Abstracts
Lomonosov’s Response to the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755
There is an incongruence in the treatments of Mikhail Lomonosov in Russian and Western histories of eighteenth-century science. He is an unsung genius in Russian histories of science, while for Western historians of science he is a nonentity. Two approaches to bridging the gap in this historiography already exist. The first, favored by scientists with an interest in history, is to bring the Russian narrative of Lomonosov as scientific genius to the attention of Western scholars. Historian Steven Usitalo offers a second way to reconcile the Western and Russian historiographies, by dismantling the Russian Lomonosov narrative. He argues that the Lomonosov of the Russian history of science tradition is an "invention", a hero created over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to aid scientists and historians in their efforts to bolster nationalist projects in the sciences and to make natural science a cornerstone of Russian and then Soviet civilization. This approach leaves Lomonosov’s place in a pan-European history of science uncertain, as it leaves him without any significant role in the wider debates in eighteenth-century natural philosophy.
The aim of this essay is to determine Lomonosov's — and by extension, Russia’s — role in a narrative of eighteenth-century science. I argue that Lomonosov is best understood as a "go-between" who crossed between the different cultures and environments of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences, German mines and universities, and the homes of his aristocratic patrons. In moving between these spaces, Lomonosov translated and adapted knowledge systems between Russia and Germany, between the mine, the academy, and the court. These repeated and multi-faceted mediations were a creative process by which Lomonosov developed novel scientific theories, adjudicated between the truth claims of Orthodoxy and of natural philosophy, and delineated Russia’s place in time and space.
This essay takes Lomonosov’s writings on the earth as a case study of the debates he engaged with. It offers a reading of the two works in which he developed his theory of earth — the 1757 Oration on the Generation of Metals in Earthquakes and the 1763 essay "On the Strata of the Earth", a scholarly appendix to a metallurgy textbook, First Principles of Metallurgy, Or Mining. After over a decade without publishing on the topic, he turned back to the study of the earth in the final years of his life because he found in the subject a forum for intervention in several major Enlightenment debates. Through his theory of earth, Lomonosov considered the role of religion in scientific inquiry, outlined a new Russian cosmogony, and defended the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff in the philosophical quarrels erupting in the wake of Great Lisbon Earthquake.
I argue that the Oration on the Generation of Metals in Earthquakes must be read as a geological theodicy. The goal of the oration is to give meaning to earthquakes, shifting the perspective from that of those suffering in earthquakes to an understanding of earthquakes as part of a cycle of metal production that is ultimately to humankind’s benefit. Addressing at once a double audience of Elizabeth’s courtiers (on the occasion of the empress’s name day) and the European Republic of Letters (through publication of a Latin edition of the text of the oration), Lomonosov mediates between the two groups to process the Lisbon tragedy into a novel theory of the phlogiston cycle and of metallogensis and to intervene on the side of Leibnizian and Wolffian theodicy in the Quarrel of Optimism.
In his next work in mineral science, the essay "On the Strata of the Earth", Lomonosov explicitly engages with the theologically fraught aspects of the study of the earth. In addition to being the fullest statement of Lomonosov’s theory of earth, this essay addresses the apparent contradictions between Biblical and scientific truth. In detailing the processes by which the surface and interior of the earth are shaped, he relentlessly mocks readers who ascribe to a static cosmogony of an earth unchanged since Creation. And while the Orthodox calendar counted the 7,271 years since Creation based on an indigenous Russian reading of the Septuagint, Lomonosov argues on the basis of geological and astronomical evidence that the earth must be at least 399,000 years old. Given the manifest problems of dating the earth according to Genesis, he argues that science and religion can only be reconciled by abandoning the Bible as an authoritative text on nature and in rejecting the traditionalist Old Believer cosmogony. Instead of using the Bible to learn about nature, he states that nature should be studied to arrive at a deeper understanding of God.
Though neglected in Western histories of geology and mining, Lomonosov's theory of the earth illustrates the power that the earth held in Enlightenment thought. In "On the Strata of the Earth", Lomonosov challenges the authority of the Bible on nature. Ever the skilful go-between attuned to the needs and limits of his courtly audience, he offers in the Bible’s stead a new Russian cosmogony—a reordered nature of a vastly longer history and a Russian-centered geography that supports state and aristocratic mining concerns. In commodifying the earth and its products, Lomonosov is the St Petersburg node of the "Underground Enlightenment" of mining experts and scholars serving state aims of rationally exploiting natural resources to expand economic activity.
Given the Soviet historiography's positivist narrative tying the Russian Enlightenment to the introduction of natural science, Lomonosov’s place in the history of Enlightenment science is a fraught issue: if we question the place of eighteenth-century Russia’s foremost scientist, we cast doubt on the existence of an indigenous national Enlightenment. By moving away from the diffusionist model of the transfer of science and Enlightenment thought to Russia, the broader concerns of a more expansive Russian Enlightenment project become clear. By studying Lomonosov as a go-between moving from Germany to Russia and from the mine to the academy, and from the academy to the court, Lomonosov’s audience, the court, becomes a participant in his theory of earth. As he was dependent on the court for social and professional advancement, Lomonosov was highly sensitive to courtiers" intellectual interests. When the Lisbon earthquake and the Quarrel of Optimism threatened the philosophically optimistic theodicy espoused by Russia’s elite, Lomonosov's Oration on the Generation of Metals in Earthquakes reassured the court of God"s benevolent order and of Russia"s special geological place in Creation. When the great aristocratic families began acquiring metallurgical plants in the 1750s, Lomonosov’s "First Principles of Metallurgy" offered instruction in the mining sciences, and the appendix "On the Strata of the Earth" provided religious sanction of their new interests by making the case for natural philosophical truth within an Orthodox society. Lomonosov's work illustrates the elite's interest in Enlightenment questions of order in a rapidly changing culture.
– Anna Graber (University of Minnesota)
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