Perhaps the most important and influential work of natural history—for almost a hundred years before Darwin’s Origin—was the Systema Naturae, authored by the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. The hugely popular and best selling book was essentially a book of nomenclature and taxonomy, with the former being as important, if not more so, than the latter. The modern convention of binomial nomenclature–genus and species—for naming all living things, was formally systematized by Linnaeus, and remains unchanged to this day.
Linnaeus himself was greatly influenced by his predecessor, the parson-naturalist John Ray (“The first step of science is to know one thing from another”). It is difficult to over-estimate the importance of this work. The Systema strove to lay out God’s creation in a rational and orderly way, and in this, to the extent that species were known (and there would be several updates), he succeeded. To be sure, his taxonomy only superficially described relationships (amongst members of a genus, like Canus, for example), but these relationships were non-derivative of ancestral forms; they were fixed and eternal. The famous phrase Deus creavit, Linnaeus disposuit, or, “God created, Linnaeus organized”, is attributed to Linnaeus himself (who saw himself as a second Adam), and was his capitulation to the over-riding belief in the fixity of animal and plant forms–that God’s creation was discreet (non-continuous in Nature) and absolute, needing only a bit of organizational “tidying up”. The book was viewed as a nearly perfect reflection of The Great Chain of Being. To challenge it was to challenge God’s creation, so much were the two viewed as inseparable and indistinguishable.
And so it was that this conceptualization–the Scala Naturae–coupled with the authoritative Systema Naturae–that supported perhaps the greatest intellectual edifice yet devised by man. Only Newton’s Principia Mathematica could be held up as an equal intellectual achievement.
The modern theological notion of Intelligent Design also can be traced to this seminal conceptualization of Nature. Those who beheld Linnaeus’ elegant tome could hardly escape the conclusion that such an orderly advancement and collection of marvelous and diverse forms could only be the result of Design (perhaps a latter day, unknowing inversion of the alchemical maxim ‘As above, so below’). Again, I must note its explicit and implicit meaning: that God’s creation is complete—a “once and future” Nature—and that was that. The role of science in this grand scheme (epitomized in the achievements of Linnaeus) was but to name and praise God’s creation. New species may be discovered (for God manifests his creative urges everywhere, even in places hidden from learned men), but they did not evolve into new creatures, i.e., engage in the “transmutation of organic substance” (Darwin). Neither could they go extinct.
About Michael Ricciardi
