The Fullness of Knowing: Modernity and Postmodernity from Defoe to Gadamer

4. Christopher Smart’s Poetry and the Dialogue between Science and Theology

95 Q CHRISTOPHER SMART’S POETRY AND THE DIALOGUE BETWEEN SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY 4 With this chapter the debate over knowledge moves into the mid-eighteenth century, when the challenge and promise of the Enlightenment had more fully entered the consciousness of thoughtful Europeans. These are the decades that saw the publication of that monument of the French Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie (1751–1772), which aimed to assemble knowledge in one set of volumes. John Leland’s View of the Principal Deistical Writers (1754–1756) described a set of Enlightenment religious tenets—belief in one God who must be worshiped and obeyed, absent Christian doctrines like the Incarnation and Trinity.1 Voltaire’s poem on the Lisbon earthquake (1756), followed by Candide (1759), demolished the standard explanations for how a benevolent God could allow evil to flourish. But most brilliant were the triumphs of natural science during this period: theories to account for electricity proliferated; in 1758, as predicted, the comet named for Edmund Halley returned to view; and eight years later the race to determine the longitude at sea would come to a successful conclusion. Many of these advances made use of the physics or the mathematics of Sir Isaac Newton, whom Joseph Addison had called “the Miracle of the present Age.”2 Science was coming to be the recognized arbiter of knowledge. 96 The Fullness of Knowing Q Christopher Smart (1722–1771) is a pivotal figure for the story I am trying to tell in this book. He is much more aware of the broad significance of the Enlightenment as an intellectual and cultural movement than the previous figures I have discussed. During his most creative period, from 1750 to 1763, his poetry responds to the Enlightenment challenge to the knowledge of God, society, and nature—the three topics that link the figures in this book. His most profound response is to that most prestigious of Enlightenment modes of knowledge, natural science. This chapter examines his encyclopedic poem, Jubilate Agno, a long fragment written between 1758 and 1763, and “A Song to David” (1763), both of which entered into the contemporary debates over knowledge. During the years he wrote Jubilate Agno, Smart was confined to several madhouses for debt and an annoying propensity to public prayer. Smart’s confinement was controversial at the time and remains so today. “His infirmities were not noxious to society ,” Samuel Johnson told James Boswell. “He insisted on people praying with him; and I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else.”3 Smart’s best modern biographer says that the nature of his illness is “impossible to diagnose at this distance in time.”4 But even if the most significant treatments of science in Jubilate Agno are the work of an eminently sane imagination, it is undeniable that the work is more suggestive than definitive. His poetry does not provide a final answer to the relation of religion and science, either for an Enlightenment or post-Enlightenment age. As the chapter proceeds, the reader may notice that some of Smart’s failed efforts at finding usable connections between scientific and religious knowledge parallel the failures of the other figures in this book. Daniel Defoe did not really understand the epistemological significance of the narrative he produced in Robinson Crusoe. Isaac Watts’ hymns did not keep him from doubting the Trinity at the end of his life. And the truths of Jonathan Swift’s satires never intended to provide us with a method of discriminating the good effects of technology from the bad ones. With the poetry of Smart, I hope the reader will see that this book is not simply trying to say, “If only we had listened to Defoe, Watts, Swift, and the rest, we could have avoided the problems of the Enlightenment.” The demand for historical verification may have constricted Defoe’s fiction, but it certainly has its place. The Q Christopher Smart’s Poetry 97 critique of enthusiasm may have unduly narrowed religious truth, but it pointed out the danger of fanaticism. This chapter illustrates the complexity of the story I am trying to tell about the Enlightenment and postmodernism. Not every critique of the Enlightenment, whether by eighteenth-century or postmodern writers, is valid. I will argue, for instance, that some leading postmodern figures, including Jean-François Lyotard, have made serious errors in treating science merely as a particular discourse with no...