Newton took his M.A. in 1668 and succeeded Isaac Barrow as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1669, still only twenty-six. In 1671 he became the first person in the world to build a reflecting telescope. It did not receive light through a lens but reflected it from a concave mirror; Newton ground the lens himself and also made the tools to build it. He sent a copy to the Royal Society in London; it created a sensation, being much shorter than a refracting telescope and supplying many times the magnification.
Beginning in 1684, the astronomer Edmund Halley, having seen with astonishment some of Newton’s unpublished work, coaxed, cajoled, and bullied Newton into writing the Principia Mathematica, which was completed in 1687. Snobelen writes that this masterpiece
introduced not only a powerful, new mathematical physics with which natural philosophers could describe both terrestrial and celestial mechanics with unprecedented precision, but also demonstrated the law-like nature of the cosmos. . . . [Moreover, Newton] through his publications made lasting contributions to the inductive and experimental methods in science.16
Newton’s fame spread. Soon he was the object of Europe-wide adulation. He moved from Cambridge to London in 1692. Not long after his arrival, he was pursuing two careers, the first as warden and then master of the London Mint, the second as president of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, founded in 1660 and the oldest—and today still the most prestigious—organization of scientists in the world.
In both of these positions, Newton displayed an excellent grasp of worldly affairs and succeeded admirably. At the mint, he oversaw a complete makeover of Britain’s coinage, designed a number of coins, and pursued counterfeiters with a vengeance. While at Cambridge he had in his clandestine writings on Christianity relentlessly tracked down fraud and corruption in the Catholic Church; now he relentlessly tracked these down in the real world.
Isaac Newton was a difficult person to get along with. In all his dealings, both private and public, he could be mean and vindictive. This served him well when it came to tracking down counterfeiters. It served him badly in his friendships, many of which were not friendships so much as sustained and difficult duels. He had a secret: he belonged to a heretical sect of Christianity—he was an Arian—and had many known, he might at the very least have lost his livelihood. This was another tension serving to keep him apart from people. Edward Dolnick writes—and all would concur—that “anyone dealing with Newton needed the delicate touch and elaborate caution of a man trying to disarm a bomb.”17 Victims of his roiled, suspicious, and unhappy mind included the Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed and the natural philosophers Robert Hooke and Gottfried Leibniz; all three came, and justifiably, to despise him.
Although Newton seems not to have been interested in women as such, and was a virgin all his life, in midlife he formed a friendship (that seemed more than a friendship) with the brilliant and charming Swiss mathematician Nicholas Fatio de Duillier, who was half his age. There was some talk between them of Fatio’s moving to Cambridge to be near Newton. Then Fatio abruptly disappeared (into the Continent), and, a month later, Newton had a nervous breakdown (regarding the causes of which, however, there is no easy answer). In sum, Newton was capable of reasonable friendship with those who were not too far below him in intelligence, such as John Locke and Edmund Halley. (This wasn’t snobbery; Newton’s almost unimaginable brilliance created a real gap between himself and other people.)
Newton died in 1728, aged 84, and was given a funeral at Westminster Abbey usually reserved for heads of state and peers of the realm. A huge monument was erected for him in the abbey. There his soul rested, presumably in peace, for one century, for two centuries—until, in early 1936, it awakened with a shock and looked around.
Isaac Newton was about to make a comeback. He was going to introduce new ideas to the world for a second time.
The man who would release the contents of Newton’s two containers of nonscientific writings to the world was a corpulent redheaded British neo-Nazi named Gerard Wallop, who was in 1936 the direct descendant of Newton’s stepniece Catherine Conduitt (née Barton) and therefore the custodian of the locked trunks. Also known as Lord Lymington, ninth Earl of Portsmouth (after the estate), Wallop admired Hitler and Mussolini, was stridently anti-Semitic, and advocated turning England into a federation of medieval fiefdoms run by dictatorial aristocrats just like himself.
It’s ironic that the murky soul that was Lord Lymington’s should have been the one to introduce to the world the bulk of Newton’s brilliantly illuminating nonscientific writings. But Lymington needed money badly—not, as has been reported, to fund the British Fascist Party but rather to pay death duties on his late aunt’s wealthy estate and for his own divorce. That’s why, on July 13 and 14, 1936, 327 lots of manuscript pages covered with Newton’s tiny, obsessively tidy handwriting went on the auction block at Sotheby’s in London. When the gavel fell for the last time, the greater part of what were then called the Portsmouth Papers had been sold for £9,000 ($30,000 today).*3
Most of the items were sold, but the knowledge they contained might not have gotten very far into the world if it hadn’t been for two guardian angels, so to speak, who, though they didn’t attend the auction, were well apprised of it and hastened to purchase large portions of the papers indirectly.
One was a heavyset Jew from Jerusalem who, avers Professor Richard H. Popkin, was once “one of the most hated people in Israel.”18 This was Abraham Yahuda (1877–1951), who received a Ph.D. in Semitic languages from the University of Nuremburg at the age of sixteen. Yahuda rapidly became perhaps the world’s leading scholar of ancient Semitic languages; during his lifetime he was probably the only person on the planet who could speak ancient Assyrian.
Yahuda was a fervent Zionist as a young man, but for thirty years he quarreled ferociously with Zionist leaders as to what form the state of Israel should take. Yahuda didn’t want it to be a modern techno-scientific state but rather a resurrection of ancient Judaea and Israel; he even insisted he be its president! Eventually the great scholar renounced Zionism, leaving Palestine permanently and pursuing an academic career that took him to the greatest universities of the world and enabled him to befriend other exceptional figures. One of these was Albert Einstein, whom Yahuda helped escape from Nazi Germany in the late 1930s.
The other “guardian angel” who would ensure the world felt the presence of Newton’s newly released manuscripts was an Englishman as slim as Yahuda was heavyset and possessed of an equally subtle and inquring mind. This was the Cambridge don and eminent economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), who literally wrote the book on Keynesian economics and who served as an economic adviser and emissary for British prime ministers Winston Churchill and Clement Atlee. Yahuda was somewhat retiring; Keynes was not and led a brilliant social life, lavishly entertaining artists and intellectuals at his country estate, and, despite the fact that he was gay (or perhaps because of it), marrying a ballerina from Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.
Yahuda acquired a considerable portion of the theology manuscripts made available at the Sotheby’s auction. Keynes, probably just to keep them together, scooped up the bulk of the alchemical writings. Poring over the manuscripts, both men immediately saw how wrong Voltaire was when he declared that Newton worked at his nonscientific writings “to relieve the fatigue of severer studies.”19 They saw that Newton had focused the same vast piercing intelligence on alchemy and religion as he had on mathematics and physics; that he had explored these areas exhaustively and done so virtually from youth to old age; and that he had made new discoveries in both these fields. They both saw Newton’s overall achievement from two new and different perspectives. Keynes declared in a public address in 1942 that Newton “was not the first scientist of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheri
tance rather less than 10,000 years ago.”20
If Keynes believed Newton came close to being a magician, Yahuda believed he came close to being a Jew. The professor of Semitic languages was moved by Newton’s assertion that the universe was created and is ruled by a single God of providence and dominion, to whom Jesus is subordinate in his role of the executor of God’s will. These long-hidden writings on theology, which were essentially heretical, revealed Newton to be, wrote Yahuda, a “Judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides” who believed that “Jehovah is the unique god.”21
Keynes was intimately in touch with the highest heads of state and the most celebrated artists of his time; Yahuda swam in the deepest depths of academic endeavor; and neither hesitated to chat about the Newton papers and what they were discovering in them. Passing academics listened in. Keynes left his collection of Newton papers on alchemy to the Cambridge University Library in 1946, while Yahuda bequeathed his share to the Jewish National and University Library of Israel in Jerusalem in 1951. Since that time both sets of papers have been scrutinized carefully, with academics recognizing their importance. In the 1990s, a number of distinguished Newton scholars, including Professors Betsy Teeter Hobbs, Richard Westfall, and James Force, sought financial backing in Britain and America to publish a set of volumes of Newton’s nonscientific writings. None was forthcoming; but suddenly in 1998 a windfall came in the form of a large grant from the British government to finance a website dedicated to reproducing as many as possible of the Newton papers auctioned at Sotheby’s in 1936. As of 2017, the Newton Project has placed seven thousand works online and moving at the academic equivalent of ramming speed to put on many more.
But what exactly do these papers say? That, we will discover in the following seventeen chapters, as we try to plumb the deeper meanings of Isaac Newton’s “History of the Corruption of the Soul of Man.”
CHAPTER TWO
THE NEWTON CODE
“Sir Isaac Newton, Britain’s greatest scientist, predicted the date of the end of the world—and it is only 57 years away.”
Thus began the front-page story in London’s Daily Telegraph for February 22, 2003. The end-of-the-world date was 2060. The Telegraph added some details: “Newton, who was also a theologian and alchemist, predicted that the Second Coming of Christ would follow plagues and war and would precede a 1,000-year reign by the saints on earth—of which he would be one.”
So great is Isaac Newton’s reputation, and so worried was humankind in 2003, that newspapers all around the globe immediately picked up the story that the creator of modern science had predicted the world would end in 2060. On February 23, Maariv and Yediot Aharonot newspapers in Israel ran the story on their front page. On February 24, major news media in Canada, the United States, and Europe broke the disconcerting news. Word of the prediction surfaced on Internet sites in Latin America, South Africa, India, China, Japan, and Vietnam. Some websites played the story for laughs, one running a photo of a mushroom cloud with the caption: “Party like it’s 2060!”
The source of this alarming news was an unassuming Canadian academic named Stephen Snobelen. Assistant professor of the history of science at King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and one of the world’s leading experts on the nonscientific writings of Isaac Newton, Snobelen had come to London to act as a consultant for an hourlong BBC-2 TV documentary titled Newton: The Dark Heretic. As the documentary ends, he is shown standing beside the stacks in the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem, holding one of three Newton manuscripts known to carry the end-of-the-world date of 2060.
Several days before the show was aired, Snobelen, interviewed by the religion correspondent for the Telegraph, had casually let slip Newton’s date for the end of the world. No one could have been more surprised than the Canadian historian of science when, next morning, he saw the interview splashed across the front page of the Daily Telegraph with Newton’s apocalypse date screaming out of the title.1
Several months later, in an article in which he tried to explain why a simple prediction by Isaac Newton would cause such a furor worldwide, Snobelen, who is a cofounder of the online Newton Project and director of its Canadian branch, suggested that “Newton’s prediction became entangled in real history unfolding in early 2003.” Snobelen cited the war in Iraq; nuclear-capable missile rattling in North Korea; India, and Pakistan; and the global epidemic of SARS. “In the context of these times of jittery nerves,” he concluded, “it is perhaps not surprising that the 2060 story resonated so well with the public.”2
Anyone learning of Newton’s prediction in 2016 would have found much more cause for alarm. Conflict still rages in Iraq and Afghanistan and a bloody no-holds-barred civil war is tearing Syria apart. A ruthless terrorist army fond of public beheadings, ISIS, lays waste to large tracts of the Middle East as it fights to build a radical Islamic caliphate spanning the Arab world. These wars are driving millions of desperate refugees into Europe, where their presence is straining the once-solid superstructures of these long-established states. North Korea is rattling its nuclear-capable missiles more loudly than ever. A new virus, zika,*4 is spreading through South and Central America and threatening North America.
An even more dire problem looms over us. Newton believed the physical cause of the end of the world might be a diluvium ignis, a flood of fire. Today, global warming, aka climate change, is beginning to profoundly affect our planet. The Earth’s north and south polar ice caps, along with Greenland’s ice sheath, are melting so fast that our planet’s ocean levels are higher than they’ve ever been before. Experts warn that if we don’t drastically scale back man-made carbon emissions, the Earth will be 4° to 7°C (7.2°–12.6°F) warmer in 2100, a level of heat that mankind will find difficult to tolerate.
In April 2016, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced:
For 2016 year to date (January–March), the average temperature for the globe was 2.07 degrees F above the 20th-century average. . . . This was the highest temperature for this period in the 1880–2016 record, surpassing the previous record set in 2015 by 0.50 degrees F. The globally averaged sea surface temperature for the year to date was also highest on record, surpassing the same period in 1998 by 0.42 degrees F, the last time a similar strength El Niño occurred.3
Mankind has caused the problem by allowing carbon to escape into the atmosphere, and only mankind can fix the problem. Except that, in the United States, deregulated capitalism, which realizes trillions of dollars a year from the production of fossil fuels, is unalterably opposed to halting global warming and even to admitting there’s a problem. Moreover, a billionare apostle of deregulated capitalism (and denier of global warming), Donald Trump, has just become the forty-fifth president of the United States. “Our economic system and our planetary system are at war,”4 sums up Naomi Klein in her magisterial This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014). NOAA warns that if global warming goes on at the present rate, dire consequences await mankind soon after the middle of the twenty-first century.*5
Which takes us to about the year 2060.
Isaac Newton was arguably the leading expert of his day on the prophetic texts of the Bible. His 323-page Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John, published posthumously in 1733, would go into eleven editions. The 1936 Sotheby’s auction brought to light hundreds of pages of additional Observations-related treatises and drafts of treatises. Some revealed the heretical nature of Newton’s religious thinking; others made strikingly original comments about the Book of Revelation. Among the papers were three citing the 2060 end-of-world date.
In the decade before Newton was born, something akin to a Copernican revolution had taken place in the world of seventeenth-century English biblical-prophecy interpretation. The beloved and learned Cambridge don Joseph Mede had devised an innovative, quasi-scientific system for interpreting the Books of Daniel and Revelation. This system was the “Bible code” that, half a centur
y later, Isaac Newton adopted, with modifications and elaborations, for his Observations. This “Newton Code” was superior to anything that had come before; in this chapter, we’ll take a brief look at it. First, though, we’ll look at the mysterious author of Saint John’s Apocalypse/the Book of Revelation.
Probably about AD 90, a certain John, minister of seven proto-Christian churches in Asia Minor, was seized by Roman soldiers in Ephesus, put in chains, bundled aboard a boat, and transported seventy miles across the Aegean to the tiny Greek island of Patmos. Here he was flung into prison. His crime (or so he tells us) was vigorously defending “the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ.” This John was the Christian Jew who would channel the Book of Revelation from his prison cave.
That is practically all we know about the historical John, though there are plenty of myths. Isaac Newton cites one: “John was put by Nero into a vessel of hot oil, and coming out unhurt, was banished by him into Patmos.”5 Another says that while John was on his way to Patmos a storm blew up and a passenger was washed overboard. John prayed for help and the passenger was immediately washed back on board. For the rest of the trip, John preached to his suddenly attentive Roman guards. When he arrived, the governor of Patmos personally removed his chains and escorted him to his cell.6
Tourists can visit John’s cell today. Its entrance is hewn into a rocky mountainside sloping sharply down to the Aegean. Inside, flickering candles light up places on the wall framed in silver where the prophet rested his head or put his hands when he got up. On the stone floor, a railing traces out the spot where John lay down to sleep. On the ceiling, a painting shows him kneeling in ecstatic wonderment as Jesus dictates the Book of Revelation.7
The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton Page 2