Divine Variations

How Christian Thought Became Racial Science

Terence Keel

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781503610095, 9780804795401
• eBook ISBN: 9781503604377
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Divine Variations offers a new account of the development of scientific ideas about race. Focusing on the production of scientific knowledge over the last three centuries, Terence Keel uncovers the persistent links between pre-modern Christian thought and contemporary scientific perceptions of human difference. He argues that, instead of a rupture between religion and modern biology on the question of human origins, modern scientific theories of race are, in fact, an extension of Christian intellectual history.

Keel's study draws on ancient and early modern theological texts and biblical commentaries, works in Christian natural philosophy, seminal studies in ethnology and early social science, debates within twentieth-century public health research, and recent genetic analysis of population differences and ancient human DNA. From these sources, Keel demonstrates that Christian ideas about creation, ancestry, and universalism helped form the basis of modern scientific accounts of human diversity—despite the ostensible shift in modern biology towards scientific naturalism, objectivity, and value neutrality. By showing the connections between Christian thought and scientific racial thinking, this book calls into question the notion that science and religion are mutually exclusive intellectual domains and proposes that the advance of modern science did not follow a linear process of secularization.

1

IMPURE THOUGHTS

Johann Blumenbach and the Birth of Racial Science

THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY German comparative anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach is an unlikely character for making a case about the Christian valences of racial science. He was surely not a theologian and did not study nature for the sake of venerating God’s creation as John Ray had done in the previous century.¹ Blumenbach’s professional writings appear remarkably secular; he believed that observable laws and uniform forces, not God, governed nature. Blumenbach’s thinking was a product of the Enlightenment. He studied medicine at Jena and earned his MD from Göttingen University in 1775, which at the time was one of Europe’s most distinguished institutions for the study of natural history. Blumenbach’s doctoral thesis, On the Natural Variety of Mankind, published in 1795, was a seminal text for post-Enlightenment European and American anthropology. He was the first ethnologist to divide the human species into five distinct types (African, Asian, Caucasian, American, Malayan). With Blumenbach’s reconfiguration of the term “Caucasian”—a concept he adopted from a colleague at Göttingen University, Christoph Meiners, who initially associated Caucasian with Europeans in his Outline of the History of Humanity (1785)—he offered one of the first “scientific” explanations for white people as the progenitors of the human race.² Blumenbach’s career as the first secular ethnologist extended well into the nineteenth century.³

Despite Blumenbach’s seminal importance for inaugurating modern secular ethnology—or perhaps because of it—very little attention has been given to the Christian epistemic setting in Germany near the end of the eighteenth century under which he wrote and thought about race and human origins. It is true that there was a structural secularization happening in the German academy at this time, during which institutions like Göttingen University broke from confessional theology and took the lead over intellectual matters once primarily in the hands of the Lutheran Church.⁴ Blumenbach was a part of this institutional division of labor between the religious and the secular. He founded the Department of Ethnology at Göttingen with the intention of freeing the study of human origins from the partisan concerns of the church, thereby allowing naturalistic explanations on the wide diversity of biological life to be debated among scholars and budding German Romantic intellectuals.⁵

New institutional spaces, however, do not necessarily engender revolutionary epistemologies. Although Blumenbach was inspired by the principles of Newtonian science and sought an empirically grounded account of our beginnings, his understanding of human origins and racial variation was consistent with a Christian cosmology—a Weltanschauung framed by a creationist view of nature and the belief that human life was the pinnacle of living things. Scholars have noted the teleology that marked Blumenbach’s understanding of nature. Robert Richards has argued that Blumenbach followed other German Romantic biologists, known as Naturphilosophen, who understood nature to be goal driven, logically ordered, and self-producing, not merely inert matter or the passive result of God’s design.⁶ When Blumenbach’s theory of the organic world and his racial science are viewed as complementary parts of a larger whole, however, he appears to be inspired as much by Christian creationism as he is by teleological reasoning. Creationism (the belief drawn from the Abrahamic faith traditions that God directly gave shape to the world and all living things) and teleological reasoning (from the Greek telos, signifying end or purpose) are not mutually exclusive, and both are operative in Blumenbach’s philosophy of the natural world. Indeed, the explanatory mechanism Blumenbach used to account for species diversity—a mechanism he called Bildungstrieb—effectively reoccupies (to invoke Hans Blumenberg) the creative powers of the God in the Genesis narrative. This divinized conception of nature is threaded throughout his account of the organic world and human racial diversity. The full consequences of these creationist commitments reveal themselves most brilliantly in Blumenbach’s claim that the white patriarch of humanity was a spontaneous, naturally civilized, and unprecedented creation. Blumenbach’s Caucasian was a secular Adam.

To account for the religious concepts embedded in Blumenbach’s thinking about race and human origins, it is worth noting the wealth of ideas and reasoning strategies about otherness that have been a constitutive part of Christian intellectual history.⁷ According to Denise Kimber Buell, signifying ethnic, religious, and racial others has enabled Christian thinkers to shore up and police the boundaries of their seemingly inclusive community.⁸ Similarly, Jonathan Boyarin argues that modern Christian European identity was the result of a sustained intellectual othering and rejection of its Jewish origins.⁹ Ronnie Po-chia Hsia has also observed that Protestant Reformers in Germany believed they “represented the true Israelites, the spiritual descendants of the Old Testament Israelites, as opposed to the Jews of their times.”¹⁰ This claim was built on the notion that diasporic Jews were no longer racially pure and had become “half breeds,” which rendered them constitutionally different from the bloodline of Jesus.¹¹

Ideas about difference were not merely at the periphery of Christian thought but deeply entangled with central theological beliefs. For example, by the seventeenth century, naturalists used the creation narrative in Genesis to articulate early biological theories about the origins of human life and the biospiritual bond shared across the races. Original sin and Adam’s Fall have sat at the center of the Christian notion of common human ancestry and the redemption of Christ since the time of the early church.¹² The fallout of Adam’s transgression against God’s will was imagined by Christian theologians to quite literally be passed down ancestrally to all races. This theological idea functioned as a background assumption for the biological theories of the seventeenth-century Dutch insectologist Jan Swammerdam. He proposed an account of embryo formation that argued that the entire human race existed within the reproductive organs of humankind’s first parents: Adam and Eve.¹³ In this view adults preexisted within the eggs found in a woman’s womb. Swammerdam, who was a follower of an early occult form of Christian ecumenism, believed his theory of the preformation of humankind within Eve’s womb accounted for how humans inherited original sin: all races were literally present within the loins of the first humans who fell from grace.¹⁴ What this history reveals is that Christian thinkers have remained invested in giving meaning to ethnic or racial differences. Blumenbach inherited this tradition and used it to form the conceptual scaffolding for his scientific account of human variation. An account of this intellectual inheritance is largely missing within the scholarship on Blumenbach’s work and the tradition of racial science he inspired.

Emerging from the recesses of Christian thought, modern racial science is a mongrel creation. That is, racial science is the synthesis of an unrecognized Christian intellectual history and the modern hope for a scientific account of our beginnings. Not only did Christian thinking carry with it consequences for science, but it also provided an epistemological ground for political discrimination against Jews during the time Blumenbach fashioned his theory of human origins. Latent Christian ideas would color both modern scientific and political reasoning about race in eighteenth-century Germany. It would be within the muddy stream of this Christian intellectual heritage where Blumenbach would father an allegedly secular ethnology whose subsequent forms remain with us today.

Blumenbach and the Self-Legislating Power of Nature

In 1781 Blumenbach published the second edition of his dissertation thesis, On the Natural Varieties of Mankind. In this version Blumenbach had yet to give proper names to the ancestral human types. He did, however, introduce the explanatory mechanism that would later allow him to do so. This was the concept of the formative drive, Bildungstrieb, drawn from a work also published in 1781 titled On the Formative Drive and the Process of Procreation (Uber den Bildungstrieb und das Zeugungsgeschaft), which made refinements to an essay written just the year before.¹⁵ In both the essay and book Blumenbach attempted to account for how previously unorganized organic matter came together to create lasting varieties of species. He also tried to explain what appeared to be nature’s ability to repair itself. Blumenbach surmised there had to be a force inherent in organic matter capable of this task. Thus, he developed the notion Bildungstrieb, a concept that would have a major influence on post-Enlightenment perceptions of nature and offer Blumenbach a theoretical tool to explain human racial descent.

In the time between the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment the field of embryology was closely tied to the study of human origins. A key issue for naturalists was whether the embryos of mammals were preformed within the reproductive organs of their progenitors (specifically among females) or if embryos came into being over time as organic matter was organized through some natural force (epigenism).

These varying approaches to embryology were accompanied by different ideas regarding God’s role in nature. The defenders of preformation, such as Jan Swammerdam, mentioned before, maintained a more theocentric understanding of life’s origin and development. As God had done for Adam, the defenders of preformationism claimed that God directly shaped all living humans that were to exist. God had buried adult “seeds” in Eve’s womb that only needed to be conceived later under the conditions appropriate to each racial group.¹⁶

Epigenists believed that organic matter was capable of organizing and giving shape to new life-forms. The sixteenth-century English physician and early theorist of the human circulatory system William Harvey developed this theory based on his observations of caterpillars.¹⁷ At the center of Harvey’s model was the idea that embryos were not preformed but emerged out of a formless organic mass that gradually developed the structures and organs of specific species. The naturalists who followed him later in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries put forward what was called a “vitalist” account of nature. Vitalists stressed nature’s nearly intelligent capacity to mold organic material into complex structures under specific conditions, thus making preformation unnecessary.¹⁸ This reconceptualization of nature as dynamic and life producing—rather than static and inert—annexed the power of creation from God and made it an attribute of nature.¹⁹ Nature in effect was divinized. The vitalist conception of the organic world would reoccupy the explanatory void left open in the wake of rejecting a God who was intimately involved in the creation and destiny of living things. This repurposing of the attributes of God the creator was an especially prominent feature of Blumenbach’s account of nature.

Blumenbach was initially partial to preformation theory in his earliest writings on the generation of natural species.²⁰ His ideas changed, however, toward the end of the 1770s after vacationing in the countryside and observing various animal and plant species. The regenerative capabilities of living organisms led Blumenbach to conclude that nature directed the reproduction, maintenance, and restoration of living things.²¹ It was the Bildungstrieb that drove this process, ultimately nurturing and preserving life after fitting each organism with its species-specific form and constituent parts. He wrote, “If by chance [an organism] should be mutilated, [it] lies in [Bildungstrieb’s] power to restore it by reproduction.”²² Nature’s freedom to organize life out of formless matter explained why animals of the same species produced varying forms and how hybrids were possible. These phenomena could not exist if each organism were already preformed within the womb of its progenitor. There must be an intermediary step between organic material and fully formed species—a step that Blumenbach believed had to be guided by some force or power within nature. This gap was pregnant with the possibility for variation and the formation of novel species. According to Blumenbach it was the Bildungstrieb that facilitated the creative ingenuity discovered in the organic world. He argued that through its formative force nature could turn “aside from its determined direction and plan” to create changes within species and ultimately produce new life-forms. Blumenbach believed that climate, diet, mode of life, hybridity (the crossing of two different species), and the passing on of hereditary diseases were all factors that had “great influence in sensibly diverting the [Bildungstrieb] from its accustomed path.” This deflection, he claimed, was “the most bountiful source of degeneration,” which yielded nature’s splendid diversity, including human racial varieties.²³

Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb was a potent concept. With it he endowed nature with the capacity to determine the form and destiny of living things. Conceptually, Blumenbach’s formative drive took on the same epis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Impure Thoughts: Johann Blumenbach and the Birth of Racial Science
• 2. Superseding Christian Truth: The Quiet Revolution of Nineteenth-Century American Science of Race
• 3. The Ghost of Christian Creationism: Racial Dispositions and Progressive Era Public Health Research
• 4. Noah’s Mongrel Children: Ancient DNA and the Persistence of Christian Forms in Modern Biology
• 5. Beyond the Religious Pursuit of Race
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index