The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton

by John Chambers

  And much more.

  The story, for those who can penetrate beneath its ultra-austere surface, is bizarre and macabre after the manner of the Spanish surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel, who hated the Catholic Church but must have known everything about it, because a severed hand appears out of nowhere in his film The Andalusian Dog (1929), and a saint on top of a sixty-foot pole is tempted by an alluring devil in his film Simon of the Desert (1965).

  Newton’s “Paradoxical Questions Concerning the Morals and Actions of Athanasius and his Followers” is a detective story, with Isaac Newton in the role of a sleuth relentlessly pursuing what must be the coldest cold case in history, one that took place thirteen hundred years before the investigator was born.

  The action of “Paradoxical Questions” unfolds on a wide canvas, including three big cities: (1) Alexandria, the Egyptian port that boasted three miles of colonnades, nine miles of wharves, the body of Alexander the Great (preserved in honey in a glass box), and a hundred bitterly warring religious and philosophical factions; (2) Constantinople, across the Bosporus from the ruins of Troy, turned into the eastern capital of the empire by Constantine, and today, in a richly expanded version, Istanbul, Turkey, with a population of 14 million; and (3) Phoenician Tyre, the ancient seaport from which, according to legend, Noah launched the ark and Saint Paul sailed for Rome. And there is the town, that of Nicaea, in Asian Turkey, today a sleepy resort town, but in AD 325 the bustling, agitated site of the paradigm-busting Council of Nicaea.

  From time to time the action skids to a stop in the deserts of Egypt, where Athanasius is exiled several times and where he writes incendiary letters and a brief incendiary biography of a saint.

  The dramatis personae consists of:

  Saint Anthony, a desert monk;

  Constantine, an emperor of Rome;

  Constantius, Constantine’s son, also an emperor of Rome;

  Arius, a heretic, the father of Arianism;

  Athanasius, a Trinitarian, the Father of Orthodoxy;

  Major and minor prelates whose names take on resonance as Newton’s narrative proceeds: Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, Bishop Alexander of Constantinople, Hosnius, Melitius, Arsenius, Macarias, and others;

  A number of women, only two of them having names: Helena, the dowager empress, Constantine’s mother; and Irene, Constantine’s sister. The rest are unnamed virgins and unnamed prostitutes;

  The Alexandrian mob in at least two incarnations.

  Richard Westfall writes that, for Newton:

  the corruptions of Scripture came relatively late. The earlier corruption of doctrine, which called for the corruption of Scripture to support it, occurred in the fourth century, when the triumph of Athanasius over Arius imposed the false doctrine of the trinity on Christianity.

  He became fascinated with the man Athanasius and with the history of the church in the fourth century, when a passionate and bloody conflict raged between Athanasius and his followers, on the one hand, and Arius, on the other. . . . Once started, Newton set himself the task of mastering the whole corpus of patristic literature [literature of the church fathers].3

  Westfall lists the myriad church fathers Newton studied to prepare his case against Athanasius. Irenaeus, Tertullian, Cyprian, Eusebius—the list goes on and on; probably Newton knew a hundred sources, and we’re left in no doubt that, whatever his bias, he knew everything there was to know or could be inferred about the Father of Orthodoxy.

  Saint Anthony, the archetypal tortured monk who virtually invented the system of monasteries, appears near the beginning of Newton’s story, because Athanasius as a teenager may have met him in the desert and been influenced by his teachings. But Newton reserves the bulk of his discussion of Anthony for the end of “Paradoxical Questions,” and it has made more sense to deal with that part of Athanasius’s story in a separate chapter (see chapter 6, “The Temptation of Saint Anthony”). Following, however, are some introductory words about Saint Anthony from Newton, which he bases on the historian Sozomen.

  [Anthony] received letters from Constantine the great, lost his parents in his youth, distributed his father’s lands amongst his towns-men, gave the rest of his goods to the poor, conversed with all wise men and imitated what was best in each, ate only bread & salt & drank only water, dined at sunset, often fasted two days or more, often watched all night, slept on a mat & frequently on the bare ground, never anointed nor bathed himself nor saw himself naked, was meek, prudent, pleasant, foreknew things, but dissuaded the monks from affecting it, spent his time in working, came often to the cities to defend the injured, interceded for them with the Presidents & great men who delighted to see & hear him, but immediately returned to the wilderness saying that as fishes cannot live on dry land so monks in cities lose their virtue.4

  Athanasius was born in Alexandria around 295 and died in 373. A tenth-century Arabic chronicle of Coptic patriarchs says his parents were pagan, and he converted his widowed mother to Christianity when he was a teenager.5 At about that time, his family was driven into the desert by Diocletian’s persecutions of the Christians. It may have been then that the zealous, rigid, fiery youth met the pious, charismatic Anthony and fell under the enchantment of his teachings on the Trinity.

  Athanasius returned to Alexandria in 313, immersed himself in the study of the scriptures, and caught the attention of Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, who made him his personal secretary when Athanasius was only twenty. In 325, Alexander brought Athanasius to the Council of Nicaea to argue the case for the doctrine of the Trinity. Athanasius succeeded admirably, if abrasively. He was on his way to becoming a forger.

  The adult Athanasius “allied ruthlessness to an acute theological mind,”6 writes Diarmaid MacCulloch. This self-appointed guardian of the Trinity could “frame a memorable phrase,” asserting, for example, that the equality of Son and Father was “like the sight of two eyes.”7 Edward Gibbon tells us Athanasius’s mind was “clear, forcible, and persuasive” but “tainted by the contagion of fanaticism.”8 Paul Johnson goes a step further, revealing that the archbishop of Alexandria (whom Athanasius became) was “a violent man, who regularly flogged his junior clergy and imprisoned his expelled bishops.”9 Newton makes the dark side of Athanasius his entire focus of his inquiry in “Paradoxical Questions.” He is, as we will see, not unpersuasive in making the case that the dark side of Athanasius is Athanasius. All the brilliance with which Newton wrote the Principia he aims with laser sharpness at the archbishop of Alexandria and his deeds. We will find cherry-picking and deductive logic in a wicked and furious partnership.

  The Council of Nicaea was convened because of the fiery rhetoric of the Alexandrian prelate Arius (AD 250/256–336), who declared that Christ was divine but not as divine as God. A swarthy, volatile Libyan, not ordained until he was more than fifty, Arius “provoked and infuriated opposition in Alexandria, including that of his bishop, Alexander.”10 Arius preached anywhere he could, subtly promoting his beliefs at the grassroots level by composing short, simple, sometimes racy songs that the workers in the mills and taverns, on the docks, could learn by heart. This was an early form of subliminal advertising! Arius was an admirer of Plato and spent much of his time trying to make Christianity presentable to pagan philosophers. But, despite his obvious rationality, he was hounded by accusations (from his enemies); seventeenth-century scholar William Cave picks up one: “Arius was a man ‘of a subtle and Versatil Wit, of a turbulent and unquiet Head, but which he vail’d with a specious Mask of Sanctity.’”11

  In AD 322, Emperor Constantine the Great (272–337) succeeded in welding the western and eastern parts of the Roman Empire into a single unified whole. He had made Christianity the official religion of Rome in 313, believing it could serve as a crucial binding agent for the empire.

  Constantine was a ruthless politician and military strategist who wasn’t without feeling or genius. He was tall and athletic, with a bull neck, a square face, blue eyes, and a peevish mouth. Indifferently educated,
Constantine campaigned much of his life and spoke Latin, Greek, Pict, Gaulish, Frankish, and at least one Asiatic dialect. He told the court chronicler, Eusebius Pamphilus, that at the battle of Milvian Bridge, near Rome—the last battle he had to win to become emperor—he saw “a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the inscription, CONQUER BY THIS.”12 Constantine decided he owed his victory to Christ—that the Christian deity was a god of battles who could be relied upon to protect him as long as he strove to be a decent Christian.

  The emperor lapsed badly when he murdered his first wife and one of his sons (perhaps for sound reasons of state) and tried to make up for it by showering Christians with churches, high office, and wealth and buying up entire towns and cities to make sure the inhabitants accepted the new religion. Increasingly he regarded himself as honorary bishop in chief and, says MacCulloch, “regularly delivered sermons to his no doubt slightly embarrassed courtiers.”13

  The pagan and Christian in Constantine combined to make him an extravagantly ambitious collector of religious relics. Constantine had pieces of the one true Cross packed into a hollow porphyry column on top of which bestrode a statue of himself. He made a nail from the Cross into a bit for his horse and slipped another nail in his tiara.14 The emperor oversaw the construction of the Church of the Twelve Apostles in Constantinople, placing in it twelve coffins ready to house the greatest relics of all: the remains of the twelve apostles. Peter and Paul had been buried in Rome; he transferred their bones to the church. The only coffin that got filled, however, was the thirteenth, his own, which he’d placed in the center of all the others.15

  In AD 320, his second year as ruler of a united Roman Empire, Constantine decided he had to deal with Arius’s heretical teachings, which were threatening to split the Christian Church. Constantine couldn’t afford this; Christianity really was helping bind the empire together. For months he tried to be conciliatory, even sending the Spanish bishop Hosnius to Alexandria to try to effect a reconciliation. But nothing availed, and Constantine, despairing, convened a conference at his summer palace at Nicaea, in Asia Minor, for the summer of 325.

  The emperor agreed to pay all transportation and lodging costs along the speedy Roman roads. He would pay all expenses during the conference. He would personally attend the sessions. And, at times, he would—begging the bishops’ indulgence, of course—say a word or two himself. The all-powerful Constantine the Great clearly meant business. The bishops acquiesced.

  In the summer of 325 the sun beat down on the shadowless scorched streets of Nicaea more pitilessly than ever, as if trying to burn through to the truth of every man and woman there. People of every color, trade, shape, size, in tatters, dressed richly, full of hope, fear, despair, surged through. Often they were brushed aside by clattering chariots that drove away wild dogs feeding on animal guts tossed into the center of the street from the butcher shops. The polyglot uproar was shot through with screams, laughter, and the bellowing of animals. The stench of animal dung, vomit, urine, and garbage mingled with the sharp aroma of fermented sauces and rotting fish. The smell of animal fat rose from burning altars.

  Inside the walls of the imperial residence, the heat and stench of the streets yielded to cool breezes from swaying fans and the musky odor of perfumes daubed on by the bishops. There were 318*10 of them in all, sitting around the white marbled walls like wary, startled birds of prey dressed in purple robes. Many of them bore the scars of Diocletian’s persecutions: an eye gouged out, a thumb sliced off, a leg dragging behind because its hamstring had been cut. At the opening ceremony Constantine, moving piously among these martyred priests, bent forward impulsively to kiss an empty eye socket or the flat stump of a thumb. Behind him there trod cautiously Bishop Hosnius, the council director, very tall, almost ninety years old, and bearing a thick, red, scythe-like scar that ran from the tip of his ear under his eye to his nose; this he had received during the Cordova persecutions.

  Constantine kept his word and attended regularly. Gibbon writes, “Leaving his guards at the door, he seated himself (with the permission of the council) on a low stool in the midst of the hall.”16 Eusebius, court chronicler and fawning flatterer, describes the emperor as “clothed in raiment which glittered as it were with rays of light, reflecting the glowing radiance of a purple robe.”17 Years later his nephew, the emperor Julian, remarked scornfully that Constantine “made himself ridiculous by his appearance—weird, stiff eastern garments, jewels on his arms, a tiara on his head, perched crazily on top of a tinted wig.”18 However he was garbed, that summer at the council he “listened with patience and spoke with modesty,” writes Gibbon.19

  The debates began. The bishops didn’t discuss the canon of the New Testament, as is often said. They debated regulations governing the clergy. The first they agreed to conveys the flavor of the whole: “If anyone in sickness has undergone surgery at the hands of physicians or has been castrated by barbarians, let him remain among the clergy. But if anyone in good health has castrated himself, if he is enrolled among the clergy he should be suspended and in future no such man should be promoted.”20 Other regulations included ordering the clergy not to live with any women except a mother, a sister, or an aunt. They tried to establish a proper date for Easter.

  The council now entered into a debate that would have direct bearing on the future of Christianity. This debate glittered with dialectics, smoldered with antipathies murmured in Christian piety, and was often confused, abstract, oversubtle, and generally mystifying. Arius, Athanasius, and their lieutenants argued fiercely over whether God and Christ were one or just a tiny bit different. The days were consumed in dialectic. Constantine grew impatient. The bishops trembled at their politely smiling emperor who had the power of life and death over every one of them. They hurried the process. Presumably at the urging of Hosius, Constantine suggested the Greek word homoousios (ὅμοούσιος), meaning “consubstantial,” or “of one substance,” be added to the final agreement to convey the appropriate relationship between God and Jesus Christ. The vote was called. It occurred to those Arians who were resisting that the word homoousios was just barely ambiguous enough to admit of a razor’s edge of difference between God and his Son. The final agreement, incorporating ὅμοούσιος, passed with just two dissenters. Arius was one. When the council ended he was excommunicated, his writings burned, and he was sent into exile in the remote Roman province of Illyricum.

  The battle to make the Trinity the central doctrine of the church had only just begun. It would end at the Council of Constantinople in 381, when the word ὅμοούσιος was officially accepted into the Nicene Creed, and it became a criminal offense to be an Arian.

  Hundreds of thousands of books, pamphlets, sermons, and tracts have been written about the use of the word ὅμοούσιος as it was first conceived at the Council of Nicaea. Newton wrote one of those tracts. It is probably the least known and the most brilliant ever written. Newton called his twenty-three-question-long treatise “Queries Regarding the Word ὅμοούσιος.” Following are the first two questions. They are the most important when it comes to understanding how Newton felt about the Christian Church. (All twenty-three queries can be found in appendix C.)

  Query 1. Whether Christ sent his apostles to preach metaphysics to the unlearned common people, and to their wives and children.21

  Newton enlarged on this query in this statement in the “Irenicum”:

  If you would know the meaning of the several names given to Christ in preaching the Gospel, you are to have recourse not to Metaphysicks & Philosophy but to the scriptures of the old Testament. For Christ sent not his disciples to preach Metaphysics to the common people & to their wives & children, but expounded to them out of Moses & the Prophets & Psalms the things concerning himself & opened their understanding that they might understand the scriptures & then sent them to teach all nations what he had taught them. And the Apostle bids us beware of vain philosophy.22

  And the second que
ry was as follows:

  Query 2. Whether the word ὁμοούσιος ever was in any creed before the Nicene; or any creed was produced by any one bishop at the Council of Nice for authorizing the use of that word.23

  Not even the most clairvoyant of the bishops assembled at Nicaea could have known that, in the Book of Revelation, John of Patmos and/or Jesus Christ had foretold the moment when the Roman Empire and the Christian world would start on the path to partnership. But Isaac Newton was certain that he had found that moment hidden among the prophetic hieroglyphs, and he tells us in his “Two Incomplete Treatises on Prophecy” that “the chief character of the sixth Dynasty was the dethroning of heathenism & enthroning of Christianity. And this is represented at the opening of the sixth seal by a description of the end of the heathen world, in the repetition of the Prophesy by the casting of the Dragon that old Serpent out heaven & exalting the Man-child up to the throne.”24

  Frank Manuel tells us that Newton’s “Paradoxical Questions”

  is a sharply argued historical brief, not untouched by irony, in which St. Athanasius too [like Jerome in Newton’s An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture] is demonstrated to be a manipulator of sacred records and a bearer of false witness against Arius. Newton’s attack on Athanasius took the form of what lawyers call a “consciousness of guilt” argument, designed to show that a series of actions performed by Athanasius were those of a man who knew he had committed a wrong and thereby tacitly admitted it.25

  Newton was trying to prove that the doctrine of the Trinity was wrong by proving that Athanasius was awful. But over and above this purpose, never far from his thoughts, was Newton’s overwhelming need to perform a detailed and complete autopsy on the body of early fourth-century Christianity, the better to know what toxins already inhabited it, what diseases were pending, and how it was that the religion of Noah, of the Jews, then of Christ had already, at that early date, become so vile and corrupt that it would turn into the Roman Catholic Church. If he knew all the stages of the disease, all the twists and turns of that process of corruption, then perhaps one day he would know how, if not to turn back the clock, then perhaps, just maybe, to ameliorate some of the problems of the body religious of his own time.