Isaac Newton (16 page)

In theology as in alchemy, he felt himself to be questing for ancient truths that had been perverted in the dark history of the past centuries. Knowledge had been lost, veiled in secret codes to hide it from the vulgar, distorted by blasphemers, priests and kings. He believed this to be true of
mathematics, too, the language of God. In all these realms, he tried to recover words and laws once known and then lost. He had a mission. He believed he was doing God’s work. “Just as the world was created from dark Chaos through the bringing forth of the light,” he wrote in one manuscript, “… so our work brings forth the beginning out of black chaos and its first matter.”
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In both alchemy and theology, he cherished secrecy just as the new philosophers in London repudiated it. No public science here: rather, meetings with anonymous confidantes, barter of manuscripts, shadowy brotherhoods.

Arianism was undergoing a clandestine revival, but disbelief in the holy Trinity amounted to dangerous heresy nonetheless. By putting his arguments to paper Newton committed a crime that, if exposed, could have cost him his position and even his freedom.
¹¹

At the last moment, in 1675, Newton’s precarious position at Cambridge was rescued. The king granted his request for a dispensation, an act that released the Lucasian professorship, in perpetuity, from the obligation to take holy orders.
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This did not end his theological obsession. He perfected his heresy through decades of his life and millions of words. He marshaled his arguments and numbered them:

1. The [word] God is no where in the scriptures used to signify more then one of the thre persons at once.

2. The word God put absolutely without particular restriction to the Son or Holy ghost doth always signify the Father from one end of the scriptures to the other.…

6. The son confesseth the father greater then him calls him his God, &c.…

11. The son in all things submits his will to the will of the father. which could be unreasonable if he were equall to the father.
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No gulf divided Newton’s theological reasoning from his physics and geometry. Logic proved that any divinity in the subordinate aspects of God remained derived from and dependent upon God. He drew a diagram:

To make this plainer suppose
a
,
b
&
c
are 3 bodies of which
a
hath gravity originally in it self by which it presseth upon
b
&
c
which are without any originall gravity but yet by the pressure of
a
communicated to them do presse downwards as much as
A
doth. Then there would be force in
a
, force in
b
& force in
c
, & yet they are not thre forces but one force which is originally in
a
& by communication/descent in
b
&
c
.
¹⁴

He would not even label years as
AD
, preferring
AC:
Christ, but not the Lord. Jesus was more than a man but less than God. He was God’s son, a mediator between God and humanity, chosen to be a prophet and messenger, and exalted to God’s right hand. If we could decipher the prophecies and the messages, we would know a God of order, not chaos; of laws, not confusion. Newton plumbed both nature and history to find out God’s plan. He rarely attended church.

Anger blazed through his theology; reason followed along behind. In his reading notes and “articles” and “points” and “observations,” his “Short Schem of the True Religion” and his analysis of prophecies and revelations, he
raged against the blasphemers. He called them fornicators—for he associated this special blasphemy with lust. “Seducers waxing worse and worse,” he wrote, “deceiving and being deceived—such as will not endure sound doctrine but after their own lusts heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears and turning away their ears from the truth.”
¹⁵
Monks, with their unclean thoughts, had perpetrated this corruption.

He felt Trinitarianism not just as error but as sin, and the sin was idolatry. For Newton this was the most detested of crimes. It meant serving false gods—“that is, Ghosts or Spirits of dead men or such like beings.”
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Kings were specially prone to it, “kings being apt to enjoyn the honour of their dead ancestors,” declared this obsessive scholar, who, for himself, could not have been less apt to call on the honor of dead ancestors.

He had seldom returned home to Lincolnshire since the sojourn of the plague years, but in the spring of 1679 his mother succumbed to a fever. He left Cambridge and kept vigil with her over days and nights, till she died. He, the first-born son, not his half-brother or sisters, was her heir and executor, and he buried her in the Colsterworth churchyard next to the grave of his father.

11
 
First Principles

I
N THE NEXT YEAR
a comet came. In England it arose faint in the early morning sky for a few weeks in November till it approached the sun and faded in the dawn. Few saw it.

A more dramatic spectacle appeared in the nights of December. Newton saw it with naked eye on December 12: a comet whose great tail, broader than the moon, stretched over the full length of King’s College Chapel. He tracked it almost nightly through the first months of 1681.
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A young astronomer traveling to France, Edmond Halley, a new Fellow of the Royal Society, was amazed at its brilliance.
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Robert Hooke observed it several times in London. Across the Atlantic Ocean, where a handful of colonists were struggling to survive on a newfound continent, Increase Mather delivered a sermon, “Heaven’s Alarm to the World,” to warn Puritans of God’s displeasure.
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Halley served as a sometime assistant to a new officeholder, the Astronomer Royal. This was John Flamsteed, a clergyman and self-taught skywatcher appointed by the King in 1675, responsible for creating and equipping an observatory on a hilltop across the River Thames at Greenwich. The Astronomer’s chief mission was to perfect star
charts for the Navy’s navigators. Flamsteed did this assiduously, recording star places with his telescope and sextant night after night, more than a thousand observations each year. Yet he had not seen the November comet. Now letters from England and Europe alerted him to it.
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Whatever comets were, omens or freaks, their singularity was taken for granted: each glowing visitor arrived, crossed the sky in a straight path, and departed, never to be seen again. Kepler had said this authoritatively, and what else could a culture of short collective memory believe?

But this year European astronomers recorded two: a faint predawn comet that came and went in November 1680, and a great giant that appeared a month later and dominated the skies till March. Flamsteed thought comets might behave like planets.
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Immersed as he was in the geometry of the sky, charting the changes in celestial perspective as the earth orbited the sun, he predicted that the comet he had missed in November might yet return. He watched the sky for it. His intuition was rewarded; he spied a tail on December 10, and the tail and head together, near Mercury, two days later. He had a friend at Cambridge, James Crompton, and he sent notes of his observations, hoping Crompton could pass them on to Newton. A fortnight later he wrote again, speculating, “If we suppose it a consumeing substant ’tis much decayed and the Fuell spent which nourishes the blaze but I have much to say against this hypothesis however you may consider of it and Pray let me have your opinion.”
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Newton read this and remained silent.

A month later Flamsteed tried again. “It may seem that the exteriour coat of the Comet may be composed of a
liquid.… It was never well defined nor shewed any perfect limb but like a wisp of hay.”
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He was persuaded more than ever that the two comets were one. After all, he had predicted the reappearance. He struggled to explain the peculiar motion he had recorded. Suppose, he said, the sun attracts the planets and other bodies that come within its “Vortex”—perhaps by some form of magnetism. Then the comet would approach the sun in a straight line, and this path could be bent into a curve by the pressure of the ethereal vortex.
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How to explain its return? Flamsteed suggested a corresponding force of repulsion; he likened the sun to a magnet with two poles, one attracting and one repelling.

Finally Newton replied. He objected to the notion of magnetism in the sun for a simple reason: “because the
is a vehemently hot body & magnetick bodies when made red hot lose their virtue.” He was not persuaded that the two comets were one and the same, because his exquisitely careful measurements of their transit, and all the others he could collect—6 degrees a day, 36 minutes a day, 3½ degrees a day—seemed to show acceleration suddenly alternating with retardation.
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“It is very irregular.” Even so, he diagrammed Flamsteed’s proposal, the comet nearing the sun, swerving just short of it, and veering away. This he declared unlikely. Instead he suggested that the comet could have gone all the way around the sun and then returned.
¹⁰
He diagrammed this alternative, too. And he conceded a crucial point to Flamsteed’s intuition: “I can easily allow an attractive power in the
whereby the Planets are kept in their courses about him from going away in tangent lines.”