The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton

by John Chambers

  Constantius had already had a number of unpleasant encounters with Athanasius. In 348, the emperor ordered him to be present at an ecumenical council he was convening in Rome. Constantius’s intention was to excommunicate Athanasius at this council.

  This summons precipitated a confrontation between emperor and ecclesiastic that resonated just as deeply—perhaps more so—as had the confrontations between Constantine and Athanasius at the councils of Nicaea and Tyre. Even the Alexandrian mob would come swarming in at one point.

  Newton writes that “when the first Messenger [Montanus] brought the Emperor’s Letters, Athanasius & his friends were extremely troubled, thinking it not safe for him to go, nor without danger for him to stay. But the advice for his staying prevailed & so the Messenger returned without doing his business.” This didn’t surprise Newton, who adds, “I must believe also that he who refused to obey Constantine the great was as refractory to Constantius, as [the church historian] Sozomen tells us he really was.”42

  Athanasius’s intransigence infuriated Constantius. He wrote an open letter to the Alexandrian people about their refractory archbishop. It’s a letter Newton might have liked to have written himself, and one that would have fired Luis Buñuel’s imagination. It reads, in part (Newton is quoting), “[Athanasius is] a man who was [had] emerged from the lowermost hell: who, as in the dark, seduced the desirers of truth to lies . . . [a man] convicted of most foul crimes for which he can never be sufficiently punished; no, not though he should be ten times killed . . . ; [a man] who hurt the Commonwealth & laid his most impious & wicked hands upon most holy men.”43

  The emperor sent a second message. This time troops accompanied the messenger to Alexandria. Athanasius again failed to respond. The enraged emperor ordered two Roman legions, one in Syria, the other in southern Egypt, to march on Alexandria and take Athanasius prisoner. If we can believe the historical records (which are bewildering in their diversity), at one midnight late in February 356, five thousand battle-ready legionnaires, led by Syrianus, Duke of Egypt, battered down the door of the Church of Saint Theognis and, bursting in, loosed a hail of arrows at the clerics and church members gathered there for prayer. Newton writes (and here he gets close to pulp fiction): “there was made a great clashing of arms the drawn swords shining by candle light & Virgins were slain & trodden under foot.”44

  Some sources suggest that an outraged (and well-bribed) pro-Athanasius Alexandrian mob stormed into the Church of Saint Theognis that night and, armed with pikes, swords, and cudgels, turned the tide of this unlikely battle in Athanasius’s favor. Either that, or the virgins had swords. And the clerics and church members too. Because Athanasius and his supporters, or so at least one account goes, fought off all five thousand legionnaires! Athanasius, jostled hither and yon by the soldiers (who had orders to take him alive), urged his flock to use prayer as a weapon, then managed somehow to get out of the church before the battle was over.

  The next morning, anyone entering the church would have been greeted by a most un-Christian-like spectacle: Roman helmets, breast-plates, arrows, broken spears, and bloodstained dented broadswords hanging off all the church walls. A cleric would have pointed proudly to these weapons and told the visitor they were war trophies; that the champion of the doctrine of the Trinity had been the champion in a war against the Roman Empire the night before.

  This bizarre and improbable epic drama might have been beyond even the ability of Luis Buñuel to film.

  For four months after the archbishop of Alexandria’s disappearance, a smoldering low-grade guerrilla war raged in Alexandria. A furious Constantius wanted Athanasius dead or alive and mobilized all the resources of the Roman Empire to run down this Black Dwarf blacker than hell.

  Edward Gibbon writes that the Roman legionnaires from Syria and southern Egypt dealt with the presbyters and bishops of Alexandria “with cruel ignominy; consecrated virgins were stripped naked, scourged, and violated; the houses of wealthy citizens were plundered; and, under the mask of religious zeal, lust, avarice, and private resentment were gratified with impunity, and even with applause.”45

  Finally, after four months, the battles ended and the Roman legions withdrew from Alexandria. Athanasius could not be found, and there was every reason to believe that he had taken refuge, again, among the monks of the Egyptian deserts. And Athanasius had indeed been on the desert for some time, hidden (as we saw in the last chapter) behind an impenetrable wall of protecting, adoring monks. He would remain there for six years, until the death of Constantius, rewriting the history of Christianity in the fourth century in a manner that best suited his own interests—and also, as we are about to see, writing (also to suit his own interests) the biography of the most celebrated desert monk who ever lived.

  We’ve seen that Athanasius, at a succession of Church councils from the years 337 to 356, was never quite able to lay to rest the charges of murder and mayhem that had been leveled against him.

  The new emperor, Julian the Apostate, a brilliant thinker and military strategist who tried to banish Christianity and bring back pagan worship, hated Athanasius even more than did Constantius. Writing the prefect of Egypt over that official’s delay in carrying out the imperial order to expel Athanasius from Egypt (Athanasius having returned after the death of Constantius in 361), Julian (who ruled from 361 to 363) scolded, “it is your duty to inform me of your conduct towards Athanasius, the enemy of the gods. . . . There is nothing that I should see, nothing that I should hear with more pleasure than the expulsion of Athanasius from all Egypt. The abominable wretch!”46

  But Athanasius’s fortunes changed. A year later, Julian was killed in battle against the Persians, probably assassinated by one of his own men who was a Christian. The new emperor, Jovian, reinstated Athanasius. Soon Jovian was gone, but over the next decade Athanasius’s fortunes steadily improved. He never ceased vigorously promoting the doctrine of the Trinity. His efforts were posthumously rewarded when, at the Council of Constantinople, convened by the emperor Theodosius in 381, the doctrine of the Trinity officially became the cornerstone doctrine of the Orthodox Catholic Church.

  Athanasius’s fourth exile in the Egyptian desert had yielded up a fraudulent account of the death of Arius and a fraudulent account of Athanasius and Arsenius together at the Council of Tyre. Newton believed the archbishop of Alexandria perpetrated yet another fraud during that final sojourn among the adoring desert monks. Newton scrutinized this third deception with especial care, for it had a direct bearing upon an aspect of Trinitarianism that Newton abhorred: the twin idolatries of the worship of saints and the worship of Christ as God.

  History believes that Saint Anthony invented these two forms of idolatry. Isaac Newton was very anxious to set history right. He believed, as we will see, that the real culprit was his lifetime archenemy Athanasius. He was ready to invest a prodigious amount of energy into proving it.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE TEMPTATION OF SAINT ANTHONY

  The celebrated desert monk Saint Anthony (251–356) was well over six feet tall and pencil thin. He was all hope, charity, and the doctrine of the Trinity, but, like so many other great saints, he had very little body in which to keep all of these merits. Still, he survived to 105.

  We’ve already read Newton’s description of Anthony in chapter 4. Sir Isaac dwells on the desert saint’s austerity, telling us he gave 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.”1

  Saint Anthony has been a popular figure among artists for two thousand years. The French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), author of Madame Bovary, made him the subject of an experimental drama, The Temptation of Saint Anthony (La Tentation de Saint Antoine)
, which was completed in 1874. In this work the author sends the saint all over the Middle East, often bringing him face-to-face with the great religious and philosophical sages of the ancient world. Flaubert turns Saint Anthony into a kind of philosophical Everyman: he uses the story of his life to convey, in the words of one critic, the “tragedy and pathos of man’s long search for some body of belief or philosophy by which he could explain to himself the strange great phenomena of life and death, and the inscrutable cruelties of Nature.”2

  Flaubert devotes much space to describing Anthony’s imaginary jousts with the world of demons. In the words of another one of Flaubert’s critics, the French novelist depicted Anthony as, along with much else:

  tempted with piles of gold, with food, with women, with “a black boy” who was “the spirit of lust.” Bands of wild animals made as if to attack him and tried to terrify him with their ferocious cries. Monstrous creatures appeared to him, having shapes half animal, half human; learned men came with beguiling heresies. Anthony was at times transported outside of himself and was able to watch his own actions.3

  Newton also lavished a lengthy paragraph on Athanasius’s description of Anthony’s seemingly supernatural side, explaining that the life of this desert saint was

  full of prodigious stories such as are: the devil’s appearing frequently to Antony in several shapes & bignesses & talking with him & afflicting him & struggling with him & sometimes multitudes of devils appearing in various shapes. Christ’s appearing in the form of light to Antony & speaking to him. Antony’s remaining as fresh & plump after long fasting as if he had not fasted, his curing diseases, casting out devils, escaping Crocodiles by prayer, frighting away devils & curing demoniacs by the sign of the cross, seeing the soul of Ammon ascend up to heaven, being himself lifted up into the air, & having revelations & by a spirit of prophesy foretelling things.4

  It is not to honor Anthony but to expose him that Newton lists these experiences. For the great scientist, these visions are all illusion, delusion, and hallucination. Newton did not believe in the supernatural. He didn’t believe in the paranormal. He didn’t believe in reincarnation, or in the existence of an afterlife, subscribing to a belief called “psychopannychism,” which holds that, when we die, our souls sleep until Judgment Day.5 (Newton cited Ecclesiastes 9:5–10 to support his belief: “The dead know not anything. . . . There is no work nor knowledge nor wisdom in the grave.”)

  It goes without saying that Newton didn’t believe in ghosts. Westfall tells this story:

  Strange noises in a house opposite St. John’s College [at Cambridge University] had many convinced it was haunted. The excitement extended over several days, while crowds gathered outside and diverse intrepid scholars and fellows ventured into the house. [Westfall quotes:]

  “On Monday night likewise there being a great number of people at the door, there chanced to come by Mr. Newton, fellow of Trinity College: a very learned man, and perceiving our fellows to have gone in, and seeing several scholars about the door, ‘Oh! Ye fools,’ says he, ‘will you never have any wit, know ye not that all such things are mere cheats and impostures? Fye, fye! Go home, for shame,’ and so he left them, scorning to go in.”6

  Probably Newton believed, with the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, that evil gods, or demons, are simply the unhappy fantasies of our dreams.

  Rather surprisingly, Newton takes a moment to examine monasticism and Anthony from a psychological point of view. Westfall writes that, for him, “monasticism was yet another atrocity spawned by the evil genius Athanasius, who had fostered it to promote his interests. Newton devoted considerable study to it, specially to the feigning of miracles by monks and to their stories of sexual temptations. The latter apparently fascinated him. Rather solemnly, he lectured the monks on how to avoid unchaste thoughts.”7 No modern psychologist would quibble with the following description by Newton, written with Anthony in mind (Newton was celibate himself).

  To pamper the body inflames lust & makes it less active & fit for use. And on the other hand to macerate it by fasting & watching beyond measure does the same thing. It does not only render the body feeble & unfit for use but also inflames it & invigorates lustful thoughts. The want of sleep & due refreshment disorders the imagination & at length brings men to a sort of distraction & madness so as to make them have visions of women conversing with ’em & think they really see & touch them & hear them talk. . . . For lust, by being forcibly restrained, & by [our] struggling with it, is always inflamed. The way to be chaste is not to contend and struggle with unchaste thoughts but to decline them and keep the mind employed about other things.8

  Perhaps Newton wouldn’t have been so offended by, and contemptuous of, Anthony’s “paranormal” experiences if the desert saint had said nothing about them. And, for all we know, Anthony kept them to himself. The problem lay, Newton thought, with Athanasius. Sir Isaac explains that the exiled archbishop didn’t only compose and circulate letters in which he rewrote history during his final, seven-year-long, sojourn in the Egyptian desert. He also wrote a biography of Anthony. By the time Athanasius wrote his Life of Anthony, Anthony had died and couldn’t be consulted, but Athanasius had no trouble getting all the information he needed because of the hundreds of monks who were at his beck and call and had known Anthony and loved him.

  Why did Athanasius write this book that is still, today, almost our only source of information about Anthony? Not really to honor the ascetic desert monk, insists Newton, nor to praise him, but entirely out of self-interest. Here’s what happened: “[Athanasius,] baffled & deserted by all but the Monks, . . . finding himself reduced to the utmost desperation, & seeing no hopes of recovery unless by extraordinary practices, set himself upon all kind of sophistry & began with writing this life [of Anthony]. . . .9

  Even in exile, Athanasius was desperately searching for ways to combat Arianism. The Life of Anthony was one of those ways. He uses Anthony’s extraordinary visions and experiences, which he implies could only have happened to a man who believed in the Trinity, as a kind of religious bait: If you become orthodox Christian after the manner of Anthony, he seems to be saying, then these wonderful experiences will come to you.

  Athanasius’s description of Anthony’s worship of relics and saints and the exciting paranormal experiences that he claimed stemmed from this practice was a particularly effective way of enticing pagans into converting to Trinitarian Christianity; the worship of analogous artifacts, and the experience of paranormal phenomena, were already part of the pagan rites they practiced.

  Newton believed that Athanasius’s Life of Anthony, which became something of a bestseller throughout the Roman Empire, was the first time most people beyond the Egyptian deserts had ever heard of such rites and experiences. He seems to have believed the book had an instant and universal effect. He explains that Athanasius “contrived his religion for the easy conversion of the heathens by bringing into it as much of the heathen superstitions as the name of Christianity would then bear. . . . By this life [of Anthony] Athanasius propagated Monkery & made it overflow the Roman world like a torrent.”10

  It’s almost as if Newton believed the supernatural experiences of Anthony as described by Athanasius had what we would today call a “copycat” effect: thousands of people wanted to emulate them and thought that they could since Athanasius described them as actually happening. Everybody started having supernatural experiences. It was like a contagious disease. It spread like an out-of-control virus, so much so that the Life of Anthony was

  the true original [origin] of heathen ceremonies & superstitions which continue to this day in the Greek & Latin Churches. . . . First it did set all the Monks upon an humor of of pretending to miracles: so that the whole world presently rang with stories of this kind. And hence it came to pass that the lives of all the first & most eminent Monks were filled with apparitions: of Devils, miraculous cures of diseases, prophesies & other prodigious relations . . . And this was the original of those eccles
iastical Legends which are still used in the Church of Rome.11

  Newton takes pains in “Paradoxical Questions” to debunk the rituals and experiences Athanasius describes in the Life of Anthony. He seeks to demonstrate that there is nothing divine or otherworldly about their origin. Perhaps at the outset only the result of an accident, the rituals evolved out of practical necessity.

  Newton tells us about a monk named Paul. This desert celibate decided to say three hundred prayers a day. To make sure he reached this number, he carried three hundred stones around with him and discarded one every time he said a prayer. Other monks began to imitate him. Over the years, the stones tended to get fewer in number and smaller in size. Eventually, a string could be threaded through them. This, declares Newton, was “the original [origin] of the Popish custom of prayer by beads.” That is, it was the origin of the rosary and the telling of beads.

  Newton cites a second example. Anthony’s disciple Macarius, “in going over the sands of Egypt . . . found a dead man’s skull & upon asking it questions the skull answered that he was in hell & that the damned found some ease by the prayers of the Church.”12

  Newton believed that Macarius, probably starving and exhausted, was merely hallucinating. Sir Isaac believed this strange encounter, and no doubt many others like it, had given rise to the doctrine of purgatory.

  Newton places the origin of the practice of worshipping saints squarely on Anthony’s doorstep. He says that according to Athanasius when the desert saint’s disciple and friend Ammon died, Anthony saw his soul rise up to heaven in the company of angels. Anthony considered Ammon a saint; if the angels saluted such people when they died, then it was right to do such things ourselves.