I. Thomas Burnet and the Telluris Theoria SacraThe publication in Latin and English of the four books of Thomas Burnet's Telluris Theoria Sacra (hereafter Theory) throughout the 1680s sparked over two decades of extensive debate within academic, scientific, and theological communities concerning the proper relation between physical hypothesis and biblical exegesis.1 Burnet's style, in English as in Latin, was universally conceded - 'there was never any book of Philosophy written with a more lofty and plausible stile than it is'2 - but his philosophical content prompted controversy. The Theory was the first book-length attempt by an English writer devoted to unifying a broadly Cartesian model of creation with conventional biblical history. Descartes's Principia Philosophiae (1644) itself had been written without any attempt to map its physical hypotheses onto the opening chapters of Genesis. Instead, Descartes maintained that if we can explain how things 'could have grown little by little from certain seeds . . . although [from Genesis] we rightly know them never to have arisen thus', then we will understand them much better.3 Burnet's Theory, in his own eyes, effected precisely the pious reconnection that Descartes had shunned, and although Burnet prudently understated his Cartesian genealogy, his work was quickly described as Descartes 'new vamp'd'.4 Burnet also remained largely silent about his intellectual debt to his old Cambridge masters Ralph Cudworth and Henry More, the latter of whom had made some very grand claims in the 1650s about the compatibility of Descartes and Moses. Burnet likewise failed to mention the last tenth of Joseph Glanvill's Lux Orientalis (1662), which had preceded him into the field of Mosaic Cartesianism, and described not only of the formation of the earth but also of its apocalyptic fate, compacting in less than 30 pages what Burnet would later spend four lengthy books and almost a decade traversing.5 Glanvill was likewise heavily influenced by Henry More, whom he cited repeatedly. But Glanvill's cosmology concluded a text primarily concerned with the pre-existence of the soul, a hypothesis of such obvious heterodoxy that Burnet - though in later life he would admit to this opinion in print6 - would have been ill-advised publicly to acknowledge any influence.7Burnet's reconnection was partial at best. He placed a great deal of emphasis on the role of the Flood in his system, barely mentioning the Hexameron or the fall of man in Eden. For Burnet, creation followed Cartesian not biblical lines; as he confessed at the beginning of his third book, on the Conflagration, 'Scripture it self will be a more visible Guide to us in these following parts of the Theory, than it was in the former'. In the first two books it was the calamity of the deluge that was the principal marker both of man's degeneracy and of catastrophic terrestrial change. Burnet advanced the suggestion at the end of the second book of the Theory itself that the opening chapters of Genesis were to be understood allegorically, or as written accommodated to a primitive Israelite audience, and he promised to defend this in a separate, later work. This was the Archaeologiae Philosophicae of 1692, a work that Burnet prudently did not translate into English. Unfortunately for Burnet, pertinent sections of the Archaeologiae were swiftly translated, and published at the front of Charles Blount's notorious Deist collection The Oracles of Reason (1693).8 The Amsterdam editions of the Theoria sacra (1694, 1699) simply appended the Archaeologiae in its entirety, with continuous pagination between the two works.Burnet had now departed from what could be tolerated by most orthodox commentators of the time, and his publications over the dozen years following 1681 contributed towards his political eclipse. They may also have cost him consideration for the See of Canterbury upon the death of his old tutor John Tillotson in 1694. Theologians attacked Burnet on theological grounds; natural philosophers criticised his physical or mathematical arguments. …
Read full abstract
Nov 1, 2009
Kuan-Hung Chen 
Open Access