Newton, born mid-century, capped off the Copernican revolution with his discovery of the laws of gravity and his 1687 book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (“Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”), known as his Principia. A fervent believer in the harmony and order of the universe, he was convinced that the observable patterns in the cosmos were the visible manifestation of a profound, mysterious, underlying order. His theories of gravitation admirably supported the Pythagorean ideal of unity and simplicity. The same force, gravity, that kept the planets in orbit also dictated the trajectory of a ball thrown on Earth and kept human beings’ feet on the ground, and its laws could be stated in a simple formula. Though he was notoriously miserly about giving credit where credit was clearly due among his contemporaries, Newton, in an extraordinary gesture, wrote that his own famous law of universal gravitation could be found in Pythagoras. Nor was this the extent of Newton’s unusual attributions. He sought examples among the Greeks, the Hebrews, and other ancient thinkers, of ideas and discoveries that seemed—sometimes it was quite a stretch—to foreshadow his own. This was not modesty. Newton was by no means a modest man. It was more a way of elevating himself to the company of the greatest sages. Better than discovering something new was rediscovering knowledge that God had previously revealed only to extraordinary men of legendary wisdom. Newton thought of another link with Pythagoras when he used a prism and split the light of the Sun into seven colors. There were seven notes in the Pythagorean scale.5
Gottfried Leibniz, Newton’s arch-rival and one of those contemporaries to whom Newton should have given considerably more credit, wrote in Pythagorean tones that “music is the pleasure the human soul experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.”6 Leibniz tried to construct a universal language which had no words, that could express all human statements and resolve arguments in a completely unambiguous way, even, he hoped, bring into agreement all versions of Christian faith. His attempts to make good on this scheme included a use of numbers that would have pleased the Pythagoreans and annoyed Aristotle: “For example, if the term for an ‘animate being’ should be imagined as expressed by the number 2, and the term for ‘rational’ by the number 3, the term for ‘man’ will be expressed by the number 2×3, that is 6.”7
NEWTON’S DISCOVERIES ABOUT gravity showed the cosmos seeming to operate like a stupendous, dependable mechanism, and, in the eighteenth century, scholars and amateur science aficionados picked up on that idea and became obsessed with mechanisms and machines. The demonstration of a new apparatus to explain or test a scientific principle was likely to cause more excitement than a lecture or a new theory at meetings of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, or of the Birmingham “Lunar Men” of Charles Darwin’s grandfather. It was the age of the “clockmaker’s universe” and of England’s industrial revolution. Careful observation and experiment became the hallmark of science, but cautious generalization was also encouraged, especially if it led to practical applications.
In other ways, in the eighteenth century, the universe was failing to live up to its promise of simplicity. The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus was applying two-word Latin names to more and more species that travelers and voyagers to all corners of the world were discovering. There were a greater number than anyone had ever imagined. Linnaeus saw new plants in his garden, too, and began to suspect, a century before Darwin’s Origin of Species, that new species were emerging all the time. He decided that these had always existed in the mind of God but were just now coming into material existence, a very Platonic way of assuaging his religious scruples.
Carl Linnaeus
No one’s faith in the completeness of universal harmony and the power of numbers surpassed that of the French mathematician Pierre Simon de Laplace, whose lifetime spanned the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. For him, numbers and mathematics were an unshakably trustworthy bridge to the past and future—if one could know the exact state of everything in the universe at a given moment. His contention was that an omniscient being with that knowledge, with unlimited powers of memory and mental calculation, and with knowledge of the laws of nature, could extrapolate from that the exact state of everything in the universe at any other given moment.
Meanwhile, Pythagorean themes appeared in other than scientific settings. The Whig party praised the governmental structure which brought together king and Parliament by means of “natural” laws, with these words:
What made the planets in such Order move,
He said, was harmony and mutual Love.
The Musick of his Spheres did represent
That ancient Harmony of Government.
That was by no means an isolated allusion. The harmony of the heavens had become a beloved poetic image. William Shakespeare, a contemporary of Galileo and Kepler, had given it beautiful expression in The Merchant of Venice, where he had Lorenzo tell Jessica,
. . . soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony . . .
Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold;
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings.
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
Shakespeare’s contemporary John Davies had written a “justification of dance” titled “Orchestra” that was full of such allusions—not only to the celestial music but also to the four elements. Davies was not making a scientific or philosophical statement. He was correcting one lady’s disparagement of dancing by pointing to its ancient, primordial origins.
Dancing, bright lady, then began to be
When the first seeds whereof the world did spring,
The fire, air, earth and water did agree,
By Love’s persuasion, nature’s mighty king,
To leave their first disordered combating
And in a dance such measure to observe
As all the world their motion should preserve.
. . . . .
The turning vault of heaven formed was,
Whose starry wheels he hath so made to pass
As that their movings do a music frame
And they themselves still dance unto the same.
. . . . .
All the world’s great fortunes and affairs
Forward and backward rapt and whirled are
According to the music of the spheres.
John Milton, a later contemporary of Galileo and Kepler, like Shakespeare referred to the inability of human ears to hear this music:
But else in deep of night when drowsiness
Hath locked up mortal sense, then listen I
To the celestial Sirens’ harmony . . .
Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie,
To lull the daughters of Necessity,
And keep unsteady Nature to her law,
And the low world in measured motion draw
After the heavenly tune, which none can hear
Of human mould with gross unpurged ear.
Another Englishman, John Dryden, born in 1631, the year after Kepler died, like Davies gave music a voice in creation:
From harmony, from heavenly harmony,
This universal frame began:
When Nature underneath a heap
Of jarring atoms lay
And could not heave her head,
The tuneful voice was heard from high:
Arise, ye more than dead!
Joseph Addison, born later in the century, was the author of a poem that combined the ideas expressed in Psalm 19 with the image of the music of the spheres. Christian congregations still sing it, to music by Franz Joseph Haydn. The final verse says of the planets:
What though in solemn silence all move round the dark terrestrial ball?
What though no real voice nor
sound amid their radiant orbs be found?
In reason’s ear they all rejoice, and utter forth a glorious voice:
Forever singing as they shine, “The hand that made us is divine.”8
Johannes Kepler (and nearly everyone who has sung this hymn) would have disagreed with the Earth-centered cosmos these lines implied, but Kepler himself—who had imagined the planets arranged in perfect harmony at the moment of creation—could not have put it better. His harmony was a harmony audible to “reason’s ear.” Even a century after Addison, William Wordsworth, whose lifetime spanned the turn of the century from the 1700s to the 1800s, could still be certain no explanation or footnote was required when he wrote of “harmony from Heaven’s remotest spheres.”
PYTHAGOREAN IDEAS AND traces of the Pythagorean tradition also showed up in more surprising contexts. One of the most bizarre examples was the reimagining, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, of Pythagoras as the hero of intellectual revolutionaries in Europe and Russia. This use, or misuse, of Pythagorean themes was brought to light by James H. Billington in his book Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith.9 Billington showed that in the midst of confusion, when nothing was stable and dependable, Pythagoras became an icon of revolution, and his name and the ideals and symbols associated with him ran as leitmotifs through the decades of revolution and revolutionary thinking.
In 1776, the year of the American Declaration of Independence and eleven years before the date usually identified as the beginning of the French Revolution, a group in Bavaria founded by one Adam Weishaupt and recruited from the Masonic lodges in Munich was calling itself “Illuminist.” Though “Illuminism” was difficult for anyone at the time (or today) to define, for Weishaupt it meant a “revolution of the mind,” discarding and avoiding all “spiritualist distortions” and occult practices and ideas. However, the name and concepts vaguely associated with Illuminism predated Weishaupt, and so, probably, did the connection with Pythagoras. Because Illuminists were usually as secretive as Pythagoras and his earliest followers, many questions about them cannot be answered, and a danger of being a secret society is that your popular and historical image may be created not by yourself but by your most vocal and influential enemies. Some credited the Illuminists with almost single-handedly precipitating the French Revolution. Others said they never really existed at all but were a “police myth” conjured up by rightists to inspire public fear of clandestine plots, a myth half believed by the authorities themselves. Others assert that they were a fictional invention of propagandists who opposed Masonry and tried to tarnish its image by associating it with insurrection and revolution. Yet others claim that they were an extreme branch of Masonry, or something independent that “infected” Masonry. The Masons also were intensely secretive, though not necessarily for the same reasons the Illuminists were.
At the time of Columbus there were “Alumbrados” in Spain whose mysticism centered around the idea that a human soul could be subjected to inner purification leading to complete submission to God’s will and direct communication with and through the Holy Spirit. Eighteenth-century Illuminists also emphasized inner perfection and purification, but with a secular stress on reason and logic. This newer Illuminist ideology either first appeared in lodges of the Freemasons and other Masonic orders, such as Weishaupt’s in Bavaria, or else found fertile ground there and rapidly took over. For Masons, working toward inner perfection and purification was already central to their teaching, and it was also attractive to see themselves as re-creating an ancient brotherhood. In fact, it must have been difficult for a member of a Masonic lodge to know whether he was merely taking part in an inspiring ceremony full of ancient symbols, or dealing with something that really was supposed to have supernatural power, or fomenting revolution—or what, if any, of this made him an “Illuminist.” How much more difficult for anyone looking from the outside! Not only was there “fire in the minds of men”; there was also considerable confusion. The Illuminist slant, however, does seem to have been that the road to perfection and purification could and should be taken not only by individuals but by human societies. Had not Pythagoras engineered a marvelous reconstruction of society in Croton? However, Illuminists believed that this time, in the eighteenth century, the process was going to require enormous upheaval and the violent overthrow of existing authority.
As early as 1780, seven years before the French Revolution began, the attempt to legitimize revolutionary thinking by reference to ancient ideas had ceased to be something happening only in closed lodges and secret gatherings. Intellectual revolutionaries found it inspiring and reassuring to resurrect what they regarded as primal, natural truths that had been discovered in antiquity, and much that was attributable to, or at least attributed to, the Pythagoreans entered the symbolism of the incipient revolution itself. The rhetoric and the images that began to appear openly in the 1780s featured four “Pythagorean” geometric figures: the circle, the triangle, and their solid counterparts the sphere and the pyramid. These had also been symbols for God in medieval Christianity, but that use was militantly rejected.
Pythagoras and also Prometheus seemed ideal role models. Concepts associated with Pythagoras, correctly or incorrectly—prime numbers, geometric shapes, and the harmonic ratios of music—were “truth” that was more ancient and fundamental than the doctrines of Christianity that intellectual revolutionaries had discarded. Plato had spoken of “a gift of the gods to human beings, tossed down from the gods by some Prometheus together with the most brilliant fire,” and Plato’s ancient readers had assumed this “Prometheus” was Pythagoras. Prometheus, according to legend, had stolen that “most brilliant fire” from the gods, and fire had long been associated with Pythagoras, the Pythagorean “central fire.” So Pythagoras seemed a splendidly appropriate symbol for the hope that darkness would vanish forever, a new day was dawning, and the sun would never set. The fact that he had left Samos to avoid a tyranny also qualified him as a model intellectual turned revolutionary. In pre-revolutionary Paris, Benjamin Franklin was dubbed “the Pythagoras of the New World,” when he served as Venerable Master of the Masonic Lodge of the Nine Sisters (La Loge des Neufs Soeurs), whose membership also included such noteworthy revolutionary figures as Nicolas de Bonneville, “Anarcharsis” Cloots, Georges Danton, and Sylvain Maréchal.
The French Revolution began in 1787, and the storming of the Bastille in Paris took place July 14, 1789. The execution of the French royal family, members of the nobility, and clergy began in 1792, and the guillotine was busy for several years as those who had overthrown the monarchy turned on one another. It was a time of chaos, ferment, and confusion—and not only in politics. Conflicting reinterpretations of history, religion, and science vied with one another as factions right and left sought legitimacy, and those caught in the maelstrom clutched desperately not only for safety or victory but also for new self-images. Billington pointed out that it was not insignificant that many of the musicians in Strasbourg who first played the hymn of the French Revolution, “La Marseillaise,” in 1792, the year the royal family were executed, had also played in the orchestra when Mozart’s Magic Flute was first introduced to French audiences there a few months earlier. Illuminism had reached Mozart in its Masonic guise, and The Magic Flute was chock full of Masonic, “Illuminist,” and Pythagorean symbols.
The opera seems, to most twenty-first-century eyes and ears, a delightful fairy tale embellished with some archaic pseudo-religious ideas. However, in the 1790s, many would have seen it differently. It spoke symbolically and eloquently for an era when traditions and assumptions were being called into question or crumbling outright, when new discoveries of science and the ideas of the Enlightenment were continuing to undermine or transform older versions of Christian faith, and, when the over-ornate, elaborate, simpering, aristocratic artificiality of the Rococo had little to offer but denial of reality. In this milieu, Mozart, Masons, Illuminists, and revolutionaries were alike in prefer
ring simple harmonies and forms in nature that could provide a securer philosophical foothold—a new, surer, more inspiring pathway to truth.
In about 1786, a young man who would later be dubbed the “first professional revolutionary,” Filippo Michele Buonarroti, had encountered Illuminism in a “Scottish Rite” Masonic lodge in Florence. This lodge had become a forum where Illuminists held sway and discussed radically revolutionary ideas. So severely did the Florentine authorities frown on Buonarroti’s involvement that although he was married to a noblewoman, held a doctorate of law, and was highly regarded for his literary talents, his library was raided and Masonic and anticlerical books confiscated. Shortly thereafter, an unrepentant Buonarroti found himself banished to Corsica.10 In 1789—the year the Bastille fell—it looked for a short time as though he would join several young Italians who were starting up of a new journal in Innsbruck (for which city they used the code word “Samos”). These men had been influenced by Weishaupt’s Illuminism while studying in Bavaria. However, events in France proved too enticing to Buonarroti, and instead of going to “Samos,” he was soon deeply involved in revolutionary activities there.
Weishaupt, meanwhile, had been the first in many centuries to consider what he thought were Pythagorean principles as direct guidelines for public policy. In 1787, he had published his Pythagoras, laying out a design for the most politicized form of Illuminism and reiterating the idea that simple principles first taught in Croton were still a splendid guide for reforming and rebuilding society. He especially approved of ending ownership of private property. Following Weishaupt’s lead, when Buonarroti drew up his own blueprint for revolution, he emphasized that same practice. Others joined the Pythagorean chorus: Nicolas de Bonneville composed poetry about “the numbers of Pythagoras” and insisted that Pythagoras “brought from the Orient his system of true Masonic instruction to Illuminate the Occident.” The American Thomas Paine, the famous pamphleteer of the American Revolution and author of Common Sense, living a liberated life in a ménage à trois with Bonneville and Bonneville’s wife, worked Pythagoras into his version of the history of the Masons, though he gave the Druids primary credit for providing Masonry with an ideology that Paine thought a finer alternative to Christianity. The sun worship of the Druids—paralleling the Pythagorean belief in the central fire—had passed into Masonry, Paine wrote, in An Essay on the Origin of Free Masonry.
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