The Masculine Birth of Time
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"I am come in very truth leading to you Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave." --"The Masculine Birth of Time" (1603) by Francis Bacon |
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In Masculus Partus Temporum (The Masculine Birth of Time, 1603), a posthumously published text, Francis Bacon first writes about the relationship between science and religion. The text consists of an elderly teacher's lecturing his student on the dangers of classical philosophy. Through the voice of the teacher, Bacon demands a split between religion and science: "By mixing the divine with the natural, the profane with the sacred, heresies with mythology, you have corrupted, O you sacrilegious impostor, both human and religious truth."
Much of the text consists of the elderly guide tracing the corruption of human knowledge though classical philosopher to a contemporary alchemist. Bacon's elderly guide commences his diatribe against ancient philosophers with Aristotle, who initially leads, for Bacon, the human mind awry by turning its attention toward words: “Just when the human mind, borne thither by some favoring gale, had found the rest in a little truth, this man presumed to cast the closest fetters on our understandings. He composed an art or manual of madness and made us slaves to words.” As Bacon develops further throughout his scientific treatises, Aristotle's crime of duping the intellect into the belief that words possess an intrinsic connection with Nature confused the subjective and the objective. The text identifies the goal of the elderly guide's instructions as the student's ability to engage in a (re)productive relationship with Nature: “My dear, dear boy, what I propose is to unite you with things themselves in a chaste, holy, and legal wedlock.” Although, as the text presents it, the student has not yet reached that point of intellectual and sexual maturity, the elderly guide assures him that once he has properly distanced himself from Nature he will then be able to bring forth “a blessed race of Heroes and Supermen who will overcome the immeasurable helplessness and poverty of the human race.”
