New Atlantis

Born in 1561, Francis Bacon was a statesman and philosopher who is best known for developing an empirical approach toward scientific inquiry and experimentation that would inspire the scientific method used today. Over the course of his life, he wrote essays on science, religion, law, and politics; New Atlantis represents his views on each of those disciplines, conveyed through the form of the utopian novel. Following in the footsteps of Thomas More’s 1516 novel Utopia, New Atlantis showcases the laws and customs of a fictional island which Bacon considers the ideal society. However, the fact that New Atlantis was unfinished and unpublished at the time of Bacon’s death (it was tacked on to the end of a natural history tome released posthumously by his secretary) complicates efforts to interpret his intentions, let alone to suss out a unified political theory from the text.

For example, there seem to be three major authoritative bodies on the island of Bensalem: the church, the monarchy, and the scientific academia, embodied by Salomon’s House. Yet it is unclear which, if any, of these bodies holds ultimate authority over the island’s peoples. Such questions of ecclesiastical authority versus monarchical authority would have been top of mind for most European scholars of Bacon’s era, given the many challenges King James I faced in navigating the fraught religious and political landscape in 17th century England. The argument that the church holds supreme authority in Bensalem is supported by Bacon’s extensive use of Christian symbols and motifs, from the cherubim that adorn Bensalem’s national seal to various acts of divine deliverance, like the one that deposits the narrator’s ship near the island in the first place.

Yet many scholars argue that Bacon’s use of Christian iconography is disingenuous. King’s College theology professor David C. Innes contends that the centrality of Salomon’s House, which devotes itself to material advancements like prolonging life and growing bigger, tastier crops, is proof that Bacon’s utopia is one where spiritual salvation is traded for secular creature comforts. Innes goes so far as to call Bensalem “a fundamental assault upon, transformation of and ultimate displacement of Christianity” (Innes, David C. “Bacon’s New Atlantis: The Christian Hope and the Modern Hope.” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 22, no. 1, Fall 1994). To Innes and others, the religious symbols function either to subvert Christianity or to borrow authority from Christianity in service of elevating Salomon’s House to the realm of the divine.

Other evidence supporting the ultimate authority of Salomon’s House comes when the “Father” of the institution tells the narrator, “[We] take all an oath of secrecy for the concealing of those which we think fit to keep secret; though some of those we do reveal sometime to the State, and some not” (38). This makes it explicitly clear that the “State”—presumably represented by the island’s king who is referred to only obliquely—is not privy to all of Salomon’s House’s works, meaning that the monarchy is not absolute in its authority. Some scholars go so far as to suggest that the pillar of light which delivered Christianity to Bensalem was a fabrication devised by Salomon’s House—after all, the Father also tells the narrator, “We have also houses of deceits of the senses; where we represent all manner of feats of juggling, false apparitions, impostures, and illusions” (37).

The scholarly debate over the role of the church and the state in Bacon’s ideal society may be reconciled to a degree by the author’s other writings. Bacon wrote often of the Biblical Solomon, the wise King of Israel who lends his namesake to Salomon’s House and who was a great source of inspiration for Bacon’s real-life sovereign, King James I. In Solomon, Bacon sees a reconciliation of wisdom, power, and piety that is clearly a major feature of Bensalem and, more specifically, Salomon’s House. For Bacon, the study of natural science and philosophy is itself a holy act, in that God created the natural world to satisfy humanity’s material needs and its curiosity. In Bacon’s highly influential 1605 book The Advancement of Learning, he characterizes Solomon’s thirst for knowledge as both sanctioned and encouraged by God:  

The glory of God is to conceal a thing, but the glory of the king is to find it out; as if, according to the innocent play of children, the Divine Majesty took delight to hide his works, to the end to have them found out; and as if kings could not obtain a greater honour than to be God's playfellows in that game, considering the great commandment of wits and means, whereby nothing needeth to be hidden from them (Bacon, Francis. “The Advancement of Learning.” Project Gutenberg, 2004).

Thus, to view Bensalem through a strictly hierarchical context, in which the state, the sciences, and the church are opposed to one another, is to ignore Bacon’s view of these three estates as complementary.

Another major theme is the moral and social decay of Europe, against which Bensalem is repeatedly compared. The conversation with Joabin, combined with the Feast of the Family ritual, show that social order in Bensalem is maintained through strong familial units led by patriarchs who are paragons of chastity. This is consistent with other writings in which Bacon argues that scholars and scientists must be self-disciplined in both their work and their lives. Joabin decries the lustful immorality of Europeans which threatens familial bonds, either by locking men into unwanted marriages or causing them to forgo marriage altogether. Moreover, the governor of the Strangers’ House goes into a great detail about Bensalem’s self-imposed isolation and how its refusal to conquer other lands—unlike the European powers of the era—has preserved its civilization for centuries. Indeed, in Plato’s original allegory of the story of Atlantis found in the dialogues Timaeus and Critias, the civilization is punished by the gods for attempting to conquer Ancient Athens. As such, New Atlantis might be read as anti-Imperialist, though this reading is complicated by Bacon’s own role as a statesman in the English colonization of Ireland and North America.

Finally, New Atlantis’s greatest legacy is its role in inspiring Bacon’s followers Robert Boyle and Samuel Hartlib to start what they call an “invisible college” devoted to experimental research based on the principles of induction practiced in Salomon’s House and in other Bacon writings. This “college” would form the basis of the Royal Society, England’s national academy of sciences and the world’s oldest continuously-running national scientific institution.