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Baconian Apologetics: Knowledge and Charity in The Advancement of Learning

essay examines the ways in which Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning reflects arguments founded on Pauline notions of charity in the anti-Scholastic polemics of Christian humanists Thomas More and Juan Luis Vives, arguments rooted in the distinctions between true and false, charitable and vain kinds of knowledge drawn by Paul and later commentators such as Irenaeus and Augustine. The Advancement uses this tradition of commentary on i Corinthians 8:1 and other Pauline epistles to pit the charitable work of true knowledge and faith against the prideful work of false knowledge and heresy. Bacon incorporates the tropes of this discourse in his advocacy of a newly revised natural philosophy in order to validate the pursuit of knowledge as a charitable, and hence profoundly Christian, endeavor.1 Like many humanists before him, Bacon argues to displace Scholasticism as the doctrinally correct form of learning, and although Bacon criticizes the humanist love of rhetorical ornamentation,2 he mirrors closely the insistence of humanist figures such as Vives and More on a model of knowledge based on collectively verifiable evidence that can be decisively