The deep sleep of Adam

‘Other pursuits become insignificant in their objects when placed in contrast with ours ...what are any, or what are all these objects when contrasted with the most precious and valued gift of God - human life’

James Young Simpson

According to many of the self appointed experts of the internet, throughout human history Christianity has been a force of backwardness and oppression, holding back scientific and intellectual advance and resisting the march of progress inch by bloody inch. Take this example from the site ‘religioustolerance.org’:

‘In 1846 James Simpson, a Scottish physician promoted the use of chloroform to relieve pain during childbirth. This was opposed by the Church, citing Genesis 3:16 "...I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children". The avoidance of pain was seen as thwarting God's will. Fortunately, Simpson found a competing passage (Genesis 2:21) which describes the first surgical operation; it seems to support the use of anesthetic: "...God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam.....he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh.." In time, the Church's opposition dissipated; pain killers have since lost their religious significance.’

Another site expresses outrage at the churches effrontery:

Astonishingly, far from crediting him for having saved countless women from avoidable pain, he (James Simposon) was severely castigated by the Scottish Church for interfering in the Divine Plan. That many other doctors from the previous centuries had used hypnotism and narcotics to relieve pain without censure was irrelevant to the Church. They wanted Simpson to stop – putting people to sleep artificially, they claimed, was making it easier for the Dark Powers to overwhelm them. In the case of women, it was particularly heinous and insensitive to try to save them from feeling pain. After all, wasn't it said in the Genesis - "In Sorrow thou shalt bring forth children"?

The central problem with this anecdote is that it is almost completely false. A. D. Farr, a medical historian has methodically searched through a vast body of literature from the 1840s and 1850s, where modern anesthesia during childbirth was first introduced, and found that the idea there was religious opposition to the introduction of childbirth anesthesia was a figment of later propaganda.

Straight after his famous experiment was performed at his house in the old town of Edinburgh, Simpson did indeed prepare a theological defense entitled ‘In Answer to the Religious Arguments advanced Against the Employment of Anaesthetic Agents in Midwifery and Surgery (1847). But the attack never materialized; not even the slightest hint of opposition occurred. On page one of the tract Simpson mentions that he had heard of patients and some doctors criticising what he was doing, but he does not name any religious organisation, theologian or religious leader as being responsible for spreading opposition to his work. Further on in the pamphlet he mentions that the leading obstetrician in Dublin had publicly denounced his work for religious reasons. Having read this, the man involved, Dr. Montgomery, in a letter of 27th December 1848 to Simpson, expressed his “astonishment” that Simpson had accepted “hearsay” and had, “taken the trouble of writing a formal reply to arguments which never were made use of by me. I never advocated or locum tenanced either in public or in private the so called ‘religious objection’ to anaesthesia in labour, ...” .In a later article he wrote, “I attach no value to what are called the ‘religious objections’ to the use of this remedy”

In a letter to Dr. Protheroe Smith, Simpson reported that following the publication of his pamphlet, he had received communications from some of the best theologians ‘...of all churches, ... Presbyterian, Independent, Episcopalian, and Protheroe’s own Anglican Church, approving of the view I had taken’. As A.D Farr’s analysis has shown, prominent leaders from across the established religious spectrum – including Rev. Thomas Chalmers (Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland),and Rabbi Abraham De Sola (Canada's first Rabbi) - were in written agreement with anesthesia. Most clergy, theologians, and religious physicians approved the whiff of painkiller. A few clergy feared that Satan was behind pain relief, but Chalmers described these dissenters as ‘small theologians’ and advised that they should be ignored.

Why did Simpson take it upon himself to write the tract in the first place?. The reason was probably that he was deeply religious and, acting on hearsay, decided to ally the fears of his peers. At home Simpson led morning and evening prayers. He frequently preached to Edinburgh congregations as well as preaching in the mining districts. He even wrote religious addresses, tracts and hymns. He also, being a man of conscience, broke from the Church of Scotland when the Free Church was formed in 1842. Given this background it seems logical that, having made a scientific breakthrough, he would expound upon the Christian teaching on the subject.

In a letter to a colleague in 1848, only a year after his theological defence was written, Simpson commented:

‘all religious opposition to chloroform has entirely ceased among us, if we except an occasional remark on the point from some caustic old maid whose prospects of using chloroform are for ever passed, or a sneer from some antiquated lady who grieves and grudges that her daughters should not suffer as their mother was obliged to suffer before them.’

These objections from lay women ceased when Queen Victoria accepted anesthesia for the birth of Prince Leopold in 1853 and described it as a pleasant experience.

So where did this myth of widespread religious opposition come from?. Professor Colin Russell throws some light upon the matter.

I had a research student who looked at this as part of a bigger task and, to cut a long story short, he found that all the stories to this effect, which are in all the modern textbooks on the history of medicine, are actually almost baseless; but not quite, because he traced them down in a sort of family tree to just one source, and that one source was A.D. White. There is a statement in A.D. White’s book that this clerical opposition was in fact the case and he doesn’t even give a footnote reference to it.

Sure enough, in 1896, Andrew Dickinson White claimed in his History of the Warfare of Science with Theology and Christendom that:

'In 1847, James Young Simpson, a Scotch physician, who afterward rose to the highest eminence in his profession, having advocated the use of anæ sthetics in obstetrical cases, was immediately met by a storm of opposition. This hostility flowed from an ancient and time-honoured belief in Scotland. As far back as the year 1591, Eufame Macalyane, a lady of rank, being charged with seeking the aid of Agnes Sampson for the relief of pain at the time of the birth of her two sons, was burned alive on the Castle Hill of Edinburgh; and this old theological view persisted even to the middle of the nineteenth century. From pulpit after pulpit Simpson's use of chloroform was denounced as impious and contrary to Holy Writ; texts were cited abundantly, the ordinary declaration being that to use chloroform was ``to avoid one part of the primeval curse on woman.'' Simpson wrote pamphlet after pamphlet to defend the blessing which he brought into use; but he seemed about to be overcome, when he seized a new weapon, probably the most absurd by which a great cause was ever won: ``My opponents forget,'' he said, ``the twenty-first verse of the second chapter of Genesis; it is the record of the first surgical operation ever performed, and that text proves that the Maker of the universe, before he took the rib from Adam's side for the creation of Eve, caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam.''

This was a stunning blow, but it did not entirely kill the opposition; they had strength left to maintain that the ``deep sleep of Adam took place before the introduction of pain into the world---in a state of innocence.;; But now a new champion intervened---Thomas Chalmers: with a few pungent arguments from his pulpit he scattered the enemy forever, and the greatest battle of science against suffering was won. This victory was won not less for religion.'

He didn’t give a source because, as we now know, he made most of it up.

Postscript: What about Eufame Macalyane?

In the reference from Andrew Dickinson White I quoted, he also mentioned the story of Eufame Macalyane /Euphame McCalzane. The claim was that Calvinists, at the instigation of King James, burnt her to death at the stake in Edinburgh in 1591. This sentence was passed because she had accepted help to ease the pains of childbirth, thereby transgressing the orders of God given in Genesis 3:16.

When the story was traced it was found that this was actually a witchcraft trial which had been spun later as an anti-Calvinist myth. In 1591 a large group were found guilty of attempted murder by attempting to cast a spell. Their objective was to use witchcraft to cause a storm at sea so in order to sink the ship transporting king James VI of Scotland, and his new wife to Edinburgh from Denmark. Having been caught they were sentenced to be strangled and their bodies to be burnt.

Fifty two accusations were issued during the trial to show that one of the leaders, Agnes Simpson / Sampsoune was a witch. One of the charges was that ten days before Euphame McCalzane expected her baby, Agnes placed ‘Mwildis’ powder under her bed and used the summoning of evil spirits to ease the pains of childbirth. The powder was supposed to consist of the finger, toe and knee joints of disinterred male corpses. Euphame herself was not accused of using this spell, but of adding to the strength of the spell aimed at causing the storm. The judges were primarily interested in whether the defendants were witches attempting to assassinate the king and the childbirth element was somewhat irrelevant, as can be seen from the entry in the register.

the execution, on the Castle-hill of Edinburgh, of Euphame M'Calyeane, one of the most famous of the reputed witches of the time. Her trial had lasted from the 9th to the 13trh of June, and had been on various charges, from witchcraft for private purposes, eighteen years ago, to recent sorcery for drowning the King and Queen on their way from Denmark. Before she was strangled and burnt, the poor woman "tooke it on her conscience that she was innocent of all the crymes layed to her charge." (Register of the Privy Council of Scotland iv, 645n)

Have a go and see how many myths you can spot in this address.


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Boxed in

In the sixth century this theological reasoning was still further developed by Cosmas Indicopleustes. Finding a sanction for the old Egyptian theory of the universe in the ninth chapter of Hebrews, he insisted that the earth is a flat parallelogram and that from its outer edges rise immense walls supporting the firmament…This was accepted by the universal Church as a vast contribution to thought’

Andrew Dickinson White

Cosmas Indicopleustes was a self educated, widely travelled Greek merchant who lived during the 6th century A.D. Having converted to Christianity, he was persuaded by certain biblical passages - which he took a very strict literal interpretation of - that the earth was in fact a flat rectangle covered with a vault containing the stars and planets. His motivation for doing so was his hatred of the heresy of the "spherists" and the antipodists, and he evolved his theory of the universe from the design of the Tabernacle built by Moses in the wilderness. This, he pointed out, Moses himself had declared to be constructed upon the pattern of the visible world. He developed this theory in a book called 'Christian Topography' in which he employed a variety of arguments in support of his hypothesis. In his preface he writes:

'Let me next exhort my readers to examine the sketch of the universe and the stellar motions which we have prepared as a representation of the organic sphere of the pagans, and to study the account of it sent to the pious deacon Homologus, then they with God's help are quite competent, especially with this book and the volume mentioned, to overthrow from the foundation the error of the pagan theories. For if any Christian possesses these three works, and is by divine grace carefully exercised in the divine scriptures, he will easily confute the foolish views of the fable-mongers'

According to Cosmas, the base of the box is formed by the surface of the earth, around which flows the ocean; on the other side of the ocean lies another continent. From this rise walls that support the firmament above. This continent, according to Cosmas, is now altogether inaccessible to man, but used to be the seat of Paradise and the home of the human race up to the time of the great flood; at which point the Ark was swept with its few saved men across to the ‘other Earth’. The stars are then carried by the angels in a circle around the firmament, above which is a vault which separates the heaven from the world beneath.

'All the stars are created….to regulate the days and nights, the months and the years, and they move, not at all by the motion of the heaven itself, but by the action of certain divine Beings, or lampadophores. God made the angels for his service, and He has charged some of them with the motion of the air, others with that of the Sun, or the Moon, or the other stars, and others again with the collecting of clouds, and preparing the rain.'

To the north, the earth rises into a cone-shaped mountain behind which the sun hides during the night. The nights themselves get longer or shorter according to the position of the sun, either near the longer base of the mountain or its shorter summit.

Much of the books consists of a long rant against Cosmas’s critics and their insane belief in a spherical earth, despite their professions to be Christian believers. In book one Cosmas writes:

'Cease, O ye wiseacres! prating worthless nonsense, and learn at last though late to follow the divine oracles and not your own baseless fancies. For, tell us, how ye think that the fixed stars move in an opposite direction to the universe? Is such a motion theirs only or that of the sphere in which they are placed? Then, if it is theirs, how do they traverse unequal orbits in equal time? …But who can imagine a greater absurdity than this? Thus they do their best to prevent anyone surpassing them in their effrontery----or rather, let me say, in impiety, since they do not blush to affirm that there are people who live on the under surface of the earth. What then, should some one question them and say: Is the sun to no purpose carried under the earth? these absurd persons will, on the spur of the moment, without thinking, reply that the people of the Antipodes are there----men carrying their heads downwards, and rivers having a position opposite to the rivers here! thus taking in hand to turn every thing upside down rather than to follow the doctrines of the truth, in which there are no futile sophisms, but which are plain and easy and full of godliness, while they procure salvation for those who reverently consult them.’

In particular he points to the attractiveness, or divine simplicity of his new quadrangular theory because it involves a less complicated model for the earth and the kingdom of heaven. In contrast the spherical model involves a proliferation of heavens to deal with:

‘It is necessary for those who wish to be considered Christians to enquire into which of these eight or nine heavens Christ has ascended, and into which they themselves hope to ascend, and what is the use of the other seven or eight heavens. For having already delineated the world in accordance with the scriptural view, we assert that two places were created, one adapted to the present state of existence, and the other to that which is to come, since we have such a hope, one that is better than the life here. And you, if as Christians you hold such a hope, will of necessity be asked what is the use of the seven or eight other heavens….. But ye advance arguments altogether incredible, and will have it that there is a multitude of spheres, and that there is no final consummation of the world since ye are unable to tell what is the necessity of these things. And in like manner ye will have it that the waters above the spheres rotate----a most ridiculous idea and altogether idiotic, and ye advance arguments which are self-contradictory and opposed to the nature of things. How great is your knowledge! how great your wisdom! how great your intelligence! how great your inconsistency!’

At this point, having worked himself up into a rage Cosmas delivers what I consider to be one of the best retorts in the history of science:

Such then is our reply to your fictitious and false theories and to the conclusions of your reasonings which are capricious, self-contradictory, inconsistent, doomed to be utterly confounded, and to be whirled round and round even more than that unstable and revolving mythical sphere of yours.

Despite Cosmas’s passionate treatise he appears to have had no influence whatsoever; he does deserve an honourable mention however, because later polemicists used him to buttress the manifestly false claim that all (or most) medieval people believed in a flat earth. Cosmas is in fact, the only medieval European known to have defended a flat earth cosmology. It is safe to assume that all educated western Europeans (and all but one educated Byzantine), as well as sailors and travellers, believed in the earth's spherity. The myth of the pre-Columbian flat earth was invented by the essayist Washington Irving in the 1820s and propagated by the notoriously unreliable Dickinson White. Cosmas has proven to be an interesting and reliable guide to the state of the world at the time and his descriptions of his travels in particular have proved invaluable. He remains one of my great heroes, having had the courage to advance an unpopular and highly speculative theory in the teeth of his mocking detractors. He had the spirit of science, but not the education and learning to be able to pull it off. If he were alive today I’m sure he would graciously concede that his detractors were right; but only by accident.

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The fall of man and the genesis of modern science

The history of Science began as a discipline towards the end of the 19th century with the emergence of such works as John William Draper’s ‘History of the Conflict between Religion and Science’ and Andrew Dickinson White’s ‘History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom’. These books presented a triumphalist view of science as symptomatic of the progressive nature of western civilisation and anathema to a biblical understanding of nature. The history of the development of science as narrated by White and Draper, represented a series of triumphs of reason over dogma and superstition. This view has been largely overturned by modern historiography, although it is still alive and well in the public consciousness and has become an ineradicable part of popular mythology.

Modern scholarship now favours the complexity thesis which presents the relationship of religion and science as much more positive than is popularly thought. Studies have shown that Christianity has often nurtured and encouraged scientific endeavour, while at other times the two have co-existed without either tension or attempts at harmonization. Some of the most influential work of recent times has come from Professor Peter Harrison, the Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford, who has published extensively on the philosophical, scientific and religious thought of the early modern period. Central to an understanding of the European intellectual landscape of the 16th and 17th century – the era of the scientific revolution – is the question of why is it in the west we value scientific activity?. This seems an odd question to the modern mind, but it worth recalling that scientific activity does not deliver much practical payoff for the first couple of centuries. As a result the underlying moral and intellectual values that will underpin scientific activities are key in understanding their development.

In ‘The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science’ Peter Harrison has shown that early modern debates about the acquisition of knowledge were dominated by the Augustinian belief that the 'fall' of Adam in the Garden of Eden not only deprived Adam's mind and senses of their original perfection, but also led to the loss of intellectual capacity in all of humanity. The promotion and practice of experimental science, he argues, were meant to counter these epistemological effects of original sin and scientific techniques were developed explicitly with theological doctrines in mind. One finds this most strikingly in many of the prefaces to works of natural philosophy, and in the intellectual discourse of the time. Robert South, the Oxford orator describes the figure of Adam in these terms:

‘He came into the world a philosopher (a scientist), which sufficiently appeared by his writing the nature of things upon their names; he could view essences in themselves, and read forms without the comment of their respective properties; he could see consequents yet dormant in their principles, and effects yet unborn and in the womb of their causes; his understanding could almost pierce into future contingents; his conjectures improving even to prophecy, or the certainties of prediction; till his fall, it was ignorant of nothing but sin, or at least it rested in the notion, without the smart of the experiment....I confess tis difficult for us who date our ignorance from our first birth and are still bred up with the same infirmities about us, with which we are born, to raise our thoughts and imaginations to those intellectual affections that attended our nature in its time of innocence’

Adam here is depicted as the perfect philosopher with a comprehensive knowledge of the natural world and the ability by looking at the present state of affairs to predict the future. Some figures, such as Luther, even maintained that Adam possessed such attributes as telescopic vision. In the early modern period this was contrasted with humanities present state of knowledge which pales in comparison to that enjoyed by Adam in paradise. The perfections of Adam’s knowledge were held up as an aspiration for the present generation, and yet were regarded as impossible to fulfil due to the damage caused by the fall.

In one of the most famous statements of this kind, Francis Bacon states that:

"Man by the Fall, fell at the same time from his state of innocence and from his dominion over creation. Both of these losses can in this life be in some part repaired; the former by religion and faith; the latter by arts and science, for creation was not by the curse made forever a rebel"

Humans, he asserted, could "recover that right over nature which belongs to it by divine bequest," and should endeavour "to establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the [entire] universe."

Bacon argued that not merely are there the barriers to knowledge generated by the fallen nature of the human mind but that the natural world itself was also cursed and resists our investigations. The Royal Society founded itself on Baconian principles and adopted as its motto, 'Nullius in verba (take no-ones words for it)'. This choice of words was significant because it demonstrated the academy fellow’s commitment to find out things for themselves and not simply to accept the view of the received authorities. This was a development which was paralleled in the religious sphere with the Protestant emphasis on what was called “experimental religion” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During this period the term “experimental” occurs as much if not more in a religious context than a scientific one, and by that term was then meant “direct experience”.

The academy’s response to the state of the human condition as a consequence of the fall was to advocate the particular approach of experimental natural philosophy.

Robert Hooke who became the first curator of experiments for the royal society says in his preface to his famous Micrographia in 1665:

‘By the addition of such artificial Instruments and methods, there may be, in some manner, a reparation made for the mischiefs, and imperfection, mankind has drawn upon it self, by negligence, and intemperance, and a wilful and superstitious deserting the Prescripts and Rules of Nature, whereby every man, both from a deriv'd corruption, innate and born with him, and from his breeding and converse with men, Is very subject to slip into all sorts of errors…The only way which now remains for us to recover some degree of those former perfections, seems to be, by rectifying the operations of the Sense, the Memory, and Reason, since upon the evidence, the strength, the integrity, and the right correspondence of all these, all the light, by which our actions are to be guided, is to be renewed, and all our command over things is to be establish’

Such thinking was far from being the preserve of the English. In Catholic France the philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, claimed that while we have aspirations to perfect knowledge we are acutely conscious that we fall well short:

‘The point is that if man had never been corrupted, he would, in his innocence, confidently enjoy both truth and felicity, and, if man had never been anything but corrupt, he would have no idea either of truth or bliss. But unhappy as we are (and we should be less so if there were no element of greatness in our condition) we have an idea of happiness but we cannot attain it. We perceive an image of the truth and possess nothing but falsehood’

In another example, the Cartesian philosopher Nicholas Malebranche titled his book ‘Concerning the Search after Truth - In which is treated the nature of the human mind and the use that must be made of it to avoid error in the sciences’. His emphasis was on the need to identify error, the assumption being that as fallen beings we are naturally prone to it. By understanding the initial conditions of Adam we will be in a position to set up structures to ameliorate the consequences of the fall.

It followed that the experimental method and the more rational approach towards the natural world would provide such a framework. This was an important shift. Aristotelianism was undeniably empirically based, but tended to make generalisations on the basis of our commonsense observations – “heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones”. Nature was read uncritically and taken to be more or less as it presents itself to us. This is in stark contrast to seventeenth century English “experimental philosophy”, which interrogates nature and examines it time and time again under what are essentially “unnatural” or artificial conditions.

What provoked all this discussion centred around the fall of Adam?. The first factor was the renewed interest in biblical narratives understood in their literal sense. In the Middle Ages, Adam’s mastery over nature was conceived as the struggle to establish reason over the more bestial passions. With the arrival of the Reformation, biblical narratives became conceived in a literal sense and In the writings of Bacon and his contemporaries the philosophical life became not just about reordering the mental dominion, but now projecting this order out onto the material world.

The second factor was the revival of ancient skepticism which chimed extremely well with the fall narrative and the idea we consequently cannot really know anything. The early modern period saw what can only be called a skeptical crisis, partly caused by the revival of ancient philosophy, but also importantly, a revival of Augustinian thought. This became a powerful strain in the thought of both Protestants and Catholics and put the question about original sin and its consequences to the forefront. Competing views about the nature of original sin had enormous impact on natural philosophy and informed differing epistemological programs. Those who took a negative view of the damage caused by the fall were more likely to favour experimental natural philosophy. Those who took an optimistic approach were more likely to be rationalists. The intellectual fervour created by the Reformation thus swept over into the natural sciences and helped provide the conceptual framework for modern science.

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Comte de Buffon and the Sorbonne

Throughout the whole of the eighteenth century one man was at work on natural history who might have contributed much toward an answer to this question: this man was Buffon. He had caught the idea of an evolution in Nature by the variation of species, and was likely to make a great advance with it; but he, too, was made to feel the power of theology.

As long as he gave pleasing descriptions of animals the Church petted him, but when he began to deduce truths of philosophical import the batteries of the Sorbonne were opened upon him. For his simple statement of truths in natural science which are to-day truisms, he was, as we have seen, dragged forth by the theological faculty, forced to recant publicly, and to print his recantation.

Andrew Dickinson White

In the eighteenth century Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon published the first volumes of his ‘Histoire Naturelle’, a work which anticipated some of the ideas of Charles Darwin. Buffon was an eccentric, especially when he was at his most creative. In order to begin writing he had to dress up in his finest regalia, from braided wig to silk waistcoat, to a lacy high-collard shirt. He was also fond of saying that there were only five truly great men: Newton, Bacon, Leibniz, Montesquieu..and himself. The ‘Histoire’, which would eventually reach 36 volumes,was a work of stunning ambition, which aimed to include everything known about the natural world up until that date. In it Buffon considered the similarities between humans and apes, and the possibility of a common ancestry.

Upon publication of ‘Histoire Naturelle’ in 1750, which was paid for by the King of France, the work became an astonishing success, the first printing selling out in around six weeks to be followed speedily by German, Dutch and English editions. Eventually ‘Histoire Naturelle’ was to become the most widespread work of the eighteenth century, outselling even the Philosophes ‘Encylopedie’ and the works of Voltaire and Rousseau. This inspired jealousy amongst some in the salons of Paris, including the Abbe Raynal who remarked that the work ‘did not succeed particularly well with educated people’ but that ‘women, to the contrary, attach importance to it’. Amongst Buffon’s greatest admirers were the Jesuits, who dedicated four articles (a total of 100 pages) in their journal ‘Journal de Savants’ to praising him. During October 1749 the Journal published a glowing analysis of the first volume of ‘Histoire Naturelle’, but then fell silent as a controversy erupted. Buffon had caught the attention of the Jansenists.

French intellectual opinion of the time was bitterly divided. The outlawed Jansenists were in great favour with the general public because they were seen as defying royal authority and hostile to absolutism. They fought bitterly with the Jesuits who were more liberal and open to new ideas. These two religious groups were too often at each others throats to pay much attention to the Philosophes. Jesuits tended to admire and prefer the writings of Locke and Bacon to those of Descartes; yet because they asserted papal authority they were unpopular. In the Jansenists eyes, the Jesuits were responsible for the decline of religion in France because of the indulgence they showed to dangerous works. In turn the Jesuits tended to regard the Jansenists as reactionary.

The Jesuit endorsement of Buffon was enough for them to resolve to condemn him. The official journal of the Jansenists was the ‘Nouvelles Eccclesiastiques’, which was officially banned by the French government but regularly published and distributed. In February 1750, in response to the Jesuit's review, the Jansenists published a scathing attack on the ‘Histoire Naturelle’, criticising it for its overt scepticism, its contradiction of Genesis and its implicit insult towards both God and the king. ‘Should such a pernicious book go unstigmatised’, claimed the Jansenists who went on to denounce the entire Academy of Sciences, the Jesuit’s Journal des Savants and the Academy of Inscriptions, which had published works by Alexander Pope; and the Academie Francaise, which had just elected Voltaire. This condemnation immensely irritated Buffon who wrote:

‘I hope it is out of the question to blacklist it...and in truth I have done everything not to deserve it and to avoid theological harassment, which I fear much more than the criticism of natural philosophers of geometers’

The Jansenists had stirred up a row amongst the populace and this forced the Sorbonne (the faculty of theology in Paris) to react. The Jansenists were demanding some kind of censorship, but this put the Sorbonne in a very difficult position. The power to censor depended on the royal administration, but the theologians did have the power to make representations to the king if the situation demanded it. In this case the book had been published by the royal press and was the work of a very high ranking civil servant; to make matters worse it was now an outstanding commercial success. Yet not to act would be to hand a victory to the Jansenists and expose the Sorbonne to rebuke. D’Argenson was exaggerating but captured something of the public’s mood when he wrote:

‘The Seigneur de Buffon...has been greatly affected by the grief that his book’s success gives him. The devout are furious and want to have it burned by the executioner. Truly he contradicts Genesis in every way.’ (this may be the source of the for the idea Buffon's books were burned which I can't find reference to elsewhere)

The Sorbonne made the decision to come to a secret agreement. In ‘Buffon – A life in natural history’ Jacques Roger notes that:

We do not know the details of the secret dealings which permitted Buffon and the Faculty to find an honourable solution for both parties. We know only that these dealings took place, certainly with Riballlier, the Faculty’s syndic, probably during the fall of 1750.

On January 15 1751 Buffon recieved the following corteous letter from the Sorbonne:

‘Sir

We have been informed, by someone amongst us on your behalf, that when you learned that the Natural History, of which you are the author was one of the works chosen by order of the faculty of Theology to be examined and censured because it contained principles and maxims that are not in accordance with those of religion, you declared to him that you did not have the intention of dissociating yourself from it and that you were prepared to satisfy the faculty in regard to each of the articles it found reprehensible in your work; we cannot, Sir, praise you enough for such a Christian resolution, and in order to put you in a position to carry it out, we are sending you the statements taken from you book that seemed to us to be contrary to the beliefs of the Church. We have the honour of being respectfully, Sir, Your very humble and obedient servants'

Attached to the letter were the 14 ‘reprehensible statements’ including the idea the earth was eternal, Buffon’s theory of planets formation and the discussion of truth and immaterialism. In reply Buffon made the necessary concessions and stated in a letter that he believed ‘very firmly in all that is told in the scriptures about creation, both as to the order of time and the circumstances of the facts’.

According to Roger

‘The proposal was clever...for we have every reason to believe that Buffon’s answer had been composed by the theologians themselves and Buffon had only to sign it. He should therefore have been sure of the success of his approach’.

Regarding the Sorbonne, Buffon was to note:

‘Of the one hundred twenty doctors assembled, I had on hundred fifteen on my side, and their decision even contained praise which I was not expecting’

Honour had been saved and the Sorbonne must have been relieved at the outcome. The Jesuits praised the retraction while the Jansenists cried foul:

‘What shame for the Faculty..to applaud such a deceleration..it amounts to hoping everyone will be taken in as the Sorbonne carcass has been..this academician has made fun of them and they deserve it’.

Buffon’s dealings with the Sorbonne were to protect him against all official accusations of irreligion for the next 30 years without him having to change a single word. With the publication of ‘Les époques de la nature’ in 1778 he further developed his ideas, discussing the origins of the solar system and speculating that the planets had been created by comets colliding with the sun (this idea was described by Voltaire as ridiculous, reminding him of an old fable in which Minerva had emerged from the brain of Jupiter). He also suggested that the age of the earth was 75,000 years, denied that Noah's flood ever occurred and observed that some animals retain parts that are vestigial and no longer useful, suggesting that they have evolved rather than having been spontaneously generated.

Buffon’s work was again attacked, both on scientific and religious grounds by figures such as the Abbe Royau and the Abbe Grosier. The Sorbonne became involved in 1779 to issue a criticism of Buffon's ‘general principles of the manner of understanding scripture’. Buffon contacted the Sorbonne directly and engineered a new retraction, very similar to the one he had signed in 1750. He promised to print this in the next edition, but in the event, refused to do so. In retaliation, and without bothering to issue any formal censure, the Sorbonne printed the correspondence in a Latin brochure in order to embarrass Buffon. Unfortunately for the faculty, no-one paid any attention to it. Theological debates has ceased to interest anyone in the 1780s; a fact acknowledged by Buffon’s religious critics who chose to attack him on purely scientific grounds in the hope people would listen. Abbe Royau in particular castigated Buffon for his hypothetical writings, remarking that 'at first leave is asked for a hypothesis, and once granted it becomes transformed into a demonstrated truth'.

As for Buffon, in 1785 he said to Herault de Sechelles:

‘The people need a religion....When the Sorbonne picked petty quarrels with me, I had no difficulty giving it all the satisfaction that it could desire: it was only a mockery, but men were foolish enough to be contented with it.’

Later on, in the late 19th century, the story of Buffon and the Sorbonne was used by Dickinson White in his ‘History of the Conflict between Religion and Science’ ( and as a favourite anecdote in the introductions of biology textbooks) ; although as we have seen, the Buffon retraction of 1751 was prompted by the rabble rousing Jansensists. The Sorbonne was far from hostile and actually worked to protect Buffon from criticism. Eventually in 1779 the Sorbonne and Buffon became involved in a petty squabble but there was no formal condemnation and the faculty's low-key protest fell on deaf ears. Rather than some sinister suppression of science by religion, the activities of Buffon and the religious groups in 18th century France merely displayed the factionalism, squabbling and double dealing we are all familiar with. When history is co-opted for other agendas, these subtleties tend to be lost.

Further Reading : Buffon : A Life in Natural History - Jacques Roger


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