The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton

by John Chambers

  Numa had friends in unusually high places. The idea of “guardian angel”—daimon to the ancient Greeks—first emerged in fifth-century BC Athens. The philosopher Socrates had a daimon that unfailingly told him when not to do something, and the voice was always right (except, perhaps, when Socrates wondered if perhaps he shouldn’t reconsider drinking the hemlock that was meant to kill him and go into exile instead, and the daimon answered, “No”).

  Numa had two major daimons and a host of minor ones. There are entities in ancient Greek literature that we might categorize as invisible daimons, but this same ancient literature often represents them as separate supernatural beings, outside the guidee and communicating with him as if they were real people. The most beguiling of Numa’s two major spirit guides was the woodland goddess Egeria. Numa married her; in Plutarch’s words, he was “admitted to celestial wedlock in the love and converse of Egeria” and thereby “attained to blessedness, and to a divine wisdom.” (Plutarch remarks that the ancient Egyptian priests debated whether a man and goddess could really get married; they decided they could but were less certain about whether sex could actually take place between a supernatural and a natural being.)24

  Numa’s other major guardian angel who manifested as an actual mortal was the muse Tacita, who sometimes put Numa in touch with the other nine muses. Tacita means “the silent one” and was named, says Plutarch, “perhaps in imitation and honor of the Pythagorean silence.”25 The Pythagorean silence was the silence Pythagoras imposed on his students in asking them not to repeat or publish his teachings outside his school. What is curious here is that Pythagoras lived two hundred years after Numa Pompilius. We are certainly in the realm of myth, and myth that does everything it can to put Numa at the level of the incomparable fifth-century Greek scientist-seer Pythagoras. Plutarch’s sources describe the second king of Rome as, variously, Pythagoras’s pupil, Pythagoras’s first cousin, and close enough to Pythagoras that he named one of his sons after him.

  Numa introduced the worship of the goddess Vesta to ancient Rome, so the ancient legend goes. Egeria had come to Earth expressly to help him do this—that is, in the words of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, to help him to “receive the ceremonies [of Vesta] he instituted among the Romans.”26 Hobbes, who didn’t know history had invented Numa, thought Numa had invented Egeria to give his precepts divine authority.

  Numa built a temple to Vesta, and with this the true nature of Tacita’s role is revealed: she had come to supervise the temple’s design. What fascinated Newton about Numa’s temple was that it was a picture-perfect copy of a pre-Flood prytaneum—a rational-religious temple that, worshipping God’s creations, honored the wisdom of the prisca sapientia. It was if Numa had found in a time capsule the blueprint of an aboriginal prytaneum. Newton writes of “that wise king of the Romans, Numa Pompilius, who, as a symbol of the figure of the world with the Sun in the center, erected a temple in honor of Vesta, of a round form, and ordained perpetual fire to be kept in the middle of it.”27

  Vestal virgins danced in circles around the central fire in imitation of the orbiting planets. Newton further writes: “Plutarch records this instruction from Numa: You should twirl around as you worship the Gods, and sit down when you have worshiped them; then he [Plutarch] adds: The turning of the worshipers is said to be an image of the orbit of the world. . . . They implied that by turning about the central fire we men are revolving in the true system of the world.”28

  So the second king of Rome knew that the cosmos was heliocentric! Most striking of all for Newton, though, was that the God of Numa Pompilius—the God of the Temple of Vesta—was Newton’s God. Plutarch writes that the second king of Rome “conceived the first principle of being [God] as transcending sense and passion, invisible and incorrupt, and only to be apprehended by abstract intelligence.” Therefore, Plutarch continues, the design of the temple was simple and without images of God, since it was idolatrous to liken “the highest” to any earthly object. You could not know God “except by the pure act of the intellect”;29 therefore, the walls of the temple were absolutely without decoration or ornamentation.

  William Blake would have regarded the spirit guides surrounding Numa Pompilius as representations of his expanded consciousness. (Today we might call them aspects of his genius.) Newton would likely have looked at them as the measure of the wisdom of the prisca sapientia still within Numa.

  (The second king of Rome had occasional concourse with other divine and semidivine figures: Plutarch says he was able to draw to himself two demigods, Picus and Faunus, who “revealed to him many secrets and future events, and particularly a charm for thunder and lightning”30 with which he was able to bring Zeus to Earth. Zeus was angry at being disturbed, but Numa figured out how to placate him, and a mollified king of the gods returned to heaven. Plutarch says all this, it seems, to complete his picture of the fullness of Numa’s soul.)

  In a remarkable passage, Plutarch tells us about the spirit guides of other great men and women of Classical times, and we get another picture of how the ancients described genius. The author of Lives of Ancient Greeks and Romans writes: “It is reported, also, that Pan became enamored of Pindar for his verses, and the divine power rendered honor to Hesiod and Archilochus after their death for the sake of the Muses; there is a statement, also, that Aesculapius sojourned with Sophocles in his lifetime, of which many proofs still exist, and that, when he was dead, another deity took care for his funeral rites.”31

  Newton was fascinated by Numa because he so perfectly exemplified Newton’s notion of what an ancient priest of the prisca sapientia might be like, from the spirits representing his expanded being, who flock around him, to the rational perfection and unassuming worship of God in the temple that he constructed in Rome.

  From Numa—who didn’t exist but was cobbled together to represent certain prevailing trends of the sixth century BC—we move on to the greatest ancient master of the prisca sapientia of them all, Pythagoras. We’ll introduce him through his disciple, Philolaus, who displaced the sun from the center of the cosmos several hundred years before Aristarchus did. In so doing, Philolaus seemed to Newton to provide overwhelming proof that the scientists of the ancient world had known everything that Newton and his contemporaries were just now learning.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  MASTERS OF THE PRISCA SAPIENTIA, PART 2

  Philolaus, Pythagoras, Moses, Pauli

  Around the year 450 BC, the Greek philosopher Plato made strenuous efforts to obtain a rare and valuable book whose very existence was a surprise to everybody.

  Plato was at the court of Dionysius II in Syracuse, Sicily, helping the king implement the rules of ideal government that the philosopher sets forth in his Republic (man being the imperfect creature that he is, the attempt was unsuccessful). The book was called On Nature; it was written by Philolaus (470–385 BC), successor to the seer Pythagoras; and, two hundred years before Aristarchus, it displaced the sun from the center of the universe.

  The book had been produced in the famed Pythagorean school at Croton in the heel of Italy. There are two versions of how Plato obtained it. One is that he bought it from Philolaus’s relatives for the enormous sum of forty Alexandrian minas of silver, perhaps $1,000 today. The other is that, in a deliberate effort to procure this extraordinary volume, he persuaded Dionysius to free a disciple of Philolaus whom the king had thrown in prison.1 A grateful Philolaus rewarded him with On Nature.

  The book was extraordinary not only for its revolutionary displacement of the sun. It was well known at the time—or so legend tells us—that Pythagoras had forbade his disciples to even talk about his teachings outside his school, let alone publish them. His followers had devoutly honored his request. At the time of the seer’s death, when he and his disciples had been attacked and were fleeing from Croton, a disciple named Timycha, trailing behind because she was pregnant, was caught and dragged before the tyrant Cylon. He threatened to torture her if she didn’t tell him why Pyt
hagoras forbade the eating of beans. Timycha ground her tongue with her teeth and bit it off, rather than reveal, because of torture, any of the master’s secrets.2

  And yet Philolaus had published On Nature. Perhaps Plato, finally reading the book in Syracuse, concluded he should not assume that (in the words of modern-day commentator Thomas Heath) “the absence of any written record of early Pythagorean doctrine [is] to be put down to any pledge of secrecy binding the school; there does not seem to have been any secrecy observed at all unless perhaps in matters of religion or ritual; the supposed secrecy seems to have been invented to explain the absence of any trace of documents before Philolaus.”3 The story of Timycha is only a poignant myth, an homage to Pythagoras.

  Plato was impressed by On Nature. Though only very late in life did he come to believe—perhaps!—that the Earth is not at the center of the universe, he nevertheless incorporated many of Philolaus’s best ideas in his own mystical-astronomical masterpiece, Timaeus.

  Philolaus’s On Nature has long been lost, but we know a great deal about it from Aristotle’s On the Heavens. In On Nature, the second-generation Pythagorean does indeed displace the Earth from the center of the universe, setting it in an orbit around that center. But he doesn’t replace it with the sun; that he leaves where it is, also orbiting the center, while he puts in the place of the Earth what the calls the “central fire.”

  The central fire is mysterious indeed. Philolaus arrived at this belief through a mystical-mathematical process of deduction. Aristotle describes the process in On the Heavens; some scholars think he does so just to make fun of Philolaus’s mystical beliefs. Aristotle writes: “Most people—all, in fact, who regard the whole heaven as finite—say it [the Earth] lies at the center. But the Italian philosophers known as Pythagoreans take the contrary view. At the center, they say, is fire, and the earth is one of the [wandering] stars, creating night and day by its circular motion about the center.”4

  Aristotle says the Pythagoreans regarded the center as the most precious of all possible places in the universe, and fire as the most precious of all possible things in the universe. Therefore, since the most precious thing belonged in the most precious place, fire must be at the center of the universe. And since what is most precious “should be most strictly guarded,”5 and there can be no better guardian than a god, then it follows that the central fire is protected by Zeus or Apollo.

  The Pythagoreans didn’t know that the Earth rotates on its axis. And they believed only half of our world’s surface was inhabited, the half that faced perpetually away from the central fire, which was why we never saw it. They believed that not just the Earth and the sun but also the moon, the five known planets, and the fixed stars (the stars functioning as a single unit) revolved around this central fire.

  This makes nine celestial bodies. The Pythagoreans maintained that nine was a “limited” number—in fact a very second-rate number—and therefore it could not have played a role in the original and divine structuring of the universe. However, the number ten, being the sum of 1, 2, 3, and 4, was not only an “unlimited” number but a perfect number. So, to arrive at a total of ten celestial bodies, the Pythagoreans tacked on a tenth body, the “Counter-Earth.”

  Even if the Counter-Earth were farther away from the sun than the Earth, we wouldn’t be able to see it any more than we can see the central fire. This is because it shares the same orbit as the earth and is directly opposite us on the other side of the central fire, and remains directly opposite us because it revolves around the central fire at the same rate of speed as we do.

  It’s not clear whether the Pythagoreans thought the central fire was really a fire at all; they may have regarded it as a “creative force which from the center gives life to all the earth and warms afresh that part of it which has cooled.”6 They believed the sun, orbiting the central fire, shone by the reflected light of that, perhaps only apparently, fiery body.

  Philolaus professed to believe that the central fire had an organizing function vis-à-vis the universe; it was “the directing fire . . . which the Demiurge [the being created by God to put together the physical universe] has placed as a sort of keel to serve as a foundation to the sphere of the All.”7

  Isaac Newton was impressed by the Pythagorean concept of the central fire. He talks about it as if it were Pythagoras’s idea, though we have no proof of this. Oddly, Newton conflates the central fire with the sun, speaking of the Pythagorean “sun” when he actually means Philolaus’s central fire.

  What truly fascinated Newton about the notion of a central fire was its nature as a unifying or organizing principle. This smacked of gravity to him. The Pythagoreans applied many epithets to this central fire that Newton regularly calls the sun: the Tower of Zeus; the Watchtower of Zeus; the Throne of Zeus; the House of Zeus; the Hearth of the Universe (the “fire” being “placed like a hearth round the center”); the Fire in the Middle; the Mother of the Gods; the Altar, Bond, and Measure of Nature; and more. For Newton these epithets had the feel of ancient hieroglyphs from the world before the Flood; he must have wondered if they were encoded descriptions of the laws of mathematics and physics that he was rediscovering.

  Newton writes that Pythagoras (by whom he means the Pythagoreans), “on account of its [the central fire’s] immense force of attraction, said that the sun was the prison of Zeus; that is, a body possessed of the greatest circuits. . . . [It was] the prison of Jupiter because he keeps the planets in their orbs.”8

  The “greatest circuits” must refer, Newton surely thought, to orbiting bodies held in place by the gravitational pull of the sun. He wrote that “the souls of the Sun and of all the Planets the more ancient philosophers held for one and the same divinity exercising its powers in all bodies whatsoever.”9 Here he seems to refer to that universal force of gravitation that, he believed, must, in the absence of any medium through which it can travel, be sustained by the power of God.

  Usually when Newton thought about the theory of universal gravitation in ancient times, he thought about Philolaus’s master, Pythagoras, who, Isaac Newton believed, knew everything he, Newton, knew about gravity and had veiled his knowledge in the legend of the music of the spheres.

  Humanity has taken three giant leaps forward in the way it understands the world we live in. The second leap was made by Isaac Newton, when he invented calculus and formulated the laws of gravitation, motion, light, and more. The third giant leap forward was as recent as a hundred years ago, when Albert Einstein discovered relativity and a group of mathematicians and physicists that included Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli developed quantum mechanics.

  The first giant leap forward was taken in the fifth century BC by the Greek philosopher-seer Pythagoras (ca. 570–495 BC). Previous Greek philosophers had struggled to identify a single substance underlying all other substances: Thales suggested water, Anaximenes named air, Anaximander said breath and air, and Heraclitus posited fire. Pythagoras’s unique genius was to discover in the chaos of the ever-changing world of sense phenomena the truth that Number is the essence of all, that it is the ultimate reality—that God, or the Universe, thinks in numbers.

  Early biographers attribute Pythagoras with a vitality and plenitude of being that make him sound like a Titan roaming the Earth in antediluvian majesty. Diogenes Laertius says Pythagoras’s students believed he was the god Apollo come back to Earth.10 Plutarch tells us he taught an eagle to come at his command and swoop down to him in flight.11 Pythagoras could talk to animals and once made a bear swear an oath that it would stop preying on the local countryside; the bear kept its word.12 He could talk to the rivers: Iamblichus records that, “once, passing over the river Nessus along with many associates, he addressed the river, which, in a distinct and clear voice, in the hearing of all his associates, answered, ‘Hail Pythagoras!’”13

  The man who discovered Number could be in two places at once: his contemporaries report that, “during the same day he was present in Metapontum in Italy, and
at Tauromenium in Sicily, discoursing with his disciples in both places, although these cities are separated, both by land and sea by many stadia, the traveling over which consumes many days.”14 He was personally captivating; the poet Timon speaks of him as “inclined to witching works and ways, / Man-snarer, fond of noble periphrase [juggling of solemn speech].”15

  The tremendous efflorescence of being that was Pythagoras swept through a tumultuous lifetime that began on the island of Samos, in Ionia, Greece, in 570 BC, and ended in the Greek colony of Croton, in southern Italy, in 495 BC. Pythagoras spent nearly all of his twenties, thirties, and forties in Egypt, Chaldea, and Phoenicia, a foreign student abroad imbibing the essence of mystery religions so old (or so it was believed) that their initial rites had been performed by the gods themselves. He may have visited Mongolia, and perhaps Persia where he communed with Zoroaster. Pythagoras returned to Samos just in time to flee the advance of the Persian army into Asia Minor, ending up at Croton in southern Italy. Here he set up a school, or more accurately a mystical fellowship, that adhered to the rule of communal ownership and included women, not the least of them Pythagoras’s wife, Theano, who was a philosopher in her own right.*54

  The power of Pythagoras’s mind and soul were such that he was soon lecturing to as many as two thousand followers16 (if “lecturing” is the word, since he spoke to his pupils from behind a curtain in the manner of the central Asian potentates of his day17). Pythagoras taught reincarnation and claimed to remember twenty-two of his past lives. He enjoined his pupils to harm nothing living, eat only vegetables, keep speech at a minimum, and strive for salvation through the assimilation to and knowledge of God.18 He invented acoustics and turned it into a therapeutic tool, curing diseases and modifying emotions by singing and playing on his lyre in ways never known before.