Mountains of the Mind (5 page)

Before Burnet, ideas about the earth lacked a fourth dimension – time. What, it was felt, could be more permanent, more incontestably
there
than mountains? They had been cast by God in their current poses, and would remain thus always and for ever. It was the biblical account of the Creation which, prior to the eighteenth century, determined how the earth’s past was imagined, and according to the Bible the beginning of the world had been a relatively recent event. In the 1600s several ingenious attempts were made to compute a date of origin for the earth from the information given in the Bible. Of these the best known was by James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, whose dubiously scrupulous arithmetic resolved that the birth of the earth had begun at 9 a.m. on Monday 26 October 4004 BC. Calculated in 1650, Ussher’s chronology for the creation of the earth was still being printed in the shoulder notes of English Bibles in the early 1800s.

The orthodox Christian imagination of Burnet’s time had thus been inoculated against perceiving a history to the earth. It was widely believed that the earth was less than 6,000 years old, and that it had not aged visibly in that time. No landscape had a past worth contemplation, for the world’s surface had always looked the same. Mountains, like everything else upon the earth, had been brought into being during that first frenzied week of creativity described in Genesis. They had been established on the third day, in fact, at the same time as the polar zones were frozen and the tropics were warmed, and their appearance had not altered much since, save for the cosmetic effects of lichen growth and a little light weathering. Even the Flood had left them untouched.

Thus ran the conventional view. It was Thomas Burnet’s conviction, however, that the scriptural account of Creation as it was at that time understood could not explain the appearance of the world. In particular, Burnet puzzled over the hydraulics of the Flood. Where on earth, he wanted to know – where, literally, on earth – did the water come from for a Flood so profound that it could, as the Bible specified, ‘cover the very highest mountain-tops’?

To achieve a global inundation of that depth, Burnet calculated, it would have taken ‘eight oceans of water’. However, the forty days of rain described in Genesis would have provided at most only one ocean: not sufficient liquid even to lap at the feet of most mountains. ‘Whither shall we go to find more than seven oceans of water that we still want?’ asked Burnet. He reasoned that if there had not been enough water, then there must have been less earth.

And so he set forth his theory of the ‘Mundane Egg’. Immediately after Creation, he proposed, the earth had been a smooth oviform spheroid: an egg. It had been flawless in appearance and uniform in texture, without hill or vale to disrupt its lovely contours. Its porcelain surface, however, belied a complicated inner architecture. The ‘Yolk’ of the earth – its very centre – was filled with fire, and in increasing
circles about that yolk, like round Russian dolls, were arranged ‘several Orbs, one including another’. And the ‘White of the Egg’ (Burnet was tenacious with his metaphors) was a water-filled abyss upon which the crust of the earth floated. Thus was the Burnetian earth composed.

At birth, asserted Burnet, this young globe was unblemished on its surface, but it was not inviolable. Over the years the action of the sun desiccated the crust, and it began to crack and fracture. From beneath, the waters in the abyss started to press more urgently upon the weakened crust until, at a summons from the Creator, came ‘that great and fatal Inundation’ – the Deluge. The inner oceans and furnaces finally ruptured the shell of the earth. Sections of the earth’s crust plunged into the newly opened abyss, and the flood-waters roared up and over the remaining landmasses to create a ‘great Ocean rowling in the Air without bounds or banks’, as Burnet winningly described it. The physical matter of the crust was swirled about in a mêlée of rock and earth, and when the waters eventually receded they left chaos behind them. They left, in Burnet’s phrase, ‘a World lying in its Rubbish’.

What Burnet was suggesting was that the globe as the inhabitants of his age knew it was nothing but ‘The Image or Picture of a great Ruin’, and a very imperfect image at that. At a single stroke, in punishment for the impiety of the human race, God had ‘dissolv’d the frame of the old World, and made us a new one out of its ruines, which we now inhabit’. And mountains, the most chaotic and charismatic of all landscape features, had not been created
ab origine
by God at all: no, they were in fact the residue left behind when the Deluge retreated, fragments of the earth’s shell which had been swirled round and piled up by the colossal hydraulics of the Flood. Mountains were, in effect, gigantic souvenirs of humanity’s sinfulness.

A rash of publications followed the English translation of Burnet’s book in 1684. Irritated by his suggestion that the earth was defective in its present design, and by his challenge to conventional understanding
of the scriptures, many wrote to disprove his sacred theory. Quickly, the controversy made Burnet’s ideas and the counter-arguments common intellectual currency – defenders and critics alike alluded to
The Sacred Theory of the Earth
simply as ‘the Theory’, and unspecified references to ‘the Theorist’ were understood to mean Burnet. Stephen Jay Gould estimates
The Sacred Theory
to have been the most widely read geologic work of the seventeenth century.

‘The Deluge and Dissolution of the Earth’, in Thomas Burnet’s
The Sacred Theory of the Earth
, 2nd edn (1691). The illustration shows three successive stages in the collapse of the earth’s crust into the watery abyss (a). The lowest and last shows the creation of the mountains (b) and the islands (c).

So it was that, for the first time, the intellectual imagination became involved in positing possible pasts for the wild landscapes of the earth. Attention was drawn by the Burnet controversy to the appearance of mountains. No longer could they just be wallpaper or backdrop – they had become objects worthy of contemplation in their own right. Importantly, it was also Burnet who fixed the perception of mountains as forms both awful and exciting in the minds of those who came after him: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example, was so stirred by Burnet’s prose that he planned to render
The Sacred Theory
into a blank-verse epic, and the theories of the Sublime formulated by Joseph Addison and Edmund Burke were both shaped by Burnet’s work. Burnet saw and communicated a majesty in mountainous scenery, and in doing so laid the groundwork for a wholly new way of feeling about mountains.

Burnet suffered for his brilliance. Cambridge had thrown a
cordon sanitaire
about itself to prevent the importation of harmful or counter-doctrinal ideas, and by questioning scripture Burnet had breached this line. After the Glorious Revolution he was forced to retire from court duties, and was then passed over for the Archbishopric of Canterbury. But his reputation as a writer would outlive his uneasy achievements as an Anglican divine. For in suggesting that the surface of the earth might not always have looked the same, Burnet started the ongoing inquisition into the history of the earth. ‘I have,’ he boasted in the preface to
The Sacred Theory
, ‘retriev’d a World that had been lost, for some thousands of Years; out
of the Memory of Man.’ He was right to boast. Burnet was the first of the geological time-travellers, an explorer backwards in history – a conquistador of that most foreign of all countries, the remote past.

Frontispiece to Thomas Burnet’s
The Sacred Theory of the Earth
, 2nd edn (1691). The seven globes represent, with a clockwise chronology, the successive stages in the history of the earth as described in Burnet’s book.

Although Burnet had challenged the belief that the visible world had always looked the same, he had not suggested that it was any older than the six millennia calculated by Ussher. It was not until the mid-eighteenth century that the first significant extensions of the earth’s age took place. One of the chief dissenters from the so-called ‘young earth’ orthodoxy was the flamboyant French natural historian, Georges Buffon (1707–88). In his compendious
Natural History
(1749–88), Buffon sketched a panorama of the earth’s history as divided into seven epochs, proposing that each of the days of Creation might in fact be a metaphor for a far longer period of time. Publicly, he estimated the earth to be 75,000 years old, although he sensed that this was too conservative a figure: in his notes was posthumously found a scribbled guess of several billion years.

Buffon’s move was a canny one: by turning each biblical day into an epoch of indefinite length, he created the space and time necessary for geologists to begin their work of disinterring an authentic history for the earth, while at the same time staying within the bounds of respect for the scriptures. It was the work of Buffon and others like him which began the transformation of Ussher’s implausibly precise dating of 4004 BC into a totem of idiotic biblical literalism.
*
For,
once the duration of the earth’s past was no longer confined to 6,000 years, it was possible to speculate more systematically on what changes might have been wrought over wider spans of time. The science of geology could emerge and define itself in this newly old earth, proofed against accusations of blasphemy.

By the start of the 1800s, those thinkers interested in postulating a past for the earth had begun to separate into two loose schools of thought, conventionally called Catastrophism and Uniformitarianism. It should be said that geologists of the later nineteenth century – notably Charles Lyell (1797–1875) – tended to exaggerate the degree to which these two schools waged intellectual warfare on each other, and it is important to realize that, while opinions did differ, battle-lines were never clearly drawn between them.

Catastrophists believed that the history of the earth was dominated by major geophysical revolutions: one or many past
Götterdämmerung
s which had convulsed the earth with water, ice and fire, and all but extinguished life. The earth was a cemetery, a necropolis in which were interred countless now-extinct species. Drastic tidal actions, global tsunamis, severe earthquakes, volcanoes, the passing of comets: these were what had shaped and shaken up the earth’s surface into its present disruption. One popular Catastrophic theory of mountain-formation suggested that, since the earth was cooling from a white-hot original state, its volume was slowly reducing and its surface was consequently prone to severe crumpling – just as the skin of an apple crinkles as it dries out. The world’s mountain ranges were corrugations or crumples in the earth’s skin.

The counter-theory to this violently paroxysmal vision of the earth’s history was preached by the Uniformitarians. The earth had never been subject to a global catastrophe, they held. Earthquakes, yes; volcanoes, yes; tidal waves, yes – undoubtedly these phenomena had taken place throughout geological history. They were localized calamities, however: they had only racked and rearranged the landscape
in their vicinity. Certainly, the earth’s surface had been subject to drastic change – evidence for this was visible in any mountain range, or on any coastline. But this change had been achieved astonishingly slowly, by the forces of wear and tear which were presently at work on the surface of the earth.