ABSTRACT
In the late Renaissance, attempts were made to create a 'Mosaic', 'sacred', or 'Christian' physics by grounding natural philosophy in a literal reading of the Bible, especially of Genesis. The status of cosmic and human phenomena as images of God meant that they could play a crucial role in natural theology, that is, in the rational knowledge of God using arguments from nature without the need for faith or Scripture. Huguenot Du Bartas expresses confidence in man's ability to perceive the cosmos as image of the divine, but not in the powers of human reason to derive from the images answers to tricky questions concerning the nature of the divine. The concern about distinguishing between the divine and the non-divine had implications for linguistic images and visual ones. Du Bartas's images for the divine seem, to varying degrees, to be tentative, so that the similarities which they imply between the human and the divine are likewise speculative and provisional.
