The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton

by John Chambers

  Now Christian/Shamrock would never know. Theirs would be the last expedition to prepare to climb Mount Ararat in search of the lost ark. Today, political storm clouds roil even more menacingly around the slopes of the 17,820-foot saddle-backed mountain as Syrian refugees pour into Turkey and a savage terrorist army, ISIS, seeks to establish a caliphate throughout the Middle East. Iraq simmers and boils, and Iran broods in isolation. Turkey’s ban against climbing Mount Ararat has become a permanent one.

  Perhaps it doesn’t matter that there will be no more trips up the mountain. Few today, evangelical Christians excepted, believe in Noah’s ark. This was far from the case in Isaac Newton’s time. In seventeenth-century Europe, Noah and the ark and the Flood were articles of religious faith. The story of the Flood, important because it told the story of humanity’s second fall into sin and scarcity (the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden was the the first), was the subject of endless speculation. How big was the ark? How did it hold so many animals? How many generations of Noah’s family did it take to repopulate the world? Was that even possible? What were the not just moral but physical causes of the Flood?

  The greatest minds of the time grappled with these problems. Comet chaser Edmund Halley (1656–1742) speculated that a passing comet might have caused the Earth to wobble on its axis enough to make the oceans slop up over the land for forty days.1 Jesuit linguist-scholar Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) used Galileo’s studies of floating bodies to try to figure out how the six-hundred-year-old Noah had been able to pack two of every living species into one big box-shaped boat.2 Swedish scientist Olaus Rudbeck (1630–1702), at age twenty-two the codiscoverer of the lymphatic system, used details from the Bible to calculate how many children were born in the generations between Jacob and Pinehas, then used that information to calculate the population of the world one century after the Flood: 44,288. Rudbeck also reconstructed the circuitous route taken by Magog (hence “Goth”), son of Japhet and grandson of Noah, when he led his progeny from the Middle East to the land that would one day be called Sweden.3

  All of this held the attention of Isaac Newton, but, more than most of his colleagues, he was fascinated by that other, special, cargo, having nothing to do with animals, that he believed Noah had brought with him on board the ark. This was the intellectual and spiritual riches of the world before the Flood that had been passed along, though suffering much corruption, until it came to Noah. And Newton wanted to know everything he could about this man, Noah, who had been ordained by God to transport such a cargo.

  First, though: Was there ever a flood at all? Was there ever a Noah? Was there ever—could there still be—an ark atop Mount Ararat?

  The story of Noah and the ark is a part of the spiritual heritage of all three major monotheistic religions of the west, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

  The Book of Genesis tells us that God, despairing that humankind will ever be cured of its wickedness, decides to drown the human race. He singles out Noah as the one righteous man in the world and tells him to build a huge, box-shaped, pitch-lined ark and fill it with two of all the fauna in the cosmos. Noah does so, and he, his family, and the male and female of every species ride out the catastrophe in their ark for forty days and forty nights. The waters subside; Noah sends out a raven and two doves. The second dove doesn’t return; he decides there must be dry land, and soon he makes landfall. Noah and his family disembark; the patriarch builds an altar and makes a burnt offering to the Lord. God blesses Noah, makes a covenant with him, and promises not to punish mankind again. A rainbow appears in the sky. Noah and his family set out on the monumental task whose historical reality was never doubted in Newton’s time: the repopulating of the world. This is the story told in Genesis 6:9 to 9:17; there are allusions to the flood in Ezekiel 14:14, 20; Isaiah 24:5, 18; 54:9; Psalm 29:10; Job 22:15; and elsewhere, and in some sections of the Koran.

  We’ve known since the latter part of the nineteenth century (from excavations made at Ashurbanipal’s library in Nineva) that the Old Testament story of Noah and the flood was borrowed from a four-thousand-year-old Sumerian epic called Gilgamesh. In this poem, the god-hero Gilgamesh, tormented by questions of why we die and whether death can be avoided, travels to the underworld to talk to Utnapishtim, the Sumerian Noah, to whom the gods have given immortality because he rescued mankind from the flood.

  Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh the flood story. The gods decided to drown mankind. One of them, Enlil, warned Utnapishtim and told him to build a huge ark in seven days. Utnapishtim filled it with “the seed of all living creatures”4 and all the animals on his estate. The flood lasted a week; it took another week for Utnapishtim to make landfall; then humanity began again. The gods reproached themselves for causing the flood and promised never to do it again; then they created wolves and tigers to harass man perpetually!

  Josephus says the third-century BC Chaldean priest-historian Berossus, “following the most ancient records, gave an account, like Moses, of the flood and the destruction in it of humankind, and the ark in which Noah, the founder of our race, was saved when it was carried onto the peaks of the Armenian mountainside.”5 Berossus’s Noachic hero is called Xisuthrus.

  Newton accumulated a large amount of material about Noah. He tells us the flood story of the Chaldean historian Abydenus (circa 200 BC), who claimed to have had access to primordial texts. Noah is the Chaldean king Sisithrus, who is warned of the flood by Saturn, the same classical god whom Newton believed was derived from Noah. The flood lasts for three days. Once Sisithrus has completed his mission he is swept up into heaven by the gods—just as, according to the Apocryphal literature, Noah’s grandfather Enoch was swept up into heaven.*26

  Glittering fragments of the Noah and Utnapishtim legends tumble kaleidoscopically through the Sisithrus version. Are all three versions fiction? In 1965, researchers taking inventory in the basement of London’s British Museum stumbled upon two cuneiform tablets that mentioned an extensive flood in the Babylonian city of Sippar in 1640 to 1626 BC. The tablets told the story of how a water god, Enki, warned a priest-king, Ziusudra, that God was planning to drown the human race; the priest-king built a boat and with all members of his family survived.

  There really was a Ziusudra. His name appears in an early column of the Sumerian king list; he ruled over the Babylonian city of Shuruppak in about 2900 BC. There is evidence that there really was a flood at Shuruppak at about this time.

  But it was a small flood. Moreover, archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley, excavating in the Sumerian city of Ur, found evidence that this mini-deluge took place between 4000 and 3500 BC. Nonetheless, writes author Paul Johnson, “the savior-figure of Ziusudra, presented in the Bible as Noah, thus provides the first independent confirmation of the actual existence of a Biblical personage.”6

  There seems to be plenty of literary evidence suggesting that, in ancient times, there were numerous floods that were at least local. Journalist Charles Berlitz writes, typically “there are over 600 variations of this legend among the ancient nations and tribes and the story has been told through the millennia in all quarters of the globe.”7

  But these ancient “nations” may have been extremely small, and the ancient floods may have taken place at very different times. Whatever the case may be, no scientist has come forward in modern times to present evidence that there was a global flood, and none seems to be interested in researching the subject.

  No one in Newton’s time doubted there had been a flood, or that the remains of the ark rested on Mount Ararat. Newton quotes Berossos: “Some part of this vessel [the ark] is preserved to this day in Armenia by the mountain of the Cordyaei, from which some inhabitants of the place are accustomed to wear bits of bitumen scraped from it as a talisman of the same thing.”8

  Newton also quotes the Greek philosopher-historian Nicolas of Damascus (born ca. 64 BC), who is mostly remembered as having tutored the children of Antony and Cleopatra: “There is above Minyas [a great mountain in Ar
menia which] they call Baris, to which, as the story goes, many fled for refuge at the time of the deluge and were saved; and a certain man borne on an ark landed on top of the mountain, and the remains of the timbers were preserved for a long time.”9

  From the early fourth century AD on, Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike were convinced that God had laid down an interdiction, to be lifted only on Judgment Day, against climbing Mount Ararat and visiting the ark. And in fact nothing was heard of the sacred mountain for a thousand years, not until 1357, when a travel guide appeared, called Travels of Sir John Mandeville, asserting that Noah’s ark indeed rested on Mount Ararat (which was seven miles high, the guide said), and it could be seen from very far away when the weather was clear. Moreover:

  some men saith that they have been there and put their fingers in the hole where the devil went out when Noah said a blessing. But a man may not well go thither upon that hill for snow that lieth always upon that hill winter and summer. For there cometh never man since Noah was, but a monk that through the grace of God went thither and brought a plank, that is yet at the abbey at the hill’s foot.10

  No one has ever seen that plank.

  Nothing was heard of an ark on Mount Ararat for another five hundred years. And then, in 1829, the mountain was climbed, and Ararat began to be demystified. A German natural philosophy professor had taken a quick look around and then returned. He hadn’t found the ark—but he hadn’t been punished by God. Was the divine injunction against climbing Ararat no longer in force? So it seemed for eleven years. Then, in 1840, Mount Ararat unexpectedly erupted. The little town of Ahora at the mountain’s base was totally destroyed. A gaping hole marked the spot where the monastery of Saint Jacob’s had once stood. The German natural philosophy professor had prayed in this monastery before setting off on his expedition.

  Divine wrath did not speak out again on the mountain. In 1845, a second German professor ascended its slopes but did not find the ark. He returned unharmed. In 1856, a team of British ex-army officers scaled Ararat and also came away empty-handed. Their Kurdish guides descended the mountain with the conviction that British aplomb and a stiff upper lip had broken the divine interdiction of the holy mountain once and for all.11

  The fifty ascents of Ararat that had followed the ascent of the two Germans had their share of, variously, adventure, joy, injuries, romance, awful weather, incompetence, and fraud, but there was nary a trace of the ark. A rumor persists to this day that the czar of Russia sent a military expedition up Ararat during World War I. Photographs of the ark’s interior, brought back to the czar, were still being passed around by towns-people in eastern Turkey in the 1960s, but none of these photos has survived. A Frenchman, Fernand Navarra, climbed the mountain several times in the 1950s, each time bringing back a piece of the ark; each time the piece turned out to be good only for firewood. In 1957, a number of Turkish air force pilots claimed to have spotted a boat-shaped mass lying near the base of Ararat. As far as is known, the Turkish government did not follow up on these reports. Later on, Soviet complaints that the holy mountain was being climbed by American spies forced the Turkish government to seal it off to foreigners. The embargo ended, and very soon the expeditions of the moon-walking American astronaut colonel James Irwin aroused new interest in Ararat and Noah’s ark. All that this evangelical Christian space explorer got for his enthusiastic efforts, however, was a fall down the mountainside that nearly killed him.12 None of these expeditions brought back evidence that the ark existed.

  Christianity, Islam, and Judaism each poured an ocean of apocryphal literature into the Noah story. Islamic sources say Noah dug up Adam’s body and carried it on board, laying it down between the sleeping quarters of the men and those of the women as a sort of chastity belt. Saint Hippolytus (died AD 235) says Noah packed frankincense, myrrh, and gold—the gifts of the Magi to the baby Jesus—into the hold. Thirteenth-century AD Islamic scholar Abdallah ibn ’Umar al-Baidawi asserts that the name of a prophet was written on every plank in the ark.

  There was a unicorn on board the ark—perhaps. The rabbis tell three unicorn stories: (1) Noah brought a few small specimens on board; (2) a single unicorn was brought on board, but it was so big its excrement clogged the Jordan River and only its head could be gotten inside; and (3) the unicorn was so big that only the tip of its nose could be pulled on board. The Talmud says the unicorn was so gigantic that none of it could be gotten on board, and it had to be lashed to the hull.13 A Ukrainian folktale bestows on the unicorn a reckless grandeur: “All the beasts obeyed Noah when he admitted them to the ark. All but the unicorn. Confident of his strength, he boasted, ‘I shall swim.’”14

  There were hitchhikers including the giant king Og, whom Noah let ride on the roof. On board was Methuselah’s niece, who is nameless, but who at a very great age dictated the history of the antediluvian world to Noah’s grandchildren.

  All three of the great monotheistic religions agree there was a light in the ark that never went out. The Koran (sura 29:13–14) says Noah’s boat carried two precious stones that, shining like the sun, told the passengers when to pray and if it was day or night. Scholars say the Hebrew word tsohar, once thought to mean a window of the ark, actually means “a brightness,” “a brilliance,” “the light of the noonday sun.” Christian sources describe the light as a “shining crystal” and a “power” that illuminated the “entire vessel for the duration of the flood voyage.”15

  It’s likely Isaac Newton would have dismissed most of these apocryphal claims as nonsense. But he would certainly have agreed that there was a light on board the ark that never went out. Only, for Newton, that light was neither mechanical nor magical: it was a “consecrated flame” that had once belonged in an antediluvian temple, or prytaneum.*27

  Newton’s belief that there was a consecrated flame on board the ark came from his reading of Genesis. He quotes Genesis 7:2–3 to the effect that along with a male and female of every species the ark contained “seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and female” and “seven pairs of the birds of the air also, male and female.” Newton explains that “Noah, when he went into the ark [at the beginning], provided for sacrifices by taking in with him a greater number of Clean Beasts and clean fowls than of unclean ones. . . . For so soon as Noah came out of the ark, he built an altar & offered burnt offerings of every clean Beast & every clean fowl unto the Lord.”16

  When clean beasts and clean fowl were sacrificed they had to be burned by a consecrated flame. From this Newton deduced that Noah had brought with him an eternally burning flame from an antediluvian temple. Newton writes: “no doubt for the same end he [Noah] took in [to the ark] with him also the sacred fire with which he was to offer them. . . . Therefore, ’tis reasonable to believe that they sacrificed also with a consecrated fire . . . and accounted it as irreligious to sacrifice with strange or profane fire as to sacrifice an unclean Beast.”17

  That ever-blazing flame in the hold of the ark turned it into a floating temple. For forty days and forty nights, it was the only temple in the world. Now the ark was a sort of “blueprint of God’s mind”; it was God’s home on Earth; and from the flame God maintained contact with mankind. (Utnapishtim’s ark was similar; a Gilgamesh translator writes that its dimensions “suggest something more like a ziggurat [tower topped by a temple] or temple than a ship.”)18 Not Newton himself, but later scholars, have made much of the dimensions of the ark as set forth in the Book of Genesis: 611.62 feet long, 85.24 feet wide, 51.56 feet in height between keel and top deck, and 18,231.58 tons in weight (when empty).19 They believe that through a reconstruction of the shape of the ark, of its every contour and nook and cranny, they can arrive at knowledge of the world before the Flood. Some modern-day Noachic Flood mavens see the ark as a floating computer chip that is encoded with all knowledge of the antediluvian world of the prisca sapientia.

  Our story has now taken us to the moment on Mount Ararat when Noah unpacks the consecrated flame from the ark and uses it for the
animal offering to the Lord.*28 This ceremony was of tremendous importance, because it cleared the way for a conversation with God. Certainly it was essential that, at this moment atop the mountain, man and God talk. The human race had failed miserably, precipitating the Flood, Noah’s agonizing voyage, and this meeting. But God had his share in the blame. He had bungled the making of the human race, and he had admitted this. (Thousands of years later, the sect of the Gnostics would tirelessly poke fun at this allegedly omniscient Creator who at the same time had acknowledged the “failure of his creation.”)20

  A circle of worshippers around a consecrated flame: The eight members of Noah’s family would have sat or knelt in a circle around the altar atop which burned the consecrated flame. Just these two elements, a consecrated flame and a circle of worshippers, turned it into a temple, one practicing what Newton called the “religion of the Prytaneum.”

  Newton believed the religion of the “first nations of the world” was the “religion of the Prytaneum,” and he held that the consecrated flame in the center of the circle symbolized the sun. This simple religious ceremony was a remembrance of the heliocentric universe and proof that the earliest men and women knew that the Earth went around the sun. The religion of the prytaneum was an “astronomical theology”; however simple in form it seemed, it was a fusion of all science and all theology.

  At this moment in time mankind (or this remnant of it), atop Mount Ararat, still practiced the simple, twofold religion that it had been practicing since the beginning of time. Newton defines it in “Of the Church”: “The moral part of all religion is comprehended in these two precepts: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart & with all thy soul & with all thy mind. This is the first & great commandment & the next is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy self. These are the laws of nature”—and have the same authority as, for example, the law of universal gravitation. “These are that part of religion which ever was & ever will be binding to all nations, being of an eternal immutable nature because grounded upon immutable reason.”21