Idolatry, Natural History, and Spiritual Medicine: Francis Bacon and the Neo-Stoic Protestantism of the late Sixteenth Century

This paper aims to explore some possible sources of Francis Bacon’s peculiar way of relating idolatry, natural history and the medicine of the mind. In the first section, I argue that Bacon’s strategy of internalizing idolatry is not unlike that of some of the leading Calvinist reformers. If in using natural history as a therapy against the idolatrous mind Bacon departed from Calvin, this departure, I claim, was not unlike the road taken earlier by another important reformer, Pierre Viret (1511–1571). In elaborating a form of spiritual medicine, Pierre Viret gave prominence to the empirical and the “anatomical” study of nature. In the second part of my paper, I focus on a particular kind of Calvinist writings against idolatry: the French “Neo-Stoic” Calvinism of the late sixteenth century. I discuss the ways in which the Neo-Stoic Huguenots (and their English followers) used an empirical, anti-dogmatic and “literal” study of the Book of Nature—under the name of “natural history”—as a weapon in the war against the idols of the mind. In particular, I compare Bacon’s form of natural historical “therapy” with the one advocated by Pierre de la Primaudaye (1546–1619).