The Bitter and the Sweet: Penemue, Francis Bacon, and the Moral Weight of Writing

Among the fallen angels named in the Book of Enoch, Penemue is one of the strangest. Other figures reveal arts whose danger is immediately apparent. Gadreel shows humanity “the blows of death” and the weapons of warfare. Kasdeja teaches destructive practices associated with spirits, poisons, and the human body. Penemue’s territory seems quieter. He teaches “the bitter and the sweet,” “all the secrets of their wisdom,” and writing with ink and paper.

The quietness is deceptive. A sword may kill a person, but writing can alter a civilization. Writing releases thought from the body that conceived it. It carries a command beyond the presence of the ruler, preserves a discovery beyond the death of the discoverer, fixes a debt, transmits a prayer, perpetuates a lie, and permits one mind to speak to people not yet born. Before writing, knowledge depends upon memory, presence, and living succession. After writing, it can travel without its teacher. It can also travel without the judgment, character, and context that once governed its use.

That is the problem contained in Penemue’s gift. It is also, in a very different setting, one of the great problems of Francis Bacon’s life and work.

Bacon sought more than an enlargement of knowledge. He sought a method by which discoveries could be made, tested, recorded, organized, communicated, and carried forward by a succession of minds. He devised an extraordinary biliteral cipher. He recognized that thoughts could be communicated through any objects capable of a “twofold difference.” He wrote in aphorism, essay, fable, prayer, history, legal maxim, natural history, philosophical treatise, political counsel, and coded alphabet. He thought continually about the forms in which knowledge should be preserved, the readers to whom it should be delivered, and the purposes that should govern its use.

Placed beside Penemue, Bacon looks uncannily like a modern embodiment of the transmitter of knowledge. The resemblance is powerful, but it requires one firm historical boundary. There is no evidence that Bacon knew the Penemue passage. The comparison is a structural and theological correspondence, not a claim of direct influence. Once that boundary is established, the comparison becomes more valuable. We are no longer trying to manufacture a secret source. We are watching two radically different texts converge upon the same permanent question: what happens when the power to know and communicate outruns the moral formation of the knower?

Penemue and the Ambiguous Gift

The relevant passage occurs in chapter 69 of 1 Enoch, within the section commonly called the Book of Parables. In R. H. Charles’s translation, the text reads:

“And the fourth was named Pênemûe: he taught the children of men the bitter and the sweet, and he taught them all the secrets of their wisdom. And he instructed mankind in writing with ink and paper, and thereby many sinned from eternity to eternity and until this day.”

The following lines say that human beings were not created to give confirmation to their good faith with pen and ink, and that through this knowledge they are perishing. The precise sense is difficult. “The bitter and the sweet” may indicate the discernment of opposites, knowledge of substances, moral discrimination, or some field of wisdom that the surviving wording no longer allows us to recover. It would be a mistake to turn the phrase into an ancient technical doctrine of binary information. The text does not say that.

Yet the phrase deserves to be preserved in its full suggestiveness. Bitter and sweet form a pair. Each becomes intelligible through difference from the other. The pair also expresses the doubleness of Penemue’s second gift. Writing carries wisdom and folly, truth and fraud, blessing and curse. The marks themselves do not decide which they will serve.

The Enochic tradition does not simply condemn writing. Enoch himself is the righteous scribe. The fallen Watchers ask him to write their petition because they have lost the right to approach heaven directly. Their appeal must pass through the hands of a human writer. The irony is severe. Heavenly beings who taught forbidden arts now require the service of the art they corrupted. Heaven answers that they should have interceded for humanity, rather than asking humanity to intercede for them.

The contrast suggests that the moral status of writing depends upon office, end, and fidelity. Enoch writes as witness and messenger. Penemue’s instruction contributes to the spread and confirmation of sin. The technology is similar. The moral order is different.

This is already close to Bacon’s mature position. Knowledge is a gift, but a gift may become poisonous when severed from charity. Communication is necessary, but indiscriminate communication may carry knowledge into conditions where it can be abused. Writing preserves. It also removes teachings from the living judgment of the teacher. The stronger the medium becomes, the more urgent the problem of moral government becomes.

What Bacon Could—and Could Not—Have Known

The historical question should be answered plainly. Bacon lived before the full Ethiopic Book of Enoch became available in Europe. James Bruce brought Ethiopic manuscripts back from Abyssinia in the eighteenth century, and the first English translation of the complete work appeared long after Bacon’s death. The Penemue passage was not part of the Enochic material available to English readers in Bacon’s lifetime.

Some Enochic material was nevertheless circulating. Joseph Justus Scaliger printed Greek fragments derived from George Syncellus in 1606. Samuel Purchas drew upon those fragments in the second edition of Purchas His Pilgrimage in 1614, bringing parts of the Watcher story into English. Purchas gave readers the descent of the angels, their union with the daughters of men, and the birth of gigantic offspring. Those fragments correspond substantially to material in 1 Enoch 6 and related passages. They did not contain chapter 69. They did not name Penemue. They did not connect “the bitter and the sweet” with writing in ink and paper.

This distinction matters because Purchas stood close to Bacon’s intellectual world. His vast collections made travel, geography, religion, natural history, and reports of distant peoples available to English readers. Scholars have long noticed the relevance of Purchas to the imaginative geography of New Atlantis. Bacon could have known that an ancient Book of Enoch was reported to contain a fuller account of the Watchers than Genesis preserved. That possibility does not give him access to Penemue.

The responsible conclusion is therefore exact. Early Stuart England possessed a fragment, a report, and a growing curiosity about Enoch. It did not possess this passage. Penemue can illuminate Bacon for us. He cannot presently be shown to have influenced him.

That limit strengthens the article. A direct source would explain the resemblance by borrowing. The absence of a demonstrable source leaves us with something more elemental: two meditations, separated by language, culture, and many centuries, upon the doubleness of transmitted knowledge.

“A Twofold Difference Only”

Bacon’s biliteral cipher is often treated as a clever episode in the history of cryptography. It is more than that. Its deepest insight concerns the independence of information from any particular material carrier.

Bacon begins by reducing the letters of the alphabet to arrangements of two characters. Five positions, each capable of assuming either of two forms, yield thirty-two possible combinations—more than enough for the twenty-four letters of Bacon’s alphabet. The internal message can then be concealed within an external text by printing the carrier letters in two subtly different forms. An innocent-looking sentence becomes the vehicle of another sentence hidden within it.

Bacon did not stop with typography. In the expanded Latin De augmentis scientiarum of 1623, later rendered into English, he generalized the principle:

“Neither is it a small matter these cypher-characters have, and may perform; for by this art a way is opened, whereby a man may express and signify the intentions of his mind, at any distance of place, by objects which may be presented to the eye, and accommodated to the ear: provided those objects be capable of a two-fold difference only; as by bells, by trumpets, by lights and torches, by the report of muskets, and any instruments of like nature.”

The sentence is astonishing. The carrier may be visible or audible. It may consist of letters, bells, lights, torches, or gunshots. The physical objects do not need to resemble the meaning they convey. They need only sustain a stable difference between two states.

This is not modern information theory, binary arithmetic, or digital computation. Bacon did not possess the later mathematics of Leibniz, the algebra of Boole, or the engineering theory of Shannon. It remains a remarkably clear articulation of binary encoding. A message can be abstracted from its carrier, translated into repeated differences, transmitted through diverse media, and reconstructed by a recipient who possesses the key.

“The bitter and the sweet” cannot responsibly be converted into an Enochic anticipation of Bacon’s cipher. Their conjunction nonetheless produces a striking symbolic correspondence. Penemue is associated with a twofold distinction, secrets of wisdom, and writing. Bacon realizes that a twofold distinction is sufficient to encode writing in almost any perceptible medium. Penemue’s pair is qualitative and mysterious. Bacon’s pair is operational and explicit. Both stand at the threshold where difference becomes transmissible meaning.

There is another reason the comparison has force. Bacon’s cipher separates the visible writing from the intended writing. The exterior letter may even say the opposite of the interior letter. Writing therefore becomes double in a second sense. It can possess a public surface and a concealed depth. Bacon’s larger work repeatedly returns to related forms: aphorism, parable, fable, emblem, cipher, guarded publication, and the distinction between methods that teach established knowledge and methods that invite later minds to continue the work.

Bacon understood that communication is never merely the movement of content. Form governs reception. A method can clarify, conceal, select, awaken, mislead, or preserve. The writer does not only decide what to say. He decides how the reader will be made capable of receiving it.

The Man Who Would Teach Humanity to Discover

The Penemue correspondence becomes still stranger when Bacon describes the dignity of invention. The passage the comparison requires occurs in Novum Organum, Book I, aphorism 129. Bacon has just recalled the divine honors ancient societies awarded to inventors. Political founders and lawgivers received heroic honors, but inventors were sometimes placed among the gods because their benefits crossed borders and generations. Printing, gunpowder, and the magnet had altered literature, warfare, and navigation more profoundly than the acts of many celebrated rulers.

Bacon then distinguishes a single invention from an art of invention:

“Again, if men have thought so much of some one particular discovery as to regard him as more than man who has been able by some benefit to make the whole human race his debtor, how much higher a thing to discover that by means of which all things else shall be discovered with ease!”

Bacon’s sentence makes the ambition unmistakable. The inventor of printing gives the world printing. The inventor of the compass transforms navigation. The discoverer of a true method of discovery gives no single object. He gives a road by which innumerable objects, operations, and remedies may be found.

This helps explain the scale of Bacon’s vocation. He did not imagine himself as the solitary possessor of all future knowledge. He repeatedly denied that one life could finish the work. He called for distributed labor, coordinated histories, institutions, experiments, and “a succession of wits.” His gift was to be architectural. He would lay out the road, purge the mind of obstacles, reform the procedures of inquiry, and deliver the unfinished work to posterity.

The humility and grandeur coexist. Bacon calls his work a “birth of time rather than of wit.” He also proposes to transform the fortunes of the human race. He insists that his method will reduce dependence upon individual genius. Yet the design of that method required an individual imagination of almost frightening range.

Read beside Penemue, the aphorism carries an unsettling resonance. The ancient text assigns transformative knowledge to a being more than human. Bacon observes that humanity has itself treated great inventors as more than human. He then asks how much greater would be the giver of a method that contains all particular inventions in possibility.

The resemblance should not be pushed into identification. Bacon did not claim angelic nature, and nothing supports the fantasy that he thought himself Penemue. He did understand his enterprise through the ancient categories of the culture hero, lawgiver, benefactor, discoverer, and restorer. He knew that a gift of method would place its giver in the company traditionally reserved for the bringers of civilization.

The end of aphorism 129 is as important as its exaltation of discovery. Bacon immediately answers the objection that arts and sciences may be debased to wickedness and luxury. Earthly goods can be abused. The answer is not to renounce them, but to recover humanity’s rightful dominion and govern its exercise: “let power be given it; the exercise thereof will be governed by sound reason and true religion.” Modern summaries often retain the power and discard the government. Bacon’s sentence contains both.

A Life Made of Writing

The sheer extent of Bacon’s writing makes the association with Penemue feel almost inevitable. The standard nineteenth-century edition prepared by James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath extends across fourteen volumes. The number requires qualification. The later volumes include Spedding’s biography, editorial commentary, and the documentary life assembled from letters, speeches, and state papers. It is not a fourteen-volume shelf of continuous Baconian composition. Even after that allowance, the surviving range is staggering.

Bacon wrote philosophical manifestos, natural histories, methodological treatises, essays, histories, legal works, maxims, parliamentary speeches, masques and devices, political advice, diplomatic papers, letters, prayers, religious meditations, a confession of faith, interpretations of ancient fables, and translations of Psalms. He revised many works repeatedly. He moved between English and Latin. He dictated, corrected, reorganized, enlarged, excerpted, and commissioned translations. He imagined not one book but a system by which books, observations, experiments, institutions, and generations could cooperate.

All this was produced during a life crowded with legal practice, parliamentary service, patronage, financial pressure, state business, the attorney generalship, the lord chancellorship, political catastrophe, illness, and the management of a large household. Bacon himself drew attention to the disproportion. In Novum Organum he asked despondent readers to look at his example: although “of all men of my time the most busied in affairs of state,” and “a man of health not very strong,” he had entered a path no predecessor had adequately marked and advanced the work some distance.

His capacity was not simply fluency. Many prolific writers repeat one form. Bacon changed intellectual instruments according to the work. The aphorism interrupts premature system. The essay compresses civil observation. The natural history accumulates particulars. The fable preserves and interprets ancient wisdom. The cipher conceals one message inside another. The prayer places inquiry beneath judgment. The utopia imagines an institution capable of continuing discovery after the founder’s death.

This is why Bacon’s writing cannot be separated from his philosophy. Writing is one of the principal technologies of the Great Instauration. Experiments must survive the experimenter. Failed trials must be recorded, because negative instances guide later inquiry. Observations must be arranged so that another mind can see where the work is weak, where it breaks off, and where it may be resumed. The proper form of writing creates a succession of labor rather than a succession of authorities.

Bacon’s own corpus enacts this purpose. It is full of thresholds, inventories, fragments, plans, tables, prefaces, specimens, and unfinished parts. He writes toward readers he will never meet. He gives them seeds rather than a completed garden. His prose is an instrument for addressing posterity.

Penemue teaches writing, and knowledge escapes the teacher. Bacon devotes a lifetime to arranging precisely that escape. He wants knowledge to outlive him. The moral difference lies in the law under which he attempts to place the transmission.

Knowledge Can Become Serpentine

The standard caricature of Bacon is the prophet of power: nature is to be conquered, dominion restored, and every restraint dissolved before the advance of science. Some of Bacon’s language undoubtedly helped create this image. He wrote of extending the power and dominion of the human race over the universe. He celebrated works, operations, inventions, and the relief of material suffering. A serious interpretation must retain this operative ambition.

It must also retain the moral architecture Bacon placed around it.

In the early manuscript known as Valerius Terminus, Bacon prepares to “open a fountain” whose streams may run farther than he can foresee. Before opening it, he says, a “strong and sound head or bank” must be constructed to guide the waters. He sets down the governing proposition in emphatic terms: “all knowledge is to be limited by religion, and to be referred to use and action.”

He then defines the permitted use. Knowledge must serve “the benefit and relief of the state and society of man.” Detached from that end, Bacon says, “all manner of knowledge becometh malign and serpentine.” He invokes Paul: “Knowledge bloweth up, but charity buildeth up.” He rejects power and knowledge “not dedicated to goodness or love.”

The serpent is not an accidental ornament. Bacon’s theory of knowledge is written under the shadow of Genesis. The biblical temptation offers intellectual elevation: opened eyes, the knowledge of good and evil, and the promise of becoming like gods. Bacon does not answer by enthroning ignorance. His entire vocation opposes ignorance. He distinguishes inquiry into creation from the presumption of making the human will its own moral law. Natural knowledge may be pursued extensively. It becomes serpentine when pride, cruelty, vanity, or appetite determines its end.

This is why the image of the bank matters. Bacon wanted the fountain opened. He also knew that released water acquires force and moves beyond the hand that opened it. The larger the stream, the stronger the bank must be.

Penemue gives us the same problem in apocalyptic form. Writing enters a fallen world and multiplies the reach of the fall. Bacon’s answer is not the refusal of writing or discovery. It is knowledge under law: tested by truth, directed to charity, and judged by the relief it brings to human life.

Whether Bacon’s safeguards are adequate is a separate question. New Atlantis leaves the governors of Salomon’s House with power to decide which discoveries will be published and which withheld. Wise secrecy may prevent abuse, but secrecy can also conceal institutional corruption. An appeal to the incapacity of recipients can become paternalism. No formula guarantees that the governors of knowledge will themselves be governed by charity.

The Crypto-Atheist and the Missing Corpus

That recognition brings us to the persistent portrait of Bacon as a crypto-atheist: a fundamentally secular thinker who used Christian language as protective coloration for a program that quietly displaced Christianity. On this reading, religion supplied a vocabulary prudent enough to reassure Jacobean readers while the operative substance of Bacon’s philosophy transferred authority from revelation to human mastery.

The argument cannot be dismissed merely because Bacon professed belief. Public orthodoxy was expected. A statesman under Elizabeth and James had obvious reasons to avoid theological suspicion. Religious language could serve rhetorical, political, or strategic purposes. Bacon valued indirect presentation, and no careful reader should assume that every public profession offers transparent access to private conviction.

The trouble begins when this reasonable caution hardens into a method that explains away every contrary text in advance. If Bacon uses religious language, it is camouflage. If he writes a prayer, it is strategy. If he discusses the Fall, charity, faith, providence, salvation, Scripture, and Christ across several decades and several genres, the recurrence becomes evidence of how thorough the disguise had to be. A theory constructed in this way cannot be tested. Every piece of counterevidence is converted into proof of concealment.

The actual corpus makes that maneuver increasingly costly. Bacon’s first publication in 1597 joined the earliest Essays to the Meditationes Sacrae, twelve sacred meditations on the works of God and man, the miracles of Christ, the wisdom of the serpent and innocence of the dove, charity, earthly hope, atheism, heresy, the Church, and the Scriptures. This was not a religious garnish added late to a secular philosophy. The sacred meditations stood at the beginning of his public career.

Around the opening years of James’s reign, Valerius Terminus placed the projected reform of knowledge beneath religion and charity. The Confession of Faith, generally dated to the same broad period and published after Bacon’s death by those responsible for his papers, is not a vague acknowledgment of providence. It is a sustained Christian confession organized around the Trinity, creation, Fall, mediation, redemption, Church, resurrection, and judgment.

The Advancement of Learning in 1605 is saturated with Scripture. Bacon distinguishes the book of God’s word from the book of God’s works. He appeals to Adam, Solomon, Job, Daniel, Paul, and Christ in defining the legitimacy, limits, temptations, and end of knowledge. The Wisdom of the Ancients in 1609 treats fable as a vehicle through which wisdom may be preserved beneath a veil. The Great Instauration and Novum Organum in 1620 place the reformation of the sciences within a theological history of creation, Fall, labor, and partial restoration.

In Novum Organum Bacon states the double loss with exceptional clarity:

“For man by the fall fell at the same time from his state of innocency and from his dominion over creation. Both of these losses however can even in this life be in some part repaired; the former by religion and faith, the latter by arts and sciences.”

This is not a minor qualification. It defines two forms of restoration because it identifies two distinct wounds. Science repairs dominion. It does not repair innocence. Religion and faith address the moral condition of the creature to whom power is being restored.

The distinction permits a criticism of modern technological civilization from within Bacon’s own framework. Dominion can advance while innocence does not. Technical capacity may grow faster than wisdom. Information may grow faster than charity. A civilization can become more powerful without becoming less fallen. In Bacon’s terms, such a civilization has completed only half of the restoration.

The religious material continues through the end of his career. The mature 1625 Essays contains “Of Atheism,” where Bacon writes that he would rather believe “all the fables in the legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran” than that the universal frame is without a mind. He declares that those who deny God “destroy man’s nobility,” because without kinship to God in spirit, man is reduced to a “base and ignoble creature.” The famous sentence is there as well: “a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.”

In the same year, Bacon published his translations of seven Psalms and dedicated them to George Herbert. His surviving papers contain the Student’s Prayer, the Writer’s Prayer, and the intensely personal “Prayer, or Psalm” composed in the aftermath of his fall. New Atlantis, published posthumously, imagines the institution of discovery within Bensalem, a society whose conversion, charity, chastity, ritual, and biblical self-understanding are woven into the story’s structure.

One may dispute the orthodoxy, depth, coherence, or political uses of any part of this material. One may ask whether Bacon’s theology changes over time, whether his natural philosophy creates pressures his stated safeguards cannot contain, or whether certain doctrines serve more than one rhetorical purpose. Those are legitimate interpretive questions. The simple crypto-atheist portrait evades them by removing too much evidence.

It is an awful lot of camouflage. More importantly, it is camouflage maintained in published books, private prayers, unfinished manuscripts, posthumous papers, philosophical architecture, scriptural exegesis, personal confession, and poetry, from the beginning of Bacon’s career to its end. A disguise normally grows thinner where no immediate audience requires it. Bacon’s religious language appears even where the incentives for public conformity are weakest.

The burden of proof therefore belongs to the theory of universal disguise. It is not enough to observe that Bacon could dissimulate. One must demonstrate that the theological texts are best explained as dissimulation, and explain why the same moral and scriptural structures recur with such consistency across the entire work.

The Force of Conviction

There is also a form of evidence that intellectual history often handles badly: the sound of the prose.

Style cannot prove belief. Great writers can impersonate conviction, and mediocre writers can possess it. Religious eloquence may be conventional, rehearsed, or politically useful. No sentence gives us unmediated access to another person’s soul.

Yet style is not nothing. A writer’s pressure of thought, selection of image, cadence, compression, vulnerability, and consistency across genres contribute to our judgment of whether language is merely being worn or has been inwardly inhabited. Good writing has the force of truth in it. At its best, it rings true—not because beauty makes a proposition correct, but because exact language records the movement of a mind that has genuinely undergone its subject.

Bacon’s devotional prose has that force. In the prayer written after his political fall, he addresses God as “my merciful Father, from my youth up, my Creator, my Redeemer, my Comforter.” He submits intention as well as action to judgment: God weighs thoughts and deeds, and measures intentions “as with a line.” He recalls his love of the Church, confesses the misuse of his gifts, and compresses his intellectual life into one unforgettable sentence: “Thy creatures have been my books, but thy Scriptures much more.”

The sentence is too compact to dismiss casually. The two books of Bacon’s philosophy have become the books of his life. Nature was read. Scripture was read more. The phrase does not abolish the tension between them. It places the tension inside a prayer of self-examination.

The Writer’s Prayer is equally revealing:

“Thou, O Father, who gavest the visible light as the first-born of thy creatures, and didst pour into man the intellectual light as the top and consummation of thy workmanship, be pleased to protect and govern this work, which coming from thy goodness, returneth to thy glory.”

It ends by asking that God, through Bacon’s hands and the hands of others given the same spirit, might “convey a largess of new alms to thy family of mankind.” That image contains the whole charitable theory of the Great Instauration. Discoveries are alms. The writer and investigator do not own the light they transmit. They receive, labor, and return the gift in service to the human family.

This is a different voice from the caricature of cold mastery. It is also different from the voice of Penemue. Penemue teaches, and the gift becomes part of humanity’s corruption. Bacon prays that the work may be protected and governed before it is conveyed. The prayer is the bank raised before the fountain is opened.

William Rawley, Bacon’s chaplain, secretary, biographer, and posthumous editor, confronted the atheist suspicion directly. “This lord was religious,” he wrote, “for though the world be apt to suspect and prejudge great wits and politics to have somewhat of the atheist, yet he was conversant with God, as appeareth by several passages throughout the whole of his writings.” Rawley was not an impartial witness, but he was a close one. His phrase, “throughout the whole of his writings,” points us toward the correct test. Bacon’s religion should be judged across the corpus rather than reduced to a handful of statements isolated from it.

The corpus does not require us to canonize Bacon. His political conduct, ambition, compromises, and moral failures remain open to judgment. Religious conviction does not make a person innocent, consistent, or wise in every act. Indeed, Bacon’s own theology gives us no reason to expect such perfection. It begins with the Fall.

It does require us to replace caricature with proportion. The man who wrote so powerfully about knowledge also wrote powerfully about charity, pride, repentance, judgment, faith, Christ, and the need for every human work to return to the glory and goodness from which it came.

The Bitter and the Sweet

We can now state the correspondence without exaggerating it. Penemue teaches “the bitter and the sweet,” the secrets of wisdom, and writing with ink and paper. His gift enters a morally disordered world, and the text remembers its consequences as corruption. Writing preserves the sin as efficiently as the wisdom.

Bacon discovers that communication requires only a stable twofold difference. He separates message from carrier and sees that letters, sounds, lights, or almost any perceptible objects can signify thought at a distance. His insight belongs to the prehistory of binary encoding. It also expresses his larger vocation: knowledge must be made capable of surviving its first possessor and traveling across distance, language, institution, and time.

Penemue belongs to a story in which forbidden knowledge increases the power of fallen humanity. Bacon belongs to a Christian philosophy in which humanity has fallen from both innocence and dominion. He seeks the partial repair of dominion through arts and sciences, while insisting that religion and faith address the other loss. The modern world has taken the first restoration with extraordinary seriousness. Bacon’s warning returns with increasing force because the second has not kept pace.

Penemue teaches writing. Bacon exhibits an almost unparalleled capacity to write and to invent forms of writing appropriate to different kinds of knowledge. Penemue reveals secrets. Bacon creates a method intended to discover what remains secret in nature. Penemue’s teaching escapes moral control. Bacon attempts to place inquiry and transmission under charity, “sound reason and true religion,” and the relief of human suffering.

Perhaps the deepest correspondence lies in the recognition that knowledge is never only knowledge. It becomes power in the receiver. Every improvement in writing, printing, cipher, code, storage, and transmission increases the number of possible receivers and the distance between the gift and its original moral context. The more perfectly we learn to communicate, the less control the first communicator retains.

That is why Bacon’s theological writings cannot be treated as disposable scenery. They carry the part of his project that technical modernity most readily forgets. Without them, he appears as the giver of power. With them, he appears as a lawgiver struggling to govern the gift.

He wanted the fountain opened but he also wanted a bank. He wanted humanity released from intellectual bondage, but he wanted the released mind subjected to truth. He wanted dominion restored, but he knew dominion was not innocence. And he wanted the work of discovery and writing to become “new alms” conveyed to the family of mankind.

There is no evidence that Bacon knew Penemue. There is no need to pretend that he did. The correspondence is valuable because it brings a very old image into relation with the architect of modern discovery. Penemue names the danger that accompanies the gift. Bacon names the discipline the gift requires. Between them stands the twofold taste of knowledge itself: bitter and sweet.

Selected Sources and Further Reading

1 Enoch 69:8–11, trans. R. H. Charles, “The Book of Enoch (Charles), Chapter 69,” Wikisource: Read online

Francis Bacon, De augmentis scientiarum, Book VI, chapter 1, biliteral cipher passage; English wording also reproduced in discussions of Bacon’s cipher. A public-domain transcription of the Spedding translation is reproduced in Bram Stoker, The Mystery of the Sea, Appendix A: Read online

Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Book I, aphorism 129, trans. James Spedding: Read online

Francis Bacon, Valerius Terminus, “Of the Limits and End of Knowledge”: Read online

Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Book II, aphorism 52, on the double loss and double restoration: Read online

Francis Bacon, Meditationes Sacrae (1597): Read online

Francis Bacon, “Of Atheism”: Read online

Francis Bacon, “A Confession of Faith”: Read online

Francis Bacon, the Student’s Prayer, Writer’s Prayer, and “A Prayer, or Psalm”: Read online

William Rawley, Life of the Right Honourable Francis Bacon: Read online

M. E. Stone, “Og King of Bashan, Enoch and the Books of Enoch: Extra-Canonical Texts and Interpretations of Genesis 6:1–4,” on Scaliger, Purchas, and the early-modern Enoch fragments: Read online

Stephen A. McKnight, The Religious Foundations of Francis Bacon’s Thought (University of Missouri Press, 2006).

Stephen Matthews, Theology and Science in the Thought of Francis Bacon (Ashgate, 2008).