Francis Bacon’s Tender Mercies

The most desperate and most heartfelt prayers are those begging God for mercy. Francis Bacon (1561–1626), one of the greatest founding fathers of modern philosophy and thus of modern life, begins his most comprehensive (though unfinished) work, The Great Instauration, with a petition to the Trinity, asking that he might serve as the human agent of divine pity and kindness: “At the outset of the work I most humbly and fervently pray to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, that remembering the sorrows of mankind and the pilgrimage of this our life wherein we wear out days few and evil, they will vouchsafe through my hands to endow the human family with new mercies.”

Bacon’s stated intention, then, is unmistakably Christian and unexceptionably pious. He goes on to insist that his project for “the inquisition of nature”—the allusion to sacred terror wielded by men of faith is glancing but patent—does not violate any godly commands. It is not morally equivalent to the original sin in the Garden of Eden, but rather resembles “that pure and uncorrupted natural knowledge” that Adam employed when he had the privilege of naming all of God’s creatures. The Fall, on the other hand, was the consequence of “the ambitious and proud desire of moral knowledge to judge of good and evil, to the end that man may revolt from God and give laws to himself.”

Much has happened in the four hundred years since Bacon’s death to warrant a reconsideration of his promises, especially those pertaining to the inviolability of Christian teaching. However innocent Bacon’s prospectus may have been, his descendants have transformed it in crucial respects precisely into their revolt against divine authority and have enthusiastically replaced God’s laws with their own. Charity—of which “there can be no excess, neither did angel or man ever come in danger by it”—is the perfect means and end of Bacon’s project. Yet the past century has proven excess of charity to be at least as lethal as straightforward hatred. In the name of love of humanity, enlightened moderns have engaged in abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineering, and the political mass murder of millions for supposed social perfection in the long run. Killing only for the “best” of reasons, they exercise god-like power over life and death as though it were their birthright. Divinely appointed prohibitions are negotiable, or altogether disposable. 

Carrying out Bacon’s proposal to its logical culmination, men of good will have undertaken to improve the slipshod arrangements of the created world—to take away as much of the pain of living as they can. The improvements have become more obviously radical as progress has proceeded. Some of modernity’s successes—and they are legion—have been so striking and so welcome that the moral ambiguities or outright abominations of certain others tend to be casually overlooked. 

As Bacon wrote in The Advancement of Learning, human knowledge ought to be “a rich storehouse for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate.” Yet man’s estate, which after centuries of repair and renovation still stands in need of some serious relief, has largely crowded the glory of God out of the picture. God evidently has a lot to answer for and is not easily forgiven. Extreme ameliorative measures on man’s part, which have become commonplace achievements made possible by scientific and technological ingenuity, are deemed necessary because God, left to his own devices, is insufficiently merciful. 

Yet we are rarely satisfied with our hard-won manmade benefits. The easier the human condition has been made by advances in almost every material aspect of our daily lives, the more intolerable the pains that have not yet been eradicated, and the less grateful we are for the wondrous gifts we have been granted, whether by God or by extraordinary human will and intelligence.  

In Bacon’s account, admirable human capacities reflect divine goodness, or at least seem to, as in his famous tale New Atlantis, where God’s mercies and man’s are on display. God’s mercy is what men pray for when their pain becomes unbearable and death threatens. A European ship is driven far off course in “the greatest wilderness of waters in the world,” somewhere in the uncharted reaches of the South Pacific. Food supplies have run out, starvation looms, and the crew cries out to “God above, who showeth his wonders in the deep, beseeching him of his mercy, that as in the beginning he discovered the face of the deep, and brought forth dry land, so he would now discover land to us, that we might not perish.” So “it came to pass,” the way things do in the course of biblical events, that what appeared to be land came in sight the next day, and they sailed into harbor the day after that. Providence, or blind chance: Who can say? There is no mention of the sailors’ giving thanks to God for their salvation: not an unusual human oversight when our importunate prayers seem to be answered. And they receive a dubious greeting from the inhabitants of the island, who forbid them to come ashore and insist they go away within sixteen days, but who do offer water, food, help for the sick, and any necessary repairs to the ship—“‘and you shall have that which belongeth to mercy.’ This scroll was signed with a stamp of cherubim’s wings, not spread but hanging downwards, and by them a cross.” 

The Bensalem authorities—rich in practical wisdom, pious practitioners of a syncretic religion with strong Christian features—relent of their severity when the Europeans demonstrate their good faith, and they initiate their visitors into the scientific marvels of Salomon’s House, or the College of the Six Days’ Works. “The End of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things, and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” Here is the ambition of modern knowledge and power: to do absolutely everything that can be done, to try it all out and then decide what ought to be kept. The questionable prudence of this procedure has been brought home to our “business and bosoms” with stunning impact of late. 

With consummate subtlety, Bacon introduces a shadow of doubt into the splendid project for human flourishing. The Father of Salomon’s House, who comes in state, magnificently arrayed and attended, “had an aspect as if he pitied men”—so strange a locution, with the delicate suggestion that the pity might be feigned. If it is, what then is the real motive for the elaborate enterprise of human mercy, and how does it reflect the mercy of God himself? The Bensalem Father, like Bacon himself a supposed agent of divine mercy, “held up his bare hand as he went, as blessing the people, but in silence.” Why do these remarkable men devote themselves to the modern scientific project for the relief of man’s estate? What might God feel for men’s sufferings if it is not pity? Some things are better left unsaid.