Was Bacon an Atheist?
Which Bacon?
Every inquiry into Francis Bacon begins with a prior question: which Bacon? There is the Bacon of the familiar historical narrative: the father of modern science, the founder of empiricism, and the herald of humanity’s conquest of nature. There is Bacon the courtier and politician, ambitious for office and compromised by power. There is the cold Bacon of later philosophical criticism, who reduced nature to an object of utility and prepared the way for an impersonal technological civilization. In recent accounts, this figure sometimes becomes a concealed atheist, or even a conscious enemy of the religious order whose language he continued to employ.
There are other Bacons. There is the Christian reformer who described knowledge as part of the restoration of humanity after the Fall. There is the moralist whose works return continually to charity, providence, humility, and the limits placed upon human understanding. There is the student of Scripture whose biblical references are so numerous and so deeply integrated into his thought that they cannot easily be removed without altering the structure of his philosophy. There is also the literary Bacon: the writer of essays, histories, myths, prayers, speeches, entertainments, philosophical fables, and unfinished imaginative works. Beyond him stands the still more elusive figure associated with ciphers, masks, secret societies, pseudonymous writings, and disputed attributions.
These figures have been separated so completely that they sometimes appear to describe different men. The division is partly created by Bacon’s extraordinary range. His writings extend across natural philosophy, jurisprudence, politics, ethics, history, theology, medicine, rhetoric, mythology, education, and literary invention. They were written in Latin and English, over several decades, for different audiences and under changing political circumstances. Some works were revised repeatedly. Others remained fragmentary or were published after his death. Any account constructed from only one part of this corpus will produce a partial Bacon.
His reputation has also been shaped by the needs of later ages. Historians of science selected the passages that appeared to anticipate experimental method. Political writers concentrated upon his fall from office and his relationship with Essex. Philosophers treated him as a symbolic beginning of modernity. Religious readers emphasized his declarations of faith, while secular interpreters often regarded the same declarations as conventional language or protective camouflage. Advocates of disputed literary and esoteric theories created still another Bacon, endowed with an almost unlimited field of activity. Each tradition preserved genuine evidence. Each also arranged that evidence around a prior conception of the man.
The construction of Bacon’s reputation is itself a substantial historical subject. Nieves Mathews devoted nearly six hundred pages to it in Francis Bacon: The History of a Character Assassination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). Her study follows the formation and repetition of charges against Bacon, particularly those concerning Essex, political betrayal, corruption, and personal character. Its scale is significant. The hostile image of Bacon did not arise from a few isolated judgments. It developed through a long process in which disputed assertions were repeated, enlarged, and eventually received as settled biography.
Mathews’s study does not resolve the theological questions considered in this book. It demonstrates something that bears directly upon them. Repetition can give an interpretation the appearance of an established fact. Once an image has become conventional, later writers no longer feel obliged to reconstruct the evidence on which it was founded. They inherit the conclusion and add new inferences to it.
This process can be seen in the modern treatment of Bacon’s religion. The claim that he was an atheist, a materialist, or a merely political user of religious language has been repeated so often that many readers now approach his works from that assumption. Explicit declarations of belief are then treated as evidence of caution, conformity, or concealment. Scriptural structures are reduced to ornament. Religious premises are translated into secular equivalents before Bacon’s argument has been allowed to speak in its own terms.
Suspicion may sometimes be justified. Bacon lived in an age when theological error could carry grave consequences, and no prudent statesman wrote without an awareness of danger. His religious language cannot therefore be accepted without examination merely because it is religious. Yet the opposite procedure is equally uncertain. A declaration does not become false simply because prudence might have recommended it. When a writer returns to the same theological principles across private meditations, published works, prayers, essays, letters, and philosophical treatises, the cumulative evidence requires more than dismissal.
The problem reaches beyond isolated statements of belief. Bacon’s conception of knowledge is repeatedly placed within the biblical history of creation, Fall, punishment, charity, and partial restoration. He distinguishes the lawful investigation of nature from the moral presumption by which humanity seeks to establish good and evil for itself. He describes the advancement of knowledge as a work to be governed by charity. He warns that knowledge separated from charity produces pride and injury. He condemns superstition, yet he also condemns atheism. He argues for boundaries between natural philosophy and revealed religion without declaring revealed religion unnecessary.
Whether these elements amount to personal orthodoxy, philosophical Christianity, political accommodation, or some more complex position must be determined from the whole body of evidence. A later chapter will examine the charge of atheism directly. It will consider Bacon’s explicit statements, his use of Scripture, the theological structure of his philosophical project, his prayers and religious writings, and the modern arguments of scholars who have restored theology to the interpretation of his thought. It will also examine the strongest reasons for reading Bacon otherwise. The purpose will not be to substitute a pious caricature for an impious one. It will be to discover what position the surviving texts can actually sustain.
The question “Which Bacon?” also governs the literary and historical inquiries pursued in this volume. A Bacon defined in advance as a narrowly practical statesman and methodologist will appear to have little relation to mythology, imaginative literature, esoteric traditions, or the great anonymous and pseudonymous works of his period. Such connections will seem extraneous before they are examined. A Bacon restored to the full range of his interests presents a different field of inquiry. His acknowledged writings already contain myths interpreted as vehicles of concealed philosophy, discussions of ciphers and secret communication, reflections upon the transmission of knowledge, and experiments in numerous literary forms.
This does not establish Bacon’s authorship of works attributed to other writers. It does make the relevant relationships legitimate objects of study. Influence, collaboration, common sources, intellectual exchange, deliberate imitation, and authorship are distinct explanations. Resemblance alone cannot decide among them. Yet resemblance may identify a historical problem that deserves to be preserved and investigated.
The present study therefore proceeds through accumulation rather than declaration. It follows recurrent ideas, verbal correspondences, symbolic structures, biographical connections, and shared intellectual environments. Some parallels may indicate direct influence. Others may belong to the common inheritance of Renaissance Europe. A few may be accidental. Their value lies partly in their individual strength and partly in the larger patterns they form when placed beside one another.
Whenever possible, the primary texts will be allowed sufficient space to display those patterns. Brief extracts can conceal as much as they reveal. A sentence removed from its surrounding argument may appear more decisive than it is, while a genuine correspondence may remain invisible until the complete passages are compared. Long quotation is therefore part of the method of this book. It allows the reader to judge the evidence without depending entirely upon the author’s interpretation.
No single Bacon presented by posterity is adequate to the surviving corpus. The scientist, courtier, moralist, theologian, mythographer, reformer, and literary craftsman belong to the same historical problem. The more speculative images must be treated cautiously, but the familiar images must also be subjected to examination. Familiarity is not proof.
The question “Which Bacon?” will remain open throughout this study. It is not a rhetorical device with a predetermined answer. It is an acknowledgment that Bacon’s historical identity has been divided among competing traditions, each possessing part of the evidence. Before deciding what Bacon believed, influenced, concealed, or created, we must first recover enough of the man to recognize the range of the question.
Was Bacon an Atheist?
This lord was religious: 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.”
—William Rawley, Resuscitatio, 1657
William Rawley, Bacon’s chaplain, literary executor, and first biographer, confronted a suspicion that has followed Bacon ever since. The sentence is more revealing than a conventional tribute to a dead patron. Rawley knew that Bacon belonged to two classes of men commonly suspected of unbelief. He was a “great wit,” possessed of an intelligence that ranged across nearly every province of learning; and he was a politician, accustomed to courts, concealment, negotiation, and the careful management of appearances. His immense intellectual ambition could be represented as pride. His insistence that natural philosophy must be freed from the interference of theology could be represented as an attempt to remove God from nature. His political career supplied an additional reason to wonder whether his public declarations expressed private conviction or public necessity.
Rawley’s answer was that Bacon “was conversant with God.” He went on to appeal to “several passages throughout the whole current of his writings,” to Bacon’s Confession of Faith, to his attendance at worship and the sacrament, and to the faith in which he died. Rawley was not a disinterested witness. He had served Bacon closely and devoted much of his later life to preserving his works. That relationship gives his testimony both its value and its limitation. He knew Bacon in a way that later interpreters did not, but he also wrote as a loyal chaplain and executor.
His statement therefore cannot settle by itself a question concerning Bacon’s inward life. It does, however, propose a test. If Bacon was “conversant with God,” that conversation should be visible in the writings. The question is not whether a profession of belief can be imagined to conceal unbelief. Any profession can be dismissed in that manner. The historical question is whether the hypothesis of concealed atheism explains the surviving evidence better than the religious understanding Bacon repeatedly supplied himself.
That evidence extends far beyond a few ceremonial references to God. It includes an explicit attack upon atheism, a formal confession of Christian belief, a volume of sacred meditations, prayers written for students and investigators of nature, a personal prayer composed in adversity, translations of the Psalms, and a philosophical project whose principal categories are Creation, Fall, charity, providence, and the partial restoration of humanity’s lost dominion. Scripture furnished Bacon with more than quotations. It supplied the architecture within which he understood knowledge.
The Name of Atheist
The word atheist did not always have a precise meaning in Bacon’s age. It could describe a person who denied the existence of God. It could also be thrown at religious dissenters, critics of superstition, political enemies, and anyone who appeared to disturb established belief. Bacon recognized the looseness of the accusation. In Of Atheism he observed that “all that impugn a received religion, or superstition, are by the adverse part branded with the name of atheists.” He even defended Epicurus against the charge that his professions concerning the gods were merely political camouflage. Epicurus, Bacon said, had been “traduced.” His words concerning the divine nature were “noble and divine,” even though he denied its administration of the world.
This is worth remembering when the same method of suspicion is applied to Bacon. He knew the argument that a philosopher might speak reverently in public while denying God in secret. He did not automatically accept it, even in the case of a philosopher whose conception of providence he rejected.
Bacon was certainly capable of religious criticism. He attacked the corruption of the clergy, the multiplication of empty controversies, the abuse of ecclesiastical authority, superstitious observances, and the intrusion of human systems into divine truth. He warned that repeated religious divisions could produce atheism and that “scandal of priests” and “profane scoffing in holy matters” gradually destroyed reverence. These statements do not place him outside religion. They show him treating religious corruption as a cause of unbelief.
It is also necessary to distinguish Bacon’s theology from the questions raised by his possible esoteric and pseudonymous activity. His relationship to alchemy, visionary experience, secrecy, and writings associated with such names as Philalethes belongs to a separate inquiry. Esotericism and atheism are not interchangeable. A concealed or symbolic religious philosophy may be unorthodox without being irreligious. The present chapter therefore concentrates upon writings securely connected with Bacon and asks what account of God, Scripture, nature, and humanity they contain.
Of Atheism
Bacon’s most direct answer appears in the essay Of Atheism, first published in 1612 and slightly enlarged for the final edition of the Essays in 1625. It begins with one of his most uncompromising declarations:
I had rather believe all the fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind. And therefore, God never wrought miracle, to convince atheism, because his ordinary works convince it. It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.
The argument turns upon depth. When the mind considers secondary causes in isolation, it may rest in them and proceed no further. When it beholds their connection, “confederate and linked together,” it is carried toward providence and deity. Bacon even invokes the atomists, whose philosophy was commonly accused of atheism. An ordered universe arising from innumerable particles without a divine marshal seemed to him less credible than the traditional elemental universe existing without God. His preference for Democritus as a natural philosopher did not entail acceptance of a godless cosmos.
The essay is severe toward atheism, but its severity is not confined to doctrine. Bacon believed that denial of God diminished the human being:
They that deny a God, destroy man’s nobility; for certainly man is of kin to the beasts, by his body; and, if he be not of kin to God, by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature. It destroys likewise magnanimity, and the raising of human nature; for take an example of a dog, and mark what a generosity and courage he will put on, when he finds himself maintained by a man; who to him is instead of a God, or melior natura; which courage is manifestly such, as that creature, without that confidence of a better nature than his own, could never attain. So man, when he resteth and assureth himself, upon divine protection and favor, gathereth a force and faith, which human nature in itself could not obtain. Therefore, as atheism is in all respects hateful, so in this, that it depriveth human nature of the means to exalt itself above human frailty.
This passage belongs naturally in a study of the heroic archetype. Bacon does not ground human nobility in bodily strength, political dominion, or intellectual independence. Man is ennobled by his kinship with God “by his spirit.” Trust in a higher nature produces magnanimity, courage, force, and faith. Atheism closes the vertical dimension of human existence and leaves humanity enclosed within its animal nature.
The argument also qualifies Bacon’s association of knowledge with power. Power alone does not raise human nature. The angels fell through the desire for power; humanity fell through a knowledge pursued in disobedience; and the acquisition of knowledge without charity can enlarge the consequences of human corruption. True magnanimity arises when human power remains conscious of divine protection and divine government.
An essay published for the world cannot give direct access to Bacon’s private consciousness. Yet Of Atheism cannot be isolated as a late or convenient profession. Its central statement had already appeared in the Meditationes Sacrae of 1597. There Bacon wrote that “a little natural philosophy, and the first entrance into it, doth dispose the opinion to atheism,” while “much natural philosophy and wading deep into it, will bring about men’s minds to religion.” The continuity extends from one of Bacon’s earliest publications to the final edition of the Essays, a period of almost thirty years.
The Sacred Meditations
The Meditationes Sacrae appeared in 1597 in the same volume as the first edition of the Essays and the Colours of Good and Evil. Their conjunction is characteristic. Sacred meditation, civil observation, rhetoric, and moral psychology were not yet divided into the separate portraits of Bacon later constructed by scholars. They appeared together at the beginning of his published career.
The twelve meditations concern the works of God and man, the miracles of Christ, charity, earthly hope, hypocrisy, imposture, atheism, heresy, the Church, and Scripture. They already contain several principles that later became central to Bacon’s reform of knowledge.
The first meditation begins from the difference between God’s works and the works of man:
God beheld all things which his hands had made, and lo they were all passing good. But when man turned him about, and took a view of the works which his hands had made, he found all to be vanity and vexation of spirit: wherefore, if thou shalt work in the works of God, thy sweat shall be as an ointment of odours, and thy rest as the sabbath of God.
The language anticipates the later Writer’s Prayer. The investigation of nature is presented as labor within God’s works. Its promised end is participation in divine vision and sabbath. This is already close to an instauration: human labor directed toward the recovery of a truer relation to creation.
The meditation on the miracles of Christ gives that labor a moral direction. Bacon observes that Christ’s miracles were acts of “goodness and mercy” directed toward human need. They provided food, safety, medicine, health, sanity, and life. His doctrine concerned the soul, while his miracles relieved the body. Bacon’s later call for knowledge devoted to the “relief of man’s estate” grows within the same moral field. Useful knowledge imitates the beneficence of Christ when it feeds, heals, preserves, and relieves.
Charity receives its own meditation. Bacon calls love of enemies “one of the cunningest points of the law of Christ, and an imitation of the divine nature.” The expression is important. Charity is not merely a restraint placed upon knowledge from outside. It is participation in the nature of God. When the mature Bacon requires that knowledge be “perfected and governed in charity,” he is applying to natural philosophy a principle already present in his early devotional writing.
The meditations also contain the germ of the doctrine of the Two Books. In Of Heresies, Bacon takes Christ’s words, “You err, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God,” as a general canon. Error arises through ignorance of God’s will and through inadequate consideration of his power. The will is revealed through Scripture. The power is contemplated in the creatures. Superstition corrupts the understanding of God’s will; atheism rebels against his power. True religion must preserve both.
This framework was in place by 1597. It was not added to the Great Instauration after Bacon had conceived an independent secular program. The distinction between God’s word and God’s works grew inside his religious thought and later became one of the governing principles of his philosophy.
The Two Books
In The Advancement of Learning, Bacon develops the distinction explicitly:
For our Saviour saith, “You err, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God;” laying before us two books or volumes to study, if we will be secured from error: first the Scriptures, revealing the will of God, and then the creatures expressing His power; whereof the latter is a key unto the former: not only opening our understanding to conceive the true sense of the Scriptures by the general notions of reason and rules of speech, but chiefly opening our belief, in drawing us into a due meditation of the omnipotency of God, which is chiefly signed and engraven upon His works.
The two books have one author and distinct offices. Scripture reveals God’s will. Creation expresses his power. Nature can assist belief by displaying divine omnipotence, but the senses cannot discover the mysteries entrusted to revelation. Scripture, in turn, should not be converted into a manual of physics.
Bacon enforced this distinction sharply. In Novum Organum he condemned attempts to construct natural philosophy from Genesis, Job, and other biblical texts. The “absurd mixture of matters divine and human,” he warned, produces both fantastical philosophy and heretical religion. Read without context, this separation can sound like an expulsion of theology from knowledge. Within Bacon’s larger argument, it is an effort to protect the integrity of both books. Physical claims require the investigation of nature. Matters of faith remain subject to the divine oracles.
The same distinction appears symbolically in The Wisdom of the Ancients. Pentheus climbs a tree to spy upon the hidden rites of Bacchus and is punished with a vision of two suns and two cities of Thebes. Bacon interprets the fable as a warning against those who use natural philosophy to pry presumptuously into divine mysteries. “The light of nature is one thing and of grace another.” Confusion between them produces the doubling, wavering, and perpetual unrest represented by Pentheus.
This boundary does not mark the difference between a real natural world and an unreal religious world. It marks two forms of light. Natural inquiry has a legitimate jurisdiction because creation is genuinely ordered and accessible to the senses. Faith has its own jurisdiction because divine mysteries exceed the competence of natural reason. Bacon feared usurpation in either direction.
The Student’s Prayer repeats the distinction as a petition to God:
This also we humbly and earnestly beg, that human things may not prejudice such as are divine; neither that from the unlocking of the gates of sense, and the kindling of a greater natural light, any thing of incredulity, or intellectual night, may arise in our minds towards divine mysteries. But, rather, that by our mind thoroughly cleansed and purged from fancy and vanities, and yet subject and perfectly given up to the divine oracles, there may be given unto faith the things that are faith’s. Amen.
The natural light is to be increased. Bacon prays that its increase will not produce an “intellectual night” concerning divine mysteries. Inquiry and faith remain distinct without becoming enemies.
Solomon
No biblical figure is more important to Bacon’s understanding of knowledge than Solomon. Solomon joins offices that later thought often separates. He is king, judge, moral philosopher, student of nature, collector of knowledge, builder, and author of sacred wisdom. His learning is a divine gift, granted in answer to prayer and placed under the responsibility of rule.
Bacon invokes Solomon near the beginning of The Advancement of Learning:
So likewise in the person of Solomon the king, we see the gift or endowment of wisdom and learning, both in Solomon’s petition and in God’s assent thereunto, preferred before all other terrene and temporal felicity. By virtue of which grant or donative of God Solomon became enabled not only to write those excellent parables or aphorisms concerning divine and moral philosophy, but also to compile a natural history of all verdure, from the cedar upon the mountain to the moss upon the wall ... and also of all things that breathe or move.
Solomon’s natural history gives scriptural authorization to the comprehensive investigation of creatures. Bacon then quotes the proverb that “the glory of God is to conceal a thing, but the glory of the king is to find it out.” He compares the concealment and discovery of nature to an innocent game in which God takes delight in hiding his works so that they may be found. Inquiry becomes a royal and religious vocation.
The connection reaches its fullest imaginative form in New Atlantis. The central institution of Bensalem is Salomon’s House, also called the College of the Six Days’ Works. It is “dedicated to the study of the works and creatures of God.” Its second name refers directly to Creation. Its investigations seek the true nature of things so that “God might have the more glory in the workmanship of them, and men the more fruit in the use of them.”
The Father of Salomon’s House gives its celebrated purpose:
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.
Taken alone, the language of human empire can appear to confirm the darkest interpretation of Bacon. In the complete institution, power is surrounded by disciplines of purpose, secrecy, judgment, worship, and public benefit. The Fellows deliberate over which discoveries should be published. They direct experiments toward “things of use and practice for man’s life.” They maintain daily hymns and services of praise and thanksgiving and offer prayers for the illumination of their labors and “the turning of them into good and holy uses.”
Salomon’s House is therefore not simply a factory of power. It is Bacon’s attempt to imagine the government of power. Its name recalls the king who united wisdom and rule; its structure follows the six days of Creation; its discoveries are subjected to collective judgment; its rites return intellectual labor to God. Whether Bacon’s safeguards would be adequate is a separate question. Their presence shows that he understood knowledge as a moral and religious responsibility.
Creation, Fall, and Restoration
Bacon’s defense of knowledge rests upon a particular reading of Genesis. The Fall did not arise from the study of nature. Adam had already contemplated the creatures and given them names according to their properties. Bacon calls these acts the two principal parts of knowledge: the view of creatures and the imposition of names. The forbidden knowledge was of another kind:
It was not the pure knowledge of Nature and universality ... which gave the occasion to the fall; but it was the proud knowledge of good and evil, with an intent in man to give law unto himself, and to depend no more upon God’s commandments, which was the form of the temptation.
The sin lies in the purpose and object of the knowledge. Humanity sought moral independence. Man attempted to become the author of good and evil and to release himself from divine command. Natural knowledge remained lawful, although the human mind and the created world both suffered damage through the Fall.
This reading allows Bacon to describe the advancement of learning as a partial restoration. Religion repairs innocence and moral relation; the arts and sciences repair dominion over creation. Neither restoration is complete, and neither abolishes the consequences of the Fall. The project remains a work undertaken within human limitation.
The religious structure also establishes the moral law of inquiry. In the general preface to the Great Instauration, Bacon warns his readers to seek knowledge neither for mental pleasure, contention, superiority, profit, fame, nor power. They are to seek it “for the benefit and use of life” and to “perfect and govern it in charity.” He then gives the theological reason:
For it was from lust of power that the angels fell, from lust of knowledge that man fell; but of charity there can be no excess, neither did angel or man ever come in danger by it.
Bacon’s formulation is compressed and severe. Knowledge is capable of participating in the original disorders of angels and men. Power may repeat the angelic fall. Knowledge may repeat the human fall when it seeks independence from divine and moral law. Charity alone can govern the enlargement of human power because charity seeks a good beyond the possessor.
The familiar reduction of Bacon’s philosophy to “knowledge is power” removes the condition he placed upon both knowledge and power. His program calls for the recovery of human capacity, yet it locates that recovery within Creation, Fall, and charity. The aim is a “rich storehouse for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate.” The glory of God and the good of humanity form one end.
A Confession of Faith
Bacon’s Confession of Faith supplies the most continuous statement of his Christian doctrine. It was probably written by 1603. Rawley later published it, and manuscript copies survive in the hands of one of Bacon’s regular scribes and of Rawley himself. Rawley also sent it to the theologian Roger Maynwaring for examination. Its attribution is secure. The confession begins:
I believe that nothing is without beginning, but God; no nature, no matter, no spirit, but one, only, and the same God. That God, as he is eternally almighty, only wise, only good, in his nature; so he is eternally Father, Son, and Spirit, in persons.
Bacon proceeds through Creation, mediation, Fall, restoration, judgment, Scripture, and salvation. Christ is the center of the created order, “the true ladder” by which God descends to his creatures and his creatures ascend to God. The language is not deistic. God does not merely initiate a universe that continues without him. He creates, governs, judges, reveals, elects, redeems, and restores.
The Confession has sometimes been treated as a document of public conformity. It may have been written with circulation in view, and its doctrines can be located within the theological conflicts of Bacon’s age. Those circumstances deserve study. They do not erase the document. A theory of camouflage must still explain why its conception of Creation and restoration corresponds so closely with the philosophical program Bacon developed elsewhere.
The convergence is especially strong because the Confession does not stand alone. Its God is the author of nature and Scripture; its Christ is the mediator of restoration; its account of the creature preserves both dependence and genuine created order. These are also the premises of the Two Books and the Great Instauration.
Bacon at Prayer
The prayers bring the argument into another register. Three devotional texts are securely attributable to Bacon: the Student’s Prayer, the Writer’s Prayer, and the personal Prayer, or Psalm, plausibly assigned to the period of his fall in 1621. A fourth prayer traditionally printed among his works has a less certain history and should not carry the argument.
The personal prayer begins:
Most gracious Lord God, my merciful Father, from my youth up, my Creator, my Redeemer, my Comforter. Thou, Lord, soundest and searchest the depths and secrets of all hearts: thou acknowledgest the upright of heart: thou judgest the hypocrite: thou ponderest men’s thoughts and doings as in a balance: thou measurest their intentions as with a line: vanity and crooked ways cannot be hid from thee.
The prayer reviews Bacon’s life under providence and chastisement. It contains self-defense, confession, gratitude, and humiliation. He claims to have valued the poor and oppressed, hated cruelty, mourned the divisions of the Church, and avoided revenge. He then turns to the relation between the two books in a sentence of extraordinary simplicity:
Thy creatures have been my books, but thy Scriptures much more. I have sought thee in the courts, fields, and gardens, but I have found thee in thy temples.
This does not sound like a rejection of nature. The creatures have indeed been his books. Yet he refuses to equate what they reveal with what he finds in Scripture and worship. Nature discloses God through his works; Scripture and the temple disclose a more direct relation. The prayer becomes still more personal when Bacon interprets his reversals as divine correction:
And now, when I thought most of peace and honour, thy hand is heavy upon me, and hath humbled me according to thy former loving-kindness, keeping me still in thy fatherly school, not as a bastard, but as a child.
He confesses sins “more in number than the sands of the sea” and admits that he has not used his gifts as he ought. The legal officer who had weighed the actions of others imagines his own intentions measured by God. The investigator of hidden causes stands before the searcher of hearts.
The Writer’s Prayer places the Great Instauration under the same judgment. It addresses God as the giver of visible and intellectual light and asks him to “protect and govern this work.” Human labor in God’s works may lead to participation in his vision and sabbath. The desired fruit of the work is described as alms:
We humbly beg that this mind may be steadfastly in us; and that thou, by our hands, and also by the hands of others, on whom thou shalt bestow the same spirit, wilt please to convey a largess of new alms to thy family of mankind.
This is one of Bacon’s clearest statements of intellectual vocation. Discovery is not private possession. It is an alms conveyed through many hands to the human family. The language unites research, collaboration, charity, and divine agency.
The Student’s Prayer asks for new mercies “for the alleviating of our miseries” and that the opening of the senses should produce no unbelief concerning divine mysteries. Together the prayers reveal the intended spiritual discipline of the investigator: the mind must be cleansed of fantasy and vanity, surrendered to evidence in natural things, and submitted to revelation in matters of faith.
A prayer is a composed text. It may be written for circulation, for a community, or for an ideal reader. It does not provide unmediated access to the soul of its author. These prayers remain important because their language agrees with the governing ideas of Bacon’s published philosophy. The same relations recur: light and humility, nature and Scripture, labor and sabbath, discovery and charity, human hands and divine purpose.
The Psalms
During an illness late in 1624, Bacon translated seven Psalms into English verse. He published them in 1625 and dedicated them to George Herbert. He called them “this poor exercise of my sickness” and selected Herbert because “Divinity and Poesy” met in the work, one supplying the matter and the other the style.
The selected Psalms were 1, 12, 90, 104, 126, 137, and 149. The sequence does not constitute a systematic confession, and its autobiographical significance should not be forced. Even so, the subjects are characteristic: the law of God, false speech, oppression, mortality, Creation, restoration, exile, memory, praise, and judgment.
Psalm 1 begins with the blessed man who refuses the counsel of the wicked and makes the law of God his continual meditation. Bacon renders him as a fruitful tree planted beside running water. Psalm 12 concerns divided speech, “a cloven heart,” the suffering of the poor, and the purity of God’s word. Psalm 90 places the brevity of human ambition before divine eternity:
O Lord, thou art our home, to whom we fly,
And so hast always been from age to age;
Before the hills did intercept the eye,
Or that the frame was up of earthly stage.
One God thou wert, and art, and still shalt be;
The line of time, it doth not measure thee.
Psalm 104, the longest of the translations, is a hymn to the created order. Psalm 126 turns upon restoration and harvest; Psalm 137 upon exile and the preservation of sacred memory; Psalm 149 upon praise and judgment. Near the end of his life, after the collapse of his political position and the failure to complete the Great Instauration, Bacon occupied himself by rendering these scriptural poems into his own language.
Their literary merit has been disputed. That question has little bearing upon their place here. The translations show Bacon reading Scripture as a poet as well as a philosopher. They also complete a remarkable chronological span. The Sacred Meditations appeared in 1597. The final Essays and the Psalms appeared in 1625. Religious writing stands near the beginning and the end of his published career.
The Current of His Writings
Rawley appealed to “the whole current” of Bacon’s writings. The metaphor is exact. Scriptural language flows through works that modern classifications place in different disciplines.
Genesis provides Bacon with Creation, the naming of creatures, the distinction between natural knowledge and the knowledge of good and evil, the corruption of the human faculties, and the hope of restoration. Solomon provides the union of wisdom, natural history, moral philosophy, and government. Job defines the limits of human understanding before the power of God. Daniel supplies an image of increasing knowledge in the latter times. Babel represents the confusion of language and the failure of an ambitious human construction. Christ supplies the law of charity and the model of works directed toward healing and relief. Paul supplies the language of faith, hope, charity, gifts, callings, and the subjection of knowledge to love.
These references do more than ornament a secular argument. Remove Creation and the Great Instauration loses its original order. Remove the Fall and Bacon’s account of intellectual error loses its history. Remove Solomon and his ideal government of knowledge loses its principal exemplar. Remove charity and the enlargement of power loses its moral law. Remove providence and Bacon’s interpretation of the progress of learning loses its place in sacred history.
Recent scholarship has begun to take this evidence more seriously. Stephen McKnight has argued that religious motifs, scriptural references, and biblical doctrines occupy a central place in Bacon’s thought. Steven Matthews similarly begins from the observation that the Instauration writings are saturated with theological statements and biblical references. Their particular interpretations remain open to criticism, as all interpretations do. Their larger evidentiary point is difficult to deny. Bacon’s theology is pervasive and structural.
The old secularizing account often proceeds by translation. Creation becomes nature. Fall becomes cognitive error. Restoration becomes technological progress. Charity becomes utility. Providence becomes historical optimism. Once every theological term has been replaced by a secular equivalent, the resulting Bacon naturally appears secular. The procedure may identify later developments from his thought, but it does not preserve the form in which he expressed it.
There is no need to claim complete orthodoxy or transparent simplicity. Bacon’s religious position may contain tensions that cannot be resolved. His protection of faith from natural reason can be understood as reverence, as strategy, or as both. His conception of human dominion can inspire charity and still expose nature to dangerous forms of power. His criticism of superstition is severe, and his treatment of religious institutions is frequently political. None of this amounts by itself to atheism.
Nor does prudence automatically convert his religious language into falsehood. Bacon lived in an age when religious profession was politically necessary and theological error could be dangerous. He also returned to the same theological principles in works composed for different purposes, in Latin and English, across nearly three decades. The hypothesis of disguise must account for that recurrence.
Conversant with God
Was Bacon an atheist? Absolute certainty about the private consciousness of a historical person is rarely available. The surviving evidence nevertheless permits a historical judgment. Bacon explicitly rejected atheism. He described it as intellectually shallow and destructive of human nobility. He confessed belief in the triune God, Creation, providence, Christ, Scripture, judgment, and restoration. He wrote sacred meditations, prayers, and versions of the Psalms. He placed natural philosophy within a biblical account of Creation and Fall. He required knowledge to be governed by charity. He imagined the ideal institution of research as Salomon’s House, the College of the Six Days’ Works, dedicated to the study of God’s creatures and to the relief of human life.
Any one of these elements could be explained as convention, prudence, rhetoric, or accommodation. Their convergence is harder to dismiss. They occur in devotional, philosophical, literary, and biographical evidence. They appear early and late. They concern both the language and the structure of his thought.
Rawley did not merely say that Bacon professed religion. He said that Bacon “was conversant with God.” His choice of words suggests familiarity: an ongoing intercourse of mind and spirit. He directed the reader toward the writings as evidence. Those writings do not disclose every secret Bacon may have kept, and they do not resolve every question about his theology. They show a mind returning continually to God as Creator, lawgiver, judge, source of light, governor of knowledge, and end of human hope.
The atheist Bacon can be constructed only by treating this entire body of evidence as camouflage. A more economical conclusion is available. Bacon was a religious thinker whose Christianity entered deeply into his conception of nature, knowledge, human dignity, moral danger, and restoration. His philosophy helped open paths that later generations would travel in secular directions. That later history should not be confused with the faith in which the journey began.
Preliminary Source Notes
William Rawley, The Life of the Right Honourable Francis Bacon, first printed with the Resuscitatio (1657). Text.
Francis Bacon, Of Atheism, in the 1625 Essays. Text.
Francis Bacon, Meditationes Sacrae (1597). Text.
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605). Text.
Francis Bacon, preface to The Great Instauration (1620). Text.
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, I.65. Text.
Francis Bacon, “Actaeon and Pentheus, or a Curious Man,” The Wisdom of the Ancients. Text.
Francis Bacon, New Atlantis. Text.
Francis Bacon, A Confession of Faith. Text.
Francis Bacon, the Prayer, or Psalm, Student’s Prayer, and Writer’s Prayer. Text.
Francis Bacon, The Translation of Certain Psalms into English Verse (1625). Text.
Richard Serjeantson, “Francis Bacon and ‘The Summe of the Bible,’“ for the textual history of the Confession and prayers. Article.
Stephen A. McKnight, The Religious Foundations of Francis Bacon’s Thought (University of Missouri Press, 2006). Publisher’s description.
Steven Matthews, Theology and Science in the Thought of Francis Bacon (Ashgate, 2008). Book record.