14 February, 1687

Dear Sir,

Thank you for your most welcome letter, I was very excited to hear from you again. I hope that my letter finds you as well as you were when I saw you last in Paris before my reinstatement. It is my greatest wish that since I will be back in Europe this Spring on assignment with Alexis I might be able to stop by the University to see you again.

We plan to visit London for an as yet undetermined amount of time. Alexis has not yet told me why he has yet again asked me to go along, and I only hope that he isn’t going to get himself into the same kind of trouble that we encountered in Poland five years ago, as I’m sure you remember. I suspect that he doesn’t want to tell me what his plans are this time, since I all but refused to return with him after the last fiasco. His startling obsession with the bizarre leaves me somewhat unnerved as my experience has been exclusively in that which we used to study in Paris, back in the good days, before I had to come back here. What I wouldn’t give to go back to studying classical philosophy and reading Aristotle with you and our wonderful pupils again. I can only hope that nothing has changed at the University and everything remains as I often imagine it.

To be honest, I haven’t much more to tell you since my last letter. Saskia sends her best wishes, as do the boys. They miss your stories and wit as much as any of us. I will write again soon when I know if we will be stopping in Paris after we make this mysterious visit to England.

Give my best regards to Jacqueline.

Yours,

F.

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21 March, 1687

My Darling,

I am writing this from our last stop along our way to London. Alexis has finally allowed me a moment to write to you. We have spent most of our time so far discussing his plans for our visit. It seems that we are to visit a museum of sorts, such that none of us have ever seen before. He has refused to tell me much, but I overheard him talking with his chief advisor and it seems that we are not going to visit one of the State museums, but a private collection. Apparently there is a Doctor living in the outskirts of the city who holds a collection of what Alexis only described as "wonders." It was his conversation that left me wondering. After he took us all the way to Poland in ’82 just to see a salamander I hesitate to trust him when he tells me that this is to be a simple venture. Again, it seems to me that he is ignoring my advice and the words of God to pursue more freaks of Nature and I only hope that his endeavors will not provoke God’s wrath. But in spite of my best efforts to dissuade him from his venture, we are due to visit this doctor tomorrow.

I cannot write any more now. I will try to get another letter to you soon, if I am again allowed the time.

My thoughts are with you and the boys, as always.

With much love,

F.

* * * * * * * *

22 March, 1687

Dear Sir,

I can hardly believe that I am writing these words, even as I sit here composing them to you. Today I have witnessed so shocking and astonishing a spectacle that I hardly know where to begin. The only way that I can explain what I have seen to you in good faith is to be completely frank and open, and trust that our friendship is so that you will understand.

Last night we arrived in London, and prepared to visit a certain museum early this morning. I had found out through some devious, but necessary, means that we were scheduled to visit a certain museum just outside of the city. Knowing what I know now I would never have called it a museum, but rather a House of Horrors, terrible to behold. The collection of artifacts is owned by a Doctor of Natural Philosophy, as he calls himself, and is composed of objects of organic and inorganic origin. It seems that the Doctor is engaged in collecting objects that are exceptional to their kind, and I shudder to report that this collection includes even Human specimen.

Never in all my life have I witnessed such a scene; first, a laboratory with machines that boggle the mind. Why, in our visit the Doctor showed us a newly developed machine that is able to make everyday objects appear in greater detail and larger just by looking through a lens of glass. Using this machine, he showed us how to make an ordinary housefly look like a dragon from childhood nightmares. Through the lens I saw rows and rows of tiny eyes on its face, and the wings that to us seem simply constructed are actually symmetrical pieces of delicate film, truly a wonder as the Doctor says, but not a wonder of science, rather certainly one of God’s art. That knowledge alone left me with a grain of security.

Around the next corner was a darkened room that, when illuminated by lamplight, proved to be strewn with the preserved bodies of animals like none I had seen before, even in all my travelling. They hung from the walls and the ceiling by thin wires so that they seemed to be floating in the air above our heads and around us. The Godless eyes of a bird surely not of this world with a long neck and two beaks stared at me from the gloom. I saw snakes as long as the room was wide, with bodies as large around as a woman’s waist, and a fish with an enormous head in the shapes of an anvil with eyes set wide out on the edges of its face. The Doctor then pulled out drawer after drawer of creatures too small to be displayed; rodents grown together mysteriously at the tail, salamanders (much to Alexis’s delight and my horror) in colors that I had never imagined, and other beasts that I could not name or even place in water, land or air. I longed to ask the Doctor where he had come upon these objects, and furthermore what they might have done to incur the wrath of Our Creator in such a way that He would plight them so. It is hard for me to imagine how a creature might offend Our Lord so that He would make him so, and I finally decided that the origin of these creatures must be a place that has yet to experience the light of The One True Lord. It comforted me to learn from the Doctor that most of the creatures on display in his museum were found in remote locations, as yet untouched by God.

The next portion of our tour was composed of things Human, either in manufacture or by birth. This room was by far the most chilling, and I noticed that even Alexis with his seemingly insatiable taste for the bizarre was clearly uncomfortable here. Even now, back at my room in London, I shudder to think of those things that the Doctor, seemingly without a holy bone in his body, collected and stored in this damp room as if they were books or paintings. My dear friend, I saw a skeleton of two babies born together, but not fully separated from each other within the womb. Each had his own legs and torso, but shared one head and had one arm each, on either side of their bodies. The face looked as if it was composed of two faces that had melted together into one, as if they had shared the same mind and soul.

Row upon row of shelves and drawers revealed this doctor’s perverse affinity for collecting the cursed, those denounced by God. For how else am I to explain the occurrence of these creatures; men with the heads of dogs, women with parts of their anatomies grossly overgrown and babies with hideous deformities, but to acknowledge that only the greatest transgression of the Will of God could bring them about? I have heard of those, even within our own midst, who renounce their faith in God and spit in His face. These I can understand being cursed with deformities themselves and their offspring. But it seems that a more subtle transgression of the mind is at work here. I have heard also of usually God-fearing women who, for one crucial moment, imagine that they lie with a man other than their husband. Or a man who might attend church every Sunday and observe his faith, but one Sunday wish that he could be hunting instead of worshiping. I believe that it is these sinners that have appeared here, my dear friend. Those who have lived honest lives, but have allowed their minds and souls to wander.

It brings to mind the question, though, of how to protect oneself from such punishment at the hand of God. I myself have lived what I think to be a virtuous life, but I have also made mistakes. Why is it that God has allowed me two beautiful twin boys when he might have delivered me the hideously deformed creatures that I witnessed today? The very act of questioning Him is an act of ill faith, so I will only say that God alone knows the real reason for the things that happen to all people, and it is not ours to guess at His Divine motivations. I can only thank Him for the blessings he has brought and know that my two boys are the "proof" as the Doctor would say, of my true and undiminished faith.

After seeing the room, I began to feel that it wasn’t so much the bodies of these poor creatures that upset me so much as the knowledge that a man who calls himself a Doctor would actually keep them as if they held some sort of value. The things this Doctor says were possibly the most chilling of the experiences we encountered today. When Alexis finally asked him the reasons for keeping such a collection, he told us that he was engaged in uncovering the very secrets of Nature! I all but covered my ears when he said this. In all my years as a man faithful to his God I have never heard such a direct challenge to our Faith. I was completely dumbfounded for most of the tour, while Alexis asked question after question concerning his collections.

According to this Doctor, some (those whom I would rather not know) see Nature as an artisan of sorts. These freaks that he collects are what he calls the "sports" of Nature, as if it is showing off! He told us that to find the secrets of the inner-workings of Nature, he was studying these "sports" by collecting evidence and studying it. Never was God mentioned, never did he seem to show remorse for his brazen refutations of his Faith and The Lord. Even Alexis looked shocked, and I thought that he had seen everything unusual that there is to see. Why, in many ways this Doctor was the greatest marvel that we witnessed today.

I left his laboratory today with a feeling of pity for the man. For how lonely and lost he must surely feel in the world without the belief that his God walks beside him and watches over everything he does? To live to study those that God has punished is surely a sorrowful experience that I would not wish on my greatest enemy. He is truly a man to be pitied.

Again, I hope that this letter finds you well, and that nothing within its contents has had a shocking effect on you. May you be spared the experience that I endured today, my dear friend, and may you always remain the same God-fearing man I remember when I saw you last. I pray it will not be too long until we meet again and that you will not be touched as I have by this new obsession among those who are passing themselves as scholars. You and I both know where true knowledge lies.

Yours,

  1. F.

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This character, an Aristotelian philosopher, is to me one of the "old believers" that found the end of their religion-based beliefs in the seventeenth-century. One of the central ideas of this class has been that the seventeenth-century was a time of transition in terms of belief and science. In the beginning of the seventeenth-century and at the end of the sixteenth-century, most people were full believers in God as an absolute creator. A faith in Providence was especially strong, for how could one believe that God created human monsters to punish badly-behaving humans if He was not intimately involved in people’s everyday lives? God had to be watching to know what was going on, and to many this was a source of assurance and a source of fear. If God was watching over people all the time, then clearly He cares and has a careful hand in determining what happens to us, but if He is watching all the time then he must see our errors, too. In many ways this belief might have operated within people’s minds like Michel Foucault’s concept of "discipline" works within the minds of modern people living in a society based on a moderate level of surveillance. The premise of his theory is that it is just as effective to control someone by making him or her feel as though they are being watched, as it is to be actually watching them. Today, we know that there cannot be a policeman around every bend in the road, yet most of us drive as if there may be a policeman, just to be sure we won’t get a speeding ticket.

The seventeenth-century belief in Providence was remarkable in that it created, to a degree, a person who monitored their own actions because they believed that God Himself was also watching at the same time. When we think about it, that belief, if it is sincere, is the ultimate way to check people’s behavior, because in that system God is truly the world’s greatest surveillance system. The only problem with using Providence as the ultimate crime-deterrent is that towards the end of the seventeenth-century, Natural Philosophers like Bacon and Hooke began to chip away at the role of God in the creation of the world’s marvels, and therefore His role in our everyday lives as he who punishes bad behavior and rewards good.

My main character, the man who writes the letters, is one of a dying breed. He is just the kind of academic that Bacon would have hated- getting all his knowledge from books, and is unable to see beyond that which he has always read and studied. This moment is supposed to be one of the first times he has ever set foot in a Natural Philosopher’s laboratory. In Special Cases, Rosamond Purcell briefly describes Czar Alexis’s trip to Poland to witness a salamander, which was supposed to be able to walk through fire because of its asbestos skin. She writes, "His insistence on touch emphasizes the human instinct to know the truth through the hands; the eyes are less trustworthy perhaps, less capable of selecting fact from fiction." It is this discrepancy between what can be seen or read about and what can be touched that I tried to explore in this little account. For "F" as I call him is satisfied with that which he cannot touch; he doesn’t need any more proof than his faith, and I believe that in the middle to the end of the seventeenth-century, more and more people began asking to see more proof of why life exists, and why we are made the way we are.

Natural Philosophers like Bacon attacked the concept of creation and began to build the blocks that would eventually compose The Scientific Method. Above all, Bacon insisted, as Alexis had, on proof about the nature of our world that he could touch and show to other people. He and others were through with talking about the world’s mysteries, and he decided it was time to go out into the world and do something to make himself more knowledgeable about this world. In the process, Bacon came to realize that the study of the exceptional and the marvelous was important because through an examination of those creatures or objects that defied the prescriptive rules of Nature that were generally accepted, he could find a hinge or a nail or some little evidence of the way in which that particular object might have come into existence. The idea was totally original and new- to deny that God had created the deformed child to punish the parents was to release many from their daily self-scrutiny. And while examining the possibility that there might be other forces besides God behind creation, he and other Natural Philosophers took away many people’s reasons for being good.

The point of this series of three totally fictional and fairly historically inaccurate letters was to mark, in a tiny way, the point at which some scholars turned from books to microscopes, from the University to the field, and how many were left without a secure basis for their faith, and in a position in which they must either change their belief-system completely or be left behind by those pursuing the new philosophies of Nature and creation that left God somewhat by the wayside.

Works Cited:

1. Foucault, Michel. "Discipline and Punish." Literary Theory, an Anthology. Eds. Rivkin and Ryan. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. 469.

2. Purcell, Rosamond. Special Cases. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997.