The Father of the American Enlightenment
Francis Bacon authored the vision of the American Commonwealth. It combined scientific progress, spiritual enlightenment, and the union of polarities.
Joseph F. McCormick and David A. Palmer, Ph.D.
To establish an ideal commonwealth: this was the mission of a central contingent of America’s founders, none more than Franklin, the oldest and most well connected among them, and Jefferson, among their youngest. But the vision they followed had deeper roots in the life’s work of one man, the historically misunderstood Francis Bacon (1561–1626).
Benjamin Franklin, as one of the fathers of the American Enlightenment, was a direct inheritor of Bacon’s efforts to create a social network of enlightened thinkers. In one edition of his Almanac he re-publishes a celebratory poem on the anniversary of Bacon’s death:
Bacon….Kind nature form’d, deep, comprehensive, clear, Exact, and elegant; in one rich soul, Plato, the Stagyrite, and Tully join’d. The great deliverer he! who from the gloom Of cloister’d monks, and jargon-teaching schools, Led forth the true Philosophy…
So too influenced was the younger Thomas Jefferson who studied Bacon’s work as a student at William and Mary and later hung his portrait in his parlor at Montecello. “Bacon, Locke and Newton… I consider them as the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception, and as having laid the foundation of those superstructures which have been raised in the Physical and Moral sciences.”
As co-founder of the Virginia Company which financed expeditions in 1607 and 1620, as well as a member of the Company of Adventurers that established a settlement in Newfoundland, Francis Bacon has been commemorated as “The Guiding Spirit in [the] Colonization Scheme.” As Solicitor General to James I, Bacon oversaw the progress of the American colonies and drafted the second and third Royal Charters of the Virginia Company in 1609 and 1612. These documents, which outlined the rights of investors and settlers, as well as the governing structure of the colony, are among the founding documents of American constitutionalism.
Bacon is best known as the “father of the modern scientific method” and one of the originators of the Enlightenment. Bacon was also a statesman of noble ideal and character, poet, editor of the King James Bible, historian of ancient wisdom, and philosopher.
Few people know that Bacon is reputed by others — primarily within the Rosicrucian tradition in American esoteric spirituality — to also be a mystic responsible for organizing a network of spiritually independent visionaries, philosophers, and thinkers in support of settling the New World in accordance with higher designs of governance (reference: Manly Hall). Thus, Bacon is honoured in different quarters as the father of the scientific revolution, as the father of American constitutionalism, and as the father of American esoteric spirituality.
The more one studies this enigmatic figure the more it’s apparent his influence on the development of American culture may be far greater than previously acknowledged.
Bacon was raised by a deeply religious woman and one of the best-educated women in England of the day, Lady Anne Cooke Bacon, the sister-in-law of Queen Elizabeth’s prime minister, William Cecil, the 1st Lord Burghley and a former tutor of Henry VIII’s only son Edward. An ardent Christian with strong Puritan sympathies, Lady Anne schooled Francis on the Bible.
William Cecil was not only Prime Minister, but had one of the most extensive libraries in England in his home, Cecil House in London, a collection of sixty ancient volumes in six languages (none English). This library also served as a small school for boys of noble birth whose parents had died. Lady Anne had access to her brother-in-law’s library for precocious young Bacon’s education.
Through his tutoring and education prior to and through entering Cambridge University at the age of twelve, Francis Bacon studied Plato’s dialogues Timaeus and Critias which speak extensively of an “ideal commonwealth.” Through Lady Anne’s careful teaching and later as one of the instigators of the project to publish the 1611 King James Version of the Bible, and its final editor, he was obviously familiar with the “city on a hill” passages from Matthew’s gospel.
Among his voluminous literary contributions to humanity was a detailed vision of the ideal commonwealth. Bacon’s utopian vision, entitled The New Atlantis published after his death in 1626 in the back of a larger volume, was only decades later recognized for what it was.
The New Atlantis describes a utopian society governed by a scientific institution, the House of Salomon, which, serving the principle of Christian charity, is devoted to expanding knowledge of the world and converting that knowledge into measures that improve the human condition: “for the finding out of the true nature of all things, whereby God might have the more glory in the workmanship of them, and men the more fruit in the use of them.” The people are described as embodying the qualities of “generosity and enlightenment, dignity and splendor, piety and public spirit”.
The House of Salomon was named after the biblical King Solomon who was known for his wisdom and justice; the House of Salomon was thus a House of Justice in which spiritual principles and material knowledge would be integrated for the judicious and equitable government of the commonwealth. In the philosophical speculations of the Renaissance, whose symbolism can be found throughout the work of Francis Bacon, the Temple of Solomon symbolises the union of the transcendental divine wisdom, serenity and detached selflessness of the spiritually enlightened, with the quest for practical knowledge of the masters of metal-working, arts, and sciences. [In the Rosicrucian and esoteric alchemical traditions,]
Bacon’s vision of the House of Salomon inspired the foundation of the Royal Society and other academic societies that began to sprout throughout Europe in the mid and late 17th centuries, laying the foundation for the collegial production of knowledge that characterizes modern academic networks and institutions. His works, in particular his Advancement of Learning, were central to Samuel Johnson’s “new model” of higher education that re-formed the curricula in American elite colleges in the mid 1750’s, with the help of Benjamin Franklin, that would later educate revolutionary leaders like Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, Jay and Madison.
But while Bacon is well known for his advocacy of the inductive empiricism that established the modern scientific method, this was only a small piece of his overall vision for the progress of knowledge and civilization.
In the New Atlantis, The House of Salomon was also called the College of the Six Days. This is also an allusion to how Bacon named his entire body of writings, as the “Great Instauration” or “Six Days Work”, which he envisioned as a step-by-step restoration of paradise on earth, in imitation of the Six Days of God’s work before the Seventh Day of rest, inaugurating a new cycle of history, a new Great Age. The six stages included systematic knowledge of natural, human, and divine realities, to understand and fully realise God’s law of universal love.
Similar to many natural philosophers of the Renaissance, key to Bacon’s vision was his interpretation of the Fall from Eden as coming from the human desire to become the same as God, to substitute himself for God by becoming his own judge of good and evil.
For so we see, aspiring to be like God in power, the angels transgressed and fell; “I will ascend and be like the Most High”: by aspiring to be like God in knowledge, man transgressed and fell: ”Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil”: but by aspiring to a similitude of God in goodness or love, neither man nor angel ever transgressed, or shall transgress. For unto that imitation we are called: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who persecute and calumniate you; that you may be children of your Father who is in heaven, who maketh His sun to rise on the good and the bad, and raineth upon the just and the unjust”. (Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning, Bk II [1605]. For a full discussion, see here)
For Bacon, then, the material progress of science needs to go hand in hand with the spiritual progress of the soul, forming a commonwealth based on universal principles of love and justice for all of humanity. The “scientific method” outlined by Bacon integrated spiritual and material knowledge, leading to action and just government in the service of the oneness of humanity.
During the early 17th century, some, particularly from the upper classes who had the leisure to begin intellectual explorations, came to the conclusion that only in the New World would there be political space to build the utopian ideal commonwealth. These early intellectual explorers saw no contradiction between the material and the spiritual, the scientific and the religious. Bacon, for one, viewed science as “the contemplation of God’s Power.” He wrote:
“Men have sought to make a world from their own conception and to draw from their own minds all the material which they employed, but if instead of doing so, they had consulted experience and observation, they would have the facts and not opinions to reason about, and might have ultimately arrived at the knowledge of the laws which govern the material world.” [Quotation on divine]
For Bacon, the material world was not separate from spirit, but an expression of spirit. Matter, mater, material, the Mother Earth, Mary Eden (M.E., Me). The “body” was not outside of religion, something to be repressed, but a full complement of the spirit, an external expression of the spirit, arising out of spirit and returning to spirit. The material realm was to be elevated to the level of spirit through knowledge and complete investigation of God’s natural laws.
Was this the original mission of America to which men like Franklin, Jefferson, and even John Adams and Alexander Hamilton were attuned? To be the place, the “ideal commonwealth” where it was possible to finally integrate the polarities of material and spiritual, Heaven and earth, religion and science? Is this not the vision of Christ? The unified being who is beyond all duality. The one who embodies and manifests all the faces of God.
The vision of Bacon’s role in the dream of America continued to live after the days of the Founding Fathers. The occultist philosopher Manly P. Hall in a 1940 lecture in Los Angeles that gained broader attention a couple of years later at Carnegie Hall in 1942 and later published as a book in 1944 by the title The Secret Destiny of America that influenced many — including Ronald Reagan — offered the following narrative of Bacon’s relationship to America’s destiny:
“In the study of the history and development of our nation, as in the case of nearly all nations, there is evidence we have been a marvelously guided and protected people. In our modern times we would say this is due to either good management or good fortune, but the Ancients would have believed it was because the guardian spirits guided and protected them. In our modern life we do not believe in guardian spirits over nations, but at the same time we cannot deny that Providence, or whatever we care to call it, has on many occasions miraculously protected our people and nation for some purpose and some reason we do not know.
What is that purpose? What is the reason behind the formulation of this nation? What is the spiritual destiny we are created to fulfill? We do not know with certainty all the details of our national life, but we are aware from the most ancient times this continent was regarded as significant for some specific reason. …In Europe it was regarded as the “New Atlantis”, regarded as the Island of the Blessed, the place where Spirits went after death to dwell together in Peace. In Asia it was regarded as the abode of the Blessed Souls. Among all ancient people there was a peculiar association between the idea of the West and the idea of Heaven itself.
We also know very early in the history of the people of the world efforts were made to create patterns of ideal civilizations. The Neo-Platonists produced Platonopolis…On the basis of Platonopolis came later Moore’s Utopia, which was derived from the Greek account, which in turn was taken from Plato’s record. Then Lord Bacon had his “New Atlantis”, and Bellamy his “Looking Backward”, all these books relate to the idea of an ideal commonwealth, and from the earliest times the ideal commonwealth has been associated with a New Continent, a new land to be discovered. Bacon’s “New Atlantis” is typical. In an effort to go around the Horn the ship was wrecked and blown from its course until it came to a continent far from Europe and Asia, a continent which was unquestionably America where the ship discovers the social commonwealth of “New Atlantis”, a great civilization, flourishing nobly and magnificently on this new continent without any of the sins or evils normal flesh is heir to.
…Lord Bacon had one of the noblest intellects the world has ever produced. He was a true descendant of the immortal Plato. In fact he was described in his own time as the Brahman of the West, the great beacon of his state. So we can find a philosophic link between what was accomplished in this country and the world plan. From his “New Atlantis” we know Lord Bacon was a sociologist, that he had a great vision of the political future of this nation and the political future of Europe. We know that because of this vision he was disgraced and imprisoned, that he was literally and actually “framed” by his political enemies, but in spite of this his King recognized the genius of the man, he pardoned him utterly, declaring he was the finest thinker and scholar, one of the richest jewels Great Britain ever produced ….”
Manly Hall’s vision can be seen as an expression of American exceptionalism: the idea that America has a special destiny in the world. But this can be understood in two ways. The first is in a narcissistic, egotistical and material sense — America is special: this means that America is the superior nation; and the proof of this mission can be seen in America’s economic and military power. Those who claim the mantle of power in America have the right to judge, to dominate, exploit, convert and “liberate” the inhabitants of the American continent and the rest of the world without accountability. This is the epitome of the Fall as understood by Bacon: to usurp the place of God by becoming the judge of good and evil in the world.
The second way of understanding American exceptionalism is in a humble, spiritual sense: America has a special burden and responsibility. More than any other country, modern America is based on utopian dreams of an ideal society, such as the visions of the “City on a Hill” and of the “New Atlantis.” These dreams are still a work in progress. Where would the holy spirit dwell but in a city carefully prepared for it by a people who grew, through a historical progression of tests and trials, in spiritual maturity and capacity to apply spiritual ideals in their families, in their communities, in their nation, and, in time, in the world?
In this light, how do we see America today in the light of Bacon’s vision?
From one perspective, she has, alas, fallen far from the ideal. Within a few decades after Bacon penned the Virginia Charter, the Colony had turned its back to the spirit of love, and legalized and institutionalized black slavery. America is far from attaining its spiritual destiny — the polarities have sharpened, turning the material against the spiritual, religion against science, the individual against community, conservative against progressive, race against race.
But, from another perspective, America is the place where, more than anywhere else in the world, extreme polarities live in a struggle that is not hidden or avoided like elsewhere, but visible and explicit, calling forth free and open reflection, debate, despair, hope, and action. America is where they clash, and America is where they must be fused.
To lose sight of this mission is easy at a time of polarization and immature political behavior. Might our current painful experience of disunity, however, not be a final test, a sort of near-death experience, the birth pangs of the “ideal commonwealth”? Is this not the dream, the long journey to oneness, conscious or unconscious, for which all the sacrifices of past generations have been made?
In the narrative of America that we offer in these essays, we follow two aspects of Bacon’s method.
In one passage, Bacon explained that knowledge is of three kinds: history, poesy, and philosophy. By history, he meant the knowledge of empirical facts. By poesy, he meant not only poetry per se, but narratives that evoke emotions and the imagination. And by philosophy, he meant the knowledge of the deeper principles that govern existence.
Our narrative is history — the facts of the past, based on research conducted by empirical scholars. But our narrative is also “poesy”, in the sense that it aims to tell a story of who we are, in a way that can excite our feelings and imaginations of who we can be. And our narrative is philosophy, in the sense that it highlights the philosophical motivations of the core actors of American history, and seeks to understand how the unfolding of American history can shed light on some of the deeper principles that govern existence.
Bacon divided philosophical knowledge into two types: physic and metaphysic. He used Aristotle’s “four causes” to further subdivide these two types. “Physic” refers to “material” and “efficient” causes, while “metaphysic” refers to “formal” and “final” causes. The material cause refers to the material substance of a thing, while the efficient cause refers to the mechanical chains of cause and effect. Formal cause refers to the structure of the thing, while the final cause refers to its purpose.
Let us illustrate using the example of the sailing of the Mayflower to New England. At a very basic level, the final cause — the purpose — of the ship is to sail across the ocean; while the formal cause is the design of the ship; the material cause is the materials out of which the ship was built; and the efficient cause is the interplay of currents, winds, and the labour of the crew, that made it possible for the Mayflower to sail across the Atlantic.
But this analysis can also be taken to a higher scale. As we discussed earlier, Francis Bacon was one of the key actors in the British scheme to colonize America. Looking at the “material causes” of this scheme, we can speak of advances in shipping and navigational technology, investment funds that were raised to make the enterprise possible, and all the different people who were involved in the scheme, including bonded servants, boat crews, colonists, investors, officials, clergy, and so on. The “efficient causes” include the news and events that led people like John Dee and others to promote the colonization scheme, the meetings at which these projects were discussed and agreed on, the orders that were given, the chain of actions and reactions that unfolded as the project was set in motion, and so on. All of these “material” and “efficient” causes are what most historians focus on, falling under what Bacon called “physic”.
But the colonization scheme had its “formal” and “final” causes too. One of the “forms” we have discussed in this essay is the vision of the House of Solomon — an institutional design for the collective generation of knowledge for the benefit of humanity. This form, which began as an object of imagination, gradually took shape as the Royal Society and, eventually, the scientific community as we know it today. The vision of the House of Solomon is thus one of the formal causes of the scientific community. Another “form” we will discuss in future essays is the joint stock corporation. Corporations such as the Virginia Company and the East India Company were the prime vehicles for the colonization project. The basic form of the corporation — how it structures relationships between humans, capital, society, and nature — determines much of how the colonization process has unfolded, and the type of society that has emerged out of it. Thus, the joint stock corporation is one of the main formal causes of colonization and of the states that have emerged out of colonization.
A form is a design, and any design has a purpose. This is the “final cause”. What is the purpose of the “City on a Hill?” What is the purpose of the House of Solomon? What is the purpose of the joint stock corporation? Without the purpose for which these things were imagined and put into action, nothing would have happened.
We have already discussed the purpose that animated Winthrop in his vision of the City on a Hill, and Bacon in his elaboration of the Great Instauration and the New Atlantis. Once we know the purpose, we can ask ourselves about the forms that were designed to manifest that purpose. For example, let’s consider the forms of governance that the colonists and the Founders designed to give shape to the dream of the City on a Hill. To what extent are those forms adequate to their purpose? To what extent does the material manifestation of the form follow the original design? To what extent are new designs needed?
Bacon classified the discussion of formal and final causes as “metaphysic”. Here, we are not only describing empirical facts and mechanical effects, but evaluating purposes and designs. Purposes and designs are the prime movers of history. Their effects are everywhere, but they are not immediately visible. Designs begin as thought forms, as objects of the intellect. Purposes arise in the hearts of the designers of the forms that shape our lives.
To some degree, sociologists and anthropologists study formal causes when they analyse how our lives are shaped by social structures (forms) and cultural patterns (forms) of thought. But they rarely consider purposes or final causes. To the extent that they do, they tend to assume that only one purpose animates all social forms: self-interest, understood as survival, competition, or domination — whether it’s the self-interest of one individual in relation to other individuals, or of one group in relation to other groups.
In our narrative, we consider that self-interest is not the only purpose or final cause in history. If self-interest — the “me” — is one of the driving forces of American history, another driving force has been the will to transcend self-interest, and to build forms of social and political cooperation that make this possible — the search to nurture an ever expanding “we”. The dynamic of American history is the drama of the interplay between “me” and “we”. What, then, are the forms that strengthen and amplify the “me”? What are the forms that strengthen and expand the “we”? What are the forms that generate conflict between individuals and between groups? And what are the forms that strengthen unity between individuals and between groups?
Different individuals and groups have different purposes, and they design different forms to accomplish their purposes. But when Bacon placed formal and final causes under metaphysics, he was thinking beyond the purposes and forms humans give themselves: each creature and each form in the world has been created by God for a purpose. Humans themselves have a final cause. To study final and formal causes, then, involves understanding the divine purpose, and the forms that have been divinely created as vehicles of the divine purpose. For Bacon, it is through the study of divine revelation that we can know the purpose of God’s creation.
Thus, there are different levels of final and formal causes:
For humanity as a whole, for each individual, and for each form, God has a purpose, which is the ultimate final cause. And there is the purpose that we, as humans, ascribe to ourselves and to the forms we create. This self-ascribed purpose may misunderstand, diverge from, or deny God’s intended purpose. The drama of history is thus the drama of how human purposes conflict or converge with each other and with God’s purpose.
Concerning formal causes, we can speak of three types of forms in the human realm.
The first are forms that are created by humans, and that can be readily observed. The design of a clock, a football game, an automobile, a nonprofit organization or a government are all forms that humans have designed, with specific purposes in mind. These forms can be called contingent, since different forms arise at different times and places, based on different needs, purposes and tastes.
The second type of form could be called eternal, or archetypal forms. Contingent forms are often made out of eternal forms. For example, the functioning of a clock is based on combining various geometric and mathematical forms, which are eternal. In our narrative, we study the interplay of many archetypal forms, as they manifest in various contingent forms. Some of the key archetypal forms we will consider are the dynamic polarities between authority and care, order and freedom, and materiality and spirituality. We will see how, through the multiplicity of contingent forms that appear and evolve in American history, it is often the same archetypal dynamics that play themselves out.
Finally, the third type of form consists of divine forms. These are the attributes of God, which can also be understood as the attributes of a perfect and fully realised creative consciousness. The divine attributes include virtues such as love, compassion, knowledge, justice, and beauty. All of these attributes describe how God relates to His creation, and the ideal form of how humans should relate to God and to each other. The divine attributes or forms reflect the perfect model of the relationship between God and His creation, and of creation with itself. When humans exemplify these attributes in their relations with each other, they become reflections of the divine forms. Utopian visions and social ideals are the reflection of these divine forms in our imagination of the world that we aspire to. History, then, is the drama of the interplay between times when the divine forms have seemingly disappeared from the lives of humans, and when they become manifest in the world of humanity and transform it.
Francis Bacon’s Great Instauration was a vision of the day when, on the Seventh Day, the divine forms would be known to humanity and become manifest through the order and pattern of the relations between humans — what we call our social and political relationships. To this end, his method consisted in learning about the divine forms through spiritual and religious wisdom, and through the scientific observation of the physical world. The combination of spiritual and material knowledge of forms was exemplified in the name of the king of the New Atlantis, Solamona. “Solamona” seems like a name similar to Solomon. As noted by one scholar, the name “Solomon” is derived from the Hebrew word for “peace”, while “Solamona” combines the Latin terms for “sun” and “moon.” In Renaissance symbolism, the sun represents eternal spirituality, while the moon represents the contingent world of material changes and mortality. The sun represents creative power and the light of illumination, while the moon represents receptive power and the depth of wisdom. Bacon’s New Atlantis envisioned a world where the divine forms would become manifest through the union of the archetypal forms of spiritual and material reality.
As we will see in future essays, parts of Bacon’s vision came to be embodied in various social forms, until it came to partial realization in the scientific community, in the American constitutional system, and in alternative spiritual networks in America. But each of these social forms was only a partial, and often seriously defective, instantiation of the divine form that Bacon tried to communicate to humanity through his Great Instauration — the ultimate purpose of the American Dream. When we apply Bacon’s method in its entirety, the imperfections of past forms give us insights on what still needs to be done to build the Great Instauration.
===
For further reading on Bacon, ranging from academic to esoteric treatments, see the following books, articles and websites:
