The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton

by John Chambers

  Worship began to include more and more of the elements of the physical universe: “And because the sacred fire was a[n arch] type of the Sun and all the elements are part of that universe which is the temple of God, they soon began to have these also in veneration. For ’tis agreed that idolatry began in the worship of the heavenly bodies and elements.”44

  Newton scholar Kenneth Knoespel explains:

  Men discard an absolute faith in God for a “veneration” of the secondary effects by which his wisdom can be apprehended, thereby confusing form and content, the ideal and the material, the timeless and the corrupt. Worshiping the mere representations of divine order—the Sun, stars, and planets—turns men and women away from techno-scientific knowledge and true faith and makes them subject to self-willed delusions.45

  It wasn’t long before the next step in the process of corruption occurred. Newton writes: “Worshiping the sun, the known planets, and the four elements, mankind began to honor the memory of his most illustrious ancestors by naming the planets after them. Finally, mankind, believing that the souls of his ancestors had transmigrated to these planets, began to worship them as gods.”46

  Man had created a set of gods whom he worshipped. The memory of the one true God remained within him, but polytheism was in the ascendant. Instead of worshipping God, we began to worship our ancestors as gods. Wanting to give them a visible habitation, we decided their souls had transmigrated to heavenly bodies, and we named those heavenly bodies after them.

  And so, in the “Theologiae Gentiles Origines Philosophicae,” Newton declares that all ancient peoples worshipped the same twelve gods if under different names, the originals of these twelve gods being Noah, his children, and his grandchildren. If we compare the pantheons of the twelve gods of the Greeks, the Romans, and the Egyptians, we see that

  the 12 Gods were all of a kindred, parents and children, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives to one another, and divers had one common mother, Cybele. They lived all at the same time, which is called the age of the Gods. . . . And in their age the brothers and sisters for want of further choice became husbands and wives. All which characters agree best to the times next the Flood.47

  Newton linked the first four post-Flood generations with the Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Iron ages of high antiquity, declaring that “the Saturn therefore who reigned in the Golden age and his son Jupiter who reigned in the Silver one can be no other than Noah and his son Ham. For Ham himself was the warrior Mars.”48

  Moreover, says Newton:

  Every nation deifying their own kings applied. . . . the name of Jupiter to him whom they had most in honor, as the Arabians [originally the Chaldeans] to their common father Chus, the Assyrians to their common father Nimrod . . . and the father of their Jupiter every nation called Saturn and one of his sons Hercules or Mars.49

  Newton piles complexity on complexity:

  The Planets and the Elements which are signified by the names of Gods were enumerated by the Egyptians in this order: a Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Sun, Moon, Fire, Air, Water, Earth (Terra). The Earth (Tellus) which is represented/produced/foreshadowed by the four Elements is the Fifth essence and completes the number twelve. The whole of Philosophy is comprehended in these twelve, provided that the stars indicate Astronomy, and the four Elements the rest of Physiology.50

  Professor Knoespel explains that, “according to Newton, Noah’s children and grandchildren became absorbed within other mytho-histories, or pre-histories, of antiquity through a process in which they first became localized as historical figures and then memorialized as stars and planets.”51

  Here we must leave our discussion of Noah. But, if Newton and his contemporaries are to be believed, Noah has not left us.

  The next time you go to a New Year’s Eve party, you can experience him in two of his guises. Father Time—the little old man with the pointed white beard and the long scythe—is a racial memory of Noah, and it is to this figure, who metamorphoses from old man to babe in swaddling clothes at the stroke of midnight, that we raise our glasses. (In the midstroke of his metamorphosis, he is also the god Janus looking backward and forward in time.)

  In this act of raising our glasses, we all take on a bit of Noah. Newton and his colleagues believed that the god Bacchus—the great celebrator of the grape—derived his existence from Noah. On New Year’s Eve, we re-create Noah’s notorious act of drunkenness (and perhaps redeem it) and recognize God’s gift of the grape to mankind.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET

  When Halley’s comet flashed across the sky in 1910, thousands of people were terrified they would be killed by the poison gas in its tail. Comet pills, comet insurance, and hard hats to protect against the rain of fire went on sale. Some clergy advised their parishioners to store their valuables in the church to keep them safe; then the clerics made off with the goods. A report out of Oklahoma said a sheriff had rescued a local virgin who was about to be sacrificed to the comet.1 A German astronomer insisted that “a single thread of a spiderweb would pose more danger to a charging elephant than would Halley’s comet.”2 But nobody listened; on the nights that the comet was closest, thousands tried to drown their fears in frenetic “comet parties” held in the major metropolises of the world.

  But there was no poisonous gas, and the worst that happened was that Mark Twain, who was born in the year of Halley’s comet 1834, predicted he would pass out of this world in the year of Halley’s comet 1910, and he turned out to be right.

  When the legendary comet next paid a visit, in 1986, everything had changed. The comet was far enough away (39 million miles, as opposed to 13.3 million in 1910), and the general public was sufficiently educated, that there was no panic. This time a gleaming armada of spaceships—two joint Soviet-French ventures, two Japanese spacecraft, and the European Space Agency’s Giotto space probe—traveled out to meet the celebrated wanderer of the skies. They prodded it, X-rayed it, palpated it, listened to it, analyzed it, photographed it, and watched as, stripped of many of its secrets, it sped away toward its rendezvous with the sun.

  Back on Earth, comet pills had gone on sale again. This time they were manufactured by a single agency, the Grand Rapids, Michigan, Public Museum, and were made of yogurt-covered sunflower seeds bearing the consumer-protection label: “Museum Surgeon General has determined that worrying about comets can be hazardous to your health.”3

  For millennia, comets instilled fear in the hearts of humankind. They appeared without warning; they lit up the sky with fire; nobody knew what they were. A widespread belief persisted that they were direct acts of God portending calamity to mankind. Often they seemed to single out distinguished individuals: In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a comet streaks across the sky after Caesar’s assassination, bearing out the prophetic words of his wife, Calpurnia: “When beggars die there are no comets seen; / The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes” (2.2.30–32).

  The comet that would come to be called Halley’s comet streaked across the sky in 1066 and was believed to foretell England’s defeat by William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings. In 1456, a huge comet filled Christendom with terror. Pope Calixtus III (1378–1458) thought it both heralded and caused the fall of Constantinople, and the frightened pope added a prayer to the Ave Maria: “Lord save us from the devil, the Turks, and the comet.” There is a legend that Calixtus III actually excommunicated the comet as a dangerous heretic.*324

  Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) wrote that comets were one of the fifteen signs heralding Judgment Day.5 Martin Luther (1483–1546) warned that “the heavens write that the comet may arise from natural causes, but God creates not one that does not foretoken a sure calamity.”6 Comets were said to foretell the death of King Frederick of Sicily in 1264 and that of Pope Urban IV in 1327. In 1531, Louise of Savoy (mother of King Francis I), seeing from her sickbed a comet in the sky, observed somberly: “Behold an omen which is not given to one of low degree. God sen
ds it as a warning to us. Let us prepare to meet death.” Three days later, she was dead.7

  It wasn’t until the latter half of the seventeenth century that the men and equipment needed to unlock the secrets of the comet began to be put in place. Isaac Newton would be the prime mover. Just as he had cleansed the New Testament of Trinitarian fraud, so he would lift the comet out of the mire of myth and superstition. Aristotle thought comets were merely atmospheric phenomena, something like sheet lightning; Newton would restore the comet to its rightful place in the heavens, demonstrating that it pursued a majestic path around the sun and teaching mankind how to measure that path.

  He would do more: he would intimate that the universe is divine sacrament as well as physical phenomenon and that God has given the comet a special role in the destiny of mankind.

  In London in 1675, King Charles II established the Royal Greenwich Observatory on hilly terrain south of the Thames River. Initially, its purpose was to reduce shipwrecks by helping ships determine longitude while at sea. A Scot, John Flamsteed (1646–1719), half crippled by teenage pleurisy, neurasthenic, defensive to the point of paranoia—but brilliant and totally dedicated to astronomy—was named Britain’s first Astronomer Royal. The salary the king granted Flamsteed was so small that he was forced to buy most of the equipment himself with the money he earned as an Anglican preacher.

  Greenwich Observatory is world-famous today. Tourists crowding through its rooms are surprised to discover (they’d never thought about it) that the line that separates the Western Hemisphere from the Eastern Hemisphere runs right between their feet, on the floor of the observatory, where it is marked off as the prime meridian. The line also marks Greenwich Mean Time, the anchor point of all the time zones in the world. So famous did Greenwich Observatory become that in 1895, two anarchists, defying it as a symbol of establishment oppression, detonated a bomb beside its walls. One anarchist died in the blast; the observatory was unharmed.*33

  The observatory was completely operational when, in November 1680, a vast new comet swam into the skies above Europe. Flamsteed followed its progress with elation, writing to a friend: “I believe scarce a larger hath ever been [seen].”8 Astronomer Pierre Lemonier wrote, “It issued with a frightful velocity from the depths of space” and by the end of November “seemed falling directly into the sun.”9 Flamsteed followed this comet, called the Great Comet of 1680 (and also Kirch Comet, after its discoverer) night after night, whenever the London fog and rain let up, until it disappeared into the precincts of the sun.

  Then, in mid-December, another comet appeared, streaming away from the other side of the sun. Or was it another comet? John Flamsteed was unique among astronomers of the time in suggesting that this second streaking ball of fire was the Great Comet of 1680 all over again. Flamsteed theorized that a combination of magnetism and Cartesian “vortices” had caused the comet to ricochet off the face of the sun and start on its way back toward Earth.

  At Cambridge, Isaac Newton, already famous for his work on optics, had been watching the new comet with furious intensity. Or, rather, the two new comets, since Newton didn’t accept Flamsteed’s single-comet theory. When the “second” comet made its closest approach to Earth on December 27, Newton sketched it as the length of four full moons set side by side, it stretched across seventy degrees (5 percent) of the night sky. In his drawing, the comet hovers above King’s College Chapel, almost parallel to the roof and only a little longer, with its head jutting out over one end and its tail slanting up just a little beyond the other.10

  Let’s hold that drawing of comet and chapel in our minds, for we will see that its hieroglyph-like contents had a significance for Isaac Newton of which even he was likely not yet quite aware.

  The great mathematician continued to observe this “second” comet, first with the naked eye (sometimes aided by a monocle, since he was nearsighted), then with a three-foot telescope, and finally with the seven-foot telescope that is on display today in Newton’s rooms in Cambridge. Toward the end of March, the comet faded away among the stars.

  Gone with the comet was Newton’s belief that it was a second comet. He had decided Flamsteed was right—though Newton believed the Great Comet of 1680 had circumnavigated the sun before starting back toward Earth.

  It was an unlucky day for John Flamsteed when it turned out he was right and Newton was wrong. Frank Manuel observes: “One rarely proved Newton wrong. If one did, retribution, though it might be long delayed, ultimately followed.”11 The relationship between Flamsteed and Newton, though it had only just begun, was already souring.*34

  By Christmas 1681, Newton had concluded that all comets circle the sun, just as planets do. He set out to demonstrate this mathematically, succeeding in time to insert his calculations into the Principia Mathematica in 1687.

  This was a prodigious achievement. Professor Dobbs writes that

  the taming of the comets, making them more or less domesticated members of the solar system, was not the least of Newton’s achievements in the Principia. Such a notion [that comets regularly orbit the sun] was almost unheard of at the time. Comets had always seemed radically alien; they were erratic and ephemeral bodies that portended no good, and had traditionally been taken as “signs” and portents of disaster—not disaster itself, for none had ever been known to crash into anything.12

  But this was only the half of what Newton had to say about comets. We’ve become aware of the other since the release of the great bulk of Newton’s nonscientific papers in 1937. Dobbs explains that, with Newton’s work, “the newly domesticated comets were promoted in status from signs to agents of destruction.”13 Newton not only believed comets portended disaster; he believed they brought disaster. And this was at the behest of God.

  The great visionary poet William Blake (1757–1827) wrote, “‘What,’ it will be question’d, ‘When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?’ O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.’”14

  The ordinary person perceives the sun as a fiery coin-shaped disk, whereas a visionary like Blake sees it as a choir of angels jubilantly singing hymns of praise to the Lord. And a vision such as this, says Blake, has more reality in it than a scientific explanation of the sun. Blake hated Newton, believing that he was capable of no more than a coldly scientific perception of the sun—even believing that Newton, in adding to our scientific knowledge of the sun, was adding to the unreality of the universe and driving away that which was most real: the creations of the visionary imagination, which if authentic are in tune with the productions of God. In his poem “Jerusalem,” Blake rails against what he believes to be Newton’s desacralization (“de-sacredizing”) of the physical universe. He includes John Locke in his scolding.

  And there behold the Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire,

  Washed by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth

  In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation; cruel Works

  Of many Wheels I view, wheel within wheel, with cogs titanic.15

  Newton didn’t see the sun as a “Heavenly host crying, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy.’” But if Blake could somehow have read the Newtonian papers that were stored in two metal boxes not twenty-five miles from where he lived in London, he would have been amazed to discover that Newton saw the sun not only in brilliant scientific detail but also—to name only one scenario that he seemed to be considering—as a divinely ordained accomplice to the Great Comet of 1680 in the upcoming Apocalyptic destruction of our world (see final section of this chapter).

  Dobbs writes:

  What Newton needed to lend coherence to his sacramental view of the creation was an agent that operated with majestic regularity and yet was capable of generating the unusual events of natural and sacred history, and he found what he needed in comets. . . .

  . . . A providential God could use comets to enact upon the earth expressions of his divine will, such as the Flood or the
Apocalypse. Comets thus became . . . “[devices ] to explain the divine operation of the universe in ‘reasonable’ terms.”16

  Of his belief in the God-directed, punitive, aspect of comets, Newton said little in his time, seemingly leaving it to his “surrogates” (such as William Whiston, see below) to float trial balloons of his ideas. But he does put forward in the Principia, without mentioning any role that God might play, the notion of the comet as a kind of benevolent cosmic breadbasket, raining essential nutrients down on the Earth whenever the need arises. Newton wrote: “I suspect, moreover, that it is chiefly from the comets that spirits come, which is indeed the smallest but the most subtle and useful part of our air, and so much required to sustain the life of all things with us.”17

  These “spirits,” which gave our planet vital nourishment beyond what purely mechanical processes can offer, have many names for Isaac Newton: the “ether”; the “vegetable spirit” (here “vegetable” means “flowering,” “flourishing”); “fermental virtue”; the “mercurial spirit” (some of the terms came from alchemy); “light” (which the Stoics, much admired by Newton, associated with God); and Jesus Christ. “It was the Christ,” writes Dobbs, “united with God in a ‘unity of dominion’ though not of substance, that put the ideas [conceived by God] into effect.”18

  As has been discussed, for Newton as the Arian Jesus was subordinate to God. But he was also God’s Man in the Universe, a sort of Executive Director of the cosmos. In sculpting the universe as God willed it, he both shaped and animated that which is strictly mechanical, and that which is more than mechanical—that is alive, that is self-actualizing. It was Jesus Christ who drove the comets in their orbits, particularly the Great Comet of 1680. As Dobbs makes clear, “Even though Newton’s God is exceedingly transcendent, He never loses touch with His creation, for He always has the Christ transmitting His will into action in the world.”19