ABSTRACT
From the day of the Genesis fall to the dawning of the seventeenth century, Bacon presented the tale of human history as the twofold recovery of what was lost in the fall. The narrative of sacred history leading up to the Instauration, as Bacon told it, included an explanation of why the Instauration had not occurred before his own age, and why the conditions were right for it to occur now. The Renaissance recovery of the Greek Fathers meant a sudden infusion of a very non-Augustinian concept of sin, which influenced both Lancelot Andrewes and Francis Bacon. The interpretation of sin as the action of the individual, and not the quality of the human race, is precisely the position espoused by Lancelot Andrewes throughout his sermons. Andrewes' theology allows the possibility of a certain amount of recovery of edenic knowledge through method and art.
