CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE:
NOAH'S ARK AND GARBETT'S APOTHEOSIS
Inventions
Garbett
believed that every fresh problem should be met with the full accumulation of
knowledge. He believed in tradition. Usually this meant integrating all sorts
of fragmentary facts to arrive at a complex and frequently obscure explanation.
This cohesion of fragments and the tortuous connections in thought which is
necessary to make them bind together gives some insight into his mind. His
intentions were nearly always laudable; his reasoning when he was able to
refrain from wilful viciousness towards the architectural establishment or the
clergy is occasionally clear. But just as one begins to settle into reading, it
is as if all the bitterness of his accumulated failures burst through the text.
At that moment, one feels, he obviously lost himself and his self control and
his prose degenerates into the strangest reproaches. Even so those glued
fragments represent a principle of uncontrolled eclecticism which also allowed
him to indulge in both inventing, exegesis, science and social reform, albeit
with very little result or public recognition.
Already in 1853 he writes that he
had, years ago, invented a method for
colour photography but:
seeing no immediate
prospect of leisure justly applicable to experiments on it, yet no call to
abandon my natural property in it, and no legal protection in this country on
terms that make it worth purchasing, I shall recur to the mediaeval and
seventeenth century mode of recording such a claim, after the manner of Roger
Bacon and Doctor Hooke. The essentials of this process, beyond those for
ordinary photography will be expressible in these twenty-five letters:-
eeeghhhhiklnoopprrssttty.
[1]
Understandably
his claim has never been discussed in any history of photography. It is somehow
a shame that no more of this process is known than the cryptic and
undecipherable phrase reminiscent of Galileo's similar obsession with priority.
Perhaps there never was such a process. Who knows. What it does illustrate is that
Garbett clearly foresaw the uses of good reproductive techniques: Of course, by this manufacture when
perfected, labourer's cottages will be adorned with the handiwork of Raffaelle
and Titian.[2]
Certainly his serious interest in photography was amply borne out by his work
in optics as manifest in his first ever publication on Parhelia.
That Garbett was much concerned with ventilation and fire-proofing we
have already seen. He applied for two patents for an improved method of
fire-proof building, only one of which was ever published. The other must have
either been withdrawn by himself or declared void by the patent
office.
[3]
"Garbett's Improved Mode of Fireproof Building" is, judging from the drawings,
completely consistent with his principles concerning the imitation of nature. A
cross section of the hollow tiles show a remarkable resemblance to the cellular
structure of living organisms. The pattern of ducts through the tiles which were
supposed to improve ventilation, were probably based on the circulation systems
of plants. The patent was bequeathed in Garbett's will to his first cousin
Isabel Harriet Lacy.
[4]
Without wanting to question the generosity of this gesture, there is no
evidence that she greatly profited by it.
Garbett did apply for a third patent,
but this too was declared void, or was withdrawn. It concerned the invention of
an improved sextant. How it worked is not known.
A project for a dam was actually
published in The Builder.[5]
The design tries to combine the Gothic economy of material with fitness to
purpose. Having already referred to the use of catenaries in determining the
shape of arches and the dispersal of thrust, attention must be focused on the
striking resemblance between Gaudi's portico of Park Guell and the lowest and
therefore strongest arch in the illustrated dam. Both have a similar solution
to the problem of supporting lateral thrust.
Geological Miracles
The
geologist Sir Charles Lyell, an intimate friend of Darwin, had in 1830 rejected
the catastrophe theories of Cuvier and others in his Principles of Geology.[6]
Lyell had argued convincingly that the order of nature in the past must have
been uniform with the order of nature in the present. On that basis, the
geologist had to always try to explain geological phenomena by analogy to the
present.
[7]
He emphasised that the magnitude of the geological changes which had occurred
during the past was not a reason to postulate extraordinary convulsions or
catastrophes. The greatest changes, could, according to him, have been
accomplished by ordinary geological processes acting gradually, if they were
given sufficient time.
Garbett tried to prove that Lyell's theories rested just as much on the
assumption of a miracle as other theories. The assumed miracle being that no
cosmic catastrophe occurred during so long a period.
[8]
Garbett calculated the chance of a comet colliding with the earth during the
course of a million years and concluded that at least four or even five must
have done so, causing a swift and major upset in Lyell's slow natural
processes.
In another article Garbett relates his catastrophe theory to Noah's
flood.
[9]
He wanted to explain Darwin's puzzle concerning the migration of fresh water
animals and came to the conclusion that the cataclastic deluge, mentioned in
the cosmological accounts of most religions, consisted of fresh water. In other
words, the similarity of fresh-water animals throughout the globe could be
accounted for by the fact that the flood, diluting the salt of the sea, simply
washed the animals away and dispersed them to the four corners of the earth. It
is the iron logic of the absurd. What happened to the salt? And if that was
diluted to allow the fresh-water fish to swim about, what happened to the
salt-water fish? Such a dilemma still requires the adaptive flexibility of
evolution to account for it.
Whatever the logical peculiarities
of his explanation, Garbett was trying to make Noah's story compatible with
scientific thought. Using rational and positivist explanations he concluded
that the Bible represented a truthful historical authority. The Bible could not
only be explained satisfactorily by science but once parts of the bible were so
explained, Garbett imagined he could use other passages in the Bible to explain
science! Consequently, if specific stories in the Bible could be interpreted
rationally and positivistically, then a similar approach to the prophecies of
Daniel and revelations of St. John, would automatically confirm their value as
literal truths. The whole Bible represented a literal truth. This did not,
however, mean that what the Bible left out, or left unsaid was necessarily
untrue. This last was an important consideration with regard to Garbett's
approach to theology. It gave him a licence to exploit science within the
context of theology and at the same time to deduce the most incredible truths.
Prophecy
Back
in 1861 Garbett had criticised Fergusson's topography of Jerusalem in The Builder. He
disagreed with the latter about whether Constantine's Dome of the Rock covered
the true sepulchre of Christ.
[10] This marks
the beginning of an ever intensifying theological tint to all his writings. In
his drive to integrate his knowledge and ideology, he embraced every new
subject in order to fuse it with a previous interest, ultimately hoping to arrive
at a universal explanation of everything. His theological preoccupations, like
his geological and astronomical ones, all relate to a desire to understand
indiscriminately. Through his curious form of rationalisation he tried to show
that the agnostic and even atheist ideas of Lyell and Darwin were not only
contradicted by the Bible, but that the Bible offered a far more cogent and scientific solution to the problem geological
development. Once he had established the Bible as a logical and consistent
authority, he plunged into religion whole-heartedly. He now became a prophet and
evangelist. Soon all his energies were employed in summoning the proof of his
theological convictions: the scientific truth of the Bible. He never let go of
his earlier preoccupations however.
[11]
The most spectacular of his ventures into theology are contained in exegetical
pamphlets with titles such as Daniel
Fulfilled, Bishops in Victoria's Time, only Idolaters, England's God, the
Bible's Baal and 3,130 Grounds for holding that Satan inspires our Clergy.
These not only provide all who care to peruse them with his interpretation of
such things as the fulfilment of Daniel's Prophecies, or the word denoting the
beasts number 666, but also denounce the Church of England most viciously for
ignoring his freely given advice on the impending doom.
His theology is a curious form of
Christian science, an uncontrolled Pythagorean mysticism pervades each
pamphlet. Science and theology are not just forced into an unhappy marriage,
their fusion is complete in the chaos of the mixture. His use of mystical
numbers combined with ordinary mathematics, for instance, makes the number 666
not only a symbol of evil, but it becomes itself the climax in a
pseudo-rationalist and very obscure calculation. His juggling with numbers in
establishing the timetable of the fulfilment of Daniel's prophecies may be seen
in a similar light.
The book of Daniel has traditionally been the concern of modern-day
prophets of doom; unhappy men and women, carrying signs of foreboding, decreeing
an imminent destruction and desperately believing that they were themselves
descendants of Lot.
[12]
Garbett joined this army of men; he had been chosen, some five years before he
published the Treatise to warn his fellow men of the imminent
fulfilment of Daniel's prophecies.
[13]
But his excursions into the mystic took on yet greater ambitions:
Now I was occasionally
in those days [1867] and earlier, what is called an "impressional medium." So at
least a Trance-speaker has since declared. They say that we impressional mediums
are never Ghost-seers nor Ghost-hearers, but liable to be suddenly interrupted
by rapid suggestion.
[14]
He
goes on to describe a conversation he had with such an interrupter. It concerned a member of the established church called
Alford, who, while busy revising the Bible was to be slain because he would not
reveal the word denoting the beasts number to the general public; a horrible
knowledge which Garbett had imparted to him.
It is hard at this point not to pass
some dismissive judgement on Garbett's state of mind. Ralph Waldo Emerson did.
I would argue that this state of mind was the climactic conclusion of
philosophical convictions that were already evident in the Treatise. His drive to reform architecture was, as we have seen not
solely fuelled by his concern for aesthetics. Architecture was a larger
question, and for Garbett this carried immense and universal moral
implications. To reform architecture was logically related and prior to the
reformation of the whole of society. His rationalisation of architectural
morality was epistemologically related to his belief that science could be used
to explain biblical occurrences and that biblical occurrences could therefore
be used to explain science. Where different religions agreed roughly on an
historical occurrence, in other words where there was universal consensus, a
truth was implied. As the Biblical flood was echoed in other cosmological
accounts, Garbett therefore assumed that it must, not unreasonably, represent
an actual fact. If Noah's flood could be used to explain natural phenomena, and
natural phenomena could explain Noah's Flood, then a similar approach could
reveal the truth in other Biblical stories. That was a dangerous assumption.
But it is such an assumption that accounts for these incomprehensible
pamphlets.
The surprising coincidences,
revealed by his mathematical conjuring tricks on Daniel's predictions, gave
numbers a double symbolic or cabalistic function. They not only signified
amount, but could also could work as a celestial language. Numerical
coincidences were proved significant by right of the innate rationality of
numbers which somehow transcended the axioms of mathematics to reveal the
unknowable mysteries.
From this idea stems his interest in
the beast's number as a mathematical, not just numerical, code for the beast's
word, which in turn represented the essence of what was wrong with society.
Naturally, Garbett, having identified the word, believed he had diagnosed
society's disease and was therefore in a position to cure it. The word he
thought denoted the beast's number was paradosis, which stands for tradition.
This can be seen in the context of Garbett's earlier involvement in the
problems concerning tradition in architecture. Garbett was, despite his
conservatism, his reactionary ideas, an anti-traditionalist, but not in the
sense that past authority should be rejected out of hand. Instead he loathed
the blind reliance on tradition which bred mental sloth, mindlessness and
copyism. Tradition is good only if it goes hand in hand with constant
reappraisal. This had been Garbett's fight, it was exactly that which he had
condemned in architects and what he later condemned in the Anglican clergy. It
was also what he tried to show in his concern for harmonising geology with
biblical occurrences.
It would too simple an explanation
to say that Garbett became a prophet of doom, or a madman out of simple
delusion, or disease. Sure enough he may well have been mad. Even so, his
foreboding attitude was a stage in a quasi-logical development from
architectural to messianic reformer. The madness resided not in that
development but in his personal logic. Examples of this logic are to be found
among the most compelling arguments of the Treatise,
arguments which are self-consistent but which start from dislocated premises.
Mysticism and mystery, Garbett believed throughout his publishing life, existed
only because ignorance existed. But it was precisely that ignorance in
combination with the peculiar cogency of souvenir proof which made him indulge
in all sorts of remedies such as arbitrary mathematical concurrence as the
solvent of ignorance.
Messiah
There
is a shift in Garbett's madness towards the end of his life. From the moment he
starts contributing in an anecdotal and nostalgic spirit to Notices and Queries in 1880. The natural
climax to Garbett's accumulative ambitions was not just to understand the
world, but to improve it by applying his salvational gnosis. It was a
resounding but largely unheard crescendo to his career as philosopher,
architectural reformer, inventor and prophet. In the 1880's Garbett became a
Christian socialist. With a highly individual program of course. These
pamphlets are far from mad, at least in their intentions. Cutting away the
roll-call of his accumulated obsessions which accompany each pamphlet and
rehearse their esoteric arguments time and time again, some of these pamphlets
show an intelligent concern with contemporary social problems.
There are several pamphlets which deal
with specific systems for the development of a new society. The first of these
sociological systems is described in a pamphlet called Finite Avarice: A Socialism Drawn from the Genesis Trade Union Law,
London, 1877. Unfortunately the contents are unknown to me. A note in the National Union Catalogue says only that it identifies the difference between capital
and anti-capital, as society's destroyer. In the pamphlet he sketches rules for
an anti-capitalist society. On the flaps of several of the other pamphlets a
similarly entitled booklet is advertised, which promises to show how a few
wealthy Christians can entirely abolish capitalism.
[15]
The idea is supposed to have been based on Joseph's redistribution of land in
Genesis, Chapter 47. While dealing with a famine in Egypt, Joseph establishes a
feudal system whereby all the land is given to the Pharaoh, but is tended by
the farmers who, in exchange for the use of the land, have to give him a fifth
of their produce.
Female emancipation
Garbett's
socialism is typical of his syncretic attitude to all ideologies. Marxism had
to be shown to have been anticipated in the Bible. In fact every modern concern
had its justification and its model in the Bible. A pamphlet with title Free Wifehood, A Lay Sermon to Young Girls
provides a framework for the emancipation of women and was published in London
in 1892. The pamphlet argues for the abolition of marriage:
Nothing seems more
natural than for a girl to follow her mother's example, and say "the condition
of marriage to which my mother attained must be good enough for me." But girls
thus reasoning, forget the rare fortune by which they individually, or their
mothers, have escaped the ordinary average lot.
[16]
and he laments the fact that the number of widows,
and still more of abandoned wives, illegally separated, is so increasing that
Fatherlessness must soon become the most general condition of growing-up girls.
The
Church and State have utterly failed to achieve permanence of marriage. To
remedy this is Garbett's task. Instead of the Wife leaving family and home it
is the husband who should cleave unto his
wife. And the proof is found in the bible. Quoting Sir J. W. Dawson he
writes that after the Fall it was decreed that Eve's husband should rule over
her; but this like other disabilities
arising from the Fall, may have been regarded in early times as a Evil to be
removed if possible.[17]
Approvingly quoting Edith Ward, Garbett argues that the curse on Eve, the first
human sinner, was a personal one, and its extension to any later person was a masculine fraud.[18]
Garbett advocates the establishment of a Sisterly
Communism consisting of communes for girls who may chose a mutually
compatible and monogamic husband. On being chosen the husband has to surrender
all personal property to the commune. Husbands and wives live separately, and
the women organise yearly meetings after the harvest to determine the number of
births allowed for the next year. When this is decided, each pair is sent on
holiday with some money in order to fulfil their conjugal duty. Garbett, in an
act of historical exemplification,
closely reminiscent of the Treatise, even
tries to prove that Jesus Christ himself was born in just such a community, and
that he had been married and produced two sons before his baptism.
Apart from being too trusting in the
will and determination of his fellow humans to succeed in his proposed system -
a problem that most designers of Utopian schemes share - the preoccupations he
reveals show him concerned with social change in a way that hints at an
appealing and profound side to his character. Many of his utopian schemes also
give the impression of being immediate responses to contemporary events.
Incidentally, he suggests that the words serve
and obey should be dropped from the marriage service, a thing that is now
becoming common practice.
[19]
National Health
His
last plan for social reform, which was published two years before his death, is
contained in a pamphlet with the title, A
Plan and Plea for National Medicine. London, 1898. He signs himself as
"E.L Garbett of the Peculiar People".
The Peculiar People were an Evangelical sect started by a man called
William Bridges in 1838.
[20]
They accepted, unconditionally, the divine inspiration behind every word of the
Bible. This led them to interpret James 5.14,15 quite literally. The text
refers to the healing powers of prayer being better than the work of
physicians. As a result of this interpretation the Peculiar People chose to
receive no medical care when they were sick, but instead relied on constant
prayer. The word peculiar refers of course, not to any strangeness in their
habits, they were a highly respectable people, but echoes their identification
with the people of Israel. As such, peculiar means special and chosen, a fact that
seems to coincide well with Garbett's own idea about himself. What seems
strange, however, is that Garbett, who calls himself a member of that sect,
should choose to design a system whereby Doctors could provide health care more
fairly. This apparent inconsistency is cleared up by another biblical text.
Garbett quotes Matthew, 9,12 where it says that They that are whole have no need of a physician, but they that are
sick. Garbett argues, therefore, that He
never adds that the whole are not to pay for Physicians, but only the sick.[21]
As everybody is liable to sickness, the expense ought to be general, and the
emphasis should not be on cure but on prevention. The private employment of
surgeons can lead to nothing but private
Class interest. Quoting Robert Dale Owen, the son of the socialist, on The Opposition of Interests, he writes
that it is in the interest of doctors to keep their patients in ignorance. All
this is a clear reaffirmation of his socialist credentials and a clear echo of
his former preoccupations with the payment of architects. In fact he mentions
his architectural grievances in the pamphlet, which sound strangely out of
context there. But as far as the system of payment itself is concerned he
suggests that doctors should be allocated a number of lives, they are not
allowed to chose their own patients. All of these are to be given a
standardised value according to their age, (not their status) on which the
doctor's salary is dependent. If the doctor loses a patient he loses an amount
of pay related to the value of that patient. In other words, as the life of a
new-born baby is not as secure as that of a healthy man of forty, losing the
former costs the doctor a lot less. Similarly, the value of an old man close to
his natural end, poses no major threat to the doctor's income. One can already
hear the Kafka-esque bureaucracy creaking the floors of the castle.
At the end of the pamphlet Garbett
again confirms his membership of the Peculiar people and ends in the call to
arms to defend his various obsessions such as the payment of architects and the
beast's number. He violently rejects Mary Baker Eddy as well as the Mormon prophet. Even so his
affiliation to the Peculiar people can do something to complete his strange and
erratic portrait. He must have been an old man by now, close to seventy-four
years old. The Peculiar People wore dark clothes and, curiously, no moustache.
Their hymnal is one of the most extraordinary publications, containing some
1058 hymns, some of which contained endless verses which were sung with great
enthusiasm, over and over again. A verse which reprimands those who come late
to the service, somehow also reflects Garbett's attitude to things, and in a
way echoes his views on thought and consideration:
Shall
chapel doors rattle and umbrellas move
To
show how you the service disapprove?...
A
little less indulgence in the bed-
A
little more contrivance in the head-
A
little more devotion of the mind-
Would quite prevent your being so behind.
[22]
There
he stands then with his back to us, triumphantly singing his hymns in a dark
suit, his back straight and his eyes always focused on his own opinions.
Death or Conclusion
In
a pamphlet entitled Facts of the
Jesus-Huxley Case, On Noah's Flood or Which is Nature and Which is Miracle,
London 1893, Garbett tries to argue against Darwin's theory of evolution.
Relying on such authorities as Isaac Newton, Halley, Cuvier and Auguste Comte,
Garbett uses a positivist approach to uphold the biblical version of the great
catastrophe, arguing that the deluge was a natural cometary phenomenon, which,
among other, things, ended the ice age and hurled us into the present order of
things. The Flood caused the general water level to rise by some 300 or 440
feet in a few days. Such a theory was, according to him, more natural than the
idea proposed by Lyell and Darwin, who assumed a far greater miracle by
supposing that so many millions of years could have left the earth undisturbed
by major catastrophe.
Ararat, the mountain on which the
Ark landed, he writes, was formed by a sudden upswelling of the land due to the
enormous cataclastic load of 16 million cubic miles of water descending on the
earth within the space of a few days, accompanied by volcanic action. The
continuation of this process, after the flood had receded, could, he thought,
explain the fact that the remnants of Noah's Ark were found 1500 feet below the
summit by the archdeacon J.J. Nourri, something that would otherwise be
inexplicable as Noah's Ark should, by rights, have landed on the summit: Until someone besides Nourri visits the
Remains, it seems impossible to add more conjectures.[23]
On
the 13th of October 1900, Edward Lacy Garbett of 3 Myddelton Square,
Clerkenwell died in Baku town hospital. He was not married, left no children
and had made out his will in 1884 to the benefit of his three cousins. His
death in far away Baku, Azarbadjan on the coast of the Black sea, represents
the most fitting climax to a most peculiar career. To have gone at the age of
seventy-six, on a pilgrimage to try and find the remains of Noah's ark, must be
seen as a tribute to his determination and his loyalty to his own thoughts
which constituted a religion in itself. He wanted to formulate the most
spectacular anti-Darwinistic theory, arriving at a literal interpretation of
the Bible through a scientific and positivist approach. The attempt was as
noble as it was Quixotic. His ambition was to integrate all knowledge into one
fantastic system. He wanted to fuse religion and science, philosophy with a deeper philosophy, and prove it
empirically, by holding up the fossilised remains of a piece of wood and
proclaim it authentic. Once he could explain it all, he, as the spiritual
reincarnation of Isaac Newton, would discredit the Godless values of Huxley, Darwin
and Lyell, and harmonise religion and science establishing a socialist world on
Christian principles deduced from his reading of the bible. He would fight them
all on their own terms, arriving at an explanation of the past by analogy to
the present. His quest for Noah's Ark, his journey to Ararat, represented a
triumphal procession of his own beliefs, ending in his death and the inevitable
apotheosis into oblivion.
the
end
3.
Specification of Edward Lacy
Garbett. An Improved Mode of Fireproof Building, Published and sold at the
Patent Office Sale Branch, 1st January, 1884. The Complete Specification
appeared on the 29th of September of that year.
10.
E.L. Garbett, "Mr. Fergusson's Topography of Jerusalem," The Builder, XIX (Mar. 2, 1861) 135-136.
11.
In his Pamphlet England's God,
The Bible's Baal, A Challenge to the Archbishop of Canterbury, London, 47th
year of the fulfilment of Daniel he writes among other more purely theological
questions the following: Another practice
of your Grace is very decisive of what manner of God you worship. Whenever some
of your Pig-goat devils (as the Chinese call them) want a new meeting house,
called a church, they, not having a man to design it for the builders, as
churches of old were designed, or as even Sir Christopher Wren designed those
in the city of London, send to a Pandemonium of percentage-devils called
architects, for a Devil to design it. This "God" of yours is one who
cannot have a temple, without hiring a Devil, on Devil's pay to provide it!
Exactly as if the Saviour whom you profess to worship were some damned
Capitalist or Shopkeeper of yours displaying his plunder. The pamphlet is
concerned with trying to get the Archbishop release his knowledge of what the
beast's number stands for, knowledge that Garbett claims to know.
13.
E.L. Garbett, Daniel Fulfilled,
Showing all the dates to have been exactly verified... This appeared on the
flap of A Plan and Plea of National
Medicine, see below.
14.
E.L. Garbett, God's View of Our
Babylon, Shown in Slaying Alford the Beginner of the Bible Revision, London
1885, p. 18.
17.
Garbett quotes from "Tract 42" in The Religious Tract Society, p. 34. cf. Free Wifehood, p. 7-8.