Newton claimed nobody had ever known about such experiences until Athanasius popularized them in the Life of Anthony.
Newton insists that when Athanasius was writing the Life of Anthony, “the superstitious or to speak more truly the magical use of the sign of the Cross” was in use in the Western churches and that “Athanasius in his exile learnt it there & now turning it into an enchantment makes Antony in a large discourse to the Monks teach them how by this sign they may drive away the Devil & dissolve all kinds of enchantments & witchcraft. And this I like to be the original of the Greek & Latin Church using it for this end.”13
Nobody ever thought Newton was an anthropologist or an ethnologist, but in “Paradoxical Questions” he gives us an astonishing description of the birth, growth, and spread of the practice of relic worshipping. He’s scornful of the role Anthony played in promoting the worship of saints and relics. But he believes we would probably never have heard of these practices if Athanasius had not made so much of them in his biography of Anthony.
Newton didn’t confine the discussion of these matters to his “Paradoxical Questions.” He writes in Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John that
in propagating these superstitions, the ringleaders were the Monks, and Antony was at the head of them: for in the end of The Life of Antony, Athanasius relates that these were his dying words to his disciples who then attended him. “Do you take care,” said Antony, “to adhere to Christ in the first place, and then to the Saints, that after death they may receive you as friends and acquaintance into the everlasting Tabernacles.”14
Newton states elsewhere that Anthony had never said these things on his deathbed at all but that Athanasius had put the words in his mouth to show that these beliefs, which were actually those of Athanasius, had had the support of the highly esteemed and wholly trusted Saint Anthony.
In a whole other matter, Newton missed a tremendous opportunity of catching Athanasius out in a whopping lie and thereby further discrediting him. The exiled bishop of Alexandria wrote in the Life of Anthony that the desert saint could neither read nor write. For centuries everybody believed this, including Newton. But we know today that that wasn’t true and that Athanasius must have known it wasn’t true.
The idea that an illiterate man could know and preach the scriptures as well as Anthony did had a certain allure during the early history of Christianity. The ancient world accepted it as fact. Saint Augustine (354–430) found the notion thrilling; the idea was in his mind at almost the same moment that he himself was suddenly converted to Christianity.
Isaac Newton had no trouble believing Anthony was illiterate. He quotes Augustine: “Antony without any knowledge of letters had the scriptures by heart.”15 Newton also cites at least half a dozen of Anthony’s contemporaries and near contemporaries who believed the desert saint was illiterate; they include Baronius, Bellarmin, Socrates, Cassian, Sozomen, and Gregory of Nazianzen.
When Anthony was asked how he could manage without the solace of books, he replied that “the nature of things” [the natural order] was his book. The church fathers believed that the desert saint was so acutely attentive to what was read or said to him that it came naturally to him to remember it all without the benefit of “letters.” When his questioners asked him why he had never learned to read or write, he in turn asked them, according to Newton, “which was oldest, the mind or letters & which was the cause of the other? To which, when they replied that the mind was older than letters & the inventor of them, he answered that he therefore who has a sound mind has no need of letters.”16
But there is a growing number of scholars today who believe Anthony really could read and write. The Princeton religion scholar Elaine Pagels tells us in Revelations that
letters long attributed to Anthony often had been disregarded as pseudonymous [by an unknown author], since their content conflicts with much that is found in Athanasius’s classic Life of Anthony. Like many others, however, I am persuaded by the analysis offered in Samuel Robertson’s book The Letters of St. Anthony: Monasticism and the Making of a Saint (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995) that the letters he identifies there are most likely to be genuine.17
Although Athanasius states categorically that the desert saint was an “illiterate and simple man,” Pagels is of the opinion that Anthony emerges in his letters as a “sophisticated and fiercely independent teacher.” The Princeton scholar believes Athanasius put many of his own likes and dislikes into Anthony’s mouth to give them added credibility. He makes Anthony into someone who “hates Christian dissidents as much as he [Athanasius] did—and who, like the bishop himself, calls them not only heretics but ‘forerunners of Antichrist.’”18 But this is not Anthony talking. It is Athanasius.
In making Anthony illiterate, Athanasius is implying that book learning and intellectual debate have little place in the true, orthodox practice of Christianity. Knowledge other than that of the scriptural text should be left to God and the bishops. It’s up to ordinary Christians to accept the authority of the bishop, believe what he tells them to believe, and do what he tells them to do. There’s no need for reading, and Anthony, the exemplary Christian, knew this.
Newton would have been delighted to have this further proof of Athanasius’s duplicity.
If we lament the fact that certain apocryphal texts, like the Book of Enoch, are missing from the Bible, then we only have Athanasius to blame. It was the archbishop of Alexandria and author of the Life of Anthony who, in his 39th Festal Letter (written in 367), laid out the canon of the Bible as we have it today. Athanasius didn’t have the authority to impose his canon, but his influence was such that it was widely accepted at the time and quickly became the canon of choice. Athanasius insisted that the books he excluded from the Bible should never be read. He said they were “empty and polluted,” written by people “who do not seek what benefits the church.”19
It is to Athanasius that we owe the inclusion of the Book of Revelation in the New Testament; all other would-be canon creators excluded it. And, says Pagels, Athanasius had a unique take on the identity of the Great Beast in Revelation, identifying it as the “demonically deceived Christian.”20 He insisted that “Babylon,” or the “Great Whore,” was heresy personified—the archetype of heresy, we might say today. (And represented every single person in the world who did not believe exactly what Athanasius believed.)
Newton’s discussion of how Athanasius used Anthony, if it is accurate (and modern scholars seem to feel it is, though they are primarily concerned with Athanasius’s having lied about Anthony’s illiteracy) is disturbing in that it greatly broadens the sphere of Athanasius’s fraudulent activities. The orthodox Christianity of the fourth century AD, Newton is saying, was built on many lies, and Athanasius was the biggest liar.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE GREAT APOSTASY
Abram Sachar writes that the Temple of Solomon, built about 1000 BC,
grew until it overshadowed Jerusalem. It became more than an object of worldly greatness. It was a symbol of peace, of social justice. Ethical meanings were read into its blocks and stones; allegories were found hidden in its measurements! No iron, it was said, went into the construction of the Temple, for iron is a weapon of war. The Temple site, the rabbis taught, was chosen because on it two brothers had shown for each other a divine, self-sacrificing love. These and other legends clustered about Solomon’s work of pride until the Temple rivaled Sinai in its religious significance.1
The Temple of Solomon, which was destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 BC, in Newton’s time had become a cult, a science, a dream, and the seventeenth-century equivalent of a mega-computer. It was not of earthly design. Just as Moses had received the divine plan of the tabernacle from Jehovah on Mount Sinai, so had David received the divine plan of the temple from God and passed it on to his son Solomon, assuring him that “all this . . . the Lord made me understand in writing by his hand upon me, even in all the works of this patt
ern” (1 Chron. 28:19). The Temple of Solomon was the blueprint of God’s mind; it was a mirror held up to the divinely created cosmos. It was, in the words of Frank Manuel, “the most important embodiment of a future extra-mundane reality, a blueprint of heaven; to ascertain every last fact about it was one of the highest forms of knowledge, for here was the ultimate truth of God’s kingdom expressed in physical terms.”2
Isaac Newton was fascinated by the temple all his life. He made an extended effort to work out the exact measurements of the sacred cubit by which it had been built.3 He did not include a history of the Jews in his Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended but instead filled five pages in the middle of the book with the floor plan, as if that said everything there was to say about God’s chosen people. He and his colleagues thought that if you could know precisely the measurement of every pillar and every tile and every nook and cranny in God’s sacred temple then you might be able to tease from it the answer to every question in the universe, for it itself was the full measure of the universe.
In the early Renaissance there began to appear in Europe scale models not only of the Temple of Solomon but of the Temple of Jerusalem and the Tabernacle, for they too were mirrors of God’s mind (the Temple of Jerusalem having been built in accordance with the design of the Temple of Solomon but also modified a little later, with details from Ezekiel’s dream of the temple). Entrepreneurial scholars trundled these models across England, giving lectures for the edification of the masses and for very small sums; in 1726, the mathematician and divine William Whiston had a craftsman build scale models of the Tabernacle of Moses and of “the Temple of Jerusalem, serving to explain Solomon’s, Zorobabe’s, Herod’s, and Ezekiel’s Temples; and had Lectures upon that at London, Bristol, Bath and Tunbridge Wells.”4 Much earlier, in February 1675, the celebrated 1:100 models of the Temple of Solomon and the Tabernacle of Moses, complete with every last moving and unmoving part and constructed by the famed Rabbi Jacob Judah Leon, were brought from Amsterdam and put on display, every day except Saturdays and Sundays, beside the tree near the Great Synagogue in Duke’s Place in London.
Every morning, the local rabbi crossed the lawn from the nearby synagogue and answered questions about this magnificent artifact. And on the first day he answered questions from the king and queen of England, who had been among the very first to come and visit. Every day thereafter, amid the barking of dogs and the shrieking of children and the muffled clattering of carriages passing by on the muddy streets, he fielded questions that were usually put by well-dressed dandies and were meant, not to edify the asker, but to entertain the asker’s lady companion, and the rabbi bore up without condescension in the face of these questions that were bitter proof of the ignorance of the gentiles in the face of the holiness of Rabbi Jacob Judah and that of Leon’s model of the sacred temple.
It is very likely that, one chilly February day, Isaac Newton came to examine the scale model of the Temple of Solomon.*18 He was thirty-three; nobody knew him, or that he was anything else than just another lean and hungry young man; and so nobody would have paid any attention to him as he gazed with a sort of preternatural intensity into the bowels of the scale models of the Temple of Solomon.
In 1675, Isaac Newton had already begun work on his celebrated exegesis of biblical prophecy, Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John. And it’s likely that, as early as 1675, Newton had reached the startling conclusion, shared by very few of his fellow countrymen, that the entire prophecy of the Book of Revelation—thundering horsemen, cascading stars, woman clothed in the sun, all of them—unfolded within the Temple of Jerusalem. That is why, scrutinizing Rabbi Leon’s brilliantly wrought scale model of the Temple of Solomon on that chilly February day, ignoring the poorly informed sallies of the foppish young, Newton might well have superimposed, in his mind’s eye, the Temple of Jerusalem on the Temple of Solomon. And if he did so, he very likely saw, scaled-down and Lilliputian-sized like the temple, making his way with dignity and forthrightness across the miniaturized floor of the model of the Temple of Solomon-Jerusalem, the tiny but eager figure of John of Patmos.
Isaac Newton’s method of interpreting the Book of Revelation was so intricate, so complex, so revolutionary, that its readers might be forgiven for taking it in slowly, bit by bit—a little here, a little there.
It was based on the assumption that the Temple of Jerusalem was indeed the blueprint of God’s mind; that it was a replica of the universe; and that therefore John could find within it, however cosmic or outré, every single prophetic hieroglyph or figure that he used in the Book of Revelation.
But these images could not be seen directly. John’s task was to derive from them the physical layout of the temple, its vessels and its paraphernalia and the ceremonies that unfolded within the temple. The original cosmic delineation of the tabernacle had been made by Moses in the desert; seers had made additions ever since; and John himself was a seer who knew more than had ever been written down.
In Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus describes what Moses did, telling us of the traditional symbolism of the Temple of Jerusalem: the three parts of the sanctuary were
every one made in way of imitation and representation of the universe. When Moses distinguished the tabernacle into three parts, and allowed two of them to the priests, as a place accessible and common, he denoted the land and the sea, these being of general access to all; but he set apart the third division for God, because heaven is inaccessible to men. And when he ordered twelve loaves to be set on the table, he denoted the year, as distinguished into so many months. By branching out the candlestick into seventy parts, he secretly intimated the Decani, or seventy divisions of the planets; and as to the seven lamps upon the candlesticks, they referred to the course of the planets, of which that is the number. The veils, too, which were composed of four things, they declared the four elements.5
Here is an example of what (or so Newton believed) John does all through the Book of Revelation: passage 10:1 reads, “I saw another mighty angel . . . his face blazed like the sun, his legs like pillars of fire, and he had a little book open in his hand. He planted his right foot on the sea and his left foot on the land, and then shouted with a loud voice like the roar of a lion.” How did John come by this image? He has seen, in the temple, a priest place one foot in the brazen laver or “sea of glass”—a large bowl filled with water beside the altar—and the other foot on the ground. In the lexicon of prophetic figures that John knew and that Newton had rediscovered, the earth symbolizing the Greek Empire, and the sea symbolizing the Latin Empire. But these basic images are drawn from the temple, so that the priest with one foot in the laver and the other on the ground becomes, in the visions, an angel with one foot in the sea and one foot on the earth, which, taken altogether, signifies an event that will concern both the Latin and Greek Empires. And since the high priest of the ceremonies is reading from the Torah (or the Book of Law) this little book becomes the “little book” that the angel shows John.
As Matt Goldish writes, Newton in his Observations
explains with the aid of his prophetic lexicon how the images presented are in fact representations of the prophet’s experience in the Temple. [Newton explains] move by move, Saint John’s entrance into the Temple precinct, his viewing of the various ceremonial objects, and his observations of the ceremonies of the daily worship, the Day of Atonement and the Feast of Tabernacles. Every aspect of the Temple—its physical layout, vessels and ceremonies—thus becomes critical to the unraveling of the secrets held in the Apocalypse. . . .
The scheme of Revelation, in Newton’s conception, is that of the prophet viewing events in the physical Temple, but reporting them in a cryptic or allegorical form which was designed to hint at the major events of apocalyptic history. Thus, the vision functions for him at three levels: the concrete physical scene of the prophet walking in the Temple; the cryptic manner in which this activity is described in Revelation; and the prophecy tha
t this cryptic description is attempting to convey to those who understand.6
But there was such a kinship between the tabernacle and the two temples—all three are the warp and woof of the mind of God—all three have operated on some realm of being too mystical to be explained or understood or even imagined but which are the shape of God’s mind—that all three eternally vibrate with the other, and if need be John can summon into the Tempe of Jerusalem resonances of the Temple of Solomon and the tabernacle; the boundaries of all three are blurred. The Temple of Jerusalem bursts its bonds, and events and objects skirting it also become the earthly correlatives of major events in the future history of mankind. For example, sometimes the Tabernacle of Moses with the twelve tribes of Israel encamped around it seem to be superimposed on the Temple of Jerusalem, and the twelve tribes become the root, the anchor point, the essential substance of events in the future history of mankind to which John will give hieroglyphic form 1,500 years later.
What became clear to Newton as he pored over the Book of Revelation was that the brilliant and despairing prophet John, incarcerated at Patmos, has re-created in his imagination, bit by bit, stone by stone, the entire structure of the Temple of Jerusalem (with the tabernacle and the Temple of Solomon flickering in and out). And within this structure, and from this structure, he has created the entire Book of Revelation.
It makes sense that he should have done this. It’s the measure of how traumatized he was by the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, which was far and away the worst of the many atrocities he knew had been inflicted on the Jews or the Christians, or that he had experienced. He was inconsolable in his grief over the Temple of Solomon. But he was a creative genius, and there is a way in which grieving creative geniuses can restore their psychic balance. They can re-create that which they have lost, and in this case John re-created in his mind’s eye the Temple of Jerusalem.
The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton Page 14