There are yet hid greater things than these and we have seen but a few of his Works.--Ecclesiasticus 43:32.
And for the country of Bensalem, this man would make no end of commending it, being desirous by tradition among the Jews there to have it believed that the people thereof were of the generations of Abraham, by another son, whom they call Nachoran; and that Moses by a secret cabala ordained the laws of Bensalem which they now use; and that when the Messias should come, and sit in his throne at Hierusalem, the King of Bensalem should sit at his feet, whereas other kings should keep a great distance. But yet setting aside these Jewish dreams, the man was a wise man and learned, and of great policy, and excellently seen in the laws and customs of that nation.--Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis.
Not all philosophical texts come with a handy thesis statement. Some texts that lack a thesis statement do not pose special interpretive problems because the intentions of the author are pretty transparent (e.g. Berkeley's Three Dialogues) because, say, the main argument (or set of arguments) are well marked in the text. But as David Lewis observes, not all philosophy is argument. For, there are some philosophical texts that (a) lack a clear thesis statement and (b) where the main drift of how the arguments, if any, are supposed to add up is not entirely transparent. I call such texts (that exhibit (a-b)) Opaque Philosophical Texts (or OPT). Some Platonic dialogues, Seneca's Letters, More's Utopia, Bacon's New Atlantis , Nietzsche's Zarathustra are paradigmatic instances of Opaque Philosophical Texts.
Interpreting an Opaque Philosophical Texts sends novice readers and more advanced students to editor’s introductions and authoritative reference sources. But this merely pushes the problem back by putting us at the mercy of the judgment of another. Even when such secondary sources exhibit good judgment, it is often left opaque what really grounds it (an infinite regress looms here), and in reading such resources one is often struck by the flimsiness of the interpretive evidence: an author, say, gets slotted into a pre-existing historical framework (X is an empiricist, therefore Y) or feeble biographical evidence is mined for hints (Z visited the Queen, therefore A), etc. Sometimes an author's life can be very revealing, but, say, More's Utopia only gets more confusing once one knows details of his life.
One more respectable trick scholars often use to guide interpretation is to look at the contextual reception of an OPT. This can be very helpful. Polemical responses can be very illuminating to bring out what is at stake. But polemics have limitations too: (i) they often distort the text they attack and (ii) they tend to focus on a limited aspects of a work. More interestingly, a polemic is made possible by shared, often tacit (religious, political, theological, etc.) commitments that are opaque to later generations. Even when, say, students write to honor their teacher, or to gain authority by their association with the revered memory of their teacher, they have a tendency to reveal more about their own aspirations (relative to, say, other of the master’s students) than the author’s intentions.
But while I reject strict rules in the history of philosophy (recall and here), there are useful heuristics. For example, while sola scriptura is an unreasonable demand for texts written by mortals, there is a heuristic that respect its spirit and that can be applied to an OPT: find an interpretation of (an apparently important theme of) the text proposed by a character within the text. I have not invented this self-referential, presentational heuristic—it’s common among literary and film critics. (In an opaque movie look for a scene in which art represents something or an artist at work tries to represent something.) The heuristic is especially useful to get interpretation started without reliance on other guides—for one lets the text be the guide. What follows is a case-study of such a heuristic.
Joabin the Jew is called “wise” by the narrator (a European visitor to Bensalem). As it happens he reports an enduring Jewish oral tradition about the legal-political founding of Bensalem: its founder was Moses. Now, the idea that Moses should be seen as a political founder is not unique to New Atlantis, of course. Machiavelli suggests the idea in The Prince, and Spinoza works it out in great detail in the Theological Political Treatise.[1] Given that the tradition reported by Joabin does not report that Moses actually visited Bensalem and there is no reason to think we are to think this, it is more likely that that this suggests that either the Hebrew Bible, or some of its sources, The Book of the Covenant or the Book of the Law of God (see Spinoza, Theological Political Treatise, 8:22-24, relying on Exodus 24:4,7 and Joshua 24:25-26), guided the political founding of Bensalem according to Jewish legend.
In fact, we know from other textual details that Hebrew Scripture and works lost to the Christian West are said to be known in Bensalem at the time of its legal re-founding: a civil servant informs the European visitor that “we have some parts of [the biblical King Salomon’s] works which with you are lost; namely, that natural history which he wrote of all plants, from the cedar of Libanus to the moss that groweth out of the wall; and of all things that have life and motion.” This legal re-founding of Bensalem is said to occurred around 1,900 years ago, that is, around 300BC by King (confusingly) Solomana, who is esteemed “the lawgiver” of Bensalem according to the public narrative as repeated by a local public servant, who doubles as a “Christian priest.” (Not all the main public officials are also clerical.)
So, these bits of evidence suggest that the existence of the Jewish community on Bensalem predates the political re-founding by Solomana. This is no surprise because prior to Solomana’s policy of isolation, Bensalem was a thriving commercial (and militaristic) society with trade all over the world and that led to immigrants from (again quoting the publicly sanctioned narrative) “almost all nations of might and fame resorted hither; of whom we have some stirps and little tribes with us at this day.”
Possibly King Solomana was Jewish, but, more likely, he was inspired by Mosaic law. (This is not unprecedented in real history.) After all, among his acts “was the erection and institution of an order, or society, which we call Saloman’s House…in ancient records, this order or society is sometimes called Solomon’s House, and sometimes the College of the Six Days’ Works.” Even the informative local public servant/priest believes the king learned from Hebrew Scripture “that God had created the world and all that therein is within six days: and therefore he instituted that house, for the finding out of the true nature of all things.” The key Biblical text is Ecclesiastes (which itself implies it was written by King Solomon) and, which together with Biblical King Solomon's example, plays a central official, justificatory role in Bacon's Advancement of Learning.
Three very striking facts are implied by Joabin’s testimony. First, according to Jewish tradition the (miraculous) introduction of Christianity on Bensalem (ca 50 AD) and its widespread adoption did not fundamentally change the character or essence of the legal-political order of society—for the local Jewish tradition embrace a continuity thesis from Moses to the present. (This is not to claim that Joabin would think Christianity is irrelevant on the island or to deny that it serves many interesting religious and political functions.) This generates a surprising, yet promising reading of the relationship between politics and religion of The New Atlantis as a whole. Even if, upon careful reading, one comes to reject this interpretation (say because other characters offer more plausible interpretations or because too many textual details resist it), it is a useful first to start to let an Opaque Philosophical Text explain itself without resorting to banality.
Second, the Jewish continuity thesis implies that the political order of Bensalem is essentially Hebraic. Now this could mean a lot of things, but the oral tradition specifies one: that when the Messiah comes, the Bensalemite King is privileged. That is to say, the Jews of Bensalem believe that Bensalem, or its royal family, and/or Bensalemites as such are the chosen people! [2] That is, according to Hebrew lore, Bensalem exists in a larger, teleological providential order in which it (Bensalem) also receives a special providence. Another, not incompatible, way to read the 'political-legal order of Bensalem is essentially Hebraic claim' is to understand Solomon's House as the enduring Mosaic legacy of King Salomana that is the unchanging (largely hidden) essence of Bensalem's political order.[2] This latter reading fits nicely with lots of details in the larger narrative of The New Atlantis.
Third, Bensalemite Jewish lore implies that Abraham had three sons: Isaac, Ishmael, and Nachoran. (Biblical Abraham has a brother and grandfother named Nachor.) Strikingly we are not told who the mother is. It is unlikely to have been Sara (barren) or Hagar (sent away after Ishmael). It follows, then, that the Bensalemites think that Abraham’s fidelity to his wife was, shall we say, less than sterling. (This amplifies, in fact, the Biblical narrative.) Moreover, the myth implies that the unnamed mother of Nachoran must have helped populate the island.
The impatient reader may wonder what the third point has to do with the narrative of The New Atlantis. (Moreover, even though Joabin is called 'wise' by the narrator -- the European visitor (who has no access to the real truth) --, that narrator rejects the Jewish lore.) Well, the very next scene in the book describes the “feast of the family.” In it male heads of the families are rewarded for their fertility (recall my exploration of Bensalem's political economy). The king provides them with “gift of revenue, and many privileges, exemptions, and points of honor, granted to the father of the family.” Strikingly, the family is treated very much like a revenue generating corporation (or guild)--privileges and exemptions are (local) trade monopolies or tax-exemptions. At the feast the wife is hidden from sight in a box, although she can witness the proceedings. And one's first reaction, and second reaction, on reading the details of the feast is that Bensalem is a very patriarchic society.
What I am about to say does not undercut the patriarchic feel of the narrative of The New Atlantis. But it is worth noticing two parallels suggested by the story about Nachoran: (A) the mother is not humbled or humiliated. Rather she is "placed in a loft above on the right hand of the chair, with a privy door, and a carved window of glass, leaded with gold and blue." So, like Nachoran's mother she is hidden from sight. Moreover, her absence promotes the fiction of sexual fidelity (which is praised extravagantly in the narrative). But as I am not the first to note the only sanctioned method of sexual partner/marriage selection on Bensalem -- the ritual at "Adam and Eve's pools...where it is permitted to one of the friends of the man, and another of the friends of the woman, to see them severally bathe naked" -- places very high demands on the fidelity of friends.[3]
In addition, the mother's role in the Feast of the Family is also analogous to (B) the role of the House of Salomon in Bensalemite society. The House -- not unlike the Judaic-Christian God -- sees everything on the island (and, through its regular global spying trips, the world), but is itself not seen. So, female fertility and hidden power are roughly paralleled here. Obviously, the proposed heuristic has led us down speculative, defeasible paths (and I am not finished yet). But note two final facts: (I) the heuristic has encouraged us to pay attention to the details of the text; (II) the heuristic has allowed us to discuss centrally important philosophical issues without imposing pre-existing interpretive frameworks on an Opaque Philosophical text.
[1] There is now a thriving research program exploring more such examples of political Hebraism.
[2] In fact, there is a larger pattern of not quite exact doubling in New Atlantis (Biblical Salomon/King Solomana; Biblical Moses/Bensalemite Moses; Biblical chosen people/Bensalem; Christianity displacing Judaism, etc.).
[3] It also places quite high demands on young people's abilities to judge character; we are told very little about the moral education of the young on Bensalem, so it is unclear what could underwrite confidence here. As my students in yesterday's class noted, it is odd that if finding hidden defects is the aim of the ritual, why the local medical experts (the folk at the House of Salomon) are excluded from the practice. Some other time I return to this latter issue (because there are details that bear on it in the text).
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