The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton
Page 24
Dobbs continues: “With their periodic returns demonstrated, he [Newton] then used comets as the hidden causes that account in a ‘natural’ way for the ‘miraculous’ congruence of natural and sacred histories, especially for the confluence of these histories at the end of time in the final conflagration of a world.”20
As regards the role of comets as disseminaters of nutrients to Earth, Newton also had this to say: “The diminution caused in the humid parts [of planets] by vegetation and putrefaction . . . by which means the dry parts of the planets must continually increase, and the fluids diminish, may in sufficient length of time be exhausted, if not supplied by some such means.”21
But God had provided a solution.
The vapors which arise from the sun, the fixed stars, and the tails of the comets, may meet at last with, and fall into, the atmospheres of the planets by their gravity, and there be condensed and turned into water and humid spirits; and from thence, by a slow heat, pass gradually into the form of salts, and sulphurs, and tinctures, and mud, and clay, and sand, and stones, and coral, and other terrestrial substances.22
According to Professor Dobbs, the term “slow heat” points to an alchemical process. Newton regarded the nourishment-recycling comet as an alchemical furnace, with Jesus Christ as the Philosophers’ Stone enabling the base metals on the comet to be transmuted into nutrients needed on Earth. Newton believed in the “inertial homogeneity and transformability of matter”;23 that is, he believed all matter was essentially the same, and could be transmuted into any other kind of matter. (This notion of Newton’s, one of the basic tenets of alchemy, is elaborated on in chapter 15, “The Secret of Life.”) With his assertion that “spirits” as subtle as gossamer wafted down to Earth from comets, help sustain life on Earth, Newton seems to be entering Velikovskian territory.
In 1951, an Austrian psychiatrist named Immanuel Velikovsky published a book that created a worldwide sensation. Its title was Worlds in Collision, and in it he argued that a comet while on its way to becoming the planet Venus brushed our world in such a way as to cause all of the biblical disasters. From its gaseous tail it rained down physical phenomena that explain the supernatural events surrounding the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, such as the phenomena of the miraculous “manna from heaven” that fed the Jews as they were crossing the Sinai.*35
Newton never mentions manna, but Velikovsky’s explanation fits in well with Newton’s assertion that comets serve as God’s instruments for the replenishment of depleted planets.
Isaac Newton had no difficulty speaking about the positive benefits of comets. Why, then, if he believed they were also under a divine injunctions to destroy or cleanse worlds, did he say nothing about that? (We will see at this end of this chapter that there was one occasion when he spoke out, and spectacularly, on the subject.)
One reason is that Newton knew these beliefs had a heretical cast. He believed Jesus had a key role . . . as the general manager of the universe; but a Christ so undignified as to lash a comet forward is hardly God’s equal. He is an Arian Christ, and for fear of negative consequences Newton had to keep his Arianism to himself.
Newton may also have feared that revealing his thoughts on these matters might make it seem as if he were attributing “occult influences” to the universe. But it was essential to Newton to demonstrate that solely mechanical causes lay behind all the workings of the universe.
Newton got around the problem by finding someone else to tell the world about the dual nature of celestial objects, particularly comets, as physical phenomena and as divine instruments. The man he recruited and trained to do the job (or so it seems to us today) was William Whiston (1667–1752)—the “honest, pious, visionary Whiston,”24 in Edward Gibbon’s words.
A German colleague, meeting the forty-three-year-old William Whiston in a coffeehouse in 1710, described him as being “of very quick and ardent spirit, tall and spare, with a pointed chin and wears his own hair. . . . He is very fond of speaking and argues with great vehemence . . . [a man who] by his many singular opinions, which he boldly professes, has made himself only too notorious.”25
This was on the downside of a tremendous divide in William Whiston’s life. Up until his thirty-third year, his career rolled forward smoothly and unstoppably. He was born in Leicestershire in 1667 to a blind cleric who homeschooled his brilliant offspring so that young Whiston could help him write his sermons. Pious and precocious, volatile and extremely productive, Whiston entered Cambridge at nineteen. He read voraciously, excelled in mathematics, received his M.A. in 1693, and was ordained a minister that same year.
Newton was still at Cambridge, already famous, almost a national monument, but an almost invisible monument. The great man rarely lectured, and his presence could be felt mainly in the diagrams (drawn with “a bit of a stick”) that he left behind in the Trinity gravel beds as he took the occasional walk through the college’s gardens. (“The Fellows would cautiously spare [these diagrams] by walking beside them,” says a contemporary.26) Whiston managed to attend a few of the lectures of the elusive genius, but (or so he tells us) he didn’t understand a thing.
The young scholar set himself to mastering the Principia, and succeeded to the extent that he was able to become friends with Newton. Whiston later boasted that the friendship had been a close one, but the truth of this is hard to determine. Newton seems to have shared some of his more basic as well as some of his most radical ideas with him, such as, in the latter category, the notion that God, unfettered by necessity, is able “to vary the laws of Nature, and make worlds of several sorts in several parts of the universe.”*3627
But these ideas may have been discussed at only a handful of meetings. It’s tempting to believe that, from the outset, Newton sized up the brilliant and impressionable Whiston as someone whom he might be able to use as a stalking horse for his more unorthodox mystico-religious ideas, for example, that a comet can be the punitive hand of God in a universe nonetheless strictly controlled by scientific laws.
In 1695, Whiston married and left Cambridge to become a church rector in Lowestoft, Suffolk. The voluble mathematician-cleric was already acquiring the reputation for saintly eccentricity that would prompt Oliver Goldsmith to choose him as the model for Vicar Primrose in Goldsmith’s perennially popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). (Whiston believed clergymen should not get married a second time and had it engraved on his wife’s tomb that she was the only wife of William Whiston; Goldsmith gives Primrose this peculiarity.28)
But Whiston had a brilliance in mathematics that far exceeded any quality Goldsmith might want to bestow on his humble characters. At the time of his marriage he was already working furiously on a book that is now regarded as the last important attempt by an equally qualified theologian and mathematician to prove that there is no contradiction between biblical scripture and Newtonian science. This book was titled A New Theory of the Earth from its Original [Origin] to the Consummation of All Things wherein the Creation of the World in Six Days, the Universal Deluge, and the General Conflagration, Are Shewn to Be Perfectly Agreeable to Reason and Philosophy. It was published in 1696, and it was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece.
The book epitomizes an era. As the seventeenth century neared an end, a transformation exciting to some but threatening to many was shaking up the worlds of natural philosophy and theology. The age-old narratives of the Bible were breaking down in the face of the rigorous equations underpinning Newton’s radical new interpretation of the universe. The two worldviews could coexist only if it could be proved that they described exactly the same phenomena. It had become necessary to “establish correspondences between the newly understood orbits of celestial bodies and past events and catastrophes known from myths and the bible.”29
This was the whole thrust of William Whiston’s New Theory of the Earth. The author never departs from his vision—shared by Newton, but to what extent and with what applications, we cannot know—of one celestial body in particula
r, the comet, indispensably generating the unusual events of both natural and sacred history. The events Whiston grapples with are: the creation of the Earth (not by, but from, a comet); the tilting of the Earth on its axis; Noah’s Flood; and the apocalyptic destruction of our world, which ends with the Earth’s being turned (in Whiston’s preferred of two versions) back into a comet it once was. The author strives to demonstrate that all this can be explained in terms of Newtonian physics and also that every bit of it is described in the Book of Genesis.
A New Theory has the flavor of sensationalist catastrophism of many of today’s Hollywood disaster movies. The Great Comet of 1680, which Whiston sees as the physical cause of all of these colossal events (though he sometimes brings in Halley’s comet), comes across as a sort of Death Star in the Star Wars mode. Whiston ascribed a periodicity of 575 years to the 1680 comet after ransacking ancient myth and legend to locate events, spaced an equal number of years apart, suggesting the periodic passing of a comet.*37
Whiston’s book is no modern-day New Age romp. It is a brilliant, eloquent, and grimly serious attempt to achieve a “union of the scriptural account of God’s way of running the world and the physical system presented by the Principia.”30 Today only some fundamentalist Christians think this is possible, and they achieve it only by excluding large blocs of religion, or science, or both. And in fact Whiston sometimes has to resort to outlandish and even fantastical hypotheses to make his case. Let’s now look briefly at his strange story of the fateful relationship between our planet and a comet.
In 1667, John Milton published his epic poem Paradise Lost, which tells the story of how and why Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden. The “Fall” of man entailed the “Fall” of the entire planet; Milton describes God’s angels tilting the Earth 23½ degrees on its axis and setting it spinning so that what was once a world with a single sunny changeless season becomes one with four seasons. (Roses grew thorns and animals sprouted claws as the whole world slipped into imperfection.) Milton writes:
. . . he [God] bid his Angels turn askance
The Poles of Earth twice ten degrees and more
From the Sun’s Axle; they with labor push’ d day
Oblique the Centric Globe . . . else had the Spring
Perpetual smil’d on Earth from verdant flowers.31
Whiston explains that a comet does this too, in that, “[from] the Impulse of a Comet with little or no Atmosphere . . . both the annual Orbit of the Earth . . . and a vertiginous Motion about a new and real Axis, would certainly commence.”32
When Milton describes Adam and Eve’s being expelled from the Garden of Eden by God and his powerful angels, he brings in the image of a comet (and even a meteor).
The Cherubim descended; on the ground
Gliding meteorous. . . . High in Front advanc’t,
The brandished Sword of God before them blaz’ d
Fierce as a Comet33
The impact of Newtonian science was to be so transformative, and even devastating, that, a mere thirty-five years later, Milton’s metaphor of God’s sword as a blazing comet had become, in Whiston’s 1696 New Theory of the Earth, a real, live comet streaking past the Earth that tilts it on its axis and triggers off its daily rotation. It was what William Blake, two hundred years later, would abhor: the gobbling up of the poetic, the hyperreal mystical, by cold science. (If Whiston did this, Newton did not; unbeknown to the world, he strove to retain the mystical with the scientific.)
This comet (probably, in Whiston’s view, the Great Comet of 1680), which, not accidentally, sped by just as Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, sped by again several orbits later—at the same time, again not coincidentally, that God decided to punish humanity once again for its sinning ways, this time with a Flood that would annihilate all but Noah, his family, and the contents of the ark.
So a comet is the cause of the Flood. How did it do this? Whiston explains that, in that antediluvian era, most of Earth’s water was underground. The gravitational pull of the passing comet abruptly yanked these subterranean waters upward so that they struck the underside of the Earth’s crust and cracked it open. At the same time, multiple gases in the comet’s tail turned into water and fell earthward in a torrent. The rains pounding downward (the “windows,” or floodgates, “of heaven were opened,” Gen. 7:11–12) and the underground oceans exploding upward through cracks in the Earth’s surface (the “breaking up of the fountains of the great deep,” Gen. 7:22), together brought to the Earth forty days and forty nights of Flood. Eventually the comet was so far from the Earth that the water drained back into its bowels and the Deluge was over.34
This description of the Deluge, some of it based on remarks Edmund Halley made to the Royal Society two years earlier, seems vaguely plausible; perhaps some of this could really have happened. But with Whiston’s description of the role the comet plays in the apocalyptic destruction of the Earth we find ourselves entering a never-never land where anything goes and science, fantasy, and desperate contrivance rules. For all we know, Whiston is going to transport us to the planet Mars and show us a row of exhibit cases containing the crystal skulls of ancient Martians.
What does happen is almost as weird. Whiston asks us to imagine that the same comet that caused the Flood (probably, says Whiston, the Great Comet of 1680) is now speeding back from its latest turn around the sun, boiling hot from having just missed falling in. It is heading directly toward Earth, and Whiston has two versions of what happens next. In the first, the gravitational pull of the comet knocks the Earth out of its orbit, sending it hurtling toward the sun, where it is burned to a cinder by the solar orb. Whiston says we can find all this accurately described in Joel 2:30–31, Matthew 24:29, and Luke 21:25–26.
In the second scenario, the one Whiston favors, the comet collides with the Earth. There is an immense conflagration. The incinerated Earth, flickering with scattered fires, rotates more and more slowly and comes to a stop.
Then the Earth takes on—Whiston isn’t easy to follow here—the momentum of the comet with which it has collided. It becomes a comet itself, and tears off for the outer reaches of space. Whiston seems to suggest that, amazingly, some humans are still alive on this scorched Earth of a comet-planet. Apparently this is the continuity-ensuring “remnant” of mankind. (See chapter 10, “With Noah on the Mountaintop.”)
A long time later—575 years, if we’re talking about the orbit of the Great Comet of 1680—the comet-planet returns and settles into the orbit the Earth once occupied. We learn that the creation of the Earth is the destruction of the Earth in reverse. As the comet firms out into a sphere, the husk of the comet it once was detaches itself and hurtles off toward the sun.
What remains is going to be a new planet Earth.
Whiston explains this in terms of Newtonian physics. He also claims it is consistent with the Genesis account of Creation. But how can this be? The Genesis account seems scarcely scientific, given that, to cite just one example, the light is separated from the darkness before the sun and the moon are created.
Whiston insists, with all his colleagues, including Newton, that the “Mosaic” account of Creation is literally true in that it is an account of the creation of the Earth from a comet as you would have observed it if you’ d actually been there.35 You had to imagine yourself inside the comet, your consciousness spinning around in its head and then in its tail, not exactly knowing what was happening but observing it all in the same way as is recorded in Genesis. You had to imagine yourself descending to its cooling, coalescing surface of this bewildering ball of matter and then just watching as it metamorphosed into a primordial, pristine, sea-less, planet Earth.
The Mosaic account was simply a birds-eye-view of all this.*38
Whiston dedicated A New Theory to Newton, insisting that his mentor “well approved of” his book that “depended”36 on Newton’s principles. In fact, says eminent Newton scholar Frank Manuel, “because they are so forthright, William
Whiston’s works cast important light on the hidden intent and meaning of similar writings by his great contemporary. Where Newton was covert, Whiston shrieked in the marketplace.”37
If A New Theory seems to us today to be a kind of evolutionary dead end in theology and science, it did not seem so to Whiston’s contemporaries. The book went into six printings. It was translated into French and German. John Locke wrote: “I have not heard anyone of my acquaintance speak of it, but with great commendations, as I think it deserves.” Samuel Johnson’s friend Mrs. Thrale enthused that, when she “read Whiston on the expected Comet, how little seem the common objects of our Care!” The philosopher George Berkeley took a copy to the American colonies and donated it to the Yale Library. It became a favorite of Yale president Ezra Stiles, who made sure everyone knew about it. Scholar James Force writes that, in 1849, “Herman Melville, in his novel Mardi, was still able to utilize to good effect Whiston’s striking vision of the earth after the final judgment, when the earth becomes once again a comet in a radically elliptical orbit on which the damned hurtle between the freezing depths of deep space and the boiling regions near the sun.”38
In 1701, Newton needed an assistant, and he asked for Whiston. It’s not clear whether this was a reward for Whiston’s having written A New Theory. Whiston took the job, returning to Cambridge with his family. Newton left for London in 1702, leaving Whiston to lecture in his stead and receive Newton’s full salary. In 1703, Newton gave up his post as Lucasian professor to become warden (later master) of the London Mint. He had made provision that Whiston should succeed him, and so the young cleric-mathematician did, in that same year.