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This chapter considers seventeenth-century poetic works that take various positions, implicitly or explicitly, on the question of the relationship between human and divine creation: Margaret Cavendish’s prose fiction Blazing World, biblical creation epics by Guillaume Du Bartas and Lucy Hutchinson, and topographical poems by Sir John Denham and Andrew Marvell. Cavendish and Marvell suggest that it is prideful and misleading to assume that humans can discover truth about divine creation by natural means; Du Bartas and Denham, by contrast, tend to collapse the distance between humans and God, frequently casting God as an “architect” or other type of human creator. Situated between these two groups is Hutchinson, who believes humans can gain insights into God’s ways by looking at our own—but these insights are only ever shadowy and partial and frequently need to be supplemented by divine revelation.
This chapter turns from a broader consideration of poetic works on divine and human creation to the most influential biblical epic in English: Milton’s Paradise Lost. Recent work on Milton has shown harmony between the content and form of Paradise Lost and the methods and aims of modern science. However, an underappreciated strand of scientific reform still needs to be integrated into our understanding of Milton’s relationship to science: a marginalization of natural theology. By working against this trend, Milton aligns himself instead with those scientific reformers who promoted natural theology, providing in Paradise Lost a rubric for applying human science to theological understanding while resisting the anthropocentrism and modern notion of reason that undergirded many contemporary prose works of natural theology. In contrast with contemporaries who emphasized the evidence of divine power in nature, Milton insists that love is the divine attribute most visible in creation, even outside of Eden. A natural theology that discerns divine love is more at home in Milton’s poetic world than in the increasingly reductive material reality on which works of physico-theology drew.
This one will explore how natural theology infused the imagination of John Bunyan. Among his imaginative works, Bunyan’s engagement with the book of nature grew between publication of the first part of Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and the second part (1684) and his Book for Boys and Girls (1686). But Bunyan differed from the physico-theologians in his understanding of nature’s ideal audience and how far nature could bring people toward salvation. Unlike contemporary scientists, Bunyan held that no special training was required to read theological messages in nature; in fact, the book of nature was especially suitable for women and children. To derive any benefit from nature, however, a person needed a conscience already awakened to faith. Bunyan’s treatment of nature differs, on the one hand, from earlier emblem texts in which images were printed in the book—requiring no direct experience of the natural world—and, on the other, from physico-theology, which increasingly required an expert’s understanding of that world.
Focusing on Donne’s view of natural theology, especially from 1614 onward, this chapter makes two central claims. First, considering Donne biographically, I argue that while there is important continuity in Donne’s career (insofar as he engages with the book of nature throughout), his vocational turn in the years 1611–1614 refocuses, reshapes, and intensifies that engagement: the skeptical and noncommittal attitude toward apprehension of the divine in the sensible world that can be traced in the Songs and Sonnets is replaced by a clearer and altogether more hopeful tone in the Essayes, with Donne further developing his insights about the book of nature in his sermons and the Devotions. Second, I argue that Donne’s insights deserve to be included in historical studies of natural theology in the early seventeenth century and his exclusion has been partly facilitated by scholarly emphasis on his earlier work, although this is changing.
This chapter focuses on how Herbert and Vaughan depict the natural world as capable of revealing theological truth--and humans as capable of receiving that truth--in their widely read devotional lyrics. Ultimately, Herbert and Vaughan do not just hint at what kind of natural theology might be possible or edifying given their respective understandings of science and nature; both authors practice natural theology in their devotional poetry. Because the two poets differ on the value of human science and the theological status of nature, however, they differ markedly on how and when natural theology may usefully be practiced. Herbert views natural theology along the lines Bacon laid down in his Essays and Advancement of Learning, anticipating—and perhaps even influencing—the physico-theology of John Ray later in the century. Vaughan, by contrast, retains the older view that more theological insight is available in nature than just the facts of God’s existence and providence, making less of a distinction than Herbert between nature and scripture.
This introduction lays out the thesis of the book before defining the key terms "literature" and "natural theology" as they were understood in early modern England. It then briefly surveys the historiography of natural theology and relevant bodies of literary criticism and provides summaries of each chapter.
This chapter considers Herbert and Vaughan’s foundational views of science and nature, toward exploring their views of natural theology more specifically in Chapter 4. How does each poet conceive of the relationships between God, humans and nature, and does he see human inquiry into nature as leading to theological insight? Both Herbert and Vaughan engage these questions, though they differ starkly on the answers. Vaughan is less dismissive of human science than is Herbert, for instance. And although both poets share a conviction that the natural world is not as it should be, Herbert sees the world as destined for conflagration while Vaughan’s hope—repeated throughout Silex Scintillans—is instead for regeneration.
Guiding readers through the diverse forms of natural theology expressed in seventeenth-century English literature, Katherine Calloway reveals how, in ways that have not yet been fully recognized, authors such as Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Cavendish, Hutchinson, Milton, Marvell, and Bunyan describe, promote, challenge, and even practice natural theology in their poetic works. She simultaneously improves our understanding of an important and still-influential intellectual movement and deepens our appreciation of multiple major literary works. “Natural theology,” as it was popularly understood, changed dramatically in England over the seventeenth century, from the application of natural light to divine things to a newer, more brittle, understanding of the enterprise as the exclusive use of reason and observation to prove theological conclusions outside of any context of faith. These poets profoundly complicate the story, collectively demonstrating that some forms of natural theology lend themselves to poetry or imaginative literature rather than prose.