The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton

by John Chambers

  The next year found the emperor campaigning on the farthest frontiers of the empire. He subdued, bullied, slaughtered defiant tribes, signed treaties and abrogated others. One day an ecclesiastical letter arrived from Alexandria. In the murky brightness of a German sun, on an autumnal day, he read it with growing anger. Eusebeans, Arians, Melitians—all listed new crimes by Athanasius and pleaded with the emperor to return and punish the evil archbishop. The impertinence of their words enraged Constantine. Then he remembered, once again, that he couldn’t afford to offend Jesus Christ, whom he had made the supreme God of the Roman Empire. The emperor wrote back to Alexandria. On his return to Constantinople he convened, for the summer of 335, a Council at Tyre in Phoenicia. He ordered Athanasius to attend and told him if he, Athanasius, saw any difficulty in this, then he, Constantine, would send a legion to help him out.

  Athanasius agreed to come.

  In Phoenician Tyre, in the summer of 335, the stench of the famous imperial dyeing factories dominated all other odors just as it had as far back as anyone could remember. That July, bright purple robes (likely colored with that same Tyrean dye) suddenly sprouted in the streets, competing for attention with the black goatskin tunics and yellow cotton robes of the milling Tyrean crowds. These were the same bright purple robes that had outshone the workaday garb of the townspeople of Nicaea a decade before. The Christian bishops of the eastern Roman Empire, more than three hundred strong, were gathering for a council once again.

  The Council of Tyre was no mere kangaroo court, hastily put together to try, convict, and hurry Athanasius off to oblivion. That is how many historians have depicted it; Newton thought they did so to belittle the importance of the council’s findings. Newton’s paradoxical question number 3 is, “Whether the Council of Tyre & Jerusalem [a side trip to Jerusalem would be a part of this council] was not an orthodox authentic Council bigger than that of Nice.” Newton answered that

  it was an ancient Canon of the Church, as well as a necessary one, that no man should be received [taken back into the church] by a less number of Bishops than those by which he had been ejected. [Constantine was planning to reinstate Arius at this Tyrean synod.] And therefore the Emperor sent his letters into all the Eastern Empire requiring the attendance of the Bishops that the Council might be full.23

  Once again, Constantine paid all the expenses. The Great Hall of the municipal palace in Tyre swarmed with Libyans, Egyptians, Syrians, Phoenicians, Ethiopians, every variety of Middle Eastern prelate. These included Melitians, Arians, Eusebeans, and supporters of the Orthodox Catholic Church of Alexandria. Athanasius had swelled the numbers significantly, “bringing,” writes Newton, “a great multitude [forty-seven bishops and presbyters] out of Egypt to create disturbance, & behaving himself very turbulently in his trial, as the Council of Tyre in their circulatory letters [post-conference reports] complained.”24

  Against a backdrop of lurid Eastern tapestries sweeping down to the floor (the largest depicted two purple lions devouring each other on an orange desert beneath a yellow moon), the bishops milled about, fussing over each other’s health, pouncing on each other’s doctrinal errors, sharing self-martyrdom stories (such as “Pachomius went 53 days without closing an eye,” or, “Eustachius carried thirty-eight pounds of bronze on his loins”), flexing their rhetorical muscles, and complaining bitterly that there were too many heretics about in the hall. The number of one-eyed, one-thumbed, hobbling bishops—grim witnesses to Diocletian’s persecutions—had greatly diminished over the years, but they were still there, and the soldiers posted at the doors glanced away from them uneasily.

  The Council of Tyre picked up where the Council of Nicaea left off. It followed the Nicaean Synod as the night follows the day, and the Council of Tyre was certainly the night. It was the black twin of the luminous Council of Nicaea. The earlier synod had touched the gleaming gates of heaven with its lofty debates on the nature of the Trinity; the Tyrean council would scrape the sulfuric walls of hell with its parade of human sin and folly including murder, rape, sedition, the destruction of church property, and much more. But the political and ecclesiastical stakes at this second council were just as high; they might decide with what doctrine, and by whom, the Christian Church would lead the world to salvation.

  At the front of the hall, Constantine’s representative, Dionysius, disinterested, swathed in a black panther cloak, sat enthroned on the dais. Behind him, a Syrian tapestry swept down from the ceiling depicting three satyrs playing the pipes at the edge of a tide as they chased three wide-eyed, nubile sea nymphs. At Dionysius’s side stood the universally learned Eusebius of Caesarea, executive director of the council, clutching a papyrus on which he was scribbling notes and wearing a snow-white omophorion that, all aglitter with four gold crosses and an eight-pointed star, swept down to below his knees.

  History has given us two versions of the Council of Tyre—sometimes three!—and Newton chronicles them all in his “Paradoxical Questions.” To most modern readers, this council will come across as macabre, even absurdist. As noted above, it was a gathering that could have come straight from the imagination of the surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel (1900–1983). And with its multiple versions it might have been a creation of the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, that supreme master at dramatizing mankind’s tendency to see the world based on personal impressions and feelings and opinions rather than on external facts. (In his 1950 masterpiece Rashomon, four witnesses to a murder tell the story of the murder in four completely different ways; one of the witnesses is the victim, whose testimony is channeled through a medium.)

  With a certain disdain Dionysius called the proceedings to order. The bishops took their seats. Eusebius delivered a benediction that insulted the Trinitarians even as it praised them. The amens had hardly died away before a shapely, haggard woman dressed in a red pleated tunic was pushed forward by two of the guards.

  Her name has not come down to us. The historian Theodoret calls her “a woman of lewd life.” We might call her a prostitute. She “deposed in a loud impudent manner” that all her life she had rejoiced in being a virgin, but that, when she had taken him into her home after he was threatened by a mob, Archbishop Athanasius had robbed her of that virginity.25

  It mustn’t have been easy for the assembled bishops, all of them sworn to virginity, most of them hot-blooded sons of Middle Eastern climes, to sit and watch this deposition. It would have provoked stirrings and arousals in them that they’d fought to suppress for years, some of them even resorting (before the Council of Nicaea forbade it)26 to castrating in imitation of the great church father Origen.*15 These feelings would have added a certain poignancy, even some anger, and perhaps a soupçon of ruefulness, to the acrimonious shouts of disapproval that must have arisen in the hall, if only briefly, on that first morning of the council.

  The shapely, haggard woman dressed in a red pleated tunic had completed her testimony. Dionysius asked Athanasius to step forward and defend himself. But the cleric who now strode purposefully up to the dais wasn’t Athanasius; history has left no description of this new witness, but we know he wasn’t the Black Dwarf. Standing before Dionysius, the newcomer turned sharply to the woman and shouted: “Have I, O woman, ever conversed with you, or have I entered your house?”

  Theodoret tells us that the woman replied, “with still greater effrontery, screaming aloud in her dispute . . . and, pointing at him with her finger, exclaimed, ‘It was you who robbed me of my virginity; it was you who stripped me of my chastity (adding other indelicate expressions which are used by shameless women).’”

  Everyone in the hall knew this was not Athanasius, although almost no one knew it was an orthodox priest named Timotheus. But the ruse had worked. Theodoret tells us that “the devisers of this calumny were put to shame, and all the bishops who were privy to it, blushed.”27

  You might have thought the matter was settled. But the restless shade of Akira Kurosawa, who knew so well how to film human subjectivity, must
have been on the prowl in the Great Hall that morning. For history has given us a second version of the story of Athanasius and the woman of lewd life. In this second version, recorded by the historian Philostorgius (368–ca. 439), the woman who is guided to the dais is eight months pregnant, and she tells the court that the father of her child is Eusebius of Caesarea, that very same executive director of the council and prolific author who is standing before her at that very moment. Isaac Newton summarizes:

  When Athanasius, being impelled by the Emperor’s threatening [him], came to Tyre, he would not submit to stand in judgment, but sent in a big-bellied woman which he had hired to accuse Eusebius of adultery: hoping that by the tumult which would probably be raised, he might escape being tried. But when Eusebius [not letting on who he was] asked her if she knew the man & whether he was amongst the Bishops then present, she answered that she was not so senseless as to accuse such men of base lust—and by those words [they] discovered the fraud.28

  These two tawdry mini–soap operas, hardly the kind of drama we expect to find at an ecclesiastical conference, were only the warm-up act for the macabre and surrealist spectacle that was to follow. The transcendent genius of Akira Kurosawa is at work again, for there are two versions of this second melodrama, and, by the time we have come to the end of the second—we find there are three.

  Dionysius now called to testify Bishop John, the current leader of the Melitians (the founder, the former preacher in the salt mines of Phaeno, being long dead). History gives us no description of John. We know only that he came up to the dais clutching a leather bag somewhat bigger than a boxing glove. He stopped before Dionysius, reached into the bag, and—we can imagine there was a sudden expectant lull in the room—slowly withdrew an object that was long, white, and withered.

  It had five fingers.

  “This is a human hand!” exclaimed Dionysius.

  And so it was. John held the withered appendage up for all to see, declaring that it was the severed hand of the Melitian bishop Arsenius, who had disappeared the month before. The appendage had been cut off, John continued, by Archbishop Athanasius of Alexandria, “to be made use of in Arts of diabolic Conjurations!”

  There must have been an outcry. But it wasn’t necessarily as great as the one that had accompanied the appearance of the woman of lewd life. A severed hand was far easier for a fourth-century bishop to deal with than a prostitute. He had seen plenty of severed hands, and severed arms, and severed legs, and even severed heads, both in the aftermath of a battle, where he ministered to the wounded and the dying, or in connection with some local quarrel or awful accident. Many of these clerics had been soldiers themselves in their pre-cleric youth, buckling on armor, flashing swords, and severing the odd limb themselves. In the fourth century, by the time a priest had became a bishop, there was no sort of bodily injury he hadn’t seen.

  Still, there must have been an outcry, if only one of indignation and confusion (for nothing had been proved yet). And it is at this point that we can imagine a second filmmaker of genius slipping down from heaven to watch the spectacle, namely, Luis Buñuel, in whose celebrated The Andalusian Dog (1929) a severed hand appears and flops around for at least a minute. (It’s possible that Buñuel, who abominated the Roman Catholic Church and researched its history thoroughly, had read the proceedings of the Council of Tyre. Another of his films is Simon of the Desert [1965], about a fourth-century desert monk who lives on top of a column.)

  Buñuel’s roving, surrealist camera would certainly have lingered lovingly on this severed hand held up so everyone could see it. He would likely have panned in on the startled eyes of the sea nymphs frolicking in the tapestry on the wall behind Dionysius, and let those eyes, expanded to fill the screen, exclaim to the viewer: “We too see the hand. And it is awful! It is absurd! We can make nothing of it! Such is the world!”

  But Buñuel’s camera could only have lingered on the sea nymphs for a moment, for almost immediately something intervened to draw his attention away.

  There was a sudden hubbub at the back of the hall. All eyes turned. Athanasius had entered and was pausing inside the doorway. Beside him stood a tall mysterious figure whose features were hidden by a scarf wrapped around its head. The figure was draped in a voluminous cloak that went down to the ankles. The sleeves were so long that they covered both the hands.

  Athanasius took the mysterious figure’s arm. He strode forward purposefully, bringing the other along with him. The archbishop of Alexandria wasn’t smiling. Athanasius rarely smiled; only the thought of the Trinity ever brought a smile to his lips, and that thought must have been far from his mind now, for he was scowling ferociously. It is impossible to imagine what sort of a hubbub must have been taking place in the hall at that moment. No doubt a few shouted, “Is the Black Dwarf a murderer?” And there may have been a (not entirely relevant), “Oh, wickedness! Is he a bishop or is he a boy?”

  They reached the dais. Athanasius turned and unwound the scarf from his companion’s head. The features were laid bare. “This,” announced Athanasius, “is Arsenius!”

  Theodoret writes that the archbishop then “turn[ed] back the man’s Cloak, and shew[ed] them one of his Hands; and after a little pause, to give them time to suspect it might be the other hand [that was missing], he put back the other side of the Cloak, and shew[ed] the other.”29

  Those who knew Arsenius knew this was Arsenius. Those who had eyes in their head saw that he had two hands.

  Theodoret’s version ends here, and you might have thought that Athanasius was totally exonerated from the charge of murdering Arsenius and cutting off his hand. But the immortal soul of Akira Kurosawa is on the prowl again, proud, compassionate, and imperious in his knowledge of the ridiculous lack of objectivity of humankind, for there is a second version to this story and, as that version nears its end, it branches out into a third version.

  In this second version death approached the dais again, but this time in a much bigger package. John the Melitian leader made his way to the dais again, but this time he was with a fellow Melitian, and the two dragged between them a huge oblong box.

  They arrived at the dais and, kneeling, removed the lid from the box. They reached in. John pulled out of the box a white, withered hand. His companion pulled out a second white, withered hand. These hands were not severed; the two bishops struggled to their feet and hauled up to a semi-standing position an entire corpse, dressed in the robes of a bishop, its eyes closed, its face a dreadful chalk white.

  The large oblong box was a coffin. John declared loudly, as the dead-white head lolled between them, “This is the body of Bishop Arsenius, murdered by Archbishop Athanasius of Alexandria!”

  Let us not even try to imagine the pandemonium in the hall. A delighted Luis Buñuel would have turned his camera here and there and everywhere, hardly knowing what to settle on in this amazing treasure trove of Hieronymus Bosch delights. Perhaps he would have turned to the other tapestry and panned in on the two purple lions devouring each other on an orange desert beneath a yellow moon, expanding the image until it filled the entire screen and conveyed, in its surrealist way, the message: “Can’t you see that Christian bishops are no better than savage lions?”

  But Buñuel’s attention would have been distracted by another new development, a voice coming from the back of the hall and saying, “I have something to show you.”

  It was Athanasius.

  The archbishop of Alexandria had just come through the door. He strode forward slowly and thoughtfully, wearing the simple white robe of a mere priest. Perhaps there were cries of execration from the bishops; many, still trying to process the sudden appearance of a corpse in their midst, for that matter one of their own brethren, must have stared in silent, astonished, consternation. The bishops parted before Athanasius. He arrived at the dais, stopped, and slowly slipped a letter out of his pocket. He may have taken care to avoid looking at the corpse.

  Here the spirit of Kurosawa runs riot: history has gi
ven us three versions of this letter.

  In the first version, Athanasius explained that the letter he was holding wasn’t addressed to himself but to a Melitian presbyter named Pinnes. Then he read the letter aloud. In it, Arsenius assured Pinnes that he was in good health. He repudiated the Arian heresy. He promised never again to bar from his church Christians who had renounced their faith during Diocletian’s persecution. He pleaded with Pinnes to persuade Athanasius to allow him back into the Orthodox Catholic Church.

  Having read this, Athanasius slipped the letter back into his pocket and asked Dionysius and Eusebius why he, Athanasius, would want to murder a man who was doing everything that they wanted him to do?

  In the second version of this story, Athanasius read aloud a letter from Arsenius that was this time addressed to Athanasius. It merely repeated everything Arsenius had said in the first letter to Pinnes.

  There is a third version: a letter written to Athanasius by a Melitian presbyter named Ischyras. This was the same presbyter whose communion cup Athanasius had allegedly smashed when he was engaged in the wholesale destruction of the Melitian church at Mareotis.

  In this letter, Ischyras absolved Athanasius of all the crimes with which he has been charged, including the murder of Arsenius. The letter declared that it was he, Ischyras, the undersigned, who had originally brought these accusations against Athanasius, and he had done this because other Melitians had beaten him harshly until he agreed to do so. The fact of the matter was, the letter concluded, that Ischyras was totally on Athanasius’s side.

  This third letter was signed by fourteen witnesses.

  Only a genius like Isaac Newton could make sense of all of this, and we will see farther on in this chapter that Newton decided all three of these letters were forgeries.