IV
The “mountain controversy” came to a climax in
the 1680's with the publication of a work that appeared
first in Latin as Telluris theoria sacra (1681), then in
English as The Sacred Theory of the Earth (1684), again
in Latin in 1689 with the addition of two more books.
This edition was republished in English in 1690-91.
There were various other editions during the eight-
eenth century and at least one in the nineteenth. The
author was Thomas Burnet, Master of the Charterhouse
and Chaplain to King William, who would probably
have become Archbishop of Canterbury had he not
published this work. Here was one of the most provoc-
ative and influential works of the century, widely read
and eliciting many replies.
Burnet's book aroused various issues, several of
which have been discussed in Mountain Gloom and
Mountain Glory. Here only Burnet's views concerning
mountain-attitudes will be stressed. Basically Burnet's
attempt was to reconcile the new science and the old
religion, which he realized were drifting apart. He
went back to Scriptural exegesis and considered par-
ticularly those Fathers who in his opinion believed that
the world and sea were not the originals created by
God for Adam and Eve, but that the physical, like the
moral, world shows marked steps in degeneration.
External Nature, as man had known it since the Flood,
is “a broken and confused Heap of Bodies, plac'd in
no Order to one another, nor with any Correspondency
or Regularity of Parts,” and, like the moon seen
through a telescope, “rude and ragged.” Both moon
and earth are images of “a great Ruin.... A World
lying in its Rubbish.” Before the Flood the face of earth
was “smooth, regular, and uniform, without Mountains
and without a Sea... you will not meet with a Mountain
or a Rock.” In this smooth world with “not a Wrin-
kle, Scar or Fracture in all its Body” lived our original
parents. The first great climax occurred when, after
generations of sins, God sent the Deluge to wipe out
all mankind, with the exception of one faithful man
and his family. Burnet's description of the coming of
the Flood is music, if sombre music. We hear the raging
waters and the broken waves coming to their height,
“so as Nature seem'd to be in a second Chaos.” The
wild abyss destroyed everything in its path, except “A
Ship, whose Cargo was no less than a whole World;
that carry'd the Fortunes and Hopes of all Posterity.”
When the Flood abated and Noah descended upon
Ararat, he saw only a great ruin of “wild, vast and
indigested Heaps of Stone and Earth.” As the Flood
receded, there stood the mountains we know today,
“the Ruines of a broken World.”
No previous writer had felt or shown anything
approaching Burnet's mountain-paradoxes. A majority
of preceding writers had been uninterested in hills or
mountains, some had actively disliked them, a few had
shown momentary response to “Mountain Glory,” but
among all previous writers interest in mountains had
been secondary. In Burnet it was primary. His theory
had developed as a result of his experience in 1671
of making the Grand Tour with the Earl of Wiltshire,
to whom he dedicated the first edition of Telluris
theoria sacra. When he crossed the Alps and Apennines,
“the Sight of those wild, vast and indigested Heaps
of Stones and Earth did so deeply stir my Fancy, that
I was not easy until I could give my self some tolerable
Account how that Confusion came in Nature.”
Burnet had grown up with traditional ideas of sym-
metry and proportion. In his atlases mountain ranges
had seemed neat, pleasing, and decorous. Even when
he saw the Alps from a distance, he could still believe
in proportion and symmetry, but not when he stood
among them. He saw “vast Bodies thrown together in
Confusion.... Rocks standing naked round about him;
and the hollow Valleys gaping under him,” black clouds
above, heaps of snow in mid-summer, and a noise of
thunder below him. Burnet's mountain-experience does
not seem to have been identical with that of Thomas
Coryate who had no head for heights. He was less
frightened than appalled at the “incredible Confusion”
that broke down all his ideals of symmetry and propor-
tion. Mountains, he found by experience, were placed
in no order implying either use or beauty. “There is
nothing in Nature more shapeless and ill-figur'd than
an old Rock or Mountain, and all the variety that is
among them, is but the many various Modes of Irregu-
larity... they are of all Forms and Figures except
regular.... They are the greatest Examples of Confu-
sion that we know in Nature; no Tempest or Earth-
quake puts things into more Disorder.” That chaos and
confusion he had found among mountains, he discov-
ered also on his travels when he saw earth's entrails
in caves and caverns, when in some districts he discov-
ered the effects of volcano and earthquake. On his
journey Burnet faced what he believed was a religious
crisis. Actually his theological beliefs did not waver.
His ethics was threatened and even more his aesthetics.
Burnet has been deliberately quoted in such a way
that he seems the most consistent of men in his repul-
sion from grand Nature, even more than Luther, beat-
ing his breast when he looked upon the ruins caused
by man's sin. But, reading Burnet's long descriptive
passages on natural scenery, we find that he is the most
paradoxical writer up to this time. His stress on form-
lessness and lack of design in external Nature was an
intellectual condemnation more than offset by his
emotional response to the grand and the vast. At the
same time that he condemned irregularity, he
responded to the majesty of mountains and oceans as
had no English traveller before him. “Places that are
strange and solemn strike an Awe into us,” he wrote.
The mountains are ruins, “but such as shew a certain
Magnificence in Nature.” The chapter in which he
most drastically condemned the gross disproportion of
mountains begins with a tribute to their majesty:
The greatest Objects of Nature are, methinks, the most
pleasing to behold; and next to the Great Concave of the
Heavens, and those boundless Regions where the Stars
inhabit, there is nothing that I looke upon with more Pleas-
ure than the wide Sea and the Mountains of the Earth.
There is something august and stately in the Air of those
things, that inspires the Mind with great Thoughts and
Passions; we do naturally, upon such Occasions, think of
God and his Greatness: and whatsoever hath but the Shadow
and Appearance of INFINITE, as all Things have that are
too big for our Comprehension, they fill and overbear the
Mind with their Excess, and cast it into a pleasing kind
of Stupor and Admiration
(Sacred Theory..., I, 188-89).
Burnet was “ravished” by the grand and majestic in
Nature. Before the vastness of mountains and ocean,
he experienced awe and wonder which he had previ-
ously associated only with God. He did not understand
his own emotional response, which he realized was not
to Beauty. The vast and irregular could not be beauti-
ful, but nothing except the night skies had ever so
moved him to thoughts of God and infinity as did the
mountains and the sea. As yet he had no vocabulary
in which to express the fact that he had discovered
the Sublime in external Nature. The development of
this part of the story is traced elsewhere in this Dic-
tionary. [See Sublime in External Nature.]
