ABSTRACT
Recovering the lost Eden became Western culture’s major project during the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. Reason and experiment were the keys to reinventing Eden on earth. During this century-long transformation, the Fall and Salvation narrative of the Middle Ages was secularized. Rather than an escape from the earth to a heavenly Eden, the new narrative remade the planet in the image of the lost Eden. Explorations of the New World, expanding capitalism, and the rise of science and technology stimulated new visions for the mind and new possibilities for the land. In this chapter I argue that a secular Recovery Narrative took shape that offered a new story within which members of a rising middle-class could live their lives. Upward mobility, provided by expanding industries in Europe and property ownership in New World colonies, sparked the hopes of many for a better worldly life. In the Protestant countries of northern Europe, human labor was glorified as the means of improving nature. Nature could be reshaped to reclaim the lost Eden, while New World Edens could be settled and improved. A new scientific understanding of God
as the laws of a rationally apprehended universe paved the way to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. God’s glory in the world was celebrated through nature and nature’s laws.
