Katherine Calloway. Literature and Natural Theology in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. 249 pp. ISBN 9781009415262. $110 hardback.

When contemporary ecocritics reach for metaphors to describe nature as a connected whole, they tend to lift them from either the realm of textiles—like mesh or weave—or technology—such as system or network. Katherine Calloway’s fine new monograph examines a branch of early modern culture, natural theology, that was interested in a quite different metaphor—nature as book­. While a book, as much as its modern counterparts, reflects a sense of connection between its parts, the early modern metaphor placed even more emphasis on the existence of an author and a purpose shaping those connections. For most academics, the idea of design in nature is now all but guaranteed to arouse a sense of suspicion; teleology is one of the most routine of ideological ruses to unmask. The unique insight of Calloway’s book comes from resisting this impulse: while early modern natural theology was teleological, it did not necessarily make nature into an object meant for humans to study or an instrument serving our needs. For many of the authors the book studies, only the rudiments of the design could be grasped and its ultimate purpose lay outside humanity altogether.

Calloway’s book makes four overall claims that advance our understanding of natural theology and the surrounding literature, philosophy, and science of the seventeenth century. First, that a crucial transformation takes place in natural theology over the course of the period, culminating in the birth of its modern form. Second, that seventeenth-century literary authors including John Donne, Henry Vaughan, John Milton, and John Bunyan play a role in this transformation, and in doing so, articulated alternative versions that ran counter to the mainstream of its development. Third, that some of these versions were not anthropocentric—that is, they did not presume that the end of nature was to serve men—and finally, that some of these versions were also not rationalistic, whereby certain writers can be seen to hold deep reservations about nature understood as a set of laws or mechanical principles comprehensible by human minds. These insights, along with a rich archive, will make the book valuable to scholars working in early modern ecocriticism as well as the intersections of literature and science. The book should also be of broader interest to early modern scholars interested in how historical literature can address issues of ongoing and present importance, since the questions these authors ask—about how to find a value in nature outside instrumental use, and about how to treat science with both wonder and a critical eye—are still quite alive today.

While natural theology is an ancient pursuit, going back to such sources as Plato, St. Paul, and the Psalms, Calloway focuses on a critical moment in its history, when the birth of modern science in the seventeenth century challenged its traditional assumptions, and in turn, natural theology re-invented itself by questioning, critiquing, and ultimately adopting much of the new scientific paradigm. This shift might be thought of as a transformation in the genre of the book of nature, as Calloway’s opening pages suggest. When Donne describes “a figurative, a metaphorical God,” he imagines nature as a book of poetry not unlike his own, full of surprise, uncertainty, and double meaning. Donne represents for Calloway the fluid, transitional nature of earlier seventeenth-century natural theology, when Francis Bacon’s skepticism of final ends in nature and John Calvin’s diminished view of human reason had begun a great “unsettling of nature’s text” away from the medieval doctrine of correspondence and analogy (217). By the end of the century, Calloway explains, a new genre of physico-theology had emerged in the works of Richard Bentley and others where the book of nature is imagined more like a scientific treatise. These works draw on scientific discoveries and methodologies supposedly to offer proof of God’s providence; essentially, they are the Restoration forerunners of modern arguments for intelligent design. Bringing out the role of literature in this historical development, Calloway shows just how closely seventeenth-century writers are in dialogue with these changing ideas of natural theology: they draw on religious and scientific treatises, propose their own versions in their non-fictional works, and incorporate such arguments into their poetry and fiction. Some of these literary authors, Calloway argues, advertently or inadvertently contribute to the development of physico-theology, and these are some of the most delightful and specific historical contributions the book makes: tracing, for example, how Herbert’s fascination with the providential design of the coconut was taken up by later treatises, or how Bentley himself, the infamously conservative editor of Paradise Lost, also gave the inaugural Boyle lectures that crystallized the modern version of natural theology. Yet the book’s heart lies with authors like Vaughan, Milton, Lucy Hutchinson, and Bunyan, who resisted the historical tide and imagined more capacious, less anthropocentric or rationalistic versions of natural theology.

The book is organized in two halves. The first three chapters take up the metaphysical poets Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan, showing how their poetry responds to challenges to traditional notions of nature’s book. Calloway presents Donne in the first chapter as a poet and divine who develops an idiosyncratic version of natural theology, that is initially present in his early erotic lyric and grows more prominent in his Essayes in Divinity, Anniversaries, and other religious works. Setting a pattern for subsequent chapters, she gives a detailed contextualization through his engagement with other works of natural theology, showing how he draws on the heretically strong affirmation of God’s presence in nature by Raymond Sebond, as well as the skepticism toward natural theology voiced by Calvin and Bacon. Calloway is at her best here and throughout the book when her literary authors imaginatively yet directly engage the tenets of natural theology, as Donne does in his religious poetry and prose. She persuasively locates in the Essayes and Anniversaries a middle path between Calvin and Bacon, where nature “becomes something more than a deterministic law and less than a series of inscrutable miracles” (51). Donne’s writing is thus the book’s first example of a natural theology that questions the powers of human reason, not making claims of absolute proof or objective knowledge, but instead grasping God’s presence in nature poetically through the experience of wonder. Calloway can be less successful at moments where Donne or other poets make a connection to natural theology primarily through metaphor or imagery, tending to flatten literary language into doctrinal position. When the speaker claims in Elegy 19, for example, that women’s naked bodies are “mystic books” that only those who receive their grace will “see revealed,” (41) it does not seem fair to scrutinize this moment as if it were a serious statement about whether election is required to grasp divine presence, rather than a rhetorically dazzling attempt to get a lover undressed. While this approach detracts from the account of Donne’s erotic poetry, the chapter otherwise convincingly presents this canonical poet’s attempt to reconcile science and religion in a new light.

The next two chapters compare Herbert and Vaughan, the earlier chapter generally in terms of their views on science and nature, and its sequel specifically in terms of their natural theology. Both authors are found to “practice natural theology in their devotional poetry,” and both share some important reservations about Baconian scientific endeavor (85). But for the most part they are contrasted. Calloway’s Herbert is Baconian in his skepticism of the intelligibility of God in the natural world, and Calvinist in his insistence on faith as the primary means of understanding God. She insightfully shows how Herbert replaces the traditional trope of nature as a book with that of a household of useful things, creating a more anthropocentric sense of nature’s value. Yet, overall, the treatment of Herbert seems more forced than other poets, perhaps because of the argumentative need to oppose him to Vaughan. Calloway discusses several moments where Herbert seems plainly to affirm natural theology, but she interprets these in salvific terms that diminish the importance of nature. When the speaker in “Mattens,” praying to God at dawn, says “by a sunne-beam I will climbe to thee,” he is held to mean not the ordinary light of the sun but the special revelation of the Son and thus, strangely, to be discounting the religious value of nature (110). The account of Vaughan, in contrast, is insightful and persuasive. Examining Vaughan’s poetic descriptions of God’s presence in nature and especially moments that allude to and revise Herbert’s writings, Callsoway brings out a theologically heterodox Vaughan in three regards: he holds that the natural world is the equal of Scripture as a source of divine revelation, that the regeneration of the world at the end of time will include non-human creatures, and most incredibly, that non-human creatures actively participate in the worship of God usually reserved for humans and angels. Calloway demonstrates through Vaughan’s meditations just how far the period could take a non-anthropocentric natural theology.

The second half of the book, “Imagined Worlds,” shifts chronologically to the later part of the seventeenth century and generically to world-making texts, whether creation epics like Paradise Lost or fictional acts of creation like Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World. The fourth chapter expands the scope of the book in two important ways. In terms of literary history, it brings in a wider range of authors, including women and less-canonized figures, and of genres, like the landscape poem and outer-space voyage. Thematically, it takes up a question essential to Renaissance poetics: to what degree can fictional authorship be compared with divine creation? Calloway wisely uses the array of authors treated to map out different solutions to this poetic problem. Some authors are classified as equivocal, like Cavendish in her Blazing World and Andrew Marvell in “Upon Appleton House,” asserting that there is no resemblance between human and divine making, since God’s acts are inscrutable and knowable only through faith. Calloway wryly points out how close this solution comes to atheism, as these two proponents leave God out of the text altogether. Univocal answers are found in Guillaume de Saluste du Bartas’s Divine Weekes and Workes (trans. Josuah Sylvester 1605) and John Denham’s “Coopers Hill,” which suggest practically no difference between mortal and immortal making, and so diminish the divinity into little more than a human artisan. Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder offers a more complex analogical view, where God exceeds human making and human knowledge, but not without any resemblance between the two. The chapter’s juxtapositions deepen and complicate our understanding of the Renaissance commonplace of author as miniature god, and in particular show how singular and complex Hutchinson’s sense of this comparison was from her peers.

The next chapter, on Milton’s Paradise Lost, is both the book’s best and its most representative. It not only provides a thorough and compelling reading of the epic, but it is also where Calloway’s central arguments about the relationship between natural theology, scientific reason, and ecology are most clearly evidenced. Calloway nuances scholarly understanding of Milton’s relation to contemporary science: while agreeing with John Gillies, Karen Edwards, and other recent critics who have shown how Milton was influenced by the new science, she shows how he was also skeptical of the anthropocentrism and rationalism sometimes used to justify it. Milton’s theology, as set forth in Christian Doctrine as well as Paradise Lost, is contrasted with the emerging genre of physico-theology in works by Henry More and Bentley. While these authors drew on scientific advancements in an attempt to prove that the universe had been designed for the sake of human well-being, Milton and theologians like Richard Baxter argued that nature was ultimately meant to lead toward the wonder and worship of God; it was “theocentric rather than anthropocentric” (162). As Calloway points out, this theocentrism occupies a middle ground between the “violent instrumentalizing of nature characteristic of some scientific practitioners and the thoroughgoing egalitarianism of many contemporary ecocritics”; while humans are placed above the rest of the created world, they are also part of a design whose ultimate purpose is much larger than them (154). Her approach makes sense of the angel Raphael’s oft-debated account of heliocentrism and geocentrism in book eight of Paradise Lost: Milton does not reject Galilean astronomy, but whatever cosmic model turns out to be true, the real point is that Adam must learn to recognize providence and “figuratively, that the universe does not revolve around him” (163). Calloway tackles other important interpretative cruxes as well, compellingly arguing that fallenness is shown by moments where characters assume an anthropocentric teleology, such as when Satan admires Earth as a new-and-improved heaven and Eve as a “goddess humane” (see 168). The chapter reveals a Milton who is not opposed to science but who is concerned with how that pursuit might lead to humanity setting itself up as the measure of all things.

Besides a short epilogue on the Boyle lectures, the book concludes with a chapter on Bunyan. The chapter departs from the accepted portrait of Bunyan as strictly a moral allegorist, showing how his strong otherworldly sensibility became tempered over the course of his career by a sympathetic appreciation of nature. The chapter has a rich range, moving beyond Bunyan’s familiar Pilgrim’s Progress to examine its sequel, Part II, and his Book for Boys and Girls; these are contextualized alongside works of reformed theology and occasional meditation. The latter genre, as practiced by Robert Boyle and other seventeenth-century scientific supporters, developed religious and moral reflections from the direct observation of minor, everyday objects and scenes. Bunyan was not only an enthusiast of occasional meditation, as shown in several scenes of Part II and throughout the Book, his version also had an egalitarian bent. To a stronger degree than other authors, he held that direct reflections on the observable world were especially useful for those left out of other forms of learning, including women and children. Calloway suggestively connects Bunyan’s attention to the neglected parts of the social world to his fondness for the miniscule and despised members of the natural world. These include the spider, who reappears across Bunyan’s works as an example of how even the tiniest parts of God’s creation have their purpose. In the book’s culminating close reading, Calloway discusses a spider in the Book who complains how “we poor Sensitives do feel and see” how human sin has “brought to Bondage every thing / Created, from the Spider to the King” (213). This is a moment where, as Calloway suggests, natural theology pictures “what nonhuman creatures might be trying to communicate about themselves,” where the resources of literature are used to imagine what the Christian cosmic drama might look like from the perspective of its non-human members (217). It is a fitting example of the book’s project as a whole, which asks us to rethink how a genre committed to design in nature, rather than being solely a vehicle to glorify man or even God, might have been a conduit through which early modern literature imagined its sympathy with the natural world.

Brent Dawson

University of Oregon