The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton

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The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton Page 18

by John Chambers


  The kneeling figure was Pope Leo III (750–816), who, eight months before, had been dragged off his horse by two assassins who tried to squeeze out his eyes and cut off his tongue. Leo was thrown into prison but escaped two months later. The pope’s brush with death—not the first—had made him more determined than ever to protect the Holy See by forging a revolutionary alliance with the greatest political figure of his day.

  Before he had knelt, Leo III had placed a crown on the head of the Frankish king Charlemagne (742–814) and named him Holy Roman Emperor. Now, as the pope struggled to his feet, Charlemagne bowed to him and called him “My brother.”

  It was a power-sharing agreement. The pope would share power with Charlemagne over the countries the newly crowned Holy Roman Emperor ruled: France and Germany. Charlemagne would add to his dominions the lands Christianity had held sway over almost since the time of Constantine: Rome, Britain, the Holy Lands, and parts of Africa and Asia.

  The first Holy Roman Emperor would soon convert the Saxons and Huns on his conquered lands to Catholicism, thereby significantly magnifying the power of the Roman Church.

  Here is Newton’s description of the coronation:

  Soon after, upon Christmas-day, the people of Rome, who had hitherto elected their Bishop, and reckoned that they and their Senate inherited the rights of the ancient Senate and people of Rome, voted Charles their Emperor, and subjected themselves to him in such manner as the old Roman Empire and their Senate were subjected to the old Roman Emperors. The Pope crowned him, and anointed him with holy oil, and worshiped him on his knees after the manner of adoring the old Roman Emperors.19

  We’ll recall that “beasts” are kingdoms; the “seven-headed beast restored” of Daniel may be the seven kingdoms (two, France and Germany, belonging to Charlemagne, and five, Rome, Britain, the Holy Lands, and parts of Africa and Asia, belonging to the pope) that came together as one on Christmas Day 800. Daniel 7:25 says the “little horn”—for Newton, the papacy—will rule for a “time, two times and half a time.” (“And they shall be given into his hand for a time, two times, & half a time.”) Newton took this phrase to signify the mystical/prophetic time span of 1,260 years, whose acquaintance we have already made. It is by adding this mystical number of 1,260 to 800 that Newton will arrive at a date for the Apocalypse of AD 2060.

  Before we get into commencement dates, however, we must take very quick note of other hieroglyphical actions fulminating, as if to emphasize its importance, around the commencement date of 800.

  “The outer court trodden down by the gentiles” takes its hieroglyphic trappings from the outer court of Solomon’s Temple, whose walls were torn down by the Babylonians and never repaired, being left open for non-Jewish visitors. Here the court seems to refer to the figurative breach torn in the side of the Roman Catholic Church to let in Charlemagne and his minions. “The witnesses on earth prophesying in sackcloth” are those who preach right Christian doctrine despite the pressure on them from the false, idolatrous, Trinitarian preachers in the Vatican and the court of Charlemagne (which have become, disastrously for Newton, almost a single entity. Newton writes:

  And so by the prophesying of the two witnesses we are to understand their promulgating & spreading the laws & word of God according to the utmost power they are able to speak with. For this their prophesying is opposed to the speaking or prophesying of the false prophet, & so signifies here not foretelling future things by immediate revelation, but the preaching to the world the word of God according to the right interpretation & meaning of it & propagating it in God’s name with all the authority they are able; as on the other hand the false Prophet propagates false interpretations & other lies in the name of his God, pretending the authority of his God, as the true prophets do that of theirs; to make his sentences pass for law & gain to himself a law making power in matters of religion.20

  To return to the subject of the “commencement date”: It had been Joseph Mede who had first set forth the “time” equals a “day” equals a “year” formula; Snobelen lists those biblical passages that influenced him:

  Numbers 14:34: “After the number of days in which ye searched the land, even forty days, each day for a year, shall ye bear your iniquities, even forty years, and ye shall know my breach of promise”;

  Ezekiel 4:6: “And when thou hast accomplished them, lie again on thy right side, and thou shalt bear the iniquity of the house of Judah forty days: I have appointed thee each day for a year”;

  Daniel 2:7: “and I heard him swear by him who lives forever that it would be for a time, two times, & half a time.”

  To reiterate: because a “day” stood for a “year,” then “time, two times, & half a time” equals 360 years (reckoning a year as 360 days according to the old standard) + (2 × 360 =) 720 years + (½ × 360 =) 180 years, totaling 1,260 years.

  But, if 1,260 days stood for 1,260 years, why the figure “1,260”—that is, why “time, two times, & half a time”—in the first place?

  Because, said Isaac Newton, 1,260 days (three-and-one-half years) was roughly the life span of a “short-lived Beast.” And “short-lived beasts” was the prophetic hieroglyph in the Book of Revelation for “lived [sic] Kingdoms.”21

  This period of 1,260 years was thus the period when the Great Apostasy, represented by the Roman Catholic Church, would rule supreme over the souls of humankind. This was the period when the Catholic Church would, in Newton’s view, have completely abandoned Christianity’s true teachings.

  Newton had calculated the time of the Apocalypse using a number of other commencement dates, and we do not know how seriously he took his prediction that the world would end in 2060. In one manuscript he seems to suggest that he made up the prediction so as to shut everybody else up. He wrote:

  This I mention not to assert when the time of the end shall be, but to put a stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men who are frequently predicting the time of the end, & by doing so bring the sacred prophesies into discredit as often as their predictions fail. Christ comes as a thief in the night, & it is not for us to know the times & seasons which God hath put into his own breast.22

  None of Newton’s contemporaries used his commencement date of AD 800. Joseph Mede reckoned the commencement date for the 1,260-year period of total apostasy was the year of the fall of the Roman Empire—476. Adding 1,260 years to this date, he came up with an End Time of 1736—nine years after Newton’s death.

  For Newton, this 1,260-year period was represented in the Apocalypse as the 1,260 days during which the woman clothed in the sun (the apostolic church) is nourished in the wilderness (Rev. 12:6), and the Great Whore rides the Beast that is the triumphant Roman Catholic Church (Rev. 17:3). Toward the end, the Beast of the Bottomless Pit kills the Two Witnesses (Rev. 11:7), but they are resurrected after having lain dead for three and a half days. The 1,260 days when “the outer court of the Temple is hidden underfoot by the Gentiles” (Rev. 11:2–3) encompasses this same time period.

  And when will that 1,260 time period end? Possibly, as we have seen, and according to Newton, in the year 2060.

  The Stoics of antiquity believed in the periodic renewal of the universe. The millenarians of Newton’s time believed that an “eternal sabbath” would follow Judgment Day.

  Steven Snobelen explains, and we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, that Newton did not believe the world would literally end in the year 2060. There would be a great battle, Armageddon, and then Christ and the saints would intervene to establish the worldwide thousand-year Kingdom of God. It would be a time of peace and prosperity; in his Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, Newton quotes Micah 4:3: “[The people will] beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks,” and during this time “nations shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”23

  Manuel tells us that into a few terse phrases from the Apocalypse, Newton

  compressed a wealth of scriptural evidence for his
belief that the world was moving inexorably toward a cataclysm, a great conflagration, to be followed by a yet undefined form of renewal. . . . I quote the whole passage (Rev. 20:10): “And the devil that deceived them was cast into a lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever” . . . [Newton] merely jotted down the phrase, “Days and nights after the Judgment.” . . . Tormenting the wicked for ever and ever is quite comprehensible and sufficient unto itself, and the prophet could have been expected to stop at that. But when John inserted the words “day and night,” which are seemingly superfluous and in excess, he surely meant to inform us of something—in this instance that the succession of days and nights would still be marked after Judgment Day. And that presupposed a new heaven and a new earth without which such a succession would be meaningless. Thus John in Revelation was communicating an important fact about the future history of the physical universe which later became part of one version of Newton’s cycloid cosmological theory.24

  Let us quote Newton more fully in this regard. He is almost lyrical when he intones:

  A new heaven & new earth, New Jerusalem comes down from heaven prepared as a Bride adorned for her husband. The marriage supper. God dwells with men wipes away all tears from their eyes, gives them of ye fountain of living water & creates all things new saying. It is done. The glory & felicity of the New Jerusalem is represented by a building of Gold & Gems enlightened by the glory of God & ye Lamb & watered by ye river of Paradise on ye banks of wch grows the tree of life. Into this city the kings of the earth do bring their glory & that of the nations & the saints reign for ever & ever.25

  As a youth, Newton believed in the succession of worlds. He based his belief on arguments from theology. The second book of Peter 3:8 reads: “Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.” Newton took this prophecy in a literal, physical sense; he had checked the text in the Vulgate, “in which text,” he wrote, “an emphasis upon the word WE is not countenanced by the original.”26

  Revelation 21:1 reads: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.” Isaiah 65:17 reads: “For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: for the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind,” and Isaiah 66:22 added, “For as the new heavens and the new earth, which I will make, shall remain before me, saith the Lord, so shall your seed and your name remain.”

  Newton found evidence for his belief in Revelation 20:10: “And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.” Newton jotted down the phrase “Days and nights after the Judgment.”27 The days and nights during which the beast and the false prophets were being tormented must have taken place on a world, since only worlds have day and night. And, since the old world had been destroyed, there must be a new world upon which this tormenting could take place.

  So, we must not despair. Even if we take seriously Newton’s assertion that the Apocalypse will come in 2160—an assertion that he doesn’t seem to have taken entirely seriously himself—we don’t have to face annihilation but merely Armageddon and, afterward (if we are among the chosen few), a strange and silent thousand years of peace. After that, we will transition to a new world; that is, if we’re among the chosen few.

  In chapter 10, we’ll discuss Noah, whose existence—and whose prowess as the patriarch captain of the ark—were articles of faith for Newton and his friends. In that chapter, we’ll become acquainted (to some degree, through Newton’s own writings) with the concept of the “remnant,” the fortunate few who are charged with the custodianship of the essence of mankind’s knowledge—in fact mankind’s very soul—during certain times of transition, both metaphorically and really, from one world to the next. (Isaac Newton thought he was a member of that remnant.)

  Before that, though—in the next chapter—we’ll look at another set of prophecies and Newton’s interpretation of them: those prophecies in the Book of Daniel bearing on the return of the Jews to the Holy Land.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE CONVERSION OF THE JEWS

  Had we but world enough, and time,

  This coyness, Lady, were no crime. . .

  I would

  Love you ten years before the Flood,

  And you should, if you please, refuse

  Till the conversion of the Jews.

  ANDREW MARVELL, TO HIS COY MISTRESS (CIRCA 1650)

  “The air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams,” wrote the poet Yehuda Amichai,1 and these yearnings of the human soul are nowhere more vibrant than above the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem. Here the three great monotheistic religions of the world—Islam, Judaism, and Christianity—stand in uneasy confrontation with each other. On one side, the Dome of the Rock shelters a huge, rough-hewn piece of limestone marking the site where the temples of Solomon and Jerusalem once stood. From its craggy surface, Muhammad soared skyward on his Night Journey to Mecca, Jacob saw a ladder stretching to heaven, and Abraham came near to sacrificing his son to God. Jesus delivered his last sermon from the temple’s sun-baked outer court. The Ark of the Covenant, missing since Babylonia destroyed the Temple of Solomon, lies hidden in a cave beneath the dome. Such are the best-known legends!

  Christianity’s rule over Jerusalem ended in 638 when the Muslim armies of Caliph Omar Umayyad overran the Holy City.*23 In 691 the caliph’s son, also Omar, constructed an edifice that, elaborated over the decades and intended as an “expression of the superiority of Islam,” became the octagonal golden-domed shrine that is the Dome of the Rock. In 715, the Muslims extended their architectural power to the other side of the Mount, where Caliph al-Walid built the Al-Aqsa Mosque, still considered to be the most beautiful mosque in the world. All this transformed the Temple Mount into the holiest site in the world for Jews and Christians and the third holiest site (after Medina and Mecca) for Muslims.

  In 1099, after a bloody siege and wholesale slaughter that left invaders and defenders up to their ankles in blood, the Crusaders crushed Jerusalem. Al-Aqsa became the palace of the Crusader kings, then, in 1118, the headquarters of the Knights Templar. In 1187, the Kurdish Muslim sultan Saladin drove the Crusaders out of Jerusalem as ruthlessly as the Crusaders had stormed their way in a century before.

  For the next 730 years, with almost no exceptions, only Muslims were permitted to tour the Temple Mount and worship at the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa. That policy didn’t change when the Ottoman Turks seized control of Jerusalem in 1516. Even the most eminent non-Muslim foreigners were forbidden entry to the Mount. In 1832, when the celebrated poet Alphonse de Lamartine (regarded as the William Wordsworth of France and destined to become the president of France) arrived in Jerusalem and asked if he could visit the dome and Al-Aqsa, the Turkish governor replied with exquisite backhandedness, saying:

  If you require it, all shall be open to you, but I shall expose myself to the risk of grievously irritating the Mussulmans of the city; they are still ignorant, and believe that the presence of a Christian within the precincts of the mosque would be perilous to them, because a prophecy says, that whatever a Christian may ask of God in the interior of Al-Aqsa he shall obtain; and they have no doubt that the petition of a Christian to his God would be the extermination of Mussulmans and the ruin of their religion.2

  The Turks remained masters of Palestine until 1918 when, just before the end of World War I, they were defeated by the Allies. The Promised Land was now a British protectorate. But Britain, seeing that the Muslims were as hostile toward the Jews and Christians as ever, decided not to lift the ban on non-Muslim visits to the Mount.

  Astonishlngly, the state of Israel was created in 1948. But East Jerusalem was still part of Jordan and the sacred sites on the Mount remained closed to the non-Muslim world. Then, in 1967, came the lightning
bolt of the Six Days’ War, when Israel crushed four Arab armies and took control of East Jerusalem. Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan, fearing a clash of religions and the rekindling of the war, left the administration of the Mount to the Palestinians. Christians and Jews could tour the Temple Mount, but they were not permitted to worship in the dome or in the mosque.

  The Muslims increasingly refused to admit there had ever been a Judeo-Christian presence on the Temple Mount, with some declaring that a Jewish temple may have existed, but not in Jerusalem. Yasser Arafat and other leading Palestinians took up the refrain, insisting that “I will not allow it to be written of me that I have . . . confirmed the existence of the so-called Temple beneath the Mount.”3

  Incessant quarreling over spiritual precedence on the Mount lit the fire of the first intifada, or first Palestinian uprising; it burned from 1987 to 1991. On September 28, 2000, a visit to the Mount by the then opposition leader Ariel Sharon sparked off the second intifada, which raged until 2005; a thousand people were killed in 2001 alone. Ever since, even as Israel has fought bloody wars with Hamas, bitter debate over who has precedence on the Temple Mount has not ended. In September 2015, TV viewers around the world were greeted by the sight of stone-throwing Palestinian youths being chased around and between the gorgeous pillars within the Al-Aqsa Mosque by tear-gas-hurling Israeli police and howling attack dogs. As of this writing, sporadic street warfare still flares up between Palestinian youth and the Israeli police, while Palestinian authorities insist with mounting fury that the Jewish presence on the Temple Mount is just another Israeli settlement that must be eradicated.

  Such are the political forces that were unleashed in 1967 when the Temple Mount was liberated by the Israelis.

 

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