The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton

by John Chambers

  These new distances are far from Aristarchus’s greatest achievement. Five years before he has used an even stranger breed of geometry to conclude, in the words of Archimedes in his Sand-Reckoner, that “the fixed stars and the sun remain unmoved, that the earth revolves around the sun in the circumference of a circle, the sun lying in the middle of the orbit.”12

  (We can assume that the shade of Newton, flitting in and out of the decades, will somehow find a way to read Aristarchus’s treatise on the location of the Earth, for does not the mysterious geometry in which it is written suggest something of the prisca sapientia?)

  A year or so after he has made this discovery, Aristarchus finds himself sometimes stumbling as he makes his way along the old, familar bypaths of this hill on the outskirts of Athens. This makes him uneasy; he knows these bypaths like the back of his hand, and in his youth he had often raced along them at night without a lantern. He stumbles once a night, and then twice a night, and then sometimes three. It is as if the plateau, which he has loved so much, from which he has gained so much, is exacting some revenge.

  One night he realizes that the stumbling comes from his own fears. He does not believe in the gods, but increasingly he cannot push away from hs mind the knowledge that, for the Stoics, the Earth is the home of Zeus, and that Aristarchus, in making his discovery, has removed the home of the king of the gods from the center of the universe to a second-tier role in the cosmos. Now he fears that the Earth, which he indubitably knows moves, may move against him, may even throw him off, because he has sinned against it.

  Aristarchus isn’t a religious man, but so radically has he turned the tables of man’s perception of the universe that he fears he may have sinned against the gods. For he has displaced Zeus himself from his position at the center of the universe. Have not the priests long worshipped Earth as the home, the hearth, the dwelling place of Zeus? It is precisely the Earth’s centrality that has cemented that belief. Has he, Aristarchus, then committed the sin of impiety in destroying that centrality? Many of his fellow countrymen think so. They fear the gods will punish him—and them. Lately he has been threatened in the marketplace. There is pressure upon him to recant.

  Suddenly he hears, ever so softly, the sound of singing. He recognizes both the hymn and the voice of the singer. He listens.

  Thou, O Zeus, art praised above all gods:

  many are thy names and thine is all power for ever.

  The beginning of the world was from thee:

  and with law thou rulest over all things.13

  These are the first lines of the Hymn to Zeus. They are being sung by its composer, Cleanthes, the leader of the Stoics.

  With growing irritation, Aristarchus hurries toward the source of the singing. He knows all about Cleanthes. He had come to Athens seventy years ago, a youthful prizefighter without a drachma in his pocket. By chance he heard Zeno, head of the Stoics, give a talk and was enchanted. He became a devotee of philosophy and Zeno’s student.

  As a student Cleanthes was so poor he took notes on oyster shells and the dried shoulder blades of oxen. He worked all night as a water bearer and studied all day with Zeno. When he was named Zeno’s successor his classmates were astonished, because he was thought to be the dullest student in the school. Clearly he is still poor. He still draws water at night, and he must be more than ninety.

  Aristarchus crests a hilltop and, looking down, sees in the circle of light cast by a lantern a very tall, very lean, extremely aged man drawing a bucket of water from the well. It is Cleanthes. Aristarchus listens as he sings:

  Under thee may all flesh speak:

  for we are thy offspring.

  Therefore will I raise a hymn unto thee:

  and will ever sing of thy power.

  Rage overtakes Aristarchus. Surely Cleanthes has come singing to this well to taunt him! This is the man who is leading the charge against him—who has stated publicly that Aristarchus should be indicted for impiety—and now it occurs to the astronomer that this bullying priest has come here tonight to harass and to bedevil him.*52

  Aristarchus scrambles down the slope, and as he does so Cleanthes sings out strongly:

  The whole order of the heavens obeyeth thy word:

  as it moveth around the earth:

  With little and great lights mixed together:

  how great art thou, King above all for ever.14

  Aristarchus stumbles and crashes to the bottom of the slope. He can no longer contain his fury. He shouts: “Cleanthes, the whole order of the heavens does not obey Zeus’s word as it moves around the earth! The whole order of the heavens moves around the sun and not the earth!”

  Cleanthes turns and stares haughtily at Aristarchus. Ten yards separate the two men. Aristarchus charges across those ten yards. The shade of Newton observes the numinosity of the prisca sapientia still glittering here and there in the thousand wrinkles of the face of Cleanthes, ninety years old if he’s a day. The shade listens, shocked as Aristarchus cries out: “Old man! You, Cleanthes! You shall be indicted for impiety! You, old man, not I! For blasphemy against the truth, blasphemy against reason!”

  These are to be the last words the two men utter that night. They will fight; eventually they will separate from each other; and the shade of Newton, having seen as much as he wants to see, realizes that religion is already cutting into those powers of the prisca sapientia that still remain within men.

  And he is appalled. One of his purposes in life was to chart the troubled descent, from the heights of Mount Ararat to the sunny uplands of humanity, of the purest form of human spirituality. And what a falling off he has found here. These two Greeks, one the greatest scientist of his time, the other the greatest religious leader—they both endure, they both seem immortal, and yet they cannot even speak to one another. In the mid-third century BC, the two components of the prisca sapientia, science and religion, are falling irrevocably further and further away from each other.

  When, in the life of ancient Greece, did this falling away begin to be inevitable?

  Perhaps in a prison cell in Periclean Athens after midnight on a late spring night in 432 BC, where an old man of amazing intelligence is hefting stones and feeding the rats.

  It is to this prison cell that the shade of Isaac Newton now hastens.

  Newton and his contemporaries called it the Golden Age of Pericles, and so do we. But today we know that Periclean Athens was also Silver. To some extent it was supported on the backs of tens of thousands of slaves who, laboring twenty-four hours a day, tore whole mountains of silver ore out of the mines of nearby Taurium and used huge carts to transport their glittering haul to Athens. The mines were owned by the ruling elite of the city; the ore, turned into bars, brought a hundred talents a year (one million dollars) into the coffers of Athens.

  Pericles saw to it that the sweat of these tens of thousands of slaves produced public buildings of rare beauty. Pericles, who ruled Athens for close to thirty years during the period 467–428 BC, poured much of the earnings from the silver into a program that rid the city of unemployment and saw the construction, overseen by sculptors such as Phidius and Praxiteles, of buildings, like the Erecteum and the Acropolis, that were themselves works of art. The creativity spread; during this period Aeschylus wrote his last play, Aristophanes his first, and Euripides and Sophocles wrote between them a hundred masterpieces. Socrates flourished, Plato was born, Hippocrates organized medicine, and science continued to make inroads against religion.

  The golden-tongued orator behind all this, Pericles, was not immune from attacks. Nor were his friends. One of these, named Anaxagoras, had been thrown in jail on trumped-up charges of atheism. There he had been languishing for several months. It was he whom the shade of Newton had come to see.

  Within four sinister walls shutting out even the thought of liberty, and certainly all hope, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (500–428 BC), ragged and gaunt, sprawls across the earthen floor. A stubby candle casts a wan glow on cakes, fish, and che
ese, all uneaten. A rat darts by; Anaxagoras, suddenly alert, throws it a piece of cheese and watches closely to see how it eats it. He abruptly picks up a large stone—the cell has a dirt floor—and examines it with fierce concentration. Then he drops it and dejectedly lies back on the floor.

  Born into wealth, Anaxagoras gave it all away while still a youth to devote his life to the study of the Earth, the sun, the moon, the stars—of all of the heavens. He is the first person to assert that the moon shines by the reflected light of the sun; the first to suggest that man became developmentally superior to other animals because “his erect posture freed his hands for grasping things”; the first to explain that it is the spring thaws and rains of Ethiopia that make the Nile overflow once a year; and much more.15

  Astronomy is his greatest love. When a fiery meteorite crashed to the ground at Aegospotami in 468 BC, the Athenians, thinking it was a fallen star, enshrined it in a temple and worshipped it. It was said that Anaxagoras, already a legend, had prophesied the fall of this “star”; but it’s more likely that the scientist from Clazomenae, gazing on the blackened stone, saw it as a most undivine example of the true nature of the heavens. Anaxagoras concluded that celestial bodies are not gods but glowing lumps of stone; that the Earth is a stone dusted with dirt; and that the sun is “a red-hot mass or a stone on fire” (many times larger than the Peloponnesian peninsula!); in short, that “the sun, the moon, and all the stars are stones on fire, which are carried round by the revolution of the aether.”16

  These declarations have gotten him into trouble, especially with those who worship the sun. Helios the sun god is a minor deity, but he commands enough respect for the Spartans to sacrifice horses to him every year and for the Rhodians to throw four horses and a chariot into the ocean annually to honor him. If the idea of a universe consisting mostly of rocks has offended the religious establishment, the notion that the sun is just another rock among rocks, albeit it a very hot one, has outraged them. Anaxagoras has been indicted for impiety and sent to prison, there to await trial and possibly execution.

  (Some think he’s an atheist, but it’s hard to tell. He has put forth the concept of the nous, a divine intelligence that suffuses all and is the underlying cause of everything. But he’s so adept at finding natural causes for things that he seems to have rendered the nous superfluous, and the people nickname him “Nous” to make fun of him and to applaud him. Some believe Anaxagoras uses the word nous to cover up his atheism; Aristotle will accuse him of using it to cloak his ignorance.17)

  Anaxagoras is an intimate friend of Pericles, and he might not have been indicted at all (religious observance being on the wane in Athens) were it not that Pericles’s enemies, during a time when the statesman is not in power, are punishing him through his friends. Now, stretched out in his cell, the astronomer thinks bitterly about Pericles. This isn’t because the statesman is the reason why he’s here. It’s because for many months now Pericles, fighting for his own survival, hasn’t given Anaxagoras the spiritual and material support that he has been wont to give him. Over the years, the scientist has passed on to the ruler everything he knows; now, depleted and starving, he needs Pericles to give back.

  Suddenly the cell door swings open and a blazing torch, held aloft by the muscular arm of a slave, fills the cubicle with light. A veiled woman enters. She wears a scarlet cloak of such purity of coloration that it seems impossible it could coexist for a moment with the filthy confines of this cell. Anaxagoras gets slowly to his feet. The woman unfastens the jeweled clasps of her cloak and lets it slip to the floor; it spreads out swiftly in a wide circle as if determined to hide the rocky, earthen surface from her eyes. She steps forward, removes the veil—reveals a face that is beautiful when she wants it to be but is now contorted by an expression of wild despair. She pulls the fleecy white robe that she is wearing closer around her and throws herself at Anaxagoras’s feet.

  This is Pericles’s mistress, Aspasia, who has lived with him ever since he and his wife parted ways in mutual agreement. Aristotle said that slaves do not have souls, that a woman has a soul but it is inoperative, and that only men have operative souls. But Aspasia’s soul is surely operative; she has the knowledge and skills of a great man, even if, for her, the amorous arts substitute for the martial arts. (Plutarch wrote: “Her occupation was anything but creditable, her house being a home for courtesans.”18) But Aspasia’s house is a school too, where women learn all that men learn, and Pericles’s consort holds symposia that even Socrates attends. All seek her out, for her skill in rhetoric, for her sinuous intelligence, for her beauty, for her connections, and because she seems capable of making anything possible.

  A second torch flares up in the doorway, more than doubling the light in the cell. A tall man in a blue cloak slips in. He moves with certain freedom and yet with discipline. His skull is oddly elongated, in a shape that has earned him the nickname “Jupiter Long-pate.”19 He has the eyes of a visionary, an enabler, and a most unhappy man. He carries himself with an incomparable self-possession. His movements are so unobtrusively and yet so overwhelmingly commanding that the shade of Newton, watching, might be forgiven for thinking that he sees the rats in the cell bow humbly and retreat before the inimitable presence of this man.

  He crosses the cell in one stride and, grasping Anaxagoras firmly by the hand, addresses him in words that are—as is always the case when this man speaks—striking both in their dignity and their high purposefulness.20

  This is Pericles, whose rule over Athens Thucydides describes as “an aristocratical government, that went by the name of a democracy, but was, indeed, the supremacy of a single great man.” His powers of persuasion are such that he can change the mind of a god or, almost, the trajectory of a stone, sometimes by the “thunder and lightning” of his oratory, other times by an Olympian detachment and a daunting self-assuredness that enable him to transform reality, first in the eyes of the beholder, and then—almost!—in the world itself. One of his rivals, when asked which of the two was, figuratively speaking, the better “wrestler,” replied, “When I’ve thrown him and given him a fair fall, by insisting that he had no fall, he gets the better of me, and makes the bystanders, in spite of their own eyes, believe him.”21

  Pericles loves Aspasia with a “wonderful affection; every day, both as he went out and as he came in from the market-place, he saluted and kissed her.”22 He loves her, and he loves Anaxagoras, for it is Anaxagoras who has taught him the best of what he knows, and it is for the astronomer that Pericles entertains, says Plutarch, “an extraordinary esteem and admiration.” Plutarch continues:

  But he that saw most of Pericles, and furnished him most especially with a weight and grandeur of sense, superior to all arts of popularity, and in general gave him his elevation and sublimity of purpose and of character, was Anaxagoras of Clazomenae; whom the men of these times called by the name of Nous; that is, mind, or intelligence. . . . The style of speaking most consonant to his [Pericles’s] form of life and the dignity of his views he found, so to say, in the tones of that instrument with which Anaxagoras had furnished him; of his teaching he continually availed himself, and deepened the colors of rhetoric with the dye of natural science.*5323

  Pericles and Aspasia have come to rescue Anaxagoras. These three, Anaxagoras, Aspasia, and Pericles, talk together rapidly in the jail cell, and in so similar a manner that it’s as if each has taught the other how to speak; they address each other with the captivating, high-minded, clear-speaking eloquence that Anaxagoras has taught Pericles and Pericles has passed along to Aspasia even as she is learning it from his teacher. To the shade of Newton they seem like Titans from before the Flood, beings hardly tainted with the sin of Adam and Eve. For the mathematician this is a conversation so vibrant and numinous that it opens out to him, as he had hoped and as he had expected, the hidden possibilities of races and lands over which hang the high mysteriousness of unrecorded ages—ages governed by the prisca sapientia.

  Suddenly, as
if such an electrifying fusion of human beings simply cannot last, a torch goes out, the light dims precipitately, there are muffled blows in the corridor—a beringed priest’s arm reaches through the bars, is violently hauled back. There is a ringing silence; then light returns and the cell door opens. A soldier appears and beckons to Pericles. He sweeps his arms around the shoulders of Anaxagoras and Aspasia and ushers the two of them swiftly out.

  Pericles will return to power soon. He has bribed some, called in favors from others, charmed many, threatened a few, to save Anaxagoras. To protect him further, he banishes him to his birthplace, the coastal city of Lampsacus. The great astronomer and master of the nous will die there, in two years, from boredom and despair.

  Aspasia will be accused of impiety. At her trial, attended by fifteen hundred people, Pericles defends her with all his ingenious wit. She is acquitted, but Pericles is a broken man. The plague that has overwhelmed Athens and killed his sister and two of his sons will claim him too.

  There is a third port of call that the shade of Newton, though he wants to, cannot visit, because it never existed.

  There existed—or so the living Newton thought—a pocket of prisca sapientia power a little more than two centuries further back in time than the Athens of Pericles.

  The pocket was an illusion, but Newton and his contemporaries didn’t know that. They studied this Shangri-la of high antiquity as if it were the realest physical place that had ever existed, mining it for fragments of the most ancient wisdom in the world.

  The place was ancient Rome—but an imaginary ancient Rome. In 390 BC, the Gauls crushed the Roman army and demolished the great city, obliterating three hundred years of historical documents. This knowledge vacuum soon filled with myths. One myth was that of Numa Pompilius (715–672 BC), the second king of Rome, who had to be coaxed into becoming king, who imposed a strict religion on the peoples of Rome, and who kept the Eternal City at peace for forty years.