The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton

by John Chambers

  *4. The zika virus causes microcephaly, a condition in which babies are born with small heads and incomplete brain development.

  *5. In January 2017, NOAA reported that the Earth was even hotter in 2016 than it was in 2015—in fact, the hottest it’s been in 125,000 years.

  *6. Zeus seems to have really hated prophets who blabbed about the future. Apollonius writes that in addition to blinding Phineus the god gave him a lingering old age and “even robbed him of such pleasure as he might have got from the many dainties which neighbours kept bringing to his house when they came there to consult the oracle. On every such occasion the Harpies swooped down through the clouds and snatched the food from his mouth and hands with their beaks, sometimes leaving him not a morsel, sometimes a few scraps, so that he might live and be tormented. They gave a loathsome stench to everything. What bits were left emitted such a smell that no one could have borne to put them in his mouth or even to come near.” (Apollonius, The Voyage of Argo, trans. E. V. Rieu [New York: Penguin, 2006].)

  *7. For a list of twenty-two prophetic hieroglyphs/figures from Newton’s dictionary, the reader is invited to go to appendix A.

  *8. Locke was done a fine service in his career by Catharine Trotter Cockburn (1679–1749), one of the female geniuses whom modern researchers are beginning to extricate from the male-dominated history making and history writing of the past. Cockburn knew French, Latin, and Greek; had learned much philosophy; and at age twenty-one had three blockbuster plays running simultaneously on Drury Lane in London. Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding had been published in 1689 to mostly negative reviews because it seemed to threaten the authority of the church. Some years later Cockburn published anonymously A Defence of Mr. Locke’s Essay of Human Understanding. When her identity became known six months later, all her plays closed in an apparent black-listing. Locke sought out Cockburn and gave her books and a great deal of money in gratitude. Her Defence of Mr. Locke’s Essay is today considered a first-rate work of philosophical analysis. Locke’s essay has gone on to be acclaimed as a highly influential world masterpiece. Isaac Newton had an encounter with another one of the unsung female geniuses of his time, Anne Finch, the Viscountess Conway (1631–1679) (see chapter 15). On Cockburn, see Moore and Bruder, Philosophy: The Power of Ideas, 341.

  *9. The great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) shared Newton’s beliefs to the letter, though it’s unlikely he knew about them. Replying to the edict of excommunication promulgated against him by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901, the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina wrote, “I believe that the will of God is most clearly and intelligibly expressed in the teachings of the man Jesus, whom to consider a God and pray to, I esteem the greatest blasphemy.” (Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, 263.)

  *10. Edward Gibbon gives the figure of 380. Eusebius speaks of 250 bishops. Later Arabic manuscripts put the figure at 2,000. Athanasius (in Ad Afros) gives a figure of 318.

  *11. Apparently private latrines weren’t much better: “The Roman author Aelian writes of a wealthy Iberian merchant who, puzzled by the gradual disappearance of the pickled fish stored in his well-stocked pantry, discovered it was being eaten bit by bit every night by an octopus that came up through the toilet.” (Koloski-Ostrow, “Raising a Really Big Stink,” 43.)

  *12. The curtain was a himation; that is, a contemporary cloak. It must have been a very big cloak or a very narrow jail cell.

  *13. Athanasius has a different account, writing that “Peter deposed Melitius for cause at a council, and that Melitius retaliated by starting the schism.” (Epiphanius, Panarion, 317, n. 6.)

  *14. There are other versions of the story of the succession of Athanasius. One says it took much more badgering of the bishops, perhaps three months’ worth, before he was named archbishop; another, that a far greater number of bishops were held prisoner; and a third that for a long time—during which Athanasius basically disappeared—there was only an interim archbishop of Alexandria.

  *15. Origen Adamantius (184/185–253/254), a brilliant scholar and early Christian theologian said to have written a thousand books, some heretical, most now lost, literally castrated himself, basing this action on Matthew 19:12.

  *16. The “skull” refers to the skull of Adam, thought to be buried there, and not the skull of Christ.

  *17. Today this church, known as the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and around which thickly populated parts of Jerusalem have grown up, is as crammed with the relics of dead saints as Madame Tussuad’s Wax Museum is crammed with wax reproductions of late, great human beings. Visiting the church in 1868, Mark Twain makes note, in his Innocents Abroad, of a column marking the center of the Earth, of the spot, beneath this column, where God scooped out the dust to made Adam, of the site of Jesus’s cross and the crosses of the two thieves crucified beside him, of the sword of Geoffrey of Bouillon, the first Crusader king of Jerusalem—and much more. (In his book, Twain also delivers a hilarious eulogy on his late great ancestor Adam.) (See Innocents Abroad, 404–15.)

  *18. Newton visited London just five times before he moved down permanently in 1696. One of these early visits was in February–March 1675. Of this visit, we know only that Newton attended two meetings of the Royal Society. It’s unimaginable that he would not have been informed by a colleague of the presence of Rabbi Leon’s celebrated scale model and that he would not have gone to see it—though there is no record of this.

  *19. Did John resurrect the Temple of Solomon in his head to serve as a memory palace—a vast ars memoria mnemonic tool—in which to store his developing Book of Revelation in anticipation of one day being able to set it down? Those interested in following this thought through should consult The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates.

  *20. Newton’s discussion of the “Preamble to the Prophetic Visions” and the Great Apostasy raises some provocative issues: First, most modern scholars believe Athanasius was “the first, as far as we know, to place the Book of Revelation in his version of the New Testament canon” (Pagels, Revelations, 135). But if Newton’s interpretation of the preamble is correct, wouldn’t the brilliant and vicious Arius-hater Athanasius have sniffed this out and absolutely not suggested that Revelation be a part of his Ur-canon of the New Testament? Second, how could John of Patmos, when he wrote Revelation at the end of the first century AD, possibly have known that a Trinitarian/anti-Trinitarian schism would develop in the church by the fourth century? In John’s time, the early apostolic church gave no indication that any such schism would ever develop.

  *21. In July 2016, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that June 2016 was the hottest June ever recorded. Global average temperatures in June were 0.9°C (1.6°F) hotter than the average for the twentieth century. These temperatures broke the previous record, set in 2015, by 0.02°C (0.036°F). Arctic sea ice now covers 40 percent less of the Earth than it did in the 1980s, NASA added.

  *22. Newton writes: “The pouring out of a Vial is taken in a double sense, signifying some times the execution of a plague on that thing whereon it is poured, & sometimes the incitement & invigoration of that thing, as it were by a contagious virtue of the medicament, to execute the plague on another thing.” (Newton, “Untitled Treatise on Revelation,” section 1.6.)

  *23. There were two exceptions. In AD 361–363, the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate, bent on eradicating Christianity, allowed the Jews to begin rebuilding the temple. This ended when Julian was assassinated by one of his soldiers, who was probably a Christian. In 614, the Persians captured Jerusalem and handed control of the city to their allies the Jews. The Persians revoked the agreement in 617.

  *24. The rebuilding of Jerusalem and the waste places was predicted in Micah 7:11, Amos 9:11, 14; Ezekiel 20, 26, 33, 35, 36, 38; and Isaiah 54:3, 11, 12; 55:12; 61:4; 65:18, 21, 22. There are allusions to the return from captivity of the Jews, and the coming of the Messiah and his kingdom, in Daniel 7; Revelation 19; Malachi 24; Joel 3; Ezekiel 36, 3
7; Isaiah, 60, 62, 63, 65, 66, and many other places of scripture. (See Snobelen, “Mystery of the Restitution,” 101.)

  *25. The legend of a relationship between Ezekiel and Pythagoras is possibly a modern one and was fueled by our new awareness of what we call the Axial Period—the time, mostly confined to the sixth century BC, when an axis of supreme genius zigzagged across the known world. The Orphics, Zarathustra, Gautama, the authors of the Upanishads, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel—all were all up and about at roughly the same moment in time. We don’t really know what caused this sudden efflorescence, right across the map, of titanic human genius; perhaps the human mind, evolving through many millennia, had reached a kind of critical mass and took a sudden leap forward. Scholar Steven Sittenreich writes: “Sometimes these towering waves of genius clashed. But the extraordinary achievements of Pythagoras, though partly derived from his travels in the Middle East, weren’t necessarily anything with which a Hebrew prophet could connect. Nowhere in the Book of Ezekiel or anywhere in the whole range of the Hebrew/Aramaic Bible is there the slightest touch of Pythagoreanism. The Greek and the Hebrew world-views were two contrasting modes of vision, and the Pythagorean Weltanshauung found its way into Judeo-Christian literature only by way of the Stoics, who posited a Logos as Mediator between a distant Creator and mankind; this doctrine shines forth here and there in the Gospel of Saint John.” (Steven Sittenreich, personal communication with the author, April 2014.)

  *26. “Sisithrus was king [of Chaldea] and Saturn predicted to him that there would be a massive downpour of rain on the fifteenth day of the month Desius, and ordered that everything that was connected with books should be hidden and put away at Heliopolis in the country of the Sippari. In obedience to the command of God, he immediately set off to sail towards Armenia [with birds, reptiles, and horses], and during this voyage he was overtaken by the sudden fulfillment of the prediction. But on the third day when the storm had begun to abate, he sent out birds to explore, in case they might see land that had emerged anywhere and was standing up above the waves. And when all they found was a measureless extent of water, and nowhere at all appeared where they might take refuge, they flew back again to Sisithrus, and others after them did the same. But when he did the same a third time, and his prayers were answered (for the birds returned with their wings covered in mud), he was immediately removed by the power of the Gods from the society and eyes of men; but the vessel came to land in Armenia, and became a source of amulets for the natives which they made from its beams and wore suspended from their necks.” (King, Finding Atlantis, 61–62.)

  *27. A consecrated flame is one that cannot be allowed to go out. It is not to be relit. In early Rome, if a consecrated flame went out it could be rekindled only by the rays of the sun focused through concave mirrors (Plutarch, The Lives of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, 82). A modern-day equivalent of the consecrated flame is the “eternal flame,” or torch, of the Olympic Games, which is not allowed to go out during the games or the four-year period between the games.

  *28. Animal sacrifice seems primitive to us today, but it was what was required at the time. Scholar Emil Fackenheim tells us that such a sacrifice, rather than being “barbaric,” was a form of prayer, prayer being “the sacrifice of the mouth.” Making a burnt offering was the “holding open” of oneself that made possible an “incursion of the Divine.” (A second interpretation is that the sacrificed animal bears the sins of the sacrificing human, and that when the animal is dead the suppliant has purified himself before the Lord, and therefore may speak.) (Fackenheim, What Is Judaism? 183–84.)

  *29. The authors of the Genesis Apocryphon don’t say that having sexual relations with a watcher necessarily produced a “bad” child. Watchers sometimes fathered good children and angels sometimes fathered bad ones. According to the Apocryphon, when a higher being (it’s not clear what this means) had relations with Zophanima, Noah’s uncle Nir’s wife, she delivered Melchizedek, a hybrid child of the highest virtue. (The birth was, however, darkened by tragedy. All through Zophanima’s pregnancy, her husband accused her of being unfaithful. And she had been—but the father of her child had cast a spell over her so that she remembered nothing. Moments before Melchizedek was born, she was overcome by doubt and her husband’s accusations and died of grief [Stone, Amihay, and Hillel, Noah and His Book(s), 72].) When the angel Samuel slept with Eve, she gave birth to the notorious Cain; but for all his future treachery Cain was almost as precocious as Noah and went out and picked flowers for his mother when he was three days old.

  *30. See Peter G. Beidler, “Noah and the Old Man in the Pardoner’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 15, no. 3 (Winter 1981): 250–54. It’s doubtful that Newton took much if any interest in this aspect of Noah.

  *31. Newton applied euhemerism to mythical places in this way: He believed the river Styx of Greek mythology, across which the boatman Charon ferries the souls of the dead, was based on the River Nile (the Egyptians had made the Nile sacred to Osiris). Newton quotes Diodorus, who quotes Homer: “They come to the waves of Ocean, and the Leucadian rock / And to the gates of the sun, where dreams rule, a wandering race, / and further on they reach the grassy green meadows, which are frequented / by the shades, mere images of men, lacking life.”

  After quoting this [says Newton], he [Diodorus] tells us that by “Ocean” here the Nile is meant, and by “the gates of the sun” Heliopolis, and by “the grassy green meadows” of the dead are meant the pastures by the Acherusian marsh near Memphis. For, he says, many grand Egyptian funerals were conducted there; they transport the corpses across the river and the Acherusian marsh and lay them in crypts situated there. Hence also the Acheron and Charon of the Greeks. (Newton, “Miscellaneous Draft Portions of ‘Theologiæ Gentilis Origines Philosophicæ.’”)

  *32. The astronomer Fred L. Whipple writes: “The story that Pope Calixtus III actually excommunicated the comet of 1456 (an apparition of Halley’s Comet) is a hoax. The Pope was clearly worried, however. He ordered public prayers for deliverance from the comet and from the enemies of Christianity. (Whipple, The Mystery of Comets, 13.)

  *33. Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel The Secret Agent is based on this incident.

  *34. The relationship would grow worse over the years as Newton increasingly demanded raw astronomical data from Flamsteed. The Astronomer Royal couldn’t supply it fast enough to suit Newton, and the latter grew steadily more imperious. Toward the end of Flamsteed’s life both men were hurling invective at each other, not the least because Newton, working with Edmund Halley, virtually stole Flamsteed’s new comprehensive star map from him, publishing it without the Astronomer Royal’s permission. (An amended version of Flamsteed’s landmark text was published five years after his death by his widow.)

  *35. In Exodus 16:4, after Moses has told God the Israelites are starving, God tells him, “Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a certain rate everyday, that I may prove them, whether they will walk in my law, or no.” And in fact “manna” begins to arrive with the dew every morning, and “it was like coriander seed, white; and the taste of it was like wafer, made of honey” (Exodus 16:31). Velikovsky believed fallout from the comet was responsible for the disasters that befell the Egyptians and forced them to release the Jews: rivers turning bloodred; stones falling from the sky; darkness at noon; death of all the Egyptian firstborn; earthquakes; high tides; many others. The Austrian-born catastrophist Velikovsky was convinced that similar calamities had taken place all over the world at that time, including the Ogygian flood. (See chapter 14, “A Glitter of Atlantis.”) He found evidence in other contemporary literature of a honey-tasting food falling from heaven, one example being ambrosia, the “food of the gods” of the ancient Greeks. (Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, 145.)

  *36. This view first became public in Newton’s Optics, published in 1704.

  *37. Whiston located seven such possible events, spaced 575 years apart. Edward Gibbon lists them in The Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire as follows: (1) The statement by Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC) in his Chronology that the planet Venus “changed her color, size, and course” in 1767 BC under the reign of Ogyges; (2) the return of this comet in 1193 BC (thought at the time to be the last year of the Trojan War), which was “darkly implied in the fable of Electra, the seventh of the Pleiades, who have been reduced to six since the time of the Trojan war. That nymph, the wife of Dardanus, was unable to support the ruin of her country: she abandoned the dances of her sister orbs, fled from the zodiac to the north pole, and obtained, from her disheveled locks, the name of the comet”; (3) the passage of the “tremendous comet of the Sibyl, and perhaps of Pliny,” in 618 BC; (4) a “long-haired star” that blazed across the sky in 44 BC, the year of the assassination of Julius Caesar; (5) the return of that comet in AD 531, the fifth year of Justinian’s reign; (6) the passage of a comet in AD 1106, “recorded by the chronicles of Europe and China”; and (7) the Great Comet of 1680. (Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 2:1426–27.)

  *38. The modern-day catastrophist Immanuel Velikovsky (1895–1979, author of the 1951 worldwide bestseller Worlds in Collision) was hugely influenced by William Whiston. His admiration for the brilliant Isaac Newton protégé did not, however, prevent him from including in Worlds in Collision a caustic comment about Whiston from the great French naturalist and zoologist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), who wrote, says Velikovsky, that “Whiston fancied that the earth was created from the atmosphere of one comet, and that it was deluged by the tail of another. The heat which remained from its first origin, in his opinion, excited the whole antediluvian population, men and animals, to sin, for which they were all drowned in the deluge, excepting the fish, whose passions were definitely less violent.” (Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, footnote, 57–58.)