimony of the Bible with the prisca sapientia and
the workings of natural providence was overtaken by a controversy
in which his writings were used to attack Christianity. In the ensuing
debate, given the choice between Moses and deism, subsequent Theo-
rists of the Earth did not hesitate to repudiate Burnet, as a surrogate
for deism, by prominently deploying hexameral idiom to proclaim their
allegiance to Moses.

Conclusion

Burnet’s Theory of the Earth consisted of almost equal parts Cartesian

cosmology, apocalyptic theology, and classical learning in the service
of the prisca sapientia, integrated in a matrix of Cambridge Platonism.
In light of contemporaneous scholarly debates and Burnet’s efforts
to enlist a natural philosophy of the Earth in defense of Cambridge
Platonism, it is no wonder that Burnet’s Theory of the Earth bears little
resemblance to a work of geology other than the fact that it deals with
the Earth as its subject matter. Contrary to the expectations of later
readers, Burnet’s Theory would not even count as proto-geology—unlike
the investigations of Hooke or Steno, there is no mention of fossils,
no hint of stratigraphy, and no use of fieldwork undertaken by either
himself or others. In contrast, the work is learned and literary; destined
to be regarded by its detractors as a captivating ‘romance’ rather than
sober natural knowledge. Yet Burnet regarded it as a serious scientific
updating of outmoded Aristotelian views with the latest mechanical
cosmology, confirmed by the independent lines of evidence offered by
ancient sacred and secular texts. Despite its apparent dissimilarity to
the historical geology that emerged as a discipline in the nineteenth
century, Burnet’s Theory of the Earth played a pivotal role in discussions

96
Blount 1695, 52.

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of Earth history for half a century. Its immense importance to the his-
tory of geology lay not in any specific discoveries it reported but in the
new discourse it established for debating the history of Earth, and in its
embodiment of a directionalist historical sensibility couched in biblical
idiom. In establishing Theories of the Earth as a contested print tradi-
tion, Burnet precipitated a lively public discourse about which kinds of
evidence would turn out to be most relevant or most productive. In that
interdisciplinary debate various writers would appeal to a wide variety
of technical and empirical sources of evidence, and Burnet himself
seemed paramount in his use of evidence from ancient texts.
The abundance of idiom from ancient sacred and secular texts in
Burnet’s Theory of the Earth is a striking linguistic feature for a work of
natural philosophy in which reason provided the chief guide rather
than Scripture, and it refl ects how Burnet developed his arguments
in natural philosophy by means of an integrated reading of the three
books of nature, Scripture, and antiquity. New natural philosophical
theories such as his idea of the paradisiacal Earth were explored and
developed by means of idiom such as the mundane egg which, compel-
lingly presented, created a linguistic commons in which rival theories
could be engaged and comparatively assessed.
In addition to the way idiom provided a cognitive resource for the
development and presentation of theories, this paper has touched upon
how biblical and classical idiom, such as the mundane egg or the fir-
mament and the gathering of the waters, could facilitate intellectual
commerce, the exchange of ideas, across disciplinary contexts. Textual
idiom in Theories of the Earth accommodated the use of diverse
kinds of evidence from a variety of technical fields and philosophical
perspectives, including but not limited to Burnet’s Cartesian natural
philosophy, Cambridge Platonism and apocalyptic theology. While
hexameral idiom predominated in the tradition overall, the case of
Burnet shows that apocalyptic and non-biblical classical idiom were
also significant. The development of a textual tradition featuring a
shared classical and biblical idiom supported a common discourse and
debate despite the diversity of philosophical, cosmological, theological,
and technical orientations and the often heated polemics conducted
within that tradition. Burnet’s literal interpretation of 2 Peter clashed
with multiple contemporaneous literal interpretations of Genesis 1; this
tension shows that the use of Scripture in interpreting nature was not
simply a matter of deciding whether to interpret the Bible literally, but
a question of how to determine which passages to interpret literally

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and which to accommodate to literal interpretations of other passages.

These decisions were made in light of extra-biblical evidence, including
evidence from ancient texts. As the multiplicity of interpretations of
Scripture and the versatility of idiom suggests, no one could predict
in advance what understandings might emerge from a hermeneutical
conversation permeated with the ancient texts.97
With publication of Burnet’s Theory of the Earth and the controversy
that ensued, shared idiomatic resources were applied by successive
generations of readers to new questions and new lines of evidence, and
a contested public tradition became designated as “The Theory of the
Earth,” constituted in part by means of a common idiom expressing
disparate interpretations.98 Not all Theories of the Earth employed
ancient idiom, of course; there remained other strategies for joining
the common discourse, including the adoption of shared conventions
for visual representations, but the prominent deployment of biblical
and classical idiom, with or without the aims of physico-theology and
with or without an accompanying acceptance of prisca sapientia, was an
important and adaptable strategy. The idiom was pervasive and versatile,
and could be adopted to varying degrees, from Burnet’s detailed con-
cordism in the mundane egg to the whiff of hexameral idiom suggested
by the six epochs of Buffon’s cosmogony a generation later.

Acknowledgements

For helpful comments on this paper I thank Ken Taylor, Michael

Barfield, Jitse van der Meer, Rick Peters, and David Oldroyd. All
images courtesy the History of Science Collections of the University
of Oklahoma Libraries.

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In Steno: Geological Papers, Trans. Alex J. Pollock, Ed. Gustav Sherz. Odense: Odense
University Press, 134–235.
Stillingfl eet, Edward. 1662. Origines Sacræ, Or, a Rational Account of the Grounds of Christian
Faith, as to the Truth and Divine Authority of the Scriptures and the Matters Therein Contained.
London: Pr. R.W. for Henry Mortlock.

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490 kerry v. magruder

Taylor, Kenneth L. 2001. The Beginnings of a Geological Naturalist: Desmarest, the

Printed Word, and Nature. Earth Sciences History 20: 44–61.
Terrall, Mary. 2006. The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the
Enlightenment. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1968. The Hydrological Cycle and the Wisdom of God: A Theme in Geoteleology.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Van Groningen, B.A. 1963. Short Manual of Greek Palaeography. 3d ed. Leyden: A.W.
Sythoff.
Vermij, Rienk. 1998. The Flood and the Scientific Revolution: Thomas Burnet’s System
of Natural Providence. In Interpretations of the Flood, Ed. Florentino García Martinez
and Gerard P. Luttikhuizen. Leiden/Boston/Köln: Brill, 150–166.
Vitaliano, Dorothy B. 1973. Legends of the Earth: Their Geologic Origins. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Walker, Daniel P. 1972. The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism From the Fifteenth
to the Eighteenth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Whiston, William. 1696. A New Theory of the Earth, From Its Original, to the Consummation
of All Things. Wherein the Creation of the World in Six Days, the Universal Deluge, and the
General Conflagration, as Laid Down in the Holy Scriptures, Are Shewn to be Perfectly Agreeable
to Reason and Philosophy. With a Large Introductory Discourse Concerning the Genuine Nature,
Stile, and Extent of the Mosaick History of the Creation. London: Printed R. Roberts, for
Benj. Tooke.
——. 1706. An Essay on the Revelation of St. John So Far as Concerns the Past and Present
Times. London: Cambridge: printed at the University-Press; for B. Tooke.
Whitehurst, John. 1778. An Inquiry Into the Original State and Formation of the Earth: Deduced
From Facts and the Laws of Nature. London: Printed for the author, by J. Cooper.
Young, Davis A. 1995. The Biblical Flood: A Case Study of the Church’s Response to Extrabibli-
cal Evidence. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

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 CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“NOT IN THE LANGUAGE OF ASTRONOMERS”:

ISAAC NEWTON, THE SCRIPTURES, AND THE
HERMENEUTICS OF ACCOMMODATION

Stephen D. Snobelen

The Lord reigneth, he is clothed with majesty; the

Lord is clothed with strength, wherewith he hath
girded himself: the world also is stablished, that it
cannot be moved.
Psalm 93:1 (KJV)
. . .the Scriptures [speak] not in the language of
Astronomers . . . but in that of ye common people to
whom they were written.
Isaac Newton

The Bible in the PRINCIPIA

The first edition of Isaac Newton’s Principia mathematica contains only

the briefest of allusions to things theological.1 A careful reader of the
Latin text published in 1687 would have encountered a solitary men-
tion of the Bible as well as a single reference to God as Creator, but
no other language of an overtly theological nature.2 The reference

1
For permission to quote from manuscripts in their archives, I gratefully acknowledge
the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library; the Jewish National and University
Library, Jerusalem; and the Provost and Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge. In
quotations from Newton’s manuscripts, Newton’s deletions are represented with strike
throughs, his insertions are placed within angle brackets and editorial additions are
placed within square brackets. An ever-increasing number of Newton’s theological
manuscripts, including many of those cited in this paper, can be found on the website
of the Newton Project. I am grateful for the useful advice of the two referees and the
two editors of this volume.
2
Newton scholars are indebted to I. Bernard Cohen for his valuable and ground-
breaking 1969 study of the continuing presence of theology in the three editions of
the Principia published during Newton’s lifetime. This study, which serves as one of
the starting points for my paper, demonstrates not only that theology was present in the
Principia even before the addition of the famous General Scholium in the second
edition of 1713, but also that some of the unpublished manuscript drafts of the first

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to God as Creator occurs in Corollary 4 to Proposition 8 in Book 3.

In a discussion about the relative densities of the planets in the solar
system, Newton concludes: “Therefore God placed the planets at dif-
ferent distances from the sun so that each one might, according to the
degree of its density, enjoy a greater or smaller amount of heat from the
sun.”3 This expression of natural theology, although cursory in nature,
is a refl ection of Newton’s deep commitments to the design argument
and his belief that the majestic structure of the solar system could
only have been the product of an intelligent agent. Newton’s mention
of the Bible comes much earlier in the Principia. After the Definitions
placed at the beginning of the work, Newton included a Scholium that
contains a discussion of the importance of the distinction between the
absolute and the relative in physical phenomena. The Scholium on the
Definitions begins with a statement asserting the need to distinguish
“time, space, place, and motion . . . into absolute and relative, true and
apparent, mathematical and common.”4 He then goes on to discuss
these distinctions in greater detail.5
Newton’s distinctions between absolute and relative time, space, place
and motion are much celebrated in the history of science. Others before
him, including, most famously, Galileo, had set out similar distinctions.
Much less well examined is a paragraph that comes near the end of
the Scholium in which Newton avers that the distinction between the
absolute and the relative has a wider application than physics:
Relative quantities, therefore, are not the actual quantities whose names
they bear but are those sensible measures of them (whether true or erro-
neous) that are commonly used instead of the quantities being measured.
But if the meanings of words are to be defined by usage, then it is these
sensible measures which should properly be understood by the terms
“time,” “space,” “place,” and “motion,” and the manner of expression
will be out of the ordinary and purely mathematical if the quantities being
measured are understood here. Accordingly those who there interpret
these words as referring to the quantities being measured do violence to

edition of the Principia reveal that Newton was often thinking about the theological
corollaries of his mathematical physics even when he did not in the end explicitly
articulate them in his published work. See Cohen 1969.
3
Newton 1999, 814, n. cc.
4
Newton 1999, 408.
5
Newton 1999, 408–13.

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the Scriptures. And they no less corrupt mathematics and philosophy who
confuse true quantities with their relations and common measures.6
In addition to asserting that a distinction between the absolute and the
relative must be maintained in the interpretation of the Scriptures as
well as physics, this paragraph also implies that a failure to recognize this
distinction in biblical hermeneutics will lead to corrupt interpretations.
What is more, the placement of a sentence on biblical hermeneutics in
a paragraph that otherwise discusses mathematics and physics implies
that Newton saw some sort of relationship between natural philosophy
and the interpretation of the Bible.
When he revised the Principia for the second edition, Newton removed
the word God (Deus) from the discussion of the densities of planets in
Book 3 and replaced the active verb attached to the word Deus (colloca-
vit) with the passive construction “were to be placed” (collocandi erant).7
Newton’s assertion of the need to distinguish between the absolute and
the relative in the interpretation of the Scriptures, on the other hand, is
a consistent feature of all three editions of the Principia. One of the aims
of this chapter is to suggest why Newton thought it important to include
a statement on the interpretation of the Scriptures in his Principia, a work
viewed by most as being exclusively devoted to mathematical physics. In
order to recover Newton’s rationale for doing so, several dynamics of his
thought must be reconstructed. This chapter begins with an outline of
some general principles of scriptural hermeneutics found in Newton’s
writings. After this, I discuss Newton’s strategies for interpreting both
the Genesis Creation and other scriptural texts that speak about the
natural and physical worlds. Particular attention is given to Newton’s
deployment of the hermeneutics of accommodation in his interpreta-
tion of scriptural passages describing astronomical phenomena and his
reconciliation of the Bible with the new knowledge coming from natural
philosophy. I also show how Newton’s use of accommodation relates

6
Newton 1999, 413–14. As Cohen expertly demonstrated in 1969, the 1930 Florian
Cajori revision of Andrew Motte’s 1729 English translation of Newton’s Principia
obscured this clear reference to the Bible (see Cohen 1969). As the above quotation
shows, the recent Cohen-Whitman translation restores this reference to the Bible to
the Principia.
7
For more detail, see Cohen 1969, 529–30. Newton more than compensated
for the removal of the word ‘God’ from this passage with the 1450-word General
Scholium added to the second edition of 1713. Accounts of the natural theology and
theology proper of the General Scholium can be found in Force 1990; Stewart 1996;
and Snobelen 2001.

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to views he held privately about a fundamental distinction between the

abilities of the wise on the one hand and the common people on the
other. Finally, this essay demonstrates that accommodation forms an
essential part of some broader dynamics in Newton’s thought that in
turn help reveal tight methodological and conceptual links between his
investigation of nature and his study of the Bible, together comprising
the two books written by God himself.8

Newton on the Interpretation of the Scriptures

By the time Isaac Newton began to study and write on astronomy

shortly after his arrival at Cambridge in 1661, large quantities of ink
had been spilled on the reconciliation of the new astronomy with the
Scriptures, including much advocacy for the hermeneutics of accom-
modation, a mode of biblical exegesis based on the view that the Word
of God is accommodated to human levels of understanding.9 As for
heliocentrism, it was then well on its way to securing its position as
the dominant model of the solar system. Nicolaus Copernicus’s De
revolutionibus had been published one hundred years before Newton’s
birth. By the time Newton died in 1727, heliocentrism was dominant
in astronomy—at least in Protestant lands.10 Beginning with Johannes
Kepler, many had moved beyond Copernicanism, including Newton
himself. Against the backdrop of these changed circumstances, there was
less need for Newton to exert himself in the production of apologetic
discourses supporting the heliocentric model. Moreover, there were no
overt legal or ecclesiastical pressures to hold back his natural philoso-
phy or his rhetoric in defence of it; unlike Galileo, Newton lived well
beyond the reach of Rome and the Inquisition.11 But, as we will see,

8
While there is no prior study dedicated to Newton’s use of accommodationist
hermeneutics, shorter discussions are available in Mandelbrote 1994; Dobbs 1991,
57–66 (a section on the hexaemeral tradition); and Brooks 1976, 116–20.
9
See Snobelen 2008, as well as Barker 2008, England 2008a, 2008b, Finocchiaro
2008, Granada 2008, Harrison 2008, Howell 2008a, 2008b, Remmert 2008, van der
Meer & Oosterhoff 2008.
10
With respect to Catholicism, Copernicus’s De revolutionibus and Galileo’s Dialogue
were not removed from the Index of Prohibited Books until 1835, although Catholic
astronomers had been writing in defence of heliocentrism and the motion of Earth
for some time before this.
11
In his notes for a projected biography of Newton, John Conduitt wrote: “Sr I had
the happiness of being born in a land of liberty <& in an age> where he {might} speak
his mind—not afraid of {the} Inquisition as Galileo was for {saying} the sun stood

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Newton was certainly aware of the rhetorical battles over Copernican-

ism and the reconciliation of heliocentrism with the Scriptures that
had occurred in the decades immediately preceding the time of his
birth. And, even during his own adult life, there were some—including
fellow Englishmen—who still tenaciously adhered to Ptolemaism and
contended that heliocentrism fl atly contradicted the Word of God.12
Moreover, the powerful psychological effect of phenomenalistic geo-
centrism and geostasis remained for Newton, as it does for us. Thus,
it remained necessary for him, as a believer committed to the verac-
ity of the biblical text, to demonstrate how the apparently geocentric
and heliokinetic language found in this one source of truth could be
compatible with the findings of natural philosophy, another source of
truth. These factors help explain why what little Newton wrote about
the reconciliation of natural philosophy with the Bible sometimes
manifests an apologetic edge. But if these reasons seem insufficient on
their own to explain the apologetic tone of some of these writings, it
is probably because they are. As is often the case with Newton, there
is much more below the surface.
Like many natural philosophers of his age, Newton was committed
to the doctrine of the two books—at least in general terms. A natu-
ral outworking of this belief that the Creator had written the book
of nature as well as the book of Scripture was a twin respect for the
authority of natural philosophy and the authority of the Bible (that is,
nature properly interpreted and Scripture properly interpreted). Since
both books ultimately derived from God, one would expect to find
concord between them. Near the beginning of a long treatise on the
Book of Revelation that he apparently started to compose sometime

still & the earth {moved} his works not in danger of being expunged as DesCartes’s
was nor he obliged to go into another country as Descartes was into Holland to vent
his opinions” (Iliffe and Higgitt 2006, 1: 192).
12
One late example is found in Edwards 1697, 23. In this work the fiery Calvinist
theologian attacks the Newtonian William Whiston’s attempt to explain Creation using
Newtonian mechanisms. Roughly two decades later, Whiston and the instrument-maker
Francis Hauksbee, Jr. began advertising in London for a course on astronomy, the sur-
viving syllabus of which shows that the first two lectures were intended to demonstrate
“the Falsity” of the Ptolemaic and Tychonic systems and establish “[t]he Truth and
Certainty of the Copernican system” (Whiston and Hauksbee ca. 1718–1722). More
than three decades after Newton’s death, the Russian astronomer Mikhail Lomonosov,
an adherent of the Orthodox faith, felt it necessary to publish an addendum to his
1761 work on the transit of Venus in which he argues that Copernicanism does not
contradict the Bible when the latter is properly interpreted. See the English translation
by Colin Chant in Oster 2002, 236–40.

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in the mid-1670s, Newton set out a series of rules for prophetic inter-
pretation. His ninth rule is “To prefer <choose> those interpretations
<constructions> wch without straining reduce things to the greatest
simplicity.” He goes on to elaborate:
Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, & not in ye multiplicity & confusion
of things. As ye world, wch to ye naked eye exhibits the greatest variety of
objects, appears very simple in its internall constitution when surveyed
by a philosophic understanding, & so much ye simpler by how much the
better it is understood, so it is in these visions. It is ye perfection of all
God’s works that they are all done wth ye greatest simplicity. He is ye God
of order & not confusion. And therefore as they that would understand ye
frame of ye world must indeavour to reduce their knowledg to all possible
simplicity, so it must be in seeking to understand these visions.13
Since God employed rules of simplicity in his writing of both books, so
both the student of nature and the investigator of the Scriptures must
follow the same rule: reduction to simplicity. Harmony exists between
the two books.
While simplicity may be at the core of biblical texts, Newton’s unpub-
lished writings suggest that he believed that only the spiritually astute
are able to arrive at this simple yet profound message. Remaining with
his treatise on the Apocalypse from the 1670s, Newton’s second rule of
prophetic interpretation is “To assigne but one meaning to one place
of scripture . . . unless,” he adds,
it be perhaps by way of conjecture, or where the literal sense is designed
to hide ye more noble mystical sense as a shell ye kernel untill such time
from being tasted either by unworthy persons, or untill such time as God
shall think fit.14
Newton goes on to elaborate on this rule, arguing that
[i]n this case there may be for a blind, a true literal sense, even such as
in its way may be beneficial to ye church. But when we have the principal
meaning: If it be mystical we can insist on a true literal sense no farther
then by history or arguments drawn from circumstances it appea[r]s to
be true.15
A prophetic text certainly may have both a literal and a mystical
meaning, but this must be established with more convincing reasons

13
Newton, Yahuda MS 1.1a, f. 14r.
14
Newton, Yahuda MS 1.1a, ff. 12r–v.
15
Newton, Yahuda MS 1.1a, f. 12v.

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than “bare analogy.”16 Newton also cautions against double mystical

meanings, although he does allow that they exist in the prophetic
Scriptures. Too much freedom in multiplying the meanings of the
Scriptures, Newton warns, “savours of a luxuriant ungovernable fansy
and borders on enthusiasm.”17
For Newton the mystical meaning of some biblical passages is part
of a divinely-directed challenge meant to separate humanity into wheat
and chaff. Writing about the mystical meaning of biblical prophecy
near the beginning of his early treatise on Revelation, he alludes to
the Scriptures in a comparison of the purpose of Christ’s parables to
that of prophecy:
Consider how our Saviour taught the Jews in Parables that in hearing
they <migh[t]> hear and not understand & in seeing they might see and
not perceive. And as these Parables were spoken to try the Jews so the
mysticall scriptures were written to try us.18
Several folios later in the same manuscript, Newton returns to this
theme, contending that the aim of biblical prophecy is not “to convert
the whole world to ye truth”, but rather
. . . the designe of them is to try men & convert the best, so yt the church
may be purer & less mixed wth Hypocrites & luke-warm persons. And
for this end it is that they are wrapt up in obscurity, & so framed by the
wisdom of God that ye inconsiderate, ye proud, ye self-conceited, <ye
presumptuous>, ye sciolist, ye sceptic . . . whose hearts are thus hardned
in seeing should see & not perceive & in hearing should heare & not
understand. For God has declared his intention in these prophesies to
be as well that none of ye wicked should understand, as yt ye wise should
understand, Dan: 12.19
Using the divine authority of a passage from Daniel 12, Newton avers
that there is a moral dimension to the interpretation of prophecy: the
wicked will not be able to understand what God has written for the
best.

16
Newton, Yahuda MS 1.1a, f. 12v.
17
Newton, Yahuda MS 1.1a, f. 12v.
18
Newton, Yahuda MS 1.1a, f. 2v. Newton is paraphrasing Mark 4:11–12, in which
Christ alludes to the words of Isa. 6:9–10 (cf. Matt. 13:13–15 and Luke 8:10). In Acts
28:25–27, the Apostle Paul quotes the passage from Isaiah in his address to the Jewish
leaders of Rome.
19
Newton, Yahuda MS 1.1a, ff. 17r, 18r.

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Although the fire of this youthful enthusiasm perhaps waned some-

what in Newton’s advancing years, he continued to maintain similar
distinctions throughout his life. Four interrelated categories of distinction
will be considered here. First, Newton distinguished between scriptural
and theological truths that were accessible to those immature in the faith
and those that could only be understood by the spiritually mature. In
his “Irenicum,” which was written in the early eighteenth century, he
contrasts the simple truths (“milk for babes”) required for communion
with the more involved truths (“strong meats”) meant for those of
advanced understanding, namely, “all that was to be learnt afterwards
by <men of riper years in> studying the scriptures or otherwise.”20 Not
surprisingly, Newton saw himself in this latter category.
Second, Newton argued that it was difficult to represent certain
absolute truths in speech without recourse to figurative language.
Evidence for this can be found in drafts for the “Avertissement au
Lecteur” meant for the French edition of the correspondence between
Gottfried Leibniz and Samuel Clarke published by Pierre Des Maizeaux
in 1720. These drafts treat the profound themes of God’s omnipres-
ence and eternal duration, themes discussed both in Newton’s General
Scholium and in the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence itself. In Draft B
of his “Avertissement au Lecteur” Newton declares: “When we speak
of things wch come not within the reach of our senses, it’s difficult to
speak without Tropes & Figures & danger of being misunderstood.”21
Draft D demonstrates that Newton believed this to be true of the Bible
as well. Newton writes that
<as the scriptures> generally spake of God by allusions & figures for want
of proper language: so I have used the words Quality in these Letters
[i.e., the correspondence between Leibniz and Clarke] the words Quality
and Property are <were> used only by a figure to signify the boundless
extent of Gods existence with respect to duration his presence <ubiquity>
& duration eternity.22

20
Newton, Keynes MS 3, pp. 2–3 (quotations from p. 3; see also pp. 11, 32, 39, 41,
43–44, 46, 51). There were many precedents for this distinction between fundamenta
(fundamentals) and adiaphora (indifferent things) in the thought of early modern Chris-
tian irenicists, including Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam. Newton here is basing this
argument on the scriptural precedent of Heb. 5:11–6:3.
21
Newton, “Advertissement au Lecteur,” Draft B (private collection), cited in Koyré
and Cohen 1962, 97. In this and the following quotation, I have adjusted the transcrip-
tion style of Koyré and Cohen to conform with that used elsewhere in this paper.
22
Newton, “Advertissement au Lecteur,” Draft D (Cambridge University Library
[hereinafter CUL], MS. Add. 3965, f. 289), cited in Koyré and Cohen 1962, 99. The
clarification within square brackets is my own.

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Interestingly, Newton’s words here suggest that he believed Clarke

(and by implication, himself) wrote in conformity to the style of the
prophets.
Confirmation that Newton believed this of descriptions of nature is
found in his Classical Scholia, a series of scholia likely dating from the
early 1690s that he drafted as possible additions to a projected second
edition of the Principia. This collection of texts argues, inter alia, that the
ancients had grasped some of the essentials of astronomy and celestial
mechanics, including heliocentrism and the Inverse-Square Law. Some
of these ancient philosophers concealed these higher truths in figures.
Thus Newton contended that the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras was
aware that the Moon, like Earth, was heavy, and
[t]hrough the fiction of the lion falling from the earth’s moon and the
stone falling from the sun he taught the gravity of the bodies of the sun
and the earth’s moon; through the figment of ascending stones he taught
the force opposite to gravity, that of rotation.
But he is also quick to clarify this meaning: “This is not meant to be
taken literally. The mystic philosophers usually hid their tenets behind
such figments and mystical language.”23 The Inverse-Square Law was
similarly hidden in the figure of the seven-string lyre. He writes:
[t]hrough this symbol they indicated that the sun acts on the planets with
its force in the same harmonic ratio to the different distances as that of
the tensile force to strings of different length, i.e., in a duplicate inverse
ratio to the distances.24
In a draft of Query 23 of the Latin Optice (which eventually became
Query 31 of the Opticks), Newton speculated that God was the ultimate
cause of gravity. The ancient philosophers who believed in the existence
of atoms and a vacuum
attributed gravity to Atoms without telling us the means unless perhaps in
figures: as by calling God Harmony & representing him & matter by the
God Pan & his Pipe, or by calling the Sun the prison of Jupiter because
he keeps the Planets in their orbs.

23
Newton, Classical Scholia, in Schüller 2001, 221. For accounts of Newton’s Clas-
sical Scholia, see McGuire and Rattansi 1966 and Casini 1984.
24
Newton, in Schüller 2001, 235.

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To this he added: “Whence it seems to have been an ancient opinion

that matter depends upon a Deity for its laws of motion as well as for
its existence.”25
Third, Newton argued for the need to make a distinction between
absolute and relative senses in scriptural language. This was already
hinted at in 1687 when in the Scholium on the Definitions he asserts
that mistaking “sensible measures” for “actual quantities” can in turn
“do violence to the Scriptures,” by which he means the original sense
and intent of God’s Word. In the General Scholium he added to
the second edition of the Principia in 1713, Newton offered a specific
example of the importance of making this kind of distinction within
the text of the Bible itself:
For “god” is a relative word and has reference to servants, and godhood
is the lordship of God, not over his own body as is supposed by those
for whom God is the world soul, but over servants. The supreme God is
an eternal, infinite, and absolutely perfect being; but a being, however
perfect, without dominion is not the Lord God. For we do say my God,
your God, the God of Israel, the God of Gods, and Lord of Lords,
but we do not say, my eternal one, your eternal one, the eternal one of
Israel, the eternal one of the gods; we do not say my infinite one, or
my perfect one. These designations [i.e., eternal, infinite, perfect] do not
have reference to servants.26
In speaking about the meaning of the term ‘God,’ Newton is referring
both to common usage and scriptural usage (the above passage includes
several biblical titles of God). To secure his point, Newton introduces an
expression for God that is arguably absolute (“the Eternal”) and shows
that it neither needs qualifications nor operates naturally with them. The
term ‘God,’ on the other hand, is regularly given specificity through
the addition of adjectives and other qualifiers. Newton is certain that
there are absolute realities behind this relative language, for he goes on
to stress that God is in fact “eternal” and “infinite.”27 But since God as
presented in the Bible is God in relation to something (e.g., his people,
his Creation), the meaning of the term ‘God’ itself is not inherently
absolute and thus must be determined by context. Further evidence
of the relative nature of the word ‘God’ is seen in its application in
the Bible to individuals other than the one true God. Thus, Moses is

25
Newton CUL MS. Add. 3970 (B), f. 619r.
26
Newton 1999, 940–1. Clarification within square brackets added by the translators.
27
Newton 1999, 941.

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called ‘God’ in the Scriptures (Ex. 4:16, 7:1), as Newton points out in
a footnote he added to the third (1726) edition.28 Certainly Moses is
not meant to be ‘God’ in an absolute or essential sense and it would
thus be a gross error to mistake the meaning of ‘God’ in these cases
as referring to the Almighty. To clarify his argument, at the point in
the text where he added his footnote on God, Newton suggests that
the word ‘God’ is like the word ‘lord,’ albeit stressing that “every lord
is not a god.”29 As is more immediately obvious with ‘lord,’ this term
is relative and its precise meaning does not emerge from a fixed, native
and universal meaning in the word itself, but must be determined
by context and qualifications in the form of adjectives and the like.
Because this word is fl exible in this way, one can have both a human
lord (something Newton’s argument seems to imply) and a supreme
Lord (that is, the Almighty).30 The term ‘God’ operates in a similar
way. All this demonstrates that Newton believed that the recognition
of a distinction between absolute and relative meanings of words is of
pivotal importance to biblical hermeneutics.31
The fourth category of distinction is accommodation. Like other
exegetes and natural philosophers from his era and before, Newton
believed that the Bible sometimes accommodates its language to the
sensibilities of the vulgar. One example of this comes in his interpre-
tation of the accounts of demon possession in the synoptic Gospels.
The demons that Christ cast out were not in reality evil spirit beings,
but rather “distempers of ye mind,” or, as we would say today, mental
illnesses:
From this figure of putting serpents for spirits & spirits or Dæmons for
distempers of ye mind, came ye vulgar opinion of ye Jews & other east-
ern nations that mad men & lunaticks were possessed with evil spirits or
Dæmons. Whence Christ seems to have used this language not only as
a Prophet but also in compliance wth ye Jews way of speaking: so yt when
he is said to cast out Devils it cannot be known by this phra those Devils
may be nothing but diseases unles it can be proved by the circumstances
that they are sp substantial spirits. For the cure of a Lunatique is called
language of . . . casting out a spirit is used for ye cure of a Lunatique Matt
17. 15, 18, 19.32

28
Newton 1999, 941 n. g.
29
Newton 1999, 941.
30
Newton 1999, 941.
31
For more detail on Newton’s argument about ‘God’ as a relative term, see
Snobelen 2001.
32
Newton, Yahuda MS 9.1, f. 21v.

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The use of the term ‘demon’ in these texts does not assert the abso-
lute reality of the demons popularly believed to exist by many Jews
in the time of Christ; instead Christ is merely adjusting his speech to
the language of contemporary vulgar demonology. In other words,
Christ accommodated his speech and actions to conform to folk belief.
As a prophet, Christ was well able to distinguish between this relative
language and the absolute reality (namely, that demons have no onto-
logical existence); it is just that in this case doing so did not serve the
purpose immediately at hand.33 One folio earlier in the same manuscript,
Newton applies this same argument to the symbols of the dragon and
serpent in the Apocalypse:
A Dragon or serpent, if called ye old serpent or ye Devil signifies the
spirit of error delusion & inordinate affections reigning in the world.
ffor spirits good or evil are sometimes put for the tempers dispositions &
persuasions of mens minds <much after ye manner that we often take
death for a substance>.34
Here Newton identifies the propensity in human language to hypostatize,
personify and substantify abstractions. The dragon of the Apocalypse
is a disposition, not a living being. Death is a condition, not something
substantial. To use such language is well and good; after all, no less
an authoritative text than the Bible does. What is wrong is to read
this language mistakenly in an overly literal or absolutist manner. The
language points to personification (the figurative) not real personalities
(the literal). The astute reader and believer will recognize these crucial
distinctions.
Immediately before penning the above-cited passage about demons,
Newton argued against the view that the serpent that deceived Eve in
the Garden of Eden was merely a symbol for a real, personal devil; if
this were true, it would involve the punishing of “one thing for anothers
fault, & <to> make ye signe suffer in a litteral sense for the crime of
the thing signified: wch is absurd & unagreeable to the nature & Designe
of Parables.” Instead, when the ancient sages wanted to represent one
thing by another thing, “they framed a Metamorphosis of the one
into the other.” When Moses wrote the Genesis Creation account he
adopted this mode of discourse. He concludes: “This was their way of

33
For more on Newton’s demonology and diabology, see Snobelen 2004.
34
Newton, Yahuda MS 9.1, ff. 19v–20v.

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making Parables, & Moses in this Parable of the Serpent speaks in the
language of ye ancient sages wise men, being skilled in all the learn-
ing of the Egyptians.”35 Thus, the biblical prophets, and preeminently
Moses whom Newton believed had training in philosophy, wrote some
of their texts in such a way that a literal, relative, conventional, or cus-
tomary meaning could be found at the surface even while a spiritual
or absolute meaning might be implied or discovered hidden in the
depths beneath.
One of the pillars of Newton’s accommodationist hermeneutics is his
belief that the Bible is written primarily for unlearned, common people.
In a manuscript in which he argues against infusing metaphysical and
philosophical meanings into the biblical names and titles of Christ,
Newton argues that the Old Testament must be the guide:
So then for understanding these names of Christ, we are to have recourse
unto the old Testament & to beware of vain Philosophy. For Christ sent
his Apostles, not to teach Metaphysicks & Philosophy to the common
people & to their wives & children, but to teach what he had taught them
out of Moses & the Prophets & Psalms concerning himself.36
While Newton’s argument here is related to his belief that Trinitarian-
ism is the result of a corruption of biblical doctrine that involved the
illegitimate intrusion of mainly Greek philosophical distinctions and
categories, it is clear that Newton adhered generally to the belief that
the primary meaning of the Scriptures is the meaning immediately
accessible to the uneducated. In another manuscript Newton repeats
in general terms his argument that the Gospel preached in the New
Testament is directed to the common people, but also adds other ele-
ments. He writes:
The Christian religion was <preached> by Christ & his Apostles to the
meanest of the people & therefore was suited to theire capacity; And
what it now <conteins> above their understanding has been introduced
<since> by men of learning.37

35
Newton, Yahuda MS 9.1, f. 21v. Cf. Newton, Yahuda MS 41, f. 25v.
36
Newton, Sotheby’s Lot 255.8, f. 1r (private collection). I am grateful to Jean-François
Baillon for granting me access to his transcriptions from this manuscript. A close parallel
to this statement can be found in Newton, Keynes MS 3, 32. See also the first “Quære”
of Keynes MS 11, f. 1r: “Whether Christ sent his Apostles to preach Metaphysicks to
the unlearned common people & to their wives & children.” An examination of Keynes
MS 11 demonstrates that Newton intended the answer to be negative.
37
Newton, Yahuda MS 15.5, f. 99r.

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Here Newton not only explicitly speaks of the accommodation of the

message to the capacity of “the meanest of people,” but also attri-
butes the more philosophical understandings of Christianity to later
developments involving the intervention of the educated.38 It is striking
that in these passages there is no direct mention of inner, esoteric, or
more mature layers of meaning in the Word of God; nevertheless, we
have already seen that Newton believed that the Scriptures did at least
sometimes contain these deeper meanings.

Newton on the Genesis Creation

Evidence for Newton’s interest in the Genesis account of Creation begins

early in his career, shortly after his arrival as a student at Trinity College,
Cambridge. This evidence is contained in the undergraduate notebook
that he entitled “Questiones quædam Philosophicæ” (“Certain Philo-
sophical Questions”) and that comprises the earliest substantial record
of Newton’s exploration of natural philosophy.39 The Genesis Creation
was also important to Newton as an alchemist.40 For example, references
to an alchemical interpretation of the Genesis Creation can be found in
the “Praxis,” an alchemical treatise of Newton’s composition that dates
to around 1693.41 But the single most important source for Newton’s
hermeneutical views on the Genesis Creation comes in an epistolary
exchange that took place in late 1680 and early 1681 between Newton
and Thomas Burnet (1635?–1715) on schemes to illuminate Genesis
with natural philosophy.42 Although dated to 1681, the first two parts
of Burnet’s Telluris theoria sacra (Sacred Theory of the Earth) were appar-
ently already printed by December 1680, and Burnet asked Newton

38
Newton may be alluding here to his belief that philosophically-trained leaders in
the early post-Apostolic Church ruined the simple truths of Christianity (which included
pure monotheism) with the nice distinctions and abstractions of Hellenic thought (which
in turn helped lead to the rise of the corrupt Trinitarian doctrine).
39
Newton 1983.
40
Newton’s interest in alchemy began in the 1660s, after which time he experimented
in alchemy for at least thirty years.
41
Newton in Dobbs 1991, 305.
42
For an expert analysis of Newton’s correspondence with Burnet, see Mandel-
brote 1994. Mandelbrote places the correspondence within its historical context and
also discusses the different ways in which Newton and Burnet were committed to the
hermeneutics of accommodation.

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for advice on their contents around this time.43 Burnet’s work deployed
Cartesian physics to explicate the Mosaic Creation and the Noachic
Flood.44 Unfortunately, the extant record of the correspondence is
defective. What survives is a 13 January 1681 reply from Burnet to a
24 December 1680 letter written by Newton and an undated reply by
Newton to Burnet’s 13 January 1681 letter. Burnet’s letter of 13 Janu-
ary 1681 contains a 139-word quotation from Newton’s 24 December
1680 letter, along with some allusions to it; Newton’s reply to Burnet’s
13 January 1681 also includes some allusions to his 24 December 1680
letter that give some sense of its contents.45
The portion of Newton’s 24 December 1680 letter quoted by Burnet,
albeit short, contains some important illustrative features. Newton speaks
of the effects of the heat of the Sun on the original chaos of Earth,
along with “ye pressure of ye vortex or of ye Moon upon ye Waters,”
and how these might have brought about some of the “inequalities”
in the surface of the earth, with the waters draining to the parts made
low and the areas in the upper regions of the earth around its poles
becoming dry land.46 Aside from the interesting fact that this argument
helps confirm that Newton was at that time still working with some
conceptions derived from Cartesian physics, it is clear that Newton had
begun to think in terms of what natural causes might have brought
about the features of the earth described in the Mosaic account. The
second argument presented in the fragment is that the original diurnal
revolutions of Earth around the time of Creation might “have been very
slow, soe yt ye first 6 revolutions or days might containe time enough
for ye whole Creation” and so that there would be enough time for

43
On this, see Mandelbrote 2006a, 345. Charles II viewed the work with favor and
requested an English edition. The first two books appeared in English guise in 1684
and the final two books, with revised versions of the first two books, were printed in
1689 in Latin and English. Burnet’s Sacred Theory elicited a great deal of controversy,
including a range of literary responses. One of the most significant of these is Whiston’s
New Theory of 1696. Whiston, a convert to Newton’s physics and a one-time admirer
of Burnet’s book, presented in his book a Newtonian counter-theory in part to com-
bat Burnet’s Cartesianism, which had become outmoded with the publication of the
Principia. Whiston argued that his Newtonian accounts of Creation, the Flood, and
the final confl agration were consistent with the biblical record.
44
For background on Burnet’s Sacred Theory and other contemporary accounts of
the origin of Earth, see Mandelbrote 1994, 152–7 and Redwood 1996, 116–32. For
more detail on Whiston’s New Theory, see Force 1985 and Farrell 1981.
45
The entire extant correspondence can be found in Newton 1959–1977, 2: 319,
321–35.
46
Newton 1959–1977, 2: 319.

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the heat of the Sun to produce inequalities in Earth’s surface.47 Two

important dynamics emerge from this short fragment. First, Newton
is keen to use natural philosophy to help explain how the Creation
might have occurred. Second, he nevertheless holds to an essentially
literal interpretation of the text in that he believes it describes physical
processes that occurred in the natural history of Earth.
These two themes, and several others beside, are elaborated in the
much more substantial body of evidence provided by Newton’s reply
to Burnet’s letter of 13 January 1681. As Burnet’s letter in part deals
with objections Burnet raised against Newton’s first letter, it will be
useful to consider some of these. First, in response to the portion of
Newton’s first letter that he quotes, Burnet writes:
But methinkes you forget Moses (whom in another place you will not
suffer us to recede from) in this acct of ye formation of ye Earth; for
hee makes ye seas & dry land to bee divided & ye Earth wholly formd
before ye Sun or Moon existed. These were made ye fourth day accord-
ing to Moses, & ye Earth was finisht ye 3rd day, as to ye inanimate part
of it, sea & land, & even ye plants alsoe; you must then according to
Moses bring ye Earth into this irregular forme it hath by other causes,
& independently upon ye Sun or Moon.48
Burnet argues that according to his own principles Newton should
not be offering an interpretation that both appears to deviate from the
chronology of the hexaemeron and requires the introduction of forces
not directly mentioned by Moses. Burnet’s reminder “whom in another
place you will not suffer us to recede from” suggests that Newton had
insisted on taking the Mosaic account seriously in his first letter. Burnet
adds: “Besides ye Earth at first was cover’d wth an Abyss of water as
both Moses & philosophy assure us.” This expression of allegiance to
both Moses and philosophy suggests a species of concordism, an appeal
to twin authorities presumed to be in harmony.
Yet when Burnet goes on to discuss Genesis 1 he appears to give
priority to natural philosophical accounts of Earth’s origin. What Moses
describes in the hexaemeron is “ye present form of ye Earth,” not “ye
primæval Earth wch was gone out of being long before.”49 If Moses had
given an accurate philosophical description of the Creation, “it would

47
Newton 1959–1977, 2: 319.
48
Burnet to Newton, 13 January 1681, Newton 1959–1977, 2: 322.
49
Burnet to Newton, 13 January 1681, Newton 1959–1977, 2: 323.

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 “not in the language of astronomers” 507

have been a thing altogether inaccommodate to ye people & a useless

distracting amusemt.”50 Thus, instead of a philosophical account
hee gives a short ideal draught of a Terraqueous Earth riseing from a
Chaos, not according to ye order of Nature & natural causes, but in
yt order wch was most conceiveable to ye people, & wherin they could
easily imagine an Omnipotent power might forme it, wth respect to ye
conveniency of man & animals: Beginning first wth wt was most neces-
sary, & proceeding by steps in ye same order to prepare an habitable
world, furnisht wth every thing proper first for animals, & then for man
ye Master of all.51
In the following paragraph Burnet reasons that the six days of Genesis 1
do not describe “physical reality” and therefore “neither is this draught
of ye creation physical but Ideal, or if you will, morall.”52 Burnet is thus
suggesting that the Mosaic account of creation is a fictional or mostly
fictional account meant more for the satisfaction of vulgar human
curiosity and spiritual instruction than to describe natural history.
Newton was unwilling to take the principle of accommodation this
far.53 While Burnet argued that Genesis 1 is an “ideal” account that is
accommodated to the needs of the common people, and that the only
concord between Genesis and the natural world relates to the world as
it is now, Newton insisted that, while the Mosaic account certainly uses
the language of accommodation, it nevertheless does describe natural
history: “As to Moses I do not think his description of ye creation either
Philosophical or feigned, but that he described realities in a language
artificially adapted to ye sense of ye vulgar.”54 Newton is proposing a
via media between the belief that Moses wrote a precise, philosophical
account (in which case it should be read in a strictly literal way) and the
view that he merely provided a moral story for the edification of the
Israelites (in which case a literal reading of the text would be mislead-
ing if not erroneous). For Newton, it is important to understand that
while Moses accommodated his language, he nevertheless still “described
realities.”55 Newton next gives an example of what he means:

50
Burnet to Newton, 13 January 1681, Newton 1959–1977, 2: 323.
51
Burnet to Newton, 13 January 1681, Newton 1959–1977, 2: 323.
52
Burnet to Newton, 13 January 1681, Newton 1959–1977, 2: 324.
53
Cf. Mandelbrote 1994, 157–8.
54
Newton to Burnet, ca. January 1681, Newton 1959–1977, 2: 331.
55
If compared to modern Christian interpretation of the Genesis Creation, Burnet’s
approach would stand for an almost complete rejection of concordism (allowing only

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Thus where [Moses] speaks of two great lights I suppose he means their
apparent, not real greatness. So when he tells us God placed those lights
in ye firmament, he speaks I suppose of their apparent not of their real
place, his business being not to correct the vulgar notions in matters
philosophical but to adapt a description of ye creation as handsomly as
he could to ye sense & capacity of ye vulgar.56
This example tells us two things. First, for Newton an astute reading
of the Mosaic Creation will allow for the distinction between the abso-
lute (the perspective of philosophy) and the relative (the perspective
of the vulgar). The Sun and the Moon of the fourth day of Creation
are described as to their relative appearance from the perspective of
humans on Earth. While a philosopher will be able to determine their
absolute luminosity and location, this is a mode of meaning with
which Moses did not concern himself, given that he was writing for
farmers and herdsmen, not philosophers. Second, despite the fact that
Newton believes Moses accommodates his language for the sake of the
unlearned, the Genesis Creation nevertheless describes physical real-
ity insofar as it provides—at one level—a true natural history of early
Earth after allowances are made for the phenomenalistic language that
mirrors the appearances of things rather than absolute reality.
Newton goes on to discuss the description of the creation of the Sun,
the Moon, and stars on the fourth day (Gen. 1:14–19) in relation to
the rest of the account. Although the heavenly bodies are described as
made on the fourth day, Newton does not believe “their creation from
beginning to end was done ye fourth day nor in any one day of ye
creation.” Nor is Moses concerned about describing them absolutely as
physical bodies in their own right, some of which are larger than Earth
and “perhaps habitable worlds,” but only relatively as luminaries that
give light to Earth.57 What is more, their creation cannot be assigned
to any one particular day of Creation. Nevertheless, they belong to the
world of appearances:
yet being a part of ye sensible creation wch it was Moses’s design to
describe & it being his design to describe things in order according to
ye succession of days allotting no more then one day to one thing, they

that the Genesis Creation describes the world that now is), while Newton’s stance
would be considered an example of moderate concordism (allowing that there is some
agreement between Genesis 1 and the history of Earth).
56
Newton to Burnet, ca. January 1681, Newton 1959–1977, 2: 331.
57
Newton to Burnet, ca. January 1681, Newton 1959–1977, 2: 331.

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 “not in the language of astronomers” 509

were to be referred to some day or other & rather to ye 4th day then any
other if the air then first became clear enough for them to shine through
it & so put on ye appearance of lights in ye firmament to enlighten the
earth.58
Newton here hints at some sort of literary framework that helps dictate
where each created thing is mentioned in the text. He also posits that
the Sun, Moon, and stars are assigned to the fourth day because it was
at this time in the history of Earth that they were first visible through
the atmosphere. Until their appearance in the heavens they could not
be described as lights, even though it is possible their creation was not
complete even by the fourth day. Newton finds this argument plausible,
but not Burnet’s completely fictional reading: “for Moses to describe ye
creation of seas [on the third day] when there was no such thing done
neither in reality nor in appearance me thinks is something hard.”59 For
Newton, the Mosaic account must deal either in reality or appearance.
Burnet’s interpretation allows for neither.
Later in his letter, Newton further clarifies his position on the creation
of the Sun, Moon, and stars:
And now while the new planted vegetables grew to be food for Animals,
the heavens becoming clear for ye Sun in ye day & Moon & starrs in ye
night to shine distinctly through them on the earth & so put on ye form
of lights in ye firmament so that had men been now living on ye earth
to view ye process of ye creation they would have judged those lights
created at this time.60
Newton here expresses an interest in teleology in the order of Creation:
vegetation (created on the third day) must come before animals (created
on the sixth day). His concern for realism is evident in his argument that
the account of the fourth day conforms to the hypothetical perspective
of a human observer on Earth. Newton continues:
Moses here sets down their creation as if he had then lived & were now
describing what he saw. Omit them he could not wthout rendering his
description of ye creation imperfect in ye judgment of ye vulgar. To
describe them distinctly as they were in them selves would have made
ye narration tedious & confused, amused ye vulgar & become a Philoso-
pher more then a Prophet. He mentions them therefore only so far as
ye vulgar had a notion of them, that is as they were phænomena in our

58
Newton to Burnet, ca. January 1681, Newton 1959–1977, 2: 331.
59
Newton to Burnet, ca. January 1681, Newton 1959–1977, 2: 332.
60
Newton to Burnet, ca. January 1681, Newton 1959–1977, 2: 333.

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firmament, & describes their making only so far & at such a time as they
were made such phænomena. Consider therefore whether any one who
understood the process of ye creation & designed to accommodate to ye
vulgar not an Ideal or poetical but a true description of it as succinctly
& theologically as Moses has done, without omitting any thing material
wch ye vulgar have a notion of or describing any being further then the
vulgar have a notion of it, could mend that description wch Moses has
given us.61
Once again, Newton steers between the Charybdis of philosophical
literalism and the Scylla of idealism to argue for a concise “theologi-
cal” mode of discourse that is attuned to realism and thus satisfies the
vulgar. Key to Newton’s understanding of the text is that Moses’ role
in providing an account of Creation under inspiration is primarily that
of a prophet rather than a philosopher. And, importantly for Newton,
the Genesis Creation is also a “true description” of the “process of
creation.” While Burnet argued that Moses taught the moral truth of
Creation alone, Newton was convinced that the Mosaic cosmogony
conveyed both the theological truths and the physical realia of the acts
of Creation, allowing for the fact that the latter elements were presented
through the filter of common speech.
It is noteworthy that Newton employs the verb “accommodate”
in his discussion of the literary strategy of Moses.62 Newton uses the
verb a second time to affirm accommodation as he continues from the
above-quoted passage to complete the paragraph. In this extension of
his discussion on accommodation, he provides other examples from the
account of the Noachic Flood that help clarify his meaning:
If it be said that ye expression of making & setting two great lights
in ye firmament is more poetical then natural: so also are some other
expressions of Moses, as where he tells us the windows or fl oodgates of
heaven were opened Gen 7 & afterwards stopped again Gen 8 & yet
the things signified by such figurative expressions are not Ideall or moral
but true. For Moses accommodating his words to ye gross conceptions
of ye vulgar, describes things much after ye manner as one of ye vulgar
would have been inclined to do had he lived & seen ye whole series of
wt Moses describes.63

61
Newton to Burnet, ca. January 1681, Newton 1959–1977, 2: 333.
62
Burnet also uses the term. The verb “accommodate,” along with its cognate
adjectives “inaccommodate” and “accommodate,” is used by Burnet in his 13 Janu-
ary 1681 letter to Newton (Burnet to Newton, 13 January 1681, Newton 1959–1977,
2: 323, 325, 326).
63
Newton to Burnet, ca. January 1681, Newton 1959–1977, 2: 333.

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 “not in the language of astronomers” 511

Thus, just as poetic or metaphorical language is used in the account

of the rain that came down in Noah’s day without implying that the
Flood never happened, so unphilosophical or less-than-literal language
in the Genesis Creation does not imply that this account is fictional.
But this discussion also makes clear that Newton believed that Moses
played a conscious role in the rendering of the description of Creation
into language accessible to hoi polloi. That Moses was in control of his
language and that he understood the need to accommodate “his words
to ye gross conceptions of ye vulgar” suggests that he was ultimately
aware of a more philosophical understanding of Creation.
Two other aspects of Newton’s reply to Burnet merit consideration.
First, in the second and third paragraphs he uses an analogy from
contemporary chemistry and metallurgy to explain how the irregulari-
ties in the surface earth and its sea beds may have been formed. Thus
Newton notes that the crystallization of saltpeter dissolved in water is
uneven. The upper crust of the globe could have been brought into
its present state through the heat of the Sun and mineral action. In
another example, he points out that melted tin congeals in lumps; a
similar action on Earth could have produced the irregularities of the
hills.64 As an afterthought, Newton adds in the final paragraph of his
letter the example of the congealing of a milk-beer mixture as another
analogy for the formation of the “rugged & mountanous” surface of
the globe.65 Therefore, although the hexaemeron is not philosophical
in nature or intent in the first instance, insights from natural philoso-
phy might be able to illuminate and fill in the details of the Mosaic
account. Second, in his penultimate paragraph, Newton contends that
the six creative days may have been longer than twenty-four hours in
length, suggesting a duration of a year for the creative work of each
day. This argument is made in the context of a discussion about the
gradual acceleration of the diurnal motion of Earth.66 It is clear then
that Newton is speaking about literal days insofar as he believes they are
defined as the diurnal rotations of Earth. In stressing that he is com-
mitted to literal (even if not twenty-four hour) days, Newton reminds
Burnet that one of the Ten Commandments (namely, the keeping of
the Sabbath) makes reference to the days of Creation and that this

64
Newton to Burnet, ca. January 1681, Newton 1959–1977, 2: 329–31.
65
Newton to Burnet, ca. January 1681, Newton 1959–1977, 2: 334.
66
Newton to Burnet, ca. January 1681, Newton 1959–1977, 2: 333–4.

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commandment “should not be grounded on a fiction.”67 Thus, although

he is diplomatic with his correspondent and is careful to commend
him in areas where they agree, Newton is firm in rejecting Burnet’s
fictional or ideal interpretative approach in favor of one that upholds
the Mosaic Creation as a record of natural history.68

Newton on Astronomical Language in the Scriptures

Although natural philosophy might help illuminate the Scriptures,

Newton, like Galileo, believed that the formal teaching of natural
philosophy is not part of the mandate of the inspired Word of God.
Thus, in one manuscript he declares: “The system of the heavenly
bodies is not at all taught in Scripture.”69 This view allows Newton to
reconcile phenomenalistic geocentric language in the Bible with the
realist heliocentric view of the solar system he espoused. Accordingly,
he is able to state in the same manuscript: “Nothing stands in the way
of the Earth’s moving around the Sun according to the law of the

67
Newton to Burnet, ca. January 1681, Newton 1959–1977, 2: 334. Newton is
alluding to Ex. 20:8–11; verse 11 describes God making heaven and earth in six days
and resting on the seventh. As Mandelbrote suggests, Newton may reveal an element
of his heterodoxy to Burnet, since his argument seems to imply that Christians kept
the Sabbath rather than Sunday for three hundred years after the time of Christ
(Mandelbrote 1994, 159–60).
68
Newton’s approach is similar to that outlined a decade and a half later by his
disciple William Whiston in Whiston 1696, a Newtonian cosmogony intended in part to
counter the Cartesianism of Burnet’s work. In an introductory essay entitled “A discourse
concerning the nature, stile, and extent of the Mosaick history of the Creation” (1–94),
Whiston argues that the language of the Genesis account of Creation is accommo-
dated to human understanding and thus Genesis 1 must not be read as a philosophical
account. But neither is the account merely parabolic or mythological (Burnet would
have been one of the targets of this declaration). Instead, Whiston argues for a form
of moderate accommodation that upholds a sort of third way in which Genesis 1 is
seen as depicting a true natural history of Creation. This moderate accommodationist
position is based in part on his belief that the Genesis Creation uses phenomenalistic
language and assumes a terrestrial perspective. Whiston states the main thesis of his
introductory essay at the end of its second paragraph: “The Mosaick Creation is not
a Nice and Philosophical account of the Origin of All Things; but an Historical and
True Representation of the formation of our single Earth out of a confused Chaos,
and of the successive and visible changes thereof each day, till it became the habitation
of Mankind” (Whiston 1696, 3). Force 1985 discusses Whiston’s “middle way.”
69
“Systema corporum coelestium in sacris literis minime doceri.” Newton, CUL MS
Add. 3965, f. 542v, in Cohen 1969, 526 (Cohen’s translation).

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Planets. Objections from Scripture are removed.”70 A little later in this

manuscript are the words: “Objections from mechanics are removed,”71
showing that in this case Newton was thinking about both scriptural
and natural philosophical objections to his astronomy.
Newton can be compared to Galileo in a second way as well. As in
the Tuscan astronomer’s celebrated Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina72
Newton believed certain truths about nature could be found in the
Scriptures, notwithstanding the general principle about the language
of accommodation in God’s Word. Evidence for this can be seen in the
single most comprehensive statement Newton made on the reconciliation
of the new astronomy with the language of the Scriptures, which forms
part of an incomplete three-paragraph manuscript bearing the title:
“An Account of the Systeme of the World described in Mr Newton’s
Mathematical Principles of Philosophy.”73 I. Bernard Cohen dated
this manuscript to the early 1690s, within five years of the publication
of the Principia to which it refers. He suggests that it might have been
prompted by Newton’s 1692–1693 correspondence with Richard Bentley
on natural theology.74 Although Cohen does not specifically comment
on how this manuscript conforms to previous attempts to deploy the
hermeneutics of accommodation in the service of heliocentrism,75
Newton’s use of accommodation to find harmony between the Scrip-
tures and astronomy follows the established tradition of hermeneutics
that extends back to ancient Judaism and Christianity.
The summary of the first and longest of the three numbered para-
graphs of this manuscript, placed in the right margin, reads: “Scripture
abused to prove the immoveableness of the earth globe of ye Eart Earth.”
The paragraph begins with a statement of purpose: “In determining

70
“Nihil obstare quo minus Terra pro lege Planetarum circa solem moveatur.
Diluuntur objectiones ex sacris litteris.” Newton, CUL MS Add. 3965, f. 542v, in Cohen
1969, 526 (Cohen’s translation).
71
“Diluunter objectiones ex mechanica.” Newton, CUL MS Add. 3965, f. 542v, in
Cohen 1969, 527 (Cohen’s translation).
72
Galileo, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, in Finocchiaro 1989, 114–18.
73
A full transcription of this manuscript, with brief notes, is published in Cohen
1969, 544–8. I have produced my own transcription of the manuscript from the original,
but include cross-references to Cohen’s published transcription in the notes below.
74
Cohen 1969, 542.
75
Cohen does, however, briefl y refer to the principle in Galileo’s Letter to the Grand
Duchess Christina that the Bible is written for the vulgar when commenting on Newton’s
reference to the Scriptures in the Scholium on the Definitions in the Principia (Cohen
1969, 525–6, 534 n. 13).

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the true system of the world the main Question is whether the earth
do rest or be moved.”76
In another manuscript dating from the same period Newton used
the expression “true systeme” to refer to the heliocentric solar system.77
Thus it is clear that he is ultimately thinking in terms of the entire
solar system even though his discussion focuses on the question of the
motion of Earth. Newton continues: “For deciding this some bring
texts of scripture, but in my opinion misinterpreted, the Scriptures
speaking not in the language of Astronomers (as they think) but in that
of ye common people to whom they were written.” Here those aware
of the long history of accommodationist hermeneutics will find them-
selves on familiar terrain: Newton is echoing (perhaps consciously in
some cases) the venerable arguments found in Augustine, Maimonides,
Calvin, Kepler, Galileo, and others.78 One should not expect to find
astronomical discourse in a book written in the idiom of the unlearned
and untrained.
Newton next presents his first category of misinterpreted Scripture,
examples used to support the sphericity and immobility of Earth:
So where tis said that God hath made ye round world so fast that it cannot
be moved, the Prophet intended not to teach Mathematicians the spherical
figure of the whole & immoveableness of the whole earth & sea in the
heavens but to tell the vulgar in their own dialect that God had made
the great continent of Asia Europe & Africa so fast upon its foundations
in the great Ocean that it cannot be moved therein after the manner of
a fl o<a>ting Island. For this Continent was the whole habitable world
anciently known & by ye ancient eastern nations was accounted round
or circular as was also the sea encompassing it.79
Those hoping to find positive sanction in the Scriptures for a spheri-
cal and immovable earth are misguided, for the inspired authors are
not writing for mathematicians or about things absolute in the natural
world. At the same time, the language does have a literal referent: the
round continental mass the ancient eastern people believed constituted

76
Newton, CUL MS. Add. 4005, f. 39r; Cohen 1969, 544.
77
Newton, Yahuda MS 41, f. 7r.
78
On accommodation, see Barker 2008, England 2008a, 2008b, Finocchiaro 2008,
Granada 2008, Harrison 2008, Howell 2008a, 2008b, Remmert 2008, van der Meer
& Oosterhoff 2008.
79
Newton, CUL MS Add. 4005, f. 39r; Cohen 1969, 544. The references Newton
gives for the underlined text are Ps. 93:2 and Psa. 96:10 (the first is a mistake for
Ps. 93:1). Newton is not quoting from the King James Version.

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the entire inhabited world. Newton bolsters this argument with a series
of biblical texts that speak about the “foundations” of Earth.80 After
writing out these supporting passages, Newton concludes:
So then the round world spoken of in scriptures is such a world as hath
foundations <& is founded in the waters> & by consequence ’tis not the
whole globe of the Earth & Sea but only the habitable dry land. For the
whole Globe hath no foundations, but this <habitable> world is founded
in the seas. And since this world by reason of the firmness of its founda-
tions is said in scripture to be immoveable this immoveableness cannot be
of ye whole globe together, but only of its parts one amongst another &
signifies nothing more than that those parts are firmly compacted together
so that the dry land or Continent of Europe Asia & Africk cannot be
moved upon the main body of ye globe on wch tis founded.81
Once again, while Newton denies that passages that appear to speak
about the immovableness of Earth can be used to support the geostatic
model, he is nevertheless adamant that the Scriptures are speaking
about physical reality. This conforms to the policy he laid down over
a decade earlier in his correspondence with Burnet. Moreover, he will
admit no confl ict with the findings of astronomy and, in asserting that
the globe is without foundation, relies on knowledge that comes from
astronomy.
The second paragraph of this manuscript deals with the abuse of math-
ematics to prove the immobility of Earth. Newton argues that another
set of arguments against Earth’s mobility is based on our senses. He
insists that “this way of arguing proceeds from want of skill & judgment
in Mathematical things, & therefore is insisted upon only by the com-
mon people & some <such> practical mathematicians <as understand
not so much as the principles of Mechanicks>,” for our senses cannot
tell us if Earth is in motion any more than “a blinded Mariner” can
determine whether a ship is moving “fast or slow or not at all.”82 The
third and final paragraph declares that neither arguments from the
Scriptures nor those based on sensation are sufficient to determine a
question such as the mobility of Earth. For this reason

80
These are, in order of appearance in Newton’s text: 2 Pet. 3:5, Ps. 102:25, Prov.
8:29, Job 38:4, Ps. 24:1,2, Ps. 136:6, Ps. 89:12, Prov. 8:27,29, Ps. 104:5 (Newton, CUL
MS Add. 4005, ff. 39r–40r; Cohen 1969, 545).
81
Newton, CUL MS Add. 4005, f. 40r; Cohen 1969, 545–6.
82
Newton, CUL MS Add. 4005, ff. 40r–41r; Cohen 1969, 546.

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’tis fit we should lay aside these & the like vulgar prejudices & have
recourse to some strickt & proper way of reasoning. Now the Question
being about motion is a mathematical one & therefore requires skill in
Mathematicks to decide it.83
The tremendous mathematical skill required helps explain the relative
lack of progress made by the ancients in astronomy, but since the recent
revival and progress of this discipline, “some able Mathematicians as
Galileo & Hugenius have carried it on further then ye Ancients did.”
What is more, he adds:
Mr Newton to advance it fur enough for his purpose has spent the two
first of his three books in demonstrating new Propositions about force &
motion before he begins to consider the systeme from the Propositions
demonstrated in the two first.84
This reference to the Principia mathematica helps establish the authority
of his own work in setting out absolute truths about the workings of
the heavens and Earth.85

The Bible in the PRINCIPIA, Again

It is now time to return to the passage in Newton’s Scholium on the

Definitions that refers to the interpretation of the Scriptures. Recall that
Newton in this passage had claimed that the distinction between the
absolute and the relative was important in the correct understanding
of the Bible as well as in physics. But the principle is merely asserted;

83
Newton, CUL MS Add. 4005, f. 41r; Cohen 1969, 546.
84
Newton, CUL MS Add. 4005, f. 41r; Cohen 1969, 547.
85
If Newton’s “Account of the Systeme of the World” was written in the early
1690s, as suggested by Cohen, it would be doubly significant that several of its positions
parallel those found in the prefatory essay to his disciple Whiston’s 1696 New Theory,
especially since Newton read Whiston’s text in manuscript and apparently approved of
it. James Force has argued that the New Theory also refl ects many of Newton’s beliefs,
including those he held privately. See Force 1985. Further evidence for this can be
found in Snobelen 2000, section 2.2. (This is not to say that differences do not exist
between Newton and Whiston, for they do). In his prefatory “Discourse concerning the
Mosaick history of the Creation,” Whiston states in the Scriptures the celestial bodies
“are no otherwise . . . described than with relation to our Earth, and as Members and
Appurtances of our Atmosphere” (Whiston 1696, 18). He goes on to discuss briefl y the
scriptural examples of descriptions of astronomical phenomena in Gen. 1:3–5, 14–17;
Acts 2:20; Matt. 24:29; Josh. 10:12; Ps. 19:4–6; Ps. 104:1ff; and Isa. 40:22 (18–19). After
this he asserts: “All which Expressions, with many others through the whole Bible, plainly
shew, That the Scripture did not intend to teach men Philosophy, or accommodate it
self to the true and Pythagorick System of the World” (Whiston 1696, 19).

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 “not in the language of astronomers” 517

no example is offered. Fortunately, there is a manuscript parallel to

the passage from the Scholium on the Definitions that does offer an
example—even if Newton at some point deleted the relevant line.86 The
manuscript containing the parallel is either fragmentary or incomplete
and was apparently written in 1685. It bears the title: “De motu corporum
in mediis regulariter cedentibus” (“On the motion of bodies in regularly
yielding media”). The relevant passage reads as follows:
I have tried It was necessary, moreover, carefully to distinguish absolute
and relative quantities from one another; because all phaenomena depend
on absolute quantities, and yet the common people, who do not know
how to abstract their thoughts from their senses, always speak of relative
quantities, to the point where it would be absurd for either wise men or
even for the Prophets to speak otherwise among them. Whence both the
Scriptures and the writings of Theologians are always to be understood
of relative quantities, and he would be laboring with a gross prejudice
who thence [i.e., on the basis of these writings] stirred up disputations
about the absolute philosophical motions of natural things. It’s just as if
someone should contend that the Moon in the first chapter of Genesis
was counted among the two greatest lights not by its apparent, but by
its absolute, magnitude.87
It is hard to imagine that the virulently anti-Catholic Newton, who once
wrote of Jesuits that it was their business to cavil,88 did not have in mind,
amongst others, Galileo’s ecclesiastical opponents when he wrote about
those who would stir up disputations about “the philosophical motions
of natural things.” But it is the deleted portion that is most relevant
to our purposes. Newton was not the first to deal with the potential
confl ict between the description of the Sun and the Moon as two great
luminaries in the account of the fourth day of Creation (Gen. 1:14–19)
and astronomical evidence that revealed that many stars were of greater
brilliance in an absolute sense than not only the Moon, but also the
Sun. Augustine, Calvin, and others, in their own ways, had tackled this
matter.89 For Newton, the language used in the fourth day of Creation
is a perfect example of relative language accommodated to the human
and terrestrial perspective. Absolute magnitude was another thing
altogether: but such determinations were in the domain of astronomy,
not the Scriptures. This single, deleted manuscript sentence confirms

86
Cohen was the first to identify this important parallel (Cohen 1969, 527).
87
Newton, CUL MS Add. 3965, in Cohen 1969, 527 (Cohen’s translation from the
original Latin; insertion in square brackets by Cohen).
88
Newton to Henry Oldenburg, 22 August 1676, Newton 1959–1977, 3: 83.
89
See Snobelen 2008.

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that when Newton wrote in the Principia about corrupt readings of the
Bible derived from a failure to distinguish between the absolute and
the relative, he was at the very least thinking of biblical passages that
discuss natural phenomena, including those in the Genesis Creation.
The Bible speaks about the sensible world, not the world of absolute
realities. As he wrote in the published version of the Scholium on the
Definitions shortly before the statement on the Scriptures:
Relative quantities, therefore, are not the actual quantities whose names
they bear but are those sensible measures of them (whether true or
erroneous) that are commonly used instead of the quantities being
measured.90
By including this general argument in his Principia, Newton was also
confirming that such considerations were relevant to his great work of
mathematical physics. But this manuscript draft also reveals something
else the published version of the Scholium on the Definitions does not.
By noting that the common people, unlike the wise, “do not know how
to abstract their thoughts from their senses” and thus deal only with
“relative quantities,” Newton was also affirming his belief in the social
corollary to the distinction between the relative and the absolute.
In the discussion above, attention was drawn to the linguistic argu-
ment on the relative nature of the term ‘God’ that Newton included in
the General Scholium. It was his contention that one must take the rela-
tive nature of this word into consideration if one desired an authentic
understanding of its scriptural usage. When used of the Almighty, the
term ‘God’ is used in relation to his dominion, not his essence (although
the reality of the latter is not denied).91 In a manuscript parallel to the
General Scholium, Newton declares: “ffor the word God relates not to
the metaphysical nature of God but to his dominion.”92 One aspect of
the usage of ‘God’ in the Bible that reveals it to be a relative term is
its application to beings other than the one true God. Newton’s anti-
Trinitarianism comes into play here,93 for his understanding of the word

90
Newton 1999, 413.
91
Newton did believe that God had some sort of substantial existence in absolute
reality, for he uses the Latin substantia when speaking about the reality of God’s omni-
presence in the General Scholium (Newton 1999, 941).
92
Newton, Yahuda MS 15.5, f. 154r.
93
In saying this, I am not arguing that Newton’s anti-Trinitarianism arose directly
out of his arguments about the relative nature of the term ‘God’ or, more broadly, his
use of accommodation only that it is tied up with these dynamics.

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 “not in the language of astronomers” 519

‘God’ offers a way of explaining precisely why it is that in the Bible

beings other than God can be called God (and Newton considers Christ
to be a being other than God).94 Part of the logic of this argument is
that humans do not have access to the absolute realities of God, only his
relations, including his sovereignty and rule.95 In other words, Newton
adheres to a phenomenalistic understanding of the person of God: he
can be known only through his actions and his attributes, not in his
substance. After treating God’s omnipresence several sentences later

94
In the General Scholium, Newton gives the example of the Hebrew judges
mentioned in Ps. 82:6 and by citing John 10:35 indirectly alludes to the example of
Christ, who is called “God” a handful of times in the New Testament (Newton 1999,
941 n. g). Unlike Trinitarian exegetes, who consider these applications of “God” to
Christ to be absolute uses of the term in which the word refers to the unique essence
of God (in which case Christ would be God in essence rather than in some titular,
honorary or derived way), Newton’s private belief was that the word ‘God’ is used
of Christ only in a relative and non-essential sense that befitted his status as Messiah
and that such usage does not point to Christ being “true God from true God” in the
orthodox Trinitarian sense (see Snobelen 2001, 180–6). By mistaking a relative sense
of the term ‘God’ when used of Christ for an absolute sense, Trinitarian hermeneutics
resulted in doctrinal error. Newton nevertheless seems to have believed that the term
had an absolute sense when applied exclusively to the Father. Thus, in a list of twelve
statements on God and Christ apparently dating from the 1670s, Newton writes: “The
word God <put absolutly> without particular restriction to ye Son or Holy ghost
doth always signify the Father from one end of the scriptures to ye other” (Newton,
Yahuda MS 14, f. 25r). While we should be cautious in using this much earlier text
to clarify an argument made four decades later, this declaration does not necessarily
contradict the apparently categorical statement he makes in the General Scholium
about the word ‘God’ being a relative term (while Newton never explicitly states in
this text that the term can be absolute as well, this may be implied). Since the term
is defined by its relations it can be rendered absolute by adjectives and qualifications
such as “supreme,” “eternal,” “infinite,” “omnipotent,” and “omniscient,” as he hints
in the same text (Newton 1999, 940–1). As to the reality behind the language, in an
unpublished manuscript draft of the footnote on the word “God” added to the General
Scholium in 1726, Newton quotes from and glosses 1 Cor. 8:4–6 to state that while
there are “gods many and lords many,” the true God (“our God”) is a spiritual being
(“Ens spirituale”) who is One and who Newton identifies as the Father (Newton, New
College Oxford MS 361.2, f. 71r). In other words, there is a Being who is God in an
absolute sense and this is the Father alone. If this had been stated in the published
version of the General Scholium, Newton would have made his anti-Trinitarian explicit.
In sum, it is precisely because the term ‘God’ requires such qualifications to provide
specific meanings that it is shown to be a fundamentally relative word.
95
Newton’s handling of the concept of substance should be seen in the light of his
opposition to the received doctrine of the Trinity (which asserts that the Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit are united in one substance). For Newton, Christ and the Father are not
united in a metaphysical unity of one substance, but a monarchical unity of dominion
(see Snobelen 2001). Again, it is instructive that Newton embraces conceptions of God
and his Son that are based on relations to which humans have some access (e.g., God’s
Providence) rather than realities to which we do not (e.g., God’s divine substance).

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in the General Scholium, Newton speaks of God’s transcendence and

incorporeality, writing that God “totally lacks any body and corporeal
shape, and so he cannot be seen or heard or touched, nor ought he to
be worshiped in the form of something corporeal.”96 Humans do not
“have an idea of the substance of God” (by which he likely means a
precise idea), and for this reason
know him only by his properties and attributes and by the wisest and
best construction of things and their final causes, and we admire him
because of his perfections; but we venerate and worship him because of
his dominion.97
Thus, without direct access to the person of God, recourse must be
made to analogies that humans can grasp, and thus
God is said allegorically to see, hear, speak, laugh, love, hate, desire, give,
receive, rejoice, be angry, fight, build, form, construct. For all discourse
about God is derived through a certain similitude from things human,
which while not perfect is nevertheless a similitude of some kind.98
In making this statement, Newton takes his place in a long and noble
tradition of Jewish and Christian scriptural hermeneutics that stretches
back to the ancient world. For what is Newton’s claim that “all dis-
course about God is derived through a certain similitude from things
human” than a re-articulation of the principle summed up in both the
Talmudic aphorism “The Torah speaks in the language of the sons of
men” and the Christian Latin dictum Scriptura human loquitur? Consis-
tent with his thinking on the use of metaphorical and other forms of
indirect language in both theology and natural philosophy, Newton
would consider literal readings of this anthropomorphic language (a
type of accommodation) to be gross misunderstandings of the relative
for the absolute. And so it is that in the final paragraphs of the second
and third editions of his Principia mathematica—arguably the single most
important work in the history of science—Newton included what he
believed were biblical examples of the language of accommodation.
Newton was undoubtedly aware of many of the examples of Jew-
ish and Christian schemes to reconcile astronomical knowledge with

96
Newton 1999, 942.
97
Newton 1999, 942.
98
Newton 1999, 942–3. Although this is not made explicit in Newton’s text, every
example of the allegorical language listed here can be found in the Bible.

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 “not in the language of astronomers” 521

the Bible as well as the many uses of accommodationist hermeneutics

and explanations of anthropomorphic language used of God that had
been developed from the time of Philo Judaeus through to his own
era.99 Evidence for this awareness comes from the record of Newton’s
library along with his citation of authors who made contributions
in these areas.100 Starting with Philo, he possessed a 1640 edition of
the complete works of the Jewish philosopher in Greek and Latin;101
references to Philo in his private manuscripts confirm that Newton
read these works actively.102 Newton specifically alludes to Book I of
Philo’s Allegorical interpretation of Genesis in the footnote on space added
to the General Scholium in the third (1726) edition of the Principia.103
A 1641 edition of the works of Clement of Alexandria in Greek and
Latin formed part of his library and scattered references to this early
Church writer appear in Newton’s manuscripts.104 Newton possessed five
titles by Origen, including a two-volume Opera prepared by Desiderius
Erasmus and the 1658 Cambridge edition of Contra Celsum.105 Newton
mentions Origen on several occasions in his writings.106 He also owned
the complete works of Augustine,107 and thus possessed Augustine’s

99
Several significant examples, including some alluded to here, are outlined in
Snobelen 2008. A useful evaluation of Newton’s use of patristic writings, including an
assessment of the presence of these works in his library, can be found in Mandelbrote
2006b.
100
This is not to say that the mere ownership of books and citation of particular
authors implies agreement, for it is evident that Newton did read these sources criti-
cally. For instance, while it is possible that Newton may have benefited from Augustine’s
writings on Genesis, he nevertheless brands him as a papist (Newton, Keynes MS 11, f.
1v). While Newton often used the authors identified here merely as historical sources,
his use of at least some of them likely exposed him to historical examples of accom-
modationist hermeneutics.
101
Harrison 1978, item 1300.
102
See Newton’s notes on Philo (“Ex Philone”) in Yahuda MS 28.1, ff. 3r–v (this
manuscript dates from ca. 1675–1685); Babson College MS 434, ff. 15r, 16r; Yahuda MS
8, f. 2r.
103
Newton 1999, 941–2 n. j.
104
Harrison 1978, item 398; references to Clement (including the Stromata) can
be found in Newton, Yahuda MSS 1, 16 and 41; Keynes MSS 2 and 146; New Col-
lege Oxford MS 361(4) (“The two notable corruptions”), as well as Newton 1728 and
Newton 1733.
105
Harrison 1978, items 1209–1213.
106
Newton, Yahuda MS 1; Keynes MS 2; New College Oxford MS 361(4); William Andrews
Clark Memorial Library (UCLA) MS **N563M3 P222; Sotheby’s Lot 255.9 (private collec-
tion); Newton 1733.
107
Harrison 1978, item 101 (an edition published in 1531–2).

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important works on Genesis.108 Many references to Augustine, including

the Confessions, City of God, and De Genesi ad litteram, can be found in
Newton’s unpublished and published works.109 Newton owned some
works by Maimonides, another advocate of accommodation, although
The Guide of the Perplexed seems not to have been among these.110 Testi-
mony to Newton’s interest in Maimonides’ works is seen in the various
mentions of the Jewish philosopher in his manuscripts.111 There is also
a reference in Newton’s theological notebook to Abraham Ibn Ezra,
the medieval Jewish exegete whose commentaries on Genesis and other
books in the Hebrew Bible generally focussed on the literal and gram-
matical aspects of the text and who also advocated accommodation.112
Newton likely encountered Ibn Ezra through seventeenth-century
Christian Hebraists.
Moving to the early modern period, the most significant resource
for accommodation that Newton owned is the 1699 printing of the
Systema Cosmicum,113 a publication that is mostly made up of a Latin
translation of Galileo’s Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the World, but
to which is also appended an excerpt from Kepler’s introduction to his
1609 Astronomia Nova as well as a Latin translation by David Lotaeus
of Paolo Antonio Foscarini’s 1615 Lettera Sopra l’opinione de’ Pittagorici e
del Copernico, both of which texts advocate the hermeneutics of accom-
modation for the reconciliation of astronomy and the Bible.114 Although

108
Mandelbrote discusses Augustine’s interpretation of Genesis, his use of accom-
modation and his value as a source for late seventeenth-century biblical critics in
England, including Newton and Burnet, in Mandelbrote 1994, 150–2.
109
Newton, Yahuda MS 41; Keynes MS 2, 5 and 11; New College Oxford MS 361(4)
(reference to De Genesi ad litteram on f. 27); Clark MS; Sotheby’s Lot 255.4 (private collec-
tion); Newton 1728; Newton 1733.
110
Harrison 1978, items 1018–22.
111
Extensive excerpts from Maimonides can be found in Newton, Yahuda MS 13.2.
References to Maimonides can also be found in Newton, Keynes MS 5, ff. 9r, 10r and
31r and Andrews University MS, ff. 34 and 39.
112
Newton, Keynes MS 2, f. 11v.
113
Harrison 1978, item 648. Newton’s copy bears a Leiden imprint. Newton was
certainly aware of the Systema cosmicum before the publication of the 1699 edition, how-
ever, as he refers to it in his Classical Scholia of the early 1690s (see Schüller 2001, 222).
114
Several editions of the Systema cosmicum appeared in northern Europe between
1636 and 1699, including a 1663 London printing. When dismissing as trivial “the
several Objections made formerly against either the Diurnal or Annual Revolutions
of the earth, either from Scripture or Nature”, which “few of the truly Learned and
Judicious . . . do now insist upon,” Whiston directs his reader to the Systema cosmicum
and William Derham’s Astro-theology in his Astronomical principles of religion, natural and
reveal’d (Whiston 1717, 39). Although the bulk of the Systema cosmicum comprises
Galileo’s Dialogue, and while Whiston refers to the book as “Galileo’s Syst. Cosmic.” (no
publication date is given), it seems likely that Whiston was referring to the arguments

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there is no evidence from Newton’s surviving library that he owned a

translation of Galileo’s Italian Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, it is
reasonable to assume that Newton would have been familiar with it
from his undergraduate days.115 The same can probably be said of John
Calvin’s counsel on accommodation, for while Newton owned a copy of
Calvin’s Institutes,116 Newton does not appear to have owned any com-
mentaries by Calvin (who used accommodation in his commentary on
Genesis). Nor does Newton appear to have owned any of the works in
the controversy that erupted in the 1630s between Alexander Ross and
John Wilkins over Copernicanism and the Bible.117 Newton would have
had ample opportunity to encounter works he himself did not possess
in the libraries of Cambridge and his scholarly acquaintances. At the
same time, it is likely that some of his ideas on the interpretation of
Genesis and the use of accommodating language in the Scriptures derive
from his own innovation, especially in the case of his correspondence
with Burnet. Whatever their origin, Newton’s views stand in a long and
noble tradition of accommodationist hermeneutics stretching back to
the first century A.D. Using the typology of Robert S. Westman, who
distinguished early modern theories of accommodation into “absolute
accommodationism” and “partial accommodationism,”118 we can con-
clude that Newton inclined more closely to the latter, which for him (as
with others) was allied with a form of moderate concordism.

from Kepler’s Astronomia nova and Foscarini’s Lettera on the reconciliation of heliocentrism
and the Bible as well as the purely astronomical arguments of Galileo’s Dialogue, in
addition to arguments of both types found in Derham’s oft-reprinted early eighteenth-
century work.
115
Thomas Salusbury’s English translation of the Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina
was published in 1661, the year Newton began his undergraduate studies in Cambridge.
This text also includes English translations of Kepler’s discussion of accommodation
from the introduction to his Astronomia nova, extracts from Diego de Zuñiga’s commen-
tary on Job, as well as Foscarini’s Letter on the Motion of the Earth, which also advocates
accommodationist hermeneutics to reconcile the Bible with natural philosophy (for
accounts of these texts, see Snobelen 2008). Salusbury’s English translations are pub-
lished in Salusbury 1661, 1: 427–503.
116
Harrison 1978, item 335.
117
Ross denied both Copernicanism and that the Bible accommodates its language
to human understanding; Wilkins affirmed both and contented that no confl ict existed
between heliocentrism and the Word of God. Although it is marred by a caricatured,
essentialist and Whiggish view of the relationship between science and religion, there
is still some value in the seventy-year-old study of this exchange by Grant McColley.
See McColley 1938.
118
With the former position holding that the accommodation in the Bible is complete
(and thus does not speak at all of physical reality), and the latter position holding that
one can still discern descriptions of physical reality once one made allowances for the
accommodated speech (Westman 1986, 90–1).

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The Bible, Natural Philosophy, and the

Hermeneutics of Accommodation

At the beginning of this paper, attention was drawn to Newton’s argu-

ment in his Principia about the need to distinguish between relative
and absolute language in the Scriptures. As we have come to see, this
distinction is one of the foundation stones of his theory of accom-
modation. In fact, for Newton accommodated scriptural language is a
species of relative speech; to mistake it for unaccommodated language
or absolute speech will lead to error. Newton’s writings on accommo-
dation in turn dovetail neatly with other elements of his theology as
well as his natural philosophy. One such element is his epistemological
dualism. Recent scholarship has emphasized how epistemological dual-
ism permeated every aspect of Newton’s thought, from alchemy and
natural philosophy to theology and prophecy. This belief that each of
these disciplines embrace both cognitively open (exoteric) and closed
(esoteric) content that are tied in with relative and absolute realities
that must be distinguished link his reading of nature and his study of
the Bible. Newton was convinced that abstract, absolute concepts had
to be presented through figures in the Bible, and that it would be ille-
gitimate to reify these figures through crude, over-literal readings. This
kind of biblical language should no more be taken in an absolute sense
than the figures the pre-Socratics used for the physical world should
be taken literally. Newton argued that the Bible (at least in its surface
meaning) was written for the common people. This helps explain why
the language of accommodation is employed in the Scriptures, with
examples of this language including biblical descriptions of diseases
as demons and popular descriptions of celestial phenomena—realities
that during biblical times were beyond the capacities of the common
people to understand.
Although none of the published editions of the Principia provide
examples of why the distinction between the absolute and the relative
was so important in the interpretation of biblical passages that mention
natural phenomena, the General Scholium that Newton appended to
the second edition of 1713 does provide examples from theology. In
the General Scholium Newton spoke about the limitations of language
in adequately describing the transcendent God (as in the Bible). These
limitations required the use of anthropomorphisms in portrayals of
God and for this reason God is described as laughing, loving, and hat-
ing. Such anthropomorphic language is a form of accommodation.

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Here the distinction between the relative and absolute is not merely a
matter of hermeneutics, but also forms an element of Newton’s under-
standing of God, who has an absolute existence, even though humans
must experience him indirectly through his works. But Newton’s com-
mitment to a distinction between the absolute and relative also has
a heretical application, for his argument about the relative nature of
the term ‘God’ is directly connected with his anti-Trinitarianism. In
his private manuscripts as well as in his published General Scholium,
Newton articulates his belief that it is both necessary to recognize the
existence of relative language in the Bible and to avoiding committing
a fundamental error by mistaking it for absolute language (which is
what he believed Trinitarians do when they mistake the relative title
‘God’ used of Christ for a declaration that Christ is “very God” in a
metaphysical sense). Thus, while Newton on the one hand seems to
want to argue that one layer of the Bible is accessible to both the vulgar
and the philosophers, while another layer is only accessible to the later,
he also makes another social distinction. Some scriptural texts have
a deeper meaning at their core and thus the Word of God serves in
part to challenge believers and to separate between the good and the
bad. Ultimately, then, there were two types of people: those who get
it and those who do not. Herein is seen an important social corollary
to Newton’s epistemological dualism.
The brief epistolary exchange with Burnet in 1680 and 1681 reveals
advanced thinking on Genesis 1 and what it might say about natural
history; while Newton does not opt for a strictly literal reading of the
text, neither is he willing to go as far in the other direction as Burnet,
who contended that the Creation account merely presented ideal or
moral meaning. Instead, Newton preferred a via media that allows for
accommodation and artificial constructs in the text, but still holds that
it is at some level an account of natural history. The advantage of the
middle path is that it allowed him to take the biblical text seriously
without having to reject the discoveries of natural philosophy. Part of
the realism of the account is explained by its phenomenalistic and ter-
restrial perspectives—perspectives that Newton mentions in his exchange
with Burnet. Genesis 1 was written from the viewpoint of an observer
on Earth and thus it is not completely contrived, but relates directly
to the appearances of nature. His correspondence with Burnet also
demonstrates that Newton felt that knowledge from natural philosophy
could assist the interpretation of the Scriptures.

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In the short treatise on reconciling natural philosophy with biblical

descriptions of Earth and the heavens, Newton appeals directly to the
principle of accommodation, arguing that those who want to use the
Bible as an authority in disputes about the motion of Earth err, “the
Scriptures speaking not in the language of Astronomers (as they think)
but in that of ye common people to whom they were written.” In
this, he comes close to the earlier and similar positions of Augustine,
Calvin, Galileo, and others—even though it is difficult to be certain
how much he owed to previous thinkers on these matters. The title
of this treatise on accommodation indicates that it bore some relation
to the Principia mathematica. Thus it is significant that in a manuscript
draft related to the Scholium on the Definitions, Newton refers to the
two luminaries of Gen. 1:16, revealing that scriptural descriptions of
astronomical phenomena are among the examples behind the state-
ment about interpreting the Scriptures that had appeared in print in
1687. Just as he wrote in the Principia about the need to distinguish
between the absolute and the relative, the true and the apparent, the
mathematical and the common when considering time, space, place, and
motion in physics, so it was when interpreting passages in the Bible that
speak about astronomical and other natural phenomena. Nevertheless,
behind the relative language in the Bible that describes the apparent in
nature for the common people, were absolute, true, and mathematical
realities. What is more, Newton appears to be saying that the absolute
standard for questions about the mobility of Earth—including when
one is considering the meaning of the Bible—is found in mathematics
(or mathematical physics), the success of which had been demonstrated
in his Principia mathematica of 1687.119
As with Copernicans who used accommodation before him, Newton
deemed a recognition of phenomenalistic perspectives and language
pivotal to the right reading of God’s Works and God’s Word. The
commonsense reading of the heavens and the literal way of reading
the Scriptures can be at variance with the actualities of each revela-
tion. With both nature and the Scriptures therefore, the astute reader
will recognize this and adopt those counter-intuitive interpretations
demanded by the best lines of evidence, even though one might want or
need to employ figures to describe certain aspects of nature or biblical

119
This can be compared with Kepler’s view of the standard of knowledge produced
by astronomy as discussed by Barker 2008.

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 “not in the language of astronomers” 527

theology when speaking ad populum. For Newton, the interpretation

of the Scriptures and the observation of nature thus confronted the
philosophically-minded scholar with similar problems. The fundamen-
tal distinction between the actual world and the sensible world (that is,
between the absolute world and relative world), applied to nature as
well as to the Scriptures and thus to biblical hermeneutics as well as
to the practice of physics. Newton’s understanding of this distinction
helps explain his twin commitment to phenomenalism in physics (he was
happy to describe the effects of gravity, but would not in the Principia
speak of its cause) and in doctrine (he preferred to speak of God and
Christ in functional rather than metaphysical terms). In this concep-
tual symmetry we see one of the most powerful relationships between
Newton’s theology and his natural philosophy. Another possible parallel
is seen in his understanding of the unity of the Scriptures. Although
Newton did recognize distinctions of genre in the Bible—after all, he
speaks of the need to understand “the language of the prophets”120—his
reference to the mystical meaning of Christ’s parables in a discussion of
the mystical meaning in prophecy does suggest that he believed there is
an underlying homogeneity in the Scriptures, just as he believed there
is a fundamental homogeneity in nature.121
Copernicus’s De revolutionibus and Newton’s Principia mathematica symbol-
ize for many the commencement and the culmination of the Scientific
Revolution. Issues relating to scriptural hermeneutics are hinted at near
the beginning of both books.122 In the first case the lack of elaboration
is due in part to Copernicus’s recognition that the reconciliation of a
radical theory like heliocentrism with the Scriptures would be deemed
extremely controversial by his contemporaries. In the latter case this
was no longer true. Nevertheless, with respect to the Principia, Newton
had pressing reasons to address hermeneutical questions. Evidence from
his private manuscripts demonstrates that he had thought deeply about
how the biblical depictions of natural phenomena might relate to the
body of knowledge he and others were developing in natural philosophy.
Manuscripts dating from shortly before and shortly after the publica-
tion of the Principia in 1687 reveal that he believed the reconciliation
of astronomy with the Bible was immediately relevant to the contents

120
Newton, Keynes MS 5, ff. Ir, 1r.
121
This point has been developed from a helpful suggestion made by the editors.
122
Copernicus 1978, 2: 5.

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of his magnum opus. Newton was also committed to the doctrine of

the two books, or something very much like it. This commitment to
the truth of both Scripture and nature brought with it a need to find
harmony between these two repositories of divine truth that both come
from the One God. This necessary reconciliation depended on correct
method in both the study of God’s Word as well as of God’s Works.
It was also crucial for a man who was both deeply committed to the
empirical program of natural philosophy and who had a fervent faith
in the Bible as the Word of God.

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 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CREATION, TIME, AND BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS IN

EARLY MODERN JEWISH PHILOSOPHY

T.M. Rudavsky

Introduction

Tension between religion and science characterizes the very essence of

Jewish philosophy. At every stage in Jewish thought, Jews have tried to
accommodate non-Jewish theories and paradigms to a Scriptural based
theology; these theories have included, for example, the philosophical
cosmologies of Plato, of Aristotle, of Ptolemy, of Averroes, of Coper-
nicus, or of contemporary astrophysics. This struggle between Athens
and Jerusalem, between rational speculation and Torah based study, has
been replayed in every generation. Situated always within the larger
context of a majority culture, be it the Hellenistic world, the Islamic
world, the world of Enlightened Europe, or most recent examples of
modernity (and postmodernity), Jews have both rejected and adopted
various aspects of these majority civilizations. For the People of the
Book, it is the word of God, as refl ected in Scripture, that has enjoyed
canonical preeminence.
But if it is above all the content of Jewish texts that matters, where
do these non-Judaic studies in general, and the study of science, in par-
ticular, fit into Jewish thought? And what do we do when the contents
of secular study contravene those texts of traditional learning? These
questions have reappeared throughout Jewish history and thought, from
the works of Philo, to Rosenzweig, culminating with attempts in modern
Jewish thought to accommodate Judaism and contemporary sciences.
This tension is poignantly described by Maimonides (1135–1204) in the
introduction to his major philosophical work Moreh Nevukhim (Guide of
the Perplexed ). In this work, Maimonides applies Aristotelian principles
of mathematics and logic to religious doctrines in such a way that his
intended audience, those devout religious individuals who admire both
science and law, could potentially assuage their intellectual “perplexi-
ties.” Maimonides clearly articulates his twofold purpose in writing this

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comprehensive philosophical treatise: first, to explain the meanings of

certain obscure, equivocal, or allegorical terms occurring in books of
prophecy; and second, to allay the perplexities encountered by a reli-
gious person who has discovered “the sciences of the philosophers.”
More specifically, Maimonides tells us that the purpose of the Guide is
to guide such a “religious man for whom the validity of our Law has
become established in his soul and has become actual in his belief ”
and at the same time has studied “the sciences of the philosophers
and come to know what they signify.” Such an individual stands in
a state of perplexity, not knowing whether to follow his intellect and
“renounce the foundations of the Law,” or hold fast to his understand-
ing of Scripture while “turning his back on it [intellect] and moving
away from it.”1 Maimonides places the Guide at the center of intellectual
attempts to harmonize Jewish texts and beliefs with those “sciences
of the philosophers” as refl ected in the works of Plato, Aristotle, the
Neoplatonists, and the Islamic Kalam writers.
Maimonides thus engages in extensive biblical hermeneutics, inter-
preting Scripture in light of Neoplatonist and Aristotelian cosmologies,
in an attempt to reconcile disparate elements in Jewish belief and
philosophy. The importance of the creation account found in Gen.
1–2 to Jewish belief is reiterated by subsequent thinkers, culminating
with Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, a work in which creation
articulates a foundational element of Jewish belief. But like their
Christian and Moslem counterparts, Jewish thinkers did not always
agree upon what qualifies as an acceptable model of creation. Take,
for example, the first word in Genesis—be-reishit, “in the beginning.”
The very term be-reishit designates the fact that there was a beginning,
i.e., temporality has been introduced if only in the weakest sense that
this creative act occupies an instant of time.2 And so any discussion
of creation, of beginnings, already presupposes a temporal ontology.
How to interpret Gen. 1:1, and what importance to place upon the
terms “beginning,” “creation” and “God,” are issues addressed by
Maimonides, and bequeathed to subsequent Jewish philosophers.
In fact, we shall see that most Jewish philosophical discussions of

1
See Maimonides 1963, 5ff for his introductory comments on how to read the Guide.
Maimonides situates the work clearly within the context of hermeneutic interpretation
of Scripture in light of the contemporary sciences of the day.
2
Cf. Neher 1976, 50: “The primordial element is ‘time’ itself. Creation was mani-
fested in the appearance of time. This time is entirely new. That is the significance
of the verb bara .”

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creation and time represent a hermeneutic interpretation not only of

Scripture, but of Maimonides’ Guide as well; just as Western philosophy
is often regarded as a footnote to Plato, so too Jewish philosophy is quite
often a creative interaction with Maimonides, the most infl uential and
seminal of Jewish thinkers.
In this chapter I turn to those philosophical developments in the
(post-Maimonidean) late medieval and early modern periods that con-
tribute to notions of time, creation, and cosmology in light of both
philosophical and biblical constraints. My analysis will center around
the hermeneutic understanding of the first statement of Genesis, “In
the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” In particular,
I concentrate upon those conceptions of time that appear in the works
of Crescas, Albo, and Spinoza, in their attempt to understand the
philosophical implications of this canonical text. I have chosen these
writers in particular because their works highlight the struggle between
philosophical and scriptural conceptions of time and creation. In these
discussions centering about issues of time and temporality, we shall have
to refl ect upon the hermeneutic tension that develops as philosophers
engage both biblical and philosophical topoi. Although Spinoza is often
regarded (for reasons we shall discuss below) as outside the Jewish canon,
I shall argue that in the context of this debate, Spinoza was engaged
with Jewish texts and themes. He was aware of (and had read) the works
of Maimonides, Crescas, and other Jewish philosophers.3 Like his Jewish
philosophical forebears, he too was involved in the quest to reconcile
Aristotelian metaphysics with broader cosmological and theological
concerns, and like them, he recognized the importance of reconciling
theological and philosophical paradigms of thought.4 And so Spinoza
represents for us the culmination of a rich tradition of Jewish thought.

Fourteenth Century Anti-Aristotelian Critiques:

Crescas and Albo on Time, Creation, and Cosmology

While the story of the interaction between Jewish and Scholastic phi-
losophers is incomplete, nevertheless, recent scholars have begun to

3
See Wolfson 1934 for discussions of the infl uence of Jewish philosophers upon
Spinoza’s intellectual development. Spinoza’s Jewish predecessors are discussed in
Rudavsky (forthcoming) as well.
4
For a recent study of the relation of Spinoza to matters pertaining to Judaism and
theology, see Mason 1997; Ravven and Goodman 2002.

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examine the impact of scholasticism upon late medieval Jewish phi-

losophy. In the fourteenth century, in part as a result of the condemna-
tions of 1277, Christian scholastics (e.g., Thomas Bradwardine; Jean
Buridan) began to question the basic premises of Aristotelian physics,
and suggest non-Aristotelian alternatives. One of the most pervasive
results of the condemnation of 1277 was that it encouraged alternatives
to Aristotelian natural philosophy.5 More specifically, the condemned
propositions directly affected theories of place, the void, and plurality
of worlds, thus giving way to new ways of thinking which helped usher
in the new science. According to Aristotle, the ultimate sphere has no
movement other than that of rotation, its fixed center belonging to the
absolutely immobile body earth. But this view threatened scholastic
notions of omnipotence; that is, it suggested that not even God was able
to displace the immobile center of the universe. The condemnation of
1277 thus targeted those propositions that imputed to God any limits.
The two propositions most important to this new way of thinking were
proposition 34 “Quod prima causa non posset plures mundos facere,”
and proposition 49 “Quod Deus non possit movere celum motu recto.
Et ratio est, quia tunc relinqueret vacuum.”6 As Murdoch and others
have argued, these two propositions represented the foundation of the
whole edifice of Aristotelian physics. Their being declared anathema
implicitly demanded the creation of a new physics that would be
acceptable to Christian reason.7
In exploring the consequences of these condemnations, scholastic
philosophers were encouraged to develop concepts contrary to Aristo-
telian physics and cosmology. With respect to the topic of place/space,
philosophers became increasingly interested in the properties of the
vacuum, e.g., the idea of a completely empty space. Proposition 49 led
to speculation about the existence of multiple universes. Prior to the
condemnations, scholastic philosophers considered the impossibility of

5
For an extensive discussion of the importance of the condemnation of 1277 upon
medieval science, see Grant 1982.
6
Proposition 34 reads “That the first cause could not make many worlds.” Proposi-
tion 49 reads “That God could not move the heavens with rectilinear motion, and the
reason is that a vacuum would remain.” See Murdoch 1991.
7
The question of the extent to which the condemnation of 1277 causally affected the
development of late medieval and early modern science is itself problematic, and has
recently been revisited. While Duhem argued for a strong causal relation, recent scholars
have been reluctant to posit a straightforward causal connection. For a discussion and
summary of recent views, see Murdoch 1991, Grant 1994, and Emery 2001.

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multiple worlds against the backdrop of Aristotelian arguments that

outside the world there cannot be any place because there are no bod-
ies; and there cannot be a void, because a void is a place where there
could be a body where there is presently no body.8 Inasmuch as these
arguments were linked to the issue of God’s omnipotence as well, it
became increasingly popular to argue that God’s creative omnipotence
allowed for the creation of multiple worlds. For example, God was said
to create multiple worlds, each with its own center. On the supposition
that God did make other worlds, it was argued that empty space would
intervene between them. So if God could create a vacuum between
worlds, certainly God could create vacua within the world.9
Writing against the backdrop of these scholastic condemnations,
Hasdai Crescas (1340–ca. 1410) too sought to demolish the Aristotelian
natural philosophy, albeit for theological rather than purely naturalistic
reasons. Born in Barcelona, Crescas studied philosophy and Talmud
under Rabbi Nissim ben Reuben Gerondi. Crescas became the lo-
cal authority on Talmudic law, and was asked by King Peter IV of
Aragon to adjudicate cases concerning Jews. When King John I and
Queen Violante took the throne, he befriended them and enjoyed a
strong social connection with the royal court. He served as a rabbi of
the main royal court at Saragossa in 1389, and by 1390 Crescas was
considered the “judge of all the Jews of the Kingdom of Aragon.”
Philosophically his interests lay in distinguishing the fundamental be-
liefs, or religious concepts, that follow analytically from his view of the
nature of the Torah.
In his major work ’Or ’Adonai (Light of the Lord ), written in 1410 in
response to Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, Crescas argues that the
Torah is a product of voluntary action from God, and certain concepts
follow from this fact undeniably. In the process of upholding the basic
dogmas of Judaism, Crescas subjects Aristotle’s physics and metaphysics
to a trenchant critique. His rejection of Aristotle’s theories of place and
the infinite forms part of an extended attempt to weaken Aristotle’s
hold upon Jewish philosophy. Harvey suggests that Crescas’s work was
“perhaps connected in some way with the pioneering work in natural
science being conducted at the University of Paris.”10 At the very least,

8
Duhem 1985, 442.
9
Grant 1994, 537–540.
10
Harvey 1998, 23.

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it is clear that Crescas is embroiled in precisely the same set of scientific

issues that occupied scholastic philosophers after the Condemnation
of 1277.
Part of Crescas’s rejection of Aristotle, and the Aristotelianism
he finds so objectionable in Maimonides’ Guide, centers around the
doctrine of creation found in Genesis. Both Maimonides and Crescas
were concerned to explicate what they took to be the implicit notion of
time and temporality embedded in the first words of Genesis. Crescas’s
characterization of time and creation occurs against the backdrop of
Maimonides’ summary in his Guide of the Perplexed of Aristotle’s twenty-
five metaphysical propositions.11 In order to understand the full force of
Crescas’s critique of both Aristotle and Maimonides, let us look briefl y
at Maimonides’ account.
In the Introduction to Part II of the Guide Maimonides lists twenty-
five propositions drawn from Aristotle, which purportedly he accepts.
That Maimonides is sympathetic to an Aristotelian theory of time
is evidenced by the following definition he adopts in the fifteenth
proposition:
(Proposition 15) Time is an accident consequent upon motion and is nec-
essarily attached to it. Neither of them exists without the other. Motion
does not exist except in time, and time cannot be conceived by the intel-
lect except together with motion. And all that with regard to which no
motion can be found, does not fall under time.12
In this formulation, Maimonides is clearly following the Aristotelian
definition of time as the “measure of motion.” The implication of this
definition occurs in Guide II.13, in the context of delineating Aristotle’s
eternity thesis. Having stated that Aristotle’s notion involves the creation
of all existence, including time, “time itself being one of the created
things,”13 Maimonides raises several puzzles concerning creation and
time, in the context of the relation between God’s actions and the
domain of temporality. Surely, he claims, no temporal predicates can

11
This discussion occurs in ’Or ’Adonai (The Light of the Lord ), Part I.2.11 and I.1,15
in Wolfson 1929, 282–91. Recent discussions of Crescas’s theory of time and its rela-
tion to Aristotle can be found in the following works: Harvey 1980, Schweid 1972,
and Wolfson 1929.
12
Maimonides 1963, II: 237. This definition is refl ected in two other contexts as
well. In Guide I.52, Maimonides defines time as “an accident attached to motion when
the motion of priority and posteriority is considered in the latter and when motion
becomes numbered.” And in a letter to Ibn Tibbon he defines time as “the measure
of motion according to prior and posterior in motion.”
13
Maimonides 1963, II:13, 281.

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 creation, time, and biblical hermeneutics 537

be used to describe God’s activities or nature before the creation, since

before creation there is no time. Interpreting the first verses of Genesis,
he argues that
Accordingly, ones saying: God ‘was’ before he created the world—where
the word ‘was’ is indicative of time—and similarly all the thoughts that
are carried along in the mind regarding the infinite duration of his
existence before the creation of the world, are all of them due to a sup-
position regarding time or to an imagining of time and not due to the
true reality of time.14
Several points are worth noting in this passage. First, Maimonides is
suggesting that inasmuch as God transcends the temporal sphere and
does not operate in a temporal context, Maimonides describes the
duration or eternity of the Deity in atemporal terms, so as to pre-
clude any temporal predications of God. To predicate of God infinite
duration has no temporal meaning. Thus with respect to creation,
Maimonides maintains in Guide II.13 that “God’s bringing the world
into existence does not have a temporal beginning, for time is one of
the created things.”15 Maimonides does not want to suggest that time
itself is eternal, for “if you affirm as true the existence of time prior to
the world, you are necessarily bound to believe in the eternity [of the
world].”16 But neither will he claim that the creation of the world is a
temporally specifiable action, for in the Aristotelian definition of time,
the world must be beginningless in the sense that it has no temporal
beginning. While supporting on an exoteric level the Scriptural read-
ing of creation, on an esoteric level Maimonides is suggesting that an
Aristotelian theory of time (which he accepts) is more consistent with
an eternity model of the universe.17
Crescas disagrees with Maimonides’ interpretation of Scripture in
light of an Aristotelian model of temporality, and he offers an anti-
Aristotelian interpretation of Genesis. Starting with Maimonides’ ac-
count of time, he first reiterates Maimonides’ fifteenth proposition:
Proof of the fifteenth proposition which reads: ‘Time is an accident that
is consequent on motion and is conjoined with it. Neither one of them
exists without the other. Motion does not exist except in time, and time

14
Ibid.
15
Maimonides 1963, II:13, 282.
16
Ibid.
17
For further discussion of the implications of Maimonides’ theory, see Rudavsky
2000.

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cannot be conceived except with motion, and whatsoever is not in motion

does not fall under the category of time.18
This statement, which is taken directly from Maimonides, is then
contrasted with Aristotle’s own definition: “Aristotle defines time as
the number of priority and posteriority of motion.”19 In Part II of ’Or
’Adonai Crescas turns to a critical evaluation of this Aristotelian concep-
tion of time, replacing Aristotle’s definition with his own, namely that
time can measure rest as well.20
Crescas’s theory of time incorporates several important elements.
The first is that time can measure rest as well as motion. Secondly,
time can be measured by rest as well as by motion. And finally, time exists
only in the soul. The first two points are captured in Crescas’s revised
definition of time: “the correct definition of time is that it is the mea-
sure of the continuity of motion or of rest between two instants.”21 In
this definition Crescas retains Aristotle’s and Maimonides’ notion of
time as a ‘measure’ or ‘number.’ However, Crescas adds the important
qualification that time is the measure not only of motion or change,
but of rest as well.
Crescas then goes on to say that the genus most appropriate to time
is magnitude. Inasmuch as time belongs to continuous quantity and
number to discrete quantity, if we describe time as number, we describe
it by a genus, which is not essential to it. Time is “indeed measured
by both motion and rest, because it is our conception of the measure
of their continuity that is time.”22 On this basis Crescas concludes that
“the existence of time is only in the soul.”23 It is because humans have
a mental conception of this measure that time even exists. The con-
tinuity of time depends only upon a thinking mind, and is indefinite,
becoming definite only by being measured by motion. Were we not to
conceive of it, there would be no time.
How then, in light of his rejection of both Aristotle and Maimonides,
does Crescas understand the statement in Scripture, “in the beginning
God created?” Without entering into the intricacies of his technical
discussion, several important points can be made. Crescas takes as his

18
Crescas 1929, I.1.15, 283.
19
Ibid., 285.
20
Ibid., 287–9.
21
Crescas, ’Or ’Adonai I.2.15 (in Wolfson 1929, 289).
22
Wolfson 1929, 289.
23
Ibid.

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 creation, time, and biblical hermeneutics 539

point of departure the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, which for him

represents a nontemporal action on the part of God. He then tries to
show that eternal creation is a plausible doctrine even in the context
of creation ex nihilo by exploring the notion of divine omnipotence.
God’s power is infinite in the sense that God’s acts are not temporally
limited. Inasmuch as God acts under no constraints, when God creates
the world, God is able to create something that is infinite in duration,
or eternal. It is in this sense that Crescas claims that the world is both
eternal and created.24
In order to support his claim that the initial instant of creation does
not imply a “before,” Crescas draws upon the arguments of his im-
mediate predecessor Gersonides (1288–1344). Gersonides’ major work
Milhamot HaShem (Wars of the Lord ), finished in 1329, was written in
response to Maimonides’ Guide and addressed all the major philosophi-
cal issues of the day, including the problem of creation. Gersonides is
concerned to interpret Genesis in a way that upholds the act of creation,
but is consistent with Aristotle’s metaphysics of time. In order to retain
both creation and temporality, Gersonides distinguishes two roles of
the instant: an initial instant, which does not yet constitute time, and
subsequent instants, which demarcate ‘before’ from ‘after.’ According
to Gersonides, these two notions of the instant serve different functions.
The first delimits a particular portion of time, namely continuous quan-
tity, and is characterized in terms of duration. The latter, on the other
hand, refl ects the Aristotelian function of the instant as characterizing
division. Gersonides claims that if there were no difference between
these two functions of the instant, we could not distinguish between
any two sets of fractions of time, for example three hours and three
days, because our measure of the two sets would be identical. Since
each period of time would be divided by the same kind of instant, there
would be no way of distinguishing three days from three hours.25 On
the basis of this distinction, Gersonides therefore defines time as “the
measure of motion as a whole according to the instants which form
the boundaries of motion but not according to the instants which only
distinguish the before from the after.”26

24
Crescas’s argument is contained in ’Or ’Adonai III.1.5, 69a. For a critical discussion
of these arguments, see Feldman 1980, 304ff.
25
Gersonides 1866, 6:1:21, 387.
26
Ibid.

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Refl ecting Gersonides’ characterization of time, Crescas argues that

an “initial instant” can serve as the absolute beginning of time with-
out implying a prior temporal unit. He claims that “God created and
brought forth the universe at a definite instant.”27 That is, he argues
that the universe has a temporal beginning. But, as we noted above,
having a temporal beginning does not mean that Crescas rejects the
doctrine of eternity altogether. Because he has already abandoned the
Aristotelian identification of time and motion, Crescas is able to argue
that the notion of ‘creation’ of the world does not refer to a temporal
beginning. Rather, for Crescas, the world is both eternal and created:
because time and motion are not interconnected, Crescas is able to
interpret Genesis in a way that, on Aristotelian grounds appears to be
self-contradictory.28
Crescas responds to Aristotle’s arguments from circular motion by
claiming that “they are likewise inconclusive, being again based upon
the analogy of a [finite] sensible body.”29 For example, Crescas explains
the motion of the outermost celestial sphere on the grounds that it
rotates in an infinite vacuum; the sphere is no longer conceived as the
final limit or boundary of the space of the universe. In an interesting
gambit, Crescas uses Aristotle’s arguments against an absolute beginning
to motion (in Physics VI.5.23a 236aff ) in order to uphold an infinite
series of causation. Appropriating Aristotle’s dictum that there can be
no first part of motion, because every object that is moved must have
already been moved, Crescas maintains that
it is not inconceivable, therefore, that the infinite line [in question] should
meet the other line in a finite distance with a finite motion, and this may
be accounted for by the fact that the extreme beginning of motion must
take place in no-time.30
Crescas thus parts company with generations of Aristotelians who had
used the denial of an infinite series of causes to postulate the necessary
existence of a prime mover; Crescas therefore will have to resort to
other arguments to postulate the existence of God.

27
Crescas, ’Or ’Adonai III.1.5:70a.
28
Crescas, ’Or ’Adonai III.1.4 66a–68b. Commentators have tried to make sense
of Crescas’s apparently contradictory theory. For further discussion of this theory of
creation, see Feldman 1980, 289–320; Schweid 1972, 44.
29
Crescas, ’Or ’Adonai I. II (in Wolfson 1929, 205).
30
Crescas, ’Or ’Adonai I.1.2 (in Wolfson 1929, 213).

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 creation, time, and biblical hermeneutics 541

One important implication of Crescas’s alternative conception of

time, place, and infinity has to do with his postulating the existence of
the vacuum. According to Crescas, place is prior to bodies: in contra-
distinction to Aristotle’s conception of place, space for Crescas is not
a mere relationship of bodies but is the “interval between the limits of
that which surrounds.”31 Space is construed by Crescas as an infinite
continuum ready to receive matter . Because this place or extension of
bodies is identified with space, there is no contradiction in postulating
the existence of space not-filled with body, i.e., the vacuum.32 Crescas,
in fact, assumes that place is identical with the void, on the grounds
that “place must be equal to the whole of its occupant as well as to
[the sum of] its parts.”33 Harvey has characterized four parallels be-
tween Crescas’s concepts of space and time. First, space and time are
both defined as “continuous quantity” as opposed to discrete quantity.
Second, both are defined as separate from physical objects; both would
continue to exist even if there were no physical objects in the universe.
Third, both are supposed infinite, as refl ected in the description of
space as an “infinite magnitude.” And finally, both the place and time
of a given thing are conceived as intervals.34
We have seen that Maimonides and Crescas offered differing herme-
neutic accounts of the first verse of Genesis. These accounts introduced
differing temporal models as well. Crescas’s student Joseph Albo ex-
panded upon his teacher’s conception of time, introducing an idealistic
dimension to time. Born in the Crown of Aragon, Joseph Albo studied
as a youth with Crescas. He moved to Soria around the time that Da-
roca was destroyed. In his major philosophical treatise Sefer ha-Ikkarim
(the Book of Principles), Albo addresses the following religious dogmas:
God’s existence, divine revelation, and punishment and reward. In ad-
dition to arguing for the divine attributes, Albo takes a critical look at
Maimonides’ proofs for God’s existence. In a similar critical spirit, he
warns his readers that his masterpiece contains deliberate contradictions
and that the reader ought to read carefully and responsibly. In this work,
Albo incorporates Maimonides’ discussion of preexistent matter into

31
Crescas, ’Or ’Adonai I.1.2 (in Wolfson 1929, 195).
32
For a detailed analysis of Crescas’s conception of space, see Wolfson 1929, 38–69.
See also Davidson, 1987, 253ff.
33
Crescas 1929, ’Or ’Adonai I.1.2, 199.
34
See Harvey 1998, 6–7 for elaboration of these points.

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542 t.m. rudavsky

his own examination of the doctrine of creation espoused in Genesis,

which is couched in the context of developing a theory of time.
Albo is one of the first Jewish philosophers to espouse the view that
time is a phenomenon of the imagination, a motif introduced by Cres-
cas and recurring in Spinoza. By removing the connection between
time and motion, Albo, following his teacher Crescas, emphasizes the
subjectivity of time: time is not dependent upon the motion of objects
in the natural order. Albo’s discussion of time occurs in the context
of demonstrating that God is independent of time. For Albo, God’s
independence of time comprises both God’s eternity and perpetuity
and is upheld as a basic principle:35
The third dogma is that God is independent of time. This means that
God existed before time, and will exist after time ceases, therefore his
power is infinite. For everyone who is dependent upon time is necessar-
ily limited in power, which ends with time. Since, therefore God is not
dependent upon time, his power is infinite.36
By God’s priority Albo means that nothing was prior to God, not
even nonexistence; God has always existed “in the same way without
change.”37 Similarly God’s eternality means that nothing is posterior
to God, not even time. For if time outlasted God either a parte ante or
a parte post, then God would exist at one instant of time and not at
another; this, of course, would undermine God’s necessary existence.
These comments lead Albo to examine the nature of time and creation
more closely. God’s eternality holds, he claims,
even if by time we mean unmeasured duration conceived only in thought,
existing always, both before the creation of the world and after its ces-
sation, but without the order apparent from the motion of the sphere,
since the sphere was then neither in motion nor existent.38
Only measured time cannot exist without motion. Time itself, according
to Albo is not dependent upon motion and even preexisted the world.
Furthermore, time, he argues, has no actual existence:
[ just as] time is not an actual existent, for the past is no longer here,
the future is not yet, and the present is merely the now which binds the
past to the future. The now itself is not real time since it is not divisible,

35
Albo, 1929–30, I.130.
36
Ibid., 30, II.18.108–9.
37
Ibid., 30, II.18.109.
38
Ibid., 30, II.18.110.

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 creation, time, and biblical hermeneutics 543

whereas time is divisible, pertaining as it does to continuous quantity.

The now is related to time as the point is related to the line. Time is
therefore not an actual existent, and yet it gives perfection of existence
to all things existing in time.39
Albo then distinguishes between ‘plain time’ and ‘the order of time’
as follows: Whereas plain time is neither numbered nor measured, the
order of times is numbered and measured by the motion of the diur-
nal sphere. In contrast to ordered time, plain time is eternal duration.
Albo then raises two perplexities pertaining to time. The first puzzle is
whether time originates in time or not. The solution is that although
time has no origin and does not come to be in time, the ‘order of time’
originates in time.40 The second puzzle concerns the instant: “The now,
it is said, divides the past from the future. There is therefore a time
before the first now, and hence time and the sphere are eternal.”41
Albo’s answer, relying on his twofold notion of time, is that Aristotle’s
argument refers only to the ‘order of times’ and not to ‘plain time’:
plain time in which there is no motion
has not the elements prior and posterior, and it is not subject to measure
because measure cannot apply to time without motion. The terms prior
and posterior apply to it [plain time] only figuratively and loosely.42
Albo thus incorporates a number of elements into his discussion. Start-
ing with the doctrine of creation expressed in Genesis, he constructs
a philosophical way of reading the creative act that incorporates a
subjective theory of time.

Judaism, Biblical Hermeneutics, and the Rise of Modern Science

Notwithstanding the condemnation of 1277 of the doctrine of the eter-

nity of time, the Aristotelian emphasis upon eternity was nevertheless
embraced and refined by the scholastic community of philosophers.43

39
Albo, 1929–30, III.27.259. Albo draws an analogy between time and the com-
mandments, on the grounds that neither has an independent existence. In this regard,
Albo is presenting a nominalist ontology.
40
Ibid., 30, II.18.111.
41
Ibid., 30, II.18.111.
42
Ibid., 30, II.18.111–112.
43
See Hutton, 1977, 348. For an excellent discussion of the impact of the Con-
demnation of 1277 upon the development of medieval philosophy and science, see
Murdoch, 1991, 253–302, esp. 259ff.

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Aristotelian conceptions of time and creation reappeared throughout

the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But Aristotle had his critics as
well, stemming first from Plotinus and then Crescas, who emphasized
that time is the product of the soul and is defined in accordance with
duration rather than number. In the early Renaissance, many philoso-
phers reintroduced Neoplatonic criticisms of Aristotle’s theory of time.
For example, in his commentary upon the Enneads of Plotinus, Ficino
reiterates Plotinus’s doctrine of the inseparability of time and soul.44
Among others, Pico della Mirandola echoes Crescas in his rejection of
Aristotle’s theory of time, quoting Crescas’s definition of time as
the measure of continuity whether of movement or of rest, between two
moments (Definit autem ipsum tempus ita (ut eius verbis agam) mensura
continuitatis vel motus, vel quietis, quae inter duo momenta).45
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ‘time’ as a philosophi-
cal subject began to differ markedly from ‘time’ as a subject of natural
science, and both began to move away from the notion of time and
beginning found in Scripture. Within the works of Descartes, Spinoza
and Leibniz, for example, conceptions of time were integral to meta-
physical views of matter and extension. Theology, metaphysics, and
physics were evolving methodologically, and were approaching their
subject-matter very differently.
Jewish thinkers during this period continued to be infl uenced by the
philosophical developments of their peers; interpretations of Scripture,
and the doctrine of creation in particular, were reconceptualized in light
of these philosophical developments. The work of Judah Abravanel
(“Leone Ebreo” ca. 1460–after 1523) represents an excellent example of
the fusion of Hebraic thought with Ficino’s revival of Greek philosophy.
Abravanel was friendly with scholars of the Platonic Academy in Flor-
ence, and served as the physician to the Spanish viceroy, Don Gonsalvo
de Córdoba. Like Plato, Judah wrote his major dialogue Dialoghi d’Amore
with the interlocutors representing the epitome of platonic lovers. The
work represents an attempt to understand Jewish concepts such as the
biblical notion of creation in light of the Renaissance Neoplatonism
permeating Florence. Abravanel constructs an allegory between two
Jewish courtiers, Philo and Sophia, in order to illustrate the importance

44
Ficino 1576.
45
Pico della Mirandola 1573, vol. 2, 1198, quoted in Hutton 1977, 353.

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of the philosophical love of God.46 Philo has explained to Sophia the

origins of love, which raises the more general question of when love
was born: was it produced from eternity or was it created in time? Philo
immediately connects this question with the issue of the origin of the
universe, which leads to a summary of the three regnant positions on
the creation of the universe—that of Plato, that of Aristotle, and that
of Moses, as refl ected in Scripture. In the course of explaining why
on the Aristotelian model the universe is eternal, Philo alludes to the
view that time must likewise be eternal,
for any given instant is in reality the end of past time and the beginning
of the future, and there can be no instant which is the first and the begin-
ning of time. Time is therefore, eternal and without beginning.47
Philo then attempts a reconciliation of Platonic theory with Mosaic law
and Lurianic Kabbalah, applying this reconciliation to the doctrine of
love. Thus even in a neoplatonic work devoted primarily to issues of
love of God, we find discussion of time and temporality against the
backdrop of scriptural theories of creation.
Jewish philosophers in Renaissance Italy were infl uenced not only by
the humanist revival of Platonism and Neoplatonism, but by the Coper-
nican revolution as well. The emphasis upon philosophy, theology, and
science found its way into Jewish philosophical texts in the late fifteenth
century onward. No longer was it sufficient to read Genesis in isolation
from other intellectual developments; Jewish thinkers were expected
to incorporate new scientific developments in their understanding of
Scripture. Ruderman and others have surveyed the impact of astronomy
upon sixteenth-century Eastern European Jewish philosophers. Citing
the works of Moses Isserles of Cracow, the Maharal of Prague, and
David Gans, Isserles’ most successful student in the sciences, Ruderman
raises the tantalizing question of the extent to which developments in
contemporary astronomy affected their works.48
In this regard, David Gans (1541–1613) presented an interesting case
study. Gans was totally conversant with biblical and Rabbinic texts,
but he was up to date on contemporary work in astronomy and other

46
For details of Judah Abrabanel’s work, see Tirosh-Rothschild 1997, 522ff.
47
Leone Ebreo 1937, p. 280.
48
Ruderman mentions the work of Moses Isserles who, writing in Cracow, was
clearly fascinated by astronomy. “Was it merely a coincidence that Isserles lived in the
same city where Copernicus had written his revolutionary work?” Ruderman asks.
See Ruderman 1995, 68ff.

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sciences as well. His major works in astronomy were written to address

what he regarded as widespread scientific ignorance on the part of his
Jewish compatriots. Gans believed that knowledge of astronomy was
a prerequisite for being a Jewish scholar; hence his work in astronomy
was meant in part to improve the level of intellectual knowledge among
sixteenth-century Jews.49 More specifically, he encouraged his peers to
study Scripture in light of recent findings in astronomy, and urged them
not to be ignorant of new scientific developments. In his work Nehmad
ve-Na’im, he traced recent developments in astronomy and mentions
Copernicus as the greatest astronomer since Ptolemy. Nevertheless, in
his own astronomical writings, Gans adhered to the geocentric models
of Brahe and Kepler.50 As Noah Efron notes, Gans is singular in that
he is the only Jew known to have visited and worked at Benatky, the
celebrated observatory of Tycho Brahe; he attended the observatory for
three five-day visits in 1599 and 1600, and conferred on several occa-
sions with Johannes Kepler about esoteric astronomical questions.51

Spinoza and Biblical Hermeneutics

Let us turn finally to Spinoza, whose work on time and duration refl ects
the culmination of the Aristotelian philosophical tradition traced in
this study. Contending with Maimonides for the title of most infl u-
ential Jewish philosopher of all time, Spinoza is also one of the most
unique and important early modern philosophers. Spinoza was born in
Amsterdam and grew up in the Portuguese-Jewish converso community.
He was forced to abandon his studies at the age of seventeen to help
run his family’s importing business. By 1656, however, Spinoza’s life
among the Jewish conversos came to an abrupt end, as he was excom-
municated by Amsterdam’s Sephardic community.
I shall not enter into the details of Spinoza’s personal drama. That
has been documented recently in Nadler’s admirable biography of
Spinoza.52 It is, however, important to recognize the unusual nature of
the Amsterdam Jewish community that, consisting primarily of former
conversos, was actually closer to Catholic sentiment than many other

49
See details in Efron 1995, 17ff.
50
For discussions of David Gans, see Levine 1983, 207; Neher 1986, 216ff.; Ruder-
man 1995, 83. See Gans 1743, 9a.
51
See Efron 1995.
52
See Nadler 1999 for details of Spinoza’s life and thought.

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historical Jewish communities.53 The Sephardim of Amsterdam were

not shy about using the writ of excommunication (herem). Disregarding
Maimonides’ admonition to wield this most extreme form of punish-
ment only sparingly, the leaders of the congregation employed the
herem widely for maintaining discipline. It was into this community that
Spinoza was born, and it was this community that judged his actions
and thoughts. On 27 July 1656, Spinoza’s herem was announced from
the synagogue of the Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam. The “Lords of
the Ma’amad,” the governing body of six parnassim and the gabbai,
proclaimed that:
having long known of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Spinoza,
they have endeavored by various means and promises, to turn him from
his evil ways. But having failed to make him mend his wicked ways, and,
on the contrary, daily receiving more and more serious information about
the abominable heresies which he practiced and taught and about his
monstrous deeds, and having for this numerous trustworthy witnesses who
have deposed and born witness to this effect in the presence of the said
Espinoza, they became convinced of the truth of this matter; and . . . they
have decided, with their consent, that the said Espinoza should be excom-
municated and expelled from the people of Israel . . .54
Although Spinoza’s views were not actually published before his
excommunication, nevertheless his perceived views were regarded with
suspicion by the rabbinical court in Amsterdam, which objected to the
perceived “objectionable views and heresies” refl ected in Spinoza’s con-
duct. Scholars have speculated over the cause of this event: while some
have suggested a socio-economic explanation for Spinoza’s marginaliza-
tion,55 others have suggested that the excommunication was possibly a
result of Spinoza’s radical views.56 Because we have very little informa-
tion pertaining to Spinoza’s formative years, scholars have disagreed over
whether these radical views can be traced to radical Christian groups
with whom Spinoza was apparently associated.57 For instance, Spinoza

53
Perhaps the best recent discussion of the impact of Marrano existence upon the
Portuguese community in Amsterdam can be found in Yovel 1989.
54
Kasher and Biderman 1990, 98–99. For further discussion of the reasons and
implications of Spinoza’s excommunication, see Nadler 2007; Pines 1987, and Popkin
1997.
55
See Israel 1985 for an economic account of Spinoza’s life and excommunication.
56
See for example Nadler 1999; Yovel 1989; Kasher and Biderman 1990, for
discussion of this issue.
57
This possibility is discussed in Kasher and Biderman 1990; Nadler 1999; Popkin
2002.

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rejected central religious notions such as the immortality of the soul,

a providential God, and human free will (as it is typically construed
as standing outside of nature). He held that adequate understanding
of God’s nature was possible for humans. Perhaps most unique to his
philosophy was Spinoza’s pantheism: that the universe contains only
one substance, which is infinite, uncaused, and necessarily exists. All
that exists is in God and God is the underlying substance that sustains
all that exists. His view of “omnitemporality” refl ected a response to
those who believe that God does endure through all possible times.58 In
Spinoza’s view, to conceive Divine eternity correctly is to understand
that “temporal extension and temporal contrasts cannot apply to Divine
existence.”59 But it was Spinoza’s taking upon himself a complete
reconceptualization of Scripture that so alienated the Jewish communal
leaders in Amsterdam. Concerned to free philosophy and the study
of nature from what he saw as the shackles of theology, Spinoza held
controversial views on how to read and evaluate statements in Scripture.
These views were embedded in his methodological concern with truth,
and with scientific truth in particular.
In discussing Spinoza’s methodological interests in the new sciences
and mathematics, we must note the infl uence of Delmedigo upon
Spinoza. Joseph Solomon Delmedigo (1591–1655) recognized the
challenge of the new Copernican astronomy. Ruderman has empha-
sized Delmedigo’s tendency, along with that of his mentor Galileo, to
understand the natural world outside the framework of Aristotelian
physics; it is this tendency that is aligned with Delmedigo’s interest in
Kabbalah and Neoplatonic thought.60 In his work Sefer Elim, a work that
discusses in great detail Galileo’s scientific theories, Delmedigo describes
the “strange astronomy,” as well as the dangers inherent in this new
astronomy, which challenged the reigning metaphysics.61 In this work
Delmedigo mentions Galileo as his “Rabbi” and notes that Galileo

58
See Spinoza 1985, 299–348 “Cogitata Metaphysica” 2: “the quantity of dura-
tion applies to modes but not to God. To ascribe duration to God is to render God’s
essence mutable.”
59
McGuire 1978, 27.
60
See Ruderman 1995, 134. Ruderman himself does not offer a study of Sefer Elim,
choosing to concentrate instead upon the Matzref la-Hokhman, a defense of Kabbalah,
and Mikhtav Ahuz, a condemnation of Kabbalistic thought.
61
Delmedigo 1864, 301; See Levine 1983, 208–9. For a survey and discussion of
Delmedigo’s work, see Barzilay 1974; Ruderman 1995, 118–152.

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allowed him to make observations with his “famous telescope.”62 Galileo

introduced Delmedigo to the Copernican system, which Delmedigo
praises, although he is careful not to abandon Ptolemy.63 He says that
Copernicus’s proofs are convincing, and “anyone who will not accept
them can only be classed as a perfect imbecile.”64 Delmedigo visited
Amsterdam in 1626 and was befriended by Spinoza’s teacher Manasseh
ben Israel who published, among other works, Delmedigo’s Sefer Elim.
Spinoza had a copy of Delmedigo’s works in his library and this could
very well have been one of his first encounters with the Renaissance
mathematics, mechanics, and astronomy. Through Delmedigo, Spinoza
could have become acquainted with the cosmology of Copernicus and
Galileo, and embarked upon a journey that was to take him far from
his roots in Jewish learning and texts.65
In fact, it is hard, when writing of Spinoza’s excommunication by
the Jewish community of Amsterdam, not to be reminded of the Galileo
Affair. Both Galileo and Spinoza shared a methodological program of
natural science that, rooted in a mathematical view of nature, was then
applied to Scripture. In their adoption of the methods of philosophy
and science, they both challenged the limits of their social, intellectual,
and theological margins. It is this methodological preoccupation that
doomed them both and ultimately subjected them to the charge of
heresy.66 Nevertheless, notwithstanding the methodological similarities
between Galileo and Spinoza, there exist important differences as well.
In a recent article, Popkin has reminded us that while we know exactly
why Galileo was excommunicated, the case of Spinoza’s excommunica-
tion is not so straightforward. In the Galileo Affair, we know that the
church authorities resented Galileo’s intrusion into biblical hermeneutics,
and we know exactly which Galilaean theses the authorities abhored.
But in the case of Spinoza, all we know is that he allegedly held perni-
cious views; we are not ever told what those views are. 67
One possibility lies in Spinoza’s application of the paradigm of
mathematical certainty to biblical hermeneutics. For Spinoza, geo-
metry itself is taken to be paradigmatic of mathematical certainty. In the

62
See Delmedigo 1864, 301, 417.
63
Delmedigo 1864, 300, 304, 315.
64
Delmedigo 1864, 304; See Neher, 1986.
65
See Levy 1989, 27.
66
See Rudavsky 2001 for an elucidation of these points.
67
See Popkin 2002 for a comparison of Galileo and Spinoza.

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case of confl ict between two statements or positions, Spinoza prefers

the guidance of mathematical reason above the suggestions of expe-
rience. According to Spinoza, for example, mathematics, “which is
concerned not with ends but only with the essence and properties of
figures, had not shown men another standard of truth.”68 By eliminating
the quest for final causes, mathematics reintroduces a model of proper
order against which other objects can be studied. For example, in his
preface to Ethics III, Spinoza says that he will “consider human actions
and appetites just as if I were considering lines, planes, or bodies.”69
Here the proper method of study of human action, including human
emotions, is geometry; not, for sure, the Archimedean geometry of
Galileo, but a Euclidean geometry nonetheless.
But what do we do in situations that appear to be impervious not
only to the mathematical certitude exemplified by geometry, but also
to the entire domain of natural science? In particular, how do we
approach the truths of theology, which utilize their own measure of
certitude independent of scientific method? According to Spinoza,
herein lies the major source of confl ict between science and theology.
Spinoza recognizes the difficulties inherent in understanding theological
statements and dogmas. The certainty refl ected in prophecy itself is
based on the imaginative and not the rational faculty, he argues, and
so does not carry the sort of certainty refl ected by metaphysics and
ontology: “the certainty afforded by prophecy was not a mathematical
certainty, but only a moral certainty.”70 And so the certitude represented
by mathematical geometry is pitted against the constraints of biblical
interpretation. It is this elevation of mathematical certainty over the
certainty grounded in revelation that gave rise to the antagonism of
Spinoza’s audiences. The techniques used by Spinoza to analyze Scrip-
ture are a direct result of the challenges of the new science. Forcing
his readers to read Scripture using a mathematical methodology tied to
his conception of science, Spinoza introduces a radical reinterpretation
of scriptural passages.
Before turning to his hermeneutic methods, let us say a bit more
about Spinoza’s conception of truth. In one of his earliest works, his
commentary upon Descartes’ Principles, Spinoza appears to follow the

68
Spinoza 1985, Ethics I:Appendix, 441.
69
Ibid., Ethics 4. Preface, 492.
70
Ibid., TTP Preface, 74.

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single-truth theory inherited from his medieval forebears that truth

does not contradict truth:
Finally, if any other passages which give rise to scruples still occur in
Sacred Scripture, this is not the place to explain them . . . the truth does
not contradict the truth, nor can Scripture teach such nonsense as is com-
monly supposed. For if we were to discover in it anything that would be
contrary to the natural light, we could refute it with the same freedom
which we employ when we refute the Koran and the Talmud. But let us
not think for a moment that anything could be found in Sacred Scripture
that would contradict the natural light.71
On this paradigm, adopted by many medieval Jewish philosophers,
there is nothing in Scripture that could contradict the “natural light”
of reason: there is only one fact of the matter, and both Scripture and
reason are refl ective of that reality.
But in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (Theologico-Political Treatise),72
Spinoza postulates the incommensurability of Scripture and reason:
the authority of the prophets carries weight only in matters concerning
morality and true virtue. In other matters their beliefs are irrelevant.
Now I found nothing expressly taught in Scripture that was not in agree-
ment with the intellect or that contradicted it, and I also came to see that
the prophets taught only very simple doctrines easily comprehensible by
all . . . So I was completely convinced that Scripture does not in any way
inhibit reason and has nothing to do with philosophy, each standing on
its own footing . . . I show in what way Scripture must be interpreted, and
how all our understanding of Scripture and of matters spiritual must be
sought from Scripture alone, and not from the sort of knowledge that
derives from the natural light of reason.73
Here Spinoza argues that Scripture and reason occupy different realms,
thus affecting the relation of faith and theology to philosophy:
we may maintain as incontrovertible that neither is theology required to
be subordinated to reason nor reason to theology, and that each has its
own domain. The domain of reason, we have said, is truth and wisdom,
the domain of theology is piety and obedience.74
By removing the domain of theology from that of ‘truth,’ and relegat-
ing it to piety and obedience, Spinoza is undermining the cognitive

71
Spinoza 1985, On Descartes’ Principles 9: 331.
72
In subsequent discussion, I shall refer to this work as TTP.
73
Spinoza 1991, TTP 14: 231.
74
Ibid., 232.

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import of theological statements that presume to offer a metaphysical

or naturalistic conception of reality. Truth is associated with reason,
with philosophical refl ection, and does not pertain to what we find in
Scripture, which as noted above, is associated with the imaginative
sphere. In the Ethics, Spinoza returns to the notion of truth in more
detail, and elaborates three distinct epistemic levels of truth, which
he articulates in terms of imagination, reason, and intuitive science.
According to Spinoza, the knowledge of the first kind (imagination) is
the cause of falsity, whereas knowledge of the second and third orders
is necessarily true.75 Spinoza goes on to argue in the demonstration to
Ethics 2:41 that the first kind of knowledge concerns all those ideas that
are inadequate and confused.
Furthermore, Spinoza denies that God is literally the author of
Scripture or that Moses wrote all, or even much, of the Torah.76 In
claiming that Scripture had many authors, Spinoza was not unique;
medieval Jewish philosophers such as Ibn Ezra had already suggested
that Moses, for example, could not have written about his own death.
But Spinoza emphasized the hermeneutic implications of this claim: if
the Bible is a historical document, and not the product of supernatural
authorship, it must be treated like any other work of nature. There is
no domain of truth unique to Scripture that is not shared by other
intellectual disciplines. By removing the unique, unassailable quality
of Biblical statements, Spinoza paves the way for the independence
of philosophical (and scientific) truth on the one hand, and religious
belief on the other.
In order to understand the radical nature of Spinoza’s move, let
us briefl y compare his attitude toward Scripture with that of Mai-
monides. Whereas Maimonides in the Guide tried to find evidence of
philosophical nuggets in Scripture, Spinoza argued that this search was
useless. Spinoza frequently cites Maimonides’ biblical exegeses, often
to disagree with him. For example, Spinoza quotes at length a passage
from the Guide in which Maimonides tries to explain why the biblical
view of creation ex nihilo is preferable to Aristotle’s eternity thesis; he
then attacks Maimonides’ use of philosophical exegesis of the Bible as
“noxious, useless and absurd.”77
Spinoza is quite explicit about his intentions in the TTP. In a letter to

75
See Spinoza 1985 Ethics 2:41.
76
Spinoza 1991, TTP:14
77
Ibid., 76; see also his discussion in chapter 15.

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Oldenberg, written in 1665, he states two explicit aims of his work: to

enable ordinary humans to engage in philosophical thinking by freeing
them from the errors and prejudices of the theologians; and to free phi-
losophy itself from the shackles and authority of religious authorities.78
In order to achieve his aims, Spinoza sees as his task the development
of a biblical hermeneutic that can allow for a new understanding of
Scripture that does not enslave philosophy or would-be philosophers.
In the preface to the TTP, Spinoza rails against those who
do not even glimpse the divine nature of Scripture, and the more enthusi-
astic their admiration of these mysteries, the more clearly they reveal that
their attitude to Scripture is one of abject servility rather than belief.79
Because of their anti-intellectual attitude toward Scripture, nothing is
left of the old religion but “the outward form.”80 Therefore Spinoza
resolves to “examine Scripture afresh, conscientiously and freely, and
to admit nothing as its teaching which I did not most clearly derive
from it.”81
But Spinoza was not working in an exegetical vacuum. Spinoza could
already find in prior Jewish thinkers paradigms for biblical interpretation
that were developed in order to accommodate the new sciences of their
day. I am not even thinking of Philo, whose revolutionary methods of
exegesis were not incorporated into the Jewish mainstream;82 rather I
am referring to Maimonides and Ibn Ezra who, as mentioned above,
were already leaders in biblical criticism. Their ideas were carried out
to fruition in Spinoza’s TTP. In an attempt to systematize theology
with the natural philosophy of Aristotle, they too had to embark on
a critical and philosophical interpretation of Scripture. This process
was perfected by Gersonides who, in his commentary to the Song of
Solomon, presented the work as representative of an entire Aristotelian
metaphysics.83
How then, does Spinoza approach the process of reading Scripture?
If, as noted above, the Bible carries no canonical stature different from
other works, then God has provided us with two equivalent sources for

78
Spinoza 1995, Letter to Oldenberg #30, p. 185.
79
Spinoza 1991, TTP Preface: 53.
80
Ibid., 52.
81
Ibid., 53–4.
82
For a description of Philo’s radical theories of biblical exegesis, see Wolfson
1947.
83
Pollock 1880, 93. For an example of this hermeneutical method, see Gersonides
1998.

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knowledge: the book of the Law, and the book of nature. But note
Spinoza’s insistence that scientific method should be used exclusively
for understanding both books. In the TTP, Spinoza introduces what I
shall call the Principle of the Priority of Natural Method (PPNM):84
Now to put it briefl y, I hold that the method of interpreting Scripture
is no different from the method of interpreting Nature [dico methodum
interpretandi Scripturam haud differre a methodo interpretandi naturam],
and is in fact in complete accord with it. For the method of interpret-
ing Nature consists essentially in composing a detailed study of Nature
from which, as being the source of our assured data, we can deduce the
definitions of the things of Nature. Now in exactly the same way the
task of Scriptural interpretation required us to make a straightforward
history of Scripture [sic etiam ad Scripturam interpretandam necesse est
ejus sinceram historiam adornare] and from this, as the source of our
fixed data and principles, to deduce by logical inference the meaning of
the authors of Scripture.85
In chapter 6 of the TTP Spinoza reiterates that the Bible must be read
and understood naturalistically, that is in terms of the laws of physical
causation. By nature Spinoza means the causal nexus of the universe
(a view that is amplified in the Ethics), which leaves no room for divine
causation. Just as we use the laws of nature to study and understand
nature itself, so too we use the internal history of Scripture to under-
stand the meaning of Scriptural passages. Spinoza now draws out the
implications with respect to our understanding of miracles, arguing
that inasmuch everything in Scripture must accord with the laws of
nature, it follows that whatever in Scripture contravenes nature must
be rejected.86
Finally, Spinoza introduces what I call the Principle of Intrinsic
Meaning and Truth (PMT), claiming that there must be a good under-
standing of the nature and properties of the language in which the text
was written and in which the authors spoke. Spinoza carefully separates
the meaning of the text from its truth.87 We have seen that according
to Spinoza, truth is defined as residing in the domain of reason, and
must be distinguished from the imaginative faculty. In a move even
more radical than that of Galileo, Spinoza concludes that Scripture

84
See Rudavsky 2001 for further discussion of these principles.
85
Spinoza 1991, TTP 7: 141.
86
Ibid., 6: 134.
87
See Smith 1997, 59.

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cannot speak the truth. Scripture can give us moral claims, but we
should be careful not to confuse moral claims, however salutary, with
epistemic truths.88 It is not just that Scripture does not, to paraphrase
Galileo, tell us “how the heavens go,” but that Scripture does not tell
us how “anything at all goes.” The purpose of Scripture is to teach
obedience, not truth; because there are no epistemic claims to be found
in Scripture, there can be no confl ict between what Scripture exhorts
and what we find to be the case in nature.
The implications of Spinoza’s biblical hermeneutics become appar-
ent when we turn now to Josh. 10:12–13.89 Joshua and his men are
worried that there will not be sufficient time to defeat the five Amorite
kings, and so Joshua prays to God to extend the day. The text from
Josh. 10:12 reads as follows:
Joshua addressed the Lord; he said in the presence of the Israelites: ‘Stand
still, oh sun, at Gibeon, Oh moon, in the Valley of Ajalon!’ and the sun
stood still and the moon halted, while a nation wreaked judgment on its
foes . . . thus the sun halted in midheaven, and did not press on to set, for
a whole day. ( Joshua 10:12–13)
For Spinoza, the Joshua example is used not only to bring home his
rejection of supernatural miracles, but also as an example of how
to approach an account in Scripture in light of scientific knowledge.
Within his new mechanistic philosophy, Spinoza argues that every event
falls within a comprehensive system of causal laws (there can be no
random events), and second that these causal laws possess the same
kind of necessity as the laws of mathematics and logic. Construed as
supernatural events that exhibit exceptions to the natural order, miracles
are impossible: nothing, according to Spinoza’s metaphysics, can con-
travene the universal, necessitarian laws of nature. In his chapter on
miracles, Spinoza then shows how biblical miracles can be explained
in naturalistic terms.90
But here, too, Spinoza had historical precedents in Jewish philoso-
phy.91 In the Guide, Maimonides had already eliminated supernaturalistic
interpretations of miracles, and had begun the reductionist process of

88
See Smith 1997, 66.
89
Both Galileo and Spinoza utilize other proof texts as well, notably II Kings. For
further discussion of this passage, see Goldstein 1990, 1–16.
90
For a discussion of Spinoza’s conception of miracle, see Jolley 1998, 386.
91
For recent surveys of treatments of Joshua 10:11–12 in medieval Jewish philosophy,
see Feldman 1986, 77–84; see also Schwarz 1999, 33–62.

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explaining miracles in naturalistic terms. In the context of demonstrating

that the miracles wrought by other prophets differ from those of Moses,
Maimonides uses Josh. 10:11–12 as an example of a prophecy which
occurs in front of some, but not all, the people. Maimonides goes on to
explain the text as claiming that the miracle consisted in the prolonga-
tion of daylight without any change in the course of the Sun, so that
in Gibeon the day was longest, but in other places not.92 Gersonides
is even more explicit than Maimonides, arguing that it is impossible
for the Sun to have stood still for Joshua. According to Gersonides,
the miracle consists in the fact that the victory was achieved during
the short period of time in which the Sun at its zenith appeared to
be stopped.93 And so what was implicit in Maimonides is spelled out
explicitly by Gersonides.
Against the backdrop of these medieval discussions, Spinoza uses
Joshua 10:12–13 as a hermeneutic example of how to interpret super-
natural miracles as naturalistic events. All the commentators, says Spi-
noza, try to demonstrate that the prophets knew everything attainable
by human intellect. In fact, however, the Joshua story is good evidence
that prophets do not always have knowledge of scientific truths.
Do we have to believe that the soldier Joshua was a skilled astronomer,
that a miracle could not be revealed to him, or that the sun’s light could
not remain above the horizon for longer than usual without Joshua’s
understanding the cause? Both alternatives seem to me ridiculous,94
argues Spinoza, claiming that we cannot expect scientific knowledge
on the part of the prophets. “Knowledge of science and of matters
spiritual” should not be expected of prophets.95 According to Spinoza,
Joshua was a simple prophet who, confronted with an unusual natural
phenomenon, namely “excessive coldness of the atmosphere,” attributed
to this phenomenon a supernaturalistic explanation. Spinoza has no
patience for those who try to “explain away the passage” by attribut-
ing to Joshua knowledge that he did not have; on Spinoza’s reading
of Scripture, Joshua was ignorant of the true causes of the lengthened
day, and to suggest otherwise is to go beyond the text. Spinoza twice

92
See Maimonides 1964, 368–9.
93
Gersonides 1999, 492–3. See also Goldstein 1990, 7. Abravanel was so furious
at Gersonides’ elimination of such a famous miracle, that he wrote a commentary on
Joshua 10 in contradistinction to Gersonides. See Touati 1973, 470.
94
Spinoza 1991, TTP ch 2, 79.
95
Ibid., 86.

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 creation, time, and biblical hermeneutics 557

suggests a naturalistic explanation of this event, although he does not

amplify what he might have in mind.96 In the case of miracles (and
the Joshua example in particular), either the biblical text is compatible
with our rational conceptions based on a naturalistic understanding of
the cosmos, or it is not; and if it is not, the supernatural understanding
of Scripture must be abandoned.

Conclusion

Throughout the history of Jewish thought, Jewish philosophers

addressed theoretical issues against the backdrop of their intellectual
neighbors: the works of Maimonides incorporated the theories of his
Islamic peers; Crescas and Albo refl ected infl uences of Christian scho-
lasticism; and sixteenth-century thinkers evinced the effects of the rise of
the “new science.” This cultural interaction affected the interpretation
of Scripture as well. Already in the first century C.E., the philosopher
Philo Judaeus incorporated Neopythagorean and Neoplatonic elements
into his reading of Scripture, attempting to show, for example, that the
account of creation in Genesis was compatible with the scientific views
of late Greek cosmologists. So too, Maimonides presented a view of
both creation and time that attempted to harmonize a biblical account
of creation with the theories propounded by Aristotle. Both Crescas and
Albo rejected Aristotelian metaphysics and physics; their interpretation
of Genesis refl ected an alternative theory of temporality that did not
depend upon Aristotelian constraints.
By the early seventeenth century, Jewish thinkers were interacting even
more fully with their intellectual peers, and were fully absorbing the
scientific advances in astronomy, mechanics, optics, and mathematics.
Astronomers such as David Gans and Joseph Delmedigo were thor-
oughly conversant with developments in the scholastic world, and sought
to introduce Jews to these exciting advances. In Spinoza’s case, this
interaction led in part to his leaving the Jewish community altogether.
Spinoza’s adherence to the importance of using scientific method in
approaching Scripture forced him to reject divine authorship of the

96
In TTP ch. 6, Spinoza returns to the Joshua example and contrasts the biblical
account of the Sun’s supposed standing still with “what really happened,” but Spinoza
does not venture an astronomical explanation of his own. In this regard his analysis of
the example differs markedly from that of Galileo. See Rudavsky 2001 for comparison
of Galileo and Spinoza.

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558 t.m. rudavsky

Torah. But Spinoza’s more radical move was to deny that Scripture
had any philosophical or scientific veracity. Unlike Maimonides and
Ibn Ezra, both of whom tried to read the Torah in light of modern
philosophical and scientific teachings, Spinoza denied the tenability
of this entire enterprise. According to Spinoza, Scripture cannot be
accommodated to the new sciences. Scripture could not be regarded
as a source of knowledge; and because it is neither a philosophical nor
a scientific work, the rational methods used by these latter disciplines
simply cannot be applied to Scripture. Scripture provides only moral
guidance and piety, not even moral truth, and certainly not scientific or
mathematical truth. Any attempt, for example, to introduce heliocen-
trism into the Joshua story (as did Galileo) is simply to misunderstand
the function of the Law in contradistinction to astronomical theory.
By pushing the views of Maimonides and Ibn Ezra to their logical
extreme, Spinoza thus destroyed the carefully constructed hermeneutic
methodology introduced by his Jewish predecessors. It would now fall to
subsequent Jewish thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
to reappropriate the Maimonidean task of accommodating the words
of Scripture to the domain of natural philosophy.

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 PART IV

COPERNICAN DEBATES AND SCRIPTURE

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 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

TYCHO BRAHE, CASPAR PEUCER, AND CHRISTOPH

ROTHMANN ON COSMOLOGY AND THE BIBLE

Miguel A. Granada

Tycho Brahe, Caspar Peucer, and Christoph Rothmann entered into

discussion on cosmology and the Bible in 1588–89 as a direct conse-
quence of the publication of Brahe’s geoheliocentric world system in
the eighth chapter of his De mundi aetherei recentioribus phaenomenis (1588).
In this chapter Brahe (1) denied that Earth’s movement as postulated
by Copernican cosmology was compatible with Holy Scripture, and
(2) affirmed that his own system, which presupposed the fl uid nature
of the heavens and therefore rejected the solid heavenly spheres of
traditional cosmology, was compatible with the Bible. The two points
under discussion by these three authors were thus the movement of
Earth—and, as a consequence, Copernican cosmology—and the fl uid
or solid (hard) nature of the heavens (this last point being independent
of the cosmological system they adopted).
Their positions on the two cosmological questions at issue were, for
a number of reasons, different. All three coincided in rejecting the solid
planetary spheres; on Copernicus and Earth’s movement, however,
their respective stances were radically different: Brahe and Peucer were
decidedly anti-Copernican (with Peucer rather inclined to Aristotelian
and Ptolemaic geocentrism), and Rothmann, contrary to Brahe’s expec-
tations, doggedly defended the movement of Earth and Copernican
cosmology. Although all three accepted without hesitation the divine
origin of the Bible, they adopted different attitudes to the relationship
between God’s word and God’s creation. Brahe and Peucer concurred,
despite minor differences, in attributing to Scripture a description of the
true structure of the world and in proposing a hermeneutics founded
on a literal reading of biblical passages that confirmed their stances on
both cosmological questions under discussion. Rothmann, contrary to
both Brahe and Peucer, assumed that in matters pertaining to cosmol-
ogy Scripture always spoke according to ‘common opinion,’ which he
claimed had been founded largely on sensory experience; consequently,

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Rothmann developed a hermeneutics based on the so-called divine

accommodation to common man’s ignorance of the true configuration
of the world. He applied this hermeneutics, which implied a clear and
radical separation of science and Scripture in theoretical matters, to
the questions of the motion of Earth and the fl uid or solid nature of
the heavens. In order to situate more precisely these three authors,
particularly Peucer, it is necessary to attend to their chronological
placement in the reception of Copernicanism in the second half of
the sixteenth century.

Caspar Peucer (1525–1602) Until 1571

Although he was younger than Georg-Joachim Rheticus (1514–1574)

and Erasmus Reinhold (1511–1553), Peucer nevertheless belonged to the
same generation of Melanchthon’s pupils in Wittenberg. From Melanch-
thon and Reinhold (his teacher in astronomy) he inherited the notion
of the ‘status,’ or intellectual and socio-political ‘role’ of astronomy;
he also played a leading part in the reception of the recently published
De Revolutionibus (1543), which soon became embodied in the so-called
Wittenberg interpretation.1 According to this interpretation, astronomy
was made responsible merely for the construction of geometrical models
describing the movements of heavenly bodies in accordance with the
principle of uniform circular motion, leaving to the natural philosophers
the task of accounting for the physical constitution of the universe. As
a consequence, the centrality of the Sun and the movement of Earth
were considered in terms of mathematical hypotheses, which could be
employed as principles of geometrical description without any physical
significance.
After Reinhold’s death in 1553, Peucer succeeded his former mentor
by assuming the chair of astronomy at Wittenberg. In keeping with
the standard division of astronomical teaching in Sphaera (generalities
and theories of stellar motion, a tradition established by Sacrobosco’s
famous textbook) and Theoricae planetarum (geometrical models for plan-
etary motion), Peucer published two works, one for each ‘side’ of the
division: in 1551 he reworked the tradition of the Sphaera in his Elementa

1
See Westman 1975a, 165–193.

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 cosmology and the bible 565

doctrinae de circulis coelestibus et primo motu;2 in 1571 he did the same for the
‘planetary theories’ in an enormous work entitled Hypotheses astronomicae,
seu theoriae planetarum. Ex Ptolemaei et aliorum veterum doctrina ad observatio-
nes Nicolai Copernici, et canones motuum ab eo conditos acommodatae. As the
title of this work suggests, Peucer followed the Ptolemaic tradition in
astronomy by assuming the reality of geocentric cosmology. However,
according to the Wittenberg interpretation, Peucer paid close attention
to Copernicus’s geometrical devices and observations and converted
them into a geostatic framework, thus rejecting the actual movement of
Earth while retaining the mathematical advantages of heliocentrism.
Before I proceed to Peucer’s criticism of Earth’s movement, however,
it may be of interest to mention some other points in his conception
of astronomy as refl ected in his Elementa of 1551. For Peucer, follow-
ing Melanchthon, astronomy was not a secular, lay enterprise, but a
religious one aiming to achieve, through contemplation of the natural
order and of heavenly infl uences on sublunary events and human affairs,
knowledge of God and of his universal providence concerning nature
and the destiny of man.3 Peucer’s dedicatory letter to August, elector
prince of Saxony, was a typical expression of this dominant theme in
contemporary Protestant Germany.4
As previously stated, Peucer firmly rejected Earth’s movement and
Copernican cosmology: “This omitted, not to offend or confuse students
by the novelty of hypotheses, we attribute to Earth the mid-point of the
world and affirm that it is the centre of the universe.”5 At this point,
it should be no surprise that Peucer’s criticism of the movement of
Earth repeats Melanchthon’s neat refusal of it formulated in 1549 in
the latter’s Initia doctrinae physicae.6 In close structural accordance with

2
Wittenberg 1551; further editions were published in 1553, 1558, 1563, 1569,
1576, 1587.
3
On this point, see Kusukawa 1995, ch. 4 (124–173); Barker 2000, 59–88; Barker
2004a, 157–187.
4
Cf. Peucer 1551 sig. *2r–6v and Barker 2004a, 171f. There is, to my knowledge,
no available monograph on Peucer and his astronomical and cosmological conceptions;
see, however, Hasse and Wartenberg 2004 in particular the contribution by Weichenhan,
91–110. For Peucer’s astrological beliefs, see Brosseder 2004.
5
Peucer ibid. sig. G1v: “Quibus praetermissis ne novitate hypothesium offendan-
tur aut conturbentur Tyrones, terrae mediam mundi sedem attribuimus, & centrum
universi statuimus.” Cf. sig. B1v, E3 r–v. Translations are the author’s own unless
otherwise stated.
6
See Melanchthon 1846 col 216–219. This work was reprinted in 1550, 1559,
1567, 1572, 1575, 1585 and 1587.

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566 miguel a. granada

his teacher and father-in-law, Peucer even employed similar wording in

his assertion of observational arguments, biblical passages, and physical
reasons contrary to the movement of Earth. Concerning the theological
problem, for example, Peucer quoted the very same biblical passages
cited by Melanchthon: Ps. 104: 5; Eccles. 1: 4–5; Ps. 19: 5–7; Josh. 10:
12.7 As for the physical reasons, he followed Melanchthon in repeating
the basic theorems of Aristotelian physics excluding the possibility of
Earth’s circular movement.8
Aristotelian physical theory, generally accepted at the time, and
Scripture in its literal reading, proved complementary for the rejection
of Copernican principles. This complementarity, supported as it was
by the general agreement of the church fathers on the issue, was the
foundation for such a neat refusal of Earth’s movement. As a result,
given this coincidence between Greek science and Christian revelation,
it was unnecessary to call for another way of understanding biblical
passages, all of which seemed to guarantee that Holy Scripture con-
tained a true description of the world. Accordingly, Peucer opened his
work with a “Table of astronomers from the First Fathers to our own
times,” in which the patriarchs from Adam to Joseph were registered
under the assumption that Israel possessed a complete knowledge of
astronomical and cosmological matters that had passed with Joseph
to the Egyptians and to other ancient peoples, until finally arriving at
the Greeks.9
Throughout the Elementa, Peucer also accepted without discussion
the existence of solid heavenly spheres. This was a cosmological point
thoroughly agreed on at the time, hence it required no support from
physical reasons nor from any scriptural authority.
The Hypotheses astronomicae of 1571 reiterated all these claims. Renewed
praise of Copernicus as an excellent mathematician, calculator, and
observer did not prevent Peucer from precluding Earth’s movement.10

7
Peucer 1551. sig. G 3v–4r. Cf. Melanchthon 1846 col 217.
8
Ibid. sig. G 4r–G 5r. Cf. Melanchthon 1846 col 217–218.
9
Ibid. sig. A 1r ff.
10
See Peucer, Hypotheses astronomicae, seu theoriae planetarum, Wittenberg 1571, 37:
“Cum autem terra, de qua nos motus contemplamur, consistat in medio stabilis &
fixa, . . . necesse est planetas ipsos proprio suo motu, tunc conscendere & eniti ad altiora
coeli loca, . . . & rursus ex iisdem praecipitari deorsum ad loca humiliora, cum terrae
propius imminent” [Because Earth, from which we contemplate the movements, remains
in the center, unmoved and fixed, . . . it is necessary that the planets themselves, with their
own movement, now ascend and try to climb to higher places in the heavens, . . . and
now precipitate again downwards from these places to inferior ones, when they come
nearer to Earth]; ibid., dedication to Wilhelm IV, landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, sig.)

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 cosmology and the bible 567

There followed in 1574, not long after the publication of the Hypotheses
astronomicae, Peucer’s incarceration on suspicions of crypto-Calvinism.
This lasted until 1586 and brought with it the end of his astronomical
investigations. Only in 1589 did Peucer reappear in a response to a
letter of Brahe; Peucer now found himself in a profoundly renewed
atmosphere of astronomical and cosmological discussion.

Brahe and Rothmann on Cosmology and Scripture

If an astronomer could ever be claimed to be ‘Melanchthonian,’ Tycho

Brahe (1546–1601) embodied the term in its fullest sense. He was fully
convinced of the theological dimension of astronomy, which remained
associated with the central position of man in the center of a world
purposefully established by God. In the programmatic Oratio de disciplinis
mathematicis (1574), he suggested that
For this reason I judge that, after the true and appropriate knowledge of
God, revealed in the Word which he has given us, nothing is more suitable
to the nature of man, and more agreeable to the purpose for which he
has been created and placed on Earth, the centre of the universe, than
that, while beholding as from a central place the things which shine forth
in the whole structure of the world, but especially in that heavenly and
brilliant court of so many everlasting stars, he should agreeably spend
his life in this pleasant and studious contemplation, and that, while
acknowledging God as Creator in these his wise and varied works, he
should worship him with due veneration and praise.11
Following Melanchthon, Brahe was persuaded that astronomy and
astrology allowed for the demonstration of God’s providential rule

(3r: “In Coperniceis absurditas offendit, aliena a vero” [in the Copernican [hypotheses],
their absurdity, very far from truth, offend]. For the spheres see ibid., 11: “artifices stel-
lis per se motum tribuerunt nullum, sed orbes constituerunt, quibus affixae stellae in
orbem circulari motu circumducuntur suo loco singulare” [the astronomers conceded
no motion to the stars themselves, but they established orbs, by which the stars are
carried in orb with circular motion, each in its own place].
11
“Quapropter post Dei veram et competentem cognitionem, nobis in verbo a se
dato reuelatam, nihil hominis naturae magis proprium, et fini, propter quem homo
in Terra, mundi centro, conditus et collocatus sit, magis consentaneum esse iudico,
quam ut inde tanquam e loco medio, ea, quae in tota mundi fabrica, imprimis vero
in coelesti illa et fulgentissima tot perpetuarum stellarum regia elucent, prospectans,
iucundâ hâc et ingeniosâ contemplatione aetatem suam suauiter transigat, Deumque
opificem in his suis sapientissimis et variis operibus agnoscens, merita eum venera-
tione ac laude celebret.” Brahe 1913–29 I, 152. 7–15 (henceforth TBOO, followed
by volume number).

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of the universe and of man’s destiny. Astrology, then, was not to be

condemned, but merely reformed for the incorporation of true founda-
tions. As he said, “to deny the forces and infl uence of the stars detracts
from God’s wisdom and prudence, and contradicts experience.”12 This
implied, as in Melanchthon, an optimistic interpretation of the natural
capacity of man to arrive at a true knowledge of nature. It is there-
fore no surprise that we see Brahe attributing to the patriarchs in the
Old Testament a profound knowledge of astronomy,13 and in this way
assuming the cosmological relevance of Scripture.
Brahe also belonged to a new generation of astronomers averse
to the traditional gulf between mathematical astronomy and natu-
ral philosophy, a generation eager to achieve an integration of both
areas, with astronomy providing the true image and structure of the
world.14 Brahe believed he had reached this goal and discovered the
true system of the world with his geoheliocentric system presented in
chapter 8 of his De mundi aetherei recentioribus phaenomenis (1588). This
system, Brahe argued, surpassed both obsolete Ptolemaic geocentrism
and Copernican heliocentrism, the latter being totally unacceptable
on account of its physical absurdities, the irrationally vast amount of
empty space between Saturn and the sphere of fixed stars required
to account for Earth’s annual movement, and its many contradictions
with Holy Scripture.15 At the same time, he affirmed the fl uid nature
of the heavens and consequently denied the existence of solid, hard,
impenetrable spheres.16
However, Brahe did not specifically address the question of the
Scriptures’ position regarding these two cosmological points. Exposi-
tion of the rebuttal in Scripture of Earth’s movement was postponed,
along with the other problematic aspects of Copernican cosmology.
Instead, Brahe merely aligned himself with the more pertinent bibli-

12
Ibid., 153.16–17: “Astrorum negare vires et infl uentiam, est sapientiae et pruden-
tiae diuinae detrahere, ac manifestae experientiae contradicere.” For Brahe’s defense
of astrology and even his eschatological expectations connected with the heavenly
novelties of the time, see Håkanson 2004, 211–236.
13
Ibid., 148 (following Flavius Josephus); cf. Howell 2002, 78. Brahe reiterated this
in his letter to Rothmann of 21 February 1589 against the opposing position of his
correspondent. See TBOO, VI, 178.3.
14
On the individuals involved in this ‘new generation’ and their critical part in
astronomy as proponents of ‘realism,’ see Westman 1975b, 285–345 (285–289).
15
See De mundi aetherei recentioribus phaenomenis, TBOO, IV, 156.19–21: “. . . Authoritati
Sacrarum literarum aliquoties Terrae stabilitatem confirmantium . . . refragari.”
16
Ibid., 159.

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cal passages already well known and acknowledged by tradition, and

did not consider it essential to quote them. Concerning the solid
spheres, he limited himself in De mundi aetherei to mentioning briefl y
the physical basis of the fl uid heavens, which included observations of
the movement of the several celestial comets from 1577 onwards, as
well as the attribution to the heavenly bodies of “an innate science of
movement divinely infused in them” (iuxta diuinitus inditam Scientiam).17
Brahe had already formulated this idea in his earlier correspondence
with Christoph Rothmann.18 There, he had also stated that the notion
of a fl uid heavens had been rejected by the ancients and by most of
the moderns;19 Brahe, however, made no reference to Scripture.
From all this it can be concluded with a certain amount of assurance
that, with physics or natural philosophy resolving both problems, Brahe
considered Scripture, with all its cosmological relevance, in agreement
with his position. Geocentric cosmology was unquestionably affirmed
by Scripture, and for his conception of a fl uid heavens he found sup-
port finally in the Latin translation of the Bible by Sébastien Castellion
(Castalio), a translation which, Brahe said, “delights me very much.”20
There he had found that, instead of firmamentum, the words employed
to describe the nature of the heavens were expansum and liquidum, in
accordance with his own conception.21 For Brahe, in accordance with
his epistemological optimism, natural philosophy had accounted for the
configuration of the universe and the nature of the heavens; Scripture
had come only afterwards in its confirmation of natural philosophy.
There was no reason, then, to proceed to a meticulous examination
of Scripture.
It was only with Rothmann’s unexpected reaction to Brahe’s geohe-
liocentric system that the latter felt compelled to consider more care-
fully the matter of biblical hermeneutics. More specifically, Rothmann’s
determined commitment to heliocentric cosmology, in addition to his
appeal to God’s accommodation in Scripture to mundane human
knowledge, turned Brahe’s attention to biblical interpretation as a
means of defending his cosmological viewpoint. Thus, I now consider
Rothmann’s infl uential position.

17
Ibid., 159.3–10. Concerning this see Granada 2006, 125–145.
18
See his letter of 20 January 1587 in TBOO, VI, 88.13–20.
19
Ibid., letter of 17 August 1588, 140.18–19.
20
Letter to Peucer of 13 September 1588, in TBOO, VII, 133.27.
21
As in a letter to Peucer of 1590, in TBOO, VII, 231.10–11.

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Rothmann: Heliocentrism, a Fluid Heavens, and Divine Accommodation

Rothmann (born ca. 1560 and died in the first years of the seventeenth
century) studied in Wittenberg beginning in 1575. Apart from his cor-
respondence with Brahe, published by the latter in 1596, and his treatise
on the comet of 1585, published by Willebrord Snell in 1619, all his
writings have remained unpublished until our own times. In the very
important Observationum stellarum fixarum liber primus, mentioned on several
occasions in the course of his correspondence with Brahe, as a work
nearly finished and destined for publication, Rothmann dedicated the
first chapter to a vindication of astronomy against its detractors.22 There,
he expressed the same Melanchthonian conception of astronomy, as the
right way to recognize God’s providence.23 Rothmann, however, did not
share Brahe’s belief in an unbroken tradition of perfect astronomy in
ancient Israel from the first patriarchs onwards. Rothmann claimed in
another manuscript source that the absence of a practice of continual
observation coupled with a lack of instruments, had prevented the
development of astronomy:
Although the First Fathers are called by historians able inquirers of the
heavens, given however that disciplines are not invented immediately in
a state of perfection, but from a feeble beginning have grown to present
perfection, Astronomy too had a small start and was uniquely occupied
in the description of the year, as we can see from Genesis [1: 14–18].24
This implies (or can at least be shown to suggest) that Scripture does not
contain any profound information on astronomy nor does it depict the
actual constitution of the world. Scripture, then, has no cosmological
relevance, at least judging from the knowledge present in the human

22
Despite Rothmann’s intentions, this work remained unpublished until its very
recent edition in 2003; see ch. 1 (De insectatoribus Astronomiae, interimque de eius
excellentia), 57–70.
23
Ibid., 64: “qui igitur, inquam, inexhaustam DEI Opt. Max. sapientiam et poten-
tiam in his stupendis operibus, laudibus extollere et tota mente celebrare voluerit . . .:
is Astronomiam praecipue suscipiet et venerabitur” [therefore he who wants, I say, to
extol with praises and celebrate with all his mind the unexhausted wisdom and power
of God . . ., he shall embrace and worship principally Astronomy].
24
“Etsi primi Patres solertes caeli indagatores ab historicis appellantur: tamen
quemadmodum omnes artes non statim perfectae inventae sunt, sed a parvis initiis
ad suam, qua videntur, perfectionem creverunt: ita Astronomia quoque exigua adhuc
habuit initia, fuitque solummodo in qualicunque annui temporis descriptione occupata,
quemadmodum in genesi videre est”, as cited in Rothmann 2003, 159, note 198. Cf.
also in this edition, ch. 18, 158f. and Granada 2002, 119ff.

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authors of its books or in the people of Israel. But what about the
divine inspiration or revelation transmitted through them?
Unexpectedly, Rothmann responded to Brahe’s geoheliocentric
proposal with an adoption of Copernican cosmology. As had been the
case previously with Rheticus, agreement between the literal reading
of Scripture and geocentric cosmology forced Rothmann to endorse a
reading of Scripture founded on the principle of divine accommoda-
tion to common notions. Thus, in his letter to Brahe of 19 September
1588 (13 Calendas Octobris, according to the Roman calendar) Rothmann
declared:
Authority of Sacred Scripture is no obstacle. It is not written solely for me
and for you, but for all men; and it speaks after their capacity of under-
standing, as all Theologians declare in the exposition of the first chapter
of Genesis. Otherwise the moon would be, against all demonstrations
of geometry, greater than all other stars. . . . God speaks accommodating
Himself to the capacity of the Hebrews.25
Sustained by a long line of scholars stretching from Augustine to
Rheticus and Calvin in the sixteenth century, the notion of divine
accommodation to common knowledge also employed by Rothmann
implied that the intention of the Bible was to teach mankind in mat-
ters pertaining to God’s will and his promise of human salvation, not
to impart scientific knowledge on cosmological matters irrelevant to its
principal end.26 Rothmann went much further than Rheticus, however,
in conceiving of accommodation in the most absolute of terms; he
therefore excluded the possibility of any relevance of Scripture what-
soever to cosmological matters. As this position was held in accordance
with the rejection of any sort of scientific astronomy possessed by the
patriarchs, Rothmann concluded that ‘geometrical demonstrations’ are
the only key to the discovery of cosmological truths:
Unless this question [the nature of celestial matter] is decided by us, it
will not be decided by anyone, whether theologian or physicist. For God

25
“Nec etiam obstat authoritas sacrarum literarum. Hae enim non mihi et tibi
solummodo, verum omnibus omnino hominibus scriptae sunt, ad quorum captum
etiam loquuntur, ut etiam omnes Theologi in explicatione capitis 1. Genes. fatentur.
Aliâs Luna contra Geometricas demonstrationes esset maior reliquis Stellis. . . . Ad horum
[Hebraeorum] igitur captum sese accomodans Deus ait . . .,” TBOO VI, 159.19–26.
Cf. ibid., 181.26–36, for a mention of Augustine as forerunner of Rothmann’s herme-
neutics. Concerning Rheticus, see Rheticus 1984.
26
For the earlier history of God’s ‘accommodation’ to human knowledge in the
Bible, see Benin 1993.

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has not revealed anything whatever about this in his Word, because it
has nothing to do with our salvation. The Scriptures, which are written
for the unlearned and learned alike, the common and ingenious, do not
contain such disputations which are not even understood by very many
learned. . . . Also, how can the physicists know anything with certainty? For
we know and understand about the heights and the matters discussed by
us only as much as we discover mathematical demonstrations through
trigonometry. Without these those who discuss such matters are completely
worthless and raving mad.27
Needless to say, Rothmann did not deny the divine origin of Scripture,
but he certainly deprived it of any value as a source of cosmological
information. He applied this radical version of the accommodation
theory first to the motion of Earth, for the sake of which he had
introduced divine accommodation in his critical response to Brahe’s
geoheliocentric system. In this case, however, he limited himself simply
to stating that Earth’s movement is compatible with the Scripture as it
was to be truly understood, without further developing the issue. He also
applied divine accommodation to the nature of celestial matter. This
was the question he began discussing with Brahe from the very start of
their correspondence. Both of them agreed that celestial matter was not
made of solid, hard and impenetrable spheres. But they diverged on
the nature of the celestial fl uid: ether for Brahe and simple (pure) air
for Rothmann. In his letters Rothmann affirmed that Scripture was fol-
lowing the common knowledge of the Hebrew people of the time, and
thus it spoke always of a ‘hard’ heaven: “Hebrews were of the opinion
that clouds in the heights could not hang [there] unless there existed
some hard and impenetrable matter which supported water.”28
Until recently, the aforementioned letters to Tycho Brahe were the
only known source of Rothmann’s accommodationist hermeneutics.

27
“Et nisi haec quaestio [sc. materia caeli] a nobis decisa fuerit, a nullo unquam,
siue Theologo siue Physico decidetur. Non enim Deus in verbo suo quicquam de hac
reuelauit, cum nihil ad salutem nostram pertineat nec eiusmodi disputationes, quas
pauci admodum etiam inter Doctos intelligunt, immiscere voluit sacris literis, quae
omnibus omnino hominibus, Indoctis pariter ac Doctis, Rudibus pariter ac Ingeniosis
scriptae sunt. . . . Physici quoque quomodo de hac quicquam certi scire poterunt? Tantum
enim de eiusmodi sublimibus et tam procul a nobis dissitis rebus scimus ac intelligimus,
quantum per Doctrinam Triangulorum et Mathematicas demonstrationes inuenimus.
Sine his qui de eiusmodi rebus disserit, vanissimus est prorsusque delirat” TBOO VI,
149–150, translated in Howell, 2002, 93f.
28
“Putârunt Hebraei, nubes in sublimi pendere non posse, nisi subesset materia
aliqua dura et imperuia, quae Aquam sustineret,” TBOO VI, 159.24–26.

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 cosmology and the bible 573

However, in Observationum stellarum fixarum liber primus, which remained

in manuscript form in the Landesbibliothek und Murhardsche Biblio-
thek, Kassel, there can be found, in chapter 23 (How the testimonies
of Holy Scripture, which seem to introduce the solidity of celestial
spheres, are to be understood), a full and systematic presentation of
Rothmann’s hermeneutics, applied specifically, as the title reads, to
the issue of the spheres. Since this important text is already edited
and its content coincides in substance with the position of Rothmann
hitherto presented, I direct the reader to this edition while proceeding
to consider Brahe’s reaction.29

Brahe’s Reply to Rothmann

In his letter of 21 February 1589 Brahe came to the defense of Scrip-
ture. He did not deny the presence in the Bible of a certain amount of
accommodation to ‘vulgar ability,’ but he did not believe this covered
an explanatory expanse as great as that postulated by Rothmann, who
was considered guilty of a crime of lèse –majesté. Thus, Brahe states:
It is wholly untenable what you adduce in order to excuse those [state-
ments] against which Scripture affirms the opposite. The reverence and
authority due to sacred writings is and ought to be greater than that of
explaining them in a high-fl own way. For although they for the most part
adjusted themselves to the common capacity in physics and some other
matters, yet let it be far from us to think of them as speaking in such a
common manner that we do not believe them to be speaking truth.30
The Dane continued defending the cosmological content of the Mosaic
account of creation, as well as the astronomical and physical knowl-
edge of the prophets in accordance with the wisdom of the patriarchs
transmitted to them. And he concluded: “Thus, the authority of

29
See Rothmann 2003, 198–205. Cf. also Granada 2002 ch. 3 and Appendix III,
where ch. 23 is reproduced.
30
“Multo minus, quae in excusandis iis, quibus sacra scriptura contrarium asseuerat,
a te praetenduntur, locum mereri poterint. Maior enim et est et esse debet diuinarum
literarum autoritas ac reuerentia, quam ut sic in modum Cothurni eas trahi deceat.
Licet enim ipsae in rebus Physicis et aliis quibusdam ut plurimum ad captum vulgi
sese attemperent, absit tamen ut ob id statuamus eas ita vulgariter loqui, quin etiam
vera proponere credamus,” TBOO VI, 177.10–16.

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sacred Scripture remains untouched, as we will see fully in its proper

place.”31
Only upon Rothmann’s provocation did Brahe address the issue
of cosmology and Scripture. And in this case, as it had always been
when dealing with the Copernican affirmation of Earth’s movement,
the Dane limited himself to a cursory treatment and to the promise,
never made good on, of its future development. By contrast, the physical
arguments against the motion of Earth and the solid spheres had been
fully explained and progressively enriched from their original introduc-
tion.32 It could perhaps be argued that Brahe would never have given
even a cursory answer to theological questions without Rothmann’s
radical proclamation of divine accommodation that stripped Scripture
entirely of any physical relevance. Here, as on several other occasions,
the Dane came to the defense of God’s ‘injured majesty.’33
Contrary to Rothmann, Brahe was not obliged to adopt a radical
version of the accommodation theory, because his cosmological tenets—
first, the immobility of Earth in the center of a finite cosmos, and
second, a fl uid heavens without solid spheres—were held not to be in
contrast with Scripture. For the first tenet, there was no doubt; for the
second, Rothmann remained convinced that solid, hard spheres were
a doctrine openly proclaimed by Scripture, mentioning this in a letter
to Brahe and fully explaining it in chapter 23 of Observationum stellarum
fixarum liber primus. For his part, Brahe could adhere to a traditional
hermeneutics of only a limited accommodation, since the literal read-
ing of Scripture as a true description of the world was in agreement
with his physical theories (these theories being able to settle the issue by

31
“Stat itaque adhuc immota Autoritas sacrarum literarum, ut suo loco plenius
videbimus,” ibid., 178.6–7. Brahe never wrote such a full treatment of the problem.
32
See Blair 1990, 355–377. Cf. Granada 2007, 95–119.
33
In his De naturae divinis characterismis (Antwerp 1575) Cornelius Gemma Frisius
(1535–1579) interpreted the nova of 1572 in Cassiopeia as a divine miracle with eschato-
logical significance, adding that the new star formed with other stars in the constellation,
the figure of the cross of Christ, in such a way that the new star “represents the head
of Christ crucified or rather his triumphal title superimposed to his head” [“Christi affixi
verticem, seu potius titulum triumphalem superimpositum capiti repraesentet”] p. 140.
In his criticism of Gemma’s interpretation, Brahe reacted indignantly: “He [Gemma]
does not fear to crucify Christ again between the stars, with utmost superstition, to say
nothing more” [“denuo quasi inter Sidera (Christum) crucifigere non exhorrescat, idque
nimis superstitiose, nequid amplius dicam”]. See Astronomiae Instauratae Progymnasmata,
TBOO III, 80 and Granada 1997, 357–435 (338f.). A similar reaction can be found in
response to implications detected in Peucer’s conception of the ‘divine dwelling place
above the superior waters’ (mentioned below).

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themselves, without appealing to extra-scientific authorities). The issue

of the makeup of the heavens makes clear that Brahe had no reason
to renounce the weight of confirmation by Scripture. Here, the pos-
sibility of interpreting the scriptural text as describing a fl uid heaven,
in opposition to Rothmann, was an additional motive for remaining
inside the limits of a traditional account of divine accommodation.
Before proceeding to consider this question further, however, I must
first take into consideration following his long imprisonment, the re-
emergence of Caspar Peucer in his brief epistolary exchange with
Brahe in 1589–90.

Brahe and Peucer on the Fluidity of the Heavens and the

Waters Above the Firmament

In 1588 Peucer wrote to Brahe through the intermediary Henricus

Ranzovius (Rantzau), Royal Governor of Holstein, who had previously
sent to him an excerpt of Brahe’s cosmological system. Peucer’s letter
is lost, but we know of its content through Brahe’s reply of 13 Sep-
tember 1588, a very significant piece of correspondence. In his letter,
Peucer stated that the fl uid nature of the heavens was confirmed by
Scripture. Most probably, Brahe himself had already become aware
of this through his reading of the Latin version of the Old Testament
written by the French humanist Sébastien Castellion (Castalio), who
had employed in Genesis 1 the word liquidum instead of the traditional
firmamentum.34 Nevertheless, Brahe had not yet mentioned this point,
and in his exposition to Peucer (in his letter of September 1588) of his
intellectual development leading up to the discovery of the geohelio-
centric system, he justified the rejection of solid spheres (incompatible
as they were with his system) by the physical reasons, already adduced

34
See Moses Latinus ex hebraeo factus . . . per Sebastianum Castalionem, Basle
1546, p. 1: “Deinde iussit Deus ut existeret liquidum inter aquas, quod aquam ab aqua
disiungeret: fecitque liquidum quod divideret aquam quae super liquidum est, ab ea
quae subter est. Quo facto liquidum coelum nuncupavit,” cited in Granada 2002, 175
[cf. Gen. 1: 6–8: “And God said, Let there be a liquid in the midst of the waters, and
let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the liquid, and divided the
waters which were under the liquid from the waters which were above the liquid: and
it was so. And God called the liquid Heaven”, King James Version slightly modified
according to Castellion’s innovation]. On Castellion, see Guggisberg 1997 (chapter IV
for the translation of the Bible).

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in his published work, surrounding the movement of comets.35 Natural

philosophy and physical reasons always took the initiative and, in the
end, held the burden of proof.36
Peucer confirmed the fl uidity of the heavens by citing Isa. 40: 22
(“it is he that . . . stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth
them out as a tent to dwell in”), adding that Job 37: 18 (“Hast thou
with him spread out the sky, which is strong, and as a molten looking
glass?”),37 traditionally held as positing a solid, most hard heavens,38
was actually in accordance with Isaiah, “affirming the solidity and
perpetual constancy of the nature and the revolutions of the heavens
and of those bodies it contains, rather than referring to the material
of which it is made.”39 Clearly, that could not but sound very pleasant
to Brahe’s ears, who responded to Peucer:
The fact that you adhere to my assertion that the material of the heav-
ens is most liquid and subtle, confirming it besides with testimonies of
Holy Scripture, is most pleasant to me. . . . Therefore, nothing in Holy

35
Letter to Peucer of 13 September 1588, in TBOO VII, 130.13–21. Concerning
De mundi aetherei recentioribus phaenomenis, see TBOO, IV, 159.3–10.
36
The same opinion is sustained now by Mosley 2007. See particularly p. 158: “These
features of the exchange [the correspondence between Brahe and Rothmann/Peucer]
suggest that, whatever role exegesis may have played in shaping Tycho’s theological and natural
philosophical ideas, it was on these, rather than exegesis per se, that his cosmology and astronomy
were grounded. . . . Though content to reject heliocentrism as contrary to the testimony
of the Bible, his engagement with specific scriptural texts, not to mention his espousal
of exegetical principles, was limited in scope, and can rarely be found in his extant
writings except at another’s instigation” (my italics).
37
King James Version.
38
Brahe mentioned, for example, Francisco Valles in his De sacra philosophia (Lyon
1588); see Howell 2002, 98ff. It should be added that this was Rothmann’s opinion
as well: in his letter of 19 September 1588 he interpreted Is. 40: 22 as conveying the
conception of a solid, hard heavens (see TBOO VI, 159.33–34), and in ch. 23 of
Observationum stellarum fixarum liber primus he added Job 37:18 along with several other
scriptural passages; see Rothmann 2003, 199.
39
“Alter locus, IOB. cap. 37 v. 18, quo contrarium asseverari prima fonte apparet,
quia coelos chalybis instar induratos esse dicit, recte a te [sc. Peucer; Brahe is describing
the content of Peucer’s lost letter] cum priore [Is. 40: 22] conciliatur, dum soliditatem
et firmitatem constantiamque perpetuam naturae revolutionisque coeli et eorum, quae
in eo continentur, corporum potius quam materiae compagem respici illic, erudite et
convenienter exponis,” [The other place, Job 37: 18, where it seems at first sight that
the opposite is affirmed, because it says that the heavens have been made as hard as
steel, is correctly harmonized by you [sc. Peucer; Tycho is describing the content of
Peucer’s lost letter] with the previous text [Isa. 40: 22], when you explain in a learned
and fitting way that in the former it is the solidity, firmness, and eternal constancy of
nature, and of the revolution of heaven and the bodies contained in it, that is in view,
rather than the structure of the material.] Letter to Peucer of 13 September 1588, in
TBOO VII, 133.32–37.

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 cosmology and the bible 577

Scripture or in philosophy prevents us from stating with certainty that

the material of the heavens is most liquid and more tenuous and subtle
than the whole air.40
In his letter of 10 May 1589 Peucer included a number of biblical
passages that confirmed the fl uid nature of the heavens41 against the
common opinion, he said, of philosophers.42 Thus, the very mention
in Job 37: 18 of the heavens being “strong as a molten looking glass”
(aeneos caelos) was simply an accommodation to the notion—foreign per-
haps to the Hebrews, but commonly held in Assyria and Egypt under
the infl uence of the philosophers—of ‘celestial orbs.’43 In this manner,
Peucer gave expression towards the end of his life to a clear mistrust
concerning philosophy and the human capacity to achieve, outside
divine revelation in Scripture, a true knowledge of the constitution
of the world. Certainly, he was always persuaded that for elementary
truths, such as the centrality and immobility of Earth, reason and phi-
losophy attain sure conclusions. However, for more abstruse questions
concerning the most remote heavens man seems, according to Peucer,
inevitably dependent on divine revelation.
In his 1589 letter Peucer added Genesis 1 (namely the correct transla-
tion of the Hebrew raqia as expansum, instead of firmamentum in the Vul-
gate) as a new biblical testimony of the fl uidity of the heavens. Scripture
nowhere says, he added, that heaven has been made solid, compact, and
impenetrable (solidum, compactum et impervium). On the contrary, it clearly
pronounces against it, as it is manifest in the ‘cataracts’ (fl oodgates) in
the heavens or in the ascensions to God’s throne or descent from him,
as described in the Bible and believed to be true.44
From this moment, and following his suspicion about man’s natural
capacity to attain true knowledge of the world’s framework, Peucer

40
“Quod autem meae assertioni de liquidissima et subtilissima coeli materia tam
belle astipularis eamque sacrarum insuper literarum testimonio confirmas, mihi per-
gratum est. . . . Nihil igitur obstabit vel e sacris Bibliis vel Philosophorum decretis, quin
coeli materiam liquidissimam et omni aëre tenuiorem subtilioremque certo statuamus,”
ibid., 133.22–24 and 135.15–18.
41
See TBOO VII, 185f.
42
Ibid., 185.27–29: “. . . eaque [heavenly substance] liquida et fl uida, divinae sapi-
entiae verbo coelesti patefactae testimonia non dubie contra Philosophos demonstrant”
[the testimonies of divine wisdom, revealed by the celestial word, demonstrate beyond
any doubt against the philosophers that (the heavens are made) of a liquid and fl uid
substance].
43
Ibid., 186.2–6.
44
Ibid., 186.22–30.

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578 miguel a. granada

embarked on a speculation, deriving from Scripture, on the “waters

above the firmament [expansum]” (Gen. 1: 6–8), understood here as
real waters and clouds above the so-called sphere of fixed stars. These
superior waters are just below the region of uncreated and inacces-
sible light, where God dwells; even the Milky Way (via lactea), Peucer
conjectured, is some more rarefied part of these superior clouds or
waters, through which the eternal, uncreated light ‘is hinted at’ from
our inferior region.45
Admittedly, Peucer was fully aware that this biblical conception con-
tradicted philosophy and the assertions of philosophers. Despite this,
however, he declared himself unaffected by the subtleties of philosophers
and ready to assent to Scripture:
I assent to Scripture, which clothed and covered the system of the world
with the huge mass of the waters . . ., which finally teaches that by this
dark obscurity of waters and clouds the eternal dwelling of the divine
Majesty, replenished with eternal light, where God inaccessible to crea-
tures dwells, is severed from the created light and dwelling of inferior
things. What is, then, in the Scriptures more manifest than all this? . . . I
impose no laws or dogmas on anyone, but conjecture from God’s word,
allowing to him to decide if he gives faith to our conjectures or to the
reasons of philosophers. . . . I do not assent to the Philosophers’ dreams [as
to the nature of the Milky Way, imagined by them as a confused light of
many little stars], but I do prefer to philosophize with Scripture and from
it instead of, against Scripture, talking nonsense with the philosophers,
ignorant of divine things.46
Peucer’s stance is, at this point, completely clear. Against his former
confidence in (Aristotelian) reason, he now stresses the uncertainty of
human knowledge and the unreliability of philosophical reasoning.
Therefore, divine revelation in Scripture is the sole clue and road to
truth in cosmological matters, at least on a point as remote from our

45
Ibid., 187–188. See Randles 1999, 113ff.
46
“Sed assentior Scripturae, quae induit et cooperit systema mundi aquarum mole . . .,
quae denique aquarum et nubium obscura tenebrositate docet secludi aeternam sedem
Maiestatis divinae aeterna luce plenam, in qua creaturis inaccessa habitat divinitas,
a luce et sede creata inferiorum. Quid enim his est in Bibliis manifestius? . . . nemini
leges et dogmata fero, sed coniecturas recito ex Dei verbo, relinquens expendendum
cuique, his utrum habere fidem an Philosophorum rationibus velit. . . . Nec assentior
Philosophorum somniis, qui illam [sc. Viam lacteam] fingunt esse confusum confer-
tumque lumen multarum et parvarum stellarum, quas propter exilitatem prospectus
oculorum consequi ac discernere nequeat; malo enim cum Scriptura et ex hac ipsa
philosophari, quam cum Philosophis rerum divinarum imperitis hanc contra nugari,”
ibid., 187.30–188.22.

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 cosmology and the bible 579

knowledge and as inaccessible to us as the composition and structure

of the highest spheres. For this reason, accommodation in Rothmann’s
sense was wholly untenable, and as a consequence, it was possible that
Brahe’s cosmological system could be the true one, as Peucer seemed to
concede. Nevertheless, Peucer concluded, one must concede that only
in the afterlife, when we would be able to contemplate God, would we
know how much of his creation we have known in mortal life.47
In his letter of 1590 Brahe mentioned neither Peucer’s rather negative
position concerning the reliability of philosophy nor his endorsement
of a sort of biblical cosmology. Nevertheless, he vigorously rejected
Peucer’s conception of the supra-celestial waters as well as the scrip-
tural reading connected with them. This interpretation was dismissed
by Brahe as excessively literal, plausible only at first sight, and clearly
erroneous by any detailed and unprejudiced examination.48 Although
Brahe explicitly approved here of Castellion’s translation of the
Hebrew raqia as liquidum,49 he highlighted the ambiguity of the term,
which, he said, had been used in the Scripture to refer both to the
heavens as a whole (totum hoc liquidum seu expansum, quod a Terra, ad
summa usque Coeli culmina se extendit)50 and to the sublunary region of
the air in particular (interdum vero pro inferiori hac liquidi regione, quae
Terram proxime circumdans . . . ad extima plus minus nubium cacumina se
extendit).51 In the latter instance, Brahe affirmed, Moses accommo-
dates his discourse to common parlance, speaking of the cloud-filled
aerial region as the heavens and intending by “celestial waters” simply
“watery clouds.”52 This is the most reasonable interpretation of the
term, he said, as Castellion, Melanchthon, and Calvin unanimously
agree.53 Brahe ended his criticism by accounting for the absurdities of
Peucer’s supra-celestial waters at a purely physical level, as well as the

47
Ibid., 189.41–190.4.
48
Ibid., 231.5–10.
49
Ibid., 231.10–11; 232.12–13; cf. ref. 34 above. Contrarily, another contemporary
proponent of a geoheliocentric system, the Alsatian physician Helisaeus Roeslin, wrote
in January 1589 a letter to Michael Maestlin, in which he resolutely rejected Castellion’s
translation as attributing to the celestial ether a liquid quality proper to the sublunary
elements. Roeslin continued to accept solid celestial spheres until 1609; see Granada
2002, 172–177 and 291–293 for the transcription of the pertinent letter.
50
TBOO VII, 231.13–14.
51
Ibid., lines 16–19.
52
Ibid., lines 19–30.
53
Ibid., 233.18–23. This was also Rothmann’s opinion, as he clearly stated it in
Observationum stellarum fixarum liber primus (ref. 22), Rothmann 2003, 200ff.; see Granada
2002, 107.

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580 miguel a. granada

impieties with which they were connected, inasmuch as they seemed to

imply some eternal, uncreated entity outside God (“and therefore two
Gods and two principles”).54 At the same time, Brahe added, Peucer
appealed to God’s permanent, miraculous intervention, despite the
fact that God is always “author of order and utility.”55 Thus, from the
perspective of a biblical hermeneutics informed by both philosophy and
physics, Brahe criticized Peucer for interpreting the Scriptures from a
position adverse to philosophy.

Conclusion

Along with Howell,56 it can be said that Brahe’s convictions lay between
two extremes. On the one hand, Peucer held an excessive literalism,
which was linked to a rejection of divine accommodation and to a more
or less marked skepticism towards man’s natural capacity for knowledge,
this scepticism becoming more acute in his last years.57 On the other
hand, Rothmann held that God completely accommodates himself to
common human intelligence. Accordingly, Scripture necessarily contains
a primitive and false cosmology, and is of no use to scientific inquiry,
specifically not in the search for an accurate cosmological theory. Clearly,
that does not mean that for Rothmann, Scripture had no bearing on
metascientific or metatheoretical questions, such as the encouragement
or promotion of the quest for a scientific cosmology. But Scripture
does not aim to impart a true description of the universe as science

54
TBOO VII, 233.35–38. See TBOO III, 80.
55
Deus est ordinis atque utilitatis author, ibid., 235.24–30.
56
See Howell 2002, 102.
57
Besides fully and permanently endorsing Aristotle’s views on the centrality and
immobility of Earth and being convinced of man’s ability to achieve certain knowl-
edge on this point as well as on God’s providential rule over nature, Peucer adopted
from the beginning the so called pragmatic compromise, according to which planetary
models represent the true motions of the heavens, whereas eccentrics and epicycles (the
tools used for constructing these models) have no reality. This mistrust of man’s ability
to attain a true knowledge in remote celestial matters (frequent in the astronomical
tradition) apparently became most acute, as we say, after Peucer’s liberation from his
long imprisonment in 1586. Peucer’s skepticism, founded as it was on the astronomical
tradition itself and independent from the contemporary revival of ancient skepticism,
did not extend, however, to his understanding of Scripture. On the pragmatic com-
promise and the presence of skepticism in early modern astronomy, see Jardine 1988,
ch. 7 (The status of astronomy), 239–243, and Jardine 1987, 83–102.

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 cosmology and the bible 581

or physical theory aims to do. Consequently, Rothmann did not look

for such a true description in Scripture.
For his part, Brahe accepted a certain degree of divine accommodation.
As is the case for Rothmann, the content and extent of this accom-
modation were determined by philosophy, precisely by physics. Literal
readings contrary to both disciplines were to be rejected. For this reason,
he, like Rothmann, rejected Peucer’s interpretation of the waters above
the firmament and agreed with Rothmann on the fact that God has
accommodated Himself to common modes of thinking in these pas-
sages. For this reason too, Brahe, conservative in physical theory and
therefore persuaded (against Rothmann) of the falsity of Copernican
cosmology, was convinced that biblical statements in accordance with
geocentric cosmology are to be read literally and not as an accommo-
dation to common and primitive human ignorance. On the question
of celestial matter, both agreed on the theoretical statement of a fl uid,
liquid substance, but disagreed on its precise scriptural correlate: for
Rothmann, a solid heavens according to vulgar prejudices; for Brahe,
a fl uid heavens in accordance with physical principles. Despite their
commitments to wholly different cosmological conceptions—geocentrism
(or geoheliocentric cosmology) in Brahe and heliocentrism in Roth-
mann58—both claimed that philosophy and physics shared a leading role
in accounting for them. Brahe’s rejection of Copernican cosmology, as
expressed in his correspondence, clearly contributed to his acceptance
of the relevance of Scripture in scientific as well as in metascientific
matters. Nevertheless, Brahe did not subordinate scientific inquiry to
it; notwithstanding all recognition of the supreme dignity and value of
divine revelation, it is rather natural philosophy, I conclude, which for
the Dane always held the initiative and determined which scriptural
tenets possess a physical reality.

58
For their respective defenses and criticisms concerning both cosmological systems
and on the issue of Earth’s movement, I refer to Granada 2007. I also refer to this
essay for a criticism of Rothmann’s presumed change from Copernican heliocentrism
to the geoheliocentric world system, as alleged by Barker in his 2004b article.

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582 miguel a. granada

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Barker, Peter. 2000. The Role of Religion in the Lutheran Response to Copernicus.
In Rethinking the Scientific Revolution, Ed. Margaret J. Osler. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 59–88.
——. 2004a. Astronomy, Providence, and the Lutheran Contribution to Science. In
Reading God’s World, The Scientific Vocation, Ed. Angus J.L. Menuge. Saint Louis: Con-
cordia Publishing House, 157–187.
——. 2004b. How Rothmann Changed His Mind. Centaurus 46: 41–57.
Benin, Stephen D. 1993. The Footprints of God: Divine Accommodation in Jewish and Christian
Thought. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Blair, Ann. 1990. Tycho Brahe’s Critique of Copernicus. Journal of the History of Ideas
51: 355–377.
Brahe, Tycho. Astronomiae Instauratae Progymnasmata. In Opera omnia. Tycho Brahe,
Ed. J.L.E. Dreyer Copenhagen: Libraria Gyldendaliana, vol. II–III.
——. De mundi aetherei recentioribus phaenomenis. In Opera omnia. Tycho Brahe, Ed.
J.L.E. Dreyer Copenhagen: Libraria Gyldendaliana, vol. IV, 1–378.
——. [1596]. Epistolarum astronomicarum liber primus. In Opera omnia. Tycho Brahe,
Ed. J.L.E. Dreyer Copenhagen: Libraria Gyldendaliana, vol. VI.
——. 1913–29. Oratio de studiis mathematicis. In Opera omnia. Tycho Brahe, Ed. J.L.E.
Dreyer Copenhagen: Libraria Gyldendaliana, vol. I, 145–173.
Brosseder, Claudia. 2004. Im Bann der Sterne. Caspar Peucer, Philip Melanchthon und andere
Wittenberger Astrologen. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Castellio, Sebastian. 1546. Moses Latinus ex hebraeo factus [. . .] per Sebastianum Castalionem.
Basle.
Granada, Miguel A. 1997. Cálculos cronológicos, novedades cosmológicas y expec-
tativas escatológicas en la Europa del siglo XVI. Rinascimento, 2ª ser., XXXVII,
357–435.
——. 2002. Sfere solide e cielo fluido. Momenti del dibattito cosmologico nella seconda metà del
Cinquecento. Guerini e Associati, Milan.
——. 2006. Did Tycho Eliminate the Celestial Spheres before 1586? Journal for the His-
tory of Astronomy, xxxvii, 125–145.
——. 2007. The Defence of the Movement of the Earth in Rothmann, Maestlin and
Kepler: from Heavenly Geometry to Celestial Physics. In Mechanics and Cosmology in
the Medieval and Early Modern Period, Ed. Massimo Bucciantini, Michele Camerota, and
Sophie Roux. Florence: Olschki, 95–119.
Guggisberg, Hans, R. 1997. Sebastian Castellio 1515–1563. Humanist und Verteidiger der
religiöser Toleranz. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Håkanson, Håkan. 2004. Tycho the Apocalyptic: History, Prophecy and the Meaning
of Natural Phenomena. In Science in Contact at the Beginning of Scientific Revolution, Acta
historiae rerum naturalium necnon technicarum, Ed. J. Zamrzlová. Prague: Prague Studies in
the History of Science and Technology New Series, vol. 8: 211–236.
Hasse, H.-P. and G. Wartenberg, eds. 2002. Caspar Peucer 1525–1602. Wissenschaft, Glaube
und Politik im konfessionellen Zeitalter. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt.
Howell, Kenneth J. 2002. God’s Two Books: Copernican Cosmology and Biblical Interpretation in
Early Modern Science. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.
Jardine, Nicholas. 1987. Scepticism in Renaissance Astronomy. In Scepticism from the
Renaissance to the Enlightenment, Ed. R.H. Popkin and C.B. Schmitt. Wolfenbütteler
Forschungen herausgegeben von der Herzog August Bibliothek. Wiesbaden: Otto
Harrassowitz, Band 35: 83–102.
——. 1988. The Birth of History and Philosophy of Science. Kepler’s A Defence of Tycho Against
Ursus with Essays on its Provenance and Significance. Cambridge: Cambridge University
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Kusukawa, Sachiko. 1995. The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Mel-
anchthon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Melanchthon, Philip. 1846. Initia doctrinae physicae. In Corpus Reformatorum. Ed. C.G.
Bretschneider. Vol. xiii. Halle: Schwetschke and Son.
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Late Sixteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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——. 1571. Hypotheses astronomicae, seu theoriae planetarum. Wittenberg.
Randles, W.G.L. 1999. The Unmaking of the Medieval Christian Cosmos, 1500 –1750: From
Solid Heavens to Boundless Aether. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Rheticus, G.J. 1984. Treatise on Holy Scripture and the Motion of the Earth. Ed. and Trans.
R. Hooykaas. Amsterdam/Oxford/New York: North-Holland.
Rothmann, Christoph. 2003. Handbuch der Astronomie von 1589. Kommentierte Edition
der Handschrift Christoph Rothmanns “Observationum stellarum fixarum liber pri-
mus,” Kassel 1589. Ed. Miguel A. Granada, Jürgen Hamel, and Ludolf von Mack-
ensen. Acta Historica Astronomiae vol. 19, Frankfurt: Harri Deutsch Verlag.
Weichenhan, Michael. 2004. Caspar Peucers Astronomie zwischen christlichen
Humanismus und Nicolaus Copernicus. In Caspar Peucer 1525–1602, Ed. H.-P. Hasse
and G. Wartenberg. Wissenschaft, Glaube und Politik im konfessionellen Zeitalter.
Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 91–110.
Westman, Robert S. 1975a. The Melanchthon Circle, Rheticus, and the Wittenberg
Interpretation of the Copernican Theory. Isis 66: 165–193.
——. 1975b. Three responses to the Copernican Theory: Johannes Praetorius, Tycho
Brahe, and Michael Maestlin. In The Copernican Achievement, Ed. R.S. Westman
Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 285–345.

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 CHAPTER NINETEEN

KEPLER AND MELANCHTHON ON THE BIBLICAL

ARGUMENTS AGAINST COPERNICANISM

Peter Barker

Why did Johannes Kepler contradict Philip Melanchthon on the bibli-

cal arguments against Copernicanism? Kepler was a second genera-
tion student of the great Lutheran educational reformer and in many
ways a faithful follower in matters of religion and natural philosophy.
But he came to diametrically opposed readings of the Bible passages
quoted by Melanchthon against the motion of Earth. After examin-
ing each author’s treatment of the contested passages, I will attempt
to explain why Kepler felt able to contradict Melanchthon by show-
ing how he made novel use of central Melanchthonian ideas: natural
law with its ideal of demonstrative proof, the status of astronomy as
the clearest example of these laws, and above all, the conviction that
these laws governed a cosmos that had been constructed according to
a providential plan.

Melanchthon on Natural Law, Providence, and Astronomy

Alliances shaped the early history of that tributary in the great fl ow of

the Reformation that would ultimately be called Lutheranism. Some
of the most important alliances were between Luther and the German
Princes who became his supporters and protectors (who after 1529
called themselves Protestants). A more general alliance formed between
Luther’s followers and the existing temporal powers, making common
cause against the people they called Anabaptists and other extremists,
and aligning the new confession with the power of the courts. The
forging of these alliances has been termed a reform within a reform,
the Magisterial Reform of Lutheranism within the wider current of
the Reformation.1

1
Mandrou 1978, 82–105; MacCulloch 2003, ch. 4, esp. 154–74; Kusukawa 1995,
27–74.

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586 peter barker

In an age ruled by patronage, Luther’s personal alliances with par-

ticular princes were the practical and political foundation of all he
achieved. But an earlier personal alliance was also crucial. Even before
he became famous Luther had converted a new colleague at the Uni-
versity of Wittenberg to his cause. Phillip Melanchthon would become
his most valuable diplomat, a major contributor to defining the new
movement’s confession, and the leading reformer of the universities
within the Lutheran area of Germany. It was in the latter role that
Melanchthon exerted his greatest infl uence on the intellectual life of
the sixteenth century. All his work, even on seemingly secular subjects,
was permeated by his commitment to Luther’s version of Christianity.
Like Luther, he was a humanist by training, and he drew upon the
skills and ideas of humanism in his own intellectual work.
A case in point is Melanchthon’s intellectual response to the civil
disturbances that prompted the Magisterial Reform of Lutheranism.
During 1524–5 peasants and commoners revolted all over Europe
north of the Alps, appropriating land and property belonging to the
aristocracy and the established Church while pursuing religious ide-
als that were perilously close to Luther’s own.2 For Luther, and espe-
cially for Melanchthon, it was not sufficient to condemn the rebels on
points of doctrine, and support the existing authorities in restoring
order and punishing the worst offenders. Melanchthon also felt the
need for a principled defense of the Lutheran position on the matters
that the rebels specifically transgressed, for example private property
and marriage customs. To defend claims like “Theft is prohibited” or
“Adultery is wrong” Melanchthon appealed to the common humanist
doctrine of natural law; such principles are innate in human beings,
having been established by God as part of human nature. But there
is an obvious difficulty; not everyone agrees on these principles. How
are we to recognize the true natural law ordained by God from the
many alternatives supported by different groups or individuals? For
Melanchthon the answer again is to fall back on humanist tools. Cor-
rect opinions—here true moral laws—are those that are capable of
being demonstrated, in the technical sense of the term introduced by
Aristotle. Remembering that all these words mean something different
in the sixteenth century, we might summarize Melanchthon’s position

2
For example the demand to elect their own priests, which MacCulloch 2003, 154
& 160, notes Luther himself dropped in the sequel.

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 kepler and melanchthon 587

by saying that true moral laws are capable of being derived, by logic
alone, from secure premises, many of which are innate.3
All of this would be unpersuasive if it left us with the same dialectic
from which we began—a variety of different candidate ‘laws’ now sup-
ported by (possibly sophistic) arguments. What Melanchthon needed
was a subject in which the use of demonstrations provided a final
answer in cases of disagreement. The best candidate was mathemat-
ics. However doubtful it may be that it is forbidden to marry a second
cousin, the proposition that a triangle has three sides is unlikely to
be doubted in the same way. Melanchthon appealed to the certainty
of mathematics as persuasive evidence that there were fundamental
truths about the world accessible to human beings, and hence that
demonstrations based on these truths would lead to reliable knowl-
edge, in both mathematics and morals. The two fields are seen by Mel-
anchthon as two aspects of a single divinely ordained structure, the
providential design of the world. The moral laws govern the human
world; the mathematical laws govern the nonhuman world. This, and
the use of mathematics to buttress the plausibility of moral claims,
gave a special status to astronomy.4
The ideal invoked here is also the Aristotelian ideal for causal demon-
stration. There is no very sharp separation between what we would
call pure mathematics (for example arithmetic and geometry) and
what we would consider a mathematical science (especially astronomy,
but also optics, geodesy, and the mathematical theory of music; but
not physics). Melanchthon and his followers routinely invoked the laws
of astronomy as the clearest evidence that the world has a providen-
tial design, and hence that the entire structure including the moral
law is an objective feature of the cosmos.5 It is important to under-
stand what the laws of astronomy—the laws of motion of celestial
objects—are here. They are the mathematical regularities employed to
calculate planetary positions in Claudius Ptolemy’s astronomy. Because
of their importance as evidence for the providential design of the cos-
mos, Melanchthon endorses not only the existence of eccentrics and

3
Kusukawa 1995, 49–74. For examples of Melanchthon’s moral reasoning, and its
application in natural philosophy by Kepler, see Barker and Goldstein 2001, 88–113,
esp. 103–106.
4
Melanchthon, 1834–1860, 12: 689–91, subsequently cited as CR; Barker 2004a,
159–65.
5
Barker 2004a, 165–72.

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588 peter barker

epicycles but also the orb-clusters used to reproduce these motions

in what we would call physical astronomy or cosmology. So to put it
baldly: the best evidence for God’s providential plan, and hence for
the truth of the fundamental moral laws that are supposed to assure
peace on Earth, is that epicycles and eccentrics allow us to understand
the motions of heavenly bodies. Evidently then, Melanchthon and his
followers might have a great deal to gain or lose from anyone offering a
persuasive new account of the motions of heavenly bodies, for exam-
ple Nicolas Copernicus. Although most members of Melanchthon’s
circle rejected Copernicus’s cosmology, they adopted his mathematical
models, praised him as a great reformer of astronomy, taught his ideas
to their students and adapted them in their books.
The special role Melanchthon gave to mathematics and mathemati-
cal knowledge led to an increased emphasis on mathematical subjects
in the curriculum at the primary Lutheran university, Wittenberg.
Although the emphasis on mathematics was only one component in
a broad movement to improve the curriculum along humanist lines,
by the middle of the sixteenth century the Lutherans were recognized
as having the greatest concentration of mathematical talent in north-
ern Europe and had achieved a special prestige from their success in
mathematical subjects. Astronomy was carried by this rising tide. In
1536 Melanchthon arranged for the appointment of two new profes-
sors of mathematics, Erasmus Reinhold and Georg Joachim Rheticus.
Both were locally trained but very talented. They split the mathemat-
ics and astronomy curriculum between them and began to produce a
series of texts specifically for their students, which were widely copied
elsewhere.
In 1538 Rheticus took a leave of absence so that he could visit
senior astronomers elsewhere in Germany—a sort of intellectual
Grand Tour. It was probably while visiting Nuremberg in 1539 that
he heard about the work of Copernicus, and determined to visit him,
both to further his own career, and also likely with a commission from
a circle of Lutheran mathematical practitioners in Nuremberg, includ-
ing the important publisher Petreius. The Nuremberg Lutherans prob-
ably hoped for an exchange of observations with Copernicus, and to
find out if he had any books worth publishing. They did not get the
observations, but they did get the book.
Copernicus—a lifelong Catholic and a canon at the cathedral of
Frauenburg (Frombork)—had been commanded to produce a com-
plete written account of his ideas by a cardinal in Rome as recently
as 1536, but the cardinal had expired before Copernicus could reason-

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 kepler and melanchthon 589

ably have been expected to comply with his request. When Rheticus
arrived to visit in 1539 he discovered that Copernicus was being per-
secuted by the newly appointed bishop of Danzig, and was threatened
with losing his property and possibly his church position, a situation
not conducive to completing books on astronomy. Rheticus then put
on a performance that ranks as dazzling even by the standards of
Melanchthon’s overachieving students. In a little over three months
he mastered enough of Copernicus’s new ideas to write a short book
advertising them to the learned world, and especially to the only local
aristocrat powerful enough to defl ect the wrath of the bishop of Dan-
zig—Albrecht, first Duke of Prussia. Albrecht was an early convert
to Luther’s faith—indeed the first major nobleman to convert and
establish a Lutheran church within his domain, which surrounded the
see of the bishop of Danzig. The conversion had taken place after
meetings with Luther and Melanchthon, Rheticus’s teachers, but Duke
Albrecht’s first acquaintance with the ideas of the reformers had come
in the sermons of Andreas Osiander, whom Rheticus had just met
in Nuremberg. Rheticus successfully sought the duke’s protection for
Copernicus. To make a long story short, Rheticus brought a com-
pleted book back to Petreius in Nuremberg where it was published in
1543, with an (unsigned) preface by Osiander.6
The Lutherans around Melanchthon eagerly adopted many aspects
of Copernican astronomy.7 They praised Copernicus as a new Ptol-
emy, and as an astronomer quite compatible with their religious view
of the world. “God in his goodness kindled a great light in him,” wrote
Erasmus Reinhold.8 But Lutheran praise was reserved for Copernicus’s
solutions to technical problems; with the sole exception of Rheticus
in his First Account they found it impossible to accept the Sun-centered
cosmology that Copernicus proposed. They used Copernicus as an
advanced text in astronomy courses, and mention of his work crept
into more elementary books, but they consistently rejected the idea
that the Earth moved around the Sun.9 Melanchthon himself wrote
the first canonical set of Lutheran objections to physical Copernican-
ism, and it is to these I now turn. Melanchthon’s objections consist
of a list of scriptural objections followed by a list of objections from

6
The two preceding paragraphs essentially summarize the argument of Barker and
Goldstein 2003, 345–68.
7
Westman 1975, 165–193; Barker and. Goldstein 1998, 232–258.
8
Quoted in Westman 1975, 177.
9
Barker and Goldstein 1998, 232–258; Barker 2000, 59–88.

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natural philosophy. In the present paper I will consider only the for-
mer. Both sets of objections are repeated by Caspar Peucer, and the
physical objections are elaborated by Erasmus Reinhold in his com-
mentary on the first book of Ptolemy’s Almagest.

Melanchthon’s Biblical Arguments Against Copernicus

and Kepler’s Replies

Melanchthon’s evaluation of Copernican cosmology appears first in the

Initia Doctrinae Physicae, a physics text for use by Wittenberg students that
distills the author’s lectures; internal evidence suggests it was written
about 1545, that is only two years after the appearance of Copernicus’s
De Revolutionibus. Kepler replies to the same passages in the Introduc-
tion to his 1609 Astronomia Nova, the work in which he introduces the
concept of an orbit and establishes that the path of a planet through
space is an ellipse. Interestingly, Kepler’s reply to the passages used by
Melanchthon also contains some of the clearest evidence that Kepler
subscribed not only to the general doctrine that the world was provi-
dentially ordered, but also to Melanchthon’s specific version in which
the laws of astronomy are cited as the best evidence for this order.10
Melanchthon mentions only four passages from Scripture as evi-
dence against the movement of Earth, and gives a reference for only
one of them (the first chapter of Ecclesiastes); his audience is presumed
to be so familiar with the Bible that they will recognize the other pas-
sages immediately. Melanchthon quotes two psalms, and also counts
God commanding the Sun to stand still as “among the miracles,” an
obvious reference to Joshua chapter 10. He considers direct evidence
from the Psalms that support the movement of the Sun, and separately
the motionlessness of Earth. Both of these points are supported from
Ecclesiastes and the miraculous halting of the Sun is mentioned as a
final piece of evidence.
The first passage mentioned is Psalm 19:6 & 7:
He has set his tabernacle in the sun: and he, as a bridegroom coming out
of his bride chamber, Has rejoiced as a giant to run the way: His going
out is from the end of heaven, And his circuit even to its end.11

10
Kepler 1609, ***5v. Donahue 1992, 65. Kepler 1937, 3: 33 subsequently cited
as KGW.
11
Melanchthon, CR 13:217a: Soli posuit tabernaculum . . . ad extremum eorum. Cf.
Vulgata Clementina 18:6 and 18:7: soli posuit tabernaculum in eis et ipse quasi sponsus

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Melanchthon introduces this passage by saying that the psalm affirms

with the greatest clarity that the Sun moves. Although there are minor
variations from the Latin of the later Vulgate, Melanchthon’s Latin is
practically a quotation. He concludes that we ought to be content with
this “perspicuous evidence” for the motion of the Sun.
The second passage mentioned is Ps. 104:5: “Who hast founded the
earth upon its own bases: it shall not be moved for ever and ever.”12
Here Melanchthon’s Latin seems more a gloss than a quotation. He
makes no additional comment, although this passage undermines the
plausibility of physical Copernicanism on separate grounds. He goes
straight on to cite Eccles. 1: 4–5, which reiterates both points; the Sun
moves and Earth does not:
Verse 4: . . . the earth stands for ever.
Verse 5. The sun rises, and goes down, and returns to his place: and
there rises again, . . .13
Finally we are reminded of Joshua’s miracle.
Josh. 10:12: Then Joshua spoke to the Lord, in the day that he delivered
the Amorrhite in the sight of the children of Israel, and he said before
them: Move not, O sun, toward Gabaon, nor thou, O moon, toward
the valley of Ajalon.
10:13: And the sun and the moon stood still, till the people revenged
themselves of their enemies. Is not this written in the book of the just?
So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and did not go down for
the space of one day. 14

procedens de thalamo suo exultavit ut fortis ad currendam viam a summitate caeli

egressus eius et cursus eius usque ad summitatem illius.
Here and elsewhere I have followed the Douay-Rheims translation from a version
of the Vulgate that seems close to that used by Melanchthon, modernizing the English
at the request of the editors. Note that the numbering of the Psalms in the Vulgate is
one lower than the King James Version and subsequent Bibles.
12
Compared to the Clementina (although it is possible he was using an unidentified
version with variant wording). Melanchthon CR: 13:217a: Qui fundavit terram super
stabilitatem suam, non movebitur in aeternum et semper. Cf. Vulgata Clementina 103:5: qui
fundasti terram super basem suam non commovebitur in saeculum et in saeculum.
13
Melanchthon CR: 13:217a: Terra autem in aeternum stat, oritur Sol et occidit et
ad locum suum tendens ibi oritur. Cf. Vulgata Clementina 103:4: . . . terra autem in æternum
stat. 5. Oritur sol et occidit, et ad locum suum revertitur ibique renascens, . . .
14
Joshua 10:
verse 12. Tunc locutus est Josue Domino, in die qua tradidit Amorrhæum in conspectu
filiorum Israël, dixitque coram eis: Sol, contra Gabaon ne movearis, et luna contra
vallem Ajalon.
verse 13. Steteruntque sol et luna, donec ulcisceretur se gens de inimicis suis. Nonne
scriptum est hoc in libro justorum? Stetit itaque sol in medio cææli, et non festinavit
occumbere spatio unius diei.

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However, in a text on natural philosophy Melanchthon cannot men-

tion the story of the Sun standing still without accommodating it to
Aristotle’s physics and Ptolemy’s astronomy, if only with the briefest of
remarks. After saying that among the miracles of the Bible is one in
which God commands the Sun to stand still, he remarks that this is the
same as commanding the Sun to move backward.15 Perhaps Melanch-
thon is proposing that to freeze the Sun’s twenty-four hour motion
would require endowing it with an equal and opposite motion, hence
making it “move backwards.” His remark is debatable: A conceptually
simpler approach in a geocentric universe, where objects move only
as long as a force is applied, would be to remove the Sun’s forward
motion. However, the Sun also has a proper motion of about one degree
per day in the opposite direction from its twenty-four hour motion.
Thus, paradoxically, canceling all the motions of the Sun, to make
it hang in the sky, would require increasing its speed in the direction
of the daily motion, a point made gleefully by Galileo in The Letter to
the Grand Duchess Christina.16 Regardless of which method is employed,
the point stands that to give a coherent account of Joshua’s miracle
requires accommodating it to whatever cosmic scheme and physics you
subscribe to. So, Melanchthon concludes, the propositions that the Sun
moves and that Earth is stationary are confirmed by sacred Scripture,
and we should resist the disturbance of the settled pattern of the arts
that the Copernican system suggests.
Exactly the same passages are mentioned by Melanchthon’s son-
in-law and academic successor, Caspar Peucer, in his elementary
astronomy book. Peucer’s Elementa doctrina de circulis coelestibus, originally
published in 1551, covered the first half of the astronomy curriculum
and replaced the previous standard, the sphaera of Sacrobosco and its
commentaries.17 It became so successful that it was reprinted several
times and entered as a required text in the Wittenberg university
statutes, an unusual mark of distinction for a contemporary work.18

15
Melanchthon CR 13: 217a: Et inter miracula recensetur, qoud Deus Solem voluit
consistere, Item, regredi.
16
Galilei 1957, 211–215.
17
Peucer, 1551. The second half of the curriculum leading to the study of Ptolemy
and Copernicus would have begun with a theorica. At Wittenberg this would probably
have been one of the many editions of Reinhold’s 1542 book.
18
Leges Academiae Witebergensis A3V (1562) and A3R–V (1572). See next note for
information on reprinting.

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Peucer asserts that Earth does not move, again on the basis of Scrip-
ture and natural philosophy and again the Scripture comes first. Peu-
cer mentions the same passages as Melanchthon but in a different
order. Psalm 104 is mentioned first and paired with Ecclesiastes chap-
ter 1. Then comes Psalm 19, and the Joshua miracle, again men-
tioned without naming Joshua. Apart from the order of presentation,
Peucer’s wording is practically identical to Melanchthon’s. Between
them, Melanchthon’s introduction to physics and Peucer’s introduc-
tion to astronomy were widely circulated and would be known to any
university-trained Lutheran in the late sixteenth century.19 It is hardly
surprising, therefore, that Kepler, who initially trained as a theologian
at the Lutheran university of Tübingen, addresses exactly these pas-
sages in his most direct examination of the relationship of biblical
evidence to the ideas of Copernicus.20
Kepler’s examination of the Bible passages used by Melanchthon
and Peucer forms part of the front matter for the Astronomia Nova
published in 1609.21 This Introduction “aimed at those who study the
physical sciences” summarizes the content of the book but also con-
tains a general discussion of physics and Copernicanism as Kepler
understood it. A central section addressed “To objections concerning
the dissent of holy scripture, and its authority” may well have formed

19
Melanchthon’s Initia doctrinae physicae was reprinted in 1550, 1559, 1567, 1572,
1575, 1585, and 1587. Peucer’s Elementa doctrinae de circulis coelestibus et primo motu was
reprinted in 1553, 1558, 1563, and 1569. Tredwell 2005 has recently documented the
previously unrecognized use of Peucer’s work in England.
20
It is important here to separate developments in the discussion of the Bible by
astronomers from developments in Lutheranism itself that may or may not have infl u-
enced these discussions. Between the death of Melanchthon in 1560 and the beginning
of Kepler’s university education in 1589 Lutheranism had divided into factions, the two
most important being the followers of Matthias Flacius (otherwise ‘gnesio-Lutherans’)
and followers of Melancthon (or ‘Philippists’). The former systematically excluded the
latter from positions of power and infl uence; Philip Apian, the predecessor of Kepler’s
astronomy teacher at Tübingen, lost his job, and Casper Peucer lost his position at the
court of Saxony and was actually imprisoned for more than a decade. During the same
period Brahe, Rothmann, and Peucer discussed the Bible through public exchanges
of letters and books (see the very illuminating new account by Mosley 2007, as well
as the discussion in Howell 2002, 97–106), and Brahe and Peucer, at least, are clearly
Philippists. Thus Kepler may have been inclined to Philippism by his early education
in astronomy in addition to the continued availability of Melanchthon’s works. On
Kepler’s religious education see: Caspar 1993, 41–50, Methuen 1998, and Barker and
Goldstein 2001, esp. 96–99. On his religious views and view of the Bible see: Hübner
1975, and Howell 2002, esp. chapter 4.
21
Kepler 1609, ***4v–***6r. Donahue 1992, 59–66. KGW 3:27–34.

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part of the opening section of the Kepler’s first book, the Mysterium
cosmographicum of 1596, until it was removed at the request of the
Tübingen authorities.22
Kepler makes two fundamental points at the outset. The first is that
the common idiom is often based on the deception of our senses, and
particularly our sense of sight.23 As Kepler was currently employed
as mathematicus, that is astronomical and astrological advisor, to the
Emperor Rudolf II, and had just written a monumental work on the
theory of optics (the Astronomiae pars optica of 1604), this placed him in
a position to offer expert testimony separating illusion from reality. For
example, the common idiom speaks of stars, and the Sun, ascending
into the sky and descending at the end of the day, as if they were
first getting further away and then returning closer. But regardless of
whether we think the Sun or Earth is stationary we know that the
distance from Earth to the Sun is fixed.24 On a given day there is no
significant approach and recession (although if Kepler had extended
the discussion to a whole year he might have had to mention that the
eccentric path of the Sun carries it to different distances from Earth).
Even technically trained astronomers refer to the positions at which a
planet is motionless compared to the background stars as ‘stationary
points,’ although according to Ptolemaic theory the planet is not sta-
tionary but continuing to move even in this position. Similarly, every-
one refers to two days during the year as ‘solstices’, although from a
technical viewpoint we know that the Sun is also not stationary but
continuing to move.
Having introduced the consideration of things that are called sta-
tionary but known to be moving, Kepler proceeds to things that are
called moving but may be stationary according to Copernicus. If the
relation between language and the world can be so problematic in
ordinary speech, it is only to be expected that Scripture too will speak
“in accordance with human perception when the truth of things is at
odds with the senses, whether or not humans are aware of it.”25
The second initial point that Kepler makes is a classic statement of
accommodationism:

22
Caspar 1993, 68–9.
23
Kepler 1609, ***4V. Donahue 1992, 60. KGW 3: 28–9.
24
For Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Copernicus or Kepler, on any given day, the distance
from Earth to the stars is also fixed.
25
Kepler 1609, ***5r. Donahue 1992, 60. KGW 3:29.

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[ T ]he sacred scriptures also speak with humans in the human manner,
in order to be understood by humans, when treating common things
about which it is not their purpose to instruct humanity. They make use
of what is generally accepted, in order to imply other, more sublime and
divine things.26
Having established these two fundamental points, Kepler proceeds
directly to Melanchthon’s first passage, Psalm 19. Who, he asks rhe-
torically, is unaware that the psalm is ‘poetical,’ that it alludes to the
coming of Christ and the spreading of the Gospel. This spiritual mes-
sage is generally agreed to be part of the meaning of the psalm, but
is far from the literal meaning of the words. We should be no more
distressed that the physical reality of Earth and sun is equally far from
the psalmist’s words. All the talk of going forth from tabernacles and
running races is another example of language that makes some kind
of sense as an account of our perceptions of the motion of the Sun
against the skyline, but is no warrant for physical truth. The same
applies to the more fundamental claim that the Sun is moving. That
is what the psalmist sees; that need not be the way it is.
The same set of issues comes up in the passage from Joshua to
which Kepler now turns.27 The very specific language about the val-
leys and rivers over which the Sun and the Moon are moving (or not)
during the story tell us about what the participants can see, not about
the physical structure of the world. Kepler imagines Joshua confronted
by someone who asserts the primacy of the physical description and
points out that to Joshua it is not the physical description that matters.
Joshua was asking for the day to be prolonged from his viewpoint,
however that was to be achieved. The contradictory claims “the sun
stood still” and “the earth stood still” can appear only in the technical
discourse of astronomy or optics, there are no corresponding claims
in common speech.
At this point Kepler displays his expertise in optical illusions to
explain why it is impossible to see the Sun as anything but moving.
The reasoning is essentially that we judge size, distance and speed
from perspective and parallax. We experience mountains, and the rest
of the skyline, as large and unmoving; the usual perspective and paral-
lax considerations that would allow us to correctly judge the size of an
animal on a distant mountain fail in the case of the Sun. While it is in

26
Kepler 1609, ***5r. Donahue 1992, 60. KGW 3:29.
27
Kepler 1609, ***5r. Donahue 1992, 60–1. KGW 3:29–30.

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the sky, its visual appearance makes it seem a small thing like a bird.
It is also impossible to see the Sun moving; all we can do is recognize
that it has shifted position after a lapse of time, and the things we use
to judge the shift in position are the large, immobile items making
up the skyline. Hence we see the Sun as small and mobile while the
skyline and the arch of the sky appear as the unmoving background
of its birdlike fl ight.28
Before dealing with the remainder of Melanchthon’s passages,
Kepler briefl y mentions several other Bible readings that may bear on
the physical nature of the world. He suggests that the famous state-
ment of human epistemological impotence from Jer. 31: 34 should be
read as an acknowledgment of our physical limitations, not a prohi-
bition on the mathematical or natural philosophical investigation of
nature. Similarly Job chapter 38 contains many claims incompatible
with current knowledge of astronomy and physics. And again, Psalm
24—which speaks of Earth being founded upon rivers—clearly does
not speak the truth about the physical construction of the world as
it would be understood by science. Kepler then turns to the passage
from Ecclesiastes cited by Melanchthon and makes essentially the same
point. The passages about Earth being “founded on its stability” have
a moral meaning. Their point is the insignificance of human affairs
in comparison to the frame of nature, that is Earth and the heavens,
which are, of course, divine in origin. As the message of the passage
is moral, we should not expect the references to Earth and the heavens
to be made using the language of science or to contain truths when
judged by the standards of natural philosophy.29
Finally Kepler turns to Psalm 104, asking whether the point of the
psalm is to convey knowledge of the physical world. Kepler answers
with a clear negative. The psalm is a glorification of God “treating the
world as it appears to the eyes” and not as it would be described by
natural philosophy. To underline the non-philosophical status of the
passage, Kepler shows that it may be read as a commentary on the
Genesis creation story, and in the longest sustained discussion of any
of the passages, spends several pages laying out the point for point
correspondences between the parts of the psalm and the days of
creation.30 This is one of the places where Kepler refers explicitly to
God as an architect, and throughout this discussion Kepler repeatedly

28
Kepler 1609, ***5r. Donahue 1992, 62. KGW 3: 30.
29
Kepler 1609, ***5v. Donahue 1992, 63. KGW 3: 31.
30
For a sustained analysis see the excellent discussion in Howell 2002, 120–124.

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returns to the notion of providential design. The features of Earth’s

surface that appear on the third day of creation are installed for the
benefit of humans and the animals that dwell there. The creation of
the Sun and Moon on the fourth day benefits the same creatures by
providing for the division of time. To underline the non-philosophical
status of this discourse Kepler points out that the Psalmist fails to
mention the planets as the best example of the creator’s wisdom, an
example that would be irresistible to someone thinking about techni-
cal astronomy, hence, “. . . it is clear that he [the Psalmist] is not writ-
ing as an astronomer here.” The whole psalm, Kepler concludes, is a
non-philosophical invitation to consider the benevolent design of the
cosmos accumulated through the six days of creation, that is to see the
creation as benevolent or providential.31
The theological part of Kepler’s Introduction concludes here with
three well known squibs. The first, headed Advice to Astronomers, exhorts
the experts in that field to remember the providential design of the
world not just in their religious observances but also when they study
astronomy. Kepler mentions his own work on the plan of the world
(the 1596 Mysterium) and his work on optics as examples of such think-
ing. The motion of Earth “at once so well hidden and so admirable”
should be seen as another aspect of divine providence. The second
squib, headed Advice to Idiots, is addressed to those too stupid to study
astronomy without becoming troubled in their faith. Such a person
Kepler tells to mind his own business and go back to “scratch in his
own dirt patch,” leaving the astronomers to their special insights into
God and his world. In a separate paragraph Kepler goes on to note
that Brahe’s system of the world, in any case, avoids the problem that
“literalists” have with asserting the motion of Earth. This system pre-
serves many benefits of Copernicus’s system, although at the price
of difficulties in astronomy and physics. The third squib is a short
numbered subsection headed To objections concerning the authority of the
pious, and concludes the sustained discussion of religion and science we
have been considering. Here Kepler uses a volley of counterexamples
to demolish the argument that ancient or modern religious authorities
are authorities about the order of nature. Lactantius denied that Earth
was a sphere. Augustine contradicted Lactantius on the shape of Earth
but denied that anyone could live on the other side. In Kepler’s day
the Holy Office was not only contradicting Augustine, it was trying to

31
Kepler 1609, ***5v. Donahue 1992, 65. KGW 3: 33.

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preserve its religious monopoly on the inhabitants of the places where

Augustine said no-one could live. All this dramatically undercuts the
Holy Office’s denial that Earth is in motion. The ancient authorities
were wrong, the modern authority is equally wrong, and the mistake is
the one with which Kepler began: attempting to make physical asser-
tions in what should be a spiritual discourse. Kepler will prove his
physical claims philosophically; “while in theology it is authority that
carries the most weight, in philosophy it is reason.” 32
It is apparent then that Kepler and Melanchthon reach diametri-
cally opposed conclusions about Copernicus, despite sharing a confes-
sion, despite both accepting that the universe has been providentially
ordered by its creator, and despite their shared belief that astronomy
furnishes the clearest evidence for the providential plan. How did this
happen? To apply the doctrine of accommodation presupposes a posi-
tion in natural philosophy—the one revealing the discrepancy between
ordinary, religious, and scientific speech which requires accommoda-
tion. Melanchthon is not simply defending a literal reading of Scripture.
He is actually accommodating the Bible passages he cites to the Aristo-
telian physics he presents in the Initia Doctrinae Physicae. Like Augustine
but unlike Lactantius, he accepts that Earth is spherical, and stationary
at the center of the cosmos. Kepler adopts a different scheme of the
cosmos. To be honest he has no complete physics to support it, but he
feels he has reasons so compelling that they undermine the religious
endorsement of Aristotle’s cosmos by Melanchthon. Kepler thinks his
Copernican cosmic scheme places him closer to God. Those reasons
had been presented at length in the Mysterium Cosmographicum.

Kepler’s Religious Evaluation of Copernicanism

Most historians of science are familiar with that peculiar pattern of the
world proposed by Kepler in his Mysterium Cosmographicum of 1596. It
has become one of the great icons of the Scientific Revolution, along
with Galileo’s telescope and the pictures he made by using it. Kepler’s
cosmos looks like an exercise in geometry. The planets are supported
by concentric spheres with large spaces between them; the spaces are

32
Kepler 1609, ***6r. Donahue 1992, 65–6. KGW 3: 33–4.

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filled with the skeletons of the six regular three dimensional solids. A
different solid spans each gap with a cube outermost, a pyramid of
equilateral triangles inside that, and so on. Until recently the only real
interest this construction held for historians was as a defense of Coper-
nicanism. The Mysterium was the first book length defense of physical
Copernicanism since the appearance of De Revolutionibus in 1543. Kepler
was not concerned with the details of Copernicus’s mathematical
techniques that attracted the first generation of Wittenberg astrono-
mers. His attention was explicitly directed to the cosmic scheme, and
the defense of the centrality of the Sun. What has been less generally
recognized is that underlying this set of arguments is the doctrine of
demonstration, and Melanchthon’s view of astronomy as the clearest
evidence of the providential plan the world. It follows that the entire
Mysterium cosmographicum should be read as a religious work first and
a work of science in the modern sense only as a very distant second.
Kepler, quite simply, believes that he has actually uncovered the plan
of the world, and it is not the one Melanchthon thought it was. Hence
he is in a position to accommodate the Bible to a Copernican cosmic
scheme for far stronger reasons than anyone before him.33
To understand Kepler’s proposals we need to remind ourselves of
several features of his historical context. First, the adoption of any
form of Copernican mathematical models unsettled what had become
a nearly universal consensus among mathematical practitioners on the
detailed structure of the heavens.34 Starting from Ptolemy’s eccentrics
carrying epicycles, Puerbach had introduced a standard pattern of
three dimensional orbs that would generate the motions required by
Ptolemy’s Almagest models as they rotated about their diameters. Each
set of orbs fitted within the boundaries referred to as the sphere of a
planet, and an entire cosmic scheme could be constructed by fitting

33
It is not clear that Kepler would have known of Rothmann’s earlier Copernican
attempt at accommodation which is presented most extensively in an unpublished
book-length handwritten script. See Granada, Hamel, and von Mackensen 2003, esp.
ch. 23, 198–205, and Barker 2004b, 41–57.
34
Contemporary Averroists are exceptions to these claims, but it is not clear that they
should be counted as mathematical practitioners in the same sense as astronomers in
the Ptolemaic tradition, although Copernicus generously includes them in his Letter to
Paul III (Barker 1999). There is now evidence that at least one very good mathemati-
cian Regiomontanus was seriously committed to Averroism in the generation before
Copernicus’ education, but this seems to have had no historically discernible result
(Shank 1998). Later Averroists astronomers such as Amico and Fracastoro appear to
be an independent, and equally fruitless, development (di Bono 1995).

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600 peter barker

them one inside another in a suitable order. This scheme was attractive
because it provided a physical interpretation for Ptolemaic mathemati-
cal astronomy that was at least consistent with Aristotle’s physics, but
the equant device did not fit easily within it. Copernicus provided a
means to bypass the equant, and a scheme of spheres could be gener-
ated from his models that would all rotate cleanly about diameters,
but his scheme led to a completely different pattern of orbs, and com-
pletely different distances between the planetary spheres.
Copernicus also undermined the consensus position on celestial orbs
in another way, by drawing new attention to an awkward result already
presented in Ptolemy. According to a theorem usually attributed to
Apollonius, any eccentric circle can be replaced by a concentric cir-
cle carrying an epicycle. Thus the conventional arrangement for the
motion of the Sun, an eccentric circle, could in principle be replaced
by a circle with Earth at its center, carrying an epicycle. But this would
require a completely different set of orbs. Copernicus discussed several
possible arrangements for the Sun. In principle similar ambiguities
could be introduced in any of the planetary models, and later Witten-
berg astronomers (especially the authors of the Hypotyposes) took note
of these alternatives. Kepler and his teacher Maestlin clearly regarded
Copernican planets as still constrained by orbs, but the requirement
to adjust the internal arrangement of orb clusters suggested by the
alternatives considered between 1543 and 1596 did not itself license
the radical shift of the center of the entire system from Earth to the
Sun.
A further difficulty was that Ptolemy’s model took the greatest and
least distances of planet as the outer and inner radii of its orb cluster,
and assumed that each cluster fitted exactly between its neighbors with
no empty space. Calculating the thickness of Copernicus’s planetary
spheres in the same way revealed large gaps between them, and an
even larger gap between the outmost orbs, those for Saturn, and the
sphere of fixed stars. One of the attractions of Kepler’s geometri-
cal construction is that it explains these gaps—at least between the
spheres of the planets. According to the autobiographical introduction
to the Mysterium Kepler’s attention was caught by the possibility of
using geometrical figures to explain the spacing between the celes-
tial orbs needed in Copernicus’s system. He rapidly realized that no
definitive arrangement could be established using two-dimensional fig-
ures—there were simply too many candidates. But it was well known
that there were exactly five regular three-dimensional solids—just the
number of gaps needed in the Copernican system, taking the Earth-

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Moon pair as a single object. Kepler therefore found himself in the

intriguing position that he could offer an argument for there being just
the number of planets there were and no other.35
But the most important argument was the relative distances between
planets as required by Copernicus and Ptolemy. As the issue of the
gaps suggests, the actual distances of planets from wherever you took
the center to be in the two systems were quite different. Kepler argued
that the polyhedral construction could be made to fit Copernicus’s
figures but not Ptolemy’s. If the regular solids were the correct expla-
nation for the number of planets, there must be a definite order and a
definite answer to the question of planetary distances. The particular
pattern of polyhedra suggested by Kepler reproduces Copernicus’s fig-
ures. Demonstrating that—to a degree of accuracy that is still surpris-
ing to modern readers—is tantamount to establishing that God used
those figures when he created the world.36
Kepler’s conclusions about the plan of the world might be dismissed
were they subject to the usual limitations of physical reasoning, the
necessity of starting from what is known, reasoning backwards to pos-
sible causes, winnowing those causes to establish the one true case and
then setting that cause in place in the a priori demonstration of the
original effect. But Kepler recognized that by relying on geometrical
arguments (there are only five regular three-dimensional solids hence
there can be no more that six spheres inscribed and circumscribed
between them) he was beginning from propositions that Melanch-
thon, for example, would already accept as certain. To the extent that
they fell into the realm of mathematics they belonged to that part
of the natural law that Melanchthon had asserted was the safest and
most certain form of knowledge, a form of knowledge provided by
God, and certifiably what God had ordained for humans to know of
such things, if not identical to God’s own knowledge of mathemati-
cal truths.37 Starting from the paradigms that Melanchthon used to
secure the truths of natural law apart from but not in competition

35
Kepler 1596, esp. ch. 2–8. On reading the Mysterium cosmographicum as a religious
work see Barker 2000, 82–8, Howell 2002, esp. ch. 4, and Barker and Goldstein 2001,
esp. section VI.
36
Barker and Goldstein 2001, 88–113.
37
For an authoritative statement on Melanchthon’s view of the status of mathemati-
cal knowledge and its relation to divine knowledge see Frank 2001, 3–18, esp. p. 14.
For Kepler’s appropriation of Melanchthon’s ideas see Barker 1997, and Barker and
Goldstein 2001.

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602 peter barker

to revelation, Kepler found a way to use some of those paradigms to

achieve knowledge of the cosmic plan so specific that it contradicted
Melanchthon’s own beliefs about that structure. Kepler’s reasoning
equally undermined the relationship Melanchthon had established
between that structure and the passages in the Bible we examined in
the previous section. Secure in the knowledge that he had uncovered
the providential plan of the world postulated by Melanchthon, Kepler
turned to the doctrine of accommodation to argue that the same pas-
sages cited by Melanchthon as evidence for geocentrism could now be
reread from the viewpoint of Kepler’s Copernican cosmos and recon-
ciled with the new cosmic scheme.

Bibliography

Barker, Peter. 1997. Kepler’s Epistemology. In Method and Order in Renaissance Philosophy
of Nature: The Aristotle Commentary Tradition, Eds. Daniel A. Di Liscia, Eckhard Kessler,
and Charlotte Methuen. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 355–68.
——. 1999. Copernicus and the Critics of Ptolemy. Journal for the History of Astronomy
30: 343–358.
——. 2000. The Role of Religion in the Lutheran Response to Copernicus. In Rethink-
ing the Scientific Revolution, Ed. M.J. Osler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
59–88.
——. 2004a. Astronomy, Providence and the Lutheran Contribution to Science. In
Reading God’s World: The Scientific Vocation, Ed. A.J.L. Menuge. St. Louis: Concordia
Press, 157–87.
——. 2004b. How Rothmann Changed His Mind. In Astronomy and Astrology from the
Babylonians to Kepler. Eds. Peter Barker, Alan C. Bowen, José Chabás, Gad Freuden-
thal, and Tzvi Langermann. Centaurus 46: 41–57.
Barker, Peter and Bernard R. Goldstein. 1998. Realism and Instrumentalism in Six-
teenth Century Astronomy: A Reappraisal. Perspectives on Science 6: 232–258.
——. 2001. Theological Foundations of Kepler’s Astronomy. In Science in Theistic Con-
texts: Cognitive Dimenions. Osiris 16. Ed. John Hedley Brooke, Margaret J. Osler, and
Jitse van der Meer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 88–113.
——. 2003. Patronage and the Production of De revolutionibus. Journal for the History of
Astronomy 34: 345–68.
di Bono, Mario. 1995. Copernicus, Amico, Fracastoro and Tusi’s Device: Observa-
tions on the Use and Transmission of a Model. Journal for the History of Astronomy 26:
133–154.
Caspar, Max. 1993. Kepler. Trans. and ed. C. Doris Hellman; new introduction and ref-
erences by Owen Gingerich; bibliographical citations by Owen Gingerich and Alain
Segonds. New York: Dover.
Donahue, William H. 1992. Johannes Kepler—New Astronomy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Duncan, A.M. 1981. Johannes Kepler—Mysterium Cosmographicum: The Secret of the Universe.
Norwalk, CT: Abaris Books.
Frank, Günter. 2001. Melanchthon and the Tradition of Neoplatonism. In Religious Con-
fessions and the Sciences in the Sixteenth Century, Eds. Jürgen Helm and Annette Winkel-
mann. Leiden: Brill, 3–18.

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Galilei, Galileo. 1957. Letter to Mme. Christina of Lorraine, Grand Duchess of Tus-
cany, Concerning the Use of Biblical Quotations in Matters of Science. In Discoveries
and Opinions of Galileo, Drake Stillman. New York: Anchor Books, 175–216.
Granada, Miguel A., Jürgen Hamel, and Ludolf von Mackensen. 2003. Christoph Roth-
manns Handbuch der Astronomie von 1589. Frankfurt am Main: Harri Deutsch.
The Holy Bible. 1914. Translated from the Latin Vulgate; Diligently Compared with the Hebrew,
Greek and other Editions in Divers Languages. The Old Testament first published by the English Col-
lege at Douay, A.D. 1609, and the New Testament first published by the English College at Rheims,
A.D. 1582. Baltimore: John Murphy.
Howell, Kenneth, J. 2002. God’s Two Books: Copernican Cosmology and Biblical Interpretation in
Early Modern Science. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Hübner, Jürgen. 1975. Die Theologie Johannes Keplers zwischen Orthodoxie und Naturwisseschaft.
Tübingen: Mohr.
Kepler, Johannes. 1596. Prodromus dissertationem cosmographicarum, continens mysterium cosmo-
graphicum. Tübingen: Gruppenbach.
——. 1609. Astronomia nova [AITIOLOGHTOS], sev physica coelestis. Heidelberg: Voegelinus.
——. 1937. Johannes Kepler Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3. Ed. M. Casper. C.H. Beck: Munich.
Kusukawa, Sachiko. 1995. The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Me-
lanchthon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Leges Academiae Witebergensis de Studiis et Moribus Auditorum. 1562. Wittenberg: George
Rhaw.
Mandrou, Robert. 1978. From Humanism to Science 1480–1700. Trans. Brian Pearce. Har-
mondsworth: Penguin Books.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. 2003. The Reformation: A History. New York: Viking.
Melanchthon, Philip. 1549. Initia doctrinae physicae. Wittenberg: J. Lufft.
——. 1834–1860. Corpus Reformatorum. 87 vols. Ed. C.G. Bretschneider. Halle:
Schwetschke.
Methuen, Charlotte. 1998. Kepler’s Tübingen: Stimulus to a theological mathematics. Aldershot,
Eng.: Ashgate.
Mosley, Adam. 2007. Bearing the Heavens: Tycho Brahe and the Astronomical Community of the
Late Sixteenth Century, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Peucer, Caspar. 1551. Elementa doctrinae de circulis coelestibus et primo motu. Wittenberg:
J. Crato.
Reinhold, Erasmus. 1542. Theoricae novae planetarum. (2d ed. 1553) Wittenberg: Lufft.
Shank, Michael. 1998. Regiomontanus and Homocentric Astronomy. Journal for the His-
tory of Astronomy, 27: 157–166.
Tredwell, Katherine A. 2005. The Exact Sciences in Lutheran Germany and Tudor England
(Ph.D. diss., University of Oklahoma).
Westman, Robert S. 1975. The Melanchthon Circle, Rheticus and the Wittenberg
Interpretation of the Copernican theory. Isis 66: 165–193.
——. 1980. The Astronomer’s Role in the Sixteenth Century: A Preliminary Study.
History of Science 28: 105–47.

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 CHAPTER TWENTY

THE DEBATE ON THE MOTION OF EARTH IN THE

DUTCH REPUBLIC IN THE 1650s

Rienk H. Vermij

For many years after Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus was published in

1543, the question whether Earth or the Sun was moving was not seen
as a major issue in Protestant theology. Although many Protestant
theologians probably were skeptical about heliocentric ideas, they did
not bother to make any public statements. For a long time, there was
no open hostility between supporters and detractors of the Copernican
system. The astronomer Nicolaus Mulerius in 1616 noted the existence
of two ‘sects’ of astronomers, the geocentrists and the heliocentrists. But,
although he himself rejected the motion of Earth for religious reasons,
he did not regard it as a point of doctrine. “This dispute is learned and
sharp,” he wrote, “but without hatred.”1 One of the main propagators
of Copernicanism in the Netherlands was a reformed minister, Philips
Lansbergen. He conceded that some people felt that the motion of
Earth was contrary to biblical revelation. For that reason, he explained
the manner in which the biblical text should be interpreted according
to Copernicus’s theory. In spite of his outspoken heliocentrism, his
orthodoxy appears not to have been questioned on this point by fellow
members of the reformed Church.2
The Roman Catholic Church’s condemnation, in 1616, of the Coper-
nican system, and subsequently, in 1633, of Galileo for upholding this
system, do not seem to have made much of a difference for Protestants.
There were even theologians who held that Galileo’s condemnation
by the Church of Rome rather confirmed the truth of the Coperni-
can system, as no truth could ever come forth from “that see of the
great antichrist.”3 Within Roman Catholicism, of course, the episode

1
Mulerius 1616, preface.
2
See on Lansbergen, Vermij 2002, 73–97; 248–249. For a discussion of Lansbergen’s
possible heterodoxy in other contexts and its relationship to his biblically inspired
Copernicanism, see van Nouhuys 2005, 147–55.
3
Megerlin 1682, 72–73.

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606 rienk h. vermij

had a momentous impact. But even here, one might doubt whether
it really laid bare a fundamental opposition or divergence between
seventeenth-century science and religion. The Roman condemnation
of the Copernican system was to a large degree due to political circum-
stances rather than the result of widespread opposition. It was a quick,
perhaps even rash, decision of the prelates in power. Personal rancor,
tactlessness on Galileo’s part, and lack of interest in astronomy on the
part of some theologians, all played their part. It is difficult to see the
condemnation of Galileo as the focus for the emergence of new and
fundamental problems in biblical criticism.
Within Protestantism, however, things took a different turn in the
1650s. All of a sudden, in the Netherlands, the Copernican system
became a hotly debated issue in reformed theology. Books, pamphlets,
and academic disputations debated the issue pro and con. In 1656 alone,
when the debate reached its highest pitch, some twenty pamphlets were
devoted to the question and to related topics. Ministers were lecturing
their congregations on it from the pulpit and synods were debating
it. Many theologians and lay people became involved and the Dutch
Reformed Church virtually split in two over the issue. Within Roman
Catholicism, the debate had been brought to a close largely by the papal
decree. The question was simply how to cope with that fact. Within
Protestantism, on the other hand, the matter now became the subject
of a heated, often passionate, debate that lasted for decades.4
Jonathan Israel has presented this debate as one of the main overtures
to what he regards as the Enlightenment.
[I]t was unquestionably the rise of powerful new philosophical systems,
rooted in the scientific advances of the early seventeenth century and
especially the mechanistic views of Galileo, which chiefl y generated the
vast Kulturkampf between traditional, theologically sanctioned ideas about
Man, God and the universe and secular, mechanistic conceptions which
stood independently of any theological sanction.5
According to Israel, the Dutch debate on the system of the world in
the 1650s was one of the opening battles in this cultural war. Whether
or not one endorses Israel’s view of the Enlightenment, clearly some

4
The debate on Copernicanism in the 1650s has been discussed in greater detail in
Vermij 2002, 256–323. The earliest author to deal with it at some length was probably
McGahagan, 1976, 281–289. On the problem as a whole, see Howell 2002, who deals
with the Netherlands as well.
5
Israel 2001, 14, 27–28.

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 debate on the motion of the earth in the dutch republic 607

consequences of the ‘scientific revolution’ first manifested themselves

in these debates of the 1650s.
In an earlier work, I discussed this debate from the point of view
of history of science. My main interest concerned the reception of
Copernican ideas as a manifestation of fundamental transformations
in natural philosophy. However, Israel is certainly right in pointing
to the theological impact of the debate. Exegetical questions were at
the heart of the debate. Yet, it is not clear why new scientific insights
should have overturned theologically sanctioned views. There therefore
seems to be a sufficient reason to reconsider the whole episode, now
principally with an eye to its impact on biblical exegesis.
This is not to say that other elements were lacking from the debate.
The quarrel arose not just from disagreement on religious or philosophi-
cal points, but also from the social and political aims of the protagonists.
Without these, people might well have failed to notice the dangerous
theological implications. Therefore, I shall first give a short summary
of the circumstances in which the dispute arose. The debate itself
was on the authority and interpretation of Scripture. However, it was
inseparably linked, as I hope to show, to the ongoing controversy over
Cartesian philosophy. Cartesians propagated the idea of the motion of
Earth, whereas anti-Cartesians resisted it. Indeed, the Cartesian view
of nature demanded a revision of traditional exegesis. The rise of the
new philosophy is at the heart of the theological debates of the 1650s.
However, the extent to which they represented a real turning point in
the rise of modernity may still be discussed. At the end of this chapter,
I shall try to give a modest assessment of Israel’s claims.

The Social and Political Setting of the Debate

The character of the Dutch Reformed Church was settled at the Synod
of Dort in 1618–1619. The synod had been convened because of a con-
fl ict over the doctrine of predestination, which had brought the country
to the brink of civil war. At Dort, the strict Calvinist doctrine of grace
was officially endorsed. The Remonstrants, who had been defending
a more lenient view, were banned from the Church. In this way, doc-
trinal unity was established, at least in theory. Still, the memory of the
Remonstrant schism continued to haunt the ‘orthodox.’ Theologians
who, later in the century, tried to enforce strict orthodoxy, often justi-
fied their actions by referring to the Remonstrant troubles.

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Not all issues were solved by the Synod of Dort and there remained
several bones of contention: the role of the Reformed Church in society,
the exclusive character of the Reformed Church, the strictness of mor-
als to be enforced. In the Dutch Church, as in Protestantism generally,
two major tendencies can be discerned which were at odds with each
other. On the one hand, there was a movement of Further Reforma-
tion (Nadere Reformatie), thus called because its adherents regarded the
Reformation of the sixteenth century as incomplete. This movement
aimed at achieving the sanctification of life and of society and had
close links with the Puritan movement in England. On the other hand,
there was the spread of what one might call Reformed Erasmianism,
a movement which was both antischolastic and irenicist and which
was not averse to calling on secular (e.g., philological) knowledge in
the study of theology.
Every now and then, tensions between the different views within the
church led to theological disputes. Precisitas, or the degree of strictness of
morals which had to be enforced, was a never-ending source of quar-
rels. Differences between a more and a less literal practice of reading
of the Bible also developed similarly. Professor of theology at Utrecht
University, Gijsbert Voet (Gisbertus Voetius), one of the principal
spokesmen of the Further Reformation, was also the main proponent
of the new reformed scholasticism in the Netherlands.6 He defended
a strictly literal exegesis. On the other hand, the leading professor
of theology at Leiden, Abraham Heidanus, felt more at home in the
humanist-philological tradition. This tradition at the time gave rise to
new forms of textual criticism, whereby a distinction was made between
the theological and the grammatical sense of the biblical texts.7
Since the foundation of the Dutch Republic, there had been an
uneasy relation between the government and the Dutch Reformed
Church. Effective power was in the hands of urban oligarchies. Their
members, called regents, manned the city councils and monopolized
state offices. The Reformed Church was not a creation of government,
having established itself in the revolt against Philip II of Spain as one of
the driving forces behind political independence. Formally, it remained

6
Goudriaan 2006. A recent biography of Voetius is lacking. There is a short but
excellent entry in van Bunge et al. 2003, 1030–1039. This dictionary contains further
information on most of the individuals dealt with in this article.
7
On these developments see Laplanche 1986. For a short summary, see ibid.,
1985, 463–388.

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 debate on the motion of the earth in the dutch republic 609

independent from the government. It was the country’s public church,

but not a formal state church. The regents naturally felt that the Church
should be subject to political control. Reformed ministers, on the other
hand, felt that the Church had the task of overseeing the people’s and
the government’s good conduct in religious matters. This underlying
tension emerged at various times in Dutch history.
The tension became particularly manifest in the political events after
the conclusion of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, when the princely
aspirations of the stadholder William II of Orange brought him into con-
fl ict with the States of Holland and the town of Amsterdam. William
succeeded in building a vigorous anti-States party by capitalizing upon
the resentment of many reformed ministers against Holland’s urban
aristocracies. So, reformed ministers and theologians came to take sides
in the political struggles of the time, with the followers of Voetius and
the Further Reformation largely in support of the stadholder.
The death of William in 1650 did little to alleviate these tensions. The
States of Holland quickly regained the initiative, abolished the stadholder-
ate, and installed a vigorously republican regime that left no room for
further clerical meddling. In doing so, they relied on the more moderate
and ‘latitudinarian’ ministers. The more intransigent and theocratic
ministers, who had supported William II, felt rather outraged by the
States’ behavior. Many of them did not acquiesce in the new regime,
but rather set their hopes on a restoration of the stadholderate under the
house of Orange.8
The division between supporters and detractors of the Copernican
theory among the reformed theologians after 1650 coincided neatly
with this division between partisans and opponents of the new political
regime. These quarrels did not arise solely from differing theological
viewpoints. Both parties were vying for power and tried to discredit
the other’s views. Moreover, in the tense political atmosphere, none
of the parties were interested in compromise. Both felt that the other
simply had to give way. They therefore put their views forward in
an aggressive and uncompromising way. What, earlier on, had been
mere differences of opinion and currents of thought, now took on a
more ideological character and served as the foundation of veritable
intellectual parties.

8
An excellent introduction to Dutch history is Israel 1995. See 595–609, 660–669,
700–713, 717–719, etc.

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Copernicanism as an Element of Cartesianism

The principal, indeed almost the sole issue which made the rupture
manifest, was Cartesian philosophy. Cartesianism had been controversial
for several years before 1656. René Descartes himself had lived in the
Dutch Republic for some twenty years. His Discours de la méthode was
originally published at Leiden, and his Principia philosophiae appeared
from the presses at Amsterdam. In the 1630s and 1640s, Descartes’s
ideas gained a foothold at the Dutch universities. This caused significant
controversy and even led to formal prohibitions. Anti-Cartesianism was
particularly strong at Utrecht University, where Voetius was defining
reformed doctrine in scholastic, neo-Aristotelian terms. To him, over-
throwing Aristotelian philosophy would upset the whole of learning and
threaten the very foundations of theology. After an acerbic struggle,
Voetius succeeded in having Descartes’s philosophy officially banned
from the university.
At Leiden University, the rise of Cartesian philosophy also caused
much turmoil. Here, too, leading theologians condemned Descartes’
philosophy, notably Jacob Trigland and Jacob Revius, the regent of the
College of Theologians. They succeeded in having it officially banned
from Leiden as well. This ban proved only partially effective, however.
Descartes had found many friends and followers at Leiden, even among
theologians—most notably, Heidanus. So, in the end Leiden proved
somewhat more open to Descartes’s ideas.9
The regents who controlled the universities felt rather lukewarm
about supporting Voetius’s program of pure religion. Lacking political
support, the theological opposition could not seriously impede the prog-
ress of Cartesianism in the Dutch Republic. Many students, especially at
Leiden, eagerly accepted Cartesian tenets. By the 1650s, these students
had taken up positions in society and started to spread the Cartesian
gospel outside academia. Voetius, however, was not prepared to take this
lying down. Through his pupils and as a result of his public standing,
he had much infl uence and he built up a veritable party. In the mid-
1650s, the debate on Cartesianism fl ared up again with unprecedented
vehemence. This time, the main issue was Earth’s motion.
Until this time, the Copernican hypothesis was far from universally
acclaimed. The discoveries by Galileo, Kepler, and others had seri-

9
Verbeek 1992; van Bunge 2001, 34–93.

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 debate on the motion of the earth in the dutch republic 611

ously challenged the Aristotelian worldview, but they failed to present a

cogent alternative. Descartes’s new view of the universe turned helio-
centrism into a viable physical theory. Whereas the ancient geocentric
astronomy accorded well with the hierarchical order of Aristotle’s
cosmos, Descartes propagated a universe filled with matter, which
could only move in vortices. As the universe was boundless, there
was no central place for Earth or the Sun to occupy. The universe
was filled with an innumerable number of stars (like the Sun), each
encircled by its own planets (like Earth). These ideas were an integral
part of Descartes’s philosophy. Hence, any Cartesian was of necessity
a Copernican.
Although in our eyes, the issue appears rather marginal to Cartesian-
ism, to contemporaries it was the perfect shibboleth for it. In upholding
Earth’s motion, Cartesianism seemed directly to contradict the Bible.
For Voetius, this made it immediately clear why Cartesianism was so
very pernicious. The issue was perfectly suited to excite large congre-
gations of lay people against Descartes’s ideas. Ordinary church-goers
might feel little interest in the more subtle elements of Descartes’s
metaphysics or methodology, but the rejection of biblical authority, on
such a clear-cut issue as the motion of Earth, was apparent to all.
In the earlier quarrels concerning the Cartesian philosophy, in the
1630s and 1640s, the motion of Earth had played only a minor role.
In the 1650s, however, it was the main point in dispute. In practice,
the Voetians (as Voetius’s followers came to be called) preferred to pose
simply as defenders of the Bible. Their anti-Cartesian tenor remained
implicit as long as they were not explicitly challenged on the issue.
Still, there cannot be any doubt that many, if not all, of the attacks on
Copernicanism in the 1650s were really aimed at Descartes.
The first book-length refutation of the motion of the Earth was writ-
ten by Jacob du Bois. Earlier in his career, as a minister in northern
Holland, he had expended some of his polemical zeal on the local
Mennonites. In 1646, he was called to the ministry at Leiden, where
he could not fail to notice the progress of Cartesian ideas. Moreover,
in his own eyes and those of his colleagues, du Bois appears to have
been an expert on astronomical matters. In 1650, he had published
a chronology of world history, based on biblical history and sacred
authors. In order to write this work, he had had to familiarize himself
with astronomical theory, and so he had taken lessons with the math-
ematician Samuel Karl Kechel.

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In 1653, du Bois published a Dialogus theologico-astronomicus, in which he

discussed and refuted the Copernican theory. In his view, there was no
reason to question the movement of Earth or the Sun since the Bible was
perfectly clear on this point. However, since the Copernicans confused
simple believers by claiming to have compelling, mathematical proof
of the motion of Earth, it was important to show that their arguments
were inconclusive. Du Bois did not mention Descartes in this work, but
in his preface he justified his undertaking by stating that the theory of
the motion of Earth at the current time was much propagated by “a
sect of new philosophers.”10
Voetius’s opponents, by contrast, made it perfectly clear that the
debate was really one about the philosophy of Descartes. The main
proponent of Copernicanism among reformed theologians was the
Leiden educated Christophorus Wittichius. In 1652, Wittichius had
openly defended Cartesianism and Copernicanism in two disputations
that he defended at Duisburg, a reformed university on German soil,
which was closely associated with the Dutch Reformed Church. In the
following year, he had the disputations reprinted at Amsterdam. The
first disputation was on “the abuse of Holy Scripture in matters philo-
sophical.” Here, Wittichius argued that the Bible should not be used as
a source of knowledge in natural philosophy. The second disputation
dealt with “the disposition and order of the universe and its principal
bodies.” In this disputation, Wittichius defended the Cartesian view of
the universe, and consequently the Copernican system. His arguments
were taken from Descartes’s Principia philosophiae. Clearly, Wittichius felt
that nature should be investigated by philosophical and mathematical
methods, and not by biblical exegesis. In the introduction to the two
disputations, he vigorously upheld the truth of Descartes’s ideas.
Wittichius was no mere mathematician or even a natural philoso-
pher. He was a theologian who could and did answer the defenders
of geocentrism on their own ground. He was not the first Protestant
theologian who upheld the motion of Earth, but it was he who pressed
the issue upon his colleagues and turned the question of Copernicanism
into a theological issue. Wittichius’s work was openly attacked by sev-
eral theologians—both by the above-mentioned Jacob du Bois and by
Jacob Revius, as well as by Petrus van Mastricht, who was at that time
a reformed minister in Germany, but later became Voetius’s successor

10
du Bois 1653, 252–255.

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as professor of theology at Utrecht. Moreover, Wittichius, who had by

then moved to Nijmegen, was called to account for his Cartesianism by
the provincial synod of Gelderland, but he emerged triumphant in the
end. In 1671, he was called to a chair of theology at Leiden.11
The second main protagonist of Copernicanism in the 1650s was
Lambert van Velthuysen, for whom there was also a close link between
Copernicanism (which he took largely for granted) and Cartesian philos-
ophy. Van Velthuysen presented Voetius’s rejection of Copernicanism
as proof of that man’s obscurantist attitude and his attempt to impose
a spiritual tyranny. Van Velthuysen was not a theologian (although in
his youth he had studied theology for some time), but instead a regent
at Utrecht. He was a partisan of the anti-Orangist party and was much
annoyed by what he regarded as Voetius’s arrogant behavior and
theocratic pretensions. In order to expose these, in 1655, he published
a pamphlet in Dutch, titled: “Demonstration that neither the doctrine
of the rest of the sun and the motion of Earth, nor the foundations
of the philosophy of Renatus Descartes, are contrary to God’s word.”
There, he focused on Voetius’s opposition to the Copernican theory. A
vehement debate ensued, again in the vernacular, with Jacob du Bois
being the main, but not the only, opponent of van Velthuysen.12
Van Velthuysen claimed that, until recently, everybody in the
Reformed Church had been free to maintain his or her own opinion
on the motion of Earth. The rise of Cartesian philosophy, however,
had given occasion for a tightening of the rules in this respect. Since
Descartes’s opponents had not succeeded in overcoming his author-
ity through their refutations of his writings, they now had recourse to
other means.
A large part of Descartes’s philosophy rests on the motion of Earth. These
foundations being taken away, the building which has been erected on
them must fall down. Now, they [the theologians] know that it is impos-
sible to overthrow these foundations by natural reasons. So what is to be
done? One must have recourse to religion and make it God’s cause . . .

11
Wittichius 1653, 1656, 1659. The last work was reprinted in 1688 at Amsterdam.
For these titles and the ensuing controversy, see in more detail Vermij 2002, 256–267.
For Wittichius’s problems with the synod of Gelderland, ibid., 299–303.
12
van Velthuysen 1655. On the political background of Velthuysen’s attack cf.
Vermij 2002, 272–280. On Velthuysen’s pamphlets and the reactions they elicited,
ibid., 281–294. The debate between Velthuysen and du Bois is discussed by van
Bunge, 74–83.

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By this expedient, [the matter] has become a theological debate, about

which they feel that they should be sole judges.13
Of course, the anti-Copernicans denied that their stance was a mere
pretext, but they readily admitted that their main objective was indeed
to counter the teachings of Descartes:
This [that they were attacking the motion of Earth because of their wor-
ries about Cartesianism] is not badly surmised. It is painful to many good
people that Descartes’s new doctrine is introduced with such vehemence
in many schools . . .14
So, according to the protagonists themselves, defending or attacking
Copernicus was just another way of defending or attacking Descartes.

Different Readings of the Bible

While the debate on the motion of Earth was a debate about Cartesian
philosophy, it can be argued that the latter also raised the issue of the
authority of Scripture. Wittichius, it is true, repeatedly stressed that
the debate was not about the status or the authority of the Bible, but
about the correct interpretation of the text.15 However, the fact that
he felt the need to state this so emphatically is telling. To Voetius, in
truth, the issue at stake was the very authority of the Bible.
The question at stake concerned the extent to which biblical exegesis
was affected by the new philosophy. It was Cartesianism that particularly
drove this problem home, and while the motion of Earth was not the
only issue, it was the point where the problem became most mani-
festly clear. By the publication of the 1656 pamphlets, the debate had
already spread to include many other issues where Cartesian philosophy
appeared to disagree with biblical revelation, or where a strictly literal
reading of the Bible could be regarded as unjustified: questions such
as whether animals have understanding; what was the nature of the
Egyptian darkness; whether God could lie, etc. These further points
help one to understand the debate as a whole, but in this section, I
shall limit myself to explaining the arguments as they referred to the
motion of Earth and the Sun.

13
[van Velthuysen 1655], 5.
14
du Bois 1655a, 5.
15
Wittichius 1656, 11–12; ibid. 1659.

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To the anti-Copernicans, led by Voetius, the issue was clear. Voetius

had explained his views on the Copernican theory several years before
the rise of Cartesianism, in a debate with the Remonstrant minister
Jacobus Johannes Batelier in 1634–1635. As Voetius saw it, the question
was whether it was possible to trust the Bible or not. If the Bible was
not accurate in every detail, there were only two possibilities: either the
Holy Ghost could not speak the truth, or He did not want to. Admit-
ting either of these would be blasphemy. Voetius rejected the argument
that the Bible had to accommodate itself to the understanding of the
common man. The Copernican system would not have been above the
understanding of the Patriarchs, the Prophets, or the people of Israel.
And the Bible directed itself not only to the ancients, but also to the
people of the seventeenth century.16
Du Bois was largely of the same opinion. His main exegetical prin-
ciple, repeatedly stated in the controversy, was that the Bible should
be taken unconditionally at face value, “unless clear and sufficient
reason leads and forces us to the contrary.”17 In the present case, he
felt, there were no such reasons at all. The theory of the motion of
Earth rested only on the sayings of a few astronomers, whereas most
others disagreed with it.
Both Voetius and du Bois felt that astronomical and philosophical
arguments were simply not worth looking into. In this, they made refer-
ence to the well-known reformed principle that Scripture should only
be interpreted by Scripture. In their view, people like Wittichius and
Velthuysen were really adapting their biblical interpretation to an exter-
nal philosophical doctrine, that is, to Cartesianism. As du Bois stated,
the aim of the Cartesians was that in natural and astronomical things,
“one no longer had to bend one’s understanding to follow Scripture,
but would bend Scripture to follow one’s understanding.”18 We should
follow the letter of the Bible unless some serious reason forces us to do
otherwise; that is, unless we are compelled by intratextual reasons, or
because the literal sense would result in an absurdity. In doing other-
wise, the interpreter would be subjugating Scripture to human reason,

16
Voetius 1635, 271, 281. The list of objections and refutations is actually much
longer: 256–283. For Voetius’s dispute with Batelier, see Vermij 2002, 162–164,
249–250.
17
du Bois 1653, preface, 14. He ventured this exegetical principle also in later works,
for instance, du Bois 1655b, 72 (“a proprietate verborum, sine cogente necessitate non
est recedendum”); ibid. 1656, 18.
18
du Bois 1655a, 25.

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which would amount in effect to a confession of Socinianism—which

to a seventeenth-century reformed theologian was hardly worse than
atheism.19
As might be expected, the advocates of Copernicus defended a more
accommodating exegesis, not unlike the earlier defenses mounted by
Galileo, Kepler, and, in the Dutch Republic itself, Lansbergen. At no
point did they deny that the Bible was the infallible Word of God.
However, they rejected the strict literalism of Voetius and his allies.
Wittichius made a distinction between philosophical knowledge and
common or vulgar knowledge. As he saw it, the Bible does not offer
philosophical instruction, that is, distinct knowledge of qualities and
substances and of the real constitution of nature. It deals with things
as they appear to us. So, in matters of practice and morals, the Bible
does not speak according to the strict philosophical truth of the matter,
but according to the opinion of the people. That does not make what
it says untrue: common notions, or common knowledge, contain the
truth ad homines relatam (with respect to man).20
Van Velthuysen based his position on a slightly different distinction.
According to him, we should distinguish between the intention of the
texts, and the language by which this intention is expressed. Where
the Bible “teaches and dogmatises,” we should absolutely and uncon-
ditionally accept these sayings as true. When the Bible teaches things
which are above our understanding, this does not allow us to deviate
from the literal sense. But we should not take the words in isolation.
Scripture sometimes uses the expressions of the people, “but that does
not mean that it teaches and dogmatises the opinion of the common
man.” Moreover, van Velthuysen maintained a strict separation between
theology and philosophy. If the Bible teaches something with words
from the secular sciences, without further explanation, and scholars do
not agree on the meaning of those words, or on the conditions which
the full meaning presupposes, “then this is only a philosophical dispute,
or a disagreement about things which are to be judged by reason and
human ingenuity, without the help and authority of Scripture.”21
Van Velthuysen was not impressed by du Bois’s accusation of Socini-
anism. He retorted that du Bois himself followed Socinian principles.

19
Ibid. 53–54. Because of their anti-Trinitarianism, Socinians were regarded as
rationalists, who rejected the Christian mysteries for being contrary to reason.
20
These opinions are stated most clearly in Wittichius 1656.
21
[van Velthuysen 1655], 10, 26.

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To depart from the literal sense every time one felt that it would oth-
erwise result in an absurdity, would really be to subjugate Scripture to
human reason. Van Velthuysen himself clearly stated that wherever
the Bible is engaged in teaching and dogmatising, one should follow it
unconditionally, even if the result might seem absurd. Du Bois indeed
had not much to say in reply to this, except to argue that he had
drawn his exegetical principles from impeccable reformed authors. Van
Velthuysen thereupon not only demonstrated in detail the similarities
between du Bois’s exegesis and that of the Socinians, he also pointed
out that his own principle of looking at what the Bible teaches and
dogmatises had previously been recommended by Voetius himself.22
Defiantly, he stated: “Two eggs are not more similar than my answer
is to that of the theologians. But now that it is said by a Cartesian, it
is a great heresy, a rupture of the authority of Holy Scripture, a devil’s
work, etc.”23
In fact, as far as exegetical principles are concerned, there do not
seem to be any significant differences between the two parties.24 All of
the protagonists clearly stood in the reformed tradition. The Coperni-
cans could and did refer to authorities of impeccable orthodoxy, John
Calvin among them. Wittichius’s detractors had to acknowledge that
they had virtually nothing to say against his basic principles. It was the
case, they agreed, that the Bible used common language, similes, and
manners of speaking; it adapted itself to our understanding and might
well be said to express the truth with respect to man. But then, they
added, none of this was relevant. The question was not “whether the
Bible speaks in general according to the common opinion; but whether
it speaks according to common opinion when it is in error, contrary to
truth.”25 The protagonists in this debate differed not in their theological
methods, but in their idea of what was true.

22
van Velthuysen 1656, 101; du Bois 1656, 10; van Velthuysen 1657, 35–42.
23
Ibid., 32–33.
24
Cf. van Bunge 2001, 52, 78.
25
Niepoort 1656, 149: “an S. Scriptura loquator secundum opinionem vulgi in
genere; sed an loquator secundum opinionem vulgi erroneam, oppositè ad veritatem.”
These disputations had originally been defended at the University of Utrecht under
the presidency of Professor Andreas Essenius.

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Different Views of the World

If we are to understand the debate, we have to take seriously the vari-

ous proponents’ own claims. They clearly stated that it was Cartesian
philosophy that made the reading of biblical texts problematic. The
question is why this should be have been so. How could Cartesianism
give occasion to a new reading of the Bible, contrary to time-honored
exegetical principles? Earlier commentators have, in this respect, largely
hinted at the methodological and epistemological claims of Cartesian-
ism. By demanding mathematical truth, Cartesian philosophers set
new standards of certainty, which would also affect theology.26 To
some degree, this appears to be accurate. Furthermore, for the follow-
ers of Cartesianism, the motion of Earth was not just an astronomical
‘hypothesis,’ but a true physical theory. Theologians did not need to
bother about mere hypotheses, but the interpretation of the Bible should
agree with acknowledged facts. Once philosophers claimed absolute
truth for their results, theologians would have either to concur or to
reject those claims.
From the point of view of the disputants, however, it made more
sense to look at Cartesianism as a new philosophy of nature. Today, the
philosophy of Descartes is mainly identified with his ideas on method
and metaphysics. In the seventeenth century, however, Descartes was
particularly admired because he had provided the foundations for a
new physics. Descartes was the first who formulated a viable alternative
to the ancient Aristotelian world. According to Descartes, nature was
uniform, it allowed only causal explanations, and it worked according to
universal laws. In this way, nature was in a sense ‘mathematized.’27
Descartes’s specific physical theories were soon to be refuted, but his
general view of nature would prove more lasting. Descartes regarded
the world and its phenomena as emerging from a deeper level of real-
ity. This idea outlived his more specific physical contributions. The
so-called scientific revolution of the seventeenth century meant a shift
in the scholar’s view of reality. Reality was no longer simply what was
seen and experienced, but existed at a far deeper and even invisible
level. The phenomena as we perceive them were held to have no

26
Armogathe 1989, 49–60; Popkin, 1982, 61–81.
27
Henry 2004, 73–114; Gaukroger 1995; see also the contributions in Gaukroger,
2000.

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ontological significance in themselves. Man had no immediate access

to reality. Only scientific and philosophical inquiry could teach us what
might really be.
It has been argued convincingly that it was exactly this rather upset-
ting aspect of Cartesianism that aroused the indignation of Voetius.
Voetius wanted to save the common-sense understanding of the world
from the onslaught of Descartes.28 Since the Bible was the fountain of
truth, truth ultimately could not be expressed in anything other than
biblical language. However, the Cartesians were deliberately upholding
a world view according to which ‘true’ philosophical knowledge was dif-
ferent from common-sense understanding. Wittichius’s understanding of
the Bible, as we saw, was really based on his distinction between popular
and philosophical notions; between truths about the real constitution
of the world and truths as they appear to us. Now, such a distinction
made sense only in a Cartesian (or post-Cartesian) framework. Voetius
stuck to the old Aristotelian notion that the individual things in the
world are substances, which the human mind can immediately grasp.
Apart from “the truth with respect to man,” nothing remains to be
known. So, there could be no middle way between accepting the letter
of the Bible and not accepting it at all.
The controversies between the two parties, then, referred to fun-
damental philosophical differences. Both parties were convinced that
they read the Bible according to reality. But Voetius felt that what the
Cartesians regarded as reality was in fact mere philosophical hypothesis,
which should have no place in biblical interpretation. The Cartesians,
on their side, felt that Voetius mistook the unreliable testimony of the
senses for reality. Clearly, it is hard for people to agree on the ‘real’
meaning of biblical sentences, even given full agreement on exegetical
or theological principles, if their ideas about what constitutes reality
itself are at variance.

The Significance of the Debate

The new view of reality that emerged in the seventeenth century was
there to last. Theologians would have to adapt themselves, in one way
or other, to this new view of the world. The new physics posed problems

28
van Ruler 1995, passim.

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for traditional interpretations of the Bible which were not just limited
to the motion of Earth. The establishment of Cartesian philosophy
with its new physics coincided with much debate, in the Netherlands
and elsewhere, on all kinds of topics where new philosophical insights
seemed to contradict traditional theological notions.
The religious meaning of comets, for example, was hotly debated
in the second half of the seventeenth century. Although many of
the arguments in this debate were of respectable antiquity, it seems
plausible that it was the new and contested views about natural phe-
nomena that made the issue so prominent in this period.29 The same
is true for debates about the resurrection in the seventeenth century.
Daily experience tells us that people’s bodies are well-defined entities.
Hence, the resurrection of the body was an unproblematic concept.
The mechanical philosophy, however, taught that those bodies were
accidental assemblages of material particles, which were in constant
fl ux. By the end of the seventeenth century, philosophers were draw-
ing attention to the consequences of such positions for the doctrine of
the resurrection. Given the accidental nature of the assemblage of the
human body, they asked, with what bodies would people appear at
the Last Judgment?30
Some philosophical debates during the second half of the seventeenth
century traced their origin directly to the Dutch pamphlets of the 1650s.
Van Velthuysen and du Bois had quarreled over biblical texts that
attribute understanding to animals. This appears to have prompted
Florentius Schuyl to publish, in 1662, an elaborated defense in Latin
of Descartes’s views on the beast-machine. This put the topic on the
philosophical agenda. After 1662, animal souls became a subject for
international debate.31
However, in conclusion, might all this mean that (as Israel contends)
such debates were merely the introduction to those later debates on
the Bible, together with other Enlightenment topics, which we associate
with the name of Spinoza? In some respects, this cannot be doubted.
One of the main issues in the debates over Spinozism was the relation

29
For the debate on comets in the Dutch Republic, see Jorink 2006, 114–185. Jorink
stresses the significance for this of the tradition of humanist philology.
30
This topic was the subject of a quarrel between the mathematician Johann Ber-
noulli and the theologian Paulus Hulsius at the University of Groningen in the 1690s.
See van Maanen 1995, 53–67.
31
Vermij 1994, 51–63.

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between theology and philosophy. This was the subject of Lodewijk

Meijer’s Philosophia S. Scripturae interpres, of 1666, as well as a main topic
of Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus of 1670. These works drew their
inspiration from many sources. But they were only able to cut the links
between philosophy and theology because they presupposed the view
of reality and its philosophical implications that had recently emerged
from the debates of the 1650s.
For Voetius, the works by Meijer and Spinoza clearly showed that
he had been in the right and demonstrated the extent to which the
principle that the interpretation of the Bible should refer to philosophi-
cal ‘truths’ had become pernicious. As far as he was concerned, Meijer
was just reaping where Wittichius had sown. As such, Voetius would
have agreed with Israel: he tended to see the debate as a struggle
between orthodoxy and a rising philosophical atheism. He initiated a
new antiphilosophical movement in theology, which regarded secular
knowledge with suspicion. As he had a European reputation, not just
among the Reformed, but also among the Lutherans, his example in
answering the challenge of Cartesianism was quite infl uential.32 His
project for a further reformation laid the basis for the later attitude
of many churches in rejecting the modern world as such. As Scholder
noted, the rejection of Cartesianism started the alliance of religious
fundamentalism with political and philosophical conservatism that
characterizes modern ecclesiastical history.33 One might well argue that
Voetius’s uncompromising stance did much more to create a “Kultur-
kampf” than the jibes of enlightened philosophers.
However, it would be slightly one-sided to regard these debates
exclusively from the perspective of the rise of radical thinking. They
succeeded more broadly in making latent intellectual contradictions
manifest. But that did not necessarily mean that those contradictions
were irreconcilable, or that they generated a “Kulturkampf.” People
became aware of serious theological problems, but they also began
immediately to look for solutions. It would seem that in the end, these
debates infl uenced the emergence of new theological ideas rather than
leading to the emergence of new philosophical ideas.

32
Schneppen 1960, 75–131; Tholuck 1853–1854 & 1861–1862.
33
Cf. Scholder 1966, 144: “Hier, in der Abwehr des Cartesianismus, beginnt jener
Bund zwischen Fundamentalismus und Konservatismus, der für die Kirchengeschichte
der Neuzeit so überaus characteristisch ist.”

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The Cartesians emphatically denied any similarity between Meijer’s

principles and their own, but they were put on the defensive by the
debate. The Groningen professor, Maresius, who had been sympathetic
to Descartes and was an enemy of Voetius, now came over to the
anti-Copernican and anti-Cartesian side and made peace with Voetius.
It may be in reaction to this that, in 1660s, the debate between the
Cartesian and the anti-Cartesian parties shifted focus. The Cartesians
no longer defended a merely philosophical interpretation of the Bible
(although they stuck to their earlier interpretations of texts on the motion
of the Sun etc.), but came instead to the defence of the theological
views of the Leiden professor, Johannes Cocceius.
Cocceius favored a prophetical reading of the Bible, according to
which the (future) course of world history might be deduced by a
complex sort of exegesis.34 He introduced a new idea of the Covenant
and regarded salvation as a gradual process that had not yet reached
its ultimate fulfillment. Most Cartesian theologians and ministers came
to adopt Cocceius’s views, whereas these were vehemently opposed by
Voetius and his allies. Indeed, in Dutch church history, the theological
strife of the second half of the seventeenth century is commonly referred
to as the struggle between Voetians and Cocceians.
The fact that from the 1660s many theologians combined Cartesian
philosophy with Cocceius’s prophetic reading of the Bible has puzzled
many church historians.35 The acceptance of Cartesianism and Coper-
nicanism among theologians is generally felt to have been the result of
new critical methods and rationalizing tendencies. Cocceius’s way of
reading the Bible, however, can hardly be deemed ‘modern’ or ‘critical,’
at least as we understand the term. Indeed, his views were criticized at
the time, not just by the Voetians, but also by the rationalist theologian,
Balthasar Bekker, who made it his life’s task to purge theology from
superstitious beliefs and practices.36
It seems plausible that Cocceian theology was attractive to Carte-
sians because it legitimized a reading of the Bible, which, on the one
hand, was theologically meaningful, but, on the other, could easily be
accommodated to new philosophical insights. By adhering to Cocceius’s
views, the Cartesians clearly showed that they were pious Christians,

34
On Cocceius’s theology, see van Asselt 2001.
35
For a discussion see van der Wall 1996, 445–455.
36
van Bunge 1995, 659–673, in particular 666–667.

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convinced of the spiritual meaning of the Bible. This enabled them to

keep their theology at some distance from the radical tendencies which
were worrying Reformed Christianity at the time. At the same time, it
left them free to follow up their philosophical program. Unlike Voetius,
Cocceius left natural knowledge alone and was only concerned with
the theological meaning of the Bible. Hence, his followers had a way
of separating theology from philosophy.

Conclusion

As far as natural reality is concerned, most people now would take it

for granted that nature has its own laws. The natural world is defined
and described by scientists who use a nonbiblical language and whose
statements are only in a very indirect way related to any metaphysi-
cal truth regarding man. Voetius’s views appear largely discredited.
His opponents, who separated theology from science and philosophy,
would appear to have been right. Even so, one may wonder how far
the fundamental problem has been solved. Voetius and his allies were
not just concerned with the motion of the Sun, or with the natural
world in general. One of the reasons they felt that Wittichius’s argu-
ments were so pernicious was that, from the outset, they had spotted
that they would apply not only to astronomy and physics, but also to
matters of theology and morals.37
In this, Voetius and his friends appear to have been right. In more
recent times, scientific enquiry has entered the realms of culture, of
behavior, of morals and of the causes of religion. In none of these
cases do scientists speak the language of the Bible. Each in turn is
(re)defined as one of the works of nature, subject only to its own laws,
and unrelated to human or biblical concerns.

Bibliography

Armogathe, J.-R. 1989. La vérité des Ecritures et la nouvelle physique. In Le grand siècle
et la bible. Ed. J.-R. Armogathe. Paris: Beauchesne.
du Bois, Jacob. 1653. Dialogus theologico-astronomicus. Leiden: Petrus Leffen.
——. 1655a. Naecktheyt van de cartesiaensche philosophie. Utrecht: Johannes van Waesberge.

37
Niepoort 1656 pars prior, thesis 7.

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——. 1655b. Veritas et authoritas sacra, in naturalibus & astronomicis asserta & vindicata.
Utrecht: Joh. à Waesberge.
——. 1656. Schadelickheyt van de cartesiaensche philosophie. Utrecht: Johan van Waesberge.
Gaukroger, S. 1995. Descartes. An Intellectual Biography. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Gaukroger, S., J. Schuster and J. Sutton eds. 2000. Descartes’ Natural Philosophy. London:
Routledge.
Goudriaan, A. 2006. Reformed Orthodoxy and Philosophy, 1625–1750: Gisbertus Voetius, Petrus
van Mastricht, and Anthonius Driessen. Leiden: Brill.
Henry, J. 2004. Metaphysics and the Origins of Modern Science: Descartes and the
Importance of the Laws of Nature. Early Science and Medicine 9: 73–114.
Howell, K.L. 2002. God’s Two Books. Copernican Cosmology and Biblical Interpretation in Early
Modern Science. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Israel, Jonathan 1995. The Dutch Republic. Its Rise, Greatness and Fall 1477–1806. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
——. 2001. Radical Enlightenment. Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jorink, E. 2006. Het boeck der natuere. Nederlandse geleerden en de wonderen van Gods schepping
1575–1715. Leiden: Primavera Press.
Laplanche, F. 1985. Tradition et modernité au XVIIe siècle. L’exegèse biblique des
protestants français. Annales ESC: 463–388.
——. 1986. L’écriture, le sacré et l’histoire. Érudits et politiques protestants devant la Bible en France
au XVIIe siècle. Amsterdam/Maarssen: APA-Holland University Press.
McGahagan, T.A. 1976. Cartesianism in the Netherlands 1639–1676: The New Science
and the Calvinist Counter-reformation (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania).
Megerlin, Petrus. 1682. Systema mundi Copernicanum, argumentis invictis demonstratum &
conciliatum theologiae. Amsterdam: Henr. Wetstenius.
Mulerius, Nicolaus. 1616. Institutionum astronomicarum libri duo. Groningen: Joannes Sassius.
Niepoort, Arnoldus. 1656. De authoritate et veritate Sacrae Scripturae in rebus philo-
sophicis. In Disputationes theologicae quatuor, de usu Sacrae Scripturae in rebus philosophicis,
contra Christophori Wittichii dissertationes. Arnoldus Niepoort, Johannes Beusechum and
Henricus Troy. Utrecht: Joannes à Waesberge.
Popkin, R.H. 1982. Cartesianism and Biblical Criticism. In Problems of Cartesianism.
Ed. Thomas M. Lennon and J.M. Nicholas. Kingston/Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press.
Schneppen, H. 1960. Niederländische Universitäten und deutsches Geistesleben. Von der Gründung
der Universität Leiden bis ins späte 18. Jahrhundert. Münster: Aschendorff.
Scholder, K. 1966. Ursprünge und Probleme der Bibelkritik im 17. Jahrhundert. Ein Beitrag zur
Entstehung der historisch-kritischen Theologie. München: Kaiser.
Tholuck, A. 1853–1854. Vorgeschichte des Rationalismus. Vol. 1, Das akademische Leben des
siebzehnten Jahrhunderts. Halle: Anton.
——. 1861–1862. Vorgeschichte des Rationalismus. Vol. 2, Das kirchliche Leben des siebzehnten
Jahrhunderts. Berlin: Wiegandt and Grieben.
van Asselt, W.J. 2001. The Federal Theology of Johannes Cocceius (1603-1669) Leiden:
Brill.
van Bunge, W. 1995. Balthasar Bekker on Daniel. An Early Enlightenment Critique
of Millenarianism. History of European Ideas 21: 659–673.
——. 2001. From Stevin to Spinoza. An Essay on Philosophy in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch
Republic. Leiden: Brill.
van Bunge, Wiep, Henri Krop, Bart Leeuwenburgh, Han van Ruler and Paul Schuur-
man, ed. 2003. Dictionary of Seventeenth and Eighteenth-century Dutch Philosophers. Bristol:
Thoemmes.

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van der Wall, E. 1996. Cartesianism and Cocceianism: a Natural Alliance? In De

l’humanisme aux Lumières, Bayle et le protestantisme. Ed. M. Magdelaine, M.C. Pitassi,
A. McKenna, and R. Whelan. Paris: Universitas; Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
van Maanen, J.A., ed. 1995. Een complexe grootheid. Leven en werk van Johann Bernoulli
1667–1748. Utrecht: Epsilon.
van Nouhuys, Tabitta. 2005. Copernicanism, Jansenism, and Remonstrantism in the
Seventeenth-Century Netherlands. In Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion,
Eds. John Brooke & Ian Maclean. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 145–68.
van Ruler, Han. 2003. Heidanus. In Dictionary of Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Dutch
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and Paul Schuurman. Bristol: Thoemmes, 1030–1039.
van Ruler, J.A. 1995. The Crisis of Causality. Voetius and Descartes on God, Nature and
Change. Leiden: Brill.
[van Velthuysen, Lambert]. [1655] Bewys, dat het gevoelen van die genen, die leeren der sonne
stilstandt, en des aertrycks beweging niet strydich is met Godts-woort. s.l. [Utrecht]: n.p.
van Velthuysen, Lambert. 1656. Bewys dat noch de leere van der sonne stilstant, en des aertryx
bewegingh, noch de gronden vande philosophie van Renatus des Cartes strijdig sijn met Godts Woort.
Utrecht: Dirck van Ackersdijck and Gijsbert van Zijll.
——. 1657. Nader bewys dat noch de leere van der sonne stilstant, en des aertryx beweging, noch
de gronden van de philosophie van Renatus des Cartes strijdig sijn met Godts woort. Utrecht:
Dirck van Ackersdijck and Gijsbert van Zijll.
Verbeek, Theo. 1992. Descartes and the Dutch. Early Reactions to Cartesian Philosophy 1637–
1650. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press.
Vermij, R.H. 1994. Dieren als machines. Een stok om de hond te slaan. In Groniek
126: 51–63.
——. 2002. The Calvinist Copernicans. The Reception of the New Astronomy in the Dutch Republic,
1575–1750. Amsterdam: Edita KNAW.
Voetius, Gisbertus. 1635. Thersites heautontimorumenos. Utrecht: Abr. ab Herwick and
Herm. Ribbius.
Wittichius, Christophorus. 1653. Dissertationes duae quarum prior de S. Scripturae in rebus
philosophicis abusu (. . .) Altera dispositionem & ordinem totius universi & principalium ejus cor-
porum tradit . . . Amsterdam: Lud. Elzevier. (This is a reprint of the original Duisburg
disputations.)
——. 1656. Consideratio theologica de stylo Scripturae quem adhibet cum de rebus naturalibus
sermonem instituit. Leiden: Adr. Wyngaerden.
——. 1659. Consensus veritatis in Scriptura Divina et infallibili revelatae cum veritate philosophica
a Renato des Cartes detecta. Nijmegen: Adrianus Wyngaerden.

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 CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

THE BIBLICAL ARGUMENT AGAINST COPERNICANISM

AND THE LIMITATION OF BIBLICAL AUTHORITY:
INGOLI, FOSCARINI, GALILEO, CAMPANELLA

Maurice A. Finocchiaro

Preliminaries

The aim of this paper is to discuss the interaction between natural

philosophy or science and biblical exegesis or hermeneutics in regard
to four crucial authors whose most relevant works were written around
the time of the first phase of Galileo’s trial, namely in 1615–1616. This
aim needs to be clarified in several ways.
The first clarification is that two things must be distinguished within
the natural philosophy (or science) of the episode under scrutiny. They
are Galileo’s telescopic discoveries and the reevaluation of Copernican-
ism they implied. These Galilean discoveries were the mountains of
the Moon, the satellites of Jupiter, the stellar composition of the Milky
Way and nebulas, the phases of Venus, and sunspots. They were made
in the period 1609–1613 and described in The Sidereal Messenger (1610)
and the Sunspot Letters (1613). The cosmological implications of these
discoveries were of course a much more controversial matter, and the
formulation on which I would like to focus is the one I believe was
favored by Galileo himself: “the demonstrations for the earth’s motion
are much stronger than those for the other side”;1 that is, the Coperni-
can theory is much more likely to be true than either the Ptolemaic or
the Tychonic theory. This reevaluation involves two main elements: a
realist, non-instrumentalist interpretation of Copernicanism, and a claim
of its superiority over all geostatic alternatives. It is useful to distinguish
the observational discoveries from the theoretical reevaluation not only

1
“Che le dimostrazioni per la mobilità della Terra sieno molto più gagliarde di quelle
dell’altra parte”: in Favaro 5:354; references to Favaro 1890–1909 will be given by
omitting the years, while retaining Favaro’s name and the volume and page numbers.
Cf. Finocchiaro (1989, 73; 1997, 5); Camerota 2004, 352.

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because one could accept the former without the latter, but also because
the scriptural controversy was elicited primarily by the latter.
Second, it is useful to distinguish not only between exegesis and herme-
neutics, but also between them (especially the latter) and what I shall call
metahermeneutics or metascriptural methodology. That is, in accordance with
standard terminology, the label exegesis should be used to refer to the
practice of textual interpretation, namely to particular interpretations of
particular biblical texts; and the label hermeneutics should be taken to
mean the theory of textual interpretation, i.e., principles and methods
of biblical interpretation. However, we also need a label to denote the
study of questions about the role (if any) of Scripture in the search for
truth about nature; I shall call this metahermeneutics or metascriptural
methodology.2 Accordingly, hermeneutics refers to principles like the
following: scriptural statements should be interpreted literally if the
literal interpretation implies no absurdities; scriptural statements should
be interpreted as accommodating themselves to popular language and
beliefs if their literal interpretation implies absurdities, such as con-
tradicting most other relevant scriptural statements (this is a version
of the so-called principle of accommodation and is the converse of the
preceding principle); scriptural statements about natural phenomena
should not be interpreted literally if their literal interpretation contradicts
scientific truths that have been conclusively demonstrated (this has been
called the principle of priority of demonstration);3 scriptural statements
about natural phenomena should be interpreted literally if their literal
interpretation does not contradict any conclusively demonstrated truths
(this is the converse of the last principle and could be called the principle
of the necessity of demonstration). Metascriptural methodology, on the
other hand, refers to maxims that have been given such labels as the
principle of scriptural limitation, or the principle denying the scientific
authority of Scripture;4 for example, Galileo claimed that in Scripture,
“the intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how one goes to heaven
and not how heaven goes.”5

2
My concept here is similar, although not identical, to the one advanced by Beretta
(2005, 244) and Mayaud (2005, 18–19); moreover, their terminology is different from
mine.
3
McMullin 1998, 294; 2005b, 93.
4
Respectively, McMullin 2005b, 95; Finocchiaro 2005, 266.
5
Finocchiaro 1989, 96; cf. Favaro 5:319.

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 the biblical argument against copernicanism 629

The next clarification centers on the notion of interaction between sci-

ence and Scripture. One reason for the complexity of this interaction
is that there are really four main things that are interacting and not
just two, since as we have just seen, the ‘science’ in question can be
either the Galilean telescopic discoveries or the Galilean reevaluation
of Copernicanism, and the ‘Scripture’ can refer to scriptural exegesis
or hermeneutics on the one hand and metascriptural methodology on
the other. A second reason is that in such interactions the causal and
historical infl uence could go in both directions, and so it is important to
be on the lookout for the possibility not only that scientific developments
affected scriptural ones, but also for the reverse possibility that scrip-
tural developments may have had an effect on scientific ones. A third
reason for the complexity is that the interactions may be not only those
that have actually taken place, but also those that could have occurred
and those that ought to have happened. In other words, regarding the
eight possible interactions (among four things, in two directions), what
one wants to do is not only to understand or interpret what exactly
infl uenced or produced what and how, but also to evaluate or assess
the propriety or desirability or beneficial character of the historical
developments so interpreted.
Finally, the four authors who are the subject of our discussion are
relevant and important for two distinct reasons. One is that they had
interesting, important, and infl uential ideas about our topic. A second
reason is that they were practically involved in the events of those crucial
years, 1615–1616. That is, the actions as well as the thought of our
four authors are part of our story. Of course, thought and action are
related, but they do not always correspond. For example, at the level
of thought, Foscarini held a principle of scriptural limitation, which can
also be viewed as a principle of non-interference by scriptural author-
ity in scientific investigation; yet his act of publishing his ideas on the
subject was a major factor in bringing about the Catholic Church’s
interference in the form of the anti-Copernican decree of 1616. My
emphasis will be on the thought of these four authors, with only a little
sprinkling about their actions, but a full account would have to examine
the latter more extensively.

Copernicanism and Scripture

Scriptural criticism of Copernicanism was immediate, as we now know

from the censure of Copernicus’s book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly

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Spheres (1543) by Giovanni Maria Tolosani in 1546–1547.6 Indeed such

criticism even antedated the publication of Copernicus’s masterpiece:
in an incidental remark in 1539, Martin Luther criticized Copernican-
ism as incompatible with the biblical passage in Josh. 10:12–13;7 and
in 1541, the second edition of Georg Joachim Rheticus’s Narratio prima
had a preface that quoted a letter by a friend (Achilles Pirmin Gasser)
suggesting that heliocentrism “can be judged heretical.”8 It is also well
known that the criticism continued, for scriptural objections were usu-
ally included in discussions of the status of heliocentrism.9 However,
it was not until Galileo’s telescopic discoveries in 1609–1613 that the
problem became a crisis. I believe the key reason for this crisis was
that these discoveries entailed a major reassessment of Copernican-
ism:10 they suggested that Earth’s motion and its a-centric ‘heavenly’
location could now be regarded as real possibilities and not merely
convenient instruments of astronomical calculations and predictions,
and indeed as more likely to be true than the alternatives, although of
course they did not provide a conclusive demonstration of the physical
truth of the doctrine.
In fact, no sooner had Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger left the printing press
(March 1610) than Martin Horky published A Very Short Excursion Against
the Sidereal Messenger ( June 1610).11 A few months later, Lodovico delle
Colombe compiled an essay “Against the Earth’s Motion” (1610–1611)
that included theological objections; it circulated widely, but was left
unpublished.12
In 1611, Francesco Sizzi published in Venice his Dianoia astronomica,
optica, physica, objecting on scriptural grounds to Galileo’s discovery of
Jupiter’s satellites.13
In 1612, Giulio Cesare Lagalla, professor of philosophy at the Uni-
versity of Rome, published in Venice a book On the Phenomena in the
Orb of the Moon, disputing Galileo’s lunar discoveries.14 In the summer

6
Garin 1975, 280; Granada 1997; Lerner 2002; Mayaud 2005, 3:84–87.
7
Blackwell 1991, 23; cf. Luther 1912–21, IV, no. 4638.
8
Lerner 2005, 11; cf. Lerner 1999, 69.
9
Cf. Grant 1984, 61–62; Lattis 1994, 106–44; Lerner 1999; 2005; Howell 2002,
39–136; Kelter 1995; 2005; Mayaud 2005.
10
See Wallace 1984, 282–98; Finocchiaro 1980, 3–45; 1988; 1997, 5, 28–38. Cf.
Favaro 5:354; Finocchiaro 1989, 73; Camerota 2004, 352.
11
Brevissima peregrinatio contra nuncium sidereum: in Favaro 3:127–45.
12
“Contro il moto della Terra”: in Favaro 3:12, 251–90.
13
Favaro 3:12, 201–50; cf. Gebler 1879 , 39; Müller 1911, 86–87.
14
De phaenomenis in orbe Lunae nunc iterum suscitatis: in Favaro 3:13, 309–99.

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 the biblical argument against copernicanism 631

of that year, Galileo was so worried that he asked Cardinal Carlo

Conti for advice on whether Scripture really favors Aristotelian natural
philosophy; Conti was an infl uential churchman in Rome and replied
promptly in two thoughtful letters.15 On November 2, in a private con-
versation Dominican Friar Niccolò Lorini attacked Galileo for being
inclined to heresy by believing ideas (such as that Earth moves) which
contradict Scripture, although on November 5 Lorini wrote Galileo a
letter of apology.16
In the fall of 1613, Ulisse Albergotti published in Viterbo a book,
Dialogue . . . in Which It Is Held . . . That the Moon Is Intrinsically Luminous . . .,
containing biblical criticism of Galileo’s theories.17 In December, incited
by Cosimo Boscaglia, special professor of philosophy at the University
of Pisa, the grand duchess dowager Christina of Lorraine, mother of
Grand Duke Cosimo II, questioned Galileo’s disciple Benedetto Cas-
telli about the compatibility of Galileo’s ideas with Scripture. Castelli
gave satisfactory answers, but informed Galileo of the incident. So on
21 December 1613, Galileo wrote a long letter to Castelli giving a
multi-faceted refutation of the scriptural objection to Copernicanism,
including a discussion of the passage from Josh. 10:12–13, which had
been advanced as especially troublesome.18 This was the formal begin-
ning of Galileo’s trial and the Galileo affair.
Exactly a year latter, on 21 December 1614 at the church of Santa
Maria Novella in Florence, Dominican Friar Tommaso Caccini preached
a sermon against mathematicians in general and Galileo in particular,
because their beliefs and practices allegedly contradicted the Bible and
were thus heretical.19 Some have claimed that Caccini, besides explain-
ing that the Joshua passage contradicts Earth’s motion and thus renders
belief in it heretical, also discussed the suggestive verse “Ye men of
Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?” (Acts 1:10).20
On 6 February 1615, Christopher Scheiner sent Galileo, together
with a courteous letter, a copy of a book (Disquisitiones mathematicae de

15
Favaro 11:354–55, 376.
16
Favaro 11:427.
17
Dialogo di Fr. Ulisse Albergotti, ecc. nel quale si tiene, contro l’opinione commune de gli astrologi,
matematici e filosofi, la luna esser da sè luminosa e non ricevere il lume dal sole . . .: cf. Favaro
11:598–99; Drake 1957, 190.
18
Favaro 11:605–06, 5:281–88; Finocchiaro 1989, 47–54.
19
Favaro 12:123, 19:307.
20
Fabroni 1773–1775, 1:47 n. 1; for the mythological character of this claim, see
Finocchiaro 2005, 115.

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controversiis et novitatibus astronomicis) by one of his disciples ( Johannes

Locher), in which the Copernicans were violently attacked. 21 The
following day, on February 7, Lorini sent the Roman Inquisition a
written complaint against Galileo, enclosing his Letter to Castelli as
incriminating evidence.22 The following month, on March 20, Cac-
cini gave a deposition to the Inquisition in Rome, charging Galileo
with suspicion of heresy, based on the content of the Letter to Castelli
and the Sunspot Letters, and on hearsay evidence.23 Caccini mentioned
German Jesuit Nicolaus Serarius’s discussion of the Joshua passage to
the effect that Copernicanism is heretical. This judgment is found in a
work published by Serarius in 1609–10, but he had also published in
1612 a book that referred extensively to Cardinal Robert Bellarmine
and advanced the same views on biblical hermeneutics.24
The issue was now in the hands of the Inquisition and Galileo’s
trial had begun in earnest. Rather than tracing the events of this con-
tentious story,25 which is far from over even today, we will focus on
the more conceptual issues of the logical, theological, epistemological,
and methodological content and import of the scriptural objection to
Copernicanism.

Ingoli

We have seen that Galileo’s discoveries and arguments triggered many

objections by clergymen and laymen, in oral and written comments,
both published and unpublished. These objections were not just reli-
gious, theological, and scriptural, but involved considerations ranging
from the astronomical and physical to the epistemological and meth-
odological. Of such critiques, one of the most significant was an essay
by Francesco Ingoli entitled “Disputation on the Location and Rest of
the Earth Against the System of Copernicus” (1616).26 Although it was
not published at the time (and not until 1891),27 it circulated widely:

21
Martin 1868, 42–43; Camerota 2004, 338–42.
22
Favaro 19:297–98; Finocchiaro 1989, 134–35.
23
Favaro 19:307–11; Finocchiaro 1989, 136–41.
24
Blackwell 1991, 39–40, 113 n. 4.
25
Cf. Finocchiaro 1989; 2005; Fantoli 1996; McMullin 2005c; 2005a; 2005b.
26
Ingoli 1616. Cf. Ingoli 1618a; 1618b; Favaro 1891a; 1891b; Bucciantini 1995.
27
Cf. Favaro 1891a, 165–72; 5:400. In light of this, the chronology of Howell’s
(2002, 199) discussion should be revised.

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 the biblical argument against copernicanism 633

two years later Kepler wrote a reply to Ingoli,28 and eight years later
so did Galileo.29
Ingoli was a well connected clergyman. Although it is not certain,
it is probable that he was commissioned by the Inquisition to write an
expert opinion on the controversy;30 that he wrote his essay in January
1616; and that it provided the chief direct basis for the recommendation
by its consultants that Copernicanism was philosophically untenable
and theologically heretical.31 However, it is a well documented fact that
soon after the Index’s anti-Copernican decree of 5 March 1616, on
May 10 Ingoli was formally appointed consultant to the Congregation
of the Index; that on 2 April 1618 he presented to this congregation
a report for the correction of Copernicus’s Revolutions; that his report
was accepted; that the Index’s decree of 15 May 1620 corresponded
essentially to Ingoli’s report; and that he was responsible also for the
banning of Kepler’s Epitome of Copernican Astronomy by the Index in
February 1618.32
What is of interest here is Ingoli’s scriptural objection. First, it is
worth repeating that Ingoli’s biblical arguments occur in the context
of a comprehensive presentation of all available anti-Copernican
arguments. He advances a total of twenty-two arguments: by his own
classification, thirteen are ‘mathematical,’ by which he means that they
involve technical details of astronomy; five are ‘physical,’ by which he
means that they involve principles about the motion, natural places,
or optical properties of bodies. Many of the objections are adapted
from Tycho Brahe’s Epistolarum astronomicarum libri (1596), which Ingoli
explicitly mentions. At least one, involving parallax, is alleged to be
original with himself.
Four of the objections are ‘theological.’ Of these, two involve com-
mon Catholic beliefs not directly traceable to Scripture: the doctrine
that hell is located at the center of Earth and is most distant from
heaven; and the explicit assertion that Earth is motionless in a hymn
sung on Tuesdays as part of the Liturgy of the Hours of the Divine

28
Kepler 1618.
29
Finocchiaro 1989, 154–97.
30
Brandmüller & Greipl 1992, 444–45; Bucciantini 1995, 86ff; Lerner 1999, 87
n. 51.
31
Favaro 19:320–21; Finocchiaro 1989, 146–47.
32
Bucciantini 1995, 87–88; Gingerich 1981; Ingoli 1618a; 1618b; Kepler 1619;
1846; Lerner 2004, 30–35; Mayaud 1997, 56–69.

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Office prayers regularly recited by priests.33 The other two theological

arguments are scriptural. One attempts to undermine the Copernican
arrangement of bodies based on Gen. 1:14, “And God said, Let there
be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the
night.” Ingoli did not think that the Copernican central location of the
Sun was compatible with its scriptural location in the firmament.34
The second scriptural objection is directed specifically against Earth’s
motion and is based on the Joshua passage. But Ingoli is aware that this
anti-Copernican passage is just an example and that many other such
passages could be appealed to. It is also noteworthy that Ingoli gives a
preemptive answer to a possible rebuttal stemming from a non-literal
interpretation of Scripture. The passage is worth quoting:
There are infinitely many theological arguments that can be advanced
against the earth’s motion based on Sacred Scripture and the authority
of Church Fathers and scholastic theologians; but, out of so many, I
shall mention two that appear to me to be stronger. One is from Joshua,
chapter 10, where Scripture says that in answer to Joshua’s prayers: “the
sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasteth not to go down for a
whole day. And there was no day like that before it and after it, that the
Lord hearkened unto the voice of a man.”35
Replies which assert that Scripture speaks according to our mode of
understanding are not satisfactory: both because in explaining the Sacred
Writings the rule is always to preserve the literal sense, when that is pos-
sible, as it is in this case; and also because all the Fathers unanimously
take this passage to mean that the sun which was truly moving stopped
at Joshua’s request. An interpretation which is contrary to the unanimous
consent of the Fathers is condemned by the Council of Trent, Session IV,
in the decree on the edition and use of the Sacred Books. Furthermore,
although the Council speaks about matters of faith and morals, never-
theless it cannot be denied that the Holy Fathers would be displeased

33
Favaro 5:411; cf. Blackwell 1991, 62; Howell 2002, 200–201. I thank Kenneth
Howell and Father Mariano Artigas for clarifications about the meaning of this refer-
ence by Ingoli.
34
Bucciantini 1995, 89; Favaro 5:407–8.
35
Josh. 10:13–14, King James Version. So far this passage corresponds to Favaro
5:411, lines 14–19, and the translation is my own: “Argumenta theologica ex Sacris
Scripturis et authoritatibus Patrum et theologorum Scholasticorum infinita possunt
contra Terrae motionem proponi: sed duo tantum adducam, quae firmiora mihi esse
videntur. Alterum est ex Iosue, cap. X, ubi ad preces Iosue dicit Scriptura: Stetit itaque
Sol in medio coeli, et non festinavit occumbere spatio unius diei; non fuit antea et
postea tam longa dies, obediente Domino voci hominis.”

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with an interpretation of Sacred Scriptures which is contrary to their

common agreement.36
Ingoli is grounding his rejection of a non-literal interpretation of the
Joshua passage on two rules. The first is that scriptural statements must
be interpreted literally (and not accommodatingly) unless it is impossible
to do so (due to some internal scriptural inconsistency, or a conclusive
philosophical demonstration to the contrary, etc.). The other is that
scriptural interpretations are allowed if and only if they correspond to
the unanimous agreement of the church fathers. Given these principles,
it would seem impossible for a Copernican to circumvent them. But
there are two loopholes. One is implicit in Ingoli’s formulation of the
first rule, which is not a categorical statement but a conditional one.
The second loophole is explicitly mentioned by Ingoli himself when
he indicates that perhaps these principles apply only for questions of
faith and morals; his attempt to close this loophole is logically weak,
although it was destined to become politically successful. The infl uential
Cardinal Bellarmine was one of the advocates of such a closure, and
so it is worthwhile to elaborate this point briefl y.
That is, one the one hand, the Council of Trent (Fourth Session,
8 April 1546) had issued the following decree, which seems to limit the
authority of Scripture to questions of faith and morals:
Furthermore, to check unbridled spirits, it decrees that no one relying
on his own judgment shall, in matters of faith and morals pertaining to
the edification of Christian doctrine, distorting the Holy Scriptures in
accordance with his own conceptions, presume to interpret them contrary
to that sense which holy mother Church, to whom it belongs to judge of
their true sense and interpretation, has held and holds, or even contrary
to the unanimous teaching of the Fathers, even though such interpreta-
tions should never at any time be published.37
On the other hand, in his famous letter to Foscarini (12 April 1615),
Bellarmine claimed that scriptural statements about astronomical phe-
nomena are matters of faith “by reason of the speaker,” even if they
are not so “by reason of the topic”:
not only the Holy Fathers, but also the modern commentaries on Gen-
esis, the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Joshua, you will find all agreeing in

36
The second paragraph of this quotation is from Blackwell 1991, 63; cf. Favaro
5:411, lines 19–28; cf. also Bucciantini 1995, 90; Howell 2002, 200.
37
Schroeder 1978, 18–19.

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the literal interpretation that the sun is in heaven and turns around the
earth with great speed, and that the earth is very far from heaven and
sits motionless at the center of the world . . . Nor can one answer that this
is not a matter of faith, since if it is not a matter of faith “as regards the
topic,” it is a matter of faith “as regards the speaker”; and so it would
be heretical to say that Abraham did not have two children and Jacob
twelve, as well as to say that Christ was not born of a virgin, because
both are said by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of the prophets and
the apostles.38
At the beginning of this letter, Bellarmine mentions Galileo by name
and makes it clear that the letter is indirectly addressed to him as well
as to Foscarini. Thus, Galileo became acquainted with it and wrote
down a series of notes which he did not publish at the time, but which
were later edited under the title of “Considerations on the Copernican
Opinion.” The logical weakness of Bellarmine’s argument just quoted
may be seen from the answer Galileo gives:
The answer is that everything in Scripture is “an article of faith by reason
of the speaker,” so that in this regard it should be included in the rule
of the Council; but this clearly has not been done because in that case it
would have said that “the interpretation of the Fathers is to be followed
for every word of the Scriptures, etc.,” and not “for matters of faith and
morals”; having thus said “for matters of faith,” we see that its intention
was to mean “for matters of faith by reason of the topic.”39
However, as already mentioned and as it will re-emerge later, here
we have another illustration characteristic of this whole episode where
political power prevailed over logical rationality.

Foscarini

In 1615, Galileo received the unexpected support of a clergyman named

Paolo Antonio Foscarini (1580–1616), who published a book containing
a theological defense of Copernicanism. Foscarini was the provincial
head of the Carmelites in Calabria and had an ambitious agenda of
works in philosophy and theology that tended to be encyclopedic in
scope. For the Lent of 1615, he had been invited to preach at the
church of Traspontina in Rome. On his way there from Calabria, he

38
Finocchiaro 1989, 67–68. Cf. Favaro 12:172; Mayaud 2005, 6:349–50.
39
Finocchiaro 1989, 84; cf. Favaro 5:367. See also Mayaud 2005, 6:349–50.

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stopped in Naples in January 1615 to supervise the publication of a

booklet written in the form of a letter to the superior general of the
Carmelite order.40
The book is entitled Letter on the Opinion, Held by Pythagoreans and by
Copernicus, of the Earth’s Motion and Sun’s Stability and of the New Pythagorean
World System.41 Foscarini is explicit that his aim is to give a theological
defense of Earth’s motion, that is a defense of the geokinetic proposition
from the objection that it is contrary to Scripture (13).42 He is equally
clear that he is in no position to mount the following direct defense:
that since Copernicanism is physically true, and since two truths can-
not contradict each other, Copernicanism is not contrary to Scripture;
this defense is not feasible because Earth’s motion has not been proved
with certainty (12–13). Foscarini is also at pains to repeat frequently
the assertion that Copernicanism is likely true, indeed more probable
than the Ptolemaic system, and that this probability is largely the result
of Galileo’s telescopic discoveries (10, 13, 56).
To show that Copernicanism is not contrary to Scripture, Foscarini
gives several arguments. One of his most important ones is based on
the principle of accommodation, which he takes to be uncontroversial:
“whenever Sacred Scripture attributes to God or to some creature any-
thing which is otherwise known to be problematic or improper, then it
is interpreted and explicated in one of the following four ways”;43 these
amount to saying that Scripture is speaking metaphorically or analogi-
cally, or is accommodating itself to the common or popular manner
of speaking, thinking, perceiving, describing, or believing. Foscarini
(19–29) illustrates this principle with scriptural statements that attribute
to God physical attributes like walking and hands and emotional states

40
For more information, see Basile 1983; 1987, Boaga 1990, Caroti 1987.
41
Foscarini 1615a. Cf. Foscarini 1635; 1641; 1661; 1663; 1710; 1811; 1846; 1991b;
1992; 1997; 2001. Many editions lengthen the book’s title by adding the clause “in
which it is shown that the opinion agrees with, and is reconciled with, the passages of
Sacred Scripture and theological propositions which are commonly adduced against
it” (Blackwell 1991, 217). But this was an editorial addition in the 1635 Strasbourg
edition.
42
Foscarini 1615a, 13. In this section, when I am indirectly quoting, further refer-
ences to Foscarini 1615a will be given in parenthesis by citing just the page number
(as done here); but when I am quoting directly and translating, I shall have a footnote
with the original Italian text.
43
Foscarini 1615a, 19: “quando dalla Scrittura sacra viene attribuita a Dio, o
ad alcuna creatura, alcuna cosa, che (per altro) si vede essergli disconveniente, et
improporzionata, allora s’interpreta, e si esplica con una, o più delle seguenti quattro
glosse.”

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like anger and regret; also with statements that attribute to Earth ends
and foundations; and with those that speak of light and night and day
having been created before anything else, of the six ‘days’ of creation,
and of the Sun and Moon as the two great luminaries. However,
Foscarini is careful to formulate the conclusion of this argument by
saying that
if the Pythagorean opinion were otherwise true, then it could easily be
reconciled with the passages of Sacred Scripture that appear contrary to
it . . . by saying that there Scripture speaks in accordance with our manner
of understanding, with the appearances, and with our point of view;44
and indeed such a conditional and relatively weak conclusion is all that
follows from the principle of accommodation as stated by Foscarini,
which is contingent on a scriptural attribution that is otherwise known
to be literally incorrect. Thus, from the principle of accommodation
Foscarini does not show, and does not pretend to show, that Coperni-
canism is indeed compatible with Scripture, but only that if we knew
that Copernicanism were true then we could reinterpret geostatic
statements in Scripture.
Another key argument is based on the principle of limited scriptural
authority.45 Paraphrasing various scriptural passages,46 Foscarini claims
that
Sacred Scripture . . . does not instruct men in the truth of the secrets of
nature . . . because [God] has already allowed and decided that the world
be occupied with disputations, quarrels, and controversies and be subject
to uncertainty in everything47 (as stated in Ecclesiastes), and that the

44
Foscarini 1615a, 29–30: “quando per altro l’opinione pittagorica sia vera, facil-
mente si possono conciliare con essa, l’auttorità della Scrittura sacra, che gli paiono
contrarie . . . dicendo, che ivi la Scrittura ragiona, secondo il modo nostro di conoscere,
e secondo l’apparenza, et a rispetto nostro.”
45
Here I am adopting McMullin’s terminology; he uses such labels as “principle of
limitation” (1998, 298) and “principle of scriptural limitation” (2005c, 95). In the past
I have used such longer and clumsier expressions as the principle that Scripture is not
a scientific authority, or the principle denying the scientific authority of Scripture, or
the principle of the nonscientific authority of Scripture.
46
Eccles. 1:13, 3:11, 8, 9; 1 Cor. 4:5.
47
Such expressions have led Howell (2002, 196–98) to attribute to Foscarini a general
skepticism about human knowledge. Instead I take them as an indication at most of
a fallibilist position; but I think Foscarini’s main point is that knowledge about nature
must be acquired by human beings through their efforts.

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answer will only come at the end . . . Thus, its intention is now only to
teach us the true road to eternal life.48
The conclusion he reaches is that
so consequently we see how and why from the passages already mentioned
we cannot derive any certain resolutions in such subjects, and how with
this principle we can easily avoid the hits from the first and second group
of passages and from any other allegation derived from Sacred Scripture
against the Pythagorean and Copernican opinion.49
This seems a more direct line of reasoning in support of his claim that
Copernicanism does not contradict Scripture, for Foscarini is saying that
since Scripture is not an authority on the secrets of nature, scriptural
allegations about Earth’s rest and the Sun’s motion do not entitle us
to infer that Earth is motionless and the Sun moves, and so we are in
no position to assert Earth’s rest on scriptural grounds, and hence the
confl ict with the Copernican opinion evaporates. That is, Earth’s motion
is not contrary to Scripture because Scripture is not a philosophical (or
scientific) authority and so scriptural assertions that Earth is motionless
do not entail that Earth is motionless.50
A third argument involves what Foscarini calls the principle of
“extrinsic denomination” and the passage in Josh. 10:12–13. This is
the passage where Joshua prays to God to stop the Sun and prevent
it from setting so that the Israelites can have more time of daylight to
finish winning a battle against the Amorites; God did the miracle and
the Sun stood still for a whole day. The principle states that

48
Foscarini 1615a, 30–31: “la Scrittura sacra . . . non istruisca gli uomini nella verità
de i segreti della natura . . . poiché ha già permesso, e statuito, che stia occupato il mondo
nelle disputationi, nelle liti, nelle controversie, e soggetto alla incertitudine d’ogni cosa
(secondo il detto dell’Ecclesiaste) e non si proferirà la sentenza insino al fine . . . Onde
solo è l’intento suo ora d’insegnarci la vera strada della vita eterna.”
49
Foscarini 1615a, 34: “e così per consequenza si vede in che modo, e per qual
causa dalle autorità già dette non si può cavar certezza alcuna di risolutioni in simili
materie; e come con questo fondamento si riparano facilmente, e schivano i colpi delle
auttorità della prima, e della seconda classe, e di qualsivoglia altra allegatione cavata
dalla Scrittura sacra, contro l’opinione pittagorica, e copernicana.”
50
Some scholars (Boaga 1990, 186) ignore this line of reasoning in Foscarini (1615a,
30–34) and portray him as accepting the philosophical primacy and authority of Scrip-
ture; they do so based on a passage (Foscarini 1615a, 7–8) that seems to say that if
there is a contradiction between Scripture and human reason or sense, Scripture ought
to have priority; but such an interpretation neglects a qualification which Foscarini
adds to the alleged contradiction, namely that the scriptural passage is so expressed
that its interpretation is not subject to argument.

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many times one says commonly and most properly that a motionless
agent moves not because it really moves but by extrinsic denomination,
namely because with the motion of the subject that receives its infl uence
and action, what also moves is some property which the agent causes
in the subject.51
Applied to the Joshua miracle, we get: if Earth moves and the Sun
stands still, sunlight would still move over Earth’s surface, and so
it would be proper to say, by extrinsic denomination, that the cause
of this moving sunlight itself moves. Earth’s motion can thus be rec-
onciled with the Joshua passage. Most of the rest of Foscarini’s Letter
consists of reasoning arguing that various specific scriptural passages
alleged to be contrary to Copernicanism can be reconciled with it in
various ways.
Foscarini’s Letter attracted the attention of the Inquisition. By March
1615 the Inquisition had ordered an evaluation, and the consultant had
written a very critical opinion.52 Foscarini must have learned something
about this censure, and so he wrote a defense of his Letter and sent both
to Cardinal Bellarmine.53 Bellarmine replied with his famous letter of
12 April 1615, containing gracious but firm criticism.54 Soon thereafter,
Foscarini left Rome and returned home, intending to revise his Letter to
take such criticism into account. This revision never materialized, partly
because not long after the Index’s anti-Copernican decree (5 March
1616), Foscarini died on 10 June 1616 “perhaps from a heartbreak,”
according to one scholar’s speculation.55

Galileo

Although encouraged by Foscarini’s booklet, Galileo was increasingly

concerned about the attacks against his views, especially about the

51
Foscarini 1615a, 35: “molte volte si suol dire communemente, è benissimo muo-
versi uno agente, il quale stia fermo, non perché si muova esso, ma per denominatione
estrinseca, perché al moto del soggetto, che riceve l’infl usso suo, e la sua attione, si muove
anche la forma, e la qualità, che in quel soggetto s’induce dall’agente.”
52
Judicium de epistola F. Pauli Foscarini de mobilitate Terrae (1615; 1882); An
Unidentified Theologian’s Censure of Foscarini’s Letter (1991); Blackwell 1991, 253–54;
Boaga 1990, 188; Kelter 1997; McMullin 2005b, 104–5.
53
Boaga 1990, 188–89, 204–14; Foscarini (1615b; 1615c; 1615d; 1882; 1911–1913;
1991a); Nardi 1970, 85–110.
54
Cf. Favaro 12:171–72; Finocchiaro 1989, 67–69.
55
Boaga 1990, 194: “forse di crepacuore.”

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scriptural objections. He had no way of knowing the details of the

Inquisition proceedings, which were a well-kept secret, but he was able
to learn of Lorini’s initial complaint. So Galileo decided to expand
his Letter to Castelli; he wrote his essay in the form of a letter to the
grand duchess Christina.
The letter consists of a brief introductory part explaining its origin
and purpose; a long main part discussing in turn a number of distinct
questions about the relationship between scriptural interpretation and
physical investigation; and a final part engaging in some scriptural exe-
gesis meant to show that Earth’s motion is not contrary to Scripture.
The introduction claims that the letter originated from some unpro-
voked attacks against Galileo charging that he was a heretic because he
believed that Earth moves, and in it he plans to defend himself from
this accusation. It is important to stress the apologetic and defensive
character of the letter.56 The apologia takes the form of criticism of the
scriptural argument against Copernicanism, and he concludes this part
of the letter with the following statement of the objection:
So the reason they advance to condemn the opinion of the earth’s mobil-
ity and sun’s stability is this: since in many places in Holy Scripture one
reads that the sun moves and the earth stands still, and since Scripture
can never lie or err, it follows as a necessary consequence that the opin-
ion of those who want to assert the sun to be motionless and the earth
moving is erroneous and damnable.57
In the main part of the letter, Galileo addresses himself to the major
premise that Scripture cannot err, and he objects that this proposition
is true but irrelevant because what is relevant is the interpretation of
Scripture, and scriptural interpretations can indeed err. Thus, the
question becomes that of what interpretation, or whose interpretation,
is correct, and in the various sections of this main part Galileo takes
up, in turn,58 literal interpretation, the interpretation by professional
theologians, the interpretation in accordance with the principle of
scriptural consensus, the unanimous opinion of church fathers, and

56
I would thus hesitate to speak of it as a “treatise” (McMullin 1998, 302; 2005c, 3);
this tends to distract one away from the key purpose of refuting the scriptural objection
and into searching (e.g., Carroll 1997; 1999; 2001) for a generality and systematicity in
Galileo’s hermeneutical views which would be at odds with this main purpose.
57
Finocchiaro 1989, 92; cf. Favaro 5:315.
58
Favaro 5:315–23, 323–30, 330–35, 335–39, 339–43, respectively.

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the official interpretation of the church. An important conclusion here

is that scriptural interpretation often presupposes philosophical or
scientific claims. Moreover, Galileo distinguishes between questions of
faith and morals and questions about the physical universe; he points
out that, though Scripture cannot err about the former, when we
come to physical questions, it is not so much false as improper to say
that Scripture cannot err; the reason is that it is not meant to provide
scientific information, and hence it would be equally improper to say
that Scripture can err. The point is that Scripture is not a scientific (or
philosophical) authority.
That is, the scriptural argument against Copernicanism is essentially
an argument from authority concluding that it is erroneous to believe in
Earth’s motion because Scripture says so. Galileo replies that Scripture
is not a scientific authority, and therefore even if Scripture endorses
the geostatic thesis, it does not follow that it is true and the geokinetic
thesis is false; such a reason for such a conclusion is inadequate, even
if it were true. He also answers that to know what Scripture really
says about physical questions, one must know the scientific truth about
them; this means that to know whether this reason is true, we would
have to know whether the conclusion is true; in short, the argument
begs the question.
The brief final part of the letter (343–48)59 may be interpreted as a
criticism of the truth of the minor premise of the scriptural argument;
Galileo tries to show that it is questionable whether Scripture says that
Earth stands still and the Sun moves.60 He does this by an analysis of
several passages typically given to support the contrariety thesis. The
Joshua miracle is discussed at great length. Galileo argues that this pas-
sage contradicts the geostatic system, whereas it could be given a literal
interpretation from the Copernican viewpoint. The passage says that,
in response to Joshua’s prayer to prolong daylight, God ordered the
Sun to stop, and the Sun stood still for a whole day, needed by the
Israelites to defeat the Amorites. Galileo points out that in any system,

59
Favaro 5:343–48. In this section, simple references to Favaro 1890–1909, vol. 5,
will be given in parenthesis by citing just the page number, as done here.
60
I believe this interpretation offers a simple and elegant solution to the problem
that here Galileo apparently does what elsewhere he claims one is not supposed to,
namely to use Scripture to support an astronomical theory. This is a problem with
which many scholars have struggled: Biagioli (2003; 2006, 219–59); Lerner (1999,
81–82; 2005, 20–21); Mayaud 2005, 1:259–62; McMullin 2005b, 101–2, 110–11;
Pesce (2000, 48–50; 2005, 1–2, 226–29).

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to lengthen the day the diurnal motion must be stopped. Unfortunately,

in the geostatic system the diurnal motion belongs to the outermost
sphere in the universe called the primum mobile, not to the Sun. The
proper motion that belongs to the latter is the annual motion, which,
being opposite in direction to the diurnal motion, would shorten the
day if stopped, making the Sun set that much sooner. It follows that if
we take the Scripture literally, the miracle is physically impossible in
the geostatic system, whereas if God did the miracle, he should have
ordered the primum mobile to stop. By contrast, Galileo argues that in
the geokinetic system the miracle could have happened as follows.
First he refers to his own discovery that the Sun is not motionless but
rotates on its axis with a period of about a month; thus, to begin with,
it makes sense to stop the Sun from moving. To this Galileo adds the
speculation that solar rotation probably causes the planetary revolu-
tions, and Earth’s own orbital revolution is probably connected with
Earth’s axial rotation; this speculation makes some sense because all
these motions are in the same direction for Copernicanism. Thus by
stopping the Sun’s rotation, God could have stopped Earth’s diurnal
motion and thus prolonged Joshua’s daylight.
In summary, the letter as a whole amounts to a threefold criticism61
of the argument that Copernicanism is wrong because Scripture says
so: first, Scripture’s saying so would not make it so; second, to know
what Scripture really says about the physical universe one has to know
what is physically true; and third, it is questionable whether Scripture
does in fact say so.
Galileo begins the central argument of the letter by elaborating two
uncontroversial points. First, the literal interpretation of Scripture is
not always correct since, for example, some scriptural statements about
God state or imply that He has eyes, ears, and so on, and we know
that it is not literally true (315–16). Second, the literal interpretation
of Scripture is incorrect when it confl icts with physical truths that
have been conclusively proved (317, 320). Then Galileo advances an
explanation of why proved scientific truths have such a priority over
literal scriptural meaning; the explanation is that whereas Scripture is
the Word of God meant “to teach us how one goes to heaven and not

61
My interpretation is reminiscent of, but different from, the accounts given by
Howell (2002, 186–96) and McMullin (2005b).

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how heaven goes,”62 the physical universe and the human senses and
mind are the work of God, and so one cannot doubt the truth of physical
conclusions grounded on sense-experience and conclusive arguments
(316–17). From these three claims, Galileo thinks it plausibly follows
that the literal interpretation of Scripture is not relevant when we are
dealing with physical propositions that are capable of being conclusively
proved (even if not proved yet), because this would be the more prudent
policy and because what we know is a minute part of what we do not
know (320–21). Galileo’s own words make clear the tentativeness and
prudential character of his conclusion:
I should think it would be very prudent not to allow anyone to commit
and in a way oblige scriptural passages to have to maintain the truth of
any physical conclusions whose contrary could ever be proved to us by
the senses and demonstrative and necessary reasons.63
Next, Galileo undertakes an explicit criticism of theological authority.
He argues that theology is not the queen of the sciences because its
principles do not provide the logical foundations of the knowledge
formulated in other sciences, the way that, for example, geometry does
for surveying (324–25). Moreover, theologians cannot dictate physi-
cal conclusions from above (i.e., without actually getting involved in
physical investigations), any more than a king who is not a physician
can prescribe cures for the sick. Nor can theologians tell scientists to
undo their own observations and proofs because this is an inherently
impossible task (325–27). Rather, theologians can and should follow two
courses. The first corresponds to already established practice: apropos of
conclusively established physical truths they should strive to show that
they are not contrary to Scripture by an appropriate interpretation of
the latter. The second would be a rule of interdisciplinary communi-
cation. Regarding scientific ideas that are not conclusively proved but
are contrary to Scripture, theologians should presume them to be false
and accordingly should try to give a scientific disproof of them; this is
desirable because the inadequacies of an idea can be discovered more
easily by those who reject it. This ingenious but plausible rule is this
section’s main conclusion (327).
Galileo then questions the traditional principle that used scriptural
consensus combined with the unanimity of the church fathers to require

62
Finocchiaro 1989, 96; cf. Favaro 5:319.
63
Finocchiaro 1989, 96; cf. Favaro 5:320.

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acceptance of the literal meaning of physical statements (327–28). Once

again he makes his fundamental distinction between physical proposi-
tions that are and those that are not capable of conclusive proof. For
the latter the principle makes sense, but for the former the previous
considerations suggest that it is not sound (330–31). Two new points
emerge in this discussion. First, scriptural consensus is not a sign that
physical statements are to be taken as literally true, but rather it is the
result of Scripture’s desire for consistency, its appeal to common people,
and the need to refl ect the opinions of the time (332–34). Second, the
unanimity of church fathers is not binding unless it is explicit, unless
it is the result of reasoned discussion, and unless it refers to matters of
faith and morals (335–37).
Finally, the authority of the church herself comes under discussion.
Galileo admits that she does have the power to condemn an idea as
heretical (343), but he notes that “it is not always useful to do all that
one can do.”64 Moreover, to make ideas heretical is not the same as
making them false; indeed, “no creature has the power of making them
be true or false, contrary to what they happen to be by nature and de
facto.”65 At any rate, the church should not be hasty in her condemna-
tion; he hopes that she is not “about to make rash decisions.”66 Before
condemning a physical idea she should listen to all the arguments on
both sides of the issue, and she should rigorously prove that her inter-
pretation of the relevant scriptural passages is correct. For example,
such a rigorous proof should use all the cautious advice elaborated by
St. Augustine. To avoid potential embarrassment, it might be best to
wait until the physical idea is conclusively refuted before declaring it
heretical.
One of the most striking features of this central part of the letter is
the negative tone67 of its component conclusions: the literal interpreta-
tion of Scripture is not relevant in physical investigation; theology is
not the queen of the sciences; scriptural consensus is not a sufficient
condition for a literal interpretation; the unanimity of church fathers
is not necessarily decisive in physical questions; and Church authority
should not be hastily applied. This negativity corresponds to the letter’s
apologetic and critical purpose, and the general suggestion is a denial

64
Finocchiaro 1989, 110; cf. Favaro 5:338.
65
Finocchiaro 1989, 114; cf. Favaro 5:343.
66
Finocchiaro 1989, 114; cf. Favaro 5:342.
67
Howell (2002, 195) is one of the few scholars who also stress this.

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of the scientific (or philosophical) authority of Scripture. There is an

underlying positive idea, however; that is, the principle of autonomy,
according to which physical investigation can and should proceed
independently of Scripture. Moreover, from the point of view of the
enterprise of understanding Scripture, we get another constructive
idea underlying these negative conclusions, which is the hermeneutical
principle that scriptural interpretation often depends on the results of
physical investigation.
A second striking theme is that of prudence, which he adopts from
St. Augustine and elaborates further. Galileo’s explicit admonitions are
against haste in condemning Copernicanism. But they would also extend
to the question of accepting the theory or judging the conclusiveness
of its supporting arguments.68
Equally striking is the theme involving the distinction between physi-
cal propositions that are and those that are not capable of conclusive
proof. This is the main epistemological distinction, rather than that
between propositions that have and those that have not been conclu-
sively proved. The central issue concerns the former distinction, and
Galileo tries to resolve it by arguing that no physical proposition capable
of conclusive proof should be condemned. The priority of established
scientific knowledge that has already been conclusively proved is a
non-issue. From the viewpoint of this uncontroversial principle, there
would no reason to write this letter, but rather the only thing to do
would have been to produce or search for the conclusive demonstra-
tion. The very fact that he writes this methodological essay indicates
that he wants to advocate a (relatively) novel principle. Besides the
argumentative content of the Letter and the very fact of writing it,
there is a third indication of Galileo’s stress on demonstrability, as
distinct from demonstration: when in 1636 the Letter was published
for the first time by some foreign friends but with his cooperation, the
stress on demonstrability was explicitly incorporated in the title of the
book,69 to be quoted in the next paragraph.
To complete my account, I now must supplement what I have said
so far with two considerations.70 The first involves an aspect of the letter
which so far I have largely ignored; that is, the letter is full of references

68
See Finocchiaro 1980; 1986; 1988.
69
Galilei 1636; cf. Finocchiaro 2005, 72–79; Garcia (2000; 2005); Motta 2000.
70
My earlier accounts (Finocchiaro 1986; 1995) did not contain this supplement.

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to and quotations from the patristic and theological tradition, such as

St. Jerome, St. Thomas, and especially St. Augustine.71 This aspect of
the letter could be reconstructed as an argument from authority, or
a series of such arguments. This is important for two reasons. First,
Galileo was aware that regardless of how cogent his methodological
argument was, his main conclusion (denying scriptural authority for
demonstrable physical claims) could be taken to be so radical that its
novelty needed to be toned down by rooting it in tradition.72 In fact,
when the Letter was first published, its two-fold aspect of being partly
radical and partly traditional (as well as the point about demonstrabil-
ity rather than demonstration) was enshrined in the book’s title, whose
Latin I translate as follows: New and Old Doctrine of the Most Holy Fathers
and Esteemed Theologians on Preventing the Reckless Use of the Testimony of the
Sacred Scripture in Purely Natural Conclusions That Can Be Established by Sense
Experience and Necessary Demonstrations.73 Second, the Augustinian quota-
tions are so crucial that they played a significant role in the subsequent
history of hermeneutics. For example, Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Provi-
dentissimus Deus, without even mentioning Galileo, advances a Galilean
view of the role of Scripture in scientific investigation, and makes a
crucial appeal to the same Augustinian passages that had been quoted
by Galileo.74 One crucial passage is Augustine’s version of the principle
of non-scientific authority of Scripture:
it should be said that our authors did know the truth about the shape of
heaven, but that the Spirit of God, which was speaking through them, did
not want to teach men these things which are of no use to salvation.75
Another is Augustine’s version of the principle of the priority of dem-
onstrated physical truth: “whenever the experts of this world can truly

71
The Augustinian aspect of Galileo’s Letter to Christina has also been discussed by
McMullin (1998; 1999; 2005b) and Howell (2002, 188–89; cf. 2005), but they advance
theses different from mine.
72
I believe McMullin (1998, 299) and Howell (2002, 197) go too far in denying
historical novelty to Galileo’s hermeneutics, just as other scholars go too far in the
opposite direction of attributing to him novelty.
73
Galilei 1636; Motta 2000; Finocchiaro 2005, 72–79.
74
See Finocchiaro 2005, 263–66.
75
Finocchiaro 1989, 95; cf. Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram, ii, 9, 20; Favaro 5:318;
Leo XIII 1893, paragraph 18, p. 334.

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demonstrate something about natural phenomena, we should show it

not to be contrary to our Scripture.”76
The second supplement regards the fact that it is undeniable that the
Letter to Christina contains several passages that appear to be inconsis-
tent with the principle that Scripture is not an authority in astronomy
or natural philosophy. Ernan McMullin has stressed this inconsistency
and focused on three passages, which he sees as asserting a “principle
of priority of Scripture”:77
[1] Even in regard to those propositions which are not articles of faith,
the authority of the same Holy Writ should have priority over the author-
ity of any human writings containing pure narration or even probable
reasons, but no demonstrative proofs; this principle should be considered
appropriate and necessary inasmuch as divine wisdom surpasses all human
judgment and speculation.78
[2] Some physical propositions are of a type such that by any human
speculation and reasoning one can only attain a probable opinion and
a verisimilar conjecture about them, rather than a certain and demon-
strated science; an example is whether the stars are animate. Others are
of a type such that either one has, or one may firmly believe that it is
possible to have, complete certainty on the basis of experiments, long
observations, and necessary demonstrations; examples are whether or not
the earth and the sun move and whether or not the earth is spherical.
As for the first type, I have no doubt at all that, where human reason
cannot reach, and where consequently one cannot have a science, but
only opinion and faith, it is appropriate piously to conform absolutely to
the literal meaning of the Scripture. In regard to the others, however, I
should think, as stated above, that it would be proper to ascertain the
facts first, so that they could guide us in finding the true meaning of
Scripture; this would be found to agree absolutely with demonstrated
facts, even though prima facie the words would sound otherwise, since
two truths can never contradict each other.79
[3] In the learned books of worldly authors are contained some propo-
sitions about nature which are truly demonstrated and others which are
simply taught; in regard to the former, the task of wise theologians is to
show that they are not contrary to Holy Scripture; as for the latter (which
are taught but not demonstrated with necessity), if they contain anything

76
Finocchiaro 1989, 101; cf. Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram, i, 21, 41; Favaro 5:327;
Leo XIII 1893, paragraph 18, p. 334.
77
McMullin 1998, 308–11; 2005b, 107–10.
78
Finocchiaro 1989, 95; cf. Favaro 5:317; McMullin (1998, 308; 2005b, 109).
79
Finocchiaro 1989, 104; cf. Favaro 5:330; McMullin 1998, 309–10.

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contrary to the Holy Writ, then they must be considered indubitably false
and must be demonstrated such by every possible means.80
Clearly, if such assertions were expressions of the principle of scriptural
priority, they would undermine the apologetic purpose of the Letter,
namely the plan to refute the scriptural objection to Copernicanism
by arguing (among other criticisms) that the objection is a nonsequitur
because scriptural statements about Earth’s rest and the Sun’s motion
do not entail that Earth really rests and the Sun really moves. However,
if these passages were regarded essentially as attempts to define more
precisely the proper scope of the principle of non-scientific author-
ity of Scripture, then such an interpretation would conform with the
apologetic purpose of the Letter, and so would be preferable to the
alternatives that undermine that purpose. I believe such an interpreta-
tion would be along the following lines.
That is, the first passage asserts that scriptural assertions have pri-
ority over other assertions in regard to historical questions; and here
Galileo’s talk of “pure narration” provides a crucial clue.81 The second
states that Scripture has priority over unprovable assertions in regard to
natural phenomena. The third claims that for theologians scriptural
assertions have priority over unsupported assertions in all other writings.
In other words, Scripture is a superior authority regarding (1) histori-
cal questions that depend on balancing probabilities of testimony; (2)
undecidable questions about physical reality; and (3) unsupported
assertions on any topic in any book. Thus, although Galileo denies the
astronomical authority of Scripture, he accepts its authority not only
for questions of faith and morals, but also for the weighing of probable
testimony in history, for undecidable questions in natural philosophy,
and for questions of presumption of truth for unsupported claims. These
are important nuances, complications, and qualifications in Galileo’s
position, but none of them undermine his criticism of the scriptural
objection to Copernicanism.

80
Finocchiaro 1989, 101–2; cf. Favaro 5:327; McMullin (1998, 310; 2005b, 109).
81
Additionally, Galileo explicitly suggests this in his reply to Bellarmine, in “Consid-
erations on the Copernican Opinion” (in Favaro 5: 367–68; Finocchiaro 1989, 84).

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Campanella

Tommaso Campanella’s Apologia pro Galileo was first published in Frank-

furt in 1622.82 Although the preface indicates that it had been written
several years earlier, the exact date of composition is not given. Nor
have any copies of the original manuscript survived. Thus, special-
ists are somewhat divided. The account I find most plausible is the
following.83
Most likely, Campanella wrote the Apologia just before the Index’s
anti-Copernican decree of March 1616 and did so at the request of
Cardinal Bonifacio Caetani, a moderate member of the Congregation
of the Index. However, Caetani’s request was an unofficial one. He had
several Neapolitan connections that probably served as links between
him and Campanella, who was in Naples serving time in prison.
A proper understanding of this work requires that one begin by
examining its full title: Apologia pro Galileo, mathematico florentino, ubi
disquisitur utrum ratio philosophandi quam Galileus celebrat faveat Sacris Scrip-
turis an adversetur; that is, Apologia for the Florentine Mathematician Galileo,
where One Discusses whether the Manner of Philosophizing Advocated by Galileo
Conforms or Conflicts with Sacred Scripture. The crucial phrase is ratio phi-
losophandi. Michel-Pierre Lerner deserves credit for having stressed that
Campanella is talking about Galileo’s philosophical approach or man-
ner of reasoning, méthode de philosopher84 in French. This contrasts with
the usual translations as: philosophical view, philosophical doctrine,
scientific theory, or ( just) theory.85 The point is extremely important
because Galileo’s theory, doctrine, or view (whether philosophical or
scientific) suggests Copernicanism or Earth’s motion; this would imply
that Campanella was more committed to the Copernican doctrine than

82
Campanella 1622; cf. Campanella 1821; 1846; 1911; 1937; 1968; 1971; 1992;
1994; 1997; 1999; 2001a; 2001b; 2006.
83
Femiano 1971, 21–30; Headley 1997, 97, 169–70; Lerner (2001a; 2001b, xix–liv;
2006, ix–xxx). For other views, see Blackwell 1994, 19–24; Ditadi 1992; Firpo 1968,
21; Ponzio (1998; 2001, 5–7).
84
Lerner 2001b, xcv–c, 1–2; 2006, xxxiii–xxxv. Also correct, of course, is Germana
Ernst’s Italian translation of this phrase in the book’s title as modo di filosofare, in Cam-
panella (1999; 2006); but it is puzzling that in the middle of ch. 3 (Campanella 2006,
98–99) she should translate modum philosophandi as filosofia.
85
See respectively, Blackwell 1994, iii; Ponzio 2001, 45; Femiano 1971, 35, 43;
Ditadi 1992, 117; Firpo 1968, 27. Slightly better is “kind of philosophy” (McColley
1937, 1).

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he really was;86 and it would imply that he was trying to do the same
thing Foscarini had done. On the other hand, ratio philosophandi suggests
some principle of reasoning or procedure, and so Campanella is trying
to do something more general or methodological.
Campanella’s general, methodological aim is also evident from other
documents and passages.87 For example, in the Apologia when in the
course of a main argument he states his conclusion, he says, “therefore
I think that this manner of philosophizing should not be prohibited,”
using a phrase ( philosophandi modum) that leaves no doubt.88 And in a
letter to Galileo dated 3 November 1616, Campanella states that he
has sent to Rome and to him a manuscript copy of his Apologia, which
he describes in Italian as “a discussion where it is proved theologically
that the manner of philosophizing [modo di filosofare] you use is more in
conformity with Divine Scripture than the contrary one is.”89 This letter
also gives a clue that Campanella’s argument is primarily theological.
Regarding the description of Galileo’s manner of philosophizing, this
must be an aspect of the manner of reasoning which Galileo uses in his
discussions of astronomical topics, e.g., in the Sidereal Messenger (1610) and
Sunspot Letters (1613), and which he justifies in his critique of the scrip-
tural objection, e.g., in the Letters to Castelli and Christina. The most
pertinent and general description is that Galileo advocates disregarding
scriptural assertions in astronomical investigation. Stated as a meth-
odological principle, this is the claim that scriptural statements about
Earth’s rest and the Sun’s motion do not entail that Earth rests and
the Sun moves; that is, Scripture is not an authority in natural phi-
losophy; or again, this is the principle of limited scriptural authority.90

86
See, for example, Campanella to Pope Urban VIII (10 June 1628), in Campanella
1927, 218–25; Headley 1997, 176.
87
Besides the passages to be mentioned below, also revealing, although indirectly
relevant, is Campanella’s (n.d.) poem “Modo di filosofare”; see also Failla to Galileo,
6 September 1616, in Favaro 12: 277.
88
Campanella 1622, 30: “Quapropter arbitror, non debere hunc philosophandi
modum vetari.” Cf. Blackwell 1991, 79; Firpo 1968, 83; Lerner 2001b, 78–79.
89
In Ditadi 1992, 238: “una quistione dove si prova teologicamente ch’il modo di
filosofare da lei tenuto è più conforme a la divina scrittura che non lo contrario.”
90
I believe my interpretation is in essential agreement with Headley’s (1997,
172–77), although he speaks of the principle of libertas philosophandi, which is even more
general that the principle of limited scriptural authority. On the other had, here I am
disagreeing with Lerner’s (2001b, xcv–c) description of the manner of philosophizing
attributed to Galileo in the Apologia. Lerner says that there Campanella attributes to
Galileo a naïve empiricism à la Bernardino Telesio, although elsewhere Lerner (1995)
argues that in other writings Campanella’s interpretation was more nuanced. Lerner

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Campanella wants to give a scriptural argument that Scripture ought

to be disregarded in physical investigation! More generally, it is also
a theological argument. In fact, such an argument constitutes a major
line of reasoning in Campanella’s Apologia.91
In a central part of his book, the so-called third assertion of the
second hypothesis, Campanella stresses that “in the Gospel Christ is
never found to discuss physics and astronomy but only morality and the
promise of eternal life” (65).92 Correspondingly, Campanella emphasizes
two crucial scriptural passages: Eccles. 3:11, “God handed the world
over to the disputes of men”;93 and Rom. 1:20, “The invisible things
of God come to be understood through the things which he has made”
(54). And he elaborates with the argument:
For us to be able to do this, he gave us a rational mind, and for
avenues of investigation he provided the five senses as windows to the
mind . . . Therefore it would have been superfl uous for him, who came to
redeem us from sin, to teach us what we are able and obliged to learn
on our own (65–66).
Here Campanella is giving a justification of the principle of limited
scriptural authority as (1) implicit in Jesus’ life; (2) explicit in assertions
of the Old and New Testament; and (3) in accordance with plausible
theological speculation.

has also objected (private correspondence) that my interpretation seems to assume

that Campanella was acquainted with Galileo’s Letters to Castelli and to Christina,
with which most likely he was not in fact acquainted, at least when he wrote the
Apologia; however, for my interpretation, it is sufficient that Campanella should have
been acquainted with The Sidereal Messenger, and we know from his letter to Galileo of
13 January 1611 that he had read that work (Favaro 11:21–26). Campanella was clearly
perceptive enough to understand this aspect (the scriptural independence) of Galileo’s
manner of philosophizing, and indeed in the same letter (Favaro 11:24) he predicted
that some theologians would start murmuring against it but claimed that theology itself
could come to Galileo’s defense.
91
This argument also corresponds to one advanced in various places in Campanella’s
Theologia, a monumental work in 30 volumes written in 1614–1624. (Cf. Campanella
1936–1969.) Cf. Headley 1997, 168–69; Ponzio 1998, 123.
92
Campanella 1994, 65. In this section, further references to Campanella 1994 will
be given in parenthesis by citing just the page number, as done here.
93
Campanella 1994, 54. Campanella (1622, 13) refers to this passage simply as
Ecclesiastes, chapter 1; and this reference is glossed more specifically as Eccles. 1:13 by
many scholars (e.g., Firpo 1968, 20; Blackwell 1994, 54). However, the verse quoted
by Campanella is actually Eccles. 3:11, as one can see from Headley (1997, 173–74)
and Lerner (2001b, 208–9, n. 28); the confusion is easily explained in light of the
similarity of the two verses. Headley (1997, 173–76) also gives a valuable analysis of
Campanella’s four references to, and glosses on, Eccles. 3:11.

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But Campanella goes further. He argues not only that it is proper to

learn about the world by using our mind and senses rather than read-
ing Scripture, but also that it is un-Christian to prevent such learning.
In the so-called fourth assertion of the second hypothesis, Campanella
holds that “anyone who forbids Christians to study philosophy and the
sciences also forbids them to be Christians” (54). One reason is that
since one truth does not contradict another, as was stated by the Lateran
Council under Leo X and elsewhere, and since the book of wisdom by
God the creator does not contradict the book of wisdom by God the
revealer, anyone who fears contradiction by the facts of nature is full
of bad faith (69). [Another reason is that] from the beginning the world
has been called the ‘Wisdom of God’ (as was revealed to St. Brigid) and
a ‘Book’ in which we can read about all things. Hence in his Sermon 7
on the fast days of the tenth month, St. Leo says, ‘We understand the
meaning of God’s will from these very elements of the world, as from
the pages of an open book’ (57); [it follows that] therefore wisdom is to
be read in the immense book of God, which is the world, and there is
always more to be discovered (71).
Using the metaphor of the book of nature and the theological claim
that this book was authored by God and so is as important as Scrip-
ture, Campanella is arguing that it is wrong (theologically) to prevent
someone from reading that book.
Similarly, in the so-called first assertion of the second hypothesis,
Campanella claims that it is not only irrational and harmful but impious
if there is anyone who chooses on his own to prescribe rules and limits
for philosophers as though they were decreed in the Scriptures and who
teaches that one should not think differently than he does, and who
subjects and confines the Scriptures to one unique meaning either of his
own or of some other philosopher (74).
Such impiety, which looks like a description of what Galileo’s critics
were doing, is justified by Campanella by appealing to both St. Augus-
tine and St. Thomas. Campanella’s reason is that such an impious
person “exposes the Sacred Scriptures to the mockery of the philoso-
phers and to the ridicule of pagans and heretics and thereby prevents
them from listening to the faith” (74); and then he gives a long quota-
tion from Thomas that includes a quotation from Augustine’s On the
Literal Interpretation of Genesis, so as to be able to claim that “so says St.
Thomas in agreement with St. Augustine” (76). This provides formi-
dable patristic and traditional-theological credentials to Campanella’s
own argument.

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Regarding the Joshua passage, Campanella denies that the miracle

“would be nullified if the sun is at rest in the center of the world” (97).
For “the appearances are exactly the same if either the observer or the
object seen is moved” (98), and the Copernicans say that the miracle
happened by stopping Earth rather than the Sun; but
whoever says that this happened by arresting the motion of the earth
does not deny the miracle but explains it, just as the physicist does not
deny that God causes the rainbow but explains how he does it and what
natural and reasonable means he uses (99).
Campanella is concerned not about the non-literal interpretation that
is needed, but about retaining the spiritual meaning.
Campanella ends his book with a profoundly prophetic formulation
of his conclusion:
In my judgment, in agreement with what St. Thomas and St. Augustine
have taught us in our Second Hypothesis, it is not possible to prohibit
Galileo’s investigations and to suppress his writings without causing either
damaging mockery of the Scriptures, or a strong suspicion that we reject
the Scriptures along with heretics, or the impression that we detest great
minds . . . It is also my judgment that such a condemnation would cause
our enemies to embrace and honor this view more avidly (122–23).

Conclusions

In his “Disputation” (1616), Ingoli included the argument that Coper-

nicanism is wrong because it is contrary to the literal meaning and the
patristic interpretation of scriptural passages such as Josh. 10:12–13,
and so it is contrary to Scripture.
In his Letter on the Earth’s Motion (1615), Foscarini criticized this argu-
ment primarily as follows: Copernicanism is not contrary to Scripture
because, although it is contrary to the literal meaning of Scripture,
Copernicanism is a thesis about natural phenomena and Scripture
does not aim to make claims about nature, and so scriptural statements
about natural phenomena are to be interpreted accommodatingly and
not literally.
In his “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina” (1615), Galileo elabo-
rated the following threefold criticism. First, literal meaning, patristic
interpretation, and scriptural authority are irrelevant for demonstrable
claims of natural philosophy or science, although they are relevant or
binding for matters of faith, morals, history, and indemonstrable claims

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about nature; such irrelevance follows from the universally accepted

principle of the priority of demonstration, together with the explanation
that this priority is the result of the two-fold aspect of divine revelation
and the asymmetries between the work and the word of God; thus,
both steps of the scriptural argument are non-sequiturs (from scrip-
tural contrariety to physical falsehood, and from contrariety to literal
meaning and patristic interpretation to scriptural contrariety). Second,
to determine the literal meaning of scriptural assertions about natural
phenomena, one normally needs to know what is really the case in
natural phenomena; so the conclusion of the argument cannot be known
to be true independently of knowing the truth of its key premise, and
the argument begs the question. Third, the literal meaning of Joshua
really contradicts the Ptolemaic system, whereas Copernicanism is
largely compatible with the literal interpretation of Joshua, so the key
premise of the argument is questionable or false.
In his Apologia pro Galileo (written in 1616 and first published in 1622),
Campanella advanced this criticism. The scriptural objection assumes
the principle that Scripture is a scientific authority (insofar as it tries
to refute a scientific theory based on Scripture). But this assumption is
itself contrary to Scripture, specifically Eccles. 3:11 and Rom. 1:20. It
is generally and deeply un-Christian because it contradicts the doctrine
that God revealed himself not only through Scripture, but also through
the book of nature; and it contradicts the patristic tradition, as shown
by the teachings of St. Augustine and St. Thomas, who regard the
assumption as an abuse of scriptural authority.
Thus, Ingoli gave a sophisticated and strong statement of the scrip-
tural argument against Copernicanism. Foscarini advanced a theological
criticism of the minor premise of this objection (the claim that Coper-
nicanism is contrary to Scripture). Campanella formulated a theologi-
cal criticism of the major premise of the objection (the principle that
Scripture is a scientific authority). Galileo proposed a methodological
criticism of this major premise; scientific and textual criticism of the
minor premise; and an epistemological criticism of the relationship
between this minor premise and the conclusion. Expressed positively
and constructively, Foscarini, Campanella, and Galileo provide us
with theological and philosophical arguments justifying the claims
that Copernicanism is not contrary to Scripture and Scripture is not a
scientific authority.
In my judgment, these arguments of Foscarini, Campanella, and
Galileo are cogent and essentially valid. They are thus of perennial

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relevance and have some applicability to subsequent and present-day

issues, e.g., that of evolution versus creation. However, it is beyond the
scope of this essay to elaborate this judgment, relevance, and applicabil-
ity. Instead I shall discuss some more historical questions.
First, if this judgment is right, then the case studied here is one where
a significant development in natural philosophy or science (the Galilean
telescopic discoveries and re-assessment of Copernicanism) produced a
significant development in hermeneutics (the metahermeneutical dis-
covery of reasons why Scripture is not a scientific authority); or more
modestly expressed, the beginning of the modern establishment of this
metahermeneutical principle.
However, despite the cogency of these criticisms and arguments,
they failed to convince the Catholic Church, and so in March 1616
the Index issued a decree declaring the doctrine of Earth’s motion
contrary to Scripture, condemning and totally prohibiting Foscarini’s
Letter, and banning Copernicus’s Revolutions until and unless revised in
a manner to be specified later.94 Although this decree did not mention
Galileo by name, it led to his condemnation as a suspected heretic in
163395 and later to what some called the “greatest scandal in Christen-
dom,”96 and contributed to the modern-times divorce between science
and religion.97
Thus, secondly, this case represents one of the greatest ironies in the
history of the interaction between scriptural interpretation and natural
science. At the intellectual level we have the invention and discussion
of some of the best arguments ever advanced why a particular scientific
theory was compatible with Scripture and why in general Scripture is
not a scientific authority. But at the institutional level, one of the world’s
great religions issued a formal condemnation of a key scientific theory
that played a crucial role in the rise of modern science. A particularly
high point in the history of thought is accompanied by a particularly
low point in the history of action.
This ironical lack of correspondence is my own way of formulating
an evaluation that is widely shared,98 although there are iconoclasts

94
Favaro 19:322–23; Finocchiaro (1989, 148–50; 2005, 16–24).
95
For some clarifications, see Finocchiaro 1989, 14–15, 363 n. 86; 2005, 11–12,
271–74.
96
Cf. Favaro 18:379: “uno scandalo tanto universale al Cristianesimo.”
97
Koestler 1959; cf. Finocchiaro 2005, 306–17.
98
E.g., Soccorsi 1947 (cf. Finocchiaro 2005, 284–94) and McMullin 2005a.

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and revisionists who think otherwise.99 Independently of the evaluative

issue, the lack of correspondence cries out for an historical explana-
tion. The most plausible explanation, which may be gleaned from the
works of Filippo Soccorsi and Ernan McMullin,100 seems to me the
following—my third main conclusion.
Copernicanism was condemned in 1616 primarily not because it
contradicted Aristotelian philosophy and was opposed by Aristotelian
philosophy professors; nor because it lacked a strict and conclusive
demonstration; nor because it aimed to be a description of physical
reality and more than merely an instrument for “saving the phenom-
ena”; nor because it allegedly contradicted voluntarist theology and
skeptical epistemology; nor because it was supposedly no better than
the Tychonic alternative; nor because it undermined geocentrism and
anthropocentrism; nor because it was allegedly advocated by Galileo
with excessive zeal and imprudence; nor because it was (mis)perceived
as implying Giordano Bruno’s doctrines of the plurality of worlds and
infinity of the universe. Each of these factors has found serious propo-
nents who have used it to advance an explanation in its terms,101 and
all have some truth and played a role, some larger and some smaller.
However, individually such explanations are one-sided, and even col-
lectively they are relatively minor and insufficient to produce the effect.
The real historical explanation is that Copernicanism appeared to
contradict the literal meaning and patristic interpretation of Scripture,
and church officials were unwilling or unable to disregard such literal
or patristic interpretation because of the Counter Reformation struggles
over biblical interpretation and because of the personal infl uence of Car-
dinal Bellarmine, who was supremely infl uential and held an especially
conservative version of biblical literalism or fundamentalism. The two
primary factors were thus a geopolitical one (Counter Reformation) and
a personal one (Bellarmine).102 But these factors were not determinist

99
See Duhem (1908; 1969, 104–17); Koestler 1959, 425–63; Feyerabend 1985; cf.
respectively Finocchiaro (2005, 266–69, 308–13; 2001, 124–25),
100
Soccorsi 1947 (cf. Finocchiaro 2005, 284–94); McMullin 2005a.
101
Just to cite two leading scholars: the first mentioned explanation was advocated
by Drake 1980; the last by Koyré (1966; 1978, 136, 211 n. 30). Cf., respectively,
Finocchiaro (2001, 116–17; 2005, 242) and 2002.
102
Here one might also add the factor involving the principle that theology is the
queen of the sciences and the unwillingness on the part of theologians to relinquish
the power resulting from this principle. But I am not sure this is a distinct third major
factor because it may be regarded as a part of the other two factors.

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causes in the sense that they made the outcome inevitable, and the
cogent arguments of Catholics like Galileo, Foscarini, and Campanella
indicate that the controversy could have been resolved the other way
and that the actual result was contingent and circumstantial.103

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——. 1619. Admonitio ad bibliopolas exteros, praesertim italos, de opere harmonico.
Trans. into French by A. Segonds. In Segonds 1984, 267–68.
——. 1846. Admonitio ad bibliopolas exteros, praesertim italos. In Galilei 1842–1856,
vol. 5, pt. 2, 633–34.
Koestler, Arthur. 1959. The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe.
New York: Macmillan.
Koyré, Alexandre. 1966. Etudes galiléennes (1939). Paris: Hermann.
——. 1978. Galileo Studies. Trans. John Mepham. Hassocks, UK: Harvester Press.
Lattis, James. 1994. Between Copernicus and Galileo: Christoph Clavius and the Collapse of
Ptolemaic Astronomy. Chicago: Univesity of Chicago Press.

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Leo XIII. 1893. Providentissimus Deus. In The Papal Encyclicals, 1740–1981. Ed. Caudia
Cerlen, 2: 325–39. 5 vols. Wilmington, North Carolina: McGrath. 1981.
Lerner, Michel-Pierre. 1995. La science galiléenne selon Tommaso Campanella. Bru-
niana & campanelliana 1: 121–56.
——. 1999. L’‘hérésie’ héliocentrique: Du soupcon à la condamnation. In Brice and
Romano 1999, 69–91.
——. 2001a. Le moine, le cardinal et le savant: A propos de l’Apologia pro Galileo de
Tommaso Campanella. Les cahiers de l’humanisme 2: 71–94.
——. 2002. Aux origines de la polémique anticopernicienne (I): L’Opusculum quartum de
Giovanmaria Tolosani. Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 86: 681–719.
——. 2004. Copernic suspendu et corrigé: Sur deux décrets de la congrégation romaine
de l’Index (1616–1620). Galilaeana 1: 21–89.
——. 2005. The Heliocentric ‘Heresy’: From Suspicion to Condemnation. In McMul-
lin 2005c, 11–37.
——. ed. 2006. Tommaso Campanella, Apologia pro Galileo. Pisa: Scuola Normale Supe-
riore.
——. ed. and trans. 2001b. Tommaso Campanella, Apologia pro Galileo. Paris: Belles
Lettres.
Lomonaco, F., and Maurizio Torrini, eds. 1987. Galileo e Napoli. Naples: Guida.
Luther, Martin. 1912–1921. Tischreden. 6 vols. Weimar: H. Böhlau.
Machamer, Peter, ed. 1998. The Cambridge Companion to Galileo. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Martin, Th. Henri. 1868. Galilée, les droits de la science et la méthode des sciences physiques.
Paris: Librairie Académique.
Mayaud, Pierre-Noël. 1997. La condamnation des livres coperniciens et sa révocation à la lumière
de documents inédits des congrégations de l’Index et de l’Inquisition. Rome: Editrice Pontificia
Università Gregoriana.
——. 2005. Le conflit entre l’astronomie nouvelle et l’Écriture Sainte aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles: Un
moment de l’histoire des idées: Autour de l’affaire Galilée. 6 vols. Paris: Honoré Champion
Éditeur.
McColley, Grant, trans. and ed. 1937. The Defense of Galileo. Smith College Studies in His-
tory, vol. 22, nos. 3–4.
McMullin, Ernan. 1998. Galileo on Science and Scripture. In The Cambridge Companion
to Galileo, Ed. Peter Machamer. 1998. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
271–347.
——. 1999. From Augustine to Galileo. Modern Schoolman 76: 169–94.
——. 2005a. The Church’s Ban on Copernicanism, 1616. In The Church and Galileo,
Ed. Ernan McMullin. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 150–90.
——. 2005b. Galileo’s Theological Venture. In The Church and Galileo, Ed. Ernan
McMullin. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 88–116.
——, ed. 2005c. The Church and Galileo. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press.
Montesinos, José, and Carlos Solís, eds. 2001. Largo campo di filosofare. La Orotava, SP:
Fundación Canaria Orotava de Historia de la Ciencia.
Motta, Franco, ed. 2000. Galileo Galilei, Lettera a Cristina di Lorena: Sull’uso della Bibbia
nelle argomentazioni scientifiche. Genoa: Marietti.
Müller, Adolf. 1911. Galileo Galilei: Studio storico scientifico. Trans. P. Perciballi. Preface
Card. P. Maffi. Rome: Max Bretschneider.
Nardi, C. 1970. Il calabrese Fra P.A. Scaridino detto Foscarini in difesa di Copernico e Galilei.
Genoa: Tolozzi.
Pesce, Mauro. 2000. Introduzione. In Galileo Galilei, Lettera a Cristina di Lorena: Sull’uso
della Bibbia nelle argomentazioni scientifiche, Ed. Franco Motta. Genoa: Marietti, 7–66.
——. 2005. L’ermeneutica biblica di Galileo e le due strade della teologia cristiana. Rome:
Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura.

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Ponzio, Paolo. 1998. Copernicanesimo e teologia: Scrittura e natura in Campanella, Galilei e

Foscarini. Pref. by William Shea. Bari: Levante.
——. ed. and trans. 1997. Tommaso Campanella, Apologia per Galileo. Milan: Rusconi.
——. 2001. Apologia per Galileo. Milan: Bompiani.
Salusbury, Thomas, ed. and trans. 1661–1665. Mathematical Collections and Translations.
2 vols. London: Leybourne.
Schroeder, H.J. 1978. Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent. Rockford, IL: Tan Books
and Publishers.
Segonds, A., trans. and ed. 1984. J. Kepler, secret du monde. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
Soccorsi, Filippo. 1947. Il processo di Galileo. Rome: Edizioni “La Civiltà Cattolica.”
Venturi, Giambattista, ed. 1818–1821. Memorie e lettere inedite finora o disperse di Galileo
Galilei. 2 vols. Modena: n.p.
Wallace, William A. 1984. Galileo and His Sources. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
——. ed. 1986. Reinterpreting Galileo. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America
Press.

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 CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“OUR MATHEMATICIANS HAVE LEARNED AND

VERIFIED THIS”: JESUITS, BIBLICAL EXEGESIS, AND
THE MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES IN THE LATE
SIXTEENTH AND EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES

Volker R. Remmert

The relationship between the mathematical sciences and biblical exege-

sis and theology in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has
often been characterized as difficult and strained within the Society of
Jesus and beyond. This view, however, stems from a narrow perspective
focused on the Copernican issue and in particular, the Galileo affair.
The literature on the history of biblical exegesis and the Galileo affair
falls into two groups: one focuses on the period before 1600, with a
particular emphasis on Protestant reactions to Copernican theory.1
The other investigates the period after 1610, primarily the reaction of
Catholic exegesis to Copernican theory. In both cases, the search for
Galileo’s sources and the reaction of the exegetes to his position have
stood at the center of research interest.2 Only a few studies have given
detailed attention to Catholic or Jesuit biblical exegesis before 1610, so
that historical knowledge about this topic remains incomplete, although
this is precisely the field which needs to be closely investigated if we
are to understand the relationship between science and exegesis among
the Jesuits—one of the foremost intellectual elites of the seventeenth
century—and the situation between 1610 and 1616, when Galileo com-
posed his famous letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany.3
While this paper makes no claim to fill that gap in the historical record,
I will argue that there was much common ground between exegesis and
the mathematical sciences in the Jesuit community in the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries.

1
See Barker 2000, Howell 1996, Howell 1998.
2
Armogathe 1989, Goldstein 1990, Ponzio 1998, Russo 1983.
3
See Dollo 1997, esp. 102–21, Fabris 1986, Kelter 2005, Ponzio 1998.

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The Mathematical Sciences, Scripture, and Theology

In early modern Europe, the term mathematical sciences was used to

describe knowledge that depended on measure, number, and weight,
refl ecting the much quoted passage from the Wis. 11:20: “but thou
hast ordered all things in measure and number and weight.” This
included astrology and architecture, as well as arithmetic and astronomy.
These scientiae or disciplinae mathematicae were generally subdivided into
mathematicae purae, dealing with quantity, continuous and discrete, as
in geometry and arithmetic, and mathematicae mixtae or mediae, which
dealt not only with quantity but also with quality—as for example, in
astronomy, geography, optics, music, cosmography, and architecture.
The mathematical sciences, in those days, consisted of various fields
of knowledge, often with a strong bent toward practical applications.
These fields only became independent from one another through the
formation of scientific disciplines between the late seventeenth and
the early nineteenth century. It is important to note the ambiguity of
the word mathematicus in the early modern period: it was used to
describe the activities of both pure mathematicians and practitioners
of the (mixed) mathematical sciences. In what follows ‘mathematician’
is employed in this broad, if ambiguous, sense.4
Early modern mathematicians, when promoting the importance of
the mathematical sciences, usually invoked their usefulness to theology.
Thus the Dutch mathematician Martinus Hortensius (1604–1639) fol-
lowed a standard procedure in his Speech on the Dignity and Utility of the
Mathematical Sciences given at Amsterdam in 1634:
To theology, acquaintance with the mathematical sciences offers so much
advantage that it in no way ought to be neglected or passed over by a
wise theologian. All agree that the highest aim of theology is to get closely
acquainted with the knowledge of God. One may indeed come to that by
a double way, through examination of the works of God, of course, or
through reading of Holy Scripture. The mathematical sciences are highly
necessary for both, because they make plain the wonders of God in his
works, and provide an easier comprehension of many passages of scripture.
For who rightly examines the world and its whole ornament without the
aid of the mathematical sciences? Or who worthily admires and reveres
the power of God and his kindness towards the sons of men, unless with

4
On this, see Remmert 1998, 79–90; cf. Damerow 1996, 128 that up to the early
eighteenth century “mathematics as a discipline did exist, the mathematician special-
ized in mathematics did not.”

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 jesuits, biblical exegesis, and the mathematical sciences 667

David he has looked upon “the heavens, the works of his fingers, and
the sun and moon that he has created”?5 Indeed, who looking at these
bodies shall have found occasion with the same bard to exclaim: “O Lord
our sovereign, how glorious is thy name in all the earth!”6 unless he has
received from the mathematical sciences the motions, orders and vast
size of these bodies, and ascended from these in his mind to the infinite
power of God? . . . No less is their advantage in explicating very many
passages of Holy Scripture, out of which I will only touch on a few. . . .
There are traces of geometry in Noah’s ark, the Temple of Solomon,
the city shown to Ezekiel in a vision,7 and the New Jerusalem seen by
the apostle John.8 There are traces of arithmetic in Daniel’s prophecy
of the seventy weeks9 and in the number of the chosen from the tribes
of Israel in the Apocalypse,10 and everywhere else.11
Among the sources Hortensius drew on for his legitimization of the
mathematical sciences was the work of Christoph Clavius (1538–1612),
who was the most important Jesuit mathematician and astronomer of
his age, and highly respected all over Europe. It was largely due to
Clavius’s infl uence that interest in the mathematical sciences blossomed
among the Jesuits in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.12
In the preface to his Sacrobosco Commentary, Clavius included a passage
on the Utility of Astronomy for Theology (Astronomiae utilitas ad Theologiam).
According to Clavius, the mathematical sciences had not only a pro-
paedeutic value for theological studies, but were also important to
theology as an auxiliary science, an idea that was increasingly taken
up after the reform of the calendar of 1582. Clavius, who had played
an essential role in this reform declared that “astronomy is necessary
for ecclesiastics” (Astronomia necessaria est personis ecclesiasticis).13
Exegetes for their part often included the mathematical sciences
among the auxiliary disciplines of theology. For example the Jesuit
José de Acosta (1540–1600), famous for his Historia Natural y Moral de

5
Ps. 8:4.
6
Ps. 8:1.
7
Ezek. 40–48.
8
Rev. 21:9–21.
9
Dan. 9:24–27.
10
Rev. 7:1–8.
11
Quoted from Imhausen & Remmert 2006, 109–111; on the background of
Hortensius see 71–78.
12
On Clavius see Knobloch 1988, Knobloch 1995, Lattis 1994, Lerner 1995,
Romano 1999, 85–180, Baldini & Napolitani 1992, 33–58.
13
Clavius 1611/12, vols. 3, 4; on the reform of the calendar see Coyne, Hoskin,
& Pedersen 1983; on the function as an auxiliary science see, for instance, Possevino
1607, 214–261.

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668 volker r. remmert

las Indias, stressed in his short treatise Of the True Way to Interpret Scrip-
ture (De vera Scripturas interpretandi ratione) that “one should not think that
philosophy and the other secular arts [seculares artes] did not contribute
to the holy science.” Rather
knowledge of animals, plants, stones, stars, elements and regions is very
useful to understand very many passages of Scripture. . . . Neither are the
arts of numbers and magnitudes to be condemned.14
Probably the most explicit declaration to this effect was made by the
theologian Jéronimo de Prado and the architect and mathematician
Juan Bautista Villalpando in their Commentary on Ezekiel (1595/1604).15
The statement in the margin of the commentary on Ezek. 3:1, “for
those who interpret Scripture it is necessary to learn the mathematical
sciences,” was reinforced in the accompanying text:
the commentary on Ezekiel will show that it is not only reasonable for
those who teach Scripture that they are instructed in the mathematical
sciences, but also that it is necessary for professors that they are well
versed in them. For ignorance in the mathematical sciences has made
the book of Ezekiel inaccessible throughout the ages.16
Such strong views on the importance of the mathematical sciences
for exegetical and theological studies were not generally shared in the
Society of Jesus, and the extent to which the mathematical sciences
should be studied was hotly debated in the Society in the sixteenth
century.17 However, it had been clear since the discussions on the Jesuit
constitutions in the 1550s that the mathematical sciences were to be

14
de Acosta 1719, 107: “Neque putandum est philosophiam caeterasque saeculares
artes ad sacram scientiam parum conferre, si ministrent & serviant, non dominentur
atque imperent. Itaque animalium, herbarum, lapidum, astrorum, elementorum,
regionum perutilis est notitia ad intelligenda permulta Scriptura loca, atque ad ea spiri-
tualiter examinanda, qui est maximus divini sermonis fructus. Nec contemnendae sunt
numerorum, & magnitudinum artes, neque dialecticae argutiae, & exquisitae primae
philosophiae rationes.” The text was first published in 1590 as part of Acosta’s De Christo
revelato libri novem and had been written before 1588. On this cf. Reinhardt 1990, 6.
15
On the details of their collaboration see Taylor 1972; cf. Lara 2000.
16
de Prado & Villalpando 1596/1604, I, 77: “Necessarium est ijs, qui sacras Scrip-
turas versant, mathematicas disciplinas addiscere.” “. . . nam Ezechielis commentarius
monstrabit non solum non absurdum esse legentibus Scripturam, vt mathesi instructi
sint; sed etiam necessarium esse professoribus non mediocriter in illa versatos. nam
matheseos ignorantia inaccessum fecit Ezechielem per tot saecula.” Cf. II, 20 on the
necessity of mechanics.
17
See, for example, Cosentio 1999, 47–79; Romano 1999.

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 jesuits, biblical exegesis, and the mathematical sciences 669

included among the proficiencies supporting theology and were thus to

be taught “with fitting diligence and by learned professors,” although,
in the case of “mathematics, with the moderation appropriate to secure
the end which is being sought.”18 Moreover, the role they could play in
biblical exegesis was theoretically delimitated by their inferior position
in the hierarchy of the loci theologici.
The central question of the relative evidential power of the various
theological sources and their relation to philosophical refl ection had
exercised theologians even before the Reformation, but their debates
were only finally recorded after the decrees of 1546 by the Dominican
theologian Melchior Cano (1509–1560) in his treatise De locis theologi-
cis. In this text, published posthumously in 1563, Cano developed a
hierarchy of authorities, and this was generally accepted as a guide in
successive centuries. Cano gave no particular weight to specific argu-
ments, but ordered them by the locations (loci) where they were to be
found. Theological argumentation, he argued, could reside in ten loci,
the first seven of which were authoritative and theological in the nar-
row sense: 1. written works; 2. oral traditions; 3. the Catholic Church;
4. the general councils; 5. the Roman Church; 6. the church fathers;
7. the scholastic theologians. The other three loci were grounded on
reason: 8. human reason; 9. philosophy; 10. history. Cano’s treatise
devoted a book to each of these loci, but his intention to add a book
on how they should be deployed in interpreting the Bible was thwarted
by his early death.19
Cano did not mention the mathematical sciences in his discussion of
exegetical principles: neither did the Jesuit Benito Pereira (1535–1610)
in his work on the subject. Pereira spent most of his life at the Col-
legio Romano in Rome, first as a student (1553–1556), then as professor
of litterae humaniores (1556–1558), philosophy (1558–1567) and Holy
Scripture (1567–1610).20 Through his position at the Collegio Romano
and a comprehensive four-volume commentary on the book of Gen-
esis, based on his lectures there, Pereira established himself as one of
the most prominent exegetes of the period. In the first volume of his

18
I refer to the constitutions of 1556: Moell 1996, 179f: Chapter 12: The subjects
which should be taught in the universities of the Society; cf. Diego de Ledesma, De
artium liberalium studiis.
19
On Cano and his doctrine of loci see above all Lohr 1988b, 148f; cf. Blackwell
1991, 15–19.
20
On Pereira see Blackwell 1991, passim; Blum 2006, 279–304; Lohr 1988a,
313–320; Reinhardt 1999, 176–183; Williams 1948, passim.

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Genesis commentary, he set down four basic rules for exegesis, which
were often cited and which Galileo explicitly referred to in his letter to
Christina. In particular, Pereira considered the meaning of nontheo-
logical disciplines for biblical exegesis, especially those of philosophy
and natural philosophy:
This also must be carefully observed and completely avoided: in dealing
with the teachings of Moses, do not think or say anything affirmatively
and assertively which is contrary to the manifest evidence and arguments
of philosophy or the other disciplines. For since every truth agrees with
every other truth, the truth of Sacred Scripture cannot be contrary to
the true arguments and evidence of the human sciences.21
Here Pereira, invoking Augustine, elaborated an exegetic position
that Cano had sketched out in De locis theologicis. Cano had expressly
given the arguments of reason a subordinate status, but had allowed
for exceptions as long as the issues involved had little or nothing to
do with faith. Pereira provided concrete examples of how insisting
on the literal sense of the Bible could contradict “manifest truths and
necessary arguments” (manifestis experimentis, necessariisque rationibus), for
example, if one concluded from the wording that the “stars [actually]
move through the heavens in the same way as fish move through the
water and birds through the air.”22

21
Pereira 1590, 27: “Illud etiam diligenter cavendum, & omnino fugiendum est,
ne in tractanda Mosis doctrina quicquam affirmate & asseveranter sentiamus, & dica-
mus, quod repugnet manifestis experimentis, & rationibus philosophiae, vel aliarum
disciplinarum: namque, cum verum omne semper cum vero congruat, non potest
veritas sacrarum litterarum, veris rationibus & experimentis humanarum doctrinarum
esse contraria.”; cf. Mayaud 2005, II, 15–21: A2, 18. Cf. Letter to Christina: V, 320;
Blackwell 1991, 22.
22
Pereira 1590, 27f: “Ad hanc regulam si exigamus, & expendamus nonnullas quo-
rundam interpretum opiniones, plane respuendas atque reiiciendas esse intelligemus.
Exempli causa: Origenes, Lactantius, Procopius Gazaeus, Chrysostomus, & quidam
alii censent secundam scripturam caelum non esse rotundum; esse immobile; moveri
stellas per caelum, ut pisces per aquam, & aves per aërem; non esse Antipodas; aquam
maris esse multis partibus sublimiorem, celsissimis etiam terrae montibus: quae tamen
falsa esse omnia, manifestis experimentis, necessariisque rationibus nunc constat.”
It is beyond the scope of this paper to compare Pereira’s position to Bellarmine’s.
In his multi-volume Disputationes de controversiis christianae fidei (1586–1593) Bellarmine
had left no doubt that Scripture was obscure and that it was therefore vital to name
a final arbiter in matters of scriptural interpretation. His comments made possible
a crucial distinction between academic exegesis, which applied the tools of scholar-
ship to analyzing the Bible line by line, and official exegesis, which, while based on
academic interpretation, was finally up to the Pope and his advisors, leaving a very
narrow space in which the interpretation of the Bible was open to debate. On this see
Remmert 2006b, 300f.

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 jesuits, biblical exegesis, and the mathematical sciences 671

In his teachings on natural philosophy, Pereira had made clear that in

his opinion “the mathematical disciplines are not properly sciences.”23
Thus, in the passage quoted above, it is not surprising that he did not
explicitly mention them along with philosophy. On the rare occasions
when he talked about the mathematical sciences in the Commentary
on Genesis, he left no doubt that, for him, they were subordinate to
metaphysics.24 This did not, however, inhibit him from referring to the
latest developments within the mathematical sciences, and astronomy
in particular.
Later exegetes, however, usually had a less antagonistic attitude
towards the mathematical sciences than Pereira. After Pereira, not
only theology, but also natural philosophy was taught with a more
respectful regard to the mathematical sciences.25 The Jesuit exegete
Jacques Bonfrère (1573–1642), in his Commentary on the Pentateuch of
1625, discussed how to investigate the literal and the mystical sense of
Scripture. Among his nontheological loci, “knowledge of Hebrew and
Greek” is ranked first, followed directly by “knowledge of the other
sciences and arts, in particular, philosophy, astronomy and the other
mathematical disciplines.”26 The Italian Jesuit Giovanni Stefano Meno-
chio (1575–1655) was close to Bonfrère’s thinking in the Prolegomena of
his Explanations of the Literal Sense of the Whole Bible, first published in 1630
and frequently reprinted well into the nineteenth century.27 Moreover,
in his later Italian essays on Scripture, Menochio asserted that contrary
to the opinion of the heretics, there were many difficulties in under-
standing the Bible that made interpretation compulsory. In particular,
he stressed “the variety and multiplicity of the sciences and arts, the

23
Pereira 1576, 73f; cf. Homann 1983, 239; Feldhay, 1998, 91ff; Gorman 1998,
49f & 56.
24
Pereira 1590, 66f.
25
On this see Wallace 1988, 228f.
26
Bonfrère 1625, 72f.
27
Menochio 1678: Cap. XXI, Quomodo sensus literalis inuestigandus sit: “Ad asse-
quendum sacrae Scripturae sensum literalem iuuant primò alia loca similia Scripturae,
quibus idem clarius dicatur, vel ex quorum collatione lux aliqua obscuriori accedat.
2. traditiones Ecclesiae. 3. Conciliorum definitiones. 4. Interpretationes Patrum.
5. Theologia scholastica. 6. Linguarum peritia. 7. Cognitio aliarum scientiarum Phi-
losophiae, Astrologiae &c. 8. Diligens consideratio antecedentium, & consequentium,
& adiunctorum; . . . .”

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ignorance of which implies that many passages of Scripture that take

them for granted cannot easily be understood.”28
Further evidence in Jesuit biblical commentaries indicating that
exegesis and the mathematical sciences were not strictly separated
fields, can be found in their dealings with the Copernican question.
Christoph Clavius, who was Pereira’s main antagonist in the debate
about the role of the mathematical sciences in Jesuit education, set
out biblical arguments against Copernican theory in his commentary
of 1570 on Sacrobosco, In sphaeram Joannis de Sacro Bosco Commentarius,
an introduction to contemporaneous astronomical science which went
through several editions, and which became a standard part of Jesuit
and Catholic biblical exegesis.29 By the late sixteenth century, Jesuit
exegetes were finally unanimous in rejecting Copernicanism, and most
of them—e.g., Benito Pereira (1590), Juan de Pineda (1598) in refutation
of the commentary on Job written by the Spanish Augustinian Diego
de Zuñiga, Jean Lorin (1605), Nicolaus Serarius (1609)30—quoted “our
Clavius” (Clavius noster) as their supporting astronomical authority. The
exegetes’ rejection in turn became binding on Jesuit astronomers and
mathematicians whenever they were required to take a position in the
cosmological debate. The consensus to reject Copernicanism was, as
indicated, not rooted in the authority of the theologians of the Society of
Jesus alone, but also in that of its leading mathematician Clavius.31
I have argued elsewhere that the rejection of Copernicanism should
not be understood as pointing to the irreconcilability of exegetes and
mathematicians. It was rather their open exchange—at least at the
Collegio Romano—that produced the anti-Copernican consensus which
later became so problematic.32 This aspect of the Copernican issue
typifies the relationship between exegesis and mathematical sciences
in Jesuit debate. Leaving this important topic aside and looking into
expositions that go beyond general exegetical principles, we find cor-
roboration of the exegetes’ acceptance of the utility and the authority of
the mathematical sciences in two important respects. First, concerning

28
Menochio 1653, 18–21: Della difficoltà della sacra Scrittura, e di dove ella nasca.
Cap. 8, on 19: “. . . ; la varietà e moltiplicità delle scienze, & arti, l’ignoranza delle quali
fa che molti passi della Scrittura, che le suppongono non siano facili da intendersi.”
29
Clavius 1570, 244–250: Terram esse immobilem, on 247f.
30
Pereira 1590, 294; de Pineda 1600, 339; Lorin 1605, 215; Serarius 1609/10,
II, 237.
31
On this see Remmert 2003; Remmert 2006b.
32
Remmert 2006a.

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chronology, the mathematical sciences and astronomy in particular were

considered indispensable for theologians. Thus the Jesuit mathematical
school in Antwerp was founded as a result of the need of astronomical
training voiced by the local Academia ecclesiastica in 1615.33 The reform
of the calendar and, more specifically, the determination of the date
of Easter also are relevant examples for the importance of astronomy
in ecclesiastical matters. Second, the mathematical sciences could be
employed to determine the meaning of the text, as in the rather out-
standing example of the theologian de Prado’s and the mathematician
Villalpando’s collaborative Commentary on Ezekiel. However, in the late
sixteenth century, astronomical problems, too, challenged exegetes.

“Whether the Stars Are Innumerable for Us?” From Clavius

and Pereira to Galileo and Lorin

Benito Pereira’s Commentary on Genesis, exemplary in its clarity and

erudition, was often reprinted and was widely distributed in both the
Catholic and Protestant worlds.34 The first part of the second book dealt
with the heavens and the stars according to Scripture. In its preface,
Pereira declared that “surely there is nothing in the discipline of the
stars, whether it is concluded from necessary reasons or found and
reliably known from manifest experiences, that could be contrary or
dissonant to Scripture.”35 In discussing the number of heavenly spheres,
he even stressed that as the Bible was not clear on this question, and as
philosophers and mathematicians (astronomers) did not agree whether
there were eight or nine or even more heavenly spheres, it would
be foolish for theologians and exegetes to refute or even damn their
opinions.36 In the next passage, he argued that, ideally, the exposition
should be based “on the consensus of numerous and highly celebrated
philosophers and theologians” ( plurimorum & maximorum Philosophorum

33
On this see van de Vyver1980, 265f.
34
See the discussion by Williams 1948, passim.
35
Pereira 1590, 251–358: Liber secundus, Qui est de Caelis & astris secundum
sacram Scripturam, & de Diuinatione astrologica, 251–253: Praefatio, 252: “Nec est
profecto quicquam in syderali disciplina, aut necessariis rationibus conclusum, aut
manifestis exploratum & compertum experimentis, quod diuinae Scripturae contrarium
vel dissonum sit.”
36
Ibid., 270–273: Quaestio quarta, De numero caelorum, 273.

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atque Theologorum consensu).37 Even though no mention was made of

mathematicians here, this was clearly an important step towards a
practice of exegesis that embraced the mathematical sciences. And
Pereira, notwithstanding his reservations concerning the epistemological
status of the mathematical sciences, was not very far away from such a
position, as is apparent in his treatment of the question “whether the
stars are innumerable for us?”38
Traditionally, astronomers had classified the fixed stars according
to their magnitude, and in the sixteenth century it was still generally
believed that 1,022 stars of six different magnitudes could be seen on
the sphere of the fixed stars.39 Pereira referred to this consensus and
even enumerated the number of stars of each magnitude, totaling them
to 1,022. However, at this point his exposition takes a surprising turn
as he speculates on the maximal number of fixed stars that the sphere
of the fixed stars could possibly contain, if it was closely packed with
those of the largest magnitude. Pereira explained, without giving a
source, that
mathematicians . . . prove that if the whole concave face of the firmament
[i.e. the surface of the sphere of the fixed stars] was everywhere filled
with stars of the first magnitude [i.e. the largest ones], one could know
how huge their number would be; concluded from necessary reasons,
they are 71,209,600. . . .40
This astonishing number raised an important exegetical problem. Did
not Gen. 15:5 say: “Look up into the sky, and count the stars if you
can. So many shall your descendants be”? This was generally taken
to imply, that the stars could not be counted. But, if one were to take
71,209,600 to be the largest possible number of fixed stars, this would
appear to contradict Scripture because in this case the stars could be
counted after all. Certainly, Pereira argued, this contradiction could not
be resolved by assuming the meaning of the text was adapted to the

37
Ibid., 273–276: Quaestio quinta, A quo mouenatur caeli, ab Angelisne, an à
seipsis, 273. Mayaud 2005, II, 311–327: A101, 321 omits this chapter.
38
Ibid., 288–291: Quaestio octava, An stellae sint nobis innumerabiles.
39
Grant 1996, 438–446.
40
Pereira 1590, 289: “Nec verò tantum omnium stellarum quae sunt in caelo
numerum Mathematici compertum esse volunt; sed ausi maiora & pene incredibilia,
demonstrant, si universa firmamenti facies concava plena esset usquequaque stellis
primae magnitudinis, sciri posse, earum numerus quantus esset; necessaria enim ratione
concludi, eas fore 71209600. hoc est, unum & septuaginta, ut vulgo apellant, & ducenties
& novies mille superque sexcentas.” Cf. Mayaud 2005, II, 311–327: A101, 323.

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understanding of those unskilled in astronomy since God did not talk

to the uneducated rabble but to “Abraham, a wise man and skilful in
astronomy” (Abrahae viro sapienti & astrologiae perito). Pereira, in standard
exegetical manner, cited supporting passages ( Jer. 33:22; Ps. 146:4) and
authorities—above all, Augustine (City of God, XVI, 23), who asserted
that the stars could not be counted. Referring to the consensus of the
philosophers on this question, he left no doubt that “not only Scripture
seems to contradict the astronomers, but the philosophers too” (e.g.,
Aristotle, Plato, Seneca).41
In the end however, Pereira, seeking to uphold the literal meaning
of the text found an elegant way out of the dilemma that allowed him
to accept the authority of the mathematicians:
It could, perhaps, be said for the astronomers, that Augustine does not
talk about the stars that are conspicuous and easily noticeable for the
eyes, whose number, strictly speaking, the astronomers hand down; but
generally about all stars that are in heaven, whether they are visible to
man or invisible; the number of all these cannot be grasped by man,
and the astronomers will not deny this. Can they know the number of
those stars, that they can neither positively identify by vision nor by any
other method? And this, too, could be said for the astronomers, that
the number of fixed stars had not been carefully investigated before
the time of Hipparchus and Aratus. . . . it is no wonder, that before this
diligent and skilled observation of astronomers, the number of the stars
was unknown to man and also thought of as incomprehensible [and
infinite]. And for this reason the Old Testament in many places speaks
of the stars as innumerable.42

41
Ibid., 290: “Nec modo Sacrae literae contradicere videntur astrologis, sed etiam
Philosophi.” Cf. Mayaud 2005, II, 311–327: A101, 324 omits this crucial passage.
42
Pereira 1590, 291: “Posset fortasse dici pro Astrologis, Augustinum non loqui
de stellis visu insignibus & notabilibus, quarum duntaxat numerum tradunt Astrologi;
sed universe de omnibus stellis quae in caelo sunt, sive aspectibiles sint hominibus,
sive inaspectibiles, quarum omnium numerum teneri non posse ab hominibus, non
ibunt inficias Astrologi. qui enim nosse possunt earum numerum, quas nec visu nec
alia ratione ceto cognoscunt? Illud quoque pro Astrologis dici posset, numerum iner-
rantium stellarum non fuisse curiose investigatum aut compertum ante Hyparchi &
Arati aetatem; nempe quosque Astrologi stellas omnes miro artificio in certas quas-
dam imagines & effigies digesserunt: ut non sit mirum, ante istam tam diligentem &
artificiosam Astrologorum observationem, incognitum fuisse hominibus, vel etiam
incomprehensibilem existimatum stellarum numerum. Atque ob eam causam Scrip-
tura veteris testamentis de stellis tanquam innumerabilibus multifariam loquitur.” Cf.
Mayaud 2005, II, 311–327: A101, 324.

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Thus Pereira seemed to be quite willing to accept the possibility that

71,209,600 is the maximum number of stars of the first magnitude
and that similar calculations could be done for the other classes still
resulting in a finite number of fixed stars. However, astronomers cannot
count them as many of them are hidden from their vision. Even though
Pereira stressed that the meaning of Gen. 15:5 was not adapted to vulgar
understanding, he was ready to assume that it might be adapted to the
contemporaneous state of astronomy, i.e., to Abraham’s understand-
ing. When considering the relationship between biblical exegesis and
the mathematical sciences, it is interesting to look at the source of the
extraordinary number 71,209,600, which is nonstandard in sixteenth-
century astronomy. It turns out that Pereira, in stating it, referred to
his colleague Christoph Clavius.43
For the second edition of his commentary on Sacrobosco, published
in 1581, Clavius made some small but significant revisions in the chapter
On the Number of the Stars (De quantitate stellarum).44 Originally this chapter
had included mostly standard material about the magnitudes of the stars
and the number of the fixed stars (1,022).45 In the second edition, how-
ever, Clavius raised the question, “what if some curious person would
wish to know how many stars of whatever class of magnitudes would
be necessary in order that they could fill the whole concave surface
of the firmament.”46 The answer, Clavius explained, was “very easy,”
based on data he had presented in preceding chapters on the diam-
eters of the earth, the planets and the fixed stars, which had all been
measured and calculated and thus were well-known to early modern

43
Mayaud 2005, IV/V, 82, footnote 64, too, identifies Clavius 1611/12 III, 103
as the source.
44
Clavius 1581, 185–191: De quantitate stellarum (last edition in Clavius 1611/12,
III, 100–105).
45
Clavius 1570, 238–244; cf. van Helden 1985, 53.
46
Clavius 1581, 189: “Quod si curiosus quispiam scire desideret, quotnam stellae
requirantur in quacunque differentia magnitudinem, ut totam superficiem concavam
Firmamenti explere possint, ita ut sese mutuo contingant, id facile assequetur partim ex
his, quae hoc loco de proportionibus diametrorum stellarum, & terrae diximus, partim
vero ex ijs, quae ad finem huius cap. scribemus. Cum enim diameter concavi firmamenti
contineat 22612 ½. semidiametros terrae, diameter autem cuiusuis stellae magnitudinis
primae contineat 4 ¾ semidiametros terrae; Si fiat, ut 4 ¾. ad 1. ita 22612 ½. ad
aliud, invenientur in diametro concavi Firmamenti diametri unius stellae magnitudinis
4760. & paulo amplius. Et si hanc diametrum multiplicemus per 3 1/7. continebit
circumferentia circuli maximi in concavo Firmamenti 14960. diametros unius stellae
magnitudinis primae, & paulo amplius. Quam circumferentiam si multiplicemus per
diametrum, nempe per 4760. reperiemus superficiem concavam Firmamenti continere
71209600. diametros quadratas unius stellae magnitudinis primae.”

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astronomers.47 Clavius gave the diameter of the concave firmament as

22,612 ½ semi-diameters (radii) of the earth and the diameter of the
fixed stars of the first magnitude as 4 ¾ semi-diameters (radii) of the
earth. Now, as he wished to make a mathematical statement about
fixed stars of the first magnitude, instead of semi-diameters (radii) of the
earth he chose the diameter of the stars of the first magnitude as the
reference unit in what follows. This numerical transformation is simply
done by dividing of 22,612 ½ through 4 ¾, which turned out to be
4,760 diameters of the fixed stars of the first magnitude (his new unit
of reference). Subsequently he simply used the formula 4πr² to calculate
the surface of the concave firmament, taking 2,380 diameters of the
fixed stars of the first magnitude (the radius 2,380 is equal to half of the
diameter 4,760). As a result, the surface of the concave firmament turned
out to be 4πr² = 4π (2,380)² = 71,209,600, the unit not being square
miles or kilometers but squares whose side lengths were one diameter
of the fixed stars of the first magnitude. Into each of these 71,209,600
squares one fixed star of the first magnitude could be packed and thus
there turned out to 71,209,600. This was not, however, the end of his
exposition, as he immediately addressed the issue of the compatibility of
this extraordinary number with the Bible. In an earlier chapter, when
the number of 1,022 stars had first been mentioned, he maintained
that Gen. 15:5 should not be taken as indicating that the number of
stars is infinite.48 He now claimed that the stars are in fact numerable
and that this was fully according to Scripture, which he elucidated by
cross-referring Gen. 15:5 to the Numbering of Israel at Sinai in Num. 1:46.
Here, the number of Israelites older than twenty-one had been given
as 603,550. If women and children had been included, according to
Clavius, their number would have been greater than 2,000,000. “Who
would doubt,” Clavius concluded, “that in so many centuries they would
have been more than 71,209,600?”49

47
On Clavius and his astronomy see Lattis 1994.
48
Ibid., 149f; III, 74; cf. Grant 1996, 445/77.
49
Ibid., 189: “Ex quo etiam apparet, illos decipi, qui putant, plures stellas esse re
ipsa in Firmamento, quàm filios Israel, propter verba scripturae supra allata. Cum enim
in egressu ex Aegypto numerata sint 600003. [sic!] filiorum Israel supra 21. annos,
qui nimirum ad bella procedebant, ut patet cap. I. Numer. recte colligunt nonulli
Doctores, si numerentur etiam pueri, & mulieres, numerum eorum maiorem fuisse,
quàm 2000000. Quis igitur dubitat, in tot seculis annorum multo plures fuisse, quàm
71209600?” In later editions he gives the correct number 603.550 instead of 600.003:
In Sphaeram Ioannis de Sacro Bosco Commentarius. Nunc tertium ab ipso Auctore
recognitus, & plerisque in locis locupletatus.” Clavius 1611/12, III, 102.

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It is not clear why Clavius included this discussion of the maximum

number of fixed stars in his book, but the relevant thing to notice here
is that the number he came up with in 1581 was reproduced by his col-
league Pereira in 1590. This testifies to the interaction between exegetes
and astronomers, demonstrates the transmission of knowledge between
them and indicates a mutual respect. To my knowledge, the only other
exegete to take up Clavius and Pereira’s number 71,209,600 was their
fellow Jesuit Jean Lorin in 1616. By that time, however, knowledge
about the stars and the heavens had changed dramatically.
In 1610 Galileo published his famous Starry Messenger. There he
boldly declared:
Surely it is a great thing to increase the numerous host of fixed stars
previously visible to the unaided vision, adding countless [innumeras] more
which have never before been seen, exposing these plainly to the eye in
numbers ten times exceeding the old and familiar stars.50
The use of the telescope had indeed enabled Galileo to add consider-
able numbers of known stars. This new development was embraced
wholeheartedly by Jesuit mathematicians and astronomers. As early
as the winter of 1610/11, in his mathematics course at the Jesuit
College in Mainz, Otto Cattenius was teaching that although earlier
astronomers had known 1,022 stars, Galileo’s discoveries had changed
the situation.51 In Rome, the Jesuits celebrated Galileo at the Collegio
Romano in May 1611 in a festa Galileana. On this occasion, Clavius’s
student Odo Maelcote (1572–1615) presented an overview of Galileo’s
astronomical achievements on behalf of the mathematicians of the Col-
legio Romano in his speech Nuntius Sidereus Collegii Romani. Equipped with
their authority—towered over by that of Clavius—Maelcote confirmed
most of Galileo’s observations. He also discussed the implications
Galileo’s observations had for ascertaining the number of fixed stars,
and cited Clavius and Brahe on the fact that their number was greater
than 1,022. Maelcote also mentioned Gen. 15:5 in this context, but
significantly, he did not interpret the passage “count the stars if you
can” (Numera stellas, si potes) as an indication of their innumerability,
but rather as an invitation and challenge for astronomers to further
study them—just as Galileo had interpreted Eccles. 3:11 in his letter
to Christina (“God hath delivered the world to their consideration, so

50
Galilei 1610, 5r; translation quoted from Galilei 1957, 27.
51
Krayer 1991, 290.

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that man cannot find out the work which God hath made from the
beginning to the end”).52 Maelcote also unmistakably emphasized the
authority of astronomy:
This excellent Nuncius added almost innumerable fixed stars, detected with
the help of this instrument [i.e. the telescope], that in the memory of man
had never before been seen nor known: this is the way things really are,
listeners; none of you may hesitate about it or doubt it.53
It is well known that Maelcote’s speech was received “not without
murmur of the philosophers“ (non absque philosophorum murmure), who
claimed cosmology as their exclusive territory and were particularly
annoyed that Venus was considered to move around the Sun.54 Cer-
tainly Maelcote’s exhortation (ita profecto est, auditores; nemo vestrum ambigat
aut dubitet) did not soften their misgivings. Nothing, however, seems to
be known about the theologians’ reaction. Considering Gen. 15:5 the
question of the number of fixed stars is of a certain relevance as a topic
between exegesis and astronomy.
The French Jesuit theologian Jean Lorin (1559–1634) was present at
the festa Galileana. Lorin, who had taught Scripture at the Collegio Romano
from 1600 to 1606 and had then been censor there and an adviser
to general Claudio Acquaviva (1543–1615), wrote several exegetical
tomes. The first of his biblical commentaries, the Commentary on Acts,55
in which he based his rejection of terrestrial motion on Pineda’s argu-
ments, was published in 1605. Lorin rejected the theory summarily
and invoked the authority of “our Clavius” and Pineda to confirm its
“falseness and recklessness” ( falsitatis ac temeritatis).56 The Commentary on
Acts was followed by a long list of further works: Commentary on Ecclesiastes,

52
Maelcote 1890–1909), III(1), 296; quotation from Galileo’s letter to Christina
(Finocchiaro 1989, 97); on the festa Galileana see Lattis, 1994, 187–195.
53
Ibid., 295: “Asserebat prior Nuncius, detectas hoc instrumento stellas fixas pene
innumeras, ab hominum memoria nec visas nec cognitas: ita profecto est, auditores;
nemo vestrum ambigat aut dubitet.”
54
Reported by Grégoire de St. Vincent to Christiaan Huygens in October 1657:
“Et venerem circa Solem volvi manifeste demonstravimus non absque philosophorum
murmure . . . ” Huygens 1889, 490.
55
See Sommervogel 1890–1911, V: 1–6.
56
Lorin 1605, 215: “Ubi Didacus Stunica illi opinioni adhaeresit, quae auctores
habent Pythagoricos, & sectatores, Copernicum [In suis resolut. (sic!)], & Coelium Cal-
cagninum, terram naturali perenni motu moveri. Eam opionem falsitatis, ac temeritatis
convincit inter alios Clavius noster, & Pineda in Iob, c. 9.” On this and Pineda’s stance
see Remmert 2001, 559f; on Lorin see Diccionario Histórico de la Compañía de Jesús, 4 vols.
(Rome/Madrid 2001), III, 2422; Sommervogel 1890–1911, V, 1–6.

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Commentary on Wisdom of Solomon, Commentary on Letters, Commentary on the

Psalms, Commentary on Leviticus, Commentary on Numbers and Commentary on
Deuteronomy.
In the third to the last folio of his monumental Commentary on the
Psalms, published in 1616 with an Imprimatur of General Acquaviva
dating from April 1614, Lorin discussed Ps. 146:4 of the Vulgate: “he
who numbers the stars one by one and names them one and all.”57
Referring to Pereira’s Commentary on Genesis, Lorin, also cited Clavius’s
number of 71,209,600 fixed stars. Like Pereira, he referred to Gen.
15:5 and Augustine’s interpretation, but more interestingly, he also
mentioned Galileo’s observations as published in the Sidereus Nuncius,58
and their affirmation by the Jesuit mathematicians at the festa Galileana
in 1611:
[And these observations] have been corroborated in my presence in Rome;
and in fact I myself, and our mathematicians, who are more experienced
in these things, Christoph Clavius, who was still alive then, and Christoph
Grienberger, and Odo Maelcote, all of whom taught the mathematical
sciences in our Roman school [i.e. the Collegio Romano], we have learned
and verified this, [that] in addition to the four planets of Jupiter which
he first discovered, he then after those found an extraordinary number
of other stars, which are called of sixth magnitude [i.e. the smallest fixed
stars], which appeared bigger and clearer than the stars of second mag-
nitude that can be seen with the natural eye [i.e. without the telescope].
For example, he reports eighty in the constellation of the Belt and Sword
of Orion, apart from those that are in the whole constellation, more than
500; further thirty-six in the Pleiades;. . . . Thus it is proved by this new
experiment that I have reported, that, as Augustine has written, the better
and clearer one sees, the more stars one sees. . . .59

57
Lorin 1612–1616, III, 1144–1147: Ps. 146:4. Qui numerat multitudinem stellarum,
& omnibus eis nomina vocat.
58
Galilei 1610.
59
Ibid., III, 1145: “. . . atque ego idem, & peritiores Mathematici nostri Christophorus
Clavius tunc adhunc superstes, & Christophorus Gramberger, & Odo Malcotus, qui
omnes disciplinas mathematicas in scholis nostris Romanis professi sunt, experti sumus,
praeter quatuor planetas circa Jovem primus deprehendit stellarum aliarum infra illas,
quae dicuntur sextae magnitudinis, numerum ingentem, quae majores, clarioresque
appaverunt, quam secundae magnitudinis stellae naturali acie visae. Affert exempli causa
in cinguli & ensis Orionis asterismo octoginta, omissis, quae in tota constellatione sunt
plus quingentis: praeterea trigenta sex in ea, quae est Plejadum: deinde conspicias &
satis magnas plurimas in Galaxia, seu lacteo circulo: adhaec viginti & unam in aste-
rismo Nebulosae, capitis Orionis: atque triginta sex in Nebulosa Praesepis. Sic novo
experimento comprobatum, quod scripsisse Augustinum retuli, quanto quisque acutius
intuetur, tanto plures videre stellas, atque acerrime cernentibus aliquas occultas esse
merito existimari. Jam vero quod attinet ad nomina, quibus Deus vocat stellas, aeque

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Lorin clearly accepted the truth of Galileo’s observations and the larger,
and increasing, number of fixed stars on the authority of the astronomers
and mathematicians. This was “learned and verified” and no longer
open to debate, as stated by Maelcote in his exhortation at the festa
Galileana. Obviously this did not imply that Lorin subscribed to Galileo’s
deductions in favor of the Copernican system, which had been banned
by the majority of Jesuit exegetes, including Lorin himself and which
had been refuted by “their Clavius” on astronomical grounds.
However, what is decisive, is that apparently for Lorin and many
of his colleagues in theology in the early years of the seventeenth
century, the reliability of astronomy and the mathematical sciences
was incontestable. In this they differed from the natural philosophers,
who generally were much more reluctant to accept the results and the
authority of their colleagues from the mathematical sciences, as Marcus
Hellyer has recently reminded us in his study of early modern Jesuit
natural philosophy. Clearly, natural philosophers had more to lose than
theologians, as the mathematical sciences were a significant challenge
to their traditional monopoly to exclusively deal with physics and cos-
mology. In the Society of Jesus the tension between natural philosophy
and the mathematical sciences continued well into the second half of
the seventeenth century.60

Jesuits, Biblical Exegesis, and the Mathematical Sciences in the

Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries

The relationship between biblical exegesis and the mathematical sci-

ences, and astronomy in particular, was less strained in the Society of
Jesus than has often been inferred from a somewhat one-dimensional
and distorted focus on the Copernican question. The rejection of
Earth’s motion was not the consequence of dissent between exegetes
and astronomers as has often been argued, but the product of a con-
sensus resulting from the open exchange between these two groups, in
particular within the walls of the Collegio Romano, where quite a number

ignota nobis, ac earundem numerus.” This passage is not in the collection of Mayaud
2005, II, 350–370: A103.
60
Hellyer 2005, 126f; on the relationship between philosophy and the mathematical
sciences among the Jesuits see Baldini 1998. Pereira’s De communibus rerum naturalium
principiis et affectionibus libri quindecem of 1576 mentioned above is a prominent example
for the anti-mathematical stance of natural philosophers.

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of standard Jesuit opinions and doctrines were formed.61 Thus the treat-
ment of the Copernican question among Jesuits was not controversial
but typified the interplay between exegesis and the mathematical sci-
ences, which was characterized by mutual respect and exchange of
ideas, always given that theology had primacy over the mathematical
sciences. A similar case of interchange between the mathematical sci-
ences and astronomy and biblical exegesis can be seen in the hotly
debated issue of the corruptibility of the heavens, which did not turn
into a delicate theological problem as Edward Grant shows in his book
on the Medieval Cosmos.62
It is clear however, that further study is needed to substantiate that
among Jesuits, at least up to the mid-seventeenth century, the math-
ematical sciences and biblical exegesis were engaged in fruitful dialogue.
In my view, two central aspects require further attention, namely the
exegetical principles and practices in the Society of Jesus and the way
Jesuit mathematicians treated and used the Bible in their works.
Biblical exegesis played a central role in the Jesuit order. Aware that
precise knowledge of the Bible and its interpretation were important in
the debate with the Protestants, the Jesuit syllabus of 1599 prescribed
daily lectures on exegesis for second and third year students. It was
expressly laid down that interpretation according to the literal meaning
(sensus literalis) should be emphasized.63
The Jesuit theologians were regarded as among the leading exegetes
of the Catholic world, and their opinion carried particular weight in
the “saeculum aureum exegeseos catholicae,”64 but the exegetical principles
and practices in the Society of Jesus have not yet been fully investigated
(with the possible exception of problems related to the Copernican ques-
tion). José de Acosta, Jacques Bonfrère, Jean Lorin, Antonio Escobar y
Mendoza, Benito Pereira, Juan de Pineda, Gaspar Sánchez, Nicolaus
Serarius, and many of their fellow Jesuits not only left dozens of biblical
commentaries, but many of them also produced clear expositions of
their exegetical principles, in both print and manuscript form, which
have never been systematically studied.
The extraordinary output of Jesuit mathematicians has frequently
been considered a marvel, and the historical study of “Jesuit science” is

61
On this see Remmert 2006a.
62
Grant 1996, 205.
63
Cf. Lukàcs 1986, 383–385, cf. Remmert 2006b, 291–313.
64
Quoted from Grabmann 1933, 155.

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 jesuits, biblical exegesis, and the mathematical sciences 683

very much in vogue today. The work of Athanasius Kircher, Christoph

Scheiner, Christoph Clavius, and their numerous, less illustrious col-
leagues have caused an ever-increasing stream of studies and reprints of
their sometimes lavishly illustrated literary productions. Their treatment
of biblical topics, however, has been examined less intensively (with the
exception of Kircher’s works on the Tower of Babel and Noah’s Ark
and, again, of some aspects related to the Copernican debate). On the
narrow basis of the Copernican question, it is rather too often taken
for granted that a ‘Jesuit astronomer’ (if there was such a thing) must
generally have been at odds with his colleagues in exegesis.65 There is,
of course, much material pointing in that direction, in particular when
it comes to censorship processes inside the order.66 On the other hand,
remarkable amounts of biblical data and even biblical problematics are
incorporated into the numerous widely read works of Mario Bettini,
Christoph Clavius, Athanasius Kircher, Christoph Scheiner, Gaspar
Schott, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, and those of their less prominent
colleagues. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, Athanasius
Kircher in his impressive folio volume on the Tower of Babel (Turris
Babel, Amsterdam 1679) even argued cautiously against limiting exegesis
to the literal meaning of Scripture. Among other things, he uses the
mathematical sciences to demonstrate the impossibility of a tower of
the dimensions described in the Bible.67
Such examples show that further studies of the relationship between
exegesis and the mathematical sciences in the second half of the sev-
enteenth century are called for. Rivka Feldhay, in her incisive study,
argued that de Prado and Villalpando’s
book created a kind of common ground for biblical exegetes, theologians,
mathematicians, and architects, a model of exchange in the context of
which the old boundaries between mathematical and physical approaches
to the universe, between practical and theoretical forms of knowledge,
were crossed. That such a dialogue continued and became an integral
part of the Jesuit intellectual inheritance is nowhere more manifest than
in Athanasius Kircher’s works. For Kircher, scientific research meant

65
Riccioli is a case in point; cf. Grant 1984, 14. Dinis 2003 has convincingly argued
against this misconception.
66
On this see Baldini 1992, 75–119; Harris 1988, 109–128; Hellyer 2005, 36f and
240.
67
Kircher 1679, 36–40; cf. Johnson 2004, 79–83; Taylor 1972, 86f.

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nothing less than the penetration into the Divine Mind, an enterprise
justified by the hermetic teachings.68
I would like to extend this argument further, and shift its focus to stress
the common ground that biblical exegetes and mathematicians occupied
and cultivated in the Society of Jesus (at least at the Collegio Romano).
Among the gains of this development was an openness on both sides
to discuss exegetical questions related to the mathematical sciences,
and the enhancement of the status of the mathematical sciences within
the Society. When Maelcote praised Galileo in 1611, the “murmur of
the philosophers” was heard, but the theologians, apparently, did not
complain.
The thesis I propose runs contrary to the view propounded by Irving
A. Kelter in his excellent paper on Jesuit exegetes and the Coperni-
can question.69 The way Kelter sees it, “none of the exegetes under
examination [Lorin, Pereira, Serarius] had any close connection to
the mathematical sciences.” He further suggests that “the refusal to
accept the new worldview” may have also been based “on Clavius’s
inability to raise the status of the mathematical disciplines to that of a
‘true sciences’ that could claim certain knowledge.”70 But the records of
Pereira-Clavius and Lorin-Maelcote/Galileo as described earlier show a
different picture and illustrate the Jesuit exegetes’ willingness to engage
the findings of their colleagues from the mathematical sciences.
These examples confirm Kenneth Howell’s conclusion that the role
of the Bible in early modern cosmology is not to be understood by a
simple Copernican/non-Copernican dichotomy.71 The interpretation
and reinterpretation of the Bible was a complex process within the
Society of Jesus, if not far beyond, during the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries. As we have seen, this process was as symptom-
atic and important for the transformations within the mathematical
sciences, their changing position in the hierarchy of the sciences and,
in particular, the growing acceptance of their epistemological certainty,
as it was for the development of biblical exegesis into a discipline that
opened as never before to non-theological loci and the incorporation
of knowledge they contained, especially that from the mathematical

68
Feldhay 1995, 160.
69
Kelter 2005, 38–53.
70
Ibid., 47.
71
Howell 2002, 11f.

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sciences. However, this ‘scientification’ of exegesis (to overstate the

infl uence of the mathematical sciences) did not last for long, and
exegesis from the mid-seventeenth century on became an increasingly
philological discipline.72

Concluding Remark: Interpreting Nature and Scripture

From the late sixteenth through the seventeenth century the mathemati-
cal sciences were at the core of what is commonly called the Scientific
Revolution. While much light has been shed in the last two decades on
the important roles that other disciplines, such as natural history and
biology, played in this great upheaval, the mathematical sciences are of
particular interest if the historical development of the modern world,
characterized by ongoing and accelerating processes of scientification,
is to be understood.
One of the essential problems in the late sixteenth and the first
half of the seventeenth century was the relationship between science
and religion. Quite a few of the theories that either resurfaced from
antiquity, such as heliocentrism and atomism, or were based on new
results, such as telescopic observations of the heavens and microscopic
observations of plants and animals, challenged the worldview that had
been developed over centuries in the Latin world. What was the exact
relationship between God’s two books—the book of nature and the
Bible? And how were apparent inconsistencies to be dealt with?
One of the most prominent answers to these questions was given
by the theory of accommodation that Galileo propounded in his letter
to Christina of 1615. Galileo explained that in the Bible observations
about the natural world were subordinate to spiritual purposes. Thus
the Bible should not be taken as a judge in matters of natural philoso-
phy and astronomy. Moreover, the biblical authors inspired by God
naturally knew the structure of the world, but accommodated their
language and exposition to the understanding of the common people.
Applied to biblical exegesis, this meant that it would be mistaken to
insist on the literal interpretation of the Bible.73
The Jesuits, as I proposed above, worked with a less spectacular
solution in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, which,

72
Cf. Williams 1948, 174 and 257f.
73
For an excellent recent discussion of this context see Bieri 2007.

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however, turned out to be quite effective and included essential ingre-

dients of Galileo’s theory of accommodation. Pereira, as we have seen,
provided concrete examples of how insisting on the literal sense of the
Bible could contradict “manifest truths and necessary arguments.”
Galileo cited Pereira’s fourth rule directly in his letter to Christina, and
the principle that two truths could not contradict one another was an
important element in his accommodation theory.74
Though further study is called for, it seems that the Jesuit practice to
present a consensus between the exegetical and astronomical realms was
an important step towards bridging the gap between these two before
1616 when the Copernican system was banned and these efforts were
thwarted. The openness of Jesuit exegetes for mathematical—not to say
scientific—expertise played a crucial role in this process. It would be
worth while to investigate the further ramifications of the mathematical
and natural sciences as tools in biblical exegesis to the present.

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 CHAPTER TWENTY-THIREE

“IN THE LANGUAGE OF MEN”:

THE HERMENEUTICS OF ACCOMMODATION
IN THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION1

Stephen D. Snobelen2

The Torah is written in the language of the sons

of men.
Babylonian Talmud
And God made two great lights; the greater light to
rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he
made the stars also.
Genesis 1:16 KJV

Part I: Introduction

Accommodation in the History of Biblical Exegesis

In the early centuries of the common era learned Jews and Christians
were not unaware of the intellectual legacy of the Hellenic world.
Jewish and Christian responses to Greek thought ranged from vigorous
repudiation all the way to enthusiastic appropriation. For those who
respected the accomplishments of the Greek philosophical traditions,
it was important to demonstrate that the Bible represented a repository
of truths of equal or—ideally—superior standing. The early chapters
of Genesis, with their description of the creation of the world, were
central to this project. It was incumbent on those who affirmed elements
of Hellenic thought—especially elements less overtly pagan, such as
astronomy, that appeared to speak truthfully of physical reality—to find
interpretative strategies to reconcile the philosophical understanding of
the world with those scriptural texts that, at least in their surface mean-
ing, sometimes appeared to contradict this extra-biblical knowledge of

1
Response to Parts 3–4.
2
For much valuable advice, I am grateful to the two anonymous referees for this
paper as well as the two editors of this volume.

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692 stephen d. snobelen

nature. Various modes of interpretation de-centered the literal sense

of the text and yielded less potentially problematic meanings. Allegory,
most famously, is one of these. But more important for the history of
science—and in particular the Scientific Revolution—is the herme-
neutics of accommodation.3 The use of accommodation in scriptural
interpretation was based on a widespread (albeit not universal) belief
that divine revelation is accommodated or adapted to the specific
capacities of its human recipients. This view of the language of the
Bible in turn rests on the central belief shared by Jews and Christians
that the ways of God are ultimately inscrutable to humans due to his
transcendent and infinite nature on the one hand, and on the other,
the powerful impediments to the understanding of God caused by
humanity’s finiteness, limited intellectual abilities and, according to
some, the deleterious effects of the Fall. The words of the Hebrew
prophet Isaiah encapsulate the transcendence of God’s mind and actions
over humans in a memorable chiasm:
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways,
and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isa. 55:8–9, KJV)
It is the great distance between God and man expressed in the central
element of the chiasm that creates the need for divine wisdom to be
brought down to a level humans can grasp.
Already by the first century of the common era, learned Jews such
as Philo had begun to argue for the presence of the language of
accommodation in the Bible. And so did the Rabbis who compiled the
Talmud. More than once the Babylonian Talmud repeats the dictum:
“The Torah is written in the language of the sons of men.”4 Accom-

3
A full-length study of the use of accommodation in Judaism and Christianity
(including many examples more purely theological and less relevant to the history of
science) up to the eighteenth century is available in Benin 1993. See also Benin 1983.
An account of several varieties of accommodation in Jewish and Christian thought
can be found in Funkenstein 1986, 213–71. Peter Harrison offers useful examples,
including some from the early modern period, in Harrison 1998, 133–8. Also from
the early modern period are the examples discussed in Westman 1986, 89–103 and
Hooykaas 1972, 114–35. A recent survey and analysis of a wide range of hermeneuti-
cal matters relating to the rise of heliocentrism in the early modern period, including
accommodation, is provided in Howell 2002. See also Howell 1996.
4
“Dibra tora kileshon bne ’adam” (Berakhot 31b, Ketubot 67b and Yebamot 71a).

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modation was regularly employed by Jews and especially Christians

in the early centuries of the common era to argue that the sacrificial
system of the Mosaic Law was a divine accommodation to a people
prone to idolatry.5 Anthropomorphic language used of God in the
Bible was not taken literally by the exegetes and theologians—for this
would debase the divine to a human form—but was instead construed
as the fashioning of the words of the Scriptures to suit human levels of
understanding. For analogical language based on mundane experience
must serve as a substitute for what is outside the bounds of human
discourse: the precise description of the divine. Similarly, symbolic lan-
guage used of God, his ways, and religious truths is necessary because
the transcendent reality of the divine is “Wholly Other,” as German
theologian Rudolf Otto put it in his The Idea of the Holy. The analogue
and the symbol thus allow there to be some communication of the divine
rather than none at all. But almost as early as these accommodationist
strategies emerged it became clear that accommodation also provided
a way of reconciling the Scriptures with the knowledge produced by
the philosophical study of nature. It is this use of accommodation that
is the primary focus of this chapter. Rather than intending to provide
completely original research on the history of accommodation, this
study is meant as an introduction for biblical scholars and historians of
science to the use of accommodation in the debates over heliocentrism
in the early modern period.
In addition to providing a general introduction to the use of accom-
modation for reconciling the Scriptures with astronomy, Part I provides
a brief account of this use of accommodation by Augustine of Hippo
from the early medieval Christian tradition. Not only did Augustine
serve as a model for both later Catholics and Protestants,6 but his com-
mentaries on Genesis provide a useful example of how accommodation
was used when the prevailing model of the solar system was Ptolemaic
geocentrism. In Part II, I discuss examples from the beginning of the
Scientific Revolution: Joachim Rheticus, Johannes Kepler, Paolo Antonio
Foscarini, Galileo Galilei, and Tommaso Campanella. The concluding
Part III offers some observations based on these historical case studies.
Because the backdrop of this study is early modern astronomy, my

5
On the use of accommodation to provide a rationale for the Law of Moses, see
Funkenstein 1986, 222–43 and Benin 1993, 1–30.
6
Thus, for example, Augustine’s use of accommodation can be compared to that
of the sixteenth-century Reformer John Calvin in his commentaries on Genesis.

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account focusses specifically on the use of accommodationist herme-

neutics to explain scriptural descriptions of the physical world (espe-
cially the heavens) in light of extra-biblical testimonies developed from
the study of nature. I make no claims to comprehensiveness in my treat-
ment of accommodation. Instead, my intention is to focus on the use
of accommodation during a particular historical moment (the Scientific
Revolution) and for a particular purpose (the reconciliation of helio-
centric astronomy with scriptural revelation). As such, it engages the first
of the three major “historical landmarks” of the interaction between sci-
ence and religion that Alister McGrath has identified in his introduction
to the study of science and religion: the astronomical revolution in the
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; Newtonianism in the late sev-
enteenth and eighteenth century; and Darwinism in the late nineteenth
century.7 Of these three “historical landmarks” scriptural interpretation
figured most prominently in the first. This chapter illustrates three
dynamics in particular. First, it shows that the use of accommodation
to reconcile biblical and philosophical accounts of nature was a crucial
feature of the theological engagement with heliocentrism during the
early modern period. Second, it emphasizes that this interpretative
strategy proved signally successful in finding harmony between the
Bible and astronomy. Third, it demonstrates that the success of the
hermeneutics of accommodation is nowhere more evident than in its
inherent fl exibility—a fl exibility that allowed it to survive the transition
from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy in the Scientific Revolution
and to continue to fl ourish in the contemporary era.

Augustine of Hippo
Without question, the most infl uential theologian of the early medieval
western church is Augustine of Hippo (354–430). Augustine is famous,
inter alia, for his Platonization of aspects of Christian theology. Although
his respect for Platonism had its limits, it is nonetheless a significant
feature of his thought that Hellenic philosophy was an entity to be
contended with and, in some cases, reconciled with Christianity. The
enthusiasm for the Greek legacy amongst some Christian theologians
emerged in the second century, with one notable Christian Platonist
being Clement of Alexandria. But part of the Greek legacy was

7
McGrath 1999, 1.

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astronomy and Augustine’s awareness of it played a role in his inter-

pretation of the Mosaic cosmogony. And this luminary of Christian
orthodoxy produced no less than five commentaries on the Genesis
creation. The first of these is On Genesis Against the Manichees (De Genesi
contra Manichaeos). The second is his On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis:
An Unfinished book (De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber), its incomplete state
standing as poignant testimony to his failure at that time to produce
a literal exposition of the hexameron. The third can be found in the
three final books of the Confessions (Confessiones); this time, Augustine
opted for an allegorical approach. His fourth and most substantial
commentary is in his On Genesis Literally Interpreted (De Genesi ad litteram),
which, despite its title, does not focus entirely on literal interpretations.
His final treatment appears in the eleventh book of The City of God
(De civitate Dei).8 Clearly, the Genesis creation was of great significance
to Augustine.9
Near the beginning of his second commentary on Genesis Augustine
affirms that this book, as part of the Law, can be interpreted in four
different senses:
Four ways of expounding the Law are handed down by certain men who
treat the Scriptures. Their names can be set forth in Greek, while they are
defined and explained in Latin: in accord with history, allegory, analogy,
and etiology. It is a matter of history when deeds done—whether by men
or by God—are reported. It is a matter of allegory when things spoken
in figures are understood. It is a matter of analogy, when the conformity
of the Old and New Testaments is shown. It is a matter of etiology when
the causes of what is said or done are reported.10
Those who adhere to this doctrine of the four senses of the Scriptures
are not bound to the literal, surface meaning of the text, but instead
have other interpretative options to explore in cases where philosophy
affirms something that appears to confl ict with a straightforward read-
ing of the Word of God.
In the fifth work, De Genesi ad litteram, Augustine offers cautionary
notes about the interpretation of the Genesis creation. In chapter 18
of Book One of this commentary, Augustine writes that when dealing

8
Teske in Augustine 1991, 3–4.
9
For a valuable outline of the exegetical principles of Augustine as they relate
to the interpretation of such texts as the Genesis creation, including the principle of
accommodation, see McMullin 2005, 90–9. See also the study by Howell 2008.
10
Augustine 1991, 147.

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with obscure and difficult topics, including those found in the Bible, it is
sometimes possible for believers to hold different views without damage
to the Christian faith. In these cases it is unwise to jump to conclusions
and to assert these dogmatically, for further advances in knowledge
may disprove cherished views and cause those who hold these views
to stumble. “This,” Augustine asserts, “would be to battle not for the
teaching of Holy Scripture but for our own, wishing its teaching to
conform to ours, whereas we ought to wish ours to conform to that of
Sacred Scripture.”11 In chapter 19 Augustine warns against Christians
with little or no knowledge of astronomy or nature who attempt to
assign philosophical meanings to the scriptural text. The problem here
is not so much that an unlearned person is made to look foolish, but
that God’s Word is made to look foolish. Such a state of affairs does
great harm to Christian apologetics, as the unbeliever may mistake the
ravings of a fool for the teachings of the Scriptures. The actions of
impetuous and inexperienced exegetes also cause headaches for their
more astute confreres:
Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold
trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one
of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who
are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend
their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call
upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many pas-
sages which they think support their position, although they understand
neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.12
In the next chapter, Augustine warns of yet another danger. Those
weak in their faith, who fail to appreciate that the Bible is directed
toward spiritual ends, “faint away” when they hear “irreligious critics
learnedly and eloquently discoursing on the theories of astronomy
or on any of the questions relating to the elements of this universe.”
Then, Augustine comments,
[w]ith a sigh, they esteem these teachers as superior to themselves, looking
upon them as great men; and they return with disdain to the books which
were written for the good of their souls; and, although they ought to drink
from these books with relish, they can scarcely bear to take them up.

11
Augustine 1982, 1: 41.
12
Ibid., 1: 43. Italics in original.

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This ought not to be, for, Augustine stresses, the Bible has a spiritual
rather than a philosophical purpose.13
Despite these notes of caution, Augustine was in the second book
of De Genesi ad litteram aware of both the claims of astronomy and
attempts to reconcile the Scriptures with some of them. In chapter
9 of Book Two he considers the theory proposed by astronomy that
the shape of the heaven is spherical. Some might feel that this theory
contradicts the Bible, which speaks of heaven as a vault. Even if one
were to take the expression “vault” literally, however, there need not
be a contradiction, as in the limited context of human perspective,
heaven may be a vault, whereas in totality it is a sphere. What then
of the scriptural language of God stretching out the heavens like a
“skin”?14 As to its agreement with the scriptural conception of the vault,
Augustine suggests that “skin” could be interpreted allegorically. Nor
need it be opposed to the astronomical theory of the spherical shape
of heaven, as leather bottles and infl ated balls are both spherical and
made of skins. In any case, the heavens may not be spherical—after
all, this is but a “man-made theory.” Finally, Augustine also argues in
this passage that both the expressions ‘skin’ and ‘vault’ may be meant
to be taken figuratively.15
And what of the theories of astronomers that postulate some of
the stars are as large or larger than the Sun and only appear less
luminous than the Sun because of their much greater distance from
Earth? Augustine discusses this matter in chapter 16 of Book Two
of De Genesi ad litteram. This knowledge from astronomy could cause
problems for a narrow and over-literal interpretation of the account of
creation’s fourth day, where it says that God made “two great lights,” a
greater one to rule the day (the Sun) and a lesser one to rule the night
(the Moon) (Gen. 1:16). Augustine dismisses this potential difficulty by
pointing out that the two lights are described as they appear to human
eyes on Earth. From this perspective, it is indeed true that the Sun is
the greatest luminary and that the Moon is the brightest object in the
night time sky.16 When one recognizes the distinction between relative
and absolute brightness, the difficulty evaporates.

13
Augustine 1982, 1: 44.
14
Augustine is referring to Psalm 104:2. The original Hebrew actually speaks of a
tent (cf. Holy Bible: English Standard Version 2001).
15
Augustine 1982, 1: 60.
16
Ibid., 1: 69–71.

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In these two case studies, Augustine has outlined several approaches

for harmonizing astronomical theory with the Bible: recourse to allegory,
the allowance that biblical expressions can be figurative, the recogni-
tion of phenomenalist language in the Bible and the possibility that the
astronomical theory in question could be wrong. In addition to these
considerations are Augustine’s contention that the Bible is intended
chiefl y for the salvation of souls and his warning that the advance
of truth may disprove cherished positions—a warning that certainly
could just as easily be applied to astronomical theories as to favored
scriptural interpretations.

Part II: Accommodation in the Scientific Revolution

Nicolaus Copernicus, Heliocentrism, and Biblical Interpretation

While it may have been difficult to find confirmation of the Aristotelian
four elements and crystalline spheres in the Bible, Aristotelian cosmol-
ogy did not appear to pose a serious challenge for scriptural passages
that—if read in a literal way—appeared to support a geocentric and
heliokinetic solar system. Copernicanism, on the other hand, raised a
new challenge in that a literal reading of such passages as Joshua 10
and Psalm 19 became untenable if one wished to embrace heliocen-
trism in a physically realist way. The supposed unscriptural nature of
the Copernican theory became the chief objection for many opponents
of heliocentrism and geokinesis, the most famous example of this
kind of confl ict being the Galileo Affair. The Bible was an authority
held in common by theologians and astronomers, and thus it became
a battleground both for opponents and supporters of heliocentrism.
Because the Bible was the supreme authority—especially, but not only
for Protestants—reconciliation of some sort was necessary for those
who wanted to uphold both the Bible and heliocentrism.17
The potential for tension between traditional geocentric interpreta-
tions of certain biblical passages treating astronomical phenomena had
been recognized by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) himself. Near
the conclusion of his dedication to Pope Paul III in his De revolutionibus,
Copernicus delicately raises the matter in the following way:

17
Accounts of the various Christian strategies for reconciling the Scriptures with
heliocentrism can be found in Westman 1986; Russell 1985, 46–9; Hooykaas in Rhe-
ticus 1984, 28–38 (Hooykaas here outlines three strategies for relating biblical texts to
natural philosophy: literalism, allegory, and accommodation).

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Perhaps there will be some babblers who claim to be judges of astronomy

although completely ignorant of the subject and, badly distorting some
passage of Scripture to their purpose, will dare to find fault with my
undertaking and censure it. I disregard them even to the extent of despis-
ing their criticism as unfounded.18
Copernicus then adds to these prescient words the example of the
fourth-century Christian theologian Lactantius, “otherwise an illustrious
writer but hardly an astronomer,” who now looks foolish for arguing
against the sphericity of Earth.19 Copernicus avoids mentioning the fact
that the church fathers adhered to geocentrism, but the point is implied
in the mention of Lactantius. “Mathematics is written for mathemati-
cians” Copernicus declares,20 suggesting that those without training in
mathematics and astronomy, including theologians with no skill in these
disciplines, should not venture into unfamiliar terrain. Copernicus may
have been suggesting a firm disciplinary distinction between theology
and mathematical astronomy here. If so, it was sensible of him not to
elaborate on this further. Nevertheless, the implication is that astronomy
and the Scriptures ultimately have at least partly different purposes,
even if astronomy might be used in the service of the church to assist
in calendrical reforms, as Copernicus suggests in his closing words to
the Pope.21
Although Copernicus wrote nothing to suggest how his astronomical
theory could be reconciled with the Bible, two of his most ardent sup-
porters—one a Protestant layman and the other a Catholic priest—did.
The first of these is Georg Joachim Rheticus (1514–1574), a Lutheran
and a professor of mathematics and astronomy at the German Univer-
sity of Wittenberg. Rheticus’s Narratio prima (1540), written in support
of Copernicus, helped prepare the way for De revolutionibus.22 It was

18
Copernicus 1978, 2: 5.
19
Ibid. It is important to note that Lactantius (ca. 250–ca. 325) does not openly
appeal to scriptural support for his denial of the antipodes and his mocking of the
belief that Earth is a globe, but instead appeals to reason. The infamous passage is
found in Lactantius 1964, 228–30 (Book III, chapter 25). Also, as Hooykaas points out,
others before Lactantius had ridiculed the idea that Earth is spherical and that there
are antipodes, including the learned pagan Greek Plutarch (ca. 50–ca. 125) in his De
facie in orbe lunae, ch. 7 (cited in Hooykaas in Rheticus 1984, 29 n. 53).
20
Rosen renders this statement as “Astronomy is written for astronomers” (Coper-
nicus 1978, 2: 5). Although mathematics and astronomy were closely associated at the
time, it seems best to translate the original Latin (“Mathemata mathematicis scribuntur”)
literally here.
21
Copernicus 1978, 2: 5–6.
22
Rheticus’s Narratio prima is conveniently accessible in the recently-reprinted
translation of Rosen 2004, 107–96. Unlike the De revolutionibus of his master, which

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Rheticus who commenced the duty of seeing Copernicus’s magnum opus

through the press in the Protestant town of Nuremberg, before handing
the job over to Nuremberg Lutheran clergyman Andreas Osiander to
complete when he had to return to Wittenberg. Sometime before the
publication of De revolutionibus, Rheticus composed a treatise explaining
how Copernicus’s theory of a heliocentric, heliostatic, geokinetic solar
system did not contradict the testimony of the Bible. A second work
devoted to this cause was written by Tiedemann Giese (1480–1550), the
Catholic Bishop of Kulm (Chelmno). Giese is named in Copernicus’s
dedication to the Pope as “a close student of sacred letters as well as
of all good literature.”23 Unfortunately, Giese’s scriptural defense of
Copernicanism appears to have been lost to history. All that survives is
a general indication of its purpose and its title, Hyperaspisticon (“Shield-
bearer”).24 The treatise of Rheticus, too, was thought lost until Dutch
historian of science Reijer Hooykaas identified an anonymous printed
text as Rheticus’ work in the early 1970s.25

Georg Joachim Rheticus

Rheticus begins his short Latin treatise on the motion of Earth with
a bold reference to the authority of Augustine (venerated by many
Protestants as well as Catholics), referring specifically to his Genesis ad
litteram. He goes on to develop a theory of scriptural accommodation
based on the precedent set by Augustine. Rheticus contends that
when there is mention in the sacred writings of the things of nature, it is
clear that the Holy Spirit does not want to speak of them in the manner
of Philosophers, but in another way, and that He keeps in view the main
purpose of Scripture which we have already mentioned: e.g. when Moses
begins Genesis he judged it necessary at the outset to impress on this people that the
world and all nature were created from nothing by the God whom their ancestors wor-

is extremely sparing in its reference to things theological, the Lutheran astronomer’s

epitome is replete with references to the will of God, divine guidance, natural theol-
ogy, and even prophecy.
23
Copernicus 1978, 2: 3.
24
Hooykaas in Rheticus 1984, 13–15.
25
Ibid., 17–19. Although some scholars have recently called into question Hooykaas’s
attribution, in order to avoid awkward circumlocutions I refer to the author of the
treatise Hooykaas rediscovered as Rheticus. However, my use of his name should not
be taken as an indication that I am convinced Rheticus is the author or that I am
unaware that the attribution is not secure. In addition to the commentary provided
in Hooykaas’s edition of Rheticus’s treatise, the reader is referred to the excellent and
much more recent discussion of Rheticus in Howell 2002, 57–67.

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shipped. For since these people were by nature superstitious, and idolaters
dwelt all around them, he thought it necessary to provide in this way,
that they should not depart from the Maker of the world and Creator
of nature, and turn to worship the sun, the stars, or some other created
things, instead of God, as Moses testifies.26
Moses’ campaign against polytheistic idolatry and his affirmation of
God as the Creator of all things are examples of the higher theological
purposes of the Genesis creation that demonstrate that Moses was not
composing a physics textbook when he wrote this account. Rheticus
returns to the principle of accommodation three pages later:
St. Augustine has the prudent insight that Scripture has deliberately
foregone an exact description of the nature of things since, as he says
elsewhere, the Spirit of God did not wish to teach men things which
would not be an aid to anybody’s salvation. For who would maintain
that knowledge of physics is necessary to salvation? Further he takes also
into account how Scripture borrows a style of discourse, and an idiom of
speech or a method of teaching from popular usage, so that it may also
fully accommodate itself to the people’s understanding, and not conform
to the wisdom of this world.27
Relying heavily on Augustine, Rheticus argues that the Holy Scriptures
must not be approached as if they constitute “a philosophical textbook,”
but as a collection of books “in which the Holy Spirit desired to teach
us something necessary for our salvation.”28 Like Copernicus, Rheticus
also gently chides Lactantius for mocking the proposition that Earth
is spherical.29
Much of the latter part of Rheticus’s treatise is devoted to the exegesis
of biblical passages that could be used to support the new Copernican
theory and those commonly deployed to sanction Aristotelian-Ptolemaic
astronomy and physics. An example of the first category is seen in
his exposition of Job 9:6: “Which shaketh the earth out of her place,
and the pillars thereof tremble.” He writes: “This may be understood
in this way: ‘who leadest the earth about from one place to another
under heaven’.”30 An example of the second category is Psalm 104:5,
which reads: “Who laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not

26
Rheticus 1984, 67. Rheticus alludes to Deut. 4:19 in the last quoted sentence.
Italics in original.
27
Ibid., 68–9.
28
Ibid., 71.
29
Ibid., 84.
30
Ibid., 76.

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be removed for ever.”31 How does one answer the argument that this
passage is meant to teach the immobility of Earth? For Rheticus, the
answer is simple: first, by mathematics (which would include astronomy)
and, second, by other testimony from the Bible. Thus Rheticus is able
to conclude that Ps. 104:5 speaks not of the immobility of Earth, but
“its stability, from which it will never decline.”32 Rheticus also deals
with scriptural passages that speak of the motion of the Sun across
the sky, passages that had long been used to support geocentrism and
heliokinesis. These passages, including those found in Joshua 10 and
Psalm 19, speak of the apparent motion of the Sun, not its absolute
state of being.33 Thus for Rheticus phenomenalism is one of the tools
of his accommodationist hermeneutics.
Using Augustine as his starting point, Rheticus contends that the
Bible is not a philosophical book meant to teach philosophical truths,
but rather a spiritual book meant to teach the way of salvation. Rheti-
cus affirms a twin respect for the Bible and philosophy: spiritual truths
should be sought from the Scriptures, while knowledge about nature
should be taken from philosophy. Scriptural passages dealing with
astronomical phenomena are accommodated to the sensibilities of the
common people and thus cannot be read literally in support of the
older Aristotelian-Ptolemaic system. He also argues that the Scriptures
sometimes use phenomenalist language when describing things astro-
nomical and urges the need to distinguish between apparent and real
motion, as in the case of the Sun. On the other hand, Rheticus hints
that certain biblical texts may point to geokinesis, confirming that he
did believe the Bible had something to say about physical reality after
all—just so long as this was in conformity with heliocentrism, which
had been established as true by astronomy. It is worth noting that
after receiving printed copies of the newly-published De revolutionibus,
Tiedemann Giese sent a letter to Rheticus in which he stated his desire
that Rheticus’s treatise reconciling heliocentrism with the Scriptures be
inserted into Copernicus’s work.34 One wonders how the early recep-
tion of Copernican astronomy would have been different if Giese’s
wish had been fulfilled.

31
Rheticus 1984, 93.
32
Ibid., 94.
33
Ibid., 98.
34
Hooykaas in Rheticus 1984, 14.

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Johannes Kepler
Thus far we have encountered attempts to reconcile readings of the
Bible with heliocentrism presented by supporters of Copernican-
ism who were not themselves eminent astronomers. In the German
Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) we see the first significant attempt by a
major Copernican astronomer to reconcile the heliocentric model with
scriptural testimonies.35 Significantly, Kepler’s predecessor Tycho Brahe,
who, like Kepler, was a Lutheran, had developed a model of the solar
system that retained a static, central Earth in part because he believed
the Bible teaches a motionless Earth at the center of the system.36
Kepler’s reconciliation of heliocentrism with the Scriptures is presented
in the introduction to his Astronomia nova (New astronomy) of 1609.
After briefl y considering philosophical objections to Copernicanism,
Kepler begins a section of his introduction to the Astronomia nova on
“objections concerning the dissent of holy scripture, and its authority”
with the following statement:
There are, however, many more people who are moved by piety to with-
hold assent from Copernicus, fearing that falsehood might be charged
against the Holy Spirit speaking in the scriptures if we say that the earth
is moved and the sun stands still.37
Those thus ill at ease with heliocentrism fail to appreciate the intimate
way language is tied to visual perception. Kepler reasons:
But let them consider that since we acquire most of our information,
both in quality and quantity, through the sense of sight, it is impossible
for us to abstract our speech from this ocular sense. Thus, many times
each day we speak in accordance with the sense of sight, although we
are quite certain that the truth of the matter is otherwise.38

35
See the account of Kepler’s scriptural hermeneutics in Howell 2002, 116–25.
36
Tycho was convinced that the doctrine of Earth’s mobility (and thus the Coper-
nican theory) was opposed both by physics and the Scriptures. See Tycho Brahe’s “Of
the discovery of the place of space between the celestial revolutions of the planets
where the comet may fitly run its course and of the construction of an hypothesis by
which its apparent motion is approximately represented,” in Boas Hall 1970, 59–60 (a
translation of an excerpt from Tycho Brahe, De mundi aetherei recentoribus phaenomenis [1588]
by A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall). Tycho’s views on scriptural hermeneutics are
discussed in Howell 2002, 78–83, 92–7, 100–6. See also Granada 2008.
37
Kepler 1992, 59.
38
Ibid., 59.

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Thus there are philosophical reasons for the unphilosophical language.

Kepler then proceeds to offer seven examples to illustrate this. The first
of these is a line from Virgil’s Aeneid: “We are carried from the port, and
the land and cities recede.”39 After presenting this series of examples,
Kepler concludes: “Now the holy scriptures, too, when treating common
things (concerning which it is not their purpose to instruct humanity),
speak with humans in the human manner, in order to be understood
by them. They make use of what is generally acknowledged, in order
to weave in other things more lofty and divine.”40 Because astronomy
falls outside the magisterial purpose of the Bible, it articulates relative
rather than absolute truths about celestial realities.
The description of the Sun at the beginning of Psalm 19, which had
been used as scriptural evidence of geocentrism, is for Kepler poetic
and can be compared to the poetic line from Virgil’s Aeneid that reads:
“Aurora leaving Tithonus’s saffron-coloured bed.”41 The psalmist was
cognizant of the fact that the Sun does not travel across the sky, but
uses this language of motion because this is how the Sun appears to
the human eye. This use of language cannot be called false, since “the
perception of the eyes also has its truth,” and this, Kepler contends
(shifting to allegory) is “well suited to the psalmodist’s more hidden
aim, the adumbration of the Gospel and also of the Son of God.”42
Thus, the hidden or overall purpose of a text must also be taken into
consideration. As for the language of Joshua 10, which appears to
countenance a geocentric system, Joshua was merely describing how
the phenomena appeared from his vantage point.43 Kepler deals with
several other scriptural texts traditionally used to support geocentrism.
One of these is Eccles. 1:4, which reads: “One generation passeth away,
and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever.” Was
it Solomon’s intention to quarrel with the astronomers? Far from it.
Solomon’s aim is a moral one; he is reminding humans of the transi-
tory nature of their lives (this, of course, is one of the great themes
of the Book of Ecclesiastes). In contrast, Earth does not pass away.44
The implication here, as with the other examples Kepler discusses, is

39
Kepler 1992, 59. This line is also cited in Copernicus’s De revolutionibus (I.8).
40
Ibid., 60.
41
Ibid., 60.
42
Ibid., 60.
43
Ibid., 61.
44
Ibid., 63.

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that the Scriptures are primarily concerned with spiritual and moral
matters. As Kenneth Howell puts it, Kepler did not believe that God
had intended the Bible to be “the kind of genre [he] knew as physica.”45
These arguments were necessary for a Christian Copernican writing for
a Christian audience. Near the end of his defense of Copernicanism
from the aspersions of those who claim it contradicts the Bible, Kepler
offers some “advice for idiots”:
But whoever is too stupid to understand astronomical science, or too
weak to believe Copernicus without affecting his faith, I would advise
him that, having dismissed astronomical studies and having damned
whatever philosophical opinions he pleases, he mind his own business
and betake himself home to scratch in his own dirt patch, abandoning
this wandering about the world.46
Once again, the message is this: astronomy is not for hoi polloi; nor
should it detract from faith. Those who lack the requisite learning to
understand astronomy venture into this magisterium at their peril.

Paolo Antonio Foscarini

It is now time to turn to the Galileo Affair. In our consideration of the
hermeneutical arguments raised at that time in favor of Copernicanism,
three concise yet powerful texts will command our attention. The first
to be written and published is the Lettera sopra l’opinione de’Pittagorici e del
Copernico, which appeared early in 1615. The other two are by Galileo
Galilei and Tommaso Campanella and will be dealt with in turn below.
The author of the Lettera was Carmelite priest and theologian Paolo
Antonio Foscarini (ca. 1565–1615/1616) who, it seems, was thoroughly
impressed with the discoveries of Galileo. Richard J. Blackwell cites
the omission of Foscarini’s Lettera from Antonio Favaro’s much-used Le
Opere di Galileo Galilei (1890–1909) as the primary reason for the relative
neglect of this text.47 Whatever the case, Blackwell’s valuable English
translation of the Lettera has helped to introduce this important text
to contemporary scholarly discussions of the Galileo Affair, as well as
to the more general theme of the reconciliation of heliocentrism with
the Scriptures in the early modern period. Blackwell calls the Lettera

45
Howell 2002, 222.
46
Kepler 1992, 65–6.
47
Blackwell 1991b, 88 n. 3.

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a “bombshell” and that it was.48 It was made all the bolder by its
print publication in vernacular Italian. Foscarini’s Lettera attempts to
do two things: to demonstrate that heliocentrism does not contradict
the Scriptures and that it is not opposed to contemporary theology.
What is more, Foscarini suggested that his heliocentric readings of the
Scriptures could one day prove useful to the church if Copernicanism
were to be established as truth, something that could help the church
to save face. What helped make the Lettera so potentially dangerous
was that it undertook to reinterpret a range of key texts to conform
to Copernicanism.49
Foscarini begins his Lettera by defending the superiority of the
Pythagorean or Copernican system, a system he believes to be sup-
ported by the recent discoveries of the telescope.50 Yet a Sun-centered
solar system appears to confl ict with the Word of God. At this point,
Foscarini states that the “Pythagorean” view is either true or false. If
the latter, it need not be regarded. If the former, then a new philosophy
and astronomy is called for based on its principles. And if it is true,
he reasons, it cannot be contrary to the Bible, “because one truth is
not contrary to another.”51 Furthermore, if the Pythagorean system
is true, “then without a doubt God has dictated the words of Sacred
Scripture in such a way that they can be given a meaning which agrees
with, and is reconciled with, that opinion.”52 It is this motive, Foscarini
declares, that has led him
to look and search for ways and means to accommodate many passages
of Sacred Scripture to it, and to interpret these passages, with the aid
of theological and physical principles, in such a way that they are not
openly contradictory.53

48
For an account of Foscarini’s Lettera and the controversy it engendered, see
Blackwell 1991b, 87–110. Blackwell’s English translation of the Lettera can be found
on 217–51. See also Blackwell 1991a, 199–210 and the comments on Foscarini in
Howell 2002, 196–9. A brief treatment of the defenses of heliocentrism by Foscarini
and Campanella can be found in Lerner 2005, 21–5.
49
Blackwell 1991b, 89. Blackwell argues that the Lettera was open to the charge that
it contravened the limitation of the interpretation of the Bible outside the confines of
the church represented in the pope and bishops, as laid down in the dictates of the
Council of Trent. This, Blackwell believes, is the principle cause of the Lettera’s eventual
placement on the Index (89–90).
50
Blackwell 1991b, 220–2. It is not clear whether Foscarini did not know that the
Pythagorean cosmology was not isomorphic with Copernicanism or if he did know but
nevertheless uses it rhetorically to help establish the antiquity of heliocentrism.
51
Ibid., 222.
52
Ibid., 222–3.
53
Ibid., 223.

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These arguments would be useful if “by chance” heliocentrism, now

only probable, is in the future proven true. With this attempt to cover
himself in place, Foscarini goes on to tackle the potentially problem-
atic loci biblici—but not before he asserts that he is the first to offer a
scriptural defense of Copernicanism.54
Foscarini outlines six categories of what he describes as “passages
of Sacred Scripture” that appear to confl ict with heliocentrism and
geokinesis. First, texts that speak of Earth as immobile. Second, texts
that describe the Sun as mobile and rotating around Earth. Third,
texts that put the heavens above and Earth beneath. Fourth, texts that
place hell in the center of the world. Fifth, texts that “always contrast
heaven to earth, and also earth to heaven, as having a relation like a
circumference to its center and a center to its circumference.” Sixth,
texts taken not from the Scriptures but from the Fathers and experts
in theology who claim that the Sun will become fixed in the east and
the Moon in the west after Judgment Day.55
Foscarini next sets out to defend Copernicanism through six principles
that he describes as “the antitheses of the six groups of passages already
mentioned.” It is the first of these that concerns us most:
The first and most important principle is the following. When Sacred
Scripture attributes something to God or to any creature which would
otherwise be improper and incommensurate, then it should be interpreted
and explained in one or more of the following ways. First, it is said to
pertain metaphorically and proportionally, or by similitude. Second, it
is said (as it is usually put in Latin) “secundum nostrum modum con-
siderandi, apprehendendi, concipiendi, intelligendi, cognoscendi, etc.”
[according to our mode of consideration, apprehension, conception,
understanding, knowing, etc.]. Thirdly, it is said according to the vulgar
opinion and the common way of speaking: the Holy Spirit frequently and
deliberately adopts the vulgar and common way of speaking. Fourthly, it
is said under the guise of some human aspect.56
To support these arguments, he offers examples of anthropomorphic
language used of God, such as the description of God walking in the
garden of Eden (Gen. 3:8), language Foscarini is confident must be
taken “metaphorically, proportionally, and by similitude.” As for the

54
Ibid., 223. Evidently Foscarini was unaware of Rheticus’s decades-old defense,
nor does he mention Kepler’s more recent reconciliation.
55
Ibid., 223–6.
56
Foscarini in Blackwell 1991b, 226–7. Insertion within square brackets added by
the translator.

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scriptural attribution of passions to God, “these can also be interpreted

as revealing God under the guise of some human trait.”57 In making
these arguments about biblical portrayals of God, Foscarini is follow-
ing what we by now recognize as an ancient and noble tradition of
hermeneutics.
Next, he goes on to discuss language used in the Genesis account of
creation. One example to which he is drawn is the now familiar example
of the creation of the two great lights on the fourth day. As with those
before him, the primary problem is that the Moon is described as a
great light and yet there are greater lights in the heavens. In order to
avoid a confl ict with physical truth, Foscarini contends that passages
such as Gen. 1:16 must be interpreted according to his already-outlined
four rules and particularly the fourth, that is, “‘according to the vulgar
meaning and the common mode of speaking,’ which is the same as
saying, ‘according to appearances and in relation to use or in respect to
us’.” There are in reality lights greater than the Moon, including Saturn
and some stars of the first magnitude—information that Foscarini must
have obtained from astronomy. For this reason, the expression “‘two
great lights’ is to be understood in relation to us and according to the
vulgar opinion, and not according to the true and real being which
these bodies have.”58 It is all a matter of relative magnitude:
For according to reality and the facts, all the shining globes of the celes-
tial bodies are indeed very large; and if we were as close to them as we
are to the moon, they would appear as big as the moon or even larger.
And if we were very far away from the sun and the moon, they would
appear as stars.59
As in Augustine, Foscarini’s arguments rely not only on accommodation-
ist hermeneutics, but also phenomenalism and the distinction between
relative and absolute realities.
Upon concluding his discussion of astronomy and the Genesis cre-
ation, Foscarini asks: “why is it that the Sacred Scriptures are so often
adapted to the common and vulgar opinion, and do not instruct us in
the truths and secrets of nature?”60 In answering this crucial question,
the Carmelite theologian offers two reasons. His first reason is summed
up in the following paragraph:

57
Foscarini in Blackwell 1991b, 227.
58
Ibid., 230.
59
Ibid., 231.
60
Ibid., 232.

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I say briefl y that this happens because of the exquisite distribution of

divine wisdom, which adjusts itself to each person according to his nature
and capacity; for the natural and necessary scientists, naturally and neces-
sarily; for the liberal arts, freely; for mighty people, nobly; for common
people, humbly; for the educated, learnedly; for the simple, vulgarly; and
thus for all, it adapts itself to each one’s style.61
His second reason is that God intended in the Scriptures “to teach us
the true road to eternal life.” Using language from Eccles. 15:3, he
avers that “the wisdom of God revealed to us in the Sacred Scripture
is called ‘saving wisdom’ and not ‘absolute wisdom.’62 Much of the rest
of the Lettera consists of philosophical and astronomical arguments that
need not concern us here.
It is worth noting that Foscarini expanded the range of his argumen-
tation in his Defensio, which responded to criticisms of his Lettera made
in the report of an unnamed theologian.63 The Defensio points out that
many distinguished and authoritative doctors of the church before him
had established the propensity of the Bible to accommodate itself to
common speech, including Jerome, Chrysostom, Aquinas, Cyril, and
Origen. He also lists authors who interpret Genesis 1 in ways similar
to himself. What is more, he is careful to mention Augustine’s De Genesi
ad litteram, along with the caution found therein against dogmatically
clinging to an interpretation of the Scriptures even after it has been
decisively disproved.64 To this Foscarini adds another warning:
in matters pertaining to the sciences acquired by human effort, no one
ought to be so addicted to a philosophical sect, or to defend some philo-
sophical opinion with such tenacity, that he thinks that the whole of
Sacred Scripture should henceforth be understood accordingly.
The danger here, Foscarini points out, is that given the tendency of
philosophical opinions to be rendered obsolete with time, the authority
of the Bible will be undermined if a philosophical view tightly associ-
ated with a particular interpretation of it is discovered to be false.65
Although Foscarini’s Lettera would be read with approbation by many
both in its original Italian and in translation, the Holy Congregation

61
Foscarini in Blackwell 1991b, 233. The use of the term “scientists” in the English
translation is of course an anachronism.
62
Foscarini in Blackwell 1991b, 233 (“absolute wisdom” is Foscarini’s term; the
Vulgate has only “sapientia salutaris”).
63
Blackwell’s translation of the Defensio is published in Blackwell 1991b, 255–63.
64
Foscarini in Blackwell 1991b, 259–61.
65
Ibid., 261.

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of the Index had an altogether different view of his attempt to pro-

vide scriptural sanction for Copernicanism. The Decree issued by the
Holy Congregation on 5 March 1616 that specifically suspended both
Copernicus’s De revolutionibus and Diego de Zuñiga’s commentary on
Job until they were corrected, also “completely prohibited and con-
demned” Foscarini’s Lettera.66 Although Foscarini had presented his
pamphlet as a series of suggestions in case Copernicanism were to be
proved one day, his bold attempt to reinterpret scriptural passages that
had for centuries been framed by Ptolemaism was considered by the
gate-keepers of doctrine a step too far.

Galileo Galilei
When we left our discussion of Kepler, we considered his recommenda-
tion that those ill-informed in matters astronomical refrain from med-
dling in the affairs of this discipline. A confl ict between the magisteria of
theology and astronomy was precisely what Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)
claimed he wanted to avoid in the years immediately subsequent to the
publication of Kepler’s Astronomia nova. Although Galileo’s “Letter to the
Grand Duchess Christina” is the most celebrated example of the use
of accommodationist hermeneutics to reconcile Copernicanism with
the Holy Scriptures, as the foregoing survey attests, much had already
been written on this interpretative mode by the time Galileo wrote his
letter in 1615.67 Nevertheless, nothing written before or since equals
the condensed wit and rhetorical power of Galileo’s contribution to the
genre—not to mention its celebrated and colorful historical backdrop.
It must be remembered that the Galileo Affair was not only about the
potential confl ict between heliocentrism and the Bible, although cover-

66
A translation of the 5 March 1616 Decree appears in Finocchiaro 1989,
148–50.
67
It is important to understand that not everyone in Galileo’s time accepted the
use of accommodation to support heliocentrism. In a recently-published study, Irving
A. Kelter has outlined the general tendency of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-
century Jesuit and other Catholic exegetes to favor literal readings of the Scriptures.
Irving notes that while Jesuit exegetes did not disclaim accommodationist hermeneutics,
they did reject the use of accommodation by those in favor of Copernican astronomy.
These dynamics serve as an important backdrop to the Galileo Affair. Irving also refers
to Benedictus Pererius, a Jesuit exegete whose Commentariorum et disputationum in Genesim,
tomi quatuor (1589–98) has been identified as the most popular work of exegesis on
Genesis by a Christian in the early modern period. While Pererius used accommoda-
tion to harmonize the Bible with Aristotelian rather than Copernican astronomy, it is
noteworthy that Pererius had a formative impact on Galileo (Kelter 2005, 38–53).

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age of the Affair—particularly in the media—tends to concentrate on

this dynamic. As the many recent studies have ably shown, Galileo’s
confl ict with the church authorities was multi-dimensional. For instance,
Galileo’s clerical opponents were able to point out (correctly) that Gali-
leo had not proven the mobility of Earth. That being said, while the
church authorities in their formal sentence against Galileo of 22 June
1633 also condemned Copernicanism both as philosophically absurd
and formally heretical, it is nonetheless true that more attention is
paid in this document to the supposed affront to the Word of God.68
Galileo’s Abjuration of the same day focuses entirely on the putative
confl ict with the Scriptures and the church.69
These concerns about the scriptural orthodoxy of Galileo’s work
arose soon after the 1610 publication of his pithy yet revolutionary
Sidereus nuncius (The Starry Messenger)—the work in which he announced
his telescopic discovery of the four Jovian moons. As Maurice Finoc-
chiaro argues, when support for geostasis began to erode, reactionary
natural philosophers and theologians began to turn increasingly to bibli-
cal, theological, and religious arguments to counter Copernicanism.70
Galileo himself was not able to escape this slight turn to the evidence
of theology. Thus, in December 1613 he was drawn into the theological
debate after his disciple the Benedictine monk Benedetto Castelli was
politely presented with a scriptural argument against Earth’s motion by
none other than the Grand Duchess Christina, the mother of Galileo’s
patron Cosimo de’ Medici II. Castelli provided the Duchess with an
off-the-cuff response and soon after sent Galileo a letter about the
encounter.71 Galileo was concerned enough to reply to Castelli with a
substantive letter answering the suggested scriptural arguments against
Copernicanism. Soon afterwards, copies of the letter began to circulate
and some of these copies fell into hostile hands.72 The letter to Castelli,
dated 21 December 1613, was the first of three such polemical pieces
Galileo would write on the subject.73 In 1615, with theological opposition
to his astronomical theories growing, Galileo scribally published two

68
Sentence (22 June 1633) cited in Finocchiaro 1989, 287–91.
69
Galileo’s Abjuration (22 June 1633) cited in Finocchiaro 1989, 292–3.
70
Finocchiaro 1989, 27.
71
Castelli to Galileo, 14 December 1613 cited in Finocchiaro 1989, 47–8.
72
On this, see Finocchiaro 1989, 27–8.
73
Galileo to Castelli, 21 December 1613, Finocchiaro 1989, 49–54. See also
Blackwell’s translation of this letter in Blackwell 1991b, 195–201.

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additional pieces on the matter for private circulation.74 The text now
referred to as “Galileo’s Considerations of the Copernican Opinion”
paid special attention to the epistemological and philosophical concerns
of his opponents, but also treated the scriptural issues. The other text
is the famous “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina,” a significant
expansion of his original letter to Castelli that dealt squarely with the
scriptural objections.
Galileo’s writings on heliocentrism and the Scriptures—including his
arguments for the partial autonomy of the magisteria of natural philoso-
phy and theology—are well known and thus do not require detailed
elaboration here.75 Instead, I will limit myself to a summary of several
points that relate to the main purpose of this chapter. It is in his letter
to Castelli that Galileo begins to sharpen the sword of his arguments on
accommodation. One of his chief contentions is that if geokinesis and
heliostasis are “proved to be physically true by philosophers, astrono-
mers and mathematicians, with the help of sense experiences, accurate
observations, and necessary demonstrations,” then we must have failed
through “the weakness of our mind” to understand “the true meaning”
of any texts in the Bible that appear to say something different, “since
one truth cannot contradict another truth.”76 This position reveals his
unwavering confidence in the authority of natural philosophy and frees
the Word of God itself from blame. Galileo goes further than this,
however, and asserts that sound knowledge coming from astronomy
and physics can determine the true meaning of scriptural descriptions
of natural phenomena in cases where they are unclear.77 Natural phi-
losophy, then, can be used as a clarifying tool in biblical hermeneutics.
As for the view that the authority of the Fathers’ teachings on physical
truth must be adhered to, Galileo reasons that they were unanimous in
support for geostasis because in their day “the opinion of the earth’s
motion was totally buried and no one even talked about it, let alone
wrote about it or maintained it.”78 When there is confl ict between the
testimony of the Fathers and unassailable physical truths demonstrated
by the observation of nature, then it is better to accept the latter and
modify our views on the absolute authority of the Fathers. Besides,

74
Finocchiaro 1989, 29.
75
See Finocchiaro 2008.
76
Galileo, in Finocchiaro 1989, 80–1.
77
Ibid., 81–2.
78
Ibid., 82.

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Galileo contends, the Council of Trent had only mandated allegiance

to patristic authority “in matters of faith and morals.”79 As for scriptural
language that appears to countenance geocentrism, it is an accommo-
dation to our way of perception.80 What is more, Galileo assures his
reader that Solomon, Moses, and other holy authors “knew perfectly
the constitution of the world, as they also knew that God has no hands,
no feet, and no experience of anger, forgetfulness, or regret.”81 Thus
in philosophy, true and absolute realities are not in doubt. He also
touches on the problem of relative motion—the natural philosophical
corollary to apparently geostatic passages in the Bible—by using the
well-known analogy of the apparent recession of the shore and the
apparent stationary state of a ship departing from it.82
But it is in his “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina” that we
see the Tuscan astronomer’s most eloquent and masterful apology for
accommodation. In this document Galileo assembles a series of argu-
ments that allow him to accept both the truth of the Scriptures and
the truth of his astronomical theories. Throughout the text he relies on
Augustine, particularly De Genesi ad litteram.83 One foundational principle
for Galileo is that “the Holy Scripture can never lie, as long as its true
meaning has been grasped.” Nevertheless, this true meaning often dif-
fers from the apparent literal meaning of the text. Thus, the biblical
attributions of “feet, hands, eyes, and bodily sensations” to God cannot
be taken literally, but are instead accommodations to the sensibilities
of the vulgar. For Galileo it follows that this principle of accommoda-
tion applies to biblical descriptions of natural phenomena.84 Since the
primary purpose of the Bible is “the worship of God and the salvation
of souls,” it is imperative that “in disputes about natural phenomena
one must begin not with the authority of scriptural passages but with
sensory experience and necessary demonstrations.” Here Galileo asserts
the authority of natural philosophy. Nevertheless, he stresses that the
Bible and nature both derive from God, “the former as the dictation of
the Holy Spirit and the latter as the most obedient executrix of God’s

79
Galileo, in Finocchiaro 1989, 83.
80
Ibid., 84–5.
81
Ibid., 85–6.
82
Ibid., 86.
83
On Galileo’s use of Augustine, see McMullin 2005; Reeves 1991, 563–79; and
Howell 2008.
84
Galileo, in Finocchiaro 1989, 92. Stillman Drake’s earlier English translation of
the “Letter to Christina” is available in Drake 1957, 173–216.

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orders.” To this Galileo adds: “to accommodate the understanding of

the common people it is appropriate for Scripture to say many things
that are different (in appearance and in regard to the literal meaning
of the words) from the absolute truth.”85 Thus, a distinction must be
made between the relative language of the Scriptures and the absolute
realities of nature.
Later in the “Letter” Galileo again emphasizes that the Holy Spirit
did not intend to teach astronomical truths, as these are secondary to
the salvific goals of the Scriptures. If this is true, and Galileo argues
that it is, then “how can one now say that to hold this rather than that
proposition on this topic is so important that one is a principle of faith
and the other erroneous?”86 It is at this point that Galileo quotes the
now-famous dictum of the conveniently by-then deceased Cardinal
Cesare Baronio: “the intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how
one goes to heaven and not how heaven goes.”87 Nevertheless, two
paragraphs later, Galileo asserts that because “two truths cannot con-
tradict each other, the task of a wise interpreter is to strive to fathom
the true meaning of the sacred texts; this will undoubtedly agree with
those physical conclusions of which we are already certain and sure
through clear observations or necessary demonstrations.”88 In other
words, if Copernicanism is true, it should be possible to reconcile its
teachings with Holy Writ. Thus, near the end of this letter, Galileo
offers a Copernican reading of the long day of Joshua 10,89 the biblical
text that had originally been raised by the Duchess to Castelli. Galileo
first demonstrates that Joshua 10 cannot be explained by the Ptolemaic
model, for according to the theory of concentric spheres associated with
Ptolemaism, stopping the Sun would shorten the day, not lengthen it.
Thus, he argues, even an adherent of the Ptolemaic system is forced to
depart from a literal reading of the relevant biblical text.90 Next, Galileo
suggests a Copernican reading of Joshua 10. Referring to his recently
published Sunspot Letters, in which he demonstrated that the Sun rotated
on its axis, and positing that the Sun is not only the source of light in
the planetary system but also of motion, acting rather like a heart giving

85
Galileo, in Finocchiaro 1989, 93.
86
Ibid., 95.
87
Ibid., 96.
88
Ibid., 96.
89
Ibid., 114–18.
90
Ibid., 114–15.

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motion to an animal body, Galileo argues that Joshua’s command for

the Sun to stand still would consequently stop the movement of Earth
and the Moon. This, Galileo reasons, would be in complete harmony
with the literal meaning of Joshua 10.91 Not content with this recon-
ciliation, Galileo also adds another example from Joshua 10 in which
Copernicanism better accords with the literal meaning of the biblical
text, namely, that the description of the Sun stopping “in the midst
of heaven” ( Josh. 10:13), makes the most sense within a Copernican
solar system, which places the Sun in the middle of the “heavens.”92
Although he does not attempt Copernican readings of any additional
texts, he is confident that astute theologians would be able to provide
them if heliocentrism were proven to be true.93 It almost goes without
saying that these two final arguments do not stand up to the intellectual
rigour of the rest of the letter.94 What is important here is that Galileo
believed Copernicanism could be reconciled even with the literal mean-
ing of the text. The appearance of the “Letter to Christina” in print
during the latter years of Galileo’s life ensured that what was originally
a private letter with restricted circulation would be read widely along
with the Tuscan astronomer’s other intentionally-public writings.95

Tommaso Campanella
Sometime in 1616, the fateful year that saw not only the Inquisition’s
censure of Galileo, but also the placement of Copernicus’s De revolu-
tionibus and Foscarini’s Lettera on the Index, a defense of Galileo and
Copernicanism was crafted by a radical Dominican priest and phi-
losopher who had by that time been languishing as a prisoner of the
Inquisition for seventeen years. The radical priest was Tommaso Cam-
panella (1568–1639) and his alleged crimes heresy and conspiracy. Not
completely convinced of the certainty of Copernicanism (although he
believed it increasingly likely to be true), in his pamphlet Campanella
championed freedom of thought and in particular Galileo’s right to

91
Galileo, in Finocchiaro 1989, 116–17. See also Finocchiaro 2008.
92
Ibid., 117–18.
93
Ibid., 118.
94
The first is based on unproven astronomical speculation, while the second departs
from Galileo’s own principle of accommodation, according to which the description
of the Sun “in the midst of heaven” would surely refer to its apparent position in the
daytime sky.
95
Galileo’s “Letter to Christina” was first published in 1636 in Strasbourg.

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defend heliocentric astronomy. Despite his reputation as a radical, Cam-

panella was a fervent supporter of the Catholic Church and his main
motive in writing this work appears to have been the overall welfare of
the church.96 It is a potent document and its extensive references to the
Scriptures, church theologians and the classics are made all the more
remarkable by the fact of his imprisonment. Like Foscarini’s Lettera,
and for similar reasons, Campanella’s Apologia pro Galileo, mathematico
florentino has received little attention until recently in studies of the
Galileo Affair.97 It is important for the purposes of this paper because
in it Campanella deploys the hermeneutics of accommodation as part
of his overall contention that Copernicanism can be harmonized with
the Scriptures.
Campanella sets out his purpose in his introduction. It is to determine
“whether the philosophical view advocated by Galileo is in agreement
with, or is opposed to, the Sacred Scriptures.”98 After discussing argu-
ments for and against Galileo in the first two chapters Campanella
begins his treatment of accommodation by pointing out in chapter
three that “in the Gospel Christ is never found to discuss physics and
astronomy but only morality and the promise of eternal life.”99 For this
reason, “it would have been superfl uous for him, who came to redeem
us from sin, to teach us what we are able and obliged to learn on our
own.”100 Similarly, he argues that “it is clear that Moses set no limits
on human knowledge, and that through him God did not teach either
physics or astronomy.” This is not to say that these two pursuits are
inappropriate for the godly,
[f ]or Solomon has said that ‘God has given the world over to human
investigation’ [Eccles. 3:11], and Solomon himself carefully investigated
all things, having studied the natural world and not just the books of
Moses.

96
For background on Campanella and his Apologia pro Galileo, see Blackwell’s intro-
duction to Campanella 1994, 1–34. See also the short discussion of Campanella in
Howell 2002, 201–3, 205–6. At first a scribal publication, the Apologia pro Galileo saw
print publication in 1622.
97
Blackwell cites both the lack of inclusion of Campanella’s work in Favaro’s Le
Opere di Galileo Galilei (1890–1909) and the inadequacies of the only prior English
translation of the Apologia pro Galileo, that of Grant McColley in 1937 (Blackwell in
Campanella 1994, ix).
98
Campanella 1994, 41.
99
Ibid., 65.
100
Ibid., 65–6.

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In arguing on the basis of a scriptural text for a separate study of nature

in addition to the study of the Mosaic Law (a distinction reminiscent
of the topos of the two books), Campanella suggests that natural phi-
losophy has the divine imprimatur. Furthermore, Campanella reasons,
the tone of the creation account refl ects the role of Moses, who was a
legislator rather than a philosopher.101
Campanella goes on to say that the non-philosophical purpose of
the Genesis account of creation
is proven by the testimony of all the Fathers, who also point out that
Moses spoke in the language of the people and not of the philosophers,
appealing to the experience of the common man and not to the philo-
sophical mind. Therefore, since he was expert in all the sciences, both
human and divine, and since he was well acquainted with all the wisdom
of the Egyptians, as is said in Acts 7 [7:22] and is proven by Philo and
Josephus, Moses satisfied the needs of both the common man and the
philosophers.102
These lines contain the familiar themes that accommodation was
embraced by the patristic authorities, that Moses used phenomenalist
language yet was proficient in both human and divine knowledge, and
that he wrote for both the common and learned people. He goes on
to offer as an example of the hidden knowledge open to those able to
perceive the mystical meaning of the Bible the theory (well-established
by the seventeenth century) that the structure of the solar system is
mapped out in the architecture of the Tabernacle.103 Relying on earlier
church authorities, Campanella offers other examples of these two layers
of meaning. Although Moses did not mention the creation of angels
due to the propensity of the common person to idolatry, the learned
can see a reference to the creation of angels in God’s command “Let
there be light” (Gen. 1:3). Moses did not directly refer to matter in the
creation account, but the learned can see matter indirectly included
in the descriptions of ‘water’ and ‘earth.’ The six days of creation are
taken by some Fathers to refer to angelic rather than physical days.
Campanella also points out that Thomas Aquinas observed that Moses

101
Campanella 1994, 66. I have used the word “philosopher” to avoid the anach-
ronism of Blackwell’s “scientist.”
102
Ibid., 67. Insertion in square brackets added by the translator.
103
Ibid., 67.

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does not mention air, since this was unknown to the people, even though
the existence of air is implied in Gen. 1:2.104
After stressing that “all the Fathers who have examined the text of
Moses philosophically agree unanimously that his mode of speech is
directed to the capacities of the common man,” Campanella offers
another example, that of the two lights of Gen. 1:16. The Moon is
called a great light “because of its effect on us and because it appears
to be larger to the senses, even though it is smaller than the earth and
many stars.” Referring to Aquinas’s Summa theologia, he notes that this
eminent theologian demonstrated “that Moses spoke here and elsewhere
according to the experience of the common man, and not according to
reason, which knows that the moon is smaller.”105 Campanella revisits
the description of Gen. 1:16 at other junctures in his pamphlet. In one
case he offers a more realist interpretation, arguing that the Bible affirms
that the Sun “is most hot and most luminous” by referring to it as “the
greater light” in Gen. 1:16, along with speaking of the heat of the Sun
in other passages.106 In another place, he contends that Copernicanism
can be accommodated to the Bible, since the Sun “appears to move
relative to our senses.”107 Once again he turns to Aquinas’s Summa for
support, noting that Aquinas believed “that Moses spoke of these mat-
ters according to sensible appearances, using the popular and not the
philosophical meaning.” Aquinas also agrees with Chrysostom who says
“that Moses calls the moon a ‘great light’ because of its effect relative
to us and to our senses, for many stars are larger than the moon.” At
this point Campanella offers the interesting analogy of an assumed
Jovian perspective:
Indeed someone living on Jupiter would say, ‘God created five great
lights: i.e., the sun which is the great light, and four smaller lights, i.e.,
the Medicean stars.’ For these moons of Jupiter would appear as large
to an inhabitant of Jupiter as our moon appears to us who live on the
earth.108

104
Campanella 1994, 67.
105
Ibid., 68.
106
Ibid., 87.
107
Ibid., 96–7.
108
Ibid., 97.

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He rounds off this point by adding that

[t]he whole of Scripture accommodates its words grammatically and in
their meaning to the senses of the people (as we have proven . . . from
the testimony of Chrysostom, Augustine, Thomas, Origen, Bede, and
all the Fathers)109
once again showing that Campanella valued the authority of such
august figures (or understood that others would). Finally, shortly there-
after in his Defense, Campanella once again refers to Gen. 1:16 when
he alludes to Chrystostom’s argument that whoever says the Moon is
a “great light” only in a relative sense “does not . . . thereby conceal the
truth or deny God’s action.”110
An integral part of Campanella’s argument involves the acceptance
of the doctrine of the two books. In chapter three he writes that while
“[a] Christian needs to know only what must be believed to attain
eternal salvation,” theologians need to know more in order to defend
the faith. Thus, theologians must become
thoroughly acquainted with all the sciences in order to know both God,
his principal object, and all the works of God, and in order to be able
to argue against and attack any science which might contradict divine
science in its treatment of God or of the works of God among men.
To this Campanella adds the declaration: “For one truth does not
contradict another truth, nor does an effect contradict its cause.”111
From this he concludes that “human science does not contradict divine
science, nor do the works of God contradict God.” Near the end of
chapter 3, he argues that the adjudication of the current debate over
Copernicanism requires judges who understand both the literal and
mystical meanings of the Bible as laid out in the Fathers and who
“also understand the book of nature as found in all the sciences and
especially the observations made by physicists and astronomers.”112 The
books of Scripture and nature do not contradict each other, Campanella
reasons, but the reading of the second book “requires a very observant
person who is so well versed in all the sciences that he can examine the
apparent disagreements and the hidden agreements between these two

109
Campanella 1994, 97.
110
Ibid., 99.
111
Ibid., 55.
112
Ibid., 80.

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books.”113 In chapter four he reintroduces the topos of the two books

to make a different point:
God handed over the world, his first Scripture, to the examination of
everyone; and he handed over his second Scripture to the learned to
examine its various meanings, but within the limits set by the Church.
Thus Christ, the incarnate wisdom of God (as Origen says), shows himself
as a man to children and the uneducated, as a prophet to the learned,
and as God to spiritual people. And the world, which is the materially
created wisdom, shows itself in many ways and under many capacities.
And so Scripture is the written wisdom.114
Although a radical in some respects, Campanella shows himself a true
Catholic in this reading of the two books. The Word of God has various
meanings, but these are to be established by the authority of the church
and its learned doctors. On the other hand, there is greater freedom
in interpreting the Works of God. It is almost as if he is saying that
one should be a Catholic when approaching the Bible, and thus adhere
to tradition, but a Protestant when approaching nature, thus opening
up the possibility of more innovative interpretations thereof through
a policy of sola natura (that is, the interpretation of nature is less fixed
by the determination of authorities). Campanella’s Catholicism comes
out in other ways in his Apologia pro Galileo as well, not only generally
in the copious allusions to respected church authorities such as Augus-
tine and Aquinas, but also in several specific examples including his
strenuous reminders that accommodation is a traditional and widely
held mode of hermeneutics used by the Fathers, even though he was
putting to use this venerable method for a new cause: the philosophy
of Copernicanism.

Part III: Accommodation Before and After Copernicus

The Hermeneutics of Accommodation in Historical Perspective

Whether captured in the dictum, “The Torah speaks in the language
of the sons of men,” as in the Talmud; in the saying, Scriptura human
loquitur, as articulated by Christians who used the Latin tongue; or in
any of the various other ways it was described, the principle that the

113
Campanella 1994, 80–1.
114
Ibid., 97.

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Bible is delivered to men and women of faith in an intentionally human

idiom was a cornerstone of scriptural hermeneutics among Jews and
Christians throughout the period covered in this study. But this general
principle also worked with (or worked best with) a series of founding
or ancillary principles. What is more, it also implied a number of cor-
ollaries. We are now prepared to summarize these and to offer some
observations on the success of the hermeneutics of accommodation.
It is not difficult to see why patristic scholarship had sanctioned
geocentric and geostatic interpretations of those scriptural texts that
described astronomical phenomena: geocentrism was the prevailing
philosophical orthodoxy in the centuries during which the ancient
Christian authorities wrote and it remained so throughout the Middle
Ages and on into the sixteenth century. During this time, there were
no powerful theological, intuitive or philosophical reasons to doubt
geocentrism, geostasis or heliokineses. The testimony of the Word of
God, the human senses and philosophy all seemed to point in the same
direction. It was only when mathematical and empirical evidence for
heliocentrism began to appear in the middle of the sixteenth century
that the christianized Aristolelian-Ptolemaic system was brought into
question. Although the ancient and medieval Jewish and Christian
authorities firmly adhered to Aristotle and Ptolemy in matters astro-
nomical, it was a mode of exegesis these same authorities developed
that provided post-Copernican exegetes with the hermeneutical tools
with which to overturn these very same geocentric interpretations of
the Bible embraced by their exegetical predecessors. The genius of
accommodation is that it could be used for Copernicanism as well as
for Ptolemaism. In fact, it could be argued that as a hermeneutical
principle it proved to be an even more useful tool for reconciling the
Scriptures with astronomy in the Copernican age than it was before.
If God knows all and if God created the universe, then surely he
understands the workings of the cosmos perfectly. Granting this, the
question then arises, Is this knowledge available in the Scriptures and
if so in what form? With respect to the solar system, a literal inter-
pretation of certain texts such as Psalm 19 appeared to accord neatly
with geocentrism throughout the centuries during which Ptolemaism
held sway. The plausibility of the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic synthesis for
biblical interpretation was further reinforced by its striking agreement
with the appearance of the heavens. This particular literal way of
reading such biblical texts geocentrically collapsed shortly after the
advent of Copernicanism in the sixteenth century. Roughly at the

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same time, as argued by Peter Harrison, allegorical exegesis, which

might otherwise have offered a way out of the putative hermeneutical
difficulties posed by heliocentrism, lost some of its support—especially
among Protestant interpreters who began to take the literal and histori-
cal aspects of the text more seriously.115 This raised a new challenge
for Protestant interpreters: how does one interpret texts such as those
in the Genesis creation account that appear to hint at some sort of
cosmology? Harrison aptly sums up the conundrum: “The conclusion
which most exegetes wanted to avoid was one which suggested that
Moses was expert in theological matters, but totally ignorant in the
field of physical science, for this conclusion would impugn the whole
authority of scripture.”116 Or so some thought. At this point, in the
face of the increasing plausibility of heliocentrism, the principle of
accommodation and the argument that the Scriptures are primarily
concerned with faith and morals, both of which had been carefully
worked out by a noble line of well-respected theologians during the
previous millennium and a half, suddenly seemed especially wise and
useful—and not only for Protestants, as the examples of Foscarini,
Galileo, and Campanella demonstrate.

Exegesis, Appearance, and Reality

Phenomenalism is a key component of accommodationist hermeneutics
used for biblical passages treating the physical world. Exegesis secundum
apparentiam is based on the belief that the Bible often describes nature
and other realities as they appear not as they are.117 This need not imply
that the Word of God is speaking untruthfully, for, as Kepler reasoned,
phenomenalist perspectives or descriptions themselves refl ect a certain
kind of truth: namely, the truth of human sensory experience. A subset
of the belief that the Bible often adopts a phenomenalist perspective is
the understanding that descriptions of nature in the Genesis creation

115
The shift from allegorical modes of exegesis to a literal-historical approach to
the interpretation of the Bible among Protestants is a major theme of Harrison 1998.
See also Harrison 2008. This is not to say that allegory disappeared, even amongst
the Reformers. Qualifications to Harrison’s thesis about the decline of allegory in
scriptural hermeneutics are offered by Methuen 2008 and by van der Meer and
Oosterhoff 2008.
116
Harrison 1998, 133.
117
Here it is worth noting that the core meaning of the Greek word phenomenon is
“appearance.”

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and elsewhere refl ect a terrestrial as well as a human perspective. Thus,

the Sun and Moon are described as great lights because they, rather
than the distant stars, so appear to those on Earth. Similarly, the Sun
is described as moving across the sky because this is precisely how it
appears to a human observer on Earth. Such descriptions affirm the
truth of our psychological experience of celestial phenomena. What
the reality of the Sun’s motion might be is not a concern of the
Scriptures, although it would be known by the Creator. Phenomenal-
ism also provided a crucial link between heliocentrism and biblical
hermeneutics. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and others committed to
heliocentrism and geokinesis had to account for the compelling nature
of phenomenalism in astronomy as they saved the appearances with
counter-intuitive, mathematical, and empirical evidence in favor of a
Sun-centered solar system and a moving Earth. The acceptance of
Copernicanism in philosophy and of the presence of accommodation
in the Bible revolved around two similar problems: the recognition of
and correction for the distorting dynamic of appearances in the book
of nature on the one hand and the identification of the language of
human experience in the book of Scripture on the other. Copernicans
who employed the hermeneutics of accommodation were in effect saying
that in both cases appearances are deceiving and that it is the counter-
intuitive explanations that refl ect absolute reality. Copernicanism was
thus well suited to accommodation, since it provided a physical analogy
to the literary dynamics of biblical accommodation: when one ‘read’
the heavens, one was not seeing reality in absolute terms, but reality
accommodated to our senses.
And how did an exegete (or an astronomer) determine whether a
particular biblical text describing a natural phenomenon deployed the
language of accommodation? Were there absolute standards? Exegetes
looked to both internal (textual) and external (natural) evidence. Thus,
the internal logic of the language of the Bible, combined with the
assumption that the Word of God makes good sense and does not com-
mit theological solecisms, suggested, for example, that anthropomorphic
language about God should not be taken literally (because this would
reduce God to the level of humans) or, in the case of the Genesis
account of creation, a close reading of the text provided clues to show
that the account has a specifically terrestrial perspective. Another way
relied on testimonies external to the Scriptures, that is, the observational
and theoretical data produced by the science of astronomy. Thus, if

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astronomy produced knowledge about the structure of the solar system

that rose to the level of a mathematical demonstration,118 and this
knowledge pointed to a heliocentric system, then biblical texts that may,
prima facie, suggest geocentrism must not be meant to provide absolute
knowledge about the solar system. But such a conclusion would not
amount to profane knowledge overturning a sacred text: first, because
the knowledge coming from nature is also constitutive of divine truth
and, second, because the biblical text evidently had not been interpreted
correctly. This twofold approach worked within the framework of a
precommitment to the two books and the belief that two truths—that
is, two divine truths—cannot be in opposition.

The Bible: For the People and the Philosophers

The distinction between accommodated language and physical or
historical realities can be compared to the commonplace distinction
between the relative and the absolute. Some may want to suggest that
Platonism lurks behind this distinction, but to identify these distinctions
as specifically Platonic in nature or origin is misleading and certainly
limiting, for the distinction between the absolute and the relative is a
leitmotiv that represents intuitions found in a much broader array of
religious, philosophical, and of course occult thought than that associ-
ated with Plato and his followers. For instance, there is the claim that
many descriptions of God in the Bible constitute examples of anthro-
pomorphism, itself a form of accommodation. Thus, descriptions of
God speaking, walking, using his hands or possessing a body are not to
be taken literally, for God is not a man, but rather these descriptions
involve relative portrayals of the absolute realities of the Deity, absolute
realities that are beyond the ability of humans to comprehend but that
exist nonetheless. While God can discern all absolute realities, this is
not true of humans. The analogy of biblical anthropomorphism—one
kind of accommodation already well-established theologically in antiq-
uity—was used to support the existence in the Word of God of phenom-
enalistic language used of nature—another kind of accommodation,
as we saw in Foscarini. For a Copernican exegete, the description of
the Sun moving across the sky in Psalm 19 uses relative language that
must not be confounded with the absolute motions of the Sun and

118
See the discussion of Kepler’s use of astronomical knowledge in Barker 2008.

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Earth. Thus, the distinction between the relative and the absolute is a
principle ancillary to accommodation.
Related to this distinction is the position that there is also a social
corollary, namely, that there are two kinds of people who engage with
the Scriptures, the common people and the philosophically-minded
reader. Those who held to this social corollary believed that the Bible
is adjusted to these social realities and thus has both a surface meaning
designed for the vulgar and a deeper spiritual or philosophical meaning
discernible by the intellectual elite (who also understand the surface
meaning of course) that is alluded to or embedded in the biblical text
or discernible when comparing the two books. This belief in a differ-
ently-accessible Bible is widespread and exists independently of accom-
modation as well as allegory, which it also allows. It does not necessarily
correspond to the difference between literal and spiritual meaning.
This can be seen in the Copernican debates that are about two literal-
natural meanings: the geocentric surface meaning of appearances and
the heliocentric deeper meaning of realities. Both the geocentric and
heliocentric interpretations were literal-natural interpretations of the
relevant texts. Those who espoused accommodation believed it forms
an integral part of the intentio auctoris (God himself or, say, God and
Moses) and is thus not simply read into the text. The desire to see in
the Bible philosophical content goes back at least as far as Philo Judaeus.
With this we also see the desire to portray Moses as a philosopher of
the highest order. While the belief that the Bible in some instances con-
tains a philosophical substratum (or implied superstratum) may appear
to contradict the central premise of accommodation (that the Bible is
written ad populum), the proposal that the Scriptures can contain multiple
levels of meaning allowed some advocates of more moderate forms of
accommodation to accept that the Bible was written both ad populum
and ad philosophos. It is not hard to see why this argument was not only
plausible, but also compelling. After all, those exegetes and astronomers
discussed in this survey believed the Bible to be not merely a human
document but a divine revelation given to humans. They accepted the
common view that the Bible is written ad populum yet also realized that
a fraction of recipients of the Word of God are philosophically learned
or, alternatively, exceptionally astute spiritually. Was there nothing in
the Scriptures for this latter group, however small they might be? And
would not the inspired Scriptures not point in some way to the physical
realities of nature? While a cynic may wish to observe that the belief
that there is some sort of exoteric—esoteric divide in the Scriptures

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separating common from higher meanings is principally an argument

of the learned, and a potentially self-serving and self-congratulatory
one at that, it is the case that apparent sanction for this kind of think-
ing could always be found in passages in both the Hebrew Scriptures
and the words of Jesus in the New Testament.119 While these passages
seem to imply more of a spiritual than an intellectual challenge, this
is precisely what some advocates of accommodation were claiming.120
On this reading, ability to discern accommodation in the Bible could
be seen as a mark of a spiritually-astute mind.
What is meant by ad litteram or ‘literal’ meaning? And can accom-
modation, or at least most forms of it, be counted as a kind of literal
meaning? The answer to the first question is not always obvious, but, as
Howell notes, accommodation was considered to lay within the scope
of the sensus litteralis.121 Most wanted to retain some level of literal or
realist meaning—meaning that could be accessed by skilful readers.
Therefore, accommodated language could still be seen to speak at one
level about reality. For example, most believed that there were literal
referents for the entities mentioned in the Genesis creation. Thus, the
descriptions of the Sun and Moon in the fourth day of creation do in
fact refer to the physical Sun and Moon that appear in the heavens,
and not merely to some spiritual or purely theological meaning. Here
we see one great difference between accommodation and allegory,
the latter being a traditional form of exegesis also available for the
reconciliation of astronomy with the Bible, albeit not employed as
much (however, we have seen even a Protestant like Kepler use it in his
interpretation of Psalm 19). And so accommodation did not exclude
literal interpretation, although some more thorough-going forms did.
Nevertheless, few argued for the kind of pure accommodation seen in
John Colet’s commentary on Genesis, where it is claimed that Moses
himself wrote the creation account as an allegory or parable for the
vulgar recipients of his writings.122 On the other hand, some advocates
of accommodation like Rheticus, Galileo, and Campanella departed
from stricter forms of accommodation to argue for realist interpreta-
tions of some portions of the Scriptures that they contended actually
agree with Copernicanism in their literal meaning.

119
See Isa. 6:8–10; Matt. 13:10–17; Mark 4:10–12; Luke 8:9–10.
120
One example from late antiquity is Origen. See Benin 1993, 12.
121
Howell 2002, 224.
122
Benin 1993, 192.

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The single most important account of nature in the Bible—both

with respect to the internal dynamics of the Scriptures as well as their
interpretation—is the Genesis account of creation. Not surprisingly, the
opening section of the Bible was also a chief concern of the exegetes
and astronomers discussed in this paper. In fact, accommodation was
found in the very structure of Genesis 1, which reveals apparent liter-
ary dynamics that can be contrasted with the actualities of the physical
creation. This sort of example could show that one can find evidence
of accommodation within the Bible, not merely when one compared
the text of the Bible with the external evidence of philosophy and
astronomy. One recurring example of accommodation that comes from
this portion of the Scriptures is the interpretation of Gen. 1:16. As we
have seen, this passage was used by Augustine, Aquinas, Fosarini, and
Campanella.123 It neatly illustrates how the interpretation of particular
biblical texts could be affected by independently-derived knowledge
from astronomy—knowledge that was available in steadily increasing
levels of detail throughout the period studied in this paper.
The topos of the two books and the belief in their fundamental unity
provided central pillars of the use of accommodation for reconciling
revelatory and natural knowledge, particularly in the early modern
period when this doctrine was more fully developed. If the two books
both come from God, then both represent not only truth but divine truth
and it was a simple matter of logic that truth cannot contradict truth.
The unity of truth—a persistent motif in western thought—provided
powerful motivation to find reconciliation between the book of Scripture
and the book of nature. Herein we see another pre-existing argument
pressed into service for heliocentrism. From early in the Common Era
this kind of thinking led theologians like Clement of Alexandria to
claim that philosophy—pagan philosophy—could contain elements of
truth that could be reconciled with divine revelation.124 This respect for
the knowledge produced by philosophy is shared by all or virtually all
of the exegetes and astronomers surveyed in this paper, exegetes and
astronomers who of course also shared a belief that the Bible is the
Word of God. But this twin respect for two sources of divine revela-
tion also meant that no real contradiction between the two could be

123
Several examples are also found in Howell 2002, 34, 101, 141, 163, 177, 221–2.
Later, Isaac Newton also developed an accommodationist reading of Gen. 1:16. See
Snobelen 2008.
124
This argument can be found in Clement 1991, 48–50, 64–65, 92–96.

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countenanced. This twin respect also underpinned another argument:

if error in the interpretation of the Bible represents a receding from the
pure message of the inspired text, then it follows that an error in the
interpretation of nature is a receding from the realia of creation. With
the main components of this argument in place before Copernicus, after
1543 geocentric readings of the Bible and nature could be exposed as
mistaken, removing obstacles from both biblical faith and astronomi-
cal theory. Finally, the doctrine of the two books and the belief in the
providential link between them demonstrates how absolute (philosophi-
cal) and relative (phenomenalistic) understandings of nature relate to
absolute (realist) and relative (accommodated) levels of meanings in
the Bible. Once again, in both cases it is the learned who are able to
discern the distinction between the absolute and the relative.
The Galileo Affair made clear the risks of associating the Bible
too closely with the teachings of a single philosophical school. It also
brought out concerns over apologetics and the defence of the faith.
The problem of obsolescence became acute at the beginning of the
seventeenth century when geocentrism came under increasing pressure.
In his Lettera, Foscarini had warned of the propensity of philosophical
views to become passé and how philosophical views shown to be false
could damage the reputation of the Bible if they were too closely
associated with it. The church, too, needed to be protected from
harm. It was always possible to point to examples such as the church
father Lactantius’s rejection of Earth’s sphericity that were rendered
embarrassing by subsequent developments in philosophy. Opponents
of Aristotelianism like Foscarini, Galileo, and Campanella could see
that the writing was on the wall for this school of philosophy and with
it the entire edifice of geocentrism. But the argument from the danger
of obsolescence had existed by then already for over a millennium. In
discussing the interpretation of the Bible, Augustine had warned that
the advance of truth can discredit long-cherished notions. Too rigid
an adherence to views over which Christians can safely disagree can
create stumbling blocks for faith when once-accepted views are dis-
proved. Besides, Augustine had reminded his readers that astronomy
involves man-made arguments that need not be considered central to
matters of faith.

The Inherent Flexibility of Accommodation

If its success in helping to reconcile the Scriptures with natural knowl-
edge is the greatest attribute of accomodationist hermeneutics, the sec-

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 “ in the language of men ” 729

ond greatest is its inherent fl exibility. Although heliocentrism was new,

neither the problem of reconciling astronomy with the Bible nor the
method of accommodation were. Since the method was not developed
to deal with heliocentrism, but was instead already available to exploit,
those using it to defend Copernicanism could not be charged with
hermeneutical innovation. Instead, the pre-existence and familiarity of
the method could be used to its advantage. Apologists of Copernican-
ism such as Campanella were able to point out that many of the most
highly-esteemed luminaries in the church prior to the time of Coper-
nicus advocated the hermeneutics of accommodation. Yet these very
same church fathers accepted geocentrism to a man. One particularly
notable example from the early Reformation is seen in John Calvin.
Although he apparently rejected Copernicanism, his use of accommo-
dationist hermeneutics allowed his later followers to reconcile the Bible
with this new view of the solar system.125 This, surely, is a indication of
both the robustness and fl exibility of this hermeneutical strategy. This
fl exibility also applies in an almost limitless way to future discovery.
Once accommodation is accepted biblical hermeneutics is potentially
open to a wide range of extra-biblical discoveries in philosophy and,
today, modern science.
Another element of the fl exibility of accommodation is seen in its
appropriation by those of all confessional stripes. Thus, advocacy for
accommodation was not the sole preserve of any early modern branch
of Christianity (as evinced through its use by the German Lutheran
Kepler and the triumvirate of Italian Catholics Foscarini, Galileo, and
Campanella).126 At the same time, opposition to the stronger forms of
biblical accommodation used in favor of heliocentrism can be found
in both Protestantism and Catholicism (as shown by the examples of
the Lutheran Tycho Brahe and the Jesuit Melchior Inchofer).127 In the
transconfessional success of accommodation, the authority of Augustine
of Hippo looms large, both for Copernicans of the Roman and the
Protestant communions. Augustine’s De Genesi ad litteram was a key text
for several of the scholars discussed in this study. But other authorities

125
Cf. Vermij 2002, 244.
126
Yet another Italian Catholic from this period who advocated accommodation
in support of Copernicanism is the radical Neapolitan Dominican priest Giordano
Bruno (see Westman 1986, 91–2).
127
Blackwell has recently published the first English translation of Melchior Inchofer’s
Tractatus syllepticus (1633), a theological response to Galileo that had been commissioned
by the Holy Office. See Blackwell 2006.

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730 stephen d. snobelen

were cited as well, and the availability of respected authorities that

could be used to lend support to accommodation is yet another rea-
son for its success. Additional authorities were available for specific
traditions, such as Aquinas for Catholics and Calvin for Protestants.
Whatever the case, one thing that counted was the venerableness of
the authority. It mattered that accommodation was not a new thing in
biblical hermeneutics.
A method that was used by all the major branches of Christian-
ity—the Latin church in the West, the Greek church in the East
and Protestantism in the early modern period—the hermeneutics of
accommodation proved especially valuable in the age of Copernicus.
Although it was not the only factor to favor Copernicanism, accom-
modation unquestionably helped make the transition from geocentric
astronomy to heliocentric astronomy a smoother one. As such, it played
a constructive role in the Scientific Revolution. At the same time, it
also provided continuity with the past and thus helped to absorb the
shock of the Copernican revolution: an ancient method of scriptural
interpretation helped make the new astronomy more acceptable both to
astronomers and theologians. Moreover, to many it simply appeared to
be good theology. Baronio’s dictum famously encapsulates what many
theologians had contended since the beginning of the medieval period.
For the argument that the purpose of the Bible is primarily salvific is
seen already in no less an authority than Augustine. By the time of
Galileo, this principle (along with its corollary that the Bible is not a
book of physics) appeared especially wise to an increasing number of
exegetes and astronomers at a time when natural philosophy was grow-
ing in epistemological respectability and beginning to encroach on the
territory of theology. Above all, the hermeneutics of accommodation
not only provided a way of securing and sustaining harmony between
the two magisteria or ways of knowing, but it also allowed theologians
and natural philosophers to affirm both the Scriptures and rising natural
philosophy in good faith.

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 INDEX

Abelard, Peter, on pagan writings, 182 Adamic language, 303–317

Abraham, Hagar and Sarah book of nature, role of, 305–307,
Philo of Alexandria on, 49 307–309
Stromateis (Clement of Alexandria) on, key assumptions of, 309–317
52 recovering, 312t1.4–6
Abravanel, Judah ad fontes, humanists and, 200–201,
Dialoghi d’Amore, 544–545 304–305
on Joshua passage, 556n93 Advice to Astronomers (Kepler), 597
“. . . abuse of Holy Scripture in matters Advice to Idiots (Kepler), 597, 705
philosophical” (Wittichius), 612 African Christianity, Augustine and,
accommodation, principle of, 27–29, 41, 141
628. See also God, condescension to Against Eunomius (Gregory), 105
humanity “Against the Earth’s Motion”
allegory as, 726 (Colombe), 630
anthropomorphism as, 724 Agricola, Rudolf, 203
Augustine and, 28, 729 De inventione dialectica libri tres, 207
Baldwin on, 28 Agrippa, Henry Cornelius
biblical interpretation and, 691–694 De incertitudine et vantitate scientiarum
Calvin and, 348, 514, 523 atque artium, 308–309
Campanella on, 226, 716, 726 Alain of Lille, 276–277
church fathers on, 729 al-Baydāw , Abd Allāh ibn ‘Umar ibn
Copernicanism and, 720–730 Muhammad
Eichhorn on, 28 al-N sāb r , rejection of, 269
fl exibility of, 728–730 Anwār al-tanz l, 257, 270
Foscarini on, 637–638 on astronomy, 259–260
Galileo on, 712–713, 726 on heavenly bodies, 259–260, 259n66
heliocentrism and, 610n67, 722 as kalām-minded commentator,
Islamic exegesis and, 28 257–260
Kepler on, 594–595 on kalām vs science, 258
Luther on, 348 on Qur ān, 2:6/7, 257, 260
Newton on, 501, 507, 510 on Qur ān, 2:29, 259
Payne on, 28 on Qur ān, 2:164, 258–259
phenomenalism and, 708, 723 rejection of al-Zamakhshar , 260
Philo of Alexandria on, 692 on Satan, 255, 257–258
Rheticus on, 700–701, 726 on sealing the heart, 255, 257–258
Scientific Revolution and, 698–720 Albergotti, Ulisse
sensus litteralis and, 726 Dialogue . . . in Which is Held . . . That the
Voetius on, 28 Moon Is Intrinsically Luminous, 631
Whiston on, 512n68 Albert the Great, 221, 222, 240, 243,
Acosta, José de 370
Historia Natural y Moral des las India, Albo, Joseph, 557
667–668 biography of, 541
Of the True Way to Interpret Scripture, on Maimonides, 541–542
668 Sefer ha-Ikkarim (the Book of Principles),
Acquaviva, Claudio, 679, 680 541–542
Adam, 136, 140, 318–319 on time and motion, 542–543
Adam and Eve, 302, 304 Albrecht, first Duke of Prussia, 589
Adamic knowledge, two books and, Alexander VII (Pope), la Peyrère and,
299–332 431

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734 index

Alexandrian-Antioch divide on tafs r of, 250n7

Scripture, 101 on vision, 265–266
Alexandrinus, Didymus, 469 alphabet of nature, 300–302, 319, 322
al-Fārāb (also al-Fârâbî) 45 al-Rāz , Fakhr al-din, 260, 261–264
on intellectual perfection, 69 al-Tafs r al-kab r, 264–265
Kitâb al-urûf (Book of Letters), 67 al-Tabar , 253
Maimonides and, 38n11 al-Tafs r al-kab r (al-Rāz ), 261
on Plato, 66–67 al-Zamakhshar , Jar Allāh Mahmud ibn
on religion and philosophy, 60, 67 ‘Umar
on Socratic method, 67 on blindness, 256–257
al-Ghazali, Abu Hamid, 240n64 Kashshāf, 254, 257, 260
allêgoria, 151, 152 on vision, 266n122
Allegorical interpretation of Genesis (Philo), ambiguity of Scripture, 378
521 Ambrose of Milan, 171
allegorical texts, symbolism of, 387–388 creation of animals, homily on,
allegorism, 96–98 108
Antioch school, rejection by, 101 on Genesis, 101, 107
attack on, 97, 100 Gregory of Nyssa and, 108
Eusebius of Caesarea on, 100 Hexaemeron, 105, 106–107, 108
Porphyry on, 100 interpretation of Old Testament,
allegory, 96n29, 365n6, 692 Augustine on, 126
as accommodation, 726 on nature, 106–107, 110
Aquinas on, 345 on Physiologus, 158–159
Basil of Caesarea on, 99 on resurrection, 158
biblical interpretation and, 100, sermons on nature, 106
343–349 Amos, N. Scott, 401
Calvin on, 375–376 amphitheatre of creation, Basil of
censure of, 347 Caesarea on, 147
defined, 367n12 Amsterdam Company, 430
Evagrius and, 160 Amsterdam Jewish community,
factual, 369 546–547
Harrison on, 367 Anabaptist alliances with Luther,
Hugh of St. Victor on, 346 585–586
Le Clerc on, 375 “An Account of the Systeme of the
literal sense of Scripture, 343–349 World described in Mr Newton’s
Luther, censure of, 347 Mathematical Principles of
Origen and, 343, 344 Philosophy” (Newton), 513
Protestant Reformers and, 377 anagogical (prophetic) sense of
rejection of, 353 Scripture, 344
typology and, 348 Anaxagoras, Newton on, 499
Almagest (Ptolemy), 194 ancient texts, 200, 203, 204, 281
al-N sāb r , Nizām al-D n, 250, Andrew of St. Victor, 219n4, 371
260–261, 264–269 animals
on blindness, 268 spiritual significance of, 423–425
on evil, 268–269 van Velthuysen on, 620
Gharā ib al-Qur ān, 261, 264 annual motion, Joshua miracle and,
on God’s effect on humanity, 643
267–268 Anselm of Canterbury, scholasticism of,
on Ibn S nā, 265 181
Mu‘tazil position on God, rejection antediluvian
on, 267 water cycle, 473, 475
on qalb (heart), 265 world, 482
on sealing the heart, 266–267, 268 Anthropology of Johannes Scottus Eriugena,
Sharh Miftāh al- ul m, 261 The (Otten), 87

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anthropomorphism, accommodation Commentary on the Book of Job, 234

and, 724 on communication with God, 241n68
anti-Cartesianism at Utrecht University, on creation ex nihilo, 219–244, 237,
610 239
anti-Copernican decree of 1616, 633, De aeternitate mundi, 240, 243
640, 650, 656, 657–658 De potentia Dei, 233–234, 241n67
anti-Copernicanism, Collegio Romano De substantiis separatis, 235–236
and, 681–682 De veritate, 229
anti-Copernicans on dialectics, 192
on Descartes, 614 Dominican order and, 222
Voetius and, 615 Epistle to the Hebrews, 244
Antiochene exegetes, on Scripture, 152 on grammar and dialectics, 192
Antiochene school, 100, 101 on heavenly bodies, movement of,
antiquity 239
Theory of the Earth and, 472, 475 Lamb on, 223
Anwār al-tanz l (al-Baydāw ), 257, 270 Lombard, teachings of, 223
Apian, Philip, 593n20 as magister in sacra pagina, 223
apocalypse, 463, 479, 495–496. See also as master of theology at University of
Book of Revelation Paris, 234
apologetic function of natural Muslim infl uence and, 221
knowledge, 128–132 Muslim theologians and, 240
apologetic function of natural on Posterior Analytics (Aristotle),
philosophy, 119, 128–132 244
apologetics in England, on nature and in principio defined, 241–242
Scripture, 291–293 sacra doctrina and, 219–244
Apologia in Hexaemeron (Gregory), 105, on science, 219–244
157 Scriptum super libros Sententiarum, 222
Apologia pro Galileo (Campanella), on Scripture, 190, 223, 276
650–654, 655, 716, 720 on sensus litteralis, 141
Apology (Plato), political philosophy and, Summa Theologiae (theologia), 184,
57 185n27, 225, 228, 229, 232–235,
Apology of Origen (Pamphilus), 51n64 241n67, 718
Aquinas, Thomas, 183–184, 195 theology and, 197
on allegory, 345 On the Unity of the Intellect, 276
Aristotelian philosophy and, 191–194 on the universe, 236
on Aristotelian principles, 224, University of Paris, on condemnations
236–237, 243 of Aristotle, 194
on astronomy, 276 via antiqua of, 198
Augustine and, 221, 224 on words, 192
on Augustinian philosophy, 276 Writings on the Sentences of Peter Lombard,
on Avicenna, 221 227, 238, 243
as baccalarius Sententiarum at University Arca Noae (Hornius), 445
of Paris, 222 Archaeologiae Philosophicae (Burnet), 483
biblical exegesis of, 219 archai
biblical interpretation and, 219, 223, Clement on, 149n6
236, 366, 370, 370n22 of cosmos, 150
Burrell on, 236 explanation of, 148–149
Campanella on, 717–718 of Scripture, 150
Catena aurea, 234 Aristotelian cosmology, 698
on causality, 237–238 Aristotelianism, 391
Christian revelation, fundamentals Aristotelian philosophy, 189
of, 224 Aquinas and, 191–194
Commentary on Boethius’ ‘De Trinitate,’ Bonaventure on, 195
228n28, 231 critique of, 206–208

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opponents of, 728 book of nature and, 358

Voetius and, 610 Brahe on, 567
Aristotelian physical theory and Chouet on, 358
Copernican principles, 566 Copernican, 548
Aristotelian physics, 43–44, 535–534 Copernicus on, 699
Aristotelian principles, Aquinas on, 224, Foscarini and, 708
236–237, 243 geometrical models and, 564
Aristotelian Prologue, 192 Kepler on, 286, 704
Aristotle, 167, 205, 208–210, 721 Lorin on, 681
banning of at University of Paris, Maelcote on, 679
191–192, 195, 220 mathematical sciences and, 357
on celestial realm, 418–419 Melanchthon on, 585–590, 599
cosmology of, 193–194, 198, 308–309 Ptolemy and, 592, 600
criticism of, 208 role of, 564
Dante on, 219 Rothmann on, 570
De anima 3, 44 Westman on, 280
Dominicans and, 187n35 Athanasius of Alexandria
on eternal Earth, 456 on creation, 154, 167
Eudemian Ethics, 42, 46 on fallenness of humanity, 90
History of Animals, 103 On the Incarnation of the World, 89
Maimonides on, 536 Atlas sinensis (Martini), 444
Meteorology, 455 Augsburg Confession, 212
on nature, symbolic view of, 391 Augustine, Aurelius, 117, 119, 693,
nature and, 191 694–698
observations of, 208–210 accommodation, principle of, 28,
Organon, 57 729
Posterior Analytics, 220, 225, 227 on Adam, 136, 140
psychology of, 57, 68 African Christianity and, 141
on sublunar phenomena, 455 on Ambrose, interpretation of Old
theology and, 191–194 Testament, 126
theory of causality, 192 Aquinas and, 221, 224
theory of interpretation, 370n22 on astronomy, 697–698
theory of time, criticism by Bible and, 143
Neoplatonism, 534, 538, 544 on biblical interpretation, 133, 156,
artes liberales, 181, 181n2, 187. See also 366, 728
liberal arts as biblical interpreter, 119–125
artifacts, 435 on biblical language, 128, 363–364,
Art of Rhetoric, human art and, 369–370
324 Burnet on, 468
Ash ari kalām, 256, 258 Campanella on, 654
Ash ar mutakallim n, 251–252 Catholic Church on, 597
Ashworth, William Jr., 309 Christian (neo)Platonic worldview,
astrology, 434–435, 567 206
Astrology Theologized (Weigel), 288 City of God, The, 695
Astronomia Nova (Kepler), 276, 284–285, Confessions XI–XIII, 95, 119, 126, 128,
522, 523n115, 590, 593, 703 131, 695
Astronomia pars optica (Kepler), 594 on creation, 156
astronomical language of Scripture, De Civitate Dei XI, 119
512–516 De Doctrina Christiana, 112, 120–122
astronomical revolution, 280 De Genesi ad litteram (On Genesis Literally
astronomy, 357, 667 Interpreted) (Literal Commentary on
al-Baydāw on, 259–260 Genesis, A), 118–120, 122, 127,
Aquinas on, 276 130, 132, 134, 136, 137, 143, 168,
Augustine on, 697–698 695–697, 709–713

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De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber (On on doctrine of creation ex nihilo, 238

the Literal Interpretation of Genesis: An ecclesiastical censure of 1277 and,
Unfinished book), 119, 653, 695 221
De Genesi contra Manichaeos (On Genesis on Islam, 35
Against the Manichees), 119, 128–129, on Islam and philosophy, 40–41
132, 695 on Mosaic Law, 35–36
on faith, 696–697 on Muslim Law, 35–36
Galileo on, 645 on religion and philosophy, 37,
on Genesis, 95, 126 37n11
Genesis, interpretation of, 117–144 on sharî ah, 42
on God’s language, 363–364 Averroists, 599n34
on hermeneutics, 121 A Very Short Excursion Against the Sidereal
on human formation, 136 Messenger (Horkey), 630
on idiom, 468 Avicenna
on Lactantius, 597 Aquinas on, 221
on language, 369–370 on essence and existence, 236
On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis, An
Unfinished book, 653 Babylonian Talmud, 692–693
on “little ones,” 120, 120n12 Bacon, Francis, 12, 389
on Manichaeism, 119n7, 120n8, 131 on Adam, 318–319
Manichees (Manichaeans) and, 127, biblical interpretation and, 328
168, 276 on the book of nature, 354
on natural phenomena, 125 on etymology, 323
natural philosophy, functions of, 119, on The Fall, 318, 319, 321n39
128–140 Great Instauration, 321
Old Testament interpretation and, on knowledge, 320
211 literal interpretation and, 328
on Platonic philosophy, 121 on nature, 316
on principium, 130, 134 Novum Organum, 318–320, 332
on prophetic passages, 461 “Of Studies,” 321n39
on rationes seminales, 130–131, on philology, 321, 321n39, 323
136–139, 167–168 on Tower of Babel, 319, 321n39
Retractiones, 126 Valerius Terminus, 317–323
Rheticus and, 143, 701 Bacon, Roger, 195
on scriptural inconsistencies, 123 Baldwin, Samuel Davies, on
on scriptural knowledge, 121 accommodation, 28
on Scripture, 123–125, 133, 156 Baronio, Cesare (Cardinal), 714
Scriptures, falsehoods in, 132 Basil of Caesarea, 102–105, 171
on stars, 675 on allegory, 99
theory of interpretation, 374 amphitheatre of creation, 147
theory of signs, 345 on creation, 148
Williams, Rowan on, 172 creation of living creatures, homilies
on words, 190 on, 102–104
Augustine of Dacia, 185, 185n27, on Genesis, 101
206 Hexaemeron of, 105, 106
Augustine of Hippo. See Augustine, Homilies on the Hexaemeron, 147
Aurelius on nature, 99
authority on resurrection symbolism,
biblical, 431, 627–658 158
church, 641–642, 645 Batelier, Jacobus Johannes, 615
Scripture, 350, 607, 652 Be inat ha-dat (The Examination of Religion)
theological, 644 (Delmedigo), 73
Averroes, 42 Bekker, Balthasar, on biblical
on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, 220 interpretation, 384

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Bellarmine, Robert (Cardinal), 356, 632, biblical interpretation, 96, 97n32,

635–636, 657 369–378. See also Bible;
on astronomical phenomena, 635 hermeneutics; scriptural authority;
Disputations on the Controversies over Scripture
Christian Faith, 350, 670n22 accommodation and, 691–694
Foscarini and, 117, 142–143, 143n76, Albert the Great and, 370
635 Alexandrian-Antioch divide on, 101
Galileo and, 636 allegorical sense of, 184–185, 190,
on quadriga, 350 343, 344–345
Bentley, Richard allegory and, 100, 343–349
Newton, correspondence with, 513 ambiguity of, 378
on prisca sapientia, 460 anagogical (prophetic) sense of, 344
Berengarius, 182 Andrew of St. Victor on, 219n4
Bernard of Clairvaux, on pagan Antiochene exegetes on, 152
writings, 182 Aquinas and, 219, 223, 236, 366,
Bernoulli, Johann, 473 370, 370n22
Berosus the Babylonian, on Chaldean archai, 150
astronomers, 435 Augustine on, 123, 125, 132, 133,
bestiaries, 370, 380–381, 386, 156, 366, 728
410–412 authority and, 614
Biagioli, Mario, on Galileo, 422 Bacon, Francis and, 328
Bible. See also biblical interpretation; Bekker on, 384
Scripture botanical knowledge and, Lemnius
Augustine on, 143 on, 423
celestial matter and, Peucer on, Brahe on, 569, 573, 574
282 Burnet on, 467
Celsus on, 65 Calvin on, 343, 347, 349, 366, 384
Charles II on, 444 Catholic Church and, 341, 350, 351
cosmology and, 563–581 Chanter on, 224n18
exegesis of, 399–402 church fathers and, 211, 351, 365,
hermeneutics of accommodation and, 370, 635
349, 504n42, 524–528, 710 contexts of, 341
people and, 724 contextualized reading of, 24–27
Pereira on literal sense of, 670, Copernicanism and, 629–632
686 Copernicus and, 698–720
plants and, 403, 404–412 cosmology and, 568–581
Principia mathematica in, 491–494, Council of Trent on, 212, 350,
516–524 634–635
reinterpretation of, by Society of double literal sense of Scripture, 371
Jesus, 665, 684 Earth movement and, 568, 590–596
on salvation, 413, 414 Ephrem the Syrian on, 154
science and, Williams on, 278 Erasmus on, 211–212
Voetius on, 439 Eriugena on, 190
Wittichius and, 619 Evagrius on, 162–163
Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural evolution and, 21
Science, The (Harrison), 326 falsehoods in, 132
Biblia Patristica, 93 Fitzralph on, 372
biblical arguments, of Ingoli, 633–634, Foscarini on, 707
655 Galileo and, 641–645, 649, 655, 685
biblical commentaries Gregory of Nyssa on, 157, 157n43
Philo of Alexandria and, 94–95 hermeneutics and, 349
in Renaissance, 199 Hugh of St. Victor on, 185, 346
biblical criticism, in Dutch Republic, humanist, 213
429–447 inconsistencies in, 123

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Irenaeus of Lyons on, 90, 93, 153, of Willemz, 20n30

167 Wittichius on, 384, 614
Jesuits on, 665–686 Biblical Interpretation in the Early Church
Kepler and, 385 (Simonetti), 93
Kuhn on, 10 biblical language, 128, 617, 691–730
Lansbergen on, 384 biblical narratives, 302–317
LeFèvre on, 374 biblical revelation of archai, 148–149
literal reading of Scripture, 184–185, biblical texts, 200, 203, 204, 281, 618
188–189 Bishop of Danzig, 589
literal sense of, 369–378 Bishop of Emesa. See Eusebius of
Lutherans and, 212 Caesarea
Luther on, 343, 347, 349, 373 Bishop of Hereford. See Croft, Herbert
Maimonides and, 532–533 Bishop of Hippo. See Augustine, Aurelius
mathematical sciences and, Bishop of Kulm, 700
666–672 Bishop Tempier, condemnation of
Maximus the Confessor on, 154, theses by, 40–41
155–156 Blackwell, Richard J., on Foscarini’s
Melanchthon and, 374, 375, 384 Lettera, 705–706
Moor on, 384 blood, Harvey and Fernel on, 314–315
natural knowledge and, 117–144, Blount, Charles
399–402 on Archaeologiae Philosophicae, 483
natural philosophy, compatibility Oracles of Reason, 483
with, 458, 471 Blyenbergh, Willem, on Scripture, 73
nature and, 125–128, 147–172, Spinoza, letter to, 73
179–213 Boardman, George Dana, on race, 27
of Newton, 493, 494–504 Boehme, Jacob, 386
Nicholas of Lyra on, 185, 349, Boethius of Daca, 206
457 Bonaventure, 240, 243, 353
Origen and, 111–112, 170 on Aristotelian philosophy, 195
of papacy, 211 on natural world, 346
Peri Archôn (Origen) on, 65 on Sacred Scripture, 183
phenomenalism and, 723 Bonfrère, Jacques
Principia mathematica and, Commentary on the Pentateuch, 671
517–518 Bono, James J.
Protestantism and, 236–237, 299, Word of God and the Languages of Man,
326, 347–353, 722 The, 328–329
Protestant Reformation and, 24–25, book of nature, 276, 302–317, 400,
180, 210, 211, 213, 376 553–554. See also nature; two books
Protestant Reformers and, 180, Adamic language, role of, 309–311
210–211, 341, 343, 344, 365–369, alphabet of nature and, 300–302,
372 319, 322
quadriga in, 344–345 astronomy and, 358
Rheticus on, 702 Bacon (Francis) on, 354
science and, 629 Boyle on, 355
Spinoza on, 552 Campanella on, 653
symbolism in, 378–379 exegesis and, 306
themes of, 148 Galileo on, 326
three books and, 475 Hooke on, 385–386
transformation of, 369–378 interpreting, 179–213
at University of Paris, 223 language, Adamic and, 305–307
Valkenberg on, 233 language and, 307–309, 322–323
Valles on, 413, 423 literal interpretation of, 317–325
van Velthuysen on, 616 Luther on, 306
Voetius on, 384 Pluche on, 386

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reading, 299–322 Burnet, Thomas, 451–486

Sibiuda on, 346 antediluvian water cycle and, 473,
technologies of the literal and, 475
329–331–333 apocalyptic concerns of, 463, 465,
Topsell on, 301 479
Book of Revelation, 466n37, 495–496. Archaeologiae Philosophicae, 483
See also apocalypse on Augustine, 468
book of Scripture. See two books biblical idiom and, 451–486
Book of Sentences (Lombard), 401 on biblical interpretation, 467
book of the Law, 553–554 Cartesianism and, 505n43
Boscaglia, Cosimo, 631 Cartesian physics and, 505
Boyle, Robert, 12, 330, 355 concordism, rejection of, 508n55
Brahe, Tycho, 294, 546, 563–581, on confl agration, 469
703n36 Croft on, 481, 482
on astrology, 567 Descartes and, 455, 456, 466, 468,
on astronomy, 567 472
biblical interpretation and, 569, 573, Earth, interpretation of, 479
574 Earth as Mundane Egg, 470–478
biblical texts and, 281 on firmament, 479
on Castellion, 569, 575 on the Flood, 456, 462, 466,
on celestial matter, 569 480–481, 505
on celestial realm, 283 on Genesis, 504, 506–507, 525
on Copernican cosmology, 563, 571, on Moses, 506, 510
581 on natural philosophy, 468–470
cosmology of, 280–287, 295, Newton, correspondence with,
567–575 504–512, 504n42
De mundi aetherei recentioribus phaenomenis, Newton on, 475n60, 481
563, 568–569 on obscure Scripture, 469–470
Earth, movement of, 563, 703 on paradise, 478, 480–481
Epistolarum astronomicarum libri, 633 Petrine theory, 458–466, 479
on fl uid heavens, 574, 575–580 as Platonist, 484
on geocentric cosmology, 569 on prisca sapientia, 460, 462, 483,
geoheliocentric world system, 568, 484
571, 575–576 on providence, 462n24
on heavenly bodies, 568 on rainbow, 468
Kepler on, 597 Sacred Theory, 505n48
on mumia, 283–284 on Solomonic Temple, 468
Oratio de studiis mathematicis, 567 Telluris theoria sacra (Sacred Theory of the
on Paracelsian fire, 283 Earth), 504, 505n43
Peucer, correspondence on fl uid Theory of the Earth, 452–457, 459, 462,
heavens, 575–580 463, 466, 469, 470, 473, 475, 477,
as Phillipist, 593n20 486
Rothmann and, 283, 572, 573–575 burning bush, 374–375
on theological dimension of Burrell, David, on Aquinas, 236
astronomy, 567
on universe, 283–284 cabalists, 305
on waters above the firmament, Caccini, Tommaso
575–580 Galileo, attack on, 631
Bucer, Martin, 375 on mathematicians, 631
Buffon, Count Georges Louis Leclerc, Roman Inquisition and, 632
452 Caetani, Bonifacio (Cardinal), 650
Bullinger, Heinrich, on senses of calendar, reform of, 667, 673
Scripture, 373 Calixt, Georg, 209
Buridan, Jean, 194 Calvin, John, 342, 344, 353, 359

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on accommodation, principle of, 348, in Dutch Republic, 610

514, 523 at Leiden University, 610
on allegory, 375–376 natural philosophy and, 467, 482
allegory, censure of, 347 as philosophy of nature, 618
on authorial intent, 383 rejection of, 621
biblical interpretation and, 343, 347, scriptural authority and, 607
349, 366 van Velthuysen on, 613
on burning bush, 374–375 Voetius and, 611, 619
Copernicanism and, 729 Wittichius on, 612
on incarnation, 348n23 Cartesian physics, 505
on Jacob’s ladder, 372 Cartesians, 619, 622
on Moses, 348 Cassini, Jacques, 473
on senses of Scripture, 373 Cassini, Jean-Dominique, 473
Calvinism Castelli, Benedetto, 631, 632, 641, 651
biblical interpretation and, 384 Galileo correspondence with,
confessional identity and, 212 711–712
Calvinist doctrine at Synod of Dort, 607 Castellion (Castalio), Sébastien, 569, 575
Calvinist Reformed Church, 72 “Catalogues and Tables: Iteration”
Spinoza and, 75n151 (Campbell), 330n64
Cambridge Platonists, 460 catechism, Protestant, 287
Burnet as, 484 Catena aurea (Aquinas), 234
prisca sapientia and, 461n17, 470, 472 Cathars, 187
Cambridge University, Whiston at, 291 cathedral school of Chartres, 219
Campanella, Tommaso, 715–720 Catholic Church
on accommodation, principle of, 226, anti-Copernican decree of 1616, 633,
716, 726 640, 650, 656, 657–658
Apologia pro Galileo, 650–654, 655, 716, biblical interpretation and, 341, 350,
720 351
on Aquinas, 717–718 church fathers, 634, 635
on Augustine, 654 Copernicanism, condemnation of, 605
on the book of nature, 653 Council of Trent, 634–635
Copernicanism and, 650–651, on Earth’s motion, 598
715–716, 718, 729 Galileo, condemnation by, 605
Galileo, defense of, 651, 715–716 Galileo on, 631–632, 641–642, 645
on Genesis, 718 Index, 633, 640, 650, 656, 657–658
on Joshua passage, 654 Protestantism, differences with,
Lerner on, 651n90 352–357, 382-384
on Moses, 716–718 reform and, 341
on natural philosophy, 717 Roman Inquisition and, 632,
on scriptural authority, 652 640–641
on two books, 719–720 on St. Augustine, 597
Campbell, Mary Baine, 330n64 Catholicism
Cano, Melchior medieval, 341, 349, 350
De locis theologicis, 669, 690 Catholic scholars, 211
canon of truth, 149, 149n5 Cattenius, Otto, on Galileo, 678
Cartesian causal demonstration, 587
cosmogony, 462 celestial matter, 569
cosmology, 475 Peucer on, 282
geogony, 470, 475, 477 celestial realm, 283, 418–422,
Cartesianism 420n103
biblical texts and, 618 Celsus, 65
Burnet and, 505n43 Chanter, Peter, on literal Scripture,
Cocceians and, 622 224n18
Copernicanism and, 610–614 Chaos, in Theory of the Earth, 453–455

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Charles II, (King) 505n43 In sphaeram Joannis de Sacro Bosco

on the Bible, 444 Commentarius, 672
diurnal motion of Earth and, 511 on stars, first magnitude, 677
Chouet, Jean-Robert, 357, 358 on stars, fixed number, 676–678
Christ Utility of Astronomy for Theology, 667
Gregory of Nyssa on, 164 Clear Explanation of the Comparisons and
as Logos, 53, 65 Parables Concerning Herbs and Trees
Newton on, 503, 519n94, 519n95 Which Are Selected from the Bible. See
Origen of Alexandria on, 51, 51n64, Concerning Herbs and Trees
65 Clement of Alexandria, 90, 694
symbols of, 378–379 on archê, 149, 149n6
in Theory of the Earth, 463 on the Bible, 93
Christian doctrines, plants and, 411 Christianity and, 52–53
Christian humanists, 304–305 on Genesis, 149
Christianity on Gnostics, 91–92
Clement of Alexandria and, 52–53 on nature, interpretation of, 149–150
philosophical interpretation of, 56–57 on religion and philosophy, 60
Platonism and, 39-40 Stromateis, 52, 149
Christian Neoplatonism, 206 Cocceians, Cartesians and, 622
Christina of Lorraine, 631 Coccejus, Johannes
Christological sense of Scripture, 373, on biblical interpretation, 384
374 on Scripture, 622
chronology, 433–438, 442–445 coeternal matter, 134, 167
Chrysostom, John, 100 Cogitata Metaphysica (Metaphysical Thoughts)
on Moses, 718 (Spinoza), 70
Old Testament interpretation and, Cohen, I. Bernard, 513n75
211 on correspondence between Burnet
church fathers and Newton, 513
on accommodation, 729 Colet, John, 204, 726
authority of, 634 Collatio Novi Testamenti (Valla), 204
biblical interpretation and, 211, 365, Collegio Romano. See Jesuit Collegio
370, 635 Romano
on cosmos and Scripture, 166, 351 Colombe, Lodovico delle
on creation, 169 “Against the Earth’s Motion,” 630
Galileo on, 644–645 Comenius, Jan Amos, 330, 330n66
geocentrism and, 699 Commentary on Acts (Lorin), 679
on human nature, 169 Commentary on Boethius’ ‘De Trinitate’
on Scripture, acceptance of, 644–645 (Aquinas), 228n28, 231
systemic theology and, 401 Commentary on the Book of Job (Aquinas),
Chytraeus, David, on spiritual 234
significance of animals, 423–424 Commentary on Deuteronomy (Lorin), 680
Cisneros, Ximenes de (Cardinal), 204 Commentary on Ecclesiastes (Lorin), 679
City of God, The (Augustine), 695 Commentary on Ezekiel (de Prado &
civil disturbances, Melanchthon Villalpando), 668, 673
response to, 586 Commentary on Genesis (Pereira), 671,
Clarke, Samuel 673–674, 680
Leibniz, correspondence with, 498 Commentary on Letters (Lorin), 680
Classical Scholia (Newton), 499 Commentary on Leviticus (Lorin), 680
classical texts, 200, 203, 204, 281 Commentary on Numbers (Lorin), 680
Clavius, Christoph, 683 Commentary on the Pentateuch (Bonfrère),
on Copernican theory, 672 671
Hortensius on, 667 Commentary on Psalms (Lorin), 680
Sacrobosco, commentary on, 667, Commentary on the Song of Songs (Origen),
676 150. See also Song of Songs

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Commentary on Wisdom of Solomon (Lorin), Foscarini on, 117, 143, 637–639,

680 706–708
Commentorium et disputationum in Genesim, Galileo on, 631, 642, 714, 715
tomi quatuor (Pererius), 710n67 heliocentrism and, 698
Common Era, 88 as heretical, 632
Concerning Herbs and Trees (Lemnius), 403, Index condemnation of, 633, 640,
403n28, 410–412, 413 650, 656, 657–658
conclusive proof, Galileo on, 646 Ingoli on, 633–636, 654–655
concordism, defined, 458 instrumentalist interpretation of, 627
condemnation of 1277, 534, 534n7, Jesuits and, 672
536, 543 Joshua passage and, 632
confession, pastoral process for, 12 Kepler on, 585–602, 703
confessional churches, 180 Lansbergen on, 605
confessional identity, 212 Lochner on, 632
confessional statements, Lutherans and, Luther on, 630
212 Melanchthon and, 589–590
Confessions XI–XII (Augustine), 95, 113, Protestantism and, 606
119, 126, 128, 131, 695 reevaluation of, 627
confusion of tongues. See Tower of rejection of by Jesuits, 672
Babel Ross on, 523n115
Congregation of the Index. See Index scriptural argument against, 627–648
“Considerations on the Copernican Scripture and, 629–632
Opinion” (Galileo), 636 van Mastricht on, 629
Constantinople, fall of, 200–201 van Velthuysen on Voetius’s rejection
consubstantial matter, 134 of, 613
consummation, 292–293 Wittichius on, 612
contemplatio, 188 Copernican mathematical models, 599
contemplation Copernican theory, 627, 710n67
of nature (theôria physikê), 150, 153, Catholic exegesis to, 665
162, 163, 165 Clavius on, 672
objects of, 346 Protestant reactions to, 606, 665
scriptural (theôria graphikê), 150, Copernicus, Nicolaus, 588, 723
165 astronomical revolution in, 280
spiritual (theôria), 150–152, 160 on astronomy, 699
ten modes of, 165 biblical interpretation and, 698–720
Conti, Carlo (Cardinal), Galileo and, commission from Rome, 588–589
631 Delmedigo on, 549
Controversiarum medicarum et philosophicarum De Revolutionibus, 494, 494n10, 527,
libri decem (Valles), 412 564, 590, 599, 605, 699–700, 710,
Copernican astronomy, 548 715
Copernican cosmology, 563, 565–567, Giese, defense of, 700
571, 581 heliocentrism and, 698–700
Copernicanism, 665, 698 Index and, 710, 715
accommodation, principle of, Lutherans on, 589
720–730 on mathematics, 699
biblical interpretation and, 629–632 Melanchthon objections to, 585–602
Calvin and, 729 persecution of, 589
Campanella and, 650–651, 715–716, Reinhold on, 589
718, 729 On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
Cartesianism and, 610–614 (1543), 629–630, 656
Catholic Church, condemnation by, Rheticus and, 588–589, 699–700,
605 701
Dutch Reformed Church and, 606 Wittenberg interpretation of, 280,
Dutch Republic and, 384 564, 565

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cosmology, 698 ‘Or ‘Adonai (Light of the Lord), 535–541

of Aristotle, 193–194, 198, 308–309 theory of time, 538
biblical interpretation and, 568–581 on time, creation and cosmology,
Brahe on, 280–287, 295, 567–575 533–543
Cartesian, 475 on Torah, 535
creation and, 533–534 on vacuum, 541
Crescas on, 533–543 Croft, Herbert
defined, 279 on Burnet, 481, 482
kenotic, 171–172 repudiation of prisca sapientia, 482
Kepler on, 280–287, 294, 295 Cudworth, on prisca sapientia, 460
of Peucer, 280–287 curiosity cabinets, 435–436
Platonic, 219 Cuvier, Georges, 472
Scripture and, 563–581 Czepko von Reigersfeld, Daniel, 276
cosmos on “Holy Triangle,” 280–290
archai, 150
church fathers and, 166, 351 Dalâlat al-â’irîn (Guide to the Perplexed)
Council of Nicaea, on Trinity, mystery (Maimonides), on intellectual love of
of, 185n26 God, 43
Council of Trent, 706n49 Daley, Brian, on Origen, 148
on biblical interpretation, 212 Dallal, Ahmad
biblical interpretation and, 350, “Science and the Qur ān,” 260
634–635 Damian, Peter, 182
Galileo and, 713 Daneau, Lambert, on Moses, 348
Courtenay, William, 199 Daniel 12, Newton on, 497
created being, Maximus on, 165 Dante on Aristotle, 219
creation Daston, Lorraine, 327
Aquinas on, 219–244 on early modern science, 331
Athanasius on, 154, 167 “Reading the Book of Nature in Early
Augustine on, 156 Modern Europe,” 329
Basil of Caesarea on, 148 Wonders and the Order of Nature, 326
church fathers on, 169 Davies, Oliver, 170–171
cosmology and, 533–534 De aeternitate mundi (Aquinas), 240, 243
Crescas on, 533–543 De anima 3 (Aristotle), 44
Descartes on, 440 De annis climactericis et antiqua astrologia
Genesis and, 235–244, 727 diatribe (Saumaise), 434–435
Gnostic view of, 25 De Civitate Dei XI (Augustine), 119
Jewish philosophy in, 531–558 decree of 1616, 710
Maximus the Confessor on, 155–156 De decalogo (Philo of Alexandria), 64
patristic interpretation of, 167–169 De Doctrina Christiana (Augustine), 112,
Scaliger on, 442–443 120–122
Timaeus on, 88n9 De elegantiae linguae latinae (Valla),
time and, 533–543 201–202
creation days, numbering of, 89 De emendatione temporum (Scaliger),
creation ex nihilo, 14, 167 433–434
Aquinas on, 237, 239 Defensio (Foscarini), 709
Averroes on, 238 De Genesi ad litteram (On Genesis Literally
Crescas on, 539 Interpreted) (Literal Commentary on Genesis,
Maimonides on, 552 A) (Augustine), 118–120, 122, 127,
Crescas, Hasdai, 557 130, 132, 134, 136, 137, 143, 168,
on Aristotelian physics, 535–534 695–697, 709–713
biography of, 535 De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber (On
on creation, 533–543 the Literal Interpretation of Genesis: An
on Genesis, 536–538 Unfinished book) (Augustine), 119, 653,
on Maimonides, 537–538 695

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De Genesi contra Manichaeos (On Genesis De potentia Dei (Aquinas), 233–234,

Against the Manichees) (Augustine), 119, 241n67
128–129, 132, 695 de Prado, Jéronimo
De incertitudine et vantitate scientiarum atque Commentary on Ezekiel, 668, 673
artium (Agrippa), 308 De principiis (Origen), 148
De inventione dialectica libri tres (Agricola), De Revolutionibus (Copernicus), 410, 494,
207 494n10, 527, 564, 590, 599, 605,
Deists, 36 699–700, 715
de Laet, Johannes Giese on, 702
Dutch West Indies Company and, Osiander preface to, 280–281
436 Derham, William, 522n114
on Grotius, 437–438 De sacra philosophia. See Of The Things
on New World, 437 Which Are Written About Natural
Notae ad dissertationem Hugonis Grotii, Philosophy in the Holy Scriptures (Valles)
437 Descartes, Rene, 385, 439–441, 452,
Reformed orthodoxy and, 436 471
Saumaise and, 437 on anti-Copernicans, 614
della Mirandola, Giovanni Pico, 205 Burnet on, 455, 456, 466, 468, 472
Delmedigo, Elijah on creation, 440
Be inat ha-dat (The Examination of Discours de la méthode, 610
Religion), 73 heliocentrism and, 611
Spinoza on, 73 philosophy of nature, 618
Delmedigo, Joseph Solomon, 557 Principia philosophiae, 459, 470–471,
on Copernicus, 549 475, 610
Sefer Elim, 548–549 Ray on, 292
De locis theologicis (Cano), 669, 670 Schuyl in defense of, 620
de Lubac, Henri, See Lubac on universe, 611
Deluge. See also Flood Voetius on, 432, 439–440, 612, 619
Burnet on, 455, 456, 466, 468, 472, De situ et qiete terrae contra copernici systema
480–481 disputatio (Ingoli), 351–352
la Peyrère on, 462 Des Maizeaux, Pierre, 498
Mosaic, 459f 2 De specialibus legibus (Philo of Alexandria),
Pereira on, 462 64
rainbow after, 468, 473n57 De substantiis separatis (Aquinas), 235–236
Stillingfl eet on, 462 De Vera Aetate Mundi (Vossius), 441–445
in Theory of the Earth, 453–455, 459f 2 De veritate (Aquinas), 229
as universal, 463 de Witt, John, 72
Vossius on, 444 d’Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry, 36, 53
Whiston on, 461 dialectics, 181, 207
demonstration Aquinas on, 192
versus demonstrability, 646 criticism of, 200
doctrine of, 599 logic of, 182–183
Galileo on, 646, 655 Dialoghi d’Amore (Abravanel), 544–545
necessity of, 628 Dialogue (Galileo ), 522n114
priority of, 628 Dialogue . . . in Which is Held . . . That
de Moor, Bernhardinus. See Moor the Moon Is Intrinsically Luminous
De mundi aetherei recentioribus phaenomenis (Albergotti), 631
(Brahe), 563, 568–569 Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the
Denis the Carthusian, on Jacob’s ladder, World (Galileo), 522
372 Dialogus theologico-astronomicus (du Bois),
De opificium hominum (Gregory of Nyssa), 612
106 Dianoia astronomica, optica, physica (Sizzi),
De origine gentium Americanarum dissertatio 351, 630
(Grotius), 437 diluvialism, 456

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Dinah, rape of (Gen. 34:25), Valles on, Synod of Dort, 607–608

415–416 van Velthuysen on, 613–614
Diodore of Tarsus Dutch Republic
Antiochene school and, 100 biblical criticism in, 429–447
on psalms, 100 Cartesianism in, 610
Diodore of Tarsus, 152 Copernicanism and, 384
Discours de la methode (Descartes), 610 Dutch Reformed Church and,
“. . . disposition and order of the universe 608–609
and its principal bodies” (Wittichius), Dutch revolt against Hapsburg rule,
612 410
“Disputation on the Location and Rest Dutch West Indies Company, 436
of the Earth Against the System of
Copernicus” (Ingoli), 632–633, Earth, 499
654 Burnet, interpretation of, 479
Disputations on the Controversies over history of, 451
Christian Faith (Bellarmine), 350, Lactantius on, 597
670n22 movement of, 596, 598, 614–615,
Disquisitiones mathematicae de controversiis 620, 643
et novitatibus astronomicis (Lochner), movement of, biblical interpretation
631–632 of, 568, 590–596
diurnal motion movement of, Brahe on, 563, 703
of Earth, Joshua miracle and, 511 movement of, du Bois on, 612, 615
Joshua miracle and, 642–643 movement of, Melanchthon on,
divine accommodation, 570–573 590–592
divine authorial intent, 368, 369, 371, movement of, Newton on, 512–513,
374–377, 382, 383 515
divine contemplation, nature and, movement of, Peucer on, 565–566
194–195 movement of, Protestant theology on,
Dobzhansky, Theodosius, on The Fall, 605
12 movement of, Ptolemy on, 599–600
doctrine of double truth, 276 as Mundane Egg, 470–478, 474f 3
doctrine of nature (physiologia), 149 theories of, 451–486
doctrine of predestination, 607 Easter, date of, 673
Dominican order Ecclesiastes 1, 704
Aquinas and, 222 Melanchthon on, 591
Aristotle and, 187n35 ecclesiastical censure of 1277, 221
Cathars, and, 187 Eckhart, Meister, 205
at University of Paris, 192 Edwards, Jonathan, 383, 495n12
double-creation, 94 Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried,
du Bois, Jacob, 612 accommodation, principle of, 28
Dialogus theologico-astronomicus, 612 Eight Chapters (Maimonides), 43
on Earth’s movement, 612, 615 Elementa doctrinae de circulis coelestibus et
at Leiden, 611 primo motu (Peucer), 564–565, 566,
Mennonites and, 611 592–593
on Socinianism, 616 eliminative (stimulative) function of
van Velthuysen on, 613–617 natural philosophy, 119, 128–129,
Dutch Reformed Church 132–135
Dutch Republic and, 608–609 Elsevier, Daniel, 430, 438
Further Reformation movement and, Enlightenment Era, 606–607
608 Enneads (Plotinus), 205
Reformed Erasmianism movement, Ephraem (Ephrem the Syrian)
608 on creation, 92
role of, 608 on nature and Scripture, 85n1, 86,
split over Copernicanism, 606 111, 154

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epistemological dualism explanatory function of

Newton on, 524 natural philosophy, 119, 135–140
epistemology of nature, 280 extrinsic denomination principle,
Epistle to the Hebrews (Aquinas), 244 639–640
Epistolarum astronomicarum libri (Brahe),
633 faith and reason, 190, 195
Epitome of the Copernican Astronomy Fall, The, 25, 299–332, 302, 312t1
(Kepler), 286–287, 633 Bacon, Francis on, 318, 319,
Erasmus, Desiderius, 207 321n39
on biblical interpretation, 211–212 Dobzhansky on, 12
“Godly Feast, The,” 409–410 human intellect and, 304
on nature, 210 Luther on, 314, 315, 327
Novum Instrumentum, 204 fallenness of humanity, 90
on systematic theology, 401 falsafa, 253, 257–258, 262
Eriugena, John Scotus, 205 Favaro, Antonio
on nature and Scripture, 190 Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, 705,
Periphyseon, 87–88 716n97
Eschinardus, Franciscus, on astronomies Feldhay, Rivka, 357, 358
of Ptolemy, Brahe, Copernicus, 358 on Catholic teaching orders, 19–20
essence and existence, 236 on Jesuit science, 357
Ethics (Spinoza), on spirit of Christ, Science in Context, 357
53–54 Fernel, Jean
ethnology, Nott on, 22 on blood and spirits in human body,
etymology, Bacon, Francis on, 323 314–315
Eudemian Ethics (Aristotle), 42, 46 festa Galileana, 680, 681
Eusebius of Caesarea, 101 Ficino, Marsilio, 39-40, 205
on Alexandrians, 64 Finocchiaro, Maurice, on geostatic
on allegorism, 100 systems, 711
biography of, 87–88 First Account (Rheticus), 589
Historia Ecclesiastica (History of the Fitzralph, Richard, on biblical
Church), 63 interpretation, 372
Praeparatio Evangelica (Preparation to the Flacius, Matthias, 593n20
Gospel), 63 Fleck, Ludwig, on interpretation of
Evagrius Ponticus nature, 10
allegory and, 160 Flood, 5, 460–481, 462. See also Deluge;
on biblical interpretation, 162–163 Noah
on Christ the Logos, 164 fl uid heavens, 570–580
on knowledge, 162 Formula of Concord, 212
on logoi, 163–164 Foscarini, Paolo Antonio, 636–640, 655,
on logos of gold, 161 705–710
on natural contemplation, 162–163 on accommodation, principle of,
“On the Eight Thoughts,” 160 637–638
on symbolism, 160–161 astronomy and, 708
on temptation, 159 Bellarmine and, 117, 143–143,
on two books, 154 143n76, 635–636, 640
Evans, G. L., 182 Copernicanism and, 117, 143,
Eve 637–639, 706, 707–708
Newton on, 502 death of, 640
evolution, biological and biblical Defensio, 709
interpretation of, 21 on extrinsic denomination principle,
exegesis, 399–402, 722–724 639–640
Exodus, Lemnius on, 409 Galileo, in support of, 636–637
Explanations of the Literal Sense of the Whole on Genesis, 708
Bible (Menochio), 671 geokinetic system and, 637, 707

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on heliocentrism, 705, 707 “Considerations on the Copernican

Index and, 710, 715 Opinion,” 636
on Joshua passage, 639–640 Conti and, 631
on language, 707–708 on Copernicanism, 631, 642, 714,
Lettera . . . , 522n114, 705–706, 715
709–710, 715, 728 Council of Trent and, 713
Lettera Sopra l’opinione de’ Pittagorici e del on demonstration, 646, 655
Copernico, 522 Dialogue, 522n114
Letter on . . . the Earth’s Motion, Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the
523n115, 647–640, 654 World, 522
on phenomenalism, 708 Foscarini in support of, 636–637
Pythagorean cosmology and, 706, “Galileo’s Consideration of the
706n50 Copernian Opinion,” 712
Roman Inquisition and, 640 heresy and, 631–632, 656
on Sacred Scripture, 707 on holy authors, 713
scriptural limitation, principle of, Il Saggiatore, 281
628–629, 638–639 John Paul II (Pope) and Galileo trial,
fourfold interpretation, 40n13, 179, 6
344–345, 695. See also quadriga on Joshua passage, 631, 642, 643,
Fourfold Interpretation of Creation (Weigel), 655, 714–715
289 Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, 22,
Fourth Lateran Council (1215), decree 142, 285, 351, 513n75, 573, 592,
of, 237, 242n69 631–632, 641–647, 654, 665, 710,
Funkenstein, Amos, on secular theology, 713–714
401 Lorini attack on, 631, 641–647
Further Reformation movement, 430, Lorin on, 681
608, 621 Maelcote on, 678–679
on natural philosophy, 173, 354, 712,
Galilei, Galileo, 21–23, 117, 655, 713
723 nature and, 355, 356, 385
on accommodation, principle of, New and Old Doctrine . . . on Preventing
712–713, 726 the Reckless Use of . . . Sacred Scripture,
on Augustine, 645 647
Baronio on, 714 Roman Inquisition and, 632,
Bellarmine and, 636 640–641, 715
Biagioli on, 422 on scriptural assertions, 641–642,
biblical interpretation and, 641–642, 649, 655
643–645, 649, 655, 685 on scriptural authority, 644–645
on the book of nature, 326 on scriptural consensus, 644–645
Caccini on, 631 Sidereal Messenger, The, 627, 630, 651
Campanella and, 651, 715–716 Siderus nuncius (The Starry Messenger),
Castelli letter, 631, 632, 641, 651, 351, 678, 711
711–712 Sunspot Letters, 627, 632, 651, 714–715
Catholic Church condemnation of, Systema Cosmicum, 522n114
605 telescopic discoveries, 655
Cattenius on, 678 on theological authority, 644
censure of by Ingoli, 715 Galileo affair, 6, 549, 665, 698, 705,
on church authority, 631–632, 711, 716, 728
641–642, 645 Galileo—Heretic (Redondi), 6
on church fathers, 644–645 “Galileo’s Consideration of the
on conclusive proof, 646 Copernican Opinion” (Galileo), 712
condemnation of, 711–715 Gans, David
confessional identity and, 212 Nehmad ve-Na im, 545–546, 557

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Gansfort, Wessel, 203 Gerondi, Nissim ben Reuben, 535

gems, 399n8 Gersonides
General Scholium (Newton), 491n2, on Genesis, 539
492–493, 493n7, 498, 500, 518, on the instant, 539–540
519n94, 521, 526 on Joshua passage, 556, 556n93
Genesis Milhamot Hashem (Wars of the Lord),
Ambrose of Milan on, 101, 107 539
Aquinas on, 219–244 Song of Solomon, 553
Augustine on, 117–144, 126 Gesner, Conrad, 399n8
Basil of Caesarea on, 101 Gharā ib al-Qur ān (al-N sābār ), 261,
Burnet on, 504, 506–507, 525 264
Campanella on, 718 Ghazali, Abu Hamid al-, 238
Clement of Alexandria on, 149 Giese, Tiedemann
Colet on, 726 Copernicus, defense of, 700
creation and, 235–244 on De Revolutionibus, 702
Crescas on, 536–538 Hyperaspisticon, 700
double-creation, 94 Giles of Rome on philosophers and
Foscarini on, 708 theologians, 242
Gersonides on, 539 Gnosticism
Gregory of Nyssa on, 101 challenges of, 87–92
Maimonides on, 536–538 creation, view of, 25
Manichean criticism of, 129–130 Markschies on, 91
Manichean interpretation, 131 Nag Hammadi, treatises on, 90n13
patristic exegesis of, 161, 166, nature and Scripture, 90
167–169 Origen of Alexandria on, 98, 149
Philo of Alexandria on, 89 Gnostics
Genesis commentaries, of nature and Clement of Alexandria on, 91–92
Scripture, 93–101 condemnation of, 90
Genesis Creation, 507n55, 512n68 described, 91
Newton on, 502–503, 504–512 on fallenness of humanity, 90
Whiston on, 512n68 pseudonyms of, 91
geocentric cosmology God
Brahe on, 569 knowledge of, 187
Rothmann on, 571 nature and, 196
geocentrism, 581, 602, 693, 721 nature of, 184, 189
church fathers and, 699 Word of, 722–726, 727
Kepler and, 704 God, condescension to humanity, 169.
Newton and, 495 See also accommodation, principle of
Psalm 19 and, 704, 721 God, Scripture and modern science,
Wittichius and, 612 363–392
geocentrists, 605 “Godly Feast, The” (Erasmus),
geoheliocentric world system 409–410
of Brahe, 568, 571, 575–576 Goering, Joseph, 377
Rothmann’s reaction to, 571, 572 Golinski, Jan, on history of science,
geokinetic system, 637, 642, 643, 698, 400
707, 723 Grafton, Anthony, 202–203, 433
geometrical demonstrations, 571–572 Grand Duchess Christina, Castelli and,
geometrism, 290, 704 711
geostatic systems, 627, 638, 642–643 Grant, Edward
Finocchiaro on, 711 Medieval Cosmos, 682
Joshua passage and, 642–643 on two books, 277
in Scripture, 638, 642–643 Great Instauration, Bacon, Francis on,
Gerard of Cremona, 220 321

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Gregory of Nyssa heavenly bodies, 563, 568, 723, 726

Ambrose and, 108 al-Baydāw on, 259–260, 259n66
Apologia in Hexaemeron, 105, 157 Elementa on, 566
on biblical interpretation, 157, Maestlin on, 209
157n43 movement of, Aquinas on, 239
on Christ the Logos, 164 movement of, Pereira on, 673,
De opificium hominum, 106 674–675, 676
Against Eunomius, 105 Heelan, Patrick
on Genesis, 101 on interpretation in science, 10
On the Making of Humans (De opificio Space-Perception and the Philosophy of
hominis), 105–106 Science, 10–11
on nature, 109–111 Heidanus, Abraham, humanist-
on senses of Scripture, 105 philological tradition of, 608
Grosseteste, Robert, 195 heliocentric cosmology, Rothmann and,
on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, 220 570–573, 581
biography of, 220n5 heliocentrism, 494, 499, 630, 703
Grotius, Hugo accommodation, principle of, 610n67,
de Laet on, 437–438 722
De origine gentium Americanarum Copernicus and, 698–700
dissertatio, 437 Descartes and, 611
on Preadamite theory, 437 Foscarini on, 705, 707
Guide to the Perplexed (Maimonides), 531, Kepler on, 703
535–536, 552, 555 Newton on, 514
Gulick, John, 12 opposition to, 729
Gundissalinus, Dominic, 220 Peucer on, 565
Scripture, reconciliation with, 495
had th traditions, 249 heliocentrists, 605
Hagar-Sarah, Paul (Apostle) on, 152 Hellenic world, 691–692
Ham, curse on, 5 Hellenistic tradition, 249, 249n5, 251
Hapsburg rule, Dutch revolt against, Helsius, Antonius, rejection of
410 Praeadamitae, 441
hard heaven, Rothmann on, 572, 574 Henry of Ghent
Harmonice Mundi (Kepler), 285 nature of God and, 196
Harrison, Peter University of Paris, condemnation of
on allegory, 367 Aristotle, 194
on ambiguity of Scripture, 378 Henry of Langenstein on celestial realm,
Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural 420n103
Science, 326 heresy, Galileo and, 631–632, 656
on modern science, rise of, 341–359, heretics, Tertullian on, 157n39
363–369 hermeneutics, 504n42, 691–730. See also
on natural order, 363 biblical interpretation
on nature symbolism, 382 of accommodation, 491–528, 710
on Protestant literalism, 382 Augustine on, 121
on Protestant Reformation, 381, 382, Bible and, 349, 524–528
388 biblical interpretation and, 349
on Protestant Reformers, 376–377, defined, 341
381 exegesis and, 628–629
on quadriga, 365 Jewish philosophy and, 531–558
on typology, 383 limited scriptural authority, principle
Harvey, William of, 628, 629, 638–639
on blood and spirit in human body, literal sense of Scripture and, 349
314–315 metahermeneutics, 628, 655
Hauksbee, Francis Jr., 495n12 modern science and, 543, 546
Healy, Nicholas, on lectio divina, 222 natural philosophy and, 524–528

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of natural world, 342, 353–358 House of Orange, 72

of nature and science, 275–296 Hugh of St. Cher, on Jacob’s ladder,
priority of demonstration, principle 372
of, 628, 655 Hugh of St. Victor
priority of Scripture, principle of, 648 on allegory, 346
Protestantism and, 349–353 biblical interpretation of, 185, 346
Reformation and, 349–353 contemplation, on objects of, 346
reformers and, 341–359 on nature, 189n43
of Rothmann, 573 on two books, 346
Spinoza and, 546–557 human art
Trinitarian, 519n94 Art of Rhetoric and, 324
Hesiod, 55, 61 as literal technology, 235–236
Hesse, Mary, on metaphor in science, techné as, 323–324, 332
10 human formation, Augustine on, 136
Heurnius, Otto, 436 human intellect, 304
Hexaemeron, 85–86, 102–111 humanism, 181n2, 326
Hexaemeron (Ambrose), 105, 106–107, biblical, 203–205
108 described, 210
hexameral idiom, 478–484 Protestantism and, 400–401, 402
Heyd, Michael, 358 Renaissance and, 180, 198–203
on Jesuit science, 357 humanist-philological tradition, 608
Science in Context, 357 humanist readings of Scripture,
Hill, Christopher, 257 210–212, 213
Hilpertius, rejection of Praeadamitae, human nature
441 church fathers on, 169
Hippocrates, Valles on, 416–417 Zabbarella on, 207
Historia Ecclesiastica (History of the Church) Hyperaspisticon (Giese), 700
(Eusebius), 63 Hypotheses astronomicae (Peucer), 565–566
Historia Natural y Moral des las India (de
Acosta), 667–668 Ibn Ezra, Abraham, 522, 552
History of Animals (Aristotle), 103 Idea of the Holy, The (Otto), 693
Hobbs, Thomas Il Saggiatore (Galileo), 281
Leviathan, 431 immortality, 206–207
Holy Congregation of the Index, decree Incarnate Logos, 89, 164-165
of 1616, 710. See also Index incarnation, 89, 348n23
Holy Office. See Catholic Church Peri Archôn (Origen) on, 51
Holy Scriptures. See Scripture Index, 706n49, 710
“Holy Triangle,” Czepko on, 289–290 anti-Copernican decree, 633, 640,
Homer, 55, 61 650, 656, 657–658
Homilies on the Hexaemeron (Basil), 147 Copernicus and, 710, 715
Hooke, Robert, 391 Foscarini and, 710, 715
on the book of nature, 385–386 Zuñiga and, 710
on Mundane Egg, 477 Index of Prohibited Books, 595n10
Hooykaas, Reijer Ingoli, Francesco, 632–636
Religion and the Rise of Modern Science, 14 biblical interpretation of, 635
Horkey, Martin on Copernicanism, 633–636,
A Very Short Excursion Against the Sidereal 654–655
Messenger, 630 on Copernicus’s Revolution, 633
Hornius, Georg, 436 De situ et qiete terrae contra copernici
Arca Noae, 445 systema disputatio, 351–352
Hortensius, Martinus “Disputation on the Location and
on Clavius, 667 Rest of the Earth Against the
Speech on the Dignity and Utility of the System of Copernicus,” 632–633,
Mathematical Sciences, 666–667 654

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on Joshua passage, 634–635 natural philosophy, 681

Roman Inquisition and, 633, 715 Protestants, debate with, 682
Initia Doctrinae Physicae (Melanchthon), Jesuit science, 357
565–566, 590, 598 Jewish philosophy, 531–558
in principio, 241–242 Job, 418, 710
Inquisition, 494n11, 632, 640–641. Zuñiga on, 523n115
See also Roman Inquisition John of Salisbury, 186, 220
Galileo censure of by Ingoli, 715 John Paul II (Pope), Galileo trial and, 6
In sphaeram Joannis de Sacro Bosco Joshua passage, 557n96
Commentarius (Clavius), 672 Abravanel on, 556n93
instant, the, Gersonides on, 539–540 Campanella on, 654
intellectual love of God Copernicanism and, 632
Maimonides on, 43, 44 diurnal motion of Earth and,
Spinoza on, 54 642–643
interpretation Foscarini on, 639–640
language as, 11 Galileo on, 631, 642, 643, 655,
vision as, 10 714–715
interpretation of natural sciences, 9–11 geokinetic system and, 643
interpretation of Scripture geostatic systems and, 642–643
Aristotelian tradition of, 19 Gersonides on, 556, 556n93
in Calvinism, 384 Ingoli on, 634–635
Inverse-Square Law Kepler on, 595, 704
of Newton, 499 Maimonides on, 556
Irenaeus of Lyons, biblical interpretation Melanchthon on, 590–591, 593
of, 90, 93, 153, 167 primum mobile, 643
Islam, 249, 252–254 Ptolemaic model and, 714
Islamic disciplines, 249 Rheticus on, 702
Islamic exegesis, accommodation and, solar rotation and, 643
28 Spinoza on, 555–557, 557n96
Israel, Jonathan, 606–607 Judaism
Radical Enlightenment, 445 modern science and, 543–546
on Spinoza, 445–446 philosophical interpretation of, 56–57
Israel, Manasseh ben, 549
Italian Aristotelians, 207 kalām, 251, 254–260
Italian Renaissance, humanism and, 199 Kashshāf (al-Zamakhshar ), on evil, 270
Kechel, Samuel Karl, 611
Jacob’s ladder, 371–372 Keill, John, on Mundane Egg, 475
Jaki, Stanley L., 118n2 Kelter, Irving
Jerome, Old Testament interpretation on Jesuit mathematical astronomy,
and, 211 358
Jesuit Collegio Romano, 356, 357, on Jesuits and Copernicanism, 684
682–684 kenotic cosmology, 171–172
anti-Copernicanism, 681–682 Kepler, Johannes, 8, 206, 208, 494,
Jesuits at, 684 703–705, 723
Pereira at, 699–670 on accommodation, principle of,
Jesuit mathematical astronomy, Kelter 594–595
on, 358 Advice to Astronomers, 597
Jesuits, 710n67. See also Society of Jesus Advice to Idiots, 597, 705
biblical exegesis, 665–686 Astronomiae pars optica, 594
on biblical interpretation, 665–686 Astronomia Nova, 276, 284–285, 522,
Copernicanism and, 672, 684 522n114, 590, 593-594, 703
Jesuit syllabus of 1599, 682 on astronomy, 286, 704
mathematical school at Antwerp, 673 on the Bible readings, 596
on mathematical sciences, 665–686 biblical interpretation and, 385

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biblical texts and, 281 La Mettrie, Julien de, 36

on Brahe’s system, 597 Lanfranc, 182
confessional identity and, 212 language, 691–730
on Copernicanism, 585–602, 703 Adamic, Perion on, 306
cosmology of, 280–287, 294, 295 Adamic, recovering, 303–317
De Revolutionibus, defense of, 599 Adamic, Wilkins on, 306
on Ecclesiastes 1, 704 ambiguity of, 378–382
Epitome of the Copernican Astronomy, Augustine on, 128, 363–364, 369–370
286–287, 633 book of nature and, 307–309,
geocentrism and, 290, 704 322–323
Harmonice Mundi, 285 divine, 302–317
on heliocentrism, 703 figurative, 498
on Joshua passage, 595, 704 Foscarini on, 707–708
Melanchthon and, 595 human, 302–317
Mysterium Cosmographicum, 285–287, as interpretation, 11
354, 594–595, 598–599 Paracelsus on, 308–309
To objections concerning the authority of the post-Babylonian, 303–305, 306
pious, 597 postlapsarian, 306
on phenomenalism, 722 prelapsarian, 301, 303, 309,
as Phillipist, 593n20 313–315
on physical world, 596 relative and absolute, 500, 517–519,
on providential plan, 596–597, 598 526–525
on Psalm 19, 704 religious, 113
Rudolf II and, 594 of symbolism, 502–503
on senses, deception of, 594 Lansbergen, Philip
on Sun, motion of, 595 on biblical interpretation, 384
Tübingen University and, 593 on Copernicanism, 605
on world plan, 601 la Peyrère, Isaac, 429–447
Kircher, Athanasius, 683 on artifacts, 435
Mundus subterraneus, 356 on biblical authority, 431
Waddell on, 356–357 on chronology, 435
Kitâb al-urûf (Book of Letters) (al-Fārāb ), Dutch Intellectual context, 433–438
on religion and philosophy, 67 on the Flood, 462
knowledge Grafton on, 433
Bacon, Francis on, 320 on New World inhabitants, 437
Evarigus on, 162 Pope Alexander VII and, 431
of nature, 188, 189 Praeadamitae, 429–433, 435, 438–439,
prelapsarian, 305–306, 308, 313–314, 441, 442
318, 322 on Tomoi, 434
as sapientia, 182n9 latitudinarian ministers, 609
as scientia, 182n9 law
speculative, 182 natural, 138–139
knowledge, apologetic function of, natural, Maximus the Confessor on,
128–132 155–156
Kuhn, Thomas, on biblical natural, Melanchthon on, 585–590
interpretation, 10 written, Maximus the Confessor on,
Kulturkampf, 621 155–156
Law, Muslim, 35–56
Lactantius, 699, 699n19, 701, 728 Law of Moses. See also Mosaic Law;
on Earth as a sphere, 597 nomoi
Lagalla, Giulio Cesare Maimonides on, 43
On the Phenomena in the Orb of the Moon, Philo of Alexandria on, 47, 64–65
630–631 Laws (Plato)
Lamb, Matthew, on Aquinas, 223 nomoi in, 55, 61–62, 76

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laws, moral liberal disciplines, John of Salisbury on,

Melanchthon on, 586–587 186
Le Clerc, Jean, on allegory, 375 Literal Commentary on Genesis, A,
lectio divina, 24, 182, 184, 222 (Augustine), 118
Lee, Richard, on sacra doctrina, 229n31 literal-historical interpretation, 373
Lefèvre d’Étaples, 305, 373–374 literal interpretation of the book of
Leibniz, Gottfried, correspondence with nature, 317–325
Clarke, 498 literal-prophetic interpretation,
Leiden University, 432, 608 373
anatomical theatre of, 432 literal sense of Scripture, 98, 99, 349,
Cartesian philosophy and, 610 365, 372
Descartes and, 610 Luther on, 349
du Bois at, 611 Pereira on, 670, 686
Wittichius as chair of theology, 613 Peri Archôn (Origen) on, 65
Leigh, Edward, on post-Babylonian literal technology, human art as,
languages, 306 235–236
Lemnius, Levinus Lochner, Johannes
biography of, 402 Disquisitiones mathematicae de controversiis
on botanical knowledge and et novitatibus astronomicis, 631–632
Scripture, 423 Loci communes (Melanchthon), 208
Clear Explanation of the Comparisons and loci theologici, 669
Parables Concerning Herbs and Trees logic
Which Are Selected from the Bible, dialectics of, 182–183
398 rhetoric and, Melanchthon on,
Concerning Herbs and Trees, 403, 208
403n28, 410–412, 413 rhetoric and, Ramus on, 207
on Exodus, 409 rhetoric and, Talon on, 208
Mosaic physics of, 392–425 logoi, 155–156, 163–164, 170, 172
on Paschal lamb, 407 Logos, 155–156, 170. See also Christ
on Passover meal, 407 Christ as, 53, 65
on plants in the Bible, 404–412 Christian philosophers on, 65–66
on wild lettuce, 407–409 incarnation of, 89
on wormwood, 405–407 Origen of Alexandria on, 65–66,
Leo XIII (Pope), Providentissimus Deus, 153–154
647 Philo of Alexandria on, 47, 50–51
Le Opere di Galileo Galilei (Favaro), 705, logos of gold, 161
716n97 Lohr, Charles, 191
Lerner, Michel-Pierre, 650, 651n90 Lombard, Peter
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 36 Aquinas and, 223
Lettera . . . (Foscarini), 522n114, 705–710, Book of Sentences, 183, 184, 199, 221,
706n49, 715, 728 233n44, 236, 401
Lettera Sopra l’opinione de’ Pittagorici e del criticism of, 222
Copernico (Foscarini), 522 four books of, 221
Letter on . . . the Earth’s Motion (Foscarini), scriptural study and, 221–223
523n115, 637–640, 654 Lomonosov, Mikhail, 495n12
Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina Lorin, Jean, 678
(Galileo), 22, 142, 285, 351, 513, 592, on astronomy, 681
631–632, 641–647, 654, 665, 710, Commentary on Acts, 679
713–714 Commentary on Deuteronomy, 680
Levering, Matthew, on metaphysics, Commentary on Ecclesiastes, 679
230n36 Commentary on Letters, 680
Leviathan (Hobbs), 431 Commentary on Leviticus, 680
liberal arts, 181, 183. See also artes Commentary on Numbers, 680
liberales Commentary on Psalms, 680

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Commentary on Wisdom of Solomon, 680 Dalâlat al-â’irîn (Guide to the Perplexed),

on Galileo, 681 43
mathematical sciences, 681 Eight Chapters, 43
on Zuñiga, 672 on excommunication, 547
Lorini, Niccoló on Genesis, 536–538
Galileo, attack on, 631, 641–647 Guide to the Perplexed, 531, 535–536,
Roman Inquisition and, 632 552, 555
Lubac, Henri de, 151,181, 185 on intellectual love of God, 43, 44
Luther, Martin, 342, 344, 353, 359 on Joshua passage, 556
on accommodation, principle of, on Law of Moses, 43
348 on miracles, 555–556
on Adamic language, 306 Newton interest in, 522
allegory, censure of, 347 on relation between God and time,
on authorial intent, 374 536–537
on the book of nature, 306 on religion and philosophy, 61
Christological sense of Scripture, 373, Spinoza and, 552
374 Mairan, Dortous de, 473
on Copernicanism, 630 majāz, defined, 254
on The Fall, 314, 315, 327 Manetti, Gianozzo, 204
on Jacob’s ladder, 372 Manichaeism
on literal sense of Scripture, 349 Augustine on, 119n7, 120n8
Melanchthon and, 586 described, 119
on papacy interpretation of Scripture, Genesis and, 119, 129–130, 131
211 Manichees, 129
Protestants, alliances with, 585–586 Augustine and, 127, 168
on Scripture, 343, 347, 373 Genesis and, 126
Lutheranism, factions of, 593n20 rejected by Augustine, 276
Lutherans Maresius, Samuel
alliances with Anabaptists, 585 rejection of Praeadamitae, 441
biblical interpretation and, 212 Voetius and, 622
confessional statements and, 212 Markschies, Christoph, on Gnosticism,
on Copernicus, 589 91
Lyell, Charles, 472 Martini, Martino
Atlas sinensis, 444
macrocosm-microcosm correlation, Sinicae historiae, 444
288–289 mathematicae mixtae, 666
Madrigal, Alfonso de, on senses of mathematicae purae, 666
Scripture, 372 mathematical sciences, 665–686
Maelcote, Odo astronomy, 357
on astronomy, 679 biblical interpretation and,
at festa Galileana, 681 666–672
on Galileo, 678–679 Jesuits and, 665–686
Maestlin, Michael, on heavenly bodies, Lorin on, 681
209 Scientific Revolution and, 685
Magisterial Reform of Lutheranism, Society of Jesus and, 668–669
585, 586 theology and, 666–672
Maimonides, 531–533, 546, 557 mathematics
Albo on, 541–542 Caccini on, 631
al-Fārāb and, 38n11 Copernicus on, 699
on Aristotle, 536 mathematical Platonism, 205
biblical interpretation and, Melanchthon on, 587
532–533 Newton on nature and, 281
on creation ex nihilo, 552 mathematicus, described, 666–667
Crescas on, 537–538 Maurer, Armand, 228n28

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Maximus the Confessor metahermeneutics, 628, 655

on biblical interpretation, 154, Metaphysical Thoughts (Spinoza), 73
155–156 metascriptural methodology, defined,
contemplation, ten modes of, 165 638–629
on created being, 165 Meteorology (Aristotle), 455
on creation and Scripture, 155–156 Meyer, Lodewijk. See Meijer, Lodewijk
on incarnate Logos, 164–165 Middle Ages, ambiguity of nature in,
on natural law, 155–156 378–382
tenfold scheme of, 165–166 Milhamot Hashem (Wars of the Lord)
on theôria graphikê, 165 (Gersonides), 539
on theôria physikê, 165 Minnis, A.J. “Aristotelian Prologue,”
on written law, 155–156 192
McMullin, Ernan, on priority of miracles
Scripture, 648 Maimonides on, 555–556
medieval Catholicism, 341, 349 Spinoza on, 555
Medieval Cosmos (Grant), 682 Mirandola, Pico della, 544
Meijer, Lodewijk Miscellaneous Discourses Concerning the
Cartesians on, 622 Dissolution and Changes of the World
Philosophia S. Scripturae interpres, 431, (Ray), 463n25
621 monastic theology, 182, 184
Spinoza, in defense of, 74 monks, 159, 160
Voetius on, 621 Moon, 499, 508, 517
Melanchthon, Philip, 11–12, 206, 282, Moor, Bernhardinus de, on biblical
342, 373, 384, 564, 567 interpretation, 384
on astronomy, 585–590, 599 Moore, James
biblical interpretation and, 374, 375, Post-Darwinian Controversies, 5
384 More, Henry, 460, 461–462
civil disturbances, response to, 586 Moreh Nevukhim (Guide to the Perplexed)
on Copernicanism, 589–590 (Maimonides). See Guide to the Perplexed
Copernicus, objections to, 585–602 Mosaic Creation, 502–503, 505, 508
on Earth’s movement, 590–592 Mosaic Deluge, 459f 2
on Ecclesiastes 1, 591 Mosaic Law, 35–36, 693, 717. See also
Initia Doctrinae Physicae, 565–566, 590, Law of Moses
598 Averroes on, 35–36
on Joshua passage, 590–591, 593 d’Holbach on, 53
Kepler and, 595 Mosaic philosophy, 390–391
Loci communes, 208 Mosaic physics, 439
on logic and rhetoric, 208 defined, 392
Luther and, 586 history of, 398
on mathematics, 587 of Lemnius, 392–425
on moral laws, 586–587 of Valles, 392–425
on natural law, 585–590 Moses, 483
on providence, 585–590, 598 Burnet on, 506, 510
on Psalm 19, 590–591, 593 Calvin on, 348
on Psalm 104, 591, 593 Campanella on, 716–718
at Wittenberg University, 586, 588 Chrysostom on, 718
Melito of Sardis, On Pascha, 152 Colet on, 726
Menetho, Tomoi, 434 Daneau on, 348
Mennonites, du Bois and, 611 education of, 48
Menochio, Giovanni-Stefano importance compared to Peter, 464,
Explanations of the Literal Sense of the 470
Whole Bible, 671 Newton on, 500–501, 502–503,
Mersenne, Marin, 278, 391 507–508, 510–511
Merton Thesis, 357 Philo of Alexandria on, 48, 64, 97

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Plato on, 48 Mundane Egg and, 478

Rheticus on, 700–701 of Newton, 493
Motte, Andrew, 493n6 Pereira on, 671
Muhammad, 253 natural theology, 29–30
Mulerius, Nicolaus natural world
on geocentrists, 605 exegesis of, 400
on heliocentrists, 605 hermeneutics and, 342, 353–358
mumia defined, 283–284 St. Bonaventure on, 346
Mundane Egg, 470–478, 485 nature. See also book of nature; two
Earth as, 472–473, 474f 3 books
Hooke on, 477 alphabet of, 300–302, 319, 322
Keill on, 475 ambiguity of, 378–382
natural philosophy and, 478 Ambrose of Milan on, 106–107,
paradisiacal globe as, 470, 472–473 110
Whiston on, 475–477 Aristotle and, 191
Mundus subterraneus (Kircher), 356 as autonomous principle, 189–190
Muñoz, on heavens, 419 Bacon, Francis on, 316
Muslim Law, 35–36 Basil of Caesarea on, 99
Muslim theologians, 240 biblical interpretation, 125–128,
Mu tarili kalām, 254 147–172, 179–213
Mu tarili tafs r, 254 biblical truth in, 287–290
Mu tazil position on God as book of Theory of the Earth, 472,
al-N sāb r , rejection of, 267 475
Mysterium Cosmographicum (Kepler), Clement, interpretation by, 149–150
285–287, 354, 594–595, 598–599 contemplation of (theôria physikê), 150,
153, 162, 163, 165
Nag Hammadi, treatises on Gnosticism, contextualized reading of, 26–27
90n13 divine contemplation and, 194–195
Narratio prima (Rheticus), 630, 699, doctrine of ( physiologia), 149
699n22 epistemology of, 280
Nathan’s prophecy, Nicholas of Lyra Erasmus on, 210
on, 371 Eriugena on, 190
natural contemplation, Evagrius on, Galileo on, 355, 356, 385
162–163 God and, 196
natural knowledge Gregory of Nyssa on, 109–111
biblical interpretation and, 117–144, Hexameron, homilies on, 102–111
399–402 Hugh of St. Victor on, 189n43
functions of, 119 intelligibility of, 187n35
natural phenomena, 328n59 knowledge of, 188, 189
natural philosophy, 117–144. See also as knowledge of God, 187, 195,
philosophy 382–387
apologetic function of, 119, 128–132 Origen of Alexandria and, 98,
biblical interpretation and, 458, 471 149–150
Burnet on, 468–470 as parallel source of scientia and
Campanella on, 717 sapientia, 305, 307
Cartesian, 467, 482 patristic views of, 153
eliminative function of, 119, 128–129, Philo of Alexandria on, 96–97
132–135 Ray on, 354–355
explanatory function of, 119, as revelation, 180
135–140 role of, 307–309
Galileo on, 173, 354, 712, 713 scholastic theology and, 187–190,
hermeneutics of accommodation and, 187n35
524–528 science and, hermeneutics of,
Jesuits and, 681 275–296

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Scripture, interpreting, 179–213 Copernicanism and, 494, 495n12,

sermons on by Ambrose of Milan, 527
106 on Daniel passage, 497
Sparrow on, 386 on demons, 524
of universals, 196–197, 196n84 on early church leaders, 504n38
nature and Scripture on Earth, 499
apologetics in England, 291–293 on Earth movement, 512–513, 515
in England, 275–296 on epistemological dualism, 524
Ephraem on, 85n1, 86, 111, 154 on Eve, 502
Eriugena on, 190 General Scholium, 491n2, 492–493,
Genesis commentaries, 93–101 493n7, 498, 500, 518, 519n94,
Gnosticism and, 90 521, 524
interpreting, 685–686 on Genesis Creation, 502–503,
two witnesses to Creator, 85–113 504–512
nature of things, 188, 189, 189n41 on geocentrism, 495
nature of universals, 196–197, 196n84 on God, the term, 500–501, 519n94
Nehmad ve-Na im (Gans), 546 on God’s omnipresence, 518n91
Neoplatonism, 223, 391, 545 on heliocentric system, 494, 495, 499,
Aristotle’s theory of time, criticism of, 514
534, 538, 544 Inverse-Square Law of, 499
Chenu on, 223n15 on language, 498, 500–503
Christian, 206 library of, 520–523
Neoplatonists on mathematics and nature, 281
condemnation of Gnostics, 90 on the Moon, 499
prisca scientia, 305 on Moses, 500–501, 502–503,
prisca theologia, 305 507–508, 510–511
Nesteruk, Alexei, 172 natural philosophy of, 493
New and Old Doctrine . . . on Preventing on Noachic Flood, 510–511
the Reckless Use of . . . Sacred Scripture on the Old Testament, 503
(Galileo), 647 Optice, 499
New Theory of the Earth (Whiston), Opticks, 279, 499
463n25, 505n43, 516n85 on planets, 492, 493
Newton, Isaac, 385 Principia mathematica, 491–494, 491n2,
on accommodation, hermeneutics of, 499, 500, 513, 516–524, 520,
491–528 526–527
on accommodation, principle of, 501, prophetic interpretation and,
507, 510 496–497
“An Account of the Systeme of the on relative and absolute language of
World described in Mr Newton’s Scripture, 500, 517–519, 524–525
Mathematical Principles of Scholium on the Definitions, 492,
Philosophy,” 513 500, 513n75, 516–517, 518,
on Anaxagoras, 499 526
anti-Trinitariansim of, 503, 518–519, on scriptural and theological truths,
525 498
apocalyptic concerns of, 463 Scripture, astronomical language of,
Bentley, correspondence with, 513 512–516
on biblical interpretation, 493, on senses in Scripture, 500
494–504 on Solomonic Temple, 460
on Book of Revelation, 495–496 on sphericity and immobility of
on Burnet, 475n60, 481 Earth, 514
Burnet, correspondence with, on the Sun, 508, 517
504–512, 504n42, 513 on symbolism, 502–503
on Christ, 503, 519n94, 519n95 teleology and, 509–510
Classical Scholia, 499 two books and, 495, 496

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New World inhabitants, la Peyrère on, On the Hexaemeron (Basil of Caesarea), 93

437 On the Incarnation of the Word (Athanasius
Nicene Creed, 52n64 of Alexandria), 89
Nicholas of Lyra, 185, 211, 350 On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis
on biblical interpretation, 185, 349, (Augustine), 653, 695
457 On the Making of Humans (De opificio
on Jacob’s ladder, 371–372 hominis) (Gregory), 105–106
on literal sense of Scripture, 347, 349 On the Making of the World, De Opificio
on Nathan’s prophecy, 371 Mundi (Philo of Alexandria), 94–95
on senses of Scripture, 371 On the Phenomena in the Orb of the Moon
Nicolas of Cusa, 205 (Lagalla), 630–631
Noachic Flood. See Deluge; Flood On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
Newton on, 510–511 (Copernicus), 629–630, 656
Noah, 5, 152 On the Six Days (In Hexameron), 101
nomoi, 55, 61–62. See also Law of Moses; On the Unity of the Intellect (Aquinas),
Mosaic Law 276
Notae ad dissertationem Hugonis Grotii Opera Logica (Zabbarella), 207
(de Laet), 437 Optice (Newton), 499
Nott, Josiah, on ethnology, 22 Opticks (Newton), 279, 499
Nous, 47, 50 Oracles of Reason (Blount), 483
nova of 1572, 209 Or Adonai (Light of the Lord) (Crescas),
Novum Instrumentum (Erasmus), 204 535–538
Novum Organum (Bacon), 318–320, 332 Oratio de studiis mathematicis (Brahe), 567
numerology, attack by Saumaise, Oresme, Nicole, 194
434–435 Origen of Alexandria, 90
allegory and, 343, 344
Observationum stellarum fixarum liber primus on the Bible, 93
(Rothmann), 570, 573, 574 biblical interpretation and, 111–112
“Of Studies” (Bacon), 321n39 on Christ, 51, 51n64
Of The Things Which Are Written About Christianity and, 65
Natural Philosophy in the Holy Scriptures Commentary on the Song of Songs, 150
(Valles), 398, 412–413, 415, 422n112, Daley on, 148
425 Davies on, 148
Of the True Way to Interpret Scripture (de De principiis, 148
Acosta), 668 On First Principles (De Principiis), 98
Ogilvie, Brian, 210, 411 on Gnosticism, 98, 149
Old Testament on Heracleon, 94
Chrysostom, interpretation of, 211 on literal Scripture, 223n17
Hebrew text of, 443–444 on logikoi, 163–164
interpretation by Jerome, 211 on Logos, 153–154
Newton on, 503 on Logos, 65–66
On a number of gems, especially those which on Marcionism, 149
St. John the Apostle mentioned in Revelation nature and, 98, 149–150
(Rueus), 398n8 on Noah story, 152
On Baptism (Tertullian), 158 Old Testament interpretation and,
On First Principles (De Principiis) (Origen 211
of Alexandria) Peri Archôn, 51, 65
on Scripture, 98 Porphyry on, 100
On Genesis Against the Manichees on religion and philosophy, 60
(Augustine), 695 on revelation, 151n18
On Genesis Literally Interpreted (Augustine), on Scripture, 170
695 Simonetti on, 98
On Pascha (Melito of Sardis), 152 on Song of Songs, 98
“On the Eight Thoughts” (Evagrius), Osiander, Andreas, 280–281, 589,
160 700

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Otten, Willemien Commentorium et disputationum in Genesim,

Anthropology of Johannes Scottus Eriugena, tomi quatuor, 710n67
The, 87 on the Flood, 462
on nature and Scripture, 191 on heavenly bodies, 673, 674–675,
Otto, Rudolf 676
Idea of the Holy, The, 693 on literal sense of Scripture, 670, 686
Ovid, 326 on natural philosophy, 671
on stars, first magnitude, 673,
pagan writings, 182 674–675, 676
Paine, Thomas, 30 on Zuñiga, 672
Paladanus, Bernardus, artifact collector, Pereius, Benedictus. See Pereira, Benito
436 Pereyra, Benito. See Pereira, Benito
Pamphilus of Caesarea Peri Archôn (Origen)
Apology of Origen, 51n64 on incarnation, 51
Paracelsian fire, 283 on literal Scripture, 65
Paracelsus, 283, 294, 308–309, 313 Perion, Joachim
paradise, 453–455, 478, 480, 481 on Adamic language, 306
paradisiacal Earth, 451–486, 473n56 Periphyseon (Eriugena), 87–88
paradisiacal globe, 475, 476–478, “Personal Knowledge” (Polanyi), 10
481–483, 485 Peter (apostle), 464, 470
as Mundane Egg, 470, 472, 473 Peter IV of Aragon (King), 535
Park, Katherine, 327 Petrine Theory of the Earth, 458–466,
Wonders and the Order of Nature, 326 479, 482
Parmenides (Plato), on forms, 47n37 Peucer, Caspar, 563–581
Parmenides, on celestial realm, 418–419 on afterlife, 579
particularity, 8–9 astronomy chair at Wittenberg, 564
particulars, study of, 326–327 on the Bible and celestial matter,
Paschal lamb, Lemnius on, 407 282
Passover meal, Lemnius on, 407 on biblical patriarchs, 282
Passover story, 152 biblical texts and, 281
patristic exegesis Brahe, correspondence on fl uid
of Genesis, 166 heavens, 575–580
Young on, 151 on Copernican cosmology, 563,
patristic hermeneutics 565–567
de Lubac on, 151 on cosmology and Scripture, 563–581
patristic interpretation of creation, cosmology of, 280–287
167–169 on Earth’s movement, 565–566
patristic period, 147–172 Elementa doctrinae de circulis coelestibus et
patristic theologians on God’s primo motu, 564–565, 566, 592–593
condescension to humanity, 169 on fl uid heavens, 575–580
Patrum sententias, 221 on heliocentrism, 565
Paul (Apostle), 152 on human knowledge, 578–579
Paul of Venice, 194 Hypotheses astronomicae, seu theoriae
Payne, Buckner H., on accommodation, planetarum, 565–566
28 incarceration of, 567
Peace of Westphalia, 609 on nova of 1572, 209
Pecham, John, 195 as Phillipist, 593n20
pedagogical-political program, 57, on philosophical reasoning, 578–579
59–65, 69, 75, 77 waters above the firmament, 575–580
Pereira, Benito at Wittenberg University, 281–282,
on biblical exegesis, 670 564
at Collegio Romano, 699–670 phenomenalism
Commentary on Genesis, 671, 673–674, accommodation, principle of and,
680 708, 723

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biblical hermeneutics and, 723 Physics, 193–194

Foscarini on, 708 physiologia, 149
Kepler on, 722 Physiologus, 370, 386
Phillip II of Spain, 609 Ambrose on, 158–159
Valles and, 412 on nature, 81
Phillipists, 593n20 symbolism in, 380–381, 387
philology physis, 189
Bacon, Francis on, 321, 321n39, 323 Pineda, Juan de, 672
Philo of Alexandria (Philo Judaeus), planetary spheres, 563
38n11, 557, 725 planets, Newton on, 492, 493
on Abraham, Hagar and Sarah, 49 plants
on accommodation, language of, Bible and, 403, 404–412
692 Christian doctrines and, 411
Allegorical interpretation of Genesis, 521 Plato, 58, 167, 186, 191
biblical commentaries and, 94–95 al-Fārāb on, 66–67
creation days, numbering of, 89 Apology, 57
De decalogo, 64 on celestial realm, 418–419
De specialibus legibus, 64 on human productivity, 88
double-creation, 94 Laws, 55, 61–62, 76
on Genesis, 89 on Moses, 48
on Law of Moses, 47, 64–65 on nonphilosophers, 76
on literalists, 95–96 Parmenides, 47n37
on Logos, 47, 50–51 political philosophy of, 57, 60
On the Making of the World, De Opificio Republic, 46, 46n37, 55, 58, 61, 69
Mundi, 94–95 Strauss on, 66
on Moses, 48, 64, 97 Theaetetus, 46, 46n37
on nature, 96–97 Timaeus, 46, 47, 88n9
on philosophy, 49, 64 Valles on, 420
Questions on Genesis, 94 Platonic cosmology, 219
on religion and philosophy, 60 Platonic philosophy, Augustine on,
on Septuagint, 89 121
on Sophia, 47, 50 Platonism, 294–295, 544, 545, 724
Philosophia S. Scripturae Interpres (Meijer), allegory and, 345
74, 431, 621 Cambridge, 460, 461n17, 470, 472,
philosophical religion, 29–30 484
philosophical texts Christianity and 39-40
University of Paris and, 192 mathematical, 205
philosophy. See also natural of Middle Ages, symbols and, 379
philosophy Renaissance, 205, 206
apologetic function of, 119 scholars of, 206
Aristotelian, 189, 191–194, 195, Plotinus, 345, 544
206–208, 610, 728 Enneads, 205
Augustinian, Aquinas on, 276 Pluche, Noël Antoine, on the book of
challenges of, 87–92 nature, 386
as foundation of religion, 42–54 Polanyi, Michael
Islam and, Averroes on, 40–41 “Personal Knowledge,” 10
Mosaic, 390–391 Polkinghorne, John, on kenotic
of nature, 618 cosmology, 171–172
Philo of Alexandria on, 49, 64 Polyglot Bible, 204
religion and, 37, 60, 61, 67, 70, Pomponazzi, Pietro
552 ‘double truth’ of, 207n137
Philosophy of the World (William of on immortality, 206–207
Conches), 219n4 Poole, Matthew, on the fl ood, 462
phoenix, legend of, 158 Popkin, Richard, 431, 440

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Porphyry, 100 prophetic interpretation

post-Babylonian languages, Leigh on, Newton and, 496–497
306 proposition 34 of condemnations of
Post-Darwinian Controversies (Moore), 5 1277, 534
Posterior Analytics (Aristotle), 220, 225, proposition 49 of condemnations of
227 1277, 534–535
postlapsarian era, 301 Protestant alliances with Luther,
humankind and, 300 585–586
language and, 306 Protestantism
post-Tridentine Catholicism, 341 biblical interpretation and, 236–237,
potentia absoluta, 196, 197–198 299, 326, 347–353, 722
potentia ordinata, 196, 197–198 catechism and, 287
Praeadamitae (la Peyrère), 429–433, 435, Catholic Church, differences with,
438–439, 441, 442 352–357, 382-384
Saumaise on, 432–433 Copernican system and, 605, 606
Voetius on, 429 divine sovereignty and, 359
Vossius, refutation of, 442 hermeneutics and, 349–353
Praeparatio Evangelica (Preparation to the humanism and, 400–401, 402
Gospel) (Eusebius), 63 in the Netherlands, 606
preaching, 380 Scripture and scientific inquiry, 342
preadamites, la Peyrère on, 433 Protestant Reformation, 117–118, 311,
Preadamite theory, 437 385, 585
predestination, doctrine of, 607 biblical interpretation and, 24–25,
prelapsarian knowledge, 305–306, 308, 180, 210, 211, 213, 376
313–314, 318, 322 Harrison on, 381, 382, 388
prelapsarian language, 301, 303, 309, hermeneutics and, 349–353
313, 315 Protestant Reformers, 373
primum mobile, 643 allegory and, 377
Principia mathematica (Newton), 491n2, biblical interpretation and, 180,
499, 500, 526–527 210–211, 341, 343, 344, 365–369,
Bible in, 491–494, 516–524 372
biblical interpretation in, 517–518 Harrison on, 376–377, 381
on relative and absolute language, on Scripture, 210–211, 341
517–519 theological disagreements of, 382
Principia philosophiae (Descartes), 459, Protestants
470–471, 475, 610 Copernican theory, reactions to,
principium (Augustine), 130, 134 665
principle of accommodation. debate with Jesuits, 682
See accommodation, principle of Protestant theology, Earth movement
Principle of Intrinsic Meaning and and, 605
Truth (PMT) (Spinoza), 554–555 providence
Principle of the Priority of Natural Burnet on, 462n24
Method (PPNM) (Spinoza), 554 Kepler on, 596–597, 598
prisca sapientia, 560–562, 577, 583, 585 Melanchthon on, 585–590, 598
Bentley on, 460 Providentissimus Deus (Pope Leo XIII),
Burnet on, 460, 462, 483, 484 647
Cambridge Platonism and, 461n17, Psalm 19, 724
470, 472 geocentrism and, 704, 721
Croft, repudiation of, 482 Kepler on, 704
Cudworth on, 460 Melanchthon on, 590–591, 593
prisca scientia, Neoplatonist, 305 Rheticus on, 702
prisca theologia, Neoplatonist, 305 Psalm 104, Melanchthon on, 591,
Proclus, 205 593
Prodromus (Steno), 471 Psalms, 100, 519n94

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Pseudo-Dionysius, 205, 224 on consummation, 292–293

psychic/moral sense of Scripture on Descartes, 292
(Origen), 98 ejected from Trinity College, 291–292
Ptolemaic model Miscellaneous Discourses Concerning the
geocentrism, 693 dissolution and Changes of the World,
Joshua passage and, 714 463n25
Ptolemaic system, 495n12 on nature, 354–355
Ptolemaism, 495, 721 Three Physico-Theological Discourses, 292
Ptolemy, Claudius Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of
Almagest, 194 Creation, The, 292
astronomy and, 592, 600 “Reading the Book of Nature in Early
on Earth’s movement, 599–600 Modern Europe” (Daston), 329
Eschinardus on, 358 realm of philosophy, 354
Puerbach, 599 realm of theology, 354
Pythagoras, on celestial realm, 418–419 Redondi, Pietro
Pythagorean cosmology, 706, 706n50 Galileo—Heretic, 6
Pythagorean system, Foscarini on, 706 reform, Catholic Church and, 341
Reformed Erasmianism movement, 608
quadriga, 185, 365, 368–369, 372, Reformed orthodoxy, 436
376–377, 387. See also fourfold Regio, Raphael, On Ovid, 326
interpretation Regiomontanus, 599n34
Bellarmine on, 350 Reinhold, Erasmus, 282, 564
as biblical interpretation, 344–345 on Copernicus, 589
quadrivium, 181n2 at Wittenberg University, 564
Questions on Genesis (Philo of Alexandria), relative and absolute language, 500,
94 517–519, 524–525
Qur ān religion
on blindness, 256–257 as handmaiden on philosophy, 54–69
commentators, 253 philosophy and, 37, 37n11, 60, 61,
God as judge of human conduct, 67, 70
252–253 philosophy as, 42–54
God’s existence and power, philosophical, 35–37
arguments for, 252 Religion and the Rise of Modern Science
kalām-minded commentators, 254–260 (Hooykaas), 14
Qur ān 2:6/7, 249–270 religious reform, 341
Qur ān 2:29, 259 Remonstrants, 607
Qur ān 2:164, 258–259 Renaissance, 544
science-minded commentators, biblical commentaries in, 199
260–269 humanism and, 180, 198–203
scientific readings of, 250 Platonism, 205, 206
twelfth-century, 181
Rabelais, François, 210 Republic (Plato), 46, 58, 69
race, Boardman on, 27 on being just, 46n37
racism, 5 on Homer and Hesiod, 55, 61
Radical Enlightenment (Israel), 445 resurrection, 158, 620
Ramus, Petrus, on logic and rhetoric, Retractiones (Augustine), 126
207 Reuchlin, Johannes, 203
Ranzovium (Rantzau), Henricus, 575 revelation, 180, 224
rationalism, 446 Revius, Jacob, 610, 612
rationes seminales, 130–131, 136–139, Revolutions (Copernicus), 656
167–168 Rheticus, Georg Joachim, 564
Ray, John, 291–293, 357 on accommodation, principle of,
apocalyptic concerns of, 463 700–701, 726
biography of, 291–292 on Augustine, 143, 701

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biblical interpretation of, 702 Rudolf II, Kepler and, 594

on Copernicus, 588–589, 699–700, Rueus, Franciscus
701 On a number of gems, especially those
First Account, 589 which St. John the Apostle mentioned in
on Joshua passage, 702 Revelation, 398n8
on Moses, 700–701 Rule of Faith, 149, 149n5
Narratio prima, 630, 699, 699n22 Rupert of Deutz (Abbot), 185n24, 222
on Psalm 19, 702
at Wittenberg University, 588, 699 sacra doctrina
Rivka, Feldhay, on de Prado and Aquinas and, 219–244
Villalpando, 683–684 Lee on, 229n31
Roman Inquisition, 494. See also as science, 225–235
Inquisition Torrell on, 226n22
Caccini and, 632 Weisheipl on, 226, 226n23
Catholic Church and, 632, Sacred Philosophy (Valles). See Of The
640–641 Things Which Are Written About
Foscarini and, 640 Natural Philosophy in the Holy Scriptures
Galileo and, 632, 640–641 (Valles)
Ingoli commissioned by, 633, 715 Sacred Scripture
Lorini and, 632 Bonaventure on, 183
Rosenzweig, Franz Foscarini on, 707
Star of Redemption, 532 Sacred Theory (Burnet), 505n48
Ross, Alexander Sacrobosco
on Copernicanism, 523n117 Clavius on, 667, 676
Rothmann, Christoph, 563–581, sphaera, 592
593n20 Salusbury, Thomas, 523n115
on astronomy, 570 salvation, 413, 414
Brahe and, 283, 572, 573–575 sapientia, 182n9
on Brahe’s geoheliocentric system, Satan
569 al-Baydāw on, 255, 257–258
on celestial realm, 283 symbols of, 378, 379
on Copernican cosmology, 563 Saumaise, Claude
on cosmology and Scripture, on astrology and numerology,
567–575 434–435
on divine accommodation, De annis climactericis et antiqua astrologia
570–573 diatribe, 434–435
on fl uid heavens, 570–573, 574 de Laet and, 437
on geocentric cosmology, 571 numerology, attack on, 434
geoheliocentric system, reaction to, on Praeadamitae, 432–433
572 Scaliger, Joseph, 432, 433, 442–443
on geometrical demonstrations as De emendatione temporum, 433–434
cosmological truth, 571–572 Thesaurus temporum, 434
on hard heaven, 572, 574 Scandella, Domenico, 20n30
heliocentric cosmology and, 570–573, Scheiner, Christopher, 631–632, 683
581 Scheuchzer, Johann Jakob, 472
hermeneutics of, 573 scholasticism, 181, 181n2
Observationum stellarum fixarum liber criticism of, 200
primus, 570, 573, 574 impact on Jewish philosophy,
on scientific inquiry, 580–581 533–534
on Scripture, 571 reformed, in the Netherlands, 608
at Wittenberg, 570 scholastic theology
Royal Society of London, 12, 321, 322, nature and, 187–190, 187n35
357 twelfth century, 199
Ruderman, David, 545 Scholder, K., 621

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Scholium on the Definitions (Newton), quadriga, 185, 365, 368–369, 372,

492, 500, 513n75, 516–517, 518, 526 376–377, 387
Schuyl, Florentius, in defense of reading of, and the Reformation,
Descartes, 620 210–212
science Rothmann on, 571
Aquinas on, 219–244 senses of, 97–99, 97n32, 105, 365,
Bible and, Williams on, 278 371, 373
biblical interpretation and, 629 senses of, Newton on, 500
kalām vs, al-Baydāw on, 258 tropological (moral) sense, 344
modern, 14, 331, 341–392, 543–546 sealing of hearts, 254–255, 257–258
in Qur ān 2:6/7, 249–270 secular theology
religion and, Westfall on, 291 Funkenstein on, 401
Scripture and, interaction between, Scientific Revolution and, 402
629 Sefer Elim (Delmedigo), 548–549
“Science and the Qur ān “ (Dallal), 260 Sefer ha-Ikkarim (the Book of Principles)
Science in Context (Feldhay & Heyd), 357 (Albo), 541–542
scientia, 182n9, 188, 196 selective concrescence, Whitehead on,
Scientific Revolution, 287, 299, 321n40, 332–333, 332n71
322, 527, 598, 691–730 senses of Scripture, 97–99, 97n32, 105,
accommodation, principle of, 365, 371, 373
698–720 sensus litteralis, 141, 279
mathematical sciences and, 685 sensus plenior, 461, 477
secular theology and, 402 Sentences (Lombard), 183, 184, 199, 221,
Scotus, John Duns, on nature of 233n44, 236
universals, 196–197 Sephardim of Amsterdam, 547
Scriptum super libros Sententiarum (Aquinas), Septuagint, 87, 89, 443
222 Serarius, Nicolaus, 632, 672
scriptural assertions, 641–642, 649, 655 Sharh Miftāh al- ul m (al-Nisaburi), 261
scriptural authority, 350, 431, 627–658, sharî ah, 35, 42
652 Short Treatise (Spinoza), 53
Cartesian philosophy and, 607 Sibiuda, Ramon, on the book of nature,
Foscarini on, 629 346, 353
la Peyrère on, 431 Sidereal Messenger, The (Galileo), 627, 630,
scriptural consensus, Galileo on, 651
644–645 Siderus (Sidereus) nuncius (The Starry
scriptural knowledge, Augustine on, 121 Messenger) (Galileo), 351, 680
scriptural limitation, principle of, Siderus nuncius (The Starry Messenger)
628–629, 638–639 (Galileo), 678, 711
scriptural study, Lombard and, 221–223 Siger of Brabant, 276
Scripture. See also biblical interpretation Significacio, 380
ambiguity of, 378 Simon, Richard, on la Peyrère, 433
anagogical (prophetic) sense of, 344 Simonetti, Manlio
Aquinas on, 190, 223, 276 Biblical Interpretation in the Early Church,
Aristotelian readings of, 23–24 93
astronomical language of, 512–516 on Origen, 98
Christological sense of, 373, 374 sin, 262–264
church fathers on, 166, 351, 644–645 single-truth theory, of Spinoza, 550–552
Copernicanism and, 629–632 Sinicae historiae (Martini), 444
cosmology and, 563–581 Sizzi, Francesco
four senses of, 185 Dianoia astronomica, optica, physica, 351,
as human language, 348 630
nature and, apologetics in England, Smalley, B., 201
291–293 on lectio divina, 184
obscure, Burnet on, 469–470 Snell, Willebrord, 570

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Society of Jesus, 356–357, 681. See also single-truth theory, 550–552

Jesuits Tractatus-Theologico-Politicus (TTP),
Bible, reinterpretation of, 665, 684 70–76, 431, 432, 433, 446–447,
mathematical sciences and, 668–669 551–555, 621
Socinianism, reformed, in the Voetius on, 621
Netherlands, 616–617 spirits, 314–315
Socrates, 57 spiritual sense of Scripture, 97n32,
solar rotation, 643 98–99, 365
sola scriptura, 279, 353, 443 Sprat, Thomas, 12, 321, 389
Song of Solomon, Gersonides, 553 Star of Redemption (Rosenzweig), 532
Song of Songs, 98. See also Commentary on stars
the Song of Songs Augustine on, 675
Sophia, 47, 50 stars, first magnitude
sources and assumptions on The Fall Clavius on, 677
and Tower of Babel, 312t, 313–317 Pereira on, 673–676
Southern, R. W., 187–188, 187n35 stars, fixed number, Clavius on,
Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science 676–678
(Heelan), 10–11 States of Holland and William II of
Sparrow, John, on nature, 386 Orange, 609
speculatio, 183 St. Augustine. See Augustine, Aurelius
speculatio theologorum, 183 St. Bonaventure. See Bonaventure
speculativa, 183 Steneck, Nicholas, 420n103
speculative knowledge, 182 Steno, Nicolaus, 452
speculative theology, 183, 187 on idiom of Augustine, 468
Speech on the Dignity and Utility of the Prodromus, 471
Mathematical Sciences (Hortensius), St. Ephrem. See Ephraem
666–667 Stillingfl eet, Edward (Bishop)
Sphaera (Sacrobosco), 564–565, 592 on the fl ood, 462
spheres, planetary, 563 on prisca sapientia, 460
Spinoza, Baruch, 37, 69–76 Stock, Brian, 346
as atheist, 70, 75 Strauss, Leo, on Plato, 66
biblical interpretation, 546–557, 552 Stromateis (Clement of Alexandria), 149
biography of, 546 on Abraham, Hagar and Sarah, 52
Blyenbergh, letter to, 73 St. Thomas. See Aquinas, Thomas
Calvinist Reformed Church and, sublunar realm, 283, 284
75n151 Summa Theologiae (theologia) (Aquinas),
Cogitata Metaphysica (Metaphysical 184, 185n27, 225, 228, 229, 232–235,
Thoughts), 70 241n67
on Delmedigo, 73 Sun
Ethics, 53–54 motion of, Kepler on, 595
excommunication of, 546–547, Newton on, 508, 517
549–550 Sunspot Letters (Galileo), 627, 632, 651,
on intellectual love of God, 54 714–715
Israel on, 445–446 superferebatur, interpretation of, 131
on Joshua passage, 555–557, 557n96 supralunar realm, 284
Maimonides and, 552 Swammerdam, Jan, 423
Meijer in defense of, 74 symbolism, 363–369, 374–377, 378–382
Metaphysical Thoughts, 73 of allegorical texts, 387–388
on miracles, 555 animal, 378–379, 381
Principle of Intrinsic Meaning and Christ and, 378–379
Truth (PMT), 554–555 Evagrius on, 160–161
Principle of the Priority of Natural language of, 502–503
Method (PPNM), 554 of nature, Harrison on, 382
Short Treatise, 53 Newton on, 502–503

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in Physiologus, 380–381, 387 scholastic, 181–186, 187n35

resurrection, Basil of Caesarea on, Scripture and, 666–672
158 secular, 401, 402
in Scripture, 363–369 speculative, 183, 187
of things in Scripture, 374–377 systematic, Erasmus on, 401
Synod of Dort, 443, 606–607 at University of Oxford, 199
Syrian Christian writers on water, 158 theôria, monks and, 160
Systema Cosmicum (Galileo), 522, theôria graphikê, 150, 165, 170–171
522n114 theôria physikê, 150, 153, 162, 163, 165,
systematic theology, 401 170–171
Theoricae planetarum, 564
tafs r, 250n8 theory of causality
of al-N sāb r , 250n7 Aristotle, 192
kalām-minded, 254–260 theory of interpretation, 370n22,
Talmud, 44, 692–693 374
Talon, Omar, on logic and rhetoric, theory of signs, 345
208 Theory of the Earth, 451–486
techné, 323–324, 332. See also Theory of the Earth (Burnet), 452–457,
technologies of the literal 462, 466, 477, 486. See also Telluris
technologies of the literal, 329, 331–333. Theoria Sacra
See also techné Aristotle, contrast to, 455
teleology, Newton and, 509–510 Christ in, 463
Telluris theoria sacra (Sacred Theory of the on the Flood, 453–455, 459f2
Earth) (Burnet), 504, 505n43. See also frontispiece to, 453, 454f1, 455, 459,
Theory of the Earth (Burnet) 463, 464, 465, 473
temporal beginning, 242 idioms in, 451–486
temptation, 159 interpretation of idioms in,
terminist logic, 197 466–470
terrestrial realm, 421–422 on Peter, 469
Tertullian of Carthage, 90, 93, 167 Petrine, 465
On Baptism, 158 Scripture and antiquity, 471, 478
on heretics, 157n39 theory of time, criticism by
on water, 158 Neoplatonism, 534, 538, 544
texts, ancient, study of, 200 Thesaurus temporum (Scaliger), 434
Theaetetus (Plato), on Godlikeness, 46, Thield, Thomas, 403
46n37 Thierry of Chartres, 219, 391
Theagenes of Rhegion, on religion and Thiselton, Anthony, 7
philosophy, 55 three-fold sense of Scripture, 97–95,
Themistius, 45 105
theocratic ministers, 609 Three Physico-Theological Discourses (Ray),
theodicy, in Qur ān 2:6/7, 249–270 292
Theodore of Mopsuestia, 100 Timaeus (Plato), 46, 47, 88n9
theological authority, Galileo on, 644 time
Theological-Political Treatise. See creation and, 533–543
Tractatus-Theologico-Politicus (TTP) Jewish philosophy and, 531–558
(Spinoza) motion and, Albo on, 542–543
theology theory of, Aristotle, 534, 538, 544
Aquinas and, 197 theory of, Crescas, 538
Aristotle and, 191–194 Tolosani, Giovanni Maria, 629–630
mathematical sciences and, Tomoi (Menetho), 434
666–672 To objections concerning the authority of the
monastic, 182, 184 pious (Kepler), 597
natural, 29–30 Topsell, Edward, 300–302, 301
Rupert of Deutz and, 185n24 Torah, 520, 535

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Torrell, Jean-Pierre Aquinas at, 194, 222, 234

on sacra doctrina, 226n22 Aristotle, banning of, 191–192,
on Writings on the Sentences of Peter 194, 195, 220
Lombard, 227–228 biblical interpretation at, 223
Tower of Babel, 299–332, 312t, 319, Dominicans at, 192
321n39 Lombard’s four books and, 220
Tractatus-Theologico-Politicus (TTP) philosophical texts and, 192
(Spinoza), 70–76, 431, 431n14, 432, Scripture at, 223
433, 551–555, 621 theology at, 199
Trigland, Jacob, 610 Utility of Astronomy for Theology (Clavius),
Trinitarian hermeneutics, 519n94 667
Trinity, mystery of, 185n26 Utrecht University and
Trinity College, Ray ejected from, Anti-Cartesianism, 610
291–292
trivium, 181n1 vacuum, Crescas on, 541
tropological (moral) sense of biblical Valerius Terminus (Bacon), 317–323
interpretation, 365, 374 Valkenberg, Wilhelmus, on biblical
TTP. See Tractatus-Theologico-Politicus interpretation, 233
(TTP) (Spinoza) Valla, Lorenzo
Tübingen University, Kepler and, 593 Collatio Novi Testamenti, 203–204
two books, 276, 293–296, 400, 724, De elegantiae linguae latinae,
725, 727, 728. See also book of 201–202
nature; nature Valles, Francisco
Adamic knowledge and, 299–332 on the Bible and natural philosophical
Campanella on, 719–720 matters, 414
Evagrius on, 154 biblical interpretation of, 413,
Grant on, 277 423
Hugh of St. Victor on, 346 on biblical study, 414–415
interaction of, 11 biography of, 412
Newton and, 495, 496 on celestial realm, 420
of Theory of the Earth, 459, 470 Controversiarum medicarum et
Whiston on, 291 philosophicarum libri decem, 412
Zanchi on, 276, 277, 278 on Dinah, rape of (Gen. 34:25),
Tychonic theory, 495n12, 657 415–416
Tyndale, William, on senses of on fractures, 416–418
Scripture, 373 on Hippocrates and healing wounds,
typological interpretations, 347–348 416–417
typology, 96n29, 348, 383 on Job, 418
Mosaic physics of, 392–425
universe Phillip II of Spain, and, 412
Aquinas on, 236 on Plato, 420
Brahe on, 283–284 on rape of Dinah (Gen. 34:25),
Descartes on, 611 415–416
“ . . . disposition and order of the Sacred Philosophy, 398, 412–413, 415,
universe and its principal bodies” 422n112, 425
(Wittichius), 612 on salvation, 414
universities on Scripture, 413, 423
arts and theology, relationship on terrestrial realm, 421–422
between, 182, 185 Of The Things Which Are Written
Bible reading and, 184 About Natural Philosophy in the Holy
University of Oxford Scriptures, 398, 412–413, 415,
Aristotle’s teachings and, 220 422n112, 425
theology at, 199 van Blyenbergh, Willem, See
University of Paris, 220 Blyenbergh

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van Mastricht, Petrus, 612 Weigel, Valentine, 276, 287–289

on Copernicanism, 629 Astrology Theologized, 288
van Velthuysen, Lambert Fourfold Interpretation of Creation, 289
on animals, 620 on macrocosm-microcosm
biblical interpretation of, 616 correlation, 288–289
on Cartesianism, 613 Weisheipl, James, on sacra doctrina, 226,
on du Bois, 613–614, 616–617 226n23
on Dutch Reformed Church, 613 Westfall, Richard S., on science and
on Scripture, 616 religion, 291
on Voetius’s rejection of Westman, Robert S., 280, 523
Copernicanism, 613 Whiston, William, 495n12, 505n43,
Vasoli, Cesare, 199–200 522n114
via antiqua, of Aquinas, 198 on accommodation, 512n68
via moderna, of Ockham, 198 apocalyptic concerns of, 463
Villalpando, Juan Bautista on the Flood, 461
Commentary on Ezekiel, 668, 673 on Genesis Creation, 512n68
vision as Lucasian chair at Cambridge
al-N sāb r , Nizām al-D n on, University, 291
265–266 on Mundane Egg, 475–477
as interpretation, 10 New Theory of the Earth, 463n25,
Vives, Juan Luis, 207 505n43, 516n85
Voetius, Gisbertus (Voet, Gijsbert) on prisca sapientia, 460–461, 461n17
on accommodation, 28 on two books, 291
anti-Copernicans and, 615 Whitehead and selective concrescence,
Aristotelian philosophy and, 610 332–333, 332n71
on the Bible, 439 Whitehurst, John, New Theory of the
biblical interpretation of, 384 Earth, 477
Cartesianism and, 611, 619 Whitman, Jon, 377
Cartesianism, on challenge to, 21 wild lettuce, Lemnius on, 407–409
on Descartes, 432, 439–440, 612, Wilkins, John, 12, 292, 306, 523,
619 523n117
enemies of, 438–441 Willemz, Evert, biblical interpretation
Further Reformation and, 621 of, 20n30
Maresius and, 622 William II of Orange and States of
on Meijer, 621 Holland, 609
on Praeadamitae, 429 William of Conches, 186, 391
preadamite theory and, 439 Philosophy of the World, 219n4
on Scripture, 616 William of St. Thierry and, 182,
on Spinoza, 621 190
at Utrecht University, 608, 610 William of Moerbeke, 220, 220n6
Vossius, Gerardus Johannes, 441 William of Ockham, 194, 196–198,
Vossius, Isaac (Voss, Isaac), 435 196n84
biography of, 441–442 William of St. Thierry
Chinese history and, 444 on nature of things, 189n41
as chronologist, 442–445 William of Conches and, 182, 190
De Vera Aetate Mundi, 441–445 Williams, Arnold
on the Flood, 444, 462 on the Bible and science, 278
Preadamitae, refutation of, 442 Williams, Rowan
Septuagint and, 443 on Augustine, 172
Vulgate, 203–204 on religious language, 113
Willugby, Francis, 292
Waddell, Mark, on Kircher, 356–357 Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of
waters above the firmament, Creation, The (Ray), 292
575–580 Witelo, 195

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770 index

Wittenberg interpretation of Copernicus, Woodward, John, 472

280, 564, 565 Word, the, 155
Wittenberg University, 593, 699 Word of God and the Languages of Man, The
Melanchthon at, 586, 588 (Bono), 328–329
Peucer as astronomy chair, 281–282, world plan, Kepler on, 601
564 Worm, Ole, 437–438
Reinhold at, 564 wormwood, Lemnius on, 405–407
Rheticus at, 588, 699 wounds, Valles on, 416–417
Rothmann at, 570 Writings on the Sentences of Peter Lombard
Wittichius, Christophorus (Aquinas), 227, 238, 243
“abuse of Holy Scripture in matters Wyclif, John, on literal interpretation of
philosophical, the,” 612 Scripture, 372
on the Bible, 619
on biblical interpretation, 384, 614 Xenophanes, on religion and
on Cartesianism, 612 philosophy, 552
as chair of theology, Leiden
University, 613 Young, Frances, on patristic exegesis,
Copernicanism, in defense of, 612 151
“disposition and order of the universe
and its principal bodies, the,” 612 Zabbarella, Jacopo, Opera Logica, 207
geocentrism and, 612 Zanchi, (Zanchius) Girolamo, on two
on knowledge, 616 books, 276, 277, 278
as theology chair at Leiden, 613 Zuñiga, Diego de, 672, 710
Wonders and the Order of Nature (Daston & Zwingli, Ulrich, in senses of Scripture,
Park), 326 373

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 A NOTE ON THE COVER ILLUSTRATION

The cover illustrations for the four volumes entitled: Nature and Scripture in
the Abrahamic Religions have been chosen from a series of fifteen paintings
by the contemporary Dutch-Canadian artist Wilhelmina Kennedy. The
series came out of a struggle of the artist with God’s action in the world,
and in particular with the realities of creation and providence and how
they are related. She, therefore, gave it the title Ultimate Realities. There
are several layers of meaning. While the paintings are about God &
Nature, they are also about knowing God and Nature, that is about
the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature. The cover illustrations
thus are a visual interpretation of the theme of the volumes.
Ultimate Realities are Christian works of art. But their emotional
power reaches across cultures. Some of the images used in the paintings
contain elements associated with medieval cathedrals. They include
doors, carved pillars, windows and ancient hand-written manuscripts
of the Bible. These images refer to the ultimate reality of the Creator,
to what can be known about God in the Book of Scripture and to his
providential action in the world. The colors are the rich dark red of
wine, gold and green—symbols in Western Christianity of the absence
of distance. This may be interpreted as ‘God with us.’
Other images originate in the Canadian landscape and these refer
to nature as well as to the Book of Nature. The cool colors symbolize
the reality that the Book of Nature has remained a distant source of
knowledge of God for many. They allude to the role of science in
creating the distance. This is intended as a contrast to the warm colors
of ‘God with us.’
Different forms and patterns symbolize different ways the relationship
of the two books can be conceived. Some patterns symbolize the Book
of Nature in the context of the Book of Scripture and vice versa. Others
symbolize the two books existing in separation, in opposition and in
mutual engagement. Not one painting suggests that the artist has
resolved her struggle with this theme.

Jitse van der Meer

June 9, 2008

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 Brill’s Series in Church History
EDITED BY WIM JANSE

22. J.L.R. LEDEGANG-KEEGSTRA. Théodore de Bèze Le Passavant. Édition Cri-

tique, Introduction, Traduction et Commentaire. 2004. ISBN 90 04 13805 6
23. J.A. FÜHNER. Die Kirchen- und die antireformatorische Religionspolitik Kaiser Karls V. in
den siebzehn Provinzen der Niederlande 1515-1555. 2004. ISBN 90 04 14083 2
24. J. VREE and J. ZWAAN. Abraham Kuyper’s Commentatio (1860). The Young
Kuyper about Calvin, a Lasco, and the Church. I: Introduction, Annotations,
Bibliography, and Indices; II: Commentatio. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14940 6
25. D. BLANKS, M. FRASSETTO and A. LIVINGSTONE (eds.). Medieval Monks
and Their World: Ideas and Realities. Studies in Honor of Richard E. Sullivan. 2006.
ISBN-10: 90 04 15463 9, ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15463 6
26. A. GOUDRIAAN. Reformed Orthodoxy and Philosophy, 1625-1750. Gisbertus
Voetius, Petrus van Mastricht, and Anthonius Driessen. 2006.
ISBN-10: 90 04 15498 1, ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15498 8
27. K.D. STANGLIN. Arminius on the Assurance of Salvation. The Context, Roots,
and Shape of the Leiden Debate, 1603-1609. 2007.
ISBN-10: 90 04 15608 9, ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15608 1
28. U. HASCHER-BURGER. Singen für die Seligkeit. Studien zu einer Lieder-
sammlung der Devotio moderna: Zwolle, Historisch Centrum Overijssel, coll.
Emmanuelshuizen, cat. VI. Mit Edition und Faksimile. 2007.
ISBN 978 90 04 16151 1
29. P. HOLTROP and H. SLECHTE. Foreign Churches in St. Petersburg and Their
Archives, 1703-1917. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 16260 0
30. A.D. FIZZARD. Plympton Priory: A House of Augustinian Canons in South-Western
England in the Late Middle Ages. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 16301 0
31. H.J. SELDERHUIS und M. WRIEDT (Hrsg.). Konfession, Migration und Eliten-
bildung: Studien zur Theologenausbildung des 16. Jahrhunderts. 2007.
ISBN 978 90 04 16314 0
32. J. ROLLO-KOSTER. Raiding Saint Peter. Empty Sees, Violence, and the Ini-
tiation of the Great Western Schism (1378). 2008. ISBN 978 90 04 16560 1
33. A. VAN HEIJST. Models of Charitable Care. Catholic Nuns and Children in their
Care in Amsterdam, 1852-2002. 2008. ISBN 978 90 04 16833 6
(Published as Vol. 1 in the subseries Religious History and Culture series)
34. W. SCHEEPSMA. Translated by David F. Johnson. The Limburg Sermons.
Preaching in the Medieval Low Countries at the Turn of the Fourteenth Cen-
tury. 2008. ISBN 978 90 04 16969 2
35. ADRIAAN C. NEELE. Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706). Reformed Orthodoxy:
Method and Piety. 2009. ISBN 978 90 04 16992 0
36. JITSE M. VAN DER MEER and SCOTT MANDELBROTE (eds.). Nature and
Scripture in the Abrahamic Religions: Up to 1700. 2008. ISBN 978 90 04 17191 6
37. JITSE M. VAN DER MEER and SCOTT MANDELBROTE (eds.). Nature and
Scripture in the Abrahamic Religions: 1700-Present. 2008.
ISBN 978 90 04 17192 3
38. JOHAN DE NIET, HERMAN PAUL and BART WALLET (eds.). Sober, Strict,
and Scriptural: Collective Memories of John Calvin, 1800-2000. 2009.
ISBN 978 90 04 17424 5

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