A Monk In the Garden of Genetics

Where the natural and the supernatural unite.

The Genesis of Genetics in the Garden of God

In the entire history of science, there is only one known instance where the creation of an entirely new branch of science sprang forth, fully formed from the mind of one man. This instance is the science of genetics, which owes its origin to one man, Gregor Johann Mendel, who expounded its basic principles at a monastery in Brunn on 8 February and 8 March of 1865¹.

A polymath whose true genius was never recognized in his own age, Mendel sought to find—and indeed did discover—the causes of heredity in order to solve the enigma of how new species emerge. A contemporary of Darwin, who held the missing key to Darwin’s theory of evolution—and knew full well that he was holding it—Mendel was also a man of great faith who discerned the work of the Creator God in the germination and development of every pea plant that he studied. 

Mendel’s Context: When Faith and Science Were Friends

Before the study of science was systematically secularized, beginning in the late 1800s and early 1900s, for three hundred years the vast majority of scientific investigation was done in explicitly religious contexts. As historian of science Peter Harrison explains, “Far from displacing religion over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, science relied heavily upon religion in order to move itself from the margins of intellectual life.”²

The work of Nicholas Steno, Nicolaus Copernicus, and Galileo Galilei was bankrolled by the Catholic Church, cathedrals were constructed to serve as celestial observatories,³ and throughout Europe scientific societies were established by those who wanted to better understand the detailed work of the Creator within Creation. Pope Benedict XIV (b. 1675) created a papal-funded scientific society specifically for women, and the 1663 charter of the Royal Society in England declared that its scientific activities shall be devoted “to the glory of God the Creator.”

The Jesuits, in particular, were engaged in establishing the foundations of science as they spearheaded the sciences of optics, magnetism, electricity, seismology, and many other fields. In fact, during the height of the scientific revolution, the religious order of the Jesuits was the leading scientific organization in the world. Many early scientific investigations were carried out in monastic centers. The rural monasteries of Franciscans, Dominicans, and Benedictines became centers of knowledge, scientific research, and technological innovation.

Mendel’s Monastic Scientific Research Center

Established in 1350, by the time of Mendel, the Augustinian monastery and school of Saint Thomas at Brunn in Moravia was a center of creative interest, education, research, and innovation in the natural sciences and culture. Its dozen or so friars were an elite community of scholars and educators representing a wide range of the sciences, humanities, and arts.

Among its members were well-known philosophers, musicologists, mathematicians, geologists, mineralogists, and botanists who were heavily involved in scientific research and teaching. Its magnificent library, which boasted over 20,000 volumes, contained precious manuscripts dating back to the 1200s, as well as textbooks and cutting-edge treatises dealing with research in the natural sciences. The monastery also held a natural history collection, a mineralogical collection, an experimental botanical garden, and a herbarium.

Upon entering the monastery of Saint Thomas, Mendel found himself in extraordinary intellectual surroundings. The Augustinian friars of his monastery served the public by openly interacting with the local people, pursuing advanced education in various subjects, participating in scholarly societies, serving in civic roles, pursuing research and writing, and teaching their academic specialties in schools. In his autobiography, Mendel would write that it was in this atmosphere that his love for the natural sciences would develop.

A Timid Preacher, Yet Gifted Teacher 

A devout man of faith, Mendel initially wished to serve God through the vocation of parish priesthood. Mendel, however, suffered from extreme anxiety when serving as a priest. The abbot of Mendel’s Monastery, Fr. Cyril Frantisek Napp, recognized that Mendel was not a good fit for the parish priesthood and wrote that he “found it necessary to relieve him from service as a parish priest” because whenever he would serve as a priest he is “seized by an unconquerable timidity when he has to visit a sick-bed or to see anyone ill and in pain. Indeed, this infirmity of his has made him dangerously ill.”

On the other hand, wrote Abbot Napp, Mendel “is very diligent in the study of the sciences.”⁴ Mendel’s abbot thus believed that he could better serve God through science and consequently assigned him to pursue and teach the natural sciences, unencumbered by parish-priest duties. Mendel soon distinguished himself as a superb and popular teacher and adept researcher.

Mendel’s career as a science teacher, however, would not last. In November 1849, the Austrian government issued an edict that all teachers must be certified through a university examination consisting of both oral and written sections. Mendel’s examiners in physics, Andreas von Baumgartner and Christian Doppler—for whom the Doppler Effect is named—praised his physics essay.

For the natural history portion, Mendel wrote on biological evolution as it had been envisioned by the scientist Saint, Nicholas Steno, stating that “as the vegetable and animal life developed more and more richly; its oldest forms disappeared in part to make way for new and more perfect ones.”⁵

Rudolph Kner, the examiner for geology and biology, was not impressed by Mendel’s grasp of biology, determined that Mendel’s account and sources were inadequate and outdated, and issued him a failing grade. Having failed Mendel for being too Biblical in his account of life’s evolution and development, and having sidetracked Mendel’s career as a science teacher, Kner ironically paved the way for the development of one of biology’s greatest geniuses. 

Solving the Riddle of Biological Inheritance 

Having failed the examinations required by the new secular law for teacher certification, Mendel, encouraged by Fr. Napp, enrolled in university courses in the natural sciences. Over a period of 22 months (from November 1851 to August 1853), Mendel took courses in physics, chemistry, mathematics, zoology, botany, and paleontology and became interested in the scientific question of how new species arise.

This was also a question that had occupied the mind and research of Abbot Napp, who, as an active member of the Moravian Agricultural Society, was keenly interested in selective breeding and scientific questions of inheritance as they related to evolution.  As far back as 1836, Napp had formulated the key questions of heredity as: “What is inherited?”, “How is it inherited?”, and “What is the role of chance?” Mendel shared Napp’s interest in the scientific causes of heredity, and with Napp’s support started a series of experiments that would answer the questions and ultimately establish the field of genetics.

Like Darwin, it was the “origin of species question” which inspired Mendel’s work on inheritance. In the experimental garden of St. Thomas Monastery Mendel began searching for laws of nature—which he affirmed as God’s laws—that governed the developmental invariance of intraspecific hybrids. Mendel supposed correctly that “unit characters”—or traits which demonstrate constancy of type—behave independently, and working with this assumption he cultivated and tested over 28,000 garden pea plants between 1856 and 1863.

Analyzing his data, which revealed numerous characteristics that were passed on and expressed through several generations without blending, Mendel observed evidence supporting the notion that characters, or traits, were inherited independently as discreet units or “factors”—what we now call genes. The 1865 paper he published on his pea hybridization experiments, Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden, conceived of the independence of such hereditary factors as material entities located within the components of the germ cells. Furthermore Mendel held that the hidden heritable factors, transmitted faithfully throughout the generations, acted as preformed traits so that the unseen factors need not be conceptually distinguished from the visible traits which they gave rise to. 

A Voice Crying Out in the Wilderness

With Mendel’s 1865 paper, the new science of genetics was born. Indeed, as H.J. Muller, a geneticist commenting on Mendel’s paper almost a hundred years later, remarked, “It was written so perfectly that we could not—not even at present—put it down more properly.”⁶ Yet, Mendel’s work on heredity remained in relative obscurity for almost four decades. In the early years of the 20th century, his work was rediscovered and verified through the research of three botanists—Hugo de Vries, Karl Correns, and Erich von Tschermak—each independently citing Mendel’s 1865 paper.

These three championed the explanatory power of the Mendelian “unit-character” and, along with William Bateson—who translated Mendel’s paper into English—and Wilhelm Johannsen—who coined the word “gene” to describe Mendel’s “factors”—they employed Mendel’s work as a critical resource in shifting the parameters of biological thought on heredity and evolution. 

Mendel’s Missing Key to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution

Although Darwin would never come across the research of Mendel, Mendel knew Darwin’s work well. He purchased personal copies of all of Darwin’s books as soon as they became available in German translation, read them diligently, and wrote copious marginal notes and comments within them. His personal copy of The Origin of Species was a second-edition German translation published in 1863, and he was strongly influenced by it. Y

et, there was one area of Darwin’s theory where Mendel refused to be convinced—and that was Darwin’s theory of heredity and his understanding of hybrids. As Mendel wrote to his friend and fellow scientist Carl Nägeli, “Darwin’s statements concerning hybrids of the genera mentioned in The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, based on reports of others, need to be corrected in many respects.”⁷ Mendel was greatly interested in the idea of evolution and was far from being an adversary of Darwin’s theory, but always, when Darwin’s name came up, he said that “the theory was inadequate, that something was lacking.”⁸

In time, Mendel’s assessment of Darwin’s missing piece would work to undermine the legitimacy of Darwin’s theory in the scientific community. The early twentieth century’s ‘eclipse of Darwinism,’ would be characterized by the widespread scientific rejection of Darwin’s theory of natural selection primarily as a consequence of Darwin’s lack of a convincing theory of heredity.⁹ This rejection of Darwin’s theory would continue within the scientific community until the 1930s and 40s after Mendel’s scientific work on heredity was rediscovered and synthesized with Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

The Faith of the Monk in God’s Garden of Genetics

While Mendel’s work in science was profoundly groundbreaking, throughout his life he remained a man of devout faith. Mendel would eventually become the abbot of his monastery and he continued to do scientific research while preaching on Sundays to the end of his life. The compelling force behind Mendel’s scientific work was “to uncover the beautiful, orderly, prescient, and perfectly clear-sighted design of the Creator.”¹⁰

For Mendel, the work of science was “not all that different from the task of theologians,” and he believed that by achieving a richer understanding of nature he would “have a window into the mind of God.” Throughout all of Mendel’s scientific work, he envisioned “God as a gardener planting the seed of grace within a person’s soul, which then grows into a plant through nourishment from soil, rain, and warmth from the sun.”¹¹ In this manner, says Mendel, “the natural and the supernatural unite, and good works are sanctified by the grace of God.”¹² For the Father of Genetics, natural science, and religious faith were simply two peas in a pod.

1. Robert Olby, “Mendel No Mendelian?” History of Science, (1979) xvii, 53-72.

2. Peter Harrison, “Religion, the Royal Society, and the Rise of Science” Theology and Science,  6 (2008), 255-71.

3. John L. Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

4. Daniel L. Hart, “Gregor Johann Mendel: From peasant to priest, pedagogue, and prelate.” Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2022 Jul 26;119 (30).

5. Daniel Fairbanks, “Mendel and Darwin: untangling a persistent enigma.” Heredity 124, 263–273 (2020).

6. Quoted in Jan Sapp, Genesis: The Evolution of Biology, (2003).

7. Fairbanks, “Mendel and Darwin.”

8. Fairbanks, “Mendel and Darwin.”

9. Peter J. Bowler, The eclipse of Darwinism : anti-Darwinian evolution theories in the decades around 1900 (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

10. Daniel J Fairbanks, Gregor Mendel: His Life and Legacy (2002).

11. Adolar Zumkeller, “Recently Discovered Sermon Sketches of Gregor Mendel,” Folia Mendeliana 6 (1971): 247–56.

12. Zumkeller, “Recently Discovered Sermon Sketches of Gregor Mendel.”