VII - Visions of the Past: Religious Belief and the Historical Sciences

Summary

Introduction

In his frontispiece to Gideon Mantell’s Wonders of geology (1838), the painter John Martin conjured up a terrifying picture of ferocious dinosaurs fighting each other in an ancient, prehuman, and tormented world. It was a far cry from the benign world of eighteenth-century natural theology, a nightmare that also shrieked against a straight reading of Genesis where the implication was that pain and death had not entered the world until Adam’s Fall. The integration of concepts drawn from astronomy, geology, paleontology, and evolutionary biology was to result in reconstructions of the past, which not only transformed perceptions of man’s place in nature, but also contributed their own leaven to the growth of biblical criticism. And, irrespective of their implications for natural and revealed theology, the historical sciences could be perplexing, even wounding, to popular belief. Harmonious images of nature were shattered by new discords to which Cuvier had drawn attention in his Preliminary discourse (1812). Life on earth had often been disturbed by calamitous events, which, in the beginning, had penetrated the very depths of the earth’s crust. Countless beings had been the victims of these upheavals – some annihilated by floods, others perishing of thirst as the seabed suddenly rose. Entire species had vanished forever, leaving their enigmatic traces.

No wonder John Ruskin was to wish he could escape the din of the geologist’s hammer. No wonder the poet Tennyson associated the historical sciences with a sense of deprivation. Faced with the loss of a dear one, there had always been the consolation that nature, though careless of the individual, was careful of the type. But if entire species had vanished, even that solace was denied. No wonder the artist William Dyce, in his painting of Pegwell Bay (1858), chose to depict the futility of human life against the gloomy backdrop of comet and cliff, each of which spoke of aeons of time, dwarfing one’s ephemeral existence into insignificance. And such melancholy thoughts as these were often as nothing compared with the revulsion experienced by those who shared Ruskin’s horror of “filthy heraldries which record the relation of humanity to the ascidian and the crocodile.”