The Rosicrucian Enlightenment

"It always interests and slightly amuses me what Rosicrucianism is today. It’s sort of like the Rotary Club. Whereas in the early 17th century it was an invented cult. Someone published pamphlets anonymously, saying that there was a secret brotherhood – the order of the rosy cross – that existed throughout Europe. Those who are in it know who they are, it said, and it’s time for them to get together and bring about a new order. This was connected to the religious currents of the time and was basically a Protestant idea, seen as an element of the Protestant struggle against Catholic oppression. So that is where Rosicrucianism came from, and in this book Francis Yates argues that the early enlightenment – the emergence of science in the 16th century – drew on part of that tradition. It’s widely agreed that Francis Yates pushed this idea too far, into realms that can no longer be upheld. Nevertheless, the idea that there was some kind of link between the development of science and the emergence of secret brotherhoods in the early 17th century has to be taken seriously. You see this motif of secret brotherhoods appear again and again among the writers of that time who then went on to be influential in the history of science, particularly Francis Bacon. It’s certainly very much talked about. We increasingly talk about curiosity-driven science, which generally means science that doesn’t have to justify itself with an economic bottom line. It’s science that simply looks at a question because it wants to know the answer to it. I suggest in my book that when we look at the history of curiosity, it’s more complex than that. In particular, curiosity has always had an agenda to it. For Francis Bacon, it was an agenda of furthering state power by creating a useful technology. For scientists like Robert Boyle, it was a religious duty of trying to find out as much about what God had created as we could. So it’s worth stepping back and asking what the agendas of curiosity are today. Space science, for example, is often sold on the basis that it’s curiosity driven – that we just want to explore our cosmos – whereas everyone acknowledges that in the beginning it was driven by the Cold War, and now increasingly by commercial objectives. That may or may not be a bad thing, but we need to acknowledge it. Think about when Robert Hooke looked through his microscope in the 17th century , including at insects. He looked at a fly’s head, and saw these multi-faceted eyes. On the one hand, that told him something new about what flies looked like close up. But it also revealed to him the intricacy of the world at scales that we cannot see, and it suggested to him that if it’s that intricate down there, why should we imagine that it ever stops? This opened up to him the vision of an infinitely capable God who could make things on scales way beyond human capability. His discovery, with the microscope, suggested to him a completely new view of our position of the world. That, I believe, is why we should be doing stuff like we are at the Large Hadron Collider. There are worlds within worlds within worlds. The closer you look, the more you see. Asking what may seem to be very recondite, obscure questions have the potential to reorder our conception of the world and our position within it. I think that ought to be motive enough to follow that kind of curiosity, instead of appealing to the notion that we will get practical spin-offs from it. You may do, but I don’t think that you will get any that will repay the original investment, and I don’t think that’s the reason for doing it."