The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton

by John Chambers

  The period of the fourth horseman, who horse is pale, commences, says Newton, during the time of Maximinus the Thracian (ca. 173–238) and represents death that came upon both rulers and people in abundance for the thirty-three-year period beginning with the Thracian: “The deaths here were not to be by bloodshed only because . . . [starvation and plague were also widespread, and came to the great and the common alike;] therefore this horse is neither red nor in mourning as in those seals, but pale, a color which equally expresses all sorts of deaths & the deaths of all sorts of persons.”21

  The first horseman, whose horse is white, is traditionally identified as Jesus Christ, and Newton accepts this identification along with his identification as Vespasian and his sons, who, Newton apparently thought, shed the least blood of all.

  Let’s examine in detail just one of these Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and marvel—or perhaps feel uncomfortable, for sometimes what Newton says feels contrived—at the wealth of detail he brings to his exegesis to these four, perhaps the best-known, hieroglyphs in John’s Book of Revelation. Christ opens the third seal. John is once more admonished to “Come and See!” He sees a black horse, “and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.” Newton says the scales allude not to famine but to Septimus’s early vocation as a judge. This emperor, he writes, “had a natural affection to judicature from a child, was so expert a Lawyer that at the age of 32 years the Emperor Marcus designed him Prætor & that more than among the candidates, after he came to the Empire heard causes daily all the morning, was very severe against criminals.”22

  Severus wins the award for the most bizarrely surrealist passage in Revelation’s account of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: “A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine” (Rev. 6:6).

  Newton discusses this exhaustively, citing numerous sources and explaining that a penny was “the daily wages of the soldiers, & of other laborers . . . a measure containing so much as was allowed for the maintenance of a poor man for a day.” Severus increased this figure, says Newton, his reign being “therefore remarkable for the increase of the Roman provisions above what other Emperors had done . . . there followed great tranquility & plenty.”23

  Historians tell us that Severus was indeed very concerned with the proper distribution of grain, barley, wine, and oil to the poor and increased quotas all around. Gibbon writes that his “expensive taste for building, magnificent shows, and, above all, a constant and liberal distribution of corn and provisions, were the surest means of captivating the affection of the Roman people. . . . Severus celebrated the secular games with extraordinary magnificence, and he left in the public granaries a provision of corn for seven years, at the rate of 75,000 modii, or about 2,500 quarters, per day.”24

  The fourth seal, says Newton, is linked to the tribes of Dan, whose color is “pale,” whose heraldic beast is the eagle, and who were encamped to the north of the tabernacle. Newton comments conclusively: “Lastly to all this the standard of this Rider is very agreeable, being an eagle, a Bird of prey which feeds on carcasses.”25

  In Heart of Darkness, the “four horsemen” are the imperialist powers of Europe clandestinely jockeying for control of the dark continent of Africa. Conrad conveys their presence with just a few words. Marlow, in the pay of the Belgians, sees, when partway down the coast of Africa, a single French man-of-war anchored just offshore and shelling the jungle and remarks, “There wasn’t even a shed there. . . . It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. . . . In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, fitting into a continent.”26 (The film The African Queen vividly records the presence of Germany in Africa during World War I; and, at the same time as Conrad was writing Heart of Darkness [1899], the British and the Dutch Boers were locked in a bloody battle for pieces of South Africa.)

  Two things should have become apparent to the reader by now: First, that Newton’s proofs for his interpretations of John’s prophetic hieroglyphs and figures often seem to be contrived, and sometimes outrageously contrived. And, second, that it is absolutely impossible, in the short space of the two chapters in this book dedicated to Newton’s interpretation of the Book of Revelation, to deal with any more than a tiny bit of Saint John’s Apocalypse. So, in our discussion, we will try to choose passages that, first of all, show us exactly how Newton does what he does (so the reader will be able to do it on his or her own) and, secondly, that bear directly on Newton’s prophecy that the Apocalypse will come in the year 2060.

  When, in Revelation, Christ loosens the fifth seal, John sees “under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held” (Rev. 6:9–10). Newton says this bitter prophetic hieroglyph emblemizes Diocletian’s persecution of the Christians, so one of the souls under the altar is Archbishop Peter of Alexandria, whose death plays a poignant role in Newton’s excoriation of Athanasius. Here, Newton’s Observations on Revelation suddenly intersects with the “Paradoxical Questions Concerning the Morals & Actions of Athanasius”; we are approaching a point of high tension in Newton’s “History of the Corruption of the Soul of Man,” where a number of events will pile up to trigger the first stage of the Great Apostasy. (The temple-related raw data that John, prompted by explosions of inspiration from Christ, draws on to create this prophetic figure derives from the ancient practice of sacrificing animals in the outer courtyard of Solomon’s Temple; the prophet has jumped far back in time to secure what he needs for this image.)

  Meanwhile, in Heart of Darkness, Conrad gives us a harshly ironic picture of the Congo natives undergoing persecution at the hands of their imperialist masters. Here the exploitation is all the more brutal in that it is passive; the Congolese are displaced, starved, and left to die. Marlow tells us that

  black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees, leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair. . . . They were dying slowly—it was very clear. . . . Near the same tree two more bundles of acute angles sat with their legs drawn up. One, with his chin propped on his knees, stared at nothing in an intolerable and appalling manner. His brother phantom rested its forehead as if overcome with a great weariness; and all about others were scattered in every pose of contorted collapse, as in some picture of a massacre or a pestilence.27

  Now Christ loosens the sixth seal, and we seem to be in a whole new universe, one of catastrophe on a cosmic level: the sun turns black, stars plummet to earth, blazing mountains are tossed into the sea, abominations crawl out of the earth. However, if we are expecting to find behind these garish hieroglyphs interstellar warfare in the mode of Doris Lessing’s “space-fiction” novels (Shikasta, The Making of Representative Seven, and so on) or interdimensional conflict after the fashion of Stephen Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, we will be in very disappointed. Newton is pursuing his agenda of seeking an “analogy between the world natural and . . . a world politic,”28 and he ruthlessly reduces whatever seems transcendent or paranormal or fantastical or from another reality to the unrelentingly mundane. John sees “a tremendous earthquake, the sun turned dark like coarse black cloth; and the full moon was red as blood. The stars of the sky fell upon the earth” (Rev. 6:12).

  The hieroglyphs of the sixth seal foretells what looms behind and follows upon the Council of Nicaea, which epochal synod Newton also describes, with his own follow-up, in “Paradoxical Questions” (see chapter 4, “Bloodbath in a Boghouse: Murder in the Fourth Century, Part 1): This is the disintegration of the pagan religions of the Roman Empire as Constantine makes Christianity its official religion. The sun is the prophetic figure for a ruler; the moon, for “the body of the common people, considered as the King’s wife”; the stars, for “subordinate Princes and great men” (or, when the ruler-sun is Christ, for bishops);29 and ea
rthquakes, for wars and similarly major disruptions. Revelation 6:14 tells us that “every mountain and island were moved out of their places,” and Newton tells us that mountains and islands are “the cities of the earth and sea politic,” so this is about shifts in political entities. Revelation 6:15 says many distinguished men “hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains.” Newton says dens and rocks are temples and that this passage prophesies “the shutting up of idols in their Temples, or burying them in the ruins thereof.”30 David Castillejo says the “motions of some and voices of others” from which John fashions these prophetic figures are, for the sun, “the bright flame of the fire of the Altar (or by the face of the Son of man) shining through this flame like the Sun in his strength,” and, for the moon, “the burning coals upon the altar convex above & flat below like an half moon.” We’re being asked to imagine that at one point, while the high priest is reading from the Torah, the flame of the altar flickers and almost goes out and the burning coals are momentarily reduced to glowing embers.31

  Now we have a hiatus: the angels, standing at the four corners of the Earth, hold the winds back. Then the “sealing” of the 144,000 “of all the tribes of the children of Israel” takes place. Newton says this prophetic hieroglyph draws its imagery from the twelve tribes (144,000 Israelites) encamped around the tabernacle; it is also linked, through the Feast of Tabernacles, to Jews who have repented during the High Holy Days and whose names God as a consequence is setting down in a positive mode in his as-yet-unsealed Book of Life.

  Heart of Darkness gives us a black parody of the sealing. The Congolese natives, whose only crime is that they are pagan Africans in the wrong place at the wrong time, are not sealed; they are shackled together with iron collars. In their own universe they are perfectly innocent, and their shackling is a kind of demonic sealing. Marlow tells us that

  a slight clinking behind me made me turn my head. Six black men advanced in a file toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their footsteps. Black rags were wound round their loins and the short ends behind waggled to and fro like tails. I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope, each had an iron collar on his neck and all were connected together with a chain whose bights swung between them, rhythmically clinking.32

  Iliffe tells us that, for Newton, the spiritual disaster of the Great Apostasy, “accomplished by making Athanasian Trinitarianism the official religion across the Roman Empire in 380, was described by the opening of the seventh seal.”33 This making of the doctrine of the Trinity the cornerstone dogma of the Catholic Church was only the second of the three phases of the settling-in of the Great Apostasy, as we will see.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  APOCALYPSE 2060?

  Let us pause for a moment in our headlong race with Isaac Newton to the Apocalypse via Revelation and look at a curious treatise of his, unknown for three hundred years, that discusses an unusual, disastrous event he believed would take place sometime during the End Times. This was the diluvium ignis, or “flood of fire.”

  If we’ve come to believe, by the time this chapter ends, that Newton really did prove the Apocalypse will arrive in 2060, then we’ll be unnerved by this disastrous event predicted by many of the millenarians of the seventeenth century. The diluvium ignis sounds like the culminating stage of what we call global warming, when, say some of our scientists, parts of the Earth’s crust will burst into flame.*21

  The flood of fire was first predicted in 2 Peter 3:10. The text was probably written in the middle of the first century AD. The passage runs: “But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.” This event is generally predicted for Judgment Day (right after Armageddon); it was first prophesied some thirty years before John of Patmos wrote Revelation.

  Isaac Newton writes, in “The Synchronisms of the Three Parts of the Prophetic Interpretation,” that “it is a received opinion that this judgment shall be accompanied with a conflagration of the world; & some hearing that in the future world the Wolf shall lie down with the Lamb & all beasts shall become gentle & harmless & the Earth become fuller of rivers & more fruitful . . . have conceived that an amendment of the whole frame of nature shall ensue that conflagration.”1 Newton means that those who believe the world will be transformed into a place of harmony and beauty believe there must be a global conflagration beforehand (“an amendment of the whole frame of nature”), because only a total cleansing of the Earth’s surface will properly prepare for this new world to arrive.

  Newton doesn’t believe this global conflagration will necessarily happen and cautions that those who read the Bible in this way are mistaking mystical for real-life, historical, language: “these fancies have been occasioned by understanding in a vulgar & literal sense what the Prophets writ in their own mystical language. For the conflagration of the world in their language signifies the consumption of Kingdoms by war, as you may see in Moses, where God thus describes the desolation of Israel.”2 Thus the conflagration is entirely political in nature.

  This being said, Newton does seem to believe there will be a smallish, localized conflagration, a diluvium ignis, around Judgment Day. He writes, “but in the day of judgment there is also a literal conflagration of the world politique in the lake of fire & to those that are cast into it a conflagration also of the world natural, the heaven & earth where they are being on fire & the elements melting with fervent heat.”3

  This conflagration will not burn up much territory.

  And whilst the Apostle Peter tells us that none but the wicked shall suffer in this conflagration & that this is a time of refreshing to the Godly I cannot take it for a conflagration of any considerable part of this globe whereby the rest of the habitable world may be annoyed. And if the world natural be not burnt up there is no ground for such a renovation thereof as they suppose: The glorious Sun & Moon, multiplied rivers & copious vegetables of the new world are its Kings & people, the peaceable & harmless Beasts its peaceable Kingdoms, & the new Jerusalem that spiritual building in Sion whereof the Chief corner stone is Christ & the rest of the stones & gold are the saints.4

  Early church fathers like Origen and Eusebius suspected the passage in Peter was a forgery. Some first- and second-century thinkers thought the predicted disaster had already occurred; perhaps, they ventured, Peter was foreseeing the fiery destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem. Many believed the flood of fire would rain down right after the Jews returned to the Holy Land and became converts to Christianity.5 (See chapter 9, “The Conversion of the Jews.”)

  The belief of a great many English millenarian thinkers of the seventeenth century was that God would aim the diluvium ignis straight at the heart of the Roman Catholic Church. Trying to determine the physical cause of a flood of fire—global warming was an inconceivable idea at the time—researchers decided it would have to be a volcanic eruption from the bowels of the Earth. The most volcanically volatile region in Europe, they decided, was central Italy (notwithstanding that Europe’s most active volcano, Mount Etna, was some little distance away, on the east coast of Sicily). And the most potentially dangerous area of all was beneath Rome’s Vatican City. So there were many thinkers, especially Protestants, who saw the raison d’être of the biblical diluvium ignis as the incineration of the Antichrist diabolically inhabiting Saint Peter’s Basilica!6

  Some believed the diluvium ignis wouldn’t arrive until near the end of the thousand years of peace. To Newton’s way of thinking, the Apocalypse, though a dreadful time (it included Armageddon and multiple plagues), was the storm before the calm. At the end of this bloody interregnum, Satan would be bottled up in the bottomless pit and a thousand years of peace would commence. Only a sainted minority would survive; our world would be strange and new, but sti
ll intact. At the end of this semi-blissful period of one millennium (during which Newton hoped to wield some influence as a saint), there would be a final clash between Christ and Satan, Christ would triumph, and our world would morph into something wholly different and unknown at the same time as a tiny remnant of mankind transitioned to another world. (See chapter 10, “With Noah on the Mountaintop.”)

  Does John’s Book of Revelation give any hint of the arrival on our planet of a diluvium ignis (which flood of fire sounds strangely like the final paroxysm of global warming as predicted by some for our Earth)? Let us return to a necessarily impressionistic discussion of Newton’s interpretation of the Book of Revelation and see if Newton has anything to say about this.

  We have arrived at the opening of the seventh seal. From beneath this seal there successively emerged seven trumpets a-blasting and, in rapid succession after, seven vials (or, in some translations, “bowls”) a-pouring. Accompanying the noisy blasts of the seven trumpets was the din of seven thunderings.

  Such was the interpretation of all the exegetes of the seventeenth century—all except Isaac Newton. Newton defied everyone by stating that the seven vials emerged concurrently with the seven trumpets; that is, that the seven trumpets (with the seven thunderings) and the seven vials described the same event from two different angles: they trumpeted and poured together.

  John, receiving the raw stuff of visions in a steady stream from Christ, molds the prophetic hieroglyphs of the trumpets and the vials from the trumpet blasts and the exquisite scents wafting from the vials of the ceremony of the Feast of Tabernacles unfolding within the temple. These exquisite scents undergo a drastic change in Newton’s deciphering of the hieroglyphs: they become horrible poisons. In Newton’s evernuanced and subtle interpretation, they have a double purpose: some just give you the plague, while others give you the ability to give others the plague.*22 The future history of the world that the trumpets and vials tell is the battles of the Romans against the barbarians; Newton says that often during the Festival of Tabernacles the high priest read not from the Torah but from Jewish history; there are many wars in Jewish history, and John makes use of this history when he concocts the prophetic hieroglyphs that emerge from the seven seals.