The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton
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To my sister-in-law, Bonnie Balas (1945–2012), who made this book possible, and my wife, Judy, who makes everything possible
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For their help in supplying me with valuable information and/or invaluable moral support, I would particularly like to thank the following: Arthur Davis, Roger Doyle, Martin Ebon, Terry Helbick, Brian Johnston, Cat Karell, Guyon Neutze, Henry Roper, Robert Ryan, Steven Sittenreich, and, of course, J.C.
CONTENTS
Cover Image
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER ONE: “A History of the Corruption of the Soul of Man”
CHAPTER TWO: The Newton Code
CHAPTER THREE: Newton’s God
CHAPTER FOUR: Bloodbath in a Boghouse: Murder in the Fourth Century AD, Part 1
CHAPTER FIVE: The Severed Hand: Murder in the Fourth Century AD, Part 2
CHAPTER SIX: The Temptation of Saint Anthony
CHAPTER SEVEN: The Great Apostasy
CHAPTER EIGHT: Apocalypse 2060?
CHAPTER NINE: The Conversion of the Jews
CHAPTER TEN: With Noah on the Mountaintop
CHAPTER ELEVEN: In the Days of the Comet
CHAPTER TWELVE: Deconstructing Time
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Chiron and the Star Globe
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: A Glitter of Atlantis
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: The Secret of Life
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Masters of the Prisca Sapientia, Part 1: Aristarchus, Anaxagoras, Numa Pompilius
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Masters of the Prisca Sapientia, Part 2: Philolaus, Pythagoras, Moses, Pauli
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Son of Archimedes
APPENDIX A. Newton’s Prophetic Hieroglyphs
APPENDIX B. Further Corruptions Found in the New Testament
APPENDIX C. Newton’s Twenty-Three Queries Concerning the Word ὁμοούσιος
APPENDIX D. Newton on God’s Anti-Trinitarian Introduction to John’s Book of Revelation
APPENDIX E. Newton on Ancient Science
APPENDIX F. Newton’s Translation of the Emerald Tablet
Footnotes
Endnotes
Bibliography
About the Author
About Inner Traditions • Bear & Company
Books of Related Interest
Copyright & Permissions
Index
CHAPTER ONE
“A HISTORY OF THE CORRUPTION OF THE SOUL OF MAN”
Epitaph
Intended for Sir Isaac Newton
In Westminster Abbey
ISAACUS NEWTONIUS:
Quem Immortalem
Testantur, Tempus, Natura, Coelum:
Mortalem
Hoc marmor fatetur.*1
Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night:
GOD said, Let Newton be! and all was light.
ALEXANDER POPE, 1730
Not long after the publication in 1687 of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica (Principles of Mathematics), the great work of science that completely changed the way we perceive the world around us, the Marquis de l’Hôpital, a prominent French mathematician, was shown a copy. He read a little, then “cried out with admiration, ‘Good god, what a fund of knowledge there is in that book!’ He then asked the Doctor [who had shown him the book] every particular about Sir Isaac, even to the color of his hair, [and] said, ‘Does he eat and drink and sleep? Is he like other men?’”1
Edmund Halley, the comet-chasing astronomer who edited the Principia, added to the book an ode that ended with the line “Nearer the Gods no mortal may approach.” When he presented Queen Anne with a copy, Halley told her: “All science can be divided into two halves. The first is everything up to Newton. The second is Newton. And Newton had the better half.”2 The French philosopher Voltaire declared: “Before Kepler, all men were blind. Kepler had one eye; Newton had two.”3
It has been almost three hundred years since Isaac Newton died, and he is still regarded by the world—Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking affirmed this view—as the greatest scientist who ever lived. His achievements are astonishing, and, if we tend to forget this, it is only because they have become the background noise of the world in which we live.
His mathematical physics have, in the words of physicist Hermann Bondi, “entered the marrow of what we know without knowing how we know it.”4 The world from which Newton departed in 1727 was substantially different from the world into which he was born, and he himself accounted for much of the difference. Ninety percent of the physics and math we learn in high school comes from Isaac Newton. He invented calculus, discovered the binomial theorem, introduced polar coordinates, proved that white light was a mixture of colors, explained the rainbow, was the first to build a reflecting telescope, and demonstrated that one force, that of gravity, is responsible for pulling objects to the ground, guiding every celestial body in its orbit, and generating the tides.
These are only the main headings of Newton’s work, which first broke upon a totally unprepared public in the Principia Mathematica of 1687. Innumerable individual discoveries and penetrating observations flow from these overarching categories. The Principia is universally considered to be the greatest work of science ever written. Newton published an adjunct work, On Optics, in 1702. It is considered to illustrate in exemplary fashion how to write a science textbook. But these epochal texts are only one-half of Newton’s literary achievement. We know today that he spent almost his entire life writing a whole other book. This work consists of many separate but interlocked parts. If we were to give it a single title, it might be “History of the Corruption of the Soul of Man.” It is five million words long—perhaps the minimum number of words required to cover the all-encompassing subject of mankind’s troubled relationship to goodness and God.
This “History” consists of hundreds of glittering treatises and fragments of treatises on alchemy, chronology, mythology, the history of Christianity, the interpretation of biblical prophecy, and much more. We find in it none of the astonishingly brave and astute overturning of paradigms that characterize the Principia Mathematica. Newton was a pious Christian who believed the Bible was the word of God; that Noah and the Flood were real; and that the world began in 6000 BC—and he never goes beyond those boundaries. But his concept of Christ’s relationship to God was heretical for his times. That is why, when Newton was alive, almost no one knew that he was writing this “second book.” Newton made sure they didn’t know.
The thousands of pages of this treasure trove of nonscientific writings were packed into two metal trunks that were hardly ever opened during the two centuries that they remained stored away on the estate of Newton’s descendants. Suddenly, in 1936, the papers were auctioned off to the public at Sotheby’s in London. Now we know that, however astonishingly diverse their contents seem, a single thread runs through them all: Everywhere, Newton is charting the descent of man’s soul from perfection through constant falling-off and fretful renewals until, not far in our own future (Newton suggests 2060), everything ends with an apocalypse followed by a radically transformed world. Everywhere, Newton seems to be asking: What happened to us? We were once perfect; why are we now so far from that? How can we reclaim our birthright? What form did it take?
During the two centuries that these writings lay hidden away, a myth was fostered of Newton as a genius of incandescent brilliance when he formulated his equations during the day, and an exhausted, doddering fool when he scribbled away at his nonscientific observations during the night. This rumor may have originated in part with orthodox Christian theologians shaken to the core by the fear that Newton’s unimpeachably towering intellect m
ight have proved some of their basic assumptions to be wrong. Rivals and envious friends may have contributed to these rumors. And Newton himself my have found it advantageous to encourage them as much as he could.
The 1936 auction at Sotheby’s was the first step in a lengthy process that would see the scholarly world only very gradually awaken to the realization that Newton had made a whole other statement to the world. Slowly, this new Summa Theologica made its way into some of the great libraries of the world; over the past eighty years, scholars have read its treatises with escalating attention. In 1998, Cambridge’s Newton Project, currently based at Oxford University, began to make these documents available online; as of June 2016, 6.4 million words had been posted.5
Scholars now see that Newton deployed his genius just as powerfully over his nonscientific writings as he did over his scientific discoveries. In the words of Steven Snobelen, that “only now are scholars beginning to study Newton’s manuscript corpus . . . to reconstruct a holistic view of the man in which his theology and natural philosophy are seen as equally important elements of the same grand unified project, the restoration of man’s original pristine knowledge of God and the world.”6
There is still reluctance to outright call this “second book” of Isaac Newton’s a “Principia Theologica” or a “Principia Ethica,” and to think of it as a companion, even a corrective, volume to the Principia Mathematica. But now that we know that Newton’s untempered intellect animates every one of these treatises, it’s possible to say, along with the Newton scholar James T. Force, that
this kind of simplistic, “two-Newton” interpretation—one a young, brilliant scientist, the second a senile religious nut case—went by the boards when the Yahuda materials, and others, which were auctioned at Sotheby’s in London in 1936 showed that Newton was working on these “unscientific” topics throughout his adult life and was, in fact, working on them at the very times that he did his greatest scientific writings.7
We can today see the possibility that one man, a product of many intellectual and religious currents in the seventeenth century, could write great scientific works, great works in church history, in biblical interpretation, and so on, as part of one great enterprise, that of understanding man and his place in the grand scheme of God’s creation.
Just who was this astonishing man who invented modern science while writing a book of a thousand treatises on the state of the soul of mankind? Did he in fact eat, drink, and sleep like any other man? Let’s begin with a brief biography of Sir Isaac Newton.
The prodigious and tormented life of Isaac Newton began on a small farm in the hamlet of Woolsthorpe, in Lincolnshire, England, on Christmas Day, 1642 (January 4, 1643, in most of continental Europe). His father, also Isaac, a competent if illiterate farmer, died three months before he was born. The infant Isaac, so tiny he could fit into a quart mug, wasn’t expected to live, but he survived until the age of eighty-four, dying on March 20, 1727.
At the time of Isaac Newton’s birth, it was believed that a “posthumous”—a child born after a parent’s death—was blessed with healing powers and destined for greatness.8 Certainly the child Isaac would have needed a degree of special inner power to get through the first decade of his life. When he was three, his mother, Hannah, married a sixty-two-year-old vicar and moved into his house a mile and a half away, leaving Isaac with his maternal grandparents. (She returned when he was ten, her second husband having died, and brought three stepsiblings with her.)
We know nothing of what Isaac did when he was in the care of his grandparents. Did he roam the woods, find solace in nature, and in his loneliness learn to inhabit a world of (as James Gleick writes) “forms, forces, and spirits, some real and some imagined”9—a world that helped him form the uncanny faculty of intuition that (as his colleague William Whiston claimed fifty years later) helped Newton arrive at truths before he’d worked out the mathematics that would lead him there?
Virtually motherless from the age of three to ten, Newton must have felt all the more keenly the lack of a father. Critic Frank Manuel wondered if Newton’s all-consuming search to find proof of God’s existence through his activities in the world did not stem in part from his yearning to find traces of his biological father. Scholar Gale Christiansen believes that Newton’s twofold abandonment “played a significant if not decisive role in the development of his sensitive temperament and always enigmatic character” and explains why, in his years at Cambridge, “somber and secretive, he moved about his shuttered rooms like some gray disheveled ghost.”10 Other scholars view the effects as more devastating, one commenting that Newton “grew up isolated as much by a shamed sense of abandonment as by his overweening intellect, emerging as a psychopathic cornucopia of simmering rage and icy disdain.”11
Hannah managed the estates of her two dead husbands well enough that by the end of the 1650s the Newton-Ascoughs were one of the thousand wealthiest landowning families in England (wealthy meant an income of £700 a year or more); she could afford to send Newton to the King’s School in Grantham, seven miles away, where he took a room above the shop of the local apothecary. The school taught much Latin and some Greek, but Newton’s real interest lay in making scale models of windmills (including one with a mouse on a treadmill turning the mill and grinding wheat);12 of watermills that he placed in streams; of a four-foot-high water clock that still told the right time years after he went to Cambridge—of paper lanterns, kites with candles attached, sundials, and for his friends’ sisters, “little tables, cupboards & other utensils” where they could “set their babies & trinkets.”13 Newton wrote poems; one was recited to William Stukeley by an eighty-two-year-old woman who told him she had been beloved of the young Newton.*2 He also drew, decorating “his whole room with pictures of his own making, [of king’s heads,] birds, beasts, men, ships & mathematical schemes, & very well designed.”14
Recently commentators have questioned whether Newton really was a “child engineer”; they believe Stukeley was too quick to accept as truth what was really a sort of village mythology vis-à-vis Newton. All agree that Newton was remote, arrogant, quick to take offense, and did well at school only when pushed—and then he did superbly. Early on Newton showed a certain steely toughness; when sufficiently aggravated by a school bully much bigger than himself, he beat him to a pulp. This toughness served him well when, some years later, he slid a jackknife under his eyeball to see how the light changed when he changed the shape of his eye; and it served him well when, a mere three years later, he wrote the Principia and changed the shape of the universe.
With one more year to go in school, Newton’s mother called him back to Woolsthorpe; she wanted her eldest son to become a gentleman farmer. Newton tried; but assigned tasks always disintegrated around this young man lost in the world of books. Newton’s schoolmaster had glimpsed his amazing potential; he begged his mother to send him back to school; Newton’s uncle, a Cambridge-trained cleric, added his voice. Reluctantly, Hannah let her son return to King’s School. He graduated head of his class and enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1661.
A secret art my soul prepares to try,
If prayers can give me, what the wars deny.
three crowns distinguishd here in order, doe
present thir objects, to my doubtful view.
Earths crown thats at my feet, I can disdain:
which heavy is, & at the best but vain.
but now a crown of thorns I gladly greet,
sharp is this crown, but not so sharp as sweet.
the radiant crown, which I above me see,
is that of glory, & eternity.
(STUKELEY, “MEMOIR OF NEWTON”)
An astounding mind, of unprecedented and seemingly unlimited capaciousness, incapable of superficiality and addicted to profundity, began to unfold in a tiny students’ quarters next to Trinity Chapel. Newton was registered as a “sizar”; he performed menial tasks for students to keep his tuition down. Newton did this in body only;
his mind was already beginning to roam through the universe of knowledge. He studied eighteen to twenty-two hours a day seven days a week. In his first year, the lean and hungry yeoman farmer’s son chewed up, swallowed, digested, and rejected much of Plato and Aristotle. In his second year, Descartes’s Geometrie turned him into a mathematician, though he would soon reject many aspects of Descartes’s philosophy. Newton drank in Kepler and Galileo and other mathematicians near his own century, then circled restlessly back to the pre-Socratics of ancient Greece. In his third year, he began to create his own mathematics.
Instruction was rarely randomly distributed at Cambridge. The school was ruled by Aristotelianism. Enormously prestigious, it basically prepared young men for government or the ministry. Who you knew counted for a lot. Isaac Barrow, the first Lucasian Professor of Mathematics and a gifted mathematician in his own right, saw Newton’s genius and took him under his wing. He coaxed him into sending a mathematical paper around and was the first to witness the odd mixture of pride and fear in Newton’s eyes when mathematicians twice his age treated him with adulation. Newton was already on the road to becoming a tormented genius.
The Great Plague of 1665–66 closed Cambridge for eighteen months; Newton spent the time on his mother’s farm at Woolsthorpe. He would call this period of his life “the prime of my age for invention.”15 Here Newton invented calculus, laid the foundations for the law of universal gravitation, and began to structure the laws of motion. Computing in the fields (perhaps lying beside the apple tree from which the famous apple fell), he became, at age twenty-four, the greatest mathematician in the world. Nobody knew it, except, perhaps, himself.
Newton had matriculated as a B.A. before the plague; back at Cambridge he took up a fellowship. At Woolsthorpe he had performed a revolutionary set of experiments that proved that white light was made up of the seven colors of the rainbow. The whole world had thought the opposite was true: that white light was primary, and the spectrum issued from it. His findings were published in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions and set up an awed furor that went on for four years. Newton’s ability to ignore received opinion and make the world un-receive it was beginning to make its disruptive, astounding presence known.