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  • The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine
  • Bruce T. Moran
James J. Bono. The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine. Vol. 1, Ficino to Descartes. Science and Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. xi + 317 pp. $50.00 (cloth); $22.95 (paperbound).

Where should one look for the dynamics of cultural and scientific change in early modern Europe? According to James Bono, the force of change has less to do with external conditions (e.g., the impact of printing, or social context) than with competing language theories—that is, assumptions and debates about the relation between words and things. On this account, language theory and science form “intersecting discourses” joined by means of metaphors common to each. In the case of late Renaissance science and medicine, the metaphors most frequently employed were those of the “Book” and the “Word.” The contest over narrative authority to interpret Scripture and the Book of Nature, argues Bono, led to new relationships between the languages of man and the Word of God.

A number of theories regarding the nature and origins of language existed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A Neoplatonic theory of language, formulated in large part by Marsilio Ficino, assumed such an intimate connection between the human word and the verbum dei as to make language the means of seizing the powers of nature. In this regard, Bono argues, Renaissance magic underscored a potentially disquieting relationship between language as a tool for acquiring knowledge and as an instrument of magical power.

The Reformation advanced its own theory of language, one in which the human word became incapable of comprehending the “Word of God.” Without access to any “supernatural” language, an understanding of divine creation might still result from an exegetical reading of the “Book of Nature.” Whether truth rested in books or in nature became the focus of competing language theories, according to Bono, in a debate between Jean Fernel and William Harvey over spirits and the blood. Here, the contest of hermeneutic practices led finally to a rejection of Renaissance Neoplatonic narratives based on the assumption that ancient texts contained shadowy glimpses of divine wisdom that could be brought to light through philological studies.

Both Fernel and Paracelsus viewed nature as an expression of the divine Word. And yet, as Bono shows, they developed different strategies for reading nature’s “text.” For Fernel ancient texts, although written in a “fallen,” “post-Babylonic” language, nevertheless contained a pure, hidden wisdom that [End Page 151] could be exhumed through exegetical expertise. Paracelsus, on the other hand, switched the direction of exegesis from the “Book” to “Nature.” In his “text” matter and spirit were interwoven in such a way as to allow the comprehension of the divine logos through the understanding of the signs and symbols imprinted by God in nature. In the hands of the Paracelsian Oswald Croll, the “text” of Paracelsus came to be reinscribed, in Bono’s view, by means of a “radical” Calvinist narrative of redemption and divine sovereignty.

Another reading of the Book of Nature resulted from separating the knowledge of nature from theology. The principal agent in authorizing that reading was Francis Bacon, who transformed cultural narratives by recasting the biblical story of Adam and the Fall. Where Adam’s knowledge in the Garden of Eden brought with it dominion over nature, the fallen state of man subjected human beings to a distorted intellect and to sensory deceptions. These hindrances might be overcome, however, when human labor, experimental tools, and rigorous method mediated the engagement with nature. In this way, Bacon considered possible a “Great Instauration,” a restoration to something like an original Adamic perfection.

Beyond the discussion of specific hermeneutic strategies, Bono’s book articulates a very important conceptual reorientation in which nature is defined less in terms of self-presenting material objects than as a “text,” the language of which depends upon a variety of narratives and linguistic assumptions. In this sense “science” itself gets redefined and embraces a broad range of discursive “practices” that are as much linguistic and rhetorical as...

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