Robert Boyle (1627–1691), the fourteenth child of the Earl of Cork, founding fellow of the Royal Society and the man who made chemistry a science. He never married, never took a degree, worked at Oxford and then in Pall Mall, paid for translations of the Bible into Irish, Welsh, Malay and Algonquian, and left money in his will for an annual lecture in defence of Christianity against unbelievers. More than a quarter of what he published was theology, and his argument throughout is the one the Christian Virtuoso is named for: that the experimental philosopher is better placed than anyone to see what the world is evidence of.
Works (11)
- A Discourse of Things Above Reason — A dialogue between four speakers on whether a philosopher may admit that some things are above reason, and on the difference between a doctrine reason cannot reach and one it can refute. The distinction is Boyle’s standing answer to both the sceptics and the dogmatists, and the Advices printed with it are six rules for keeping it. (9 notes)
- A Disquisition About the Final Causes of Natural Things — Whether, and with what caution, a naturalist may argue from the use of a thing to the end it was made for. Boyle is answering Descartes, who had ruled final causes out of physics as presumption about the mind of God, and the Epicureans, who ruled them out altogether; his own position is that the eye is for seeing, that this is a discovery and not a piety, and that it is the naturalist rather than anyone else who is in a position to say so. (12 notes)
- A Free Discourse Against Customary Swearing — Written in Boyle’s twenties and published in the year of his death by John Williams. It answers, one at a time, the thirteen things men say in excuse of the oaths they swear without meaning them, and ends in six directions for breaking the habit. A Dissuasive from Cursing is printed with it. (26 notes)
- A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature — Boyle’s attack on the word Nature itself, as it was used by the Aristotelians: a wise and provident being standing between God and the world, which abhors a vacuum and does nothing in vain. He argues that there is no such being, that the notion is a hindrance to physics and an injury to religion at once, and that what is meant should be said plainly — the settled course God gave matter and motion at the creation, and upholds. It is the clearest statement of what the mechanical philosophy was for. (10 notes)
- Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects — Meditations made out of whatever happened to be in front of him, with the discourse defending the practice printed before them. The six sections are of different kinds: the second is written to his sister during a fit of the ague, and the fourth is a day’s fishing with Eusebius and Lindamor, in which every accident of the river is turned to account. Swift parodied the whole in A Meditation upon a Broomstick, which has kept the book better known by its mockery than by itself. (96 notes)
- Of the High Veneration Man’s Intellect Owes to God — On the distance between what God is and what a mind can hold of him, argued from the two attributes a natural philosopher meets first: his wisdom and his power. Boyle’s case is that the more exactly the works are understood the further off the workman is seen to be, so that knowledge of nature ends in awe rather than in familiarity. (2 notes)
- Seraphic Love — Boyle’s first published book, written at twenty-one as a letter to a friend disappointed in love, and the work he was best known for in his own lifetime — it went through six editions. Its argument is that the love of God answers everything the love of a creature promises and fails to give, and it is written throughout in the heightened style Boyle afterwards gave up. (2 notes)
- The Christian Virtuoso — Boyle’s answer to the charge that experimental philosophy makes men irreligious: that it does the opposite, since the man who has looked hardest at the contrivance of things is the last to think them accidental. Printed in 1690 with two pieces subjoined — a discourse on the distinction between what is above reason and what is against it, and Greatness of Mind Promoted by Christianity. (11 notes)
- The Excellency of Theology — Written in 1665 during the plague and printed nine years later. Boyle, at the height of his reputation as a natural philosopher, argues that theology is the nobler study of the two — nobler in its object, its certainty and its use — and that this is said not against natural philosophy but by one who has spent his life in it. The volume closes with his essay on the grounds of the corpuscular philosophy. (13 notes)
- The Martyrdom of Theodora and of Didymus — Written in Boyle’s early twenties and published forty years later at the urging of friends: the martyrdom under Diocletian of Theodora of Antioch, sentenced to a brothel for refusing to sacrifice, and of the Christian soldier Didymus who changed clothes with her to get her out and died in her place. Boyle tells it as a romance rather than a chronicle, and it is the only thing of the kind he wrote. Handel set Thomas Morell’s libretto from it as Theodora in 1750. (13 notes)
- The Reconcileableness of Reason and Religion — Published under the initials T.E., a lay-man. Boyle takes the objection that the articles of faith affront reason and separates it into parts: what reason is, what it can settle, where its own principles run out, and what follows for a revealed doctrine that lies past the end of them. Some Physico-Theological Considerations about the Possibility of the Resurrection is annexed. (12 notes)