The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton
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Millenarianism became especially popular in England, where John’s Book of Revelation was a source of intense interest for a group of thinkers who wanted to know exactly when the Kingdom of Christ would come.
The upper classes of England were often as frightened by life and its uncertainties as were the poor and the illiterate they looked down upon with disdain. The prophetic books of the Bible became the fortune-tellers and crystal balls of aristocrats, university dons, physicians, and barristers. The greatest minds of the day—Isaac Newton, John Locke, Henry More, Robert Boyle, and many more—studied Daniel and Revelation with the same seriousness that physicist Stephen Hawking breathes into the study of black holes today, or linguist Noam Chomsky brings to his scathing comments on American democracy. Beneath the dreaming spires of Oxford and Cambridge, in the great manor houses of the countryside, in the living quarters of cathedrals, natural philosophers and Anglican divines wrestled with the Whore of Babylon or galloped beside the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. They counted the horns on the Beast from the Sea and sounded the depths of the bottomless pit, watching anxiously as the dragon’s tail swiped one-third of the stars from the sky. All strove mightily to undo the Gordian knot that was the Book of Revelation.
Most of these men were unmarried. The muse of prophecy, waltzing her way through the seven scrolls in Revelation as seductively as Salome ever danced the dance of the seven veils, was the mistress of them all. She beckoned, and they followed; they held back, and she let slip another secret. These men of note circled each other warily, each jealous of what she might have whispered to the other.
Scholars Buchwald and Feingold report that
Newton is said to have refused to see Richard Bentley [Master of Trinity College and preeminent classical scholar] for an entire year because the latter dared to inquire whether Newton “could demonstrate” that a prophetic day [such as were found in Daniel and Revelation] denoted “a year in their completion.” According to William Whiston, Newton was offended by Bentley’s challenge because he interpreted the request “as invidiously alluding to his being a mathematician; which science was not concerned in this matter.”21
The same Bentley argued so vociferously with his fiancée over a passage in Revelation that she broke down in tears. Was this because he’d spoken too harshly to her? Or because she disagreed with him? Or was it because the future Mrs. Bentley had suddenly realized that a marriage to Mr. Bentley would be a ménage à trois—an eternal triangle of herself, her husband, and John of Patmos? Whatever the case, she married him anyway.22
In August 1680, in a letter to mathematician John Sharp, philosopher Henry More described how much he had enjoyed an evening spent discussing Revelation with Isaac Newton.
For after his reading of the Exposition of the Apocalypse which I gave him, he came to my chamber, where he seem’d to me not only to approve my Exposition as coherent and perspicacious throughout from the beginning to the end, but (by the manner of his countenance which is ordinarily melancholy and thoughtful, but then mighty lightsome and cheerful, and by the free profession of what satisfaction he took therein) to be in a manner transported.23
This letter gives us a glimpse of a more tender side to Isaac Newton, though later More would be pained to discover that Newton hadn’t changed his views one bit after reading More’s exposition.
Newton was close to the Swiss mathematical genius Nicholas Fatio de Duillier, who understood the Principia in depth and shared Newton’s passion for biblical prophecy. Fatio had a fantastic linguistic gift and was said to speak fifty-two languages; you might have thought this would help him interpret prophecy, but it only helped him to go overboard. He saw the entire Bible as a Book of Revelation, believing the serpent in the Garden was the Roman Empire, Eve was the pristine Christian Church, and Adam was the clergy caught in between. Fatio glimpsed Apocalypse, martyrs, and the papacy behind almost every paragraph of Job, Psalms, Proverbs, and much more. His damn-the-torpedoes approach to the prophetic texts was one of the few strains in his relationship with Newton, who chided him gently in a letter: “I am glad you have taken the prophecies into consideration & I believe there is much in what you say about them, but I fear you indulge too much in fancy in some things.”24
Not all eminent Europeans, especially busy generals and anticlerical philosophers, took the Book of Revelation seriously. In 1712, the mathematician William Whiston contacted Prince Eugene of Savoy (comrade in arms of the Duke of Marlborough) to tell him the prince’s victory over the Turks at Corfu, along with the Peace of Karlowitz, were fore-told in Revelation 9:15. In response, “the prince sent Whiston fifteen guineas and a note thanking him for bringing it to the prince’s attention that he ‘had the honor to be known to St. John.’”25 In France, the hater of Catholicism and iconoclastic writer Voltaire wittily remarked: “Sir Isaac Newton wrote his comment upon the Revelation to console mankind for the great superiority he had over them in other respects.”26
“Zeus himself intends a prophet’s revelations to be incomplete, so that humanity may miss some part of Heaven’s design.”
These words are spoken by Phineus, the blind seer in Apollonius of Rhodes’s epic poem The Voyage of Argo. The seer had once disclosed Zeus’s intentions, and the god had punished him by blinding him.*627
Did Zeus know, as Doc Emmett Brown puts it in the hit 1980s film trilogy Back to the Future, that knowledge of the future can cause a rupture in the space-time continuum and change the present and the past? We don’t know whether Newton believed this, but we do know that he believed God intended that the prophecies in Daniel and Revelation should be understood only after the prophesied events had gone by; God had designed his hieroglyphs in such a way that we can only know the future once it has become the past.
That being said, there was a good reason for interpreting biblical prophecy even after the prophesied events had taken place. It was to demonstrate the existence of God. Scholar Matt Goff writes: “Since the Bible was thought to be divinely inspired, one can ‘prove’ that human history is all carried out according to a divine plan by showing how historical events correlate to biblical prophecy. . . . This work [Revelation] attempts to demonstrate that God orchestrates human history.”28
Prophecy wasn’t about the prophet, Newton insisted. It was about God. God had dictated the future history of mankind to John so that, once that future history had become the past, you could match it up with the actual facts of history and demonstrate that there was a God. John should not get a swelled head over this.
In Newton’s words:
The folly of Interpreters has been, to foretell times and things by this Prophecy [John’s], as if God designed to make them prophets. By this rashness they have not only exposed themselves, but brought the prophecy also into contempt. The design of God was much otherwise. He gave this and the Prophecies of the Old Testament, not to gratify men’s curiosities by enabling them to foreknow things, but that after they were fulfilled they might be interpreted by the event, and his own Providence, not the Interpreters, be then manifested thereby to the world. For the event of things predicted many ages before, will then be a convincing argument that the world is governed by providence.29
But Newton and his fellow prophecy enthusiasts were only human, and they couldn’t resist trying to find out what the future might hold for the seventeenth century, in particular, when Christ would return and the End Times begin. But the real thrust of Newton’s monumental examination of Revelation was to unveil the future events God had dictated to John so that Newton could demonstrate that they jibed with the actual facts of history.
Newton prepared himself for the task of interpreting Daniel and Revelation with a diligence that puts to shame today’s biblical prophecy mavens looking for a trip to the future as easy as hitting the keys of a computer. Richard Westfall writes:
First of all, with his customary thoroughness Newton established a proper text for Daniel and Revelation. He compared twenty different editions of Revelation an
d two manuscript versions, scouring “individual passages such as he could find them in ancient commentators” such as Cyprian, Irenaeus, and Tertullian. Rather early, he composed a Variantes Lectiones Apocalypticae (“Variant Apocalyptic Readings”) which proceeded through Revelation verse by verse, indicating variant readings from his many sources.30
The texts of Daniel and Revelation are peppered with surrealist hieroglyph-like images. Newton called these symbolic images prophetic figures or prophetic hieroglyphs. He believed that in the beginning of the world mankind shared a universal language written in hieroglyphs. All prophets worldwide shared a second-generation hieroglyphic language. The hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt were a first cousin to this prophetic language, which was, as scholar Michael Murrin explains, a “common symbolic discourse, resembling a code which could be broken or a forgotten language which could be recovered.”31
Newton wrote:
As critics for understanding the Hebrew consult also other Oriental Languages of the same root, so I have not feared sometimes to call in to my assistance the eastern expositors of their mystical writers. . . . For the language of the Prophets, being hieroglyphical, had affinity with that of the Egyptian Priests & eastern wise men & therefore was anciently much better understood in the East then it is now in the west.32
When we watch Isaac Newton scouring the ancient literatures of the world for help in interpreting Daniel and Revelation, he comes across to us as an extremely buttoned-down seventeenth-century version of Indiana Jones racing in hot pursuit of the lost Ark of the Covenant or the ever-vanishing Holy Grail. There’s a touch of the romantic in the source books Newton uses. One is the Oneirocriticon, or Interpretation of Dreams, written by one Achmet, who preferred to be called the son of Sereim, dream interpreter to Mámún, Caliph of Babylonia. We know today that this extraordinary text, from which Freud borrowed the title for his own Interpretation of Dreams, was actually written in the tenth century AD by an anonymous Byzantine Christian.
The Oneirocriticon was based on the Oneirocritica (also translated as Interpretation of Dreams) written in the middle of the second century AD by the Hellenistic Greek Artemidorus of Daldis. Legend has it that Artemidorus copied many of his dream interpretations from the ancient monuments of Egypt, Persia, and India. Some of these “dream graffiti” are said to have come from the “Dream Book” of Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria from 669 to 626 BC.
Ashurbanipal’s great loves were war and learning. Pillaging the homes of the more literary of his conquered adversaries helped him build a library of thirty thousand cuneiform tablets. The king’s “Dream Book” was discovered in the ruins of this library early in the nineteenth century—or not: no trace of the book remains today. Ashurbanipal’s journal of nocturnal adventure was said to be the final link in a chain of dream books stretching back to 5000 BC. (The king supposedly wrote on a tablet found in his library the tantalizing words, “I have examined stone inscriptions from before the Flood.”33)
Another sourcebook Newton used derived from the shifting cultures of the Middle East two centuries before Christ. By the fourth century BC, the use of Hebrew as the vernacular language in Palestine was in steady decline. By the second century, Aramaic was the language of choice, and Palestinians no longer learned Hebrew. Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible began to appear, usually taking the form of semi-paraphrases in Aramaic with plenty of commentary.
These new texts were called targumin (“translations,” sing. targum). Newton used the Targum Jonathan ben Uzziel, aka Targum Onkelos, which was probably written in the first century AD though the final version, a Latin translation used by Newton, wasn’t completed until the fourth century AD.
Rabbi Jonathan ben Uzziel was a man after Newton’s heart; it’s said this prodigious rabbi studied Torah so intensely that “the birds flying over him were burnt to death.”34 The mathematician used the rabbi’s targum under the title of Chalde Paraphrastas (Chaldean Semiparaphrases).
Here is Newton using the Oneirocriticon and the Chalde Paraphrastas as he works his way toward the meaning of the prophetic figure “locust”:
Locusts are generally referred to a multitude of enemies—If any king or Potentate see Locusts come upon a place, let him expect a powerful multitude of enemies there: & look what hurt the Locusts do the enemy will do mischief proportionally. Ind. Pers. Ægypt. in Achmet. c. 300. . . .
13. Wild beasts also by reason of their feeding upon vegetables, & preying upon one another signify Kingdoms of the Earth with their armies. A particular Beast, as in Daniels prophesies, signifies a particular kingdom, & Beasts in general kingdoms in general. Come ye, assemble all the Beasts of the field, come to devour. Chal. Paraphr.35
Newton believed the fact that God himself had created the prophecies of Daniel and Revelation meant that they were eminently decipherable. “If it cannot be understood,” he queried, “then why did God give it? Does he trifle?”36 They were simply expressed with simple meanings. “Truth is recognized as such by its simplicity and harmony,” Newton wrote, admonishing us to
choose those constructions which, without straining, reduce things to the greatest simplicity. . . . Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusing of things. As the world, which to the naked eye exhibits the greatest variety of objects, appears very simple in its internal constitution when surveyed by a philosophic understanding, and so much the simpler, the better it is understood, so it is in these visions. It is the perfection of all God’s works that they are done with the greatest simplicity.37
The language of biblical prophecy was consistent from the first page of the Bible to the last: “John did not write in one language, Daniel in another, Isaiah in a third, and the rest in another,” Newton declared; all the prophets “wrote in one and the same mystical language.”38
There were no garish cosmic extravaganzas in the Book of Revelation. What Newton found instead were commonsensical down-to-earth people and places. The prophets consistently employed an “analogy between the world natural & [the] world politique”;39everything in Revelation could be translated into a political or social entity. Manuel explains that Newton worked out a dictionary of historical, political, and ecclesiastical equivalents for the images and symbols in prophetic literature. Once an appropriate political translation of any given “prophetic hieroglyph” had been determined, the same meaning had to apply whenever it appeared in a book of prophecy. The tests of truth were constancy and consistency.*740
If you were looking for the wild and fantastic, you would be disappointed. Everything worldly (for example, men, beasts, insects, greenery, and so on), and everything cosmic (for example the sun, the stars, the planets, and so forth), always referred to a political entity. “Heaven” always meant a mundane throne or court or honors bestowed by a court. “Eye” did not have the mystical aspect that is imputed to the Masonic eye on the American dollar; it always meant worldly knowledge. “Beast,” though it may make us think of monsters, always referred to “a body politique & sometimes a single person, . . . or an army whereby kingdoms are usually founded and upheld.” (“If any man interpret a Beast to signify some great vice,” adds Newton, “this is to be rejected as his private imagination.)41 “Woman” always meant a church—and when we know this we know that we will never find anything risqué in Newton’s interpretation of the Book of Revelation.
Our interpretations must never be personal. Newton tells us we should “rely rather upon the traditions of the ancient Sages than upon the suggestions of private fancy.”42 Propriety, reason, simplicity, harmony: these qualities define the character of a prophetic text, and they also define the character of the prophet and of the interpreter of prophecy. Newton believed, writes Manuel, that divinely inspired prophets were never
enthusiasts, ranters, men who spoke with tongues. . . . [The prophet was, rather,] immensely learned, of impeccable moral virtue, a man who had devoted himself to years of study, and who when properly prepared was the perfect vehicle fo
r God’s word. . . . [He was] a supremely rational man, a man worthy of receiving a message from the Divine Reason through the agency of the prophetic spirit.43
The most famous of all the seventeenth-century interpreters of divine prophecy, Joseph Mede, came close to fitting this description. Mede (1586–1639) entered Christ’s College, Cambridge, when he was fifteen, and in the course of his stay there (he became a don) mastered biblical scripture, philology, world history, mathematics, physics, botany, anatomy, astrology, and the Semitic languages. He must have had a gift for connecting with people as well as for connecting with Christ through the Book of Revelation, for as a Cambridge don he was constantly surrounded by admiring pupils (the poet John Milton was one of them), and he carried on an immense correspondence with most of the learned men of Europe. He died at age fifty-three, probably from overwork.
Mede wrote what is today arguably the most unread masterpiece in the history of English literature. This was the Clavis Apocalyptica (Key to the Apocalypse), which appeared in Latin in 1627. Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell was greatly taken by this book and ordered that it be translated into English and a copy placed near the pulpit of every Puritan Church in England and Scotland. The translation, titled Key of the Revelation Searched and Demonstrated, appeared in 1643, and did end up in many churches.
So Mede’s Clavis Apocalyptica was certainly read in its time—and by no one more avidly than Sir Isaac Newton—but when the Age of Reason dawned and the idea that God had dictated the prophetic books of the Bible became untenable, Mede’s book began to lose favor and was quickly relegated to the attics of the scholars who had once pored over it with delight.