Enlightenment's Apocalypse: Providence, Prophecy, and Science in the Work of Joseph Priestley

Joseph Priestley had a particular story to tell about his own and others' scientific work, or rather a larger story, religious in nature, which historically placed and specified the fundamental meanings of historically recent and contemporary natural science. This paper will reconstruct these meanings firstly by analysis of his preoccupations with the nature and forms of divine providence, and his concern to detect God's 'different footsteps', the traces of divine action in human history. This analysis produces a concept of Priestley's 'providential epistemics' as the basis of his perception and grasp of historical meaning, and aspects of the natural sciences are among his most significant exemplars. The paper then focuses upon his his hermeneutics of Biblical prophecy, emphasizing its intensely apocalyptic tenor, its presentist interpretation of prophecy, its latter interest in the restoration of the Jews to the land of Canaan and their conversion, and its stress upon the recent course of science as herald of apocalyptic imminence. Priestley's understanding of the historical meanings of the progress of natural science recall that of the Puritan millenarians of the mid- seventeenth century English Revolution. For historians of the eighteenth century, particularly historians of Enlightenment, to which historiography Priestley and his radical Dissenting colleagues are often assimilated, unavoidable problems occur once the apocalyptic disposition of Priestley and his colleagues is taken as a characteristic and forceful feature of their work. The paper thus concludes with consideration of the issues raised for Enlightenment historiography by recognition of Priestley's apocalyptic discourse.