Bacon the Prophet

In his defense of the legitimacy of the modern age, Hans Blumenberg attempts to pry apart the legitimate kernel ideas of modernity from the illegitimate, mostly medieval and superstitious, husks by which the kernel ideas were often expressed.

Whether this works for any early modern thinker, it does not work, Charles Whitney argues, for Bacon: “An important part of the ‘husk’ of Bacon’s work that Blumenberg, along with other historians, has underestimated is its prophetic character; indeed this aspect even comprises part of the ‘kernel’ . . . .

“With measured humility, Bacon calls himself a buccinator . . . or trumpeter of new arts and sciences; there was in fact no specific genre of prophecy in his time that could have included his manifestos. But though he sets at a distance the religious commitment and many of the rhetorical and mythical contexts within which prophecy had been meaningful, Bacon’s vision of humanities fulfillment remains prophetic in scope as well as in the religious innuendos Blumenberg so easily dismisses, as readers of Bacon since Abraham Cowley (who compared Bacon to Moses) have persistently recognized. Historians have long since debunked Bacon’s old reputation as the father of modern science, and ironically have moved toward reducing his stature to that of prophet in the sense of cheerleader, advance man, or, precisely, trumpeter. But King James I, to whom Bacon addressed both The Advancement of Learning and the Instaratio Magna in 1620 . . . expected the end of the world, and helped to provide an atmosphere within which many of the leading writers of his time were able to understand and to gather creative power from biblical prophecy and its present application.”