The Ark and Immediate Revelation in Francis Bacon's New Atlantis

Throughout Christian history, Noah's ark and the Ark of the Covenant have served as images representing interrelated concepts of memory, preservation, election, and salvation. For instance, many of the church fathers believed Noah's ark foreshadows Christ and his church, perceiving typological significance in its dimensions and physical characteristics.¹ Additionally, the ark's protection of Noah's family and the animals during the deluge was seen to correspond to the church's preservation of Christians in history, "saved through the wood" of the cross.²

The ark's association with memory is exemplified in Hugh of St. Victor's mid-twelfth-century mnemonic structure, "De arca Noe mystica," a textual pictura embodying a profusion of Christian doctrines and knowledge for the purposes of meditation and rhetorical invention.³ Here the ark of Noah, the storehouse of God's elect preserved against the destruction of the flood, becomes quite literally a storehouse in the mnemonic sense, an archive of knowledge.⁴ Mary Carruthers has indicated the significance of the punning involved in Hugh's mnemonic scheme, which conjoins "arca" ("chest"), Noah's ark, the Ark of the Covenant, and the citadel ("arca") of Jerusalem: "Puns transform the treasure chest of memory into the salvational ark of Noah, into a treasure chest (the ark of Moses) that contains the matter of salvation (God's law) which, stored in the chest of memory and thus available for meditation, will redeem and save, as the citadel (arc-) of 'Jerusalem' will save God's people."⁵ As Carruthers notes, puns are crucial to the elaborate memory system Hugh erects, exploiting not only homophonic relationships but semantic, historical, and theological ones as well. The connection between these arks is a commonplace as early as Pru-dentius's Psychomachia of 405, in which the "Ark (of Noah), [the] Ark (of the Covenant) in its Tabernacle carried in the camps of the Israelites, and [the] Temple of Solomon in the citadel of Jerusalem are all brought together."⁶ Another important link in this "mnemonic catena" is the word arc-cana ("secrets"): the ark of Genesis and the Ark of the Covenant both store God's secrets, protecting them like citadels ("arc-es").⁷

While Francis Bacon's various allusions to biblical arks were not employed in the kinds of memory systems Carruthers discusses,⁸ he nonetheless invokes their traditional associations with preservation and salvation. Moreover, he conflates the various biblical arks, relying on similar theological and semantic connections to those exploited by his medieval predecessors, and he often relies on a highly traditional understanding of the ark as a type of the church. In his discussion of ecclesiastical history in The Advancement of Learning (1605), Bacon claims that the first division of this form of history is concerned with the militant, or earthly, church and "whether it be fluctuant, as the Arke of Noah, or moueable, as the Arke in the Wildernes, or at rest, as the Arke in the Temple; That is, the state of the Church in Persecution, in Remoue, and in Peace" (71). Bacon also describes the church as an ark in his Better Pacification and Edification of the Church of England (1603) (10:119) and the Confession of Faith (1603) (7:225).

In addition to these more conventional uses, Bacon also employs an ark in his scientific utopia New Atlantis (1627) in a similar but much more complex way.⁹ Despite the fact that this ark's significance has received virtually no commentary, it has a crucial function in this text. The governor of Bacon's imaginary society, Bensalem, describes how his isolated island nation became Christian, recounting that about twenty years after Christ's resurrection, a pillar of light, topped with a cross, appeared in the middle of the sea surrounding the island. Under this pillar, a "small ark or chest of cedar" was seen floating on the waves, containing a book and a letter. The governor describes these texts as follows: "The Book contained all the canonical books of the Old and New Testament, according as you have them …; and the...