Prelapsarian Perfection and Blurred Distinctions

This, then, is what the arts are concerned with, this is what they intend, namely, to restore within us the divine likeness.

—Hugh of St. Victor

The relation between technology and religion is problematic and has generally been recognized as such at least since the work of Max Weber—and even more so as a result of studies by Lynn White jr. ¹ There are basically two positions on this relationship. One asserts that some version of the Christian religion made a decisive contribution to the rise of modern technology, while partisans of the other position contend that religion and technology are fundamentally at odds. In two recent books David Noble and Jay Newman revive the historical and philosophical arguments between these two positions, which have sometimes been seen as having exhausted themselves. ² Unfortunately, Noble and Newman only marginally advance the state of this discussion.

Noble begins his The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention with the observation that we approach the new millennium under the guise of “two seemingly incompatible enthusiasms” (p. 3): the resurgence of fundamentalist faith and an infatuation with technological progress. Imagine The 700 Club meets the Discovery Channel. But according to Noble, this is not such an odd couple. “For Christianity alone blurred the distinction and bridged the divide between the human and the divine. Only here did salvation come to signify the restoration of mankind to its original God-likeness” (p. 10). Noble traces this restoration through a study of the history of Christian millenarianism, the expectation that the end of the world is near and an earthly paradise is at hand.

Although the Council of Ephesus formally condemned millenarianism as a heresy in 431, the Church could not stifle its popularity in medieval or in modern times. Noble begins his study with the Cistercian abbot Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135–1202), who initiated the monastic idea of transcendence as a recovery of human likeness to the divine, an idea that wed biblical prophecy and scientific progress. Despite clerical censure, this millenarian inspiration behind technological development was carried forward by other religious, such as the Franciscan Roger Bacon (c. 1215–c. 1292). Noble further credits New World explorations to this evangelical challenge to discover the earthly paradise prophesied in the Bible. Christopher Columbus, for example, saw his discoveries as fulfilling prophesy and on his deathbed took the habit of a Franciscan tertiary before being buried in a Carthusian monastery.

The early scientists as well as early explorers were strongly motivated by this biblical fundamentalism. Francis Bacon (1561–1626), for instance, aimed to “redeem man from original sin and reinstate him in his prelapsarian power over all created things” (p. 50). According to Bacon, the fall of Adam was a dual fall of humanity from the state of innocence and from dominion over creation. Both losses could and would be recovered, the former by religion and faith, the latter by the arts and sciences. Adam’s fall was not due to a Promethean desire to steal the fire of the gods, but was caused by his striving after moral knowledge (the knowledge of good and evil) rather than after natural knowledge (science and technology). According to Bacon, science and technology would restore humankind to its “prelapsarian Adamic perfection” (p. 62).

Other early scientists continued this twelve-step recovery program to return humankind to the time before it fell off the wagon. Robert Boyle (1627–1691) and Isaac Newton (1642–1727) considered the scientist a priest of nature, and both looked forward to the new millennium and the New Adam. Noble discusses at length the movement of the Freemasons, with adherents as diverse as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Joseph Priestly. With freemasonry the discipline of engineering emancipated itself from its military preoccupation and engineers became the new priesthood. This tradition of technological transcendence carried over into the New World in the poetry of Walt Whitman, who was an avid believer in millenarianism. Even nature buffs such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau praised the “transcendentalism in mechanics” (p...