Subduing the Earth: Genesis 1, Early Modern Science, and the Exploitation of Nature

Author(s): Peter Harrison

Source: The Journal of Religion , Jan., 1999, Vol. 79, No. 1 (Jan., 1999), pp. 86-109
Published by: The University of Chicago Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1207043

REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1207043?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to The Journal of Religion

This content downloaded from

106.202.59.181 on Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:55:16 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Subduing the Earth: Genesis 1, Early
Modern Science, and the Exploitation
of Nature

Peter Harrison / Bond University, Australia

In a short paper which appeared thirty years ago in the journal Science,
historian Lynn White, Jr., suggested that in "the orthodox Christian arro-
gance toward nature" may be found the ideological source of our contem-
porary environmental woes. The Christian doctrine of the creation sets
the human being apart from nature, advocates human control of nature,
and implies that the natural world was created solely for our use. The
biblical text that best exemplifies this view is Gen. 1:28: "And God said to
them 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have
dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over
every living thing that moves upon the earth.'" In the Christian Middle
Ages, according to White, we already encounter evidence of attempts at
the technological mastery of nature, and of those incipient exploitative
tendencies that come to full flower in scientific and technological revolu-
tions of later eras. All of this is attributed to the influence of Judeo-
Christian conceptions of creation. Christianity, White concludes, "bears a
huge burden of guilt for environmental deterioration."'
White's views have attracted considerable criticism. Historians have
pointed out that the exploitation of nature is not unique to the West;
biblical scholars have maintained that the relevant passages of the Judeo-

'Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis," Science 155 (1967):
1203-7. Major discussions of the thesis include Ian Barbour, ed., Western Man and Environ-
mental Ethics: Attitudes towards Nature and Technology (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1973);
Donald Gowan and Millard Shumaker, Subduing the Earth: An Exchange of Views (Kingston:
United Church of Canada, 1980), esp. the bibliography; Robin Attfield, The Ethics ofEnviron-
mental Concern (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); David Spring and Eileen Spring, eds., Ecology and
Religion in History (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); Carl Mitcham and Jim Grote, eds.,
Theology and Technology: Essays in Christian Analysis and Exegesis (New York: University Press of
America, 1984); Jeremy Cohen, "Be Fertile and Increase, Fill the Earth and Master It"' The Ancient
and Medieval Career of a Biblical Text (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 15-18;
and Elspeth Whitney, "Lynn White, Ecotheology, and History," Environmental Ethics 15
(1993): 151-69.
? 1999 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0022-4189/99/7901-0004$02.00

86

This content downloaded from

106.202.59.181 on Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:55:16 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Subduing the Earth

Christian scriptures do not sustain the interpretation placed on them by

White and his followers; social scientists have claimed that no correlation
presently obtains between Christian belief and indifference to the for-
tunes of the environment. Moreover, since the publication of White's ar-
ticle, more nuanced accounts of the ideological sources of Western atti-
tudes toward nature have appeared. In the influential Man's Responsibility
for Nature (1974), John Passmore identified two distinct emphases within
the Christian tradition, despotism and stewardship, suggesting that the
counterproductive attempt to dominate nature-"man as despot"-owes
more to Greek conceptions than to the biblical tradition.2 But despite
these developments, the idea that the Christian doctrine of creation pro-
vided the ideological basis for the exploitation of the nature has proven
tenacious. White himself saw no reason to resile from his original observa-
tions, and his views, despite their never having been developed to any
great degree, continue to attract adherents. The presumed historical link
between the Christian doctrine of creation and the Western attitude to-
ward nature has been endlessly rehearsed in the burgeoning literature
on environmental degradation and its causes. In a further development,
many within the Christian tradition itself have endorsed aspects of the
White thesis, calling for a radical revision of those traditional Christian
doctrines that are supposed to have inspired ecological irresponsibility
and chauvinism toward the natural world.
In this article I shall examine some of the ways in which the creation
narratives of Genesis were used in the medieval and early modern peri-
ods, with a view to showing that "the roots of our environmental crisis"
are somewhat more complex than either White or his critics imagined.3
As we shall see, while the biblical imperative "have dominion" played an
important role in the rise of modern science and is undoubtedly impli-
cated in what appears to be the "exploitation" of nature, the same impera-
tive, when linked to the human fall, also promoted the goal of the restora-
tion of the earth. "Despot" and "steward" thus turn out to be twin aspects
of single role, rather than opposing traditions. In addition, I will suggest
that the supposed anthropocentrism of the Western tradition has little to
do with environmental degradation, falling into decline at precisely that
historical moment that witnesses the beginnings of the large-scale exploi-

2 John Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature (London: Duckworth, 1974), pt. I. See also
Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from An-
cient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).
3 The need for such a study has already been pointed out by Jeremy Cohen, "The Bible,
Man, and Nature, in the History of Western Thought: A Call for Reassessment," Journal of
Religion 65 (1985): 155-72. To a degree, this need has been admirably met by Cohen's "Be
Fertile and Increase." However, his study, comprehensive as it is, deals with only the ancient
and medieval periods.

87

This content downloaded from

106.202.59.181 on Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:55:16 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The Journal of Religion
tation of nature. There is, therefore, a need to revise standard accounts
of the religious origins of Western attitudes toward nature and to call
into question the fundamental premise of those new, ecologically sensitive
theologies that too easily concede that the ecological crisis is to be attrib-
uted in part to the Christian doctrine of creation.

Before proceeding to the history of interpretation of Genesis 1 in medi-

eval and early modern periods, it is worth dwelling briefly on a common
but misplaced line of argument in this general discussion. Some of the
most vocal attacks on the White thesis have come from the sphere of bibli-
cal criticism. A number of biblical scholars have patiently tried to explain
that when we examine such Hebrew terms as "have dominion" and "sub-
due," we find that they do not really mean "have dominion" and "sub-
due." James Barr, for example, informs us that the verb rada-"have do-
minion"-is not a particularly strong expression and was used to refer to
Solomon's peaceful rule; kabash, "subdue," refers simply to "the 'working
or 'tilling' of the ground in the J story." 4 Lloyd Steffen follows suit, point
ing out that while it is true that one of the meanings of the word "do
minion" (rada) is "to tread down," what the term denotes in the Genesis
context is "the ideal of just and peaceful governance." Dominion, he con-
cludes, "is not a domination concept."5
Other biblical scholars have accused White of being ignorant of find
ings of source criticism. The creation stories in Genesis, we are told, hav
their origins in two distinct sources-the priestly account, P, and the Yah
wist, J-and these sources ought not to be confused. Had not Lynn Whit
been "critically illiterate," Richard Hiers observes, he would not have con
flated the P and J creation stories, "thereby obscuring and omitting sig

4James Barr, "The Ecological Controversy and the Old Testament," Bulletin of the John
Rylands Library 55 (1972): 9-32, esp. p. 22.
5 Lloyd H. Steffen, "In Defence of Dominion," Environmental Ethics 14 (1992): 63-80. Fo
similar analyses, see Attfield, pp. 27-32; Claus Westerman, Creation (London: SPCK, 1974
pp. 52 and 82, and Genesis 1-11: A Commentary, trans. J. Scullion (Minneapolis: Augsburg
1984), p. 159; Susan Bratton, "Christian Ecotheology and the Old Testament," Environmen
tal Ethics 6 (1984): 195-209; George Coats, "God and Death: Power and Obedience in th
Primeval History," Interpretation 29 (1975): 227-39; Gowan and Shumaker, pp. 16-17, 22.
An exception to these awkward attempts to avoid the natural sense of the passages in ques
tion is Wilhelm Fudpucker, who with refreshing honesty suggests that the biblical injunctio
"subdue the earth" should be translated with its full force, "to tread down," "to conquer,
"to trample"; see his "Through Christian Technology to Technological Christianity," in Mit
cham and Grote, eds., pp. 53-69. See also John Black, The Dominion of Man (Edinburgh
Edinburgh University Press, 1970), p. 37; A. S. Kapelrud, "Die Theorie der Sch6pfung im
Alten Testament," Zeitschrift fiir die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 91 (1979): 159-69; Han
Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament (London: SCM, 1974), pp. 226-27.

88

This content downloaded from

106.202.59.181 on Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:55:16 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Subduing the Earth

nificant elements."'6 J. Baird Calicott complains similarly that White

mistakenly thinks of Genesis "as a composite whole," and that he jumps
carelessly between J and P to wrest his preferred interpretation from
the text.7
Finally, a number of critics have pointed out that the bible does not
present a single perspective on the question of the human relation to the
natural world. There are, Ian Barbour points out, "diverse strands in the
Bible" regarding this issue.8 If Genesis contains a dominion concept, it
also puts forward one of stewardship. Gabriel Fackre thus suggests that
Genesis teaches "stewardship over the earth before a higher claimant."
Human beings, he adds, are "called to tend the earth in responsibility to
its Creator."' John Passmore speaks similarly of a minority view within
the Western tradition, which regards the human being as steward rather
than a despot.'1 Indeed White himself has remarked that the most com-
mon complaint he received regarding his thesis was that he had ignored
the fact that human dominion granted by God was intended to make
human beings stewards of his creation rather than its despoilers."
What such criticisms fail to take into consideration, however, is the fact
that the original meaning of the text, or the true meaning of the text,
or the meaning of the text as established by current methods of biblical
criticism, is at best tangentially related to the issue of how the text might
have informed attitudes toward nature and environmental practices.
White's thesis is not concerned with the meaning of the text as such, with
how it was understood by the community in which it first appeared, or
with what modern biblical scholars have made of it, but rather with what
the text was taken to mean at certain periods of history, how it motivated
specific activities, and how it came to sanction a particular attitude toward
the natural world. In other words, it is the reception of the text, and
not its presumed meaning, which is at issue here. White's thesis does not
therefore lie within the ambit of biblical criticism or hermeneutics but
in the sphere of history." Thus it is not clear that contemporary under-

6 Richard H. Hiers, "Ecology, Biblical Theology, and Methodology: Biblical Perspectives

on the Environment," Zygon 19 (1984): 43-59, esp. 45. Also, on J and P, see Black,
pp. 40-41.
7'. Baird Callicott, "Genesis Revisited: Murian Musings on the Lynn White, Jr. Debate,"
Environmental History Review 14 (1990): 65-90.
8 Barbour, ed., p. 6.
9 Gabriel Fackre, "Ecology and Theology," in Barbour, ed., p. 122.
10 Passmore, chap. 2. Passmore notes, however, that there is "very little" support for this
interpretation within the Christian tradition. The "stewardship" tradition was originally
identified by Black, pp. 44-57.
11 Lynn White, Jr., "Continuing the Conversation," in Barbour, ed., p. 60.
12 Thus, attempts to refute the White thesis on the basis of contemporary social scientific
studies of religious belief and attitudes to the environment are also misplaced. For examples
of such studies, see Michelle Wokomir et al., "Substantive Religious Belief and Environmen-

89

This content downloaded from

106.202.59.181 on Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:55:16 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Journal of Religion

standings of the meaning of the Genesis accounts of the creation have a

direct bearing on the question of how such texts were used in the past,
nor on what practices they might have encouraged. In order to evaluate
claims about a connection between biblical doctrines and attitudes toward
nature, we need to abandon the quest for definitive meaning and attend
to the history of interpretation of the relevant texts.'3

II

For the first fifteen hundred years of the Christian era there is little in the
history of interpretation of Genesis to support White's major contentions.
Patristic and medieval accounts of human dominion are not primarily
concerned with the exploitation of the natural world. A common patristic
reading of "dominion over the beasts," for example, relies upon the an-
cient conception of the human being as a microcosm of the world and
internalizes the idea of dominion, directing it inward to the faculties of
the human soul. Origen, the third-century church father who pioneered
the allegorical reading of scripture, pointed out that the mind is "another
world in miniature" and that it contains all manner of living things.14 The
allegorical reading of the creation of the animals thus construed them as
"the impulses and thoughts of our mind which are brought forth from
the depths of our heart."'5 Accordingly, the dominion over nature re-

talism," Social Science Quarterly 78 (1997): 96-108; Douglas Eckberg and T. Jean Blocker,
"Varieties of Religious Involvement and Environmental Concerns: Testing the Lynn White
Thesis," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 28 (1989): 509-17.
13 Some of White's critics seem to concede this point. Barr candidly admits: "It is of course
possible to argue that the Genesis account of creation has had an influence not through its
own original meaning but through interpretations which have been placed upon it. ... This
may or may not be so; I have not been able to carry out a study of the ways in which Genesis
in this regard has been used over a period of many centuries" (Barr, p. 23). Also, Whitney
(n. I above) states that "White's claim that the Bible had inspired the development of West-
ern technology and control of nature rested not on the biblical text per se or on any 'time-
less' theological explication of it .... The crucial question, therefore was not so much what
the writers of the Old and New Testaments had meant about technology, or even how their
world might be construed by modern readers, but how the Bible had been interpreted in
the Middle Ages and after" (p. 162). Compare Odil Steck, World and Environment (Nashville,
Tenn.: Abingdon, 1980), p. 198; Roderick Nash, The Rights of Nature (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1988), p. 89.
14 Origen, Homilies on Leviticus 5.2, in Fathers of the Church (hereafter FC) (Washington,
D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1947-), 83:91-92. For other readings suggesting
the human microcosm, see Gregory, Homiliae in Evangelium 29 in Patrologia cursus completus,
series Latina (hereafter PL) (Paris 1958-), ed. J. P. Migne, 76:1212; Ambrose, Hexameron
6.2.3; Gregory of Nyssa, De hominis opificio 4.1. Also see Patricia Cox, "Origen and the Bestial
Soul," Vigiliae Christianiae 36 (1982): 115-40, esp. 123.
15 Origen, Homilies on Genesis 1.11 (FC 71:60). See also the fragment attributed to Origen,
D. Glaue, ed., Ein Bruchstiick des Origenes iiber Genesis 1, 28 (Giessen: Alfred Topelmann,
1928), pp. 8-10.

90

This content downloaded from

106.202.59.181 on Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:55:16 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Subduing the Earth

ferred to in Genesis was frequently interpreted by the church fathers to

mean dominion over the rebellious beasts within. "The saints and all who
preserve the blessing of God in themselves exercise dominion over these
things," wrote Origen, "but on the other hand, the same things which are
brought forth by the vices of the flesh and the pleasures of the body hold
dominion over sinners."'6 Jerome similarly identified various beasts with
the "irascible and concupiscible passions," while John Chrysostom advo-
cated "bringing the beast under control" by "banishing the flood of un-
worthy passions."' Augustine thought that the beasts "signify the af-
fections of the soul." The unruly impulses of the body are thus "animals"
that "serve reason when they are restrained from their deadly ways."'"
The imperative force of the biblical injunction "have dominion" thus be-
came, during the patristic period, a powerful incentive to bring rebellious
carnal impulses under the control of reason.
This allegorical approach to texts, which became universal practice
during the Middle Ages, also informed the structures of knowledge of
the natural world. Knowledge of things was not pursued in order to bring
nature under human control but, rather, to shed light on the meanings
of nature and of the sacred page. Nature and scripture were both books,
and their elucidation called for an interpretive science. Living things, it
was assumed, had been designed in part to serve for the physical needs
of human beings but equally to serve a spiritual function as well. In this
latter role, natural objects symbolized eternal verities, or taught impor-
tant moral lessons. Nature, in this scheme of things, was to be known in
order to determine its moral and spiritual meanings and not so that it
might be materially exploited.
No work embodies this approach to nature better than the Physiolo-
gus-a work on animals, plants, and stones, produced in Alexandria at
some time between the second and fifth centuries. The Physiologus sets
out the moral and theological significance of numerous natural objects.
Throughout the Middle Ages it was to enjoy a popularity second only to
the Bible itself. Indeed in the jaundiced judgments of previous genera-
tion of scholars, this was the work that substituted fanciful fables for the
measured and rational judgments of Aristotelian natural history, eclips-
ing for a thousand years the systematic scientific approach of the Greek

'6 Origen, Homilies on Genesis 1.16 (FC 71:69).

'7Jerome, Commentariorum in Hiezechielem 1.1.6/8, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina,
vol. 75 (Turnholti: Brepols, 1975), pp. 11 ff. Jerome, Homilies 7, 30. John Chrysostom, Homi-
lies on Genesis 8.14 (FC 74:113). Compare Philo, De plantatione 11.43, De opificio mundi
51.146, 53.151.
18 Augustine, Confessions 13.21, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1991), p. 291.

91

This content downloaded from

106.202.59.181 on Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:55:16 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Journal of Religion

philosopher.19 Yet the fables of the Physiologus helped created a rich sym-
bolic world in which natural objects came to be invested with profound
and mystical meanings. If this was not a scientific view of nature, it was
nonetheless one which found in the cosmos a moral and theological order
and located human beings at its centre.
In one sense, the Physiologus might be said to present a utilitarian ap-
proach to the natural world. However, the utilities of living things are
seen to reside in their symbolic and moral functions. The fox, to take a
single example, is described thus:

The fox is an entirely deceitful animal who plays tricks. If he is hungry and finds
nothing to eat, he seeks out a rubbish pit. Then, throwing himself on his back, he
stares upwards, draws in his breath, and thoroughly bloats himself up. Now the
birds, thinking the fox dead, descend upon him to devour him. But he stretches
out and seizes them, and the birds themselves die a miserable death.
The fox is a figure of the devil. To those who live according to the flesh he
pretends to be dead. Although he may hold sinners in his gullet, to spiritual men
and those perfected in faith, however, he is dead and reduced to nothing.20

The purpose of the fox is to teach an important lesson, to inspire the

faithful, and to give pause to the apostate. Nature had not been created
solely, or even primarily, to cater for the material needs of the human
race, but to serve spiritual and moral requirements as well. The use of
creatures, in this scheme of things, requires knowledge of their meanings.
The Physiologus promotes an anthropocentric conception of nature, but it
is a conception that takes a passive, interpretive view of the world, rather
than one that actively seeks its material exploitation. The enormously
popular bestiaries of the later Middle Ages were all based on the Physiolo-
gus.21 These books of birds and beasts reinforced the symbolic and moral
functions of the things of nature.
With the thirteenth-century translation of the biological works of Aris-
totle into Latin, a new source of knowledge of the natural world arrived
in the West. If the monasteries tended to persist with the emblematic
approach of the bestiary, the new schools turned to the writings of the
Greek philosopher, producing encyclopedic works which, collating a wide

19 Patricia Cox, "The Physiologus: A Poiesis of Nature," Church History 52 (1983): 433-43,
esp. 433.
20 Physiologus 17, trans. Michael Curley (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979),
pp. 27-28.
21 For the story of the fox in twelfth- and thirteenth-century bestiaries, see, e.g., Bestiary,
trans. Richard Barber (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1993), p. 65; The Book of Beasts, trans. T. H.
White (London: Cape, 1954), pp. 53-54. For general studies of the bestiaries, see M. R.
James, The Bestiary (Oxford: Roxburghe Club, 1928); Florence McCulloch, Medieval Latin
and French Bestiaries (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962); W. B. Clark
and M. T. McMunn, eds., The Bestiary and Its Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylva-
nia Press, 1989).

92

This content downloaded from

106.202.59.181 on Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:55:16 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Subduing the Earth

variety of sources, contained all extant knowledge of natural things.22 The

rediscovery of ancient Greek knowledge during the course of the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries thus inspired a more direct engagement with
the empirical world, adding a new dimension, the idea of dominion over
nature. Yet we still do not encounter an explicit ideology of material ex-
ploitation of the world. Rather, the new emphasis is on the intellectual
mastery of the knowledge of living things. Adam, it was believed, had
once enjoyed a perfect knowledge of nature, a knowledge evidenced in
his naming of the creatures (Gen. 2:20). With the fall, the creatures re-
belled, and antipathies developed among them and between them and
the erstwhile masters. The creatures were now to be reunited in the hu-
man mind. The thirteenth-century Franciscan Bonaventure wrote that
Adam in the state of innocence "possessed knowledge of created things
and was raised through their representation to God and to his praise,
reverence and love." With the fall, Adam and his progeny had become
alienated from God and had lost that knowledge. For Bonaventure, the
reaccumulation of this lost knowledge was "the goal of the creatures and
the way they are led back to God."23 To know the things of nature was
thus to reorder them mentally. Honorius Augustodunensis, author of the
popular medieval digest of cosmology and geography Imago mundi, had
written something similar in the twelfth century. Man, he claimed, is the
supreme animal in which God willed all things to be reunited.24 Knowl-
edge of the creatures was thus another way, of restoring, in a fashion, the
original dominion that the human race had once enjoyed. Two of the
dominant senses of dominion that we encounter in the patristic period
and the Middle Ages are thus to do with the realm of the human mind.
Both rely to a degree on the idea of the human microcosm. Thomas Aqui-
nas is typical of the Middle Ages in claiming that human dominion over
things is intimately related to the fact that the human individual "contains
all things." 25
Having said this, it must be conceded that the modification of nature,

22 Michel de Bofiard, "Encyclopedies medievales: Sur la 'connaissance de la nature et du

monde' au Moyen Age," Revue des questions historiques, ser. 3, 16 (1930): 258-304, esp. 267,
n. 2. Willene Clark, The Medieval Book of Birds: Hugh of Fouilloy's Aviarum (Birmingham, N.Y.:
Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), introduction, p. 23.
23 Bonaventure, Hexameron 13, quoted in J. McEvoy, "Microcosm and Macrocosm in the
Writings of St. Bonaventure," Commissio Internationalis Bonaventurianae S. Bonaventura: Vol-
umen Commemorativum ... Cura et Studio Commissionis Internationalis Bonventurianae (Rome:
Padre di Editori di Quaracci, 1972-74), p. 330.
24 Honorius Augustodunensis, Hexaemeron 3 (PL 172:258D-259A), De animae exsilio et pa-
tria 13 (PL 172:1246B). Compare Hugh of St. Victor, De arca Noe morali, Prologus
(PL 176:619), In ecclesiasten homiliae (PL 174:277D), Didascalicon 2.1, trans. J. Taylor (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 61.
25 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae la.96.2, Blackfriars edition (London: Eyre & Spot-
tiswoode, 1964-76).

93

This content downloaded from

106.202.59.181 on Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:55:16 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Journal of Religion

oftentimes on a large scale, undoubtedly took place during the Middle

Ages. The pious spiritual works performed by medieval monastic com-
munities, for example, were invariably accompanied by more mundane
pursuits, for the monasteries in which these acts of contemplation were
to occur, of necessity, had also to cater for bodily needs. This in turn
required agriculture and husbandry and the transformation of woods
and swamps into fields and pastures. William of Malmesbury thus lauded
the improvements made to the natural world by the industry of the
monks of Thorney:

In the middle of wild swampland where the trees are intertwined in an inextrica-
ble thicket, there is a plain with very green vegetation which attracts the eye by
reason of its fertility; no obstacle impedes the walker. Not a particle of the soil is
left to lie fallow; here the earth bears fruit trees, there grapevines cover the
ground or are held on high trellises. In this place cultivation rivals nature; what
the latter has forgotten the former brings forth. What can I say of the beauty
of the buildings whose unshakeable foundations have been built into the
marshes. ... This is an image of Paradise; it makes one think already of heaven.26

Reference to the reconstruction of a paradise on earth seems to suggest

that here we have a clear instance of a religiously motivated attempt to
conquer nature. Yet this was not an engagement with natural world in
order to assert dominion or reap material gain; neither was it informed
by a callous disregard for the earth. It was otherworldly preoccupations
that motivated this activity. Malmesbury thus continues: "This incompa-
rable solitude has been granted the monks so that they may grow more
closely attached to the higher realities for being the more detached from
those of mortal life." 27 Control of nature was exercised in this attenuated
fashion to promote the concerns of the other world and thus, paradoxi-
cally, to further a detachment from material nature.
White himself has pointed to other examples of medieval attempts to
master nature that occur quite independent of religious communities.
The introduction of the heavy plough into northern Europe made pos-
sible the large-scale cultivation of land and lifted agricultural production
above the level of subsistence farming. This technological innovation thus
revolutionized the relationship between human beings and the land that

26 William of Malmesbury, De gestis pontificum Angliae, in PL 175:1612-13, quoted in Jean

Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God (New York: Fordham University Press,
1974), p. 165.
27 Leclercq, p. 165. Leclerq thus suggests that "the cloister is the 'true paradise'" and that
the surrounding countryside merely "shares in its dignity" (ibid.). Other monastic concerns,
too, called for the control of nature. Leclercq informs us that a flock of sheep was required
to provide the parchment for a single copy of a work by Cicero or Seneca. In addition, the
leather to bind such works required the hunting of wild beasts-deer, roebuck, boar
(p. 155).

94

This content downloaded from

106.202.59.181 on Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:55:16 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Subduing the Earth

they inhabited, yielding up food surpluses and facilitating the develop-

ment of towns. According to White, this single agricultural advance
meant that whereas "once man had been a part of nature; now he became
her exploiter."28 In addition, the medieval deployment of an impressive
array of machines-water wheels, windmills, cranks and con-rods, fly-
wheels, and treadles-are for White symptomatic of "the emergence of a
conscious and generalised lust for natural energy and its application to
human purposes."29 Yet in none of this do we encounter the explicit artic-
ulation of an attitude of indifference to, or hostility toward, nature. In-
deed, there seems to be no compelling reason to view these developments
as anything more than particular expressions of the universal tendency
of all cultures to seek efficient means to provide for basic human needs.
Such activities require no religious ideology to motivate them, nor do
they need any other justification than that human beings require food
and shelter, and when these are met, further creature comforts as well.
The medieval West, in other words, shares with every culture a concern
to feed and clothe itself. These imperatives frequently lead to the deple-
tion of natural resources and ecological change. While the modes of ex-
ploitation may differ, the underlying impulse is universal.30
What is lacking in this analysis, then, is the identification of a religiously
motivated ideology of exploitation, explicitly informed by aspects of the
Christian doctrine of creation. As I have already suggested, the absence
of the obvious candidate here-the biblical conception of dominion-
was owing to the fact that the literal force of the imperative "have domin-
ion" was dissipated by moral interpretations. It is telling, in this connec-
tion, that the one extensive study that has been carried out on the history
of the interpretation of the crucial text Gen. 1:28 ("be fruitful and multi-
ply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion") fails to support
the view that it was allied with exploitative material practices during the
Middle Ages. Jeremy Cohen, author of this survey, concludes that "the
primary meaning of Gen. 1.28 during the period we have studied [an-
cient and medieval times] [is] an assurance of divine commitment and
election, and a corresponding challenge to overcome the ostensive con-
tradiction between the terrestrial and the heavenly inherent in every hu-

28 Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1964), p. 56.
29 Ibid., p. 129. We also witness in the later Middle Ages the widespread practice of forest
clearing by fire or by axe. Glacken (n. 2 above) refers to the period of the eleventh to the
thirteenth century as "the great age of forest clearance" (p. 330). For medieval modifica-
tions of nature generally, see pp. 318-51.
30 Thus, some of White's critics have observed that ecological problems are not restricted
to the West. See, e.g., Lewis Moncrief, "The Cultural Basis of Our Environmental Crisis,"
Science 170 (1970): 508-12; Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (Ringwood: Penguin,
1984), pp. 23-24.

95

This content downloaded from

106.202.59.181 on Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:55:16 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Journal of Religion

man being." In the Middle Ages, Cohen continues, the Genesis text that
granted human dominion over nature "touched only secondarily on con-
quering the natural order."31
While dominion is interpreted psychologically, and while much of na-
ture's utility is perceived to lie in its symbolic aspects, the goal of physical
domination of the world, as an end in itself, fails to take hold. For the
Middle Ages, as literal readings of the text "have dominion"-the body
of the text as Origen would have it-tend to be subordinated to spiritual
readings that referred the reader to the inward disciplines of self-control,
so religious motivations for the material domination of nature are second-
ary to the pursuit of a spiritual dominion of the will over the wild and
wayward impulses of the body. Undeniably, the conquest of nature is well
in evidence during the Middle Ages, but for the most part this is to be
attributed to pragmatic rather than ideological concerns.
However, this state of affairs was to change. Had Cohen extended his
labors into the early modern period, a somewhat different picture of the
influence of that text would have emerged. In the seventeenth century
we find practitioners of the new sciences, preachers of the virtues of agri-
culture and husbandry, advocates of colonization, and even gardeners
explicitly legitimating their engagement with nature by appeals to the
text of Genesis. The rise of modern science, the mastery of the world that
it enabled, and the catastrophic consequences for the natural environ-
ment that ensued, were intimately related to new readings of the seminal
Genesis text, "Have dominion."

III

While the themes of moral and intellectual dominion have not en

disappeared in the seventeenth century, "dominion over the earth"
read by most commentators as having to do with the exercise of co
not in the mind, but in the natural world. A variety of interrelated fac
can be suggested to account for this shift: the demise of the rich,
conception of the microcosm in which features of the natural wor
been mapped onto the human psyche; the "death of nature," whic
the replacement of Aristotelian vitalism with a mechanical world vie
collapse of the "symbolist mentality" of the Middle Ages and the r
contraction of sacramentalism, which resulted in a denial of the tra
dental significance of the things of nature; the appearance on the
gious landscape of this-worldly Protestantism with its attendant
ethic; and finally, the new hermeneutics of modernity, which looks

"3 Cohen, "Be Fertile and Increase" (n. 1 above), p. 313.

96

This content downloaded from

106.202.59.181 on Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:55:16 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Subduing the Earth

literal sense as the true meaning of a text.32 It is this last factor in particu-
lar which brings about new readings of the biblical imperative "have do-
minion." 1

The literal approach to texts that, from the sixteenth century onward,
becomes a hallmark of modern hermeneutics, meant that natural objects
were no longer to be treated as symbols. The fundamental presupposition
of allegorical interpretation was that natural objects could function, like
words, as signs. A word in scripture would refer to an object, and the
object in turn would refer to some theological or moral truth. Irenaeus
had written that "earthly things should be types of the celestial." Origen
agreed that "this visible world teaches us about that which is invisible,
and ... this earthly scene contains patterns of things heavenly." 34The dis-
integration of this symbolist mentality, to which the Protestant insistence
that only words and not things have referential functions was a major
contributing factor, meant that practical uses would now have to be
sought for natural objects that had hitherto served merely symbolic func-
tions. In part, then, "scientific" modes of explanation, along with the
search for the practical uses of the things of nature, came into being in
order to fill the vacuum left by the demise of traditional medieval systems
of representation.35
Now the injunction to exercise dominion over birds and beasts was
taken quite literally to refer to the actual exercise of power over the things
of nature, its sense no longer being distributed across allegorical, anagog-
ical, or tropological readings. The beasts of Genesis did not represent
impulses of the mind, which needed to be bridled by reason, nor was the
desired control of living things to be achieved merely through systemati-

32 For discussions of some of these themes, see Caroline Merchant, The Death of Nature:
Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1990); John Brooke,
Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), pp. 82-116; Thomas, pp. 22-24; David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers, eds., God
and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1986).
33 Much of the impetus for the literal reading of texts came from the Protestant reformers.
See, e.g., Martin Luther, "The Babylonian Captivity of the Church," in Three Treatises (Phila-
delphia: Fortress Press, 1970), pp. 146, 241; John Calvin, Institutes 2.5, trans. H. Beveridge,
2 vols. (London: Clark, 1953); Alister McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the European Refor-
mation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 186; Pierre Fraenkel, Testimonia Patrum: The Function of
the Patristic Argument in the Theology of Philip Melanchthon (Geneva: Droz, 1961), pp. 70-93;
Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974),
p. 37.
34 Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.19, in Ante-Nicene Fathers (Edinburgh: T. & T Clark, 1989),
5:439; Origen, The Song of Songs, Commentary and Homilies, trans. R. P. Lawson (London:
Longmans, Green, 1957), p. 218.
35 For a more detailed discussion of this general theme, see Peter Harrison, The Bible,
Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
esp. pp. 107-20.

97

This content downloaded from

106.202.59.181 on Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:55:16 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Journal of Religion

cally ordering them in the mind. Adam had once literally been lord of
all the creatures, and this was the kind of dominion sought by his
seventeenth-century imitators. With the turn away from allegorical inter-
pretation, the things of nature lost their referential functions, and the
dominion over nature spoken of in the book of Genesis took on an un-
precedented literal significance.36
There are numerous examples that serve to show how this new impulse
of dominion was incorporated into the rhetoric of scientific progress in
the seventeenth century. Francis Bacon, who first set out the method of
the empirical sciences, famously observed that only "by digging further
and further into the mine of natural knowledge" could the human race
extend "the narrow limits of man's dominion over the universe" to their
"promised bounds.""' Genesis taught that dominion had been lost as a
result of the Fall but now, through science and industry, that dominion
could be restored: "For man by the fall fell at the same time from this
state of innocency and from his dominion over creation. Both of these
losses however can even in this life be in some part repaired; the former
by religion and faith, the latter by arts and sciences. For creation was not
by the curse made altogether and forever a rebel, but . .. is now by vari-
ous labours ... at length and in some measure subdued to the supplying
of man with bread; that is to the uses of human life.""8 The Baconian
program of dominion over nature was subsequently adopted by the Royal
Society. First historian of the society, Thomas Sprat, stated as one of the
group's objectives a reestablishment of "Dominion over Things."39 In an
address delivered to that same august body, Platonist and religious writer
Joseph Glanvill announced that the new philosophy had provided "ways
of captivating Nature, and making her subserve our purposes and designments"
leading to the restoration of "the Empire of Man over Nature."40 Nature,
he was to remark elsewhere, was to be "master'd, managed, and used in
the Services of Humane life."41 Such services might include "the acceler-

36 On the exposition of Genesis during the early modern period, see Arnold Williams,
The Common Expositor: An Account of the Commentaries on Genesis, 1527-1633 (Chapel Hill: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, 1948); Joseph Duncan, Milton's Earthly Paradise (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972), chap. 5.
37 Quoted in Merchant, p. 170; on Bacon and dominion generally, see pp. 164-90. Com-
pare William Leiss, The Domination of Nature (New York: George Braziller, 1972), pp. 45-71.
On the continent, Descartes offered the similar remark that through science we can "thus
make ourselves, as it were, the lords and masters of nature" (Discourse on Method, vol. 6, in
The Philosophical Writings of Descartes trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984-], 1:142-43).
38 Francis Bacon, Novum Organum 2.52, in Works, 14 vols., ed. James Spedding, Robert
Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (London: Longman, 1857-74), 4:247-48.
39 Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society (London, 1667), p. 62.
40Joseph Glanvill, Scepsis Scientifica (London, 1665), sig. b3v.
41Joseph Glanvill, Plus Ultra (London: 1668), p. 87, cf. p. 104.

98

This content downloaded from

106.202.59.181 on Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:55:16 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Subduing the Earth

ating and bettering of Fruits, emptying Mines, drayning Fens and Marshes."
"Lands," he concluded, "may be advanced to scarce credible degrees of
improvement, and innumerable other advantages may be obtained by an
industry directed by Philosophy and Mechanicks." 42
The notion that it was the new natural philosophy that would promote
the control of nature also had its inspiration in the Genesis text. During
the periods of the Renaissance and the scientific revolution there was a
renewed interest in the encyclopedic knowledge that Adam had pos-
sessed before his fall. Educational reformer John Webster, to take a single
example, pointed out in his attack on the English universities that Adam
understood the "internal natures" of all creatures and that "the imposi-
tion of names was adequately agreeing to their natures." While this
knowledge had been lost at the Fall, it was the proper role of the universi-
ties to promote the regaining of this Adamic wisdom, "to know nature's
power in the causes and effects" and "to make use of them for the general
good and benefit of mankind, especially for the conservation of and re-
stauration of the health of man, and of those creatures which are usefull
for him."43 Some of the leading scientists of the seventeenth century actu-
ally saw their task as the revival of an ancient science. Adam, it was
thought, had subscribed to the heliocentric hypothesis, to corpuscular
philosophy, and possibly even the theory of gravitation.44 Dominion over
the earth was to be established through a regaining of the knowledge
once possessed by Adam in Eden. At this time, then, Adam's encyclopedic
knowledge was sought not in order to reunite all of the creatures in the
human mind and thereby find the way back to the deity, as had been the
case in the Middle Ages but, rather, to revisit Adam's literal dominion.
Knowledge alone would not suffice for the domination of nature, how-
ever. Work was required. The emergence of the Protestant work ethic,
commonly associated with Calvinist notions of election, also gained sup-
port from literal readings of Genesis. What made this possible was the
fact that the Garden of Eden was now seen to be an actual garden, in

42 Glanvill, Scepsis Scientifica, sigs. b4r-v.

43 John Webster, Academiarum Examen (London, 1654), pp. 29, 19. On Adam's knowledge,
see also Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), p. 6; Wil-
liam Coles, Adam in Eden (London: 1657), preface; Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books
of Occult Philosophy (London: 1651), p. 153; Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1982), 2.2, p. 65; Lancelot Andrewes, Apospasmatia Sacra (London, 1657),
pp. 208-12; Robert South, Sermons, in English Prose, ed. W. Peacock, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1949), 2:208; John Salkeld, Treatise of Paradise (London, 1617), pp. 185-96;
George Walker, The History of the Creation (London, 1641), p. 193.
44 See, e.g., Henry More, A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings, 2d ed. (London,
1662), pp. xviii-xix; Richard Bentley, The Works of Richard Bentley D.D., 3 vols. (London,
1838), 3:74; Frank Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), p. 23;
J. E. McGuire and P. M. Rattansi, "Newton and the Pipes of Pan," Notes and Records of the
Royal Society of London 21 (1966): 108-43.

99

This content downloaded from

106.202.59.181 on Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:55:16 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Journal of Religion

which Adam had literally carried out agricultural work.45 Eden was not
an allegory of the human soul, and the fruits that Adam had cultivated
were not the fruits of the spirit. Neither was paradise to be located in the
incorruptible regions of the heavens. Thus Adam's work was not the pious
contemplation of higher spiritual realities but a physical engagement with
material things.46 According to Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, one of the
translators of the Authorized Version, God made man "to labour, not to
be idle." It was for this reason that Adam "was put into the garden of
Eden that he might dresse it and keep it."47 English jurist Matthew Hale
(whom, incidentally, John Passmore regards as the sole seventeenth-
century exemplar of the "stewardship tradition") insisted that the para-
dise that God had created was one that by its very nature needed to be
worked.48 Adam's original vocation, Richard Neve thought, sanctified
agriculture, and tilling the earth was thus "the most Ancient, most Noble,
and most Useful of all the Practical Sciences"-a science without which,
moreover, the earth would quickly degenerate into a wilderness.49 In his
commentary on the first three chapters of Genesis, John White wrote that
when God ordered Adam to subdue the earth, he intended him "by Cul-
ture and Husbandry, to Manure and make it fit to yield fruits and provi-
sion."5o Other commentators agreed that "subduing the earth" was to be
understood to mean "plowing, tilling, and making use of it." ''51 Such read-
ings suggest that labor came to be more than just a means of providing
human sustenance. Work was now regarded as a sanctified activity, an
intrinsic good. By implication, working the earth and transforming the
natural landscape were no longer simply means to an end, but ends in
themselves.
A final incentive for this energetic engagement with the material world
came with the linkage of the imperative "have dominion" to justifications
of property ownership and colonization. In his Second Treatise of Govern-
ment (1689), John Locke set out the view that in the state of nature, all
land had been common. Land became private property when it was im-

45 Duncan, pp. 152-54.

46 For such allegorical readings of paradise, see Alexander Neckham, De naturis rerum
2.49; Guibert of Nogent, Moralium Geneseos 1.1.21-24; Bartholomew Anglicus, De proprietati-
bus rerum 15:111, 158. For seventeenth-century criticism of these readings, see Salkeld, p. 4.
See also Williams (n. 36 above), p. 110.
47 Andrewes, p. 104.
48 Matthew Hale, The Primitive Origination of Mankind (London, 1677), p. 317.
49 Richard Neve [T. Snow, pseudonym], Apopiroscipy (London, 1702), chap. 2, p. 3.
50 John White, A Commentary upon the First Three Chapters of the First Book of Moses Called
Genesis (London, 1656), bk. 1, pp. 113-14.
51 George Hughes, An Analytical Exposition of the First Book of Moses (London, 1672), p. 11.
Compare John Pettus, Volatiles from the History of Adam and Eve (London, 1674), p. 83.

100

This content downloaded from

106.202.59.181 on Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:55:16 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Subduing the Earth

proved by clearing, planting, cultivation, or stocking with animals. The

justification for this influential understanding of the basis of property
ownership came from the biblical story of creation: for inasmuch as "God
and his reason commanded him to subdue the earth, i.e. improve it for
the benefit of life ... he that in obedience to this command of God, sub-
dued, tilled, and sowed any part of, thereby annexed to it something that
was his property."52 Logically, it followed that those who occupied lands,
yet had done nothing to bring them under control, could legitimately be
dispossessed of them. Such notions were to play an important role in the
justification of overseas plantations and colonies. Richard Eburne ex-
plained in A Plaine Path-way to Plantations (1624) that colonization was to
be justified on account of "God's expresse commandment to Adam, Genesis
1.28. that hee shouldfill the earth, and subdue it." 53 George Walker reasoned
similarly that those parts of the world "which are not replenished with
men able to subdue the Earth and till it," are open to those who could prop-
erly exploit them.54 Later in the century, clergyman and naturalist John
Ray pointed out that the author of nature "is well pleased with the Indus-
try of Man in adorning the Earth with beautiful Cities and Castles, with
pleasant Villages and Country Houses, with regular Gardens and Or-
chards and Plantations." In this respect, he pointed out, Europe differed
markedly from "a rude and unpolished America, peopled with slothful
and naked Indians," hinting darkly that the conquest of America was in
keeping with the biblical injunction to subdue the earth.55 Developing
conceptions of private property, along with commercial incentives for col-
onization, thus played their role in the modern conquest of nature, and
these factors, too, found their ideological justification in seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century readings of Genesis.56
In the rhetoric of seventeenth-century scientists and exegetes, then, we
encounter new and momentous applications of the biblical imperatives
"subdue" and "have dominion." It is difficult to escape the conclusion

52 John Locke, Two Treatises, in Works, 10th ed., 10 vols. (London, 1801), 5:354, 356, 362.
53 Richard Eburne, A Plaine Path-Way to Plantation (London, 1624), sig. B2v, pp. 16-18
(emphasis in original). Also see Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century
Revolution (Ringwood: Penguin, 1994), p. 136.
54 Walker (n. 43 above), p. 222 (emphasis in original).
55John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (London, 1691),
pp. 117-18.
56 Thus Karl Marx's claim that it was the coming of private property that led Christians
to exploit nature is not necessarily inconsistent with the thesis of theological motivation.
See Marx, Grundrisse, ed. David McLellan (St. Albans: Paladin, 1973), pp. 94-95. On the
theological justifications of capitalism generally, see William Coleman, "Providence, Capi-
talism, and Environmental Degradation: English Apologists in an Era of Economic Revolu-
tion," Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976): 27-44.

101

This content downloaded from

106.202.59.181 on Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:55:16 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Journal of Religion

that the Genesis creation narratives provided the program for not only
the investigation of nature but its exploitation as well.57 Stripped of their
allegorical and moral connotations, these passages were taken to refer
unambiguously to the physical world and its living occupants. Whatever
the ecological practices of medieval societies had been, at no time in the
West prior to this do we encounter so explicit an ideology of the subordi-
nation of nature. White was correct to assign an important role to the
creation story in the development of modern science and technology but
mistaken in locating that effect earlier than the seventeenth century.58

IV

This may seem to lend support to the general thesis that the biblical ac-
count of the creation played an important role in the development of an
exploitative attitude toward the natural world. However, the situation is
more complex than this. When we attend closely to the seventeenth-
century contexts in which the biblical imperative "have dominion" is used
to justify the technological mastery of the natural world, we find that
dominion is almost invariably associated with the Fall. Many writers al
lude to the fact the human rule over the earth had been lost through
human disobedience to God. The dominion that plays so crucial a role in
much seventeenth-century scientific discourse is thus a recovered domin-
ion or a restored dominion, a pale imitation of that original sovereignty
that had been granted to the human race. Loss of dominion, moreover,
was not the only misfortune to have followed upon the lapse of our first
parents: "Cursed it the ground because of you," the Lord says to Adam
"in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles
it shall bring forth to you; and you shall eat the plants of the field
(Gen. 4:17b-18). As a consequence of the human fall, the natural world,
too, it was thought, fell from its original perfection. The whole creation
Saint Paul had written, now "groans in travail" (Rom. 8:22).
For seventeenth-century commentators, the consequences of the divine
curse were pervasive. The fallen world inhabited by Adam's descendants

57 In this connection, Bono has recently argued that the Genesis accounts of the Fall and
Babel became for the early modern period a "master narrative" that eventually gave rise t
scientific practices. See James Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpretin
Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995),
vol. 1.

58 Compare Glacken: "It is in the thought of this period [i.e., the seventeenth century]
that there begins a unique formulation in Western thought, marking itself off from the
other great traditions, such as the Indian and the Chinese .... The religious idea that man
has dominion over the earth, that he completes the creation, becomes sharper and more
explicit by the seventeenth century" (Glacken [n. 2 above], pp. 494-95).

102

This content downloaded from

106.202.59.181 on Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:55:16 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Subduing the Earth

was not the earth in its natural state, but an earth suffering under a curse
on account of human transgression. The infertility of the ground, the
ferocity of savage beasts, the existence of weeds, thorns, and thistles, of
ugly toads and venomous serpents, all of these were painful reminders of
the irretrievable loss of the paradisal earth. Even the surface of the globe
itself, once a smooth and perfect sphere, had been transformed into hid-
eous vistas of bogs, valleys, ravines, hills, and mountains. In its original,
pristine state, the whole earth had been an ordered garden, now it was
an untamed and unkempt wilderness, inhabited by a menagerie of mostly
unmanageable beasts.59
Viewed in this context, early modern discourse about human dominion
is not an assertion of a human tyranny over a hapless earth, nor does it
exemplify an arrogant indifference to the natural world. Rather, domin-
ion is held out as the means by which the earth can be restored to its
prelapsarian order and perfection. It is for this reason that the seven-
teenth-century discourse of dominion is almost invariably accompanied
by a rhetoric of restoration. John Pettus, for example, speaks of "subdu-
ing the earth" and "conquering those extravagancies of nature," but his
aim is "the replenishment of the first creation." The "extravagancies" to
which he refers are those of a nature gone wild and unchecked. Agricul-
ture, which required a clearing of the native vegetation, a levelling of
land, and a draining of swamps, was the activity that lay at the vanguard
of these projects of restoration. Metaphysical poet Thomas Traherne
wrote that the earth "had been a Wilderness overgrown with Thorns, and
Wild Beasts, and Serpents: Which now by the Labor of many hands, is
reduced to the Beauty and Order of Eden."60 According to Timothy
Nourse, agricultural activities heal the land of "the Original Curse of
Thorns and Bryers" thus effecting "the Restauration of Nature, which may
be looked upon as a New Creation of things."61 In a similar vein, Richard
Burton was to write of his ideal estate, "I will have no bogs, fens, marshes,
vast woods, deserts, heaths ... I will not have a barren acre in all my
territories, not so much as the tops of the mountains: where nature fails,
it shall be supplied by art."62 Human artifice compensates for the defects
of nature, and fittingly so, for these defects represent the consequences

5 For typical accounts of the mutations of the earth and its creatures that resulted from
the fall, see Walker, pp. 23-25; Jean-Franfois Senault, Man Becom Guilty, Or the Corruption of
Nature by Sinne, According to St. Augustin's Sense (London, 1650), pp. 319-90; Richard Franck,
A Philosophical Treatise (London, 1687), pp. 124-70.
60 Thomas Traherne, Christian Ethicks (London, 1675), p. 103.
61 Pettus (n. 51 above), p. 83. Timothy Nourse, Campania Foelix (London, 1700), p. 2.
62 Quoted in John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (New York: Touchstone,
1995), p. 511.

103

This content downloaded from

106.202.59.181 on Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:55:16 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Journal of Religion

of human sin. It is our business, wrote John Donne, "To rectifie nature
to what she was."63 Bacon himself wrote that the endeavour "to establish
and extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the
universe" was undertaken with a view to enabling the human race to
"recover the light over nature which belongs to it by divine bequest."64
Dominion, then, was not exercised so that humanity could leave its mark
upon the earth. On the contrary, it was to erase those scars that embodied
the physical legacy of a moral fall. These measures were intended to im-
prove the earth, to reinstate a paradise on earth, and provide an anticipa-
tion of heaven. "A skilful and industrious improvement of the creatures,"
observed one writer, would lead to "a fuller taste of Christ and Heaven."65
The rhetoric of dominion and subjection that we encounter in this period
does not therefore betray an indifference to the fortunes of nature but a
concern to restore it to its original perfection.
The seventeenth century furnishes us with further evidence that chal-
lenges standard accounts of "Christian attitudes towards nature." Many
such accounts refer to a connection between anthropocentrism and envi-
ronmental exploitation. White, for example, maintained that "Christian-
ity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen."66 While this
may be the case, it is by no means clear that anthropocentrism inevitably
leads to an aggressive violation of the integrity of nature. As it turns out,
the link between anthropocentrism and the early modern exploitation of
the natural world is quite different from what we might expect, for the
first serious challenges to anthropocentrism in the West come in the sev-
enteenth century.67 Many divines and scientists who unambiguously sub-
scribed to a Christian doctrine of creation questioned the prevailing view
that the whole of the created order had been brought into existence to
serve human beings. Robert Boyle, one of the fathers of modern chemis-
try, described the idea as "erroneous." William Derham thought it a vul-
gar error. Fellow physico-theologian John Ray agreed that it was "vulgarly
received" that "all this visible world was created for Man," but that "Wise
Men now think otherwise." Thomas Burnet, who advocated a kind of
seventeenth-century creation science, regarded as absurd the belief that
the earth and the myriad celestial bodies were designed for use by "the
meanest of all the Intelligent Creatures." Anthropocentrism was an opin-

63 John Donne, "To Sr Edward Herbert. At Julyers," lines 33-34.

64 Bacon, Novum Organum (n. 38 above), 1.129.
65 John Flavell, Husbandry Spiritualized (London, 1669), sig. A2v.
66 Lynn White, in Barbour, ed. (n. 1 above), p. 25.
67 Some pagan writers of the patristic period-most notably Celsus and, later, Porphyry-
took issue with the anthropocentric stances of Stoicism and Christianity. See, e.g., Origen,
Against Celsus 4; Porphyry, De abstinentia 3.20, and passim.

104

This content downloaded from

106.202.59.181 on Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:55:16 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Subduing the Earth

ion, wrote Archbishop William King, attended with "inextricable diffi-

culties." 68

We do not need to search far to discover the reasons for this challenge.
The Copernican hypothesis that had displaced the earth from the center
of the cosmos gained increasing support during the course of the seven-
teenth century. Many critics of anthropocentrism were Copernicans, and
some explicitly identified their heliocentric commitments as the reason
for their rejection of anthropocentrism. The expansion of the universe
that came with the invention of the telescope also called into question the
privileged place of the human race. The new astronomy, complained one
of its critics, had made the earth "a despicable Spot, a Speck, a Point
in comparison of the Vast and Spacious Conjeries of the Sun and Fixed
Lights."69 Such an insignificant planet could hardly serve as the home of
the creature that was supposedly the pinnacle of the material creation.
The passing of the microcosmic conception of the human being as the
one creature in which all others were comprehended further eroded the
prestige of the human animal. Added to this, the criticism of explanation
in terms of final causes, articulated by such influential figures as Bacon
and Descartes, removed human needs and purposes from the sphere of
scientific explanation.
It is not unreasonable to conclude that during the course of the seven-
teenth century active engagement with the natural world increased as
anthropocentric convictions waned. This development is not as surpris-
ing as it may at first seem. Francis Bacon's notorious advocacy of wresting
nature's secrets from her by force was premised on the view that nature
is not a pliant servant, transparent to the intellect and designed to cater
for human needs. It is because nature does not readily acquiesce in its
own exploitation that force is called for. Nature, wrote Bacon, is to be
interrogated and subjected to "trials and vexations of art."'70 A number of

68 Robert Boyle, A Disquisition about the Final Causes of Things (London, 1688), p. 10; Wil-
liam Derham, Astro-Theology; Or, a Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God from a Survey
of the Heavens (London, 1715), p. 39; Ray (n. 55 above), pp. 127-28; Thomas Burnet, The
Sacred Theory of the Earth (1690-91), 2.11 (London: Centaur Press, 1965), p. 218; William
King, An Essay on the Origin of Evil (London, 1731), p. 91. Also see Henry More, An Antidote
against Atheism, 2d ed. (London, 1662), appendix, p. 178; Jean d'Espagnet, Enchyridion phys-
icae restitutae (London, 1651), p. 162; Pierre Charron, On Wisdom (London, 1697),
pp. 365-66.
69 John Edwards, Brief Remarks upon Mr. Whiston's New Theory of the Earth (London, 1697),
"Epistle Dedicatory," pp. 23-26. Edwards believed that the Copernican hypothesis was a
passing fad. On the connection between final causes and cosmology, also see John Witty,
An Essay towards a Vindication of the Vulgar Exposition of the Mosaic History of the World, 2 vols.
(London, 1705), 1:105, 108-9. Also see Boyle, preface, pp. 32-33, for a comparison of the
Cartesian and Epicurean denials of final causes.
70 Francis Bacon, De dignitate, in Works, 4:298. Compare Novum Organum 1.98, in Works, 4:94.

105

This content downloaded from

106.202.59.181 on Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:55:16 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Journal of Religion

his contemporaries agreed. According to Galileo, nature does not care "a
whit whether her abstruse reasons and methods of operation are under-
standable to men." Robert Hooke thought that nature seemed "to use
som kind of art in indeavouring to avoid our discovery." Thus nature was
to be investigated when "she seems to be put to her shifts, to make many
doublings and turnings."'7 It had been a central assumption of Aristote-
lianism, by way of contrast, that the interpretation of nature could be
based on commonsense observations of everyday phenomena. Accord-
ingly, Aristotle and his medieval successors had erroneously concluded
that heavy objects will fall faster than light ones, that objects in motion
will naturally tend to come to rest, that the apparently circular motions
of celestial objects were based on principles fundamentally different from
those of terrestrial mechanics. The Aristotelian approach to knowledge
of nature thus meshed neatly with the anthropocentric presumption. For
seventeenth-century investigators, however, it was precisely because na-
ture had not been framed solely with human utility in mind that an ag-
gressive stance toward it was considered necessary. Robert Boyle thus
thought it a mistake to claim that all things in the visible world had been
created for the use of human beings, yet he allowed that all things had
potential uses that could be determined only through systematic investi-
gation.72
Growing uncertainties about how human interests fitted into the cos-
mic scheme of things thus combined with the ancient narrative of the
expulsion from the garden, now read exclusively in its literal sense, to
relocate early modern individuals into an apparently hostile environment
in which they must make their own way and painstakingly accumulate
knowledge from a world reluctant to yield up its secrets. Whatever the
past glories of Eden, whatever easy assumptions of the superiority of the
human race had been made in the previous periods of history, the present
world was no longer regarded as the place over which human beings
exercised a natural superiority, nor did the earth compliantly satisfy intel-
lectual curiosity and provide for the material comforts of its human ten-

71 Galileo, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, trans.
Stillman Drake (New York: Anchor, 1957), p. 183; cf. pp. 187, 199; Robert Hooke, Micro-
graphia (London, 1665), preface.
72 Boyle, p. 10; cf. pp. 230-31. The rise of theological voluntarism is also a relevant con-
sideration here. If the laws of nature rested upon the divine will, rather than the divine
reason, the basis of the regularities of nature could only be discovered through empirical
investigation and not merely through the exercise of human reason alone. See Richard
Westfall, Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1958), pp. 5-7; Richard Greaves, "Puritanism and Science," Journal of the History
of Ideas 30 (1969): 345-68; R. Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science (Grand Rap-
ids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1972), pp. 98-114; Eugene Klaaren, Religious Origins of Modern Science
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1977), pp. 32-52.

106

This content downloaded from

106.202.59.181 on Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:55:16 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Subduing the Earth

ants. It was not arrogance, but modesty, that motivated the first of the
modern scientists, and their program was not the violation of nature but
the restoration of the earth to a paradise in which all creatures could take
their proper place.

All of this suggests that some prevalent ideas about the relationship be-
tween the Christian doctrine of creation and Western attitudes toward
nature require significant revision in a number of areas. First, if White
was fundamentally correct to identify in specific Christian ideas and in
particular biblical texts powerful determinants of Western attitudes to-
ward the natural world, he was, for all that, mistaken in attributing to
these an influence that predated the rise of science in the early modern
period. Whatever evidence there may be of human impact on the natural
landscape during the Middle Ages, only in the early modern period do
we encounter the explicit connection between the exploitation of nature
and the Genesis creation narratives.
Second, the common assumption that anthropocentrism is one of the
engines that drives the exploitation of nature now seems questionable.
For the Middle Ages, the centrality of the human being in the cosmos was
unquestioned. For the moderns, it was precisely the loss of this centrality
that motivated the quest to conquer an obstinate and uncooperative
earth. From the perspective of Francis Bacon and his generation, if the
natural world were genuinely to function as a willing vassal for its human
masters, its active exploitation would have been unnecessary. Were na-
ture truly submissive-as once it had been in Eden-it would already
cater to all human needs. Thus doubts about the cosmic status of human
beings motivated the investigation of nature in the search for hitherto
hidden utilities. Such considerations furthered the cause of the scientific
enterprise and indirectly contributed to environmental degradation.
Third, the role played by the narratives of creation and fall in the sev-
enteenth-century discourses of the domination of nature suggests that
the long-standing distinction between the traditions of "stewardship" and
"despotism" in the Western tradition might have outlived its usefulness.
The key to resolving the apparent tension between the views of the hu-
man being as steward or despot-the opposing perspectives of our re-
lation to the natural world supposedly inherent in the Judeo-Christian
tradition-lies in the conception of nature to which our early modern
counterparts subscribed. For them, the world in its virgin state, un-
touched by human industry, was not the "natural" world but a fallen and
disfigured creature, a standing rebuke to human sin and idleness. Ac-
cordingly, their responsibility, as they perceived it, was not to leave the

107

This content downloaded from

106.202.59.181 on Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:55:16 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Journal of Religion

world in its fallen state but rather to manipulate it, to improve it, to ex-
periment upon it, all with a view to restoring it to its original perfection.
In carrying out such activities they sought to redeem nature from the
curse to which it had been subject for centuries on account of our first
father's disobedience. In an important sense, then, early modern advo-
cates of dominion and contemporary environmentalists share a common
concern-to preserve or restore the natural condition of the earth, with
the crucial difference between them residing in their respective views of
what that "natural condition" is believed to be. What is certain is that,
during this period of history at least, the impulses of dominion and stew-
ardship were directed toward a common goal.
Finally, and following on directly from the previous point, it might be
said that in these early modern understandings of creation and fall are
the resources for an ecologically sensitive theology. It is intriguing, then,
that so many advocates of ecotheology have tended to regard traditional
theology as the problem rather than the solution." Thomas Berry, one of
the leading Catholic thinkers in this field, thus observes that our environ-
mental problems are to be attributed at least in part to "our identification
of the divine as transcendent to the natural world." What is required
instead, he suggests, is "a new type of religious orientation."74 Sally
McFague, who has sought to articulate new models of God more congru-
ent with contemporary ecological sensitivities, has likewise criticized the
theological stance according to which God is "distant from the world and
relates only to the human world." It is this "image of sovereignty" that
"supports attitudes of control and use toward the nonhuman world."75
Perhaps most directly relevant of all for our present discussion is Matthew

73 See, e.g., H. Paul Santmire, The Travail of Nature: The Ambiguous Ecological Promise of
Christian Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), pp. 146-47, "Healing the Protestant
Mind: Beyond the Theology of Human Dominion," in After Nature's Revolt: Eco-Justice and
Theology, ed. D. Hessel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1992), pp. 62-63; William French,
"Subject-Centered and Creation-Centered Paradigms in Recent Catholic Thought," Journal
of Religion 70 (1990): 48-72; Gustaf Wingren, The Flight from Creation (Minneapolis: Augs-
burg, 1971); Frederick Elder, Crisis in Eden: A Religious Study of Man and Environment (Nash-
ville, Tenn.: Abingdon, 1970); Sean McDonagh, To Care for the Earth: A Call to a New Theology
(Santa Fe, N.M.: Bear, 1987); John Carmody, Ecology and Religion: Toward a New Christian
Theology of Nature (New York: Paulist, 1983); Rosemary Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward
a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon, 1983); Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970), and The Rights of Nature (n. 13 above),
chap. 4; John Cobb, Is It Too Late? A Theology of Ecology (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Bruce, 1972);
Matthew Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ (San Francisco: Harper, 1988).
74 Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Books, 1988), pp. 113-15,
87. Intriguingly, White also spoke of a religious solution to our environmental problems,
suggesting the revival of the theology of Saint Francis of Assisi, and proposing him as the
patron saint of ecologists. See Barbour, ed., p. 30.
75 Sally McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: For-
tress Press, 1987), p. 68.

108

This content downloaded from

106.202.59.181 on Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:55:16 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Subduing the Earth

Fox, who in Original Blessing (1983) blames "Augustinian fall-redemption

theology" for what he identifies as an openly antagonistic approach to the
natural world.76 In light of the history of various readings of the creation
and fall, it seems that such analyses concede too easily the agenda of
White and his successors and prematurely abandon traditional Christian
understandings of God's relation to the world. While it is tempting to
speculate about simple connections between such ideas as divine tran-
scendence or human dominion on the one hand, and attitudes of arro-
gance toward the natural order on the other, and while such links may
seem to have a prima facie plausibility, history bears out the fact that the
real situation is rather more complex.
The brief account of some of the dominant early modern readings of
the Genesis text that I have provided is admittedly far from complete.
Yet it serves to show the inadequacy of commonly held views about the
relationship between Christianity and the exploitation of nature. I hope
also to have shown that the religious convictions of previous eras are per-
haps not as irrelevant to our present predicament as is often claimed.
However ecologically naive our seventeenth-century forebears might now
appear, and however misguided their efforts to "improve" the natural
world, their program of retrieving a nature that had fallen into ruin on
account of human transgressions seems not entirely inappropriate for the
late twentieth century.

71 Matthew Fox, Original Blessing (Santa Fe, N.M.: Bear, 1983), pp. 10-11.

109

This content downloaded from

106.202.59.181 on Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:55:16 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms