2 - The Extrinsic Bible

Summary

This chapter examines the portrayal of Scripture as miraculously transcendent of history, human activity, and material conditions in Francis Bacon’s utopian narrative New Atlantis. It considers how this imagined Bible founds a mode of social organization oriented towards human mastery over created nature. Drawing on Maurice Blondel’s concept of “extrinsicism,” which describes a stark separation of revelation from its human and historical mediations, this chapter analyzes the significance of this transcendent Bible, including the displacement of human agency, history, and culture from its production and transmission. This chapter argues that the social organization oriented to the acquisition and implementation of natural knowledge imagined by Bacon is enabled by the seemingly secularizing boundaries between revelation and reason, and theology and philosophy, which this miraculous Bible establishes. However, the apparently secularizing consequences of a wholly transcendent Bible are disrupted when considered in the larger frame of Baconian philosophy, which in fundamental ways retains a theological conception of nature and of the social organization needed to harness its power.