The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton

by John Chambers

  That night—or perhaps it was a few nights later; we don’t know for sure—Peter was taken outside the walls of Alexandria and executed. Legend has it that he bent his head, offered his neck to the soldiers, and said quietly, “Do what you have been commanded to do.” But none of the soldiers could bring himself to do what he had been commanded to do. Finally the legionnaires put a fund together, chose a soldier by lot, and paid him to decapitate Peter.6

  Melitius, along with many of the other prisoners, was sent to the salt mines at Phaeno in Palestine. And this was where the split, or schism, in the Church of Egypt that had been developing out of the heated debates between Peter and Meletius finally took concrete form. Gibbon writes: “The confessors who were condemned to work in the mines were permitted, by the humanity or the negligence of their keepers, to build chapels and freely to profess their religion in the midst of those dreary habitations.”7 For the next two years, Melitius preached to his fellow prisoners—and, it is possible, inadvertently to the pillars of salt surrounding him, as if they were among the sinners who, like Lot’s wife, stole a backward glance to watch God annihilate the sin-laden cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Melitius preached, planned, won recruits, and, when the persecution of the Christians ended and he was a free man, founded the Church of the Martyrs, which was not exclusively devoted to martyrs but insisted that Christians who had lapsed during the persecution undergo a lengthy period of repentance, following which their readmittance was almost, though not entirely, assured.*13

  Alexander, who was with Athanasius at the Council of Nicaea, had succeeded Peter as archbishop of the Trinitarian Church of Egypt. Alexander would be succeeded by Athanasius. The schismatic Church of the Martyrs, whose members called themselves Melitians, would become an increasing thorn in the side of Alexander and then of Athanasius. This was in part because the brainchild of Meletius had begun to incline itself toward the beliefs of Arius. Added to this, a third church, that of the Eusebeans, led by Eusebius in Bythnia—already semi-Arian and not enthusiastic about the doctrine of the Trinity—had begun to align itself tentatively with the Church of the Martyrs.

  Then, in 313, a miracle happened. It was engineered by Emperor Constantine. Hans Küng writes: “To the great delight of Christians, in 313 this cool master of realpolitik, with his co-regent, Licinius, granted unlimited freedom of religion to the whole empire. In 315 the punishment of crucifixion was abolished, and in 321 Sunday was introduced as a legal festival and the church was allowed to accept legacies.”8

  Christians rejoiced in their sudden freedom. But it was the freedom to quarrel as well as to grow. Over the next dozen years, the Christianity of the East increasingly assumed the form of what the French call a panier de crabes—a “basket of crabs”—that is, an organization whose people metaphorically claw and crawl over one another to get to the top. The followers of Melitius, the bishop who had laid the foundations for a new church while toiling in the salt mines of Phaeno; of Eusebius, the most prolific writer of his day and an ecclesiastical fashion plate who wore a scarflike omophorion that swept down from his shoulder to his knees; and of Arius, the sly heretic who embedded subversive doctrines in the ditties he sang to dockworkers—the followers of these three not only fought singly or together against Alexander’s Orthodox Church of Egypt and the idea that God and Christ were one, but they often quarreled hotly with each other over points of doctrine that were of burning concern to them but mean nothing to us today.

  This forced a brilliant and now disgruntled Emperor Constantine to convene the Council of Nicaea in 325. That council had ended in a shotgun wedding. The emperor held the shotgun and performed the ceremony. The blushing brides were Alexander and Athanasius; the scowling grooms were Arius, Melitius, and Eusebius. The wedding vow, sung out joyfully by the brides and muttered grimly by the grooms, was the first draft of the Nicene Creed.

  Once Constantine, whom the bishops feared greatly because he held the power of instant life or death over all of them, had dissolved the council and headed home, the marriage fell apart, though nobody dared admit it let alone ask for a divorce. The participants began to quarrel all over again, and this time their disputes were envenomed by the conclusions the council had reached about the relationship of God and Jesus. As Newton writes, “when the Council of Nicea was ended there burned an implacable fury of contention among the Egyptians . . . this contention was about the Nicene decree of the word homousios.”9

  Athanasius, who had been such a trustworthy secretary to Alexander at Nicaea, was named a deacon of the orthodox church at Alexandria in 326. He immediately began to co-opt the functions of the aging archbishop. This made him more and more the target of doctrinal and personal attacks, and he returned these attacks with a vengeance. Newton writes: “Athanasius, in the controversy between the Clergy of Alexander [about the Son of God], inflamed differences, thereby to throw out part of the Clergy & make room for himself & his friends: & when he had thus gotten to be Deacon, the reputation & interest he had got with his friends by that controversy served him to invade the Bishoprick.”10

  Alexander died in 328. Athanasius immediately began to maneuver ruthlessly to become the new archbishop. He succeeded, but his election was contested and it still is today. And here the steamy, contentious, volatile city of Alexandria itself with all its mobs enters our drama as a character, for it played a role in that election.

  Straddling East and West, the city of Alexandria had a population of 800,000 in 328, about the same as San Francisco today. The ancient seaport, founded by Alexander the Great in 334 BC, boiled over with an explosive mix of Greeks, Egyptians, Jews (one-quarter of the population), Italians, Arabs, Phoenicians, Persians, Ethiopians, Syrians, Libyans, Cilicians, Scythians, Indians, Nubians, and others—a wild superabundance of ethnic diversity that has not been seen in the world again even to our day.

  The emperor Hadrian (AD 76–138) wrote of the Alexandrians that they were “very seditious, very vain, and very quarrelsome. The city is commercial, opulent, and populous. No one is idle. Some make glass; others manufacture paper; they seem to be, and indeed are, of all trades; not even the gout in their feet and hands can reduce them to entire inactivity; even the blind work. Money is a god which the Christians, Jews and all men adore alike.”11

  The city was a “continuous . . . revel of dancers, whistlers, and murderers,”12 declared Dio Chrysostom, while Voltaire insisted that the Alexandrians were of a “contentious and quarrelsome spirit, joined to cowardice, superstition and debauchery.”13 This quarrelsome people had a near-magical capacity for forming and reforming into ferocious howling mobs, accomplishing some piece of work (usually a destructive one) in one part of the city, and then melting away into the landscape as if they had never existed. It took the merest peccadillo to incite one of these collective rampages: the shortage of a fruit in the marketplace, a perceived snub, a plebeian elbowing a nobleman in the baths.

  Usually, though, the Alexandrian mob was bought, and the principal buyers were the politicians and the ecclesiastics. But—caveat emptor!—the mob could easily turn on its new owner, and it often did. When it was paid by the bishops it was often joined by a horde of desert monks who, skinny as poles and dressed in black tatters, shouting hymns and brandishing cudgels, swarmed up over the sand dunes surrounding the city.

  These monks, who spent most of their days praying to God, were notorious for the violent anger they often displayed when they got off their knees. In 415, a gang of the desert monks would murder the beautiful Neoplatonist philosopher and mathematician Hypatia (370–415). Alexandria was celebrated for the brilliance, variety, and sheer number of its schools of rhetoric and philosophy. It was rare to see a woman among the thinkers who frequented these schools, but Hypatia was first among equals. Bishop Cyril of Alexandria complained that this upstart woman, a pagan, was fomenting trouble between his church and the civic authorities. Cyril exhorted a mob of desert monks then roaming the streets to solve this problem. They seized her in the street, drag
ged her into a temple, and then stripped her, killed her, mutilated her body with broken glass, and set her corpse on fire. They were never punished.

  In the last week of February 329, a vociferous Alexandrian mob, which could have included the grandfathers of the desert monks who had murdered Hypatia a century later, surged down a side street that radiated out from two huge avenues that met and crossed at the center of Alexandria. Barking dogs fled before the mob; the homeless, stretched out on the side street, rolled out of the way. The masses of men wove giddily between statues of the dog-headed god Anubis and pointy-eared Hermes and orange Egyptian pylons stretching up to the sky; spears glinted and swords rippled with the light of swaying torches; the mob sang hymns and shouted imprecations and chanted. Some parts of the mob shouted, “The black dwarf! The black dwarf!” This was the people’s nickname for the short, swarthy, scowling Egyptian Copt who answered to the name of Athanasius. The mob was in the pay of those who supported him, and possibly in the pay simply of Athanasius himself.

  They arrived at their first destination: the Church of Saint Theognis. Just inside gleamed the coffin in which Alexander lay in ecclesiastic state. There was almost nobody there, and the mob didn’t stop for long. A few dropped to one knee, bowed their head, and quickly rose.

  To the left, some distance down another side street, there was a muted clamor; screams, shouts, and the clashing of swords filled the turgid air. The mob turned away from Saint Theognis and, racing down the narrow side street, came out into a large square in which a multitide of force, packed tightly together, contended for mastery. Thick knots of men swayed, grappled, struck out at each other with broadswords; some fled, others fell, new fighters entered the fray. The pandemonium was atrocious; but above it could be heard, sometimes indistinctly, other times quite clearly, the refrain, “Oh, wickedness! Is he a bishop or is he a boy?”

  These were the anti-Athanasian factions, who in some cases were very carefully chosen Melitians, Arians, or Eusebeans, in others, pure howling mob. It would be some time before the facts of this night were sorted out—and there must have been other nights like this—but those who hated Athanasius had brought forward the objection that he was not yet thirty-five years old, and a candidate for archbishop had to be thirty-five.

  This was problematical; for centuries it was believed that Athanasius really was thirty-five when he became archbishop. But others, including Newton, believe that Athanasius falsified the records some years later and that he was born sometime between 296 and 298. Whatever the case may be, that night the rival camps were battling in the square to try to gain entrance to the Church of Saint Dionysius, which rose up majestically on one side of the square, or to keep others from gaining entrance. There were wild rumors as to what was going on in the chuch, and some didn’t know exactly what they were fighting for. But it would become clear, if not that night then the next, or the next, that the Church of Saint Dionysius had become a jail; that its jailers were a mixture of paid mob and supporters of Athanasius; and that the jailed were a dozen bishops whose vote was needed to make Athanasius archbishop.

  This, if we are to believe the somewhat contradictory records, had been going on for days, and the imprisoned bishops were starving, exhausted, and enraged. But there came a night—perhaps it was that very night—when the bishops agreed to make Athanasius archbishop, and they were liberated from the church that had become their prison. The mob dissipated, having played out its role, and Alexandria became merely a backdrop, and not an actual participant, in the story of the slow and tormented climb to power of now Archbishop Athanasius.

  In the twelfth of his paradoxical questions, Newton introduces a document that, he says, was released by the Council of Alexandria fifteen years after the election of Athanasius and that claimed to be a letter put together by the people of Alexandria during those tumultuous nights in late February 329. The letter asserts that Athanasius was elected directly after Alexander died. It reads in part, “we [the city fathers] & the whole City & Province are witnesses that all the multitude & all the people of the Catholick church (that is [adds Newton] all whom they would acknowledge to be catholick) being assembled as with one soul & body, cried out with great acclamations desiring that Athanasius might be Bishop of the Church” (emphasis in original).14

  Newton believed this letter was a forgery, likely written by Athanasius at the time of the Alexandrian synod. Or, he states elsewhere, it was written by Athanasius (without any townspeople) directly after a group of bishops had ordained him in a secret place. But Newton seems ultimately to have believed that a small number of bishops had been forced by the mob and its puppet masters to make Athanasius the new archbishop, just as has been described above.*14

  The Black Dwarf, when he became archbishop, was far more abrasive and polarizing than he had been as deacon. He was quarrelsome and vindictive. He kept all the factions agitated. He kept his flock of Christians regularly informed, and he chastised them regularly. He was, though Newton scarcely mentions it, one of the great polemical theologians of his time. Here, for example, he explains that the three aspects of the Trinity are not inferior to one another but that God is a Trinity, “not only in name and linguistic expression, but Trinity in reality and truth. Just as the Father is the ‘One who is’ (Ex 3:14), so likewise is his Word the ‘One who is, God over all’ (Rom 9:5). Nor is the Holy Spirit non-existent but truly exists and subsists.”15

  Athanasius treated God, Christ, and the Holy Ghost with exquisite tact and tenderness, and human beings at best autocratically and at worst violently. His abuses mounted steadily, if we are to believe Sir Isaac Newton. They reached a high point in probably 333. He stalked into a Melitian Church of the Martyrs in Mareotis, a suburb of Alexandria, shattered the communion cup, overturned the communion table, and (surely with the aid of others) laid waste to the entire church.

  Did this really happen? It was the Melitians who leveled the accusations. When Athanasius denied them, they dug up the past, charging him (as they had before) with the use of “violence and bribery to achieve episcopal election while below the canonical age.”16 Melitians, Eusebeans, and Arians alike joined in the assault on Archbishop Athanasius, piling up a heap of charges: the Egyptian prelate was guilty of immoral conduct, of illegally taxing the people, of plotting treason against the the emperor. Athanasius railed furiously at his accusers. They railed back and threw in more chips, accusing him of raping a virgin when she hid him in her home to save him from the mob and of murdering a Melitian bishop and making supernatural use of a part of his body. Newton sums up:

  When Athanasius succeeded in the Bishopric of Alexandria he was accused of tyrannical behaviour towards the Meletians so as in the time of the Sacrament to break the communion cup of one Ischyras a Meletian Presbyter in Mareote & subvert the communion table & cause the Church to be speedily demolished, & some time after to kill Arsenius a Bishop the successor of Melitius in Hypsalita.17

  With charges and countercharges flying all around, it was time to ask the emperor Constantine for mediation.

  But, first: How is it that these Christian leaders, dedicated to the imitation of the life of Christ, could act so vilely? Basil of Caesarea (329/330–379), a more or less contemporary bishop-monk, wrote that the progress of Christianity at the time was like “a naval battle fought at night in a storm, with crews and soldiers fighting among themselves, often in purely selfish power struggles, heedless of orders from above and fighting for mastery even while their ship foundered.”18

  MacCulloch observes: “It may seem baffling now that such apparently rarefied disputes could have aroused the sort of passion now largely confined to the aftermath of a football match.”19 And the journalist and historian Paul Johnson perhaps goes to the root of the problem: “The venom employed in these endemic controversies reflects the fundamental instability of Christian belief during the early centuries, before a canon of New Testament writings had been established, credal formulations evolved to epitomize them, and a regular eccl
esiastical structure built up to protect and propagate such agreed beliefs.”20 To all the accusations that the Melitians aimed at Athanasius, Athanasius responded by blaming the Melitians; they had lied or they themselves had committed these same crimes and others. Isaac Newton’s second paradoxical question asks, “Whether the Meletians deserved that ill Character which Athanasius gave them.” Newton thought absolutely not; we will see why shortly.

  The Melitians pleaded with Constantine to put Athanasius on trial. The emperor stalled for a year. He had an excuse: he was busily trying to make some Roman laws a little less unforgiving. Constantine understood that a changed religion demands a changed social system,21 and he changed as much as he could, though this could not be a great deal, since the emperor was locked in the traditional armor of Roman sternness. Constantine promulgated a law forbidding the separation by sale of slaves who were man and wife; he prohibited divorce except on statutory grounds; he created other laws making relations between Roman men and women a little easier.22

  But he could fob off the enemies of Athanasius for only so long. Constantine was bold, brilliant, fearless, and frightened. For all his breathtaking palaces, his bedrooms lined with statues of the gods (and now of Jesus Christ), for all the soft rustling silk of his bedsheets, all the beauty of his compliant concubines—despite all that, the emperor had terrible dreams. He had slaughtered tens of thousands in his wars; he had tortured multitudes; worst of all, he had murdered his first wife and his eldest son and his favorite sister’s husband. He wondered if the God who had given him victory at the Milvian Bridge wasn’t having second thoughts about favoring a man whose hands were red with the blood of his own family.

  He trembled at the thought of offending Jesus Christ and listened to his bishops. He convened a council at Constantinople. There, he would try Athanasius for his alleged crimes. The council got under way. Athanasius, insulted, sulky, frightened, didn’t turn up. Furious, the emperor canceled the council.