Thomas Burnet

English theologian and geologist

• Born: c. 1635
• Birthplace: Croft, Yorkshire, England
• Died: September 27, 1715
• Place of death: London, England

Burnet composed what he believed to be a scientific description of the early geological history of the earth that would explain the biblical account of Creation. He is notable for attempting to establish a bridge between the science and religion of his day.

Early Life

Thomas Burnet earned early recognition as an excellent student and entered Cambridge in 1651, studying under John Tillotson (archbishop of Canterbury from 1691 to 1693) and the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth. Burnet received an M.A. from Christ’s College (John Milton’s alma mater) in 1658, becoming a proctor in 1667. He visited the Continent, serving as a tutor to the young James Butler, Lord Wiltshire, the grandson of James Butler, twelfth earl, first marquis, and later first duke of Ormonde.

In 1685, Ormonde was influential in helping Burnet to gain the position of master of Charterhouse School in London. In 1686-1687, Burnet and others successfully resisted illegal efforts by James II to make the Catholic Andrew Popham a pensioner of the school; Burnet remained its master until his death. In 1691, he became chaplain in ordinary and clerk of the closet to King William III of Orange. Burnet was regarded as a possible successor to Tillotson as archbishop, but his theology was thought too unorthodox, and he advanced no further in the Church. Toward the end of 1695, Burnet resigned his duties at court, largely under pressure brought against his writings, and thereafter he lived at Charterhouse as a lifelong bachelor. He died there on September 27, 1715, and is buried in the chapel.

Life’s Work

Burnet’s most famous work, Telluris theoria sacra(1681; The Sacred Theory of the Earth , 1684-1690), offered a theory of the development of the earth since Creation that would be rationally plausible yet support the biblical account given in Genesis. Burnet believed that Creation had been divinely caused, but he felt it should be possible to explain in physical terms the processes by which the globe achieved its present form. Because science in Burnet’s day had not yet become a distinctly defined discipline, later practitioners of formal science would evaluate his theory harshly, categorizing it as speculation lacking in hard evidence (he completely ignored the known fossil record). Nevertheless, his effort to propose an explanatory hypothesis is a significant step toward the later growth of empirical geology.

Burnet posited that the earth’s original form, owing to the perfection of creation, was a smooth sphere unbroken by mountains or valleys. He calculated that the biblical Deluge would have been insufficient to cover the continents, and therefore the Flood must have sprung from a subterranean layer of water that cracked through the surface from an underground abyss. Mountain ranges were the result of this breakup of the surface; they stood as evidence of the imperfect nature of the world after the Fall (the earth was now “a hideous ruin”), yet they possessed a profound grandeur that moved Burnet deeply. “There is nothing that I look upon,” he wrote, “with more pleasure than the wide Sea and the Mountains of the Earth. There is something august and stately in the Air of these things that inspires the mind with great thoughts and passions.”

Burnet also offered a physical explanation of the final destruction of the world by fire. Interestingly, Sir Isaac Newton disagreed with Burnet’s account of the Flood and supported the authority of the Genesis account rather than Burnet’s more “rational” analysis. Burnet’s assumptions about the relationship of human reason to divine authority are perhaps more significant than the details of his theory, for he believed that if human reason and biblical truth were both the works of God, they could not finally contradict each other: “He that made the Scripture made also our Faculties, and ’twere a reflection upon the Divine Veracity, for the one or the other to be false when rightly us’d. We must therefore be careful and tender of opposing these to one another, because that is, in effect, to oppose God to himself.”

Burnet’s Archaeologiae philosophicae (1692) is the work credited with earning him the label “unorthodox,” thus ending his position at court. Burnet supported the concept of accommodation in biblical language. In other words, he asserted that the truths of Scripture were framed in language adapted to the imperfect understanding of its human readers, not necessarily in ways that rendered its ideas factually (rather than spiritually) true. Burnet held that Moses had simplified the account of Creation to better enable the ancient Hebrews to comprehend it, a view that prompted a satirical poem of the 1690’s accusing him of stating “That all the books of Moses/ Were nothing but supposes.”

Burnet also anonymously issued a series of three responses in 1697 and 1699 in answer to John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Burnet argued against Locke’s concept of learned ideas, asserting that humans instead possess at birth a native moral sense allowing them to distinguish right from wrong. Two of Burnet’s theological works were published posthumously, De statu mortuorum et resurgentium liber: Accesserunt epistolae duae circa libellum de archaeologiis philosophicis (1723; A Treatise Concerning the State of Departed Souls, Before, and at, and After the Resurrection , 1730) and De fide et officiis Christianorum liber (1723; The Faith and Duties of Christians, 1728?).

Significance

Though his ideas have in the past been generally deemed eccentric, Burnet now tends to be viewed as a precursor of modern attempts to form a unified conception of scientific and religious truth, specifically to reconcile the claims of empirical research with the biblical narrative of Creation. He is also a significant figure in the development of the aesthetics of the sublime, the effort to portray verbally or pictorially the grandeur of natural vistas that seem too exalted for human expression. Such scenes, he felt, “fill and overbear the mind with their Excess and cast it into a pleasing kind of stupor and imagination.”

Burnet’s writing style impressively conveys his theories in graceful, rhythmic sentences. His ideas prompted both vigorous support and angry criticism after his death. Among his English supporters were Richard Steele, who compared Burnet favorably to Cicero and praised The Sacred Theory of the Earth in the August 17, 1711, issue of The Spectator, and Steele’s partner, Joseph Addison, who composed a Latin ode in praise of him. Others, however, suggested that Burnet might even have been an atheist. His work contributed to the strong eighteenth century interest in the aesthetic appeal of nature and thus distantly influenced Edmund Burke’s important essay A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). The English Romantic poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley refer in passing to Burnet’s ideas, and Coleridge used a passage from the Archaeologiae Philosophicae as the epigram to later editions of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798).

Bibliography

Almond, Philip C. Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Contains several brief discussions of Burnet’s skeptical, nonliteral interpretations of Genesis in The Sacred Theory of the Earth.

Bevenga, Nancy. “On Holy Ground: Mountains and Their Significance for Samuel Taylor Coleridge.” Anglican and Episcopal History 67, no. 1 (1998): 49-68. Examines the sources of Coleridge’s fascination with mountains, among which The Sacred Theory of the Earth is significant.

Davenport-Hines, Richard. Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil, and Ruin. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998. Contains a brief popular discussion of Burnet’s place in the development of the Gothic movement in art, placing him in the context of the paintings of Salvator Rosa (1615-1673) and the aesthetics of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713).

Gould, Stephen Jay. Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. Sees Burnet as a key figure in the development of the modern concept of “deep” geological time, paving the way for the more influential geologists James Hutton and Charles Lyell, who dispensed with religious considerations entirely. Gould also discusses Burnet briefly in his Ever Since Darwin (1977).

Grave, S. A. Locke and Burnet. [Perth]: Philosophy Society of Western Australia and Department of Philosophy, University of Western Australia, 1981. A philosophical study comparing Burnet and John Locke on issues of morality, religious revelation, and the immortality of the soul, as well as addressing Burnet’s concept of the conscience.

Jacob, M. W., and W. A. Lockwood. “Political Millenarianism and Burnet’s Sacred Theory.” Science Studies 2, no. 3 (July, 1972): 265-279. Argues that Burnet’s original intention in writing The Sacred Theory of the Earth was to assert the final authority of the Anglican Church in the coming millennium.

Mandelbrote, Scott. “Isaac Newton and Thomas Burnet: Biblical Criticism and the Crisis of Late Seventeenth-Century England.” In The Books of Nature and Scripture: Recent Essays on Natural Philosophy, Theology, and Biblical Criticism in the Netherlands of Spinoza’s Time and the British Isles of Newton’s Time, edited by James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin. Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1994. A detailed discussion of Burnet’s work within the larger seventeenth century debate over the nature of scientific evidence and its relationship to scriptural authority; also examines Newton’s response to Burnet.

Nicholson, Marjorie Hope. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite. Reprint. New York: W. W. Norton, 1963. Devotes chapters 5 and 6 to Burnet’s ideas, the debates they sparked, and the broad influence they had.

Rappaport, Rhoda. When Geologists Were Historians, 1665-1750. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997. Summarizes Burke’s methodology and contains a detailed summary of reactions to Burnet’s theories by British and European thinkers of his own day. Extensive bibliography and index.

Watson, George, ed. Remarks on John Locke by Thomas Burnet with Locke’s Replies. Doncaster, South Yorkshire, England: Brynmill Press, 1989. A complete edition of Burnet’s responses to Locke, with a helpful introductory essay.