The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton
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Gibbon says that Askenaz, son of Gomer, grandson of Japheth, and great-grandson of Noah, founded Germany, while, some centuries later,
the giant Partholanus, who was the son of Seara, the son of Esra, the son of Sru, the son of Framant, the son of Fathaclan, the son of Magog, the son of Japheth, the son of Noah, landed on the coast of Munster [Ireland], in the 14th day of May, in the year of the world one thousand nine hundred and seventy-eight. [Subtracting 1,978 years from 2400 BC, the year of the Flood, we arrive at AD 422 as the year Noah’s descendants founded Ireland.] Though he [Partholanus] succeeded in his great enterprise, the loose behavior of his wife rendered his domestic life very unhappy, and provoked him to such a degree that he killed—her favorite greyhound. This . . . was the first instance of female falsehood and infidelity ever known in Ireland.27
Today, we can’t imagine how the progeny of a single family could manage the feat of populating an entire planet. Newton’s age had no conception of the vast stretches of geological time over which Homo sapiens developed nor of the laws of evolution. They believed man was created pretty much as he is today, except that he was much smarter. God had told the story quite clearly in the Bible, with words that were meant to be taken literally. Nevertheless, the scholars of the day, while believing in the truth of Noah and his family, applied themselves diligently to working out the practical details of just how this amazing repeopling of a planet could have taken place.
Almost all pondered the command God gave Noah, not once, but twice, in Genesis 9:1 and 9:7, to “be fruitful and multiply, [and] replenish the earth.” Did this command license man to be licentious? The Calvinist clergyman Andrew Willet interpreted it to mean God was giving permission to all post-Flood men and women, married or not, to practice polygamy and the “obscene fecundity” of “unlawful copulations.”28 The Protestant jurist Jean du Temps interpreted God’s command to mean that once the floodwaters had receded Noah’s three sons set about producing twins annually, a male and a female; these offspring in their turn procreated in the same way when they turned twenty, and so forth. This extraordinary method of birth control, which would have required an amazing knowledge of DNA and genetics, jumped the world’s population to 1,554,420 people—518,140 descendants per son—101 years after the Flood. (Athanasius Kircher, accepting du Temps’s bizarre scenario, somehow came up with a figure of more than 23 billion people on Earth at the end of 101 years—perhaps indicating not even a meager knowledge of biology on the part of the renowned Jesuit polymath.)29
The Jesuit theologian Petavius believed God’s wish was that two of Noah’s sons should sire only males while the third son should father “an ample number of females” to be impregnated by the male offspring. This would put 623, 612,358, 728 males on the face of Earth just 285 years after the Flood. Voltaire, ridiculing all of the above, jested that the priests produced these figures because they didn’t know how babies were made.30
Though Newton first of all thought that mankind had recovered quite quickly from the Flood, perhaps in a hundred years or so, he became more and more pessimistic about the ability of our species to recoup its forces. He thought the world must have been bleak and harsh for the first thousand years: the first Greeks had been cannibals who “lived in caves and dens of the earth like wild beasts,” while the early Egyptians “lived in mountainous syringes or subterranean vaults.”31The latter at least provided the Egyptians with a cultural breakthrough: because they lived inside mountains, they discovered metals and invented metallurgy.
Newton’s changed time frame was, perhaps, partly a strategy for stretching out the development time of ancient nations so that they could not attain to civilization before the ancient Jews did. In the earliest drafts of “The Original of Monarchies,” he was inclined to fix the origins of all kingdoms at shortly after the deluge. Then he became convinced that elaborate kingdoms and city life had emerged only toward the beginning of the first millennium BC—that neither Egyptian nor Greek civilization could have existed much before the time of Solomon’s reign.
Those of us who’ve seen Cecil B. DeMille’s movie The Ten Commandments and watched the enslaved Israelites toiling in the shadow of the towering palaces of ancient Egypt find it hard to believe that the land of the pharaohs was not fully a civilization while the Jews were still twelve wandering tribes. But, as has been recounted, Newton believed there was no single monolithic kingdom of Egypt but rather a collection of many tiny Egyptian city-states that did not follow one another chronologically but existed side by side; Newton turned an extension in time on the part of the ancient Egyptians into an extension through space.
This was only one of Newton’s many strategies to slow down the evolution of the Egyptian, Greek, and Mesopotamian empires so as to make Jewish civilization preeminent. Thus the first great achievements of mankind came not from the pagan classical world but from the Jews from whom Christianity had sprung.
This belief in the primacy of Jewish civilization wasn’t confined to Newton’s time. It went back at least two thousand years. Clement of Alexandria (ca. AD 150–215) insisted in his Stromata (“Lists”) that the Greeks had stolen their culture from the Egyptians, who had stolen it from the Jews. Eusebius of Caesarea (AD 260/265–339/340) made the same claim a century later, declaring that Solon and Pythagoras were disciples of Egyptian prophets. Eusebius stated that those Syrians who had reputedly invented the alphabet were actually a tribe of Hebrews who were then living in the part of Phoenicia later called Judaea.
Moses had possessed a knowledge that would ferment among the Jews for generations, then blossom forth at the time of David into a civilization. Newton believed the great patriarch possessed knowledge of the prisca sapientia delivered up by Noah from the antediluvian world. In the second century BC the Greco-Jewish historian Eupolemus emphatically declared that: “Moses was the first wise man, and the first that imparted grammar to the Jews.”32 The Jews passed the knowledge of grammar along to the Phoenicians, who passed it on to the Greeks.
“Homer had read over all the books of Moses, as by places stolen thence almost word for word may appear [as evidenced by passages stolen almost word for word),” wrote the great Elizabethan adventurer-scholar Sir Walter Raleigh. Because Homer had copied his epic poems from the Torah, which many (though not Newton) thought was written by Moses, the Iliad and the Odyssey were merely warmed-over Moses. Scholar John Wallis pronounced contemptuously that Plato was no more than “Moses disguised in Greek dress,” the “Attic Moses, [who] stole everything he taught about God and the world from the books of Moses.”33 Christian scholars went so far as to bring Moses’s wife Zipporah into the act, venerating her not as a fountainhead of knowledge but as the template for all the pagan goddesses of the ancient world.34
All this seems very strange to us today. Though ancient Greek literature and ancient Hebrew literature developed at about the same, these two bodies of literature were very different, and often even in conflict. Paul Johnson writes that the Jewish revolt against Rome, culminating with the war of AD 66–70, was
at bottom a clash between Jewish and Greek culture. Moreover, the clash arose from books. There were only two great literatures, the Greek and the Jewish, for Latin texts, modeled on the Greek, were only just beginning to constitute a corpus. More and more people were literate, especially Greeks and Jews, who had elementary schools. Writers were emerging as personalities: we know the names of as many as 1,000 Hellenistic authors, and Jewish writers too were just beginning to identify themselves. . . . In many respects Hebrew literature was far more dynamic than Greek. Greek texts, from Homer onwards, were guides to virtue, decorum and modes of thought; but the Hebrew texts had a marked tendency to become plans for action. Moreover, this dynamic element was becoming more important.35
But there was no curbing Isaac Newton’s enthusiasm to prove the primacy of the civilization that produced Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, and Jesus Christ. He pursued this “vendetta” until his very last days.
Histo
rians point out that there are no human beings in the histories of the rise of civilizations as set forth by Isaac Newton. Manuel writes:
In his law of the growth of the great kingdoms Newton was performing for political history a function similar, mutatis mutandis, to his discovery of the laws of motion (it was universal and it was simple), though he considered that prophets like Daniel had anticipated him by depicting the same history of the “four kingdoms” in hieroglyphic language. Newton never wrote a history of men—they do not seem to count as individuals in his narrative—but of bodies politic as he had written a history of bodies physical. These agglomerations did not spring into being suddenly: like the physical planets they too had an “original,” a history of creation, and extension in space which could be marked chronologically, as they too would have an end. Newton’s chronological writings might be called the mathematical principles of the consolidation of empires because they dealt primarily with quantities of geographic space in a temporal sequence; the individuals mentioned in his histories . . . were merely signposts . . . they have no distinctive human qualities. . . . His kings are automaton-like agents in the acquisition of power and the extensions of dominance.36
While admiring Newton’s prodigious efforts, Manuel and others point out that Newton, in treating history as pure mathematics, was incapable of ascribing to the shakers and movers of civilization any more than the simplest “stock” emotions, for example, “vanity,” and “lust”; he scarcely noticed the passions of the men and women in history but was concerned only with mechanics, with the passionless dynamics of the physical growth of kingdoms.
“Everything human is alien to him,” concludes Manuel, “at least insofar as he expressed himself on mankind. His history hardly ever records a feeling, an emotion. . . . Newton’s passion for factual detail shriveled the past to a chronological table and a list of place names.”37 “In what appears to be an early exercise in social science history, Newton had incinerated the fiber and substance of human life in a numerical furnace,” add Professors Buchwald and Feingold.38
Still, however dispassionate Newton may have been in his deliberations, it’s now become clear that he was far ahead of his time in the insights he gained into the causes of civilization. A man of his brilliance could not acutely observe and catalogue the rise and fall of ancient Egypt, of Assyria, of Babylonia, and of Persia without seeing with uncommon penetration into the beating heart of mankind’s pro-found impulse to gather and grow within a collectivity. Critic Jonathan Reé writes that Newton’s Chronology “may be the source of one of the formative ideas of our time: that every society must pass through the same stages—savagery, pastoralism and agriculture—on the way to civilized maturity.”39 Contemporary historians call this the “stadial view” of societal progression; its basic principles were taken up in full by Enlightenment historians such as Adam Smith.
The insightful David Castillejo may be right in crediting The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended with unknown metaphysical depths. But until such time as (as Castillejo has suggested) Newton’s great history book is “passed through a computer,” we may have to stay with the far less romantic but every bit as impressive judgment that Isaac Newton was the greatest sociologist of history of his time—and is still, today, a figure to contend with in that field.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHIRON AND THE STAR GLOBE
Chiron the centaur cut a tremendous figure in the classical age. And this because of, or perhaps despite, the fact that he was half man, half horse, his human body ending at the waist and becoming a horse’s body. But, unlike most other centaurs, who were lawless and warlike, he was gracious and regal, a being of wisdom and justice. It was Chiron who, according to that second-century AD gossipmonger of genius Saint Clement of Alexandria, “first led mortals to righteousness.”1
Chiron (or Cheiron) was a historical figure. He was the sacred king of the centaurs, a race that worshipped the horse and were part of the mixed population of Pelasgians (“seafarers”) that first streamed across mainland Greece in about 1600 BC. It was on two very human feet that Chiron led his people into warfare with firmness and dignity, and then only if absolutely necessary. The word cheiron is linked with the Greek word cheir, a “hand,” and centaur with centron, a “goat.”2 “Chiron” is usually translated as “the Handy One.”
Chiron was very rapidly deified, becoming the son of Chronos and the ocean nymph Philyra. Apollo and Diana doted on him and taught him everything they knew about botany, music, astronomy, divination, medicine, hunting, and gymnastics. The chroniclers don’t know where history ends and myth begins when they say Chiron directed a famous school on the slopes of Mount Pelion whose pupils included Hercules, Achilles, and Jason, the leader of the Argonautic expedition that circumnavigated the ancient world in search of the Golden Fleece.
Isaac Newton was greatly interested in Chiron. He believed it was this brilliant centaur who had first traced out the constellations in the sky and given them names. He believed Chiron had fashioned the first star globe and, delineating those constellations on it, had given it specifically to his old pupil Jason because Jason’s unusually large longboat would be sailing out of sight of land for long periods of time and would need the guidance of the stars at night.
There was more. Chiron and his constellations were to become indispensable elements in a fantastically original mathematical-astronomical-chronological stratagem that Newton would employ to pin down the dates of King Solomon’s death and the fall of Troy and establish once and for all an accurate chronology of the ancient world.
In the same way that the stained-glass windows of some of the great cathedrals of Europe sometimes tell, pane by pane, the story of the life of Christ, Isaac Newton belived groupings of constellations in the night sky sometimes recount the adventures of the heroes of ancient Greece. In his Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, Newton lists sixteen constellations that refer to the adventures of Jason and the Argonauts.*44 These include: Centaurus for Chiron; Argo for the fifty-oared longboat Argo; Taurus the Bull for the sacred bulls Jason kills to claim possession of the fleece; and the Cup for the cup that the priestess Medea, madly in love with Jason, fills with a potion Jason needs to defeat the bulls. That these constellations were in the night sky at all was a matter of great significance to Newton, for a reason intimately bound up with his great mathematical-astronomical adventure that we will describe in this chapter.
We know today that there never was a voyage of the Argonauts in search of a legendary and hallowed golden fleece. (Even the ancients didn’t quite swallow the legend; Strabo, for one, “mentions the gold of the Caucasus as a reasonable motive for Jason’s expedition, pointing out that the natives collected gold dust from the river on fleecy skins.”3) And so we can’t help but feel, without knowing anything about it, that Newton had no chance of success in the experiment he was planning to carry out.
But Newton himself didn’t believe entirely literally in the legend of the Golden Fleece,†6 since for him all gods and goddesses had once been, euphemistically speaking, mortal men and women. Certainly Newton’s notion of what the Argonautic expedition was all about shimmers and shifts as he writes about it. Sometimes he sees it as heraldic, a symbol of an important breakthrough in Greek technological history; namely, the invention of the fifty-oared iron boat that enabled the ancient Greeks to travel out of sight of land for long periods of time. (Today’s historians date the invention of the fifty-oared iron boat at about 700 BC.) Newton wrote: “The Ship Argo was the first long ship built by the Greeks. Hitherto they had used round vessels of burden, and kept within sight of the shore; and now, . . . by the dictates of the Oracle, and consent of the Princes of Greece, the Flower of Greece were to sail with Expedition through the deep, in a long Ship with Sails, and guide their Ship by the Stars.”4
Other times, Newton sees the voyage of the Argo as a specific historical event, telling us that “Egypt was in its greatest distraction: and then it was, as I conceive,
that the Greeks, hearing thereof, contrived the Argonautic Expedition, and sent the flower of Greece in the Ship Argo to persuade the Nations upon the Sea Coasts of the Euxine and Mediterranean Seas to revolt from Egypt, and set up for themselves, as the Libyans, Ethiopians and Jews had done before.”5
But however much Newton’s vision of the voyage of the Argonauts seems to vary, there is one constant he always comes back to, and that is Chiron’s gift of the delineated star globe to Jason. This was important to Newton because the star globe showed those positions as they were in the actual year, or so Newton believed, that the Argonautic expedition was launched. And that meant that if you could just have a look at this globe, you could figure out the actual date of the voyage of the Argonauts.
But, what star globe? There was no record that any such star globe had ever existed. What was Newton thinking of?
To begin to get an answer to this question, we need to pick up the thread of the history of chronology that we left dangling in the middle of the previous chapter.
Though he was hailed by his peers as “the light of the world” and “the sea of sciences,” the outrageously arrogant Dutch French scholar Joseph Justice Scaliger (1540–1609) thought these epithets fell far short of truly describing his genius. His colleagues found this infuriating, but it’s not hard to see why Scaliger thought so well of himself. He seems to have read virtually all classical literature, and he spoke thirteen languages. He wrote landmark works on drama, music, linguistics, and philosophy (most have not been translated from Latin, since they are a little too encyclopedic and exacting for modern tastes).