The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton
Page 17
So, the yoked trumpet blasts and vial pourings emerge one after another. John creates, encoded in hieroglyphs, vivid images of bloody, desperate struggles between Rome and the Goths, or the Huns, or the Vandals, or the Alans, or the Franks, and so on. The adoption in 380 of Athanasian Trinitarianism as the official religion across the Roman Empire (which marked the beginning of the second phase of the Great Apostasy) has begun to operate like a corrosive acid, weakening the moral fiber of the Romans, because, by distracting their attention with Jesus Christ, it dilutes the power of man’s exclusive and necessary love for God.
As has been said, all other Revelation exegetes, including Newton’s tutor Joseph Mede, saw the seven vials as emerging from the seventh seal long after the seven trumpet blasts. This was a reasonable assumption, since the vials come long well after the trumpets in the text of Revelation, the first group in passages 8:7–12; 9:1–13; 11:14; and 12:1, 3; and the second in 16:2–17. These exegetes interpreted the prophetic hieroglyphs of the seven vials as foretelling the struggles of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation against the papacy.
But Newton dismissed this interpretation, because he virtually dismissed the Protestant Reformation. He thought it was a mere bump in the road in the face of the oncoming juggernaut of the now fully consolidated Great Apostasy. Iliffe writes that, for Newton, “the demonic power of the Papacy was so great that Martin Luther’s revolution had no dampening effect whatsoever on the papacy.” He adds that with his “astonishing and utterly original analysis,” Newton “totally inverted what orthodox Christians of all persuasions took to be the heroes and villains of history. His colleagues had reserved a special place for the six vials as a specific account of the trials of Protestantism. Newton composed a detailed and extensive analysis of the way in which Catholics—whom he termed ‘sorcerers’ and ‘magicians’—fulfilled the conditions of the sixth trumpet and vial.”7 The trumpetled battles with the barbarians, the potions in the vials, had merely exacerbated the Catholic Church’s relentless corruption of the soul of man.
The first trumpet blast hurls hail and fire mingled with blood on the earth (Rev. 8:7). The first vial (or bowl) empties “loathsome and malignant ulcers” on the enemies of Christ (Rev. 16:2). These seemingly cosmic hieroglyphs, says Newton, actually
direct us to the invasions which broke forth immediately after the death of Theodosius. For during the reign of that Emperor the Empire flourished very much bearing up against the endeavors of all foreign enemies, & enjoying a more then usual tranquility. There were indeed between the wars of Maximus & Eugenius some attempts upon Gallia by the Franks, but these were but short & unsuccessful & may be compared rather to gentle breathings then winds. But so soon as Theodosius was dead, Ruffin, to whom Theodosius left the tuition of Arcadius thinking to get the Empire to himself, called in all the nations of the North to trouble the Roman waters. 8
For more details, including Newton’s explication of the various symbols, the reader is directed to section 1.6 of the “Untitled Treatise on Revelation,” on the Newton Project website.
Let’s jump ahead to the fourth trumpet blast and its concurrent vial pouring. Revelation 8:12 reads: “The fourth angel blew his trumpet, and a third part of the sun, a third part of the moon and a third part of the stars were struck. A third part of the light of each of them was darkened, so that light by day and light by night were both diminished by a third part.” We are, of course, not in a cosmic realm but in the thoroughly mundane domain of kings, kingdom, and princes. The kingdoms of western Europe are darkened and will be for some time. Newton says the passage refers to Belisarius (505–565). Flavius Belisarius was a Byzantine Empire general who played a decisive role in emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire Justinian’s attempt to reconquer much of the former Western Roman Empire, which had been lost to the barbarians less than a century before. What lies within this hieroglyph, says Newton, is the story of how Belisarius “conquered the Vandals, invaded Italy AD 535, and made war upon the Ostrogoths in Dalmatia, Liburnia, Venetia, Lombardy, Tuscany, and other regions northward from Rome, twenty years together. In this war many cities were taken and retaken.” There was a colossal loss of both military and civilian life; when the Ostrogoths retook Milan from the Romans, they murdered 300,000 males, from the young to the old, and “sent the women captives to their allies the Burgundians.” Rome itself, and other great cities, were taken and retaken several times, and Rome, practically without governance, fell into great decay. In AD 552, “after a war of seventeen years, the kingdom of the Ostrogoths fell.” A remnant of the Ostrogoths, supported by a German army, fought on for three or four more years. This was followed by the war of the Heruli, which, says Newton, quoting authorities, “slew all Italy.”9
But what about the fourth vial, whose contents, when deciphered, should complement the story of the fourth trumpet? Revelation 16:8 tells us that “the fourth angel emptied his vial over the sun, and the sun was given power to scorch men in its fiery blaze. Then men were terribly burned in the heat, and they blasphemed the name of God who has control over these afflictions; but they neither repented nor gave him glory.”
Newton says his interpretation of the fourth trumpet is
notably confirmed by the correspondent Vial; the tenor of this is that, it was poured upon the Sun & power was given him to scorch men with fire & men were scorched with great heat & blasphemed God &c, that is, that the pouring out of this Vial was an incitement of the supreme terrestrial potentate to torment men with war & men were tormented with vehement war & blasphemed God. And thus it happened. For the Greek Emperor (the supreme terrestrial potentate) [Justinian] was the cause of the wars of this Trumpet by sending his armies [led by the formidable Belisarius] into Italy in pursuance of his claim to those regions.10
It’s as if a sun-induced fever has seized Justinian and compelled him to unleash the extremes of warfare. The brightness of western Europe is reduced by one-third during these years of war; faith is lost and God is ignored; and the world is swept more and more powerfully toward the third and cumulative stage of the Great Apostasy.
In Heart of Darkness, Revelation 8:12 and 16:8 are reflected in the growing darkness of the soul of man as expressed by the murder, terror, and depravity confronting Marlow as he pilots his steamboat up the Congo River. At the end of the trip is the object of their search, the maverick white hunter Kurtz, whose soul is already dark; it is, in fact, the “heart of darkness.” As Marlow proceeds, with the foliage ever thickening on the riverbanks, a hail of native spears sprays the steam-boat from both sides; the helmsman is killed in front of Marlow’s eyes. A harlequinesque figure hails the steamboat from the bank; Marlow puts in, and this bizarrely dressed naive young European turns out to be in the spell of the evil genius Kurtz; he is the anti–John the Baptist to the counter-Christ of this once-promising leader who has gone wholly over to the dark side. Guided by the acolyte, they arrive at Kurtz’s encampment; and as they draw nearer strange round objects atop stakes in the front of his house resolve themselves into shrunken heads. Nature seems to droop and crawl and be a part of the steady corruption of the human soul that Marlow senses all around him.
In the simultaneous blast of the fifth trumpet and pouring out of the fifth vial, John of Patmos has foretold, says Newton, the birth and rise of Islam.
When the fifth trumpet sounds (Rev. 9:1), a star falls to earth and an angel opens a bottomless pit from which arises smoke so thick it darkens the sun and moon. Out of the smoke come locusts as strong as scorpions, who have the power to harm every living creature except those with the mark of God on their foreheads. Newton says these plagues of locusts are armies, and these armies are the warriors of Muhammad. Revelation 16:10 says the fifth angel emptied his vial (the plague of darkness) upon the throne of the animal; Newton says the throne of the animal is Islam.
Ron Iliffe explains:
This was the rise of Islam, to be dated from when Mohammed found his vocation as a prophet in 609 CE (as Newton date
d it). His flight from Mecca to Medina in 622 was the opening of the pit, but the fifth trumpet and vial lasted from 635 to 936. . . . The extended torment referred to the fact that Muslims had repeatedly laid siege to Constantinople without being able to take it.11
Newton tells us something about the temple components out of which John molds the prophetic hieroglyphs that encode the story of Islam’s birth. Newton says that “the bottomless pit or lower parts of the earth called Hades & hell” was based on “the sink which ran down into the earth from the great Altar & was covered with a stone to open & shut,” adding that, “the opening of the bottomless pit . . . denotes the letting out of a false religion: the smoke which came out of the pit, signifying the multitude which embraced that religion.”12
Now an angel hands John a “little book” and tells him to eat it (Rev. 10:1). The angel tells him to prophesy anew according to this book; it’s generally considered that God has given John access to the backs of the pages of the scroll that Christ had read to him.
We are nearing the point where the Great Apostasy will begin to take hold, and it is at this point that two women enter the Book of Revelation.
We know that, for Newton, a woman is always a church. In Revelation 12:6, a woman clothed in the sun gives birth. Her baby is snatched away. A beast rises up out of the water and attacks her. She escapes. It is not clear where her newborn son is. Most exegetes, including Newton, believed the woman clothed in the sun is the Christian Church in its purest form, which is now, with the ascendancy of Trinitarianism, being exiled, sent to be “nourished in the wilderness” for the duration of the supremacy of the Roman Catholic Church, the papacy, or, for Newton, as Iliffe sums it up, “that impious monster bristling with stakes, relics, indulgences, saint-worship and miracle-soliciting.”13
The other woman is the Whore of Babylon riding the Beast, which beast is the Antichrist, or the Roman emperor Nero. It was thought that Nero had never died, and in fact he lives on in the Revelation narrative through various “incarnations.” He is Rome; he is the Rome that becomes entangled, through Constantine, with Christianity; he is the Roman Empire harshly compromised by the growing power of the church. Finally, Rome is subsumed into the Roman Catholic Church, which becomes, for Newton and most non-Catholic exegetes, the Whore of Babylon riding on the back of the Beast (Rev. 17:3). As that, she is the demonic opposite of the woman clothed with the sun, who represents the true Christianity of Jesus’s apostles, who taught love to God and our neighbors. She is the pope’s kept whore, the totally corrupt Roman Catholic Church that Newton and his colleagues despise with a virulence that ceases to surprise postmodern man.
We also encounter two women in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. One is Kurtz’s black pagan mistress, who has been utterly corrupted by Kurtz himself; she is the Whore of Babylon riding the Beast who is Kurtz/the Antichrist—except that this woman comes from the polar opposite of a great city like Babylon; namely, the bare jungle. The text hints of “the unspeakable acts” she and Kurtz have committed together; she appears, lost, mourning, and savage, on the shore as Marlow’s boat leaves with the dying Kurtz on board. Marlow describes her thus:
She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed clothes, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men, that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step. . . . She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress.14
The counterpart to this black pagan goddess is Kurtz’s fiancée, whom he long ago left behind in Belgium. She is the “woman clothed in the sun”; her purity is such that she cannot know that her beloved Kurtz could ever have become what he became. Marlow, visiting her on his return to Brussels, doesn’t try to enlighten her. Hers is the spotlessness that cannot see dirt. Kurtz’s last words were, “The horror! The horror!” Marlow tells her that those last words were her name.15
For Newton, the resurrection of the Two Witnesses and the recommencement of the preaching come at the same time as the fall of Babylon, the corrupt church—that is, the Roman Catholic Church—and perhaps all other churches that fail to preach the necessity of worshipping God, and God alone. Newton believed that, as the 1,260-year period of the Great Apostasy comes to an end, we would see “many begin to run to and fro as knowledge of the church begins to be preached in all nations by the two witnesses ascending up to heaven in a cloud.”16 The fall of Babylon and the preaching of the true Gospel end with the blasting of the seventh trumpet, which heralds Armageddon, the coming of Christ, the resurrection, the judgment, and the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth. Newton also links the return of the Jews (see chapter 9, “The Conversion of the Jews”) with the sounding of the seventh trumpet of Revelation.
Newton mulled over several “commencement dates.” One was AD 538, when the emperor of the eastern remnant of the Roman Empire decreed that the bishop of Rome should be the head of all the Christian churches. This decree became effective with the defeat of the Arian (i.e., anti-Trinitarian) powers that had ruled much of the western empire (including Italy). Adding 1,260 years to 538 brings us to 1798, the year when Napoleon’s general Berthier took the pope prisoner and proclaimed the end of all political rule of the Roman Catholic Church. Other commencement dates Newton toyed with included AD 476, then considered the year of the fall of the Roman Empire, which put the end of the world at 1736; and AD 609, roughly the year the Roman emperor Phocas gave Pope Boniface IV the right to institute image worship in churches, which put the end of the world at 1869.
“The two-horned Beast slowly rises up out if the earth and the ten-horned Beast receives the Dragon’s throne in the west. . . .” We have now entered that part of Newton’s exegeses that fairly bristles with horns. This is because Newton is about to lean heavily on the Book of Daniel to supplement his journey of discovery through the Book of Revelation. We find the same horns, with the same meanings, in Revelation, but in the Book of Daniel they are the star performers. Horns stand for kingdoms, usually political and sometimes spiritual. Newton believed the beast in Daniel’s fourth vision was the prophetic hieroglyph for Rome.
This was the beast with “huge iron teeth” and ten horns, of whom Newton wrote, “Daniel’s fourth Beast, which is the same with Saint John’s [beast with ten horns], signifies properly the western nations of the Roman Empire, & those alone.”17
The ten horns were the ten barbarian kingdoms that harried and sometimes occupied Rome: the Vandals and Alans in Spain and Africa, the Suevians in Spain, the Visigoths, the Alans in Gallia, the Burgundians, the Franks, the Britons, the Huns, the Lombards, and Ravenna. As Daniel watched (Dan. 8:20, 24), three of the horns were “plucked out by the roots” and a “little” horn sprouted in their place. This little horn quickly became “greater than his fellows.”
Newton argued that this eleventh horn was the Roman Catholic Church. It differed from the other horns in claiming to be a “universal bishopric; Daniel 25 says it will “alter the seasons and the Law.” This horn had “a mouth full of boasting” (Dan. 7:8), which Newton thought symbolized Pope Leo III’s haughtiness. Newton wrote: “With his mouth he gives laws to kings and nations as an Oracle; and pretends to Infallibility, and that his dictates are binding to the whole world.”18
(In Heart of Darkness, there are no horns save those the Africans are wearing decoratively; but there are tusks—elephant tusks. The action revolves around them. The Europeans lust after them, killing, maiming, and enslaving to have these tusks; they are beautiful and valuable in themselves, but man’s rapacity makes them become deliverers of death. The lust to have them brings the colonial powers into Europe, makes these powers clash—and they end up acting as badly as the battling Romans a
nd barbarians symbolized by the horns of the Book of Daniel and John’s Book of Revelation.)
Newton had been tempted to choose 774 as the commencement date, which would have put the Apocalypse at 2034. It was in 774 that Pope Adrian I first gained “temporal dominion” for the Vatican by acquiring three earthly principalities. Newton says these acquisitions were the three uprooted horns of the fourth beast, which stood for Ravenna, Lombardy, and Rome. The pope acquired this political power with the help of the Franks and their king Charlemagne.
It is at this time that the Catholic rites of the canonization of saints and of transubstantiation (the belief that the bread and wine offered in the celebration of the sacrament of the Eucharist turn into the actual blood and body of Jesus Christ during the service) took hold. For Newton this is the vilest sort of idolatry, and an ominous intensification of the Great Apostasy. But Newton finally decided that the year the papacy achieved political dominion over the Earth—the year when the Great Apostasy became established in full control of the religious life of mankind—was 800.
This was the true commencement year.
One event, both real and symbolic, captured the moment. It took place in the old Basilica of Saint Peter’s on Vatican Hill in Rome on Christmas Day 800. On that day, an old, trembling man, with red swollen eyes and a floppy tongue that made him hard to understand, got down on his knees before a fifty-six-year-old, black-bearded soldier built like a sumo wrestler (and between five and seven feet tall, depending on who you talked to) and pledged allegiance to him.