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as his memory and body failed him, so that he was
“almost continually afflicted with pain,” he urged
his friend James Petiver to continue the task of
“carrying and promoting natural history and the
knowledge of the works of God.”
Upon first reading, submission and obedience to
one’s God-given lot in life seems the main message
of natural theology classics such as The Wisdom of
God. After all, some people, such as St. Bernard,
the medieval French abbot of Clairvaux, argued
that “to consult physicians and take medicines
befits not religion.” Yet we know from Ray’s
letters that he was anything but submissive in
the face of bodily pain. His letters are full of
new prescriptions tried and disappointment on
the heels of great hope of relief. And remember
he blamed himself, not God, for his daughter’s
death, on the grounds that he had not given her
the correct medicine. But how was the anxious
search for a medicine to heal his terrible sores
to be reconciled with devout belief in a wise,
all-powerful, benevolent God?
The answer to this question—and the
explanation of Ray’s stance at the bedside of
his dead child—lies in the fact that Ray viewed
medicines as God’s gifts, albeit gifts that would
be revealed only through human effort. He
envisioned mankind taking up the tools provided
by a wise and good God to improve the human
condition. Ray spoke of the human hand, for
example, as “wonderfully adapted” for all the
uses that made man an agent of civilization and
improvement. He believed that God had placed
man “in a spacious and well-furnished world,”
full of beauty and proportion, with materials to
be molded and land capable of improvement by
industry. God’s provision included seeds and fruit
capable “of being meliorated and improved” by
human art, and useful for food and medicine.
Ray described plants such as the Jesuit’s bark tree
(quinine) and the poppy (opium) as clear evidence
of “the illustrious Bounty and Providence of the
Almighty and Omniscient Creator, towards his
undeserving Creatures.” And—this is key—Ray
was sure “there may be as many more as yet
discovr’d, and which may be reserv’d on purpose
to exercise the Faculties bestow’d on Man, to find
out what is necessary, convenient, pleasant or
profitable to him.”Ray worshipped a God, then, who had
organized the world and the mind of man so
that men could improve upon their surroundings
through studying natural philosophy and natural
history. God had even made man a social creature,
so that he could improve his understanding “by
Conference, and Communication of Observations
and Experiments.” (What a perfect justification for
attending a Royal Society meeting!) Ray’s attitude
was an early example of the belief that one could
and should improve life in the here and now,
even amid deep faith in the hereafter. Critically,
that stance shifted the blame for earthly evil and
suffering to man’s ignorance. Faced with the death
of a beloved, as hard as it was to blame oneself, at
least one need not blame one’s God.
The trajectory of this bargain—and it was a
bargain, with important costs and benefits—is
fascinating. The historian John Hedley Brooke
has described how despite seventeenth-century
natural philosophers’ insistence that natural laws
were not binding on God, the pressure to make
them so arose directly from the wish to address
the existence of suffering. Even Robert Boyle, a
founder of the Royal Society, who was said never
to have mentioned the name of God “without
a pause,” thought it “perhaps unreasonable” to
expect God to intervene in natural law to save an
individual (to suspend, for example, the law of
gravity when someone fell over a cliff ). At the
time, that temptation to transfer agency (and thus
fault) to Man rather than God often removed God
to some distance. Take Erasmus Darwin’s epic
evolutionary poem, The Temple of Nature. At one
point Erasmus describes the slaughterhouse of the
warring world—predation, pestilence, famine,
earthquakes, flood—and wonders:Ah where can Sympathy reflecting find
One bright idea to console the mind?
One ray of light in this terrene abode
To prove to Man the Goodness of his GOD?Erasmus’s reply was that so long as one placed all the
good and all the evil on the scale, “where the Good
abides, / Quick nods the beam, the ponderous
gold subsides.” Lest a reader miss the point behind
Erasmus’s elaborate lines about Nymphs and Muses,
he circled back to it in a footnote later in the poem:THE BEST PANACEAS FOR HEARTACHES | KRISTIN JOHNSON