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References
Joseph Glanvill, A Blow at Modern Sadducism in some Philosophical Considerations about Witchcraft. To which is added, the Relation of the Fam’d Disturbance by the Drummer, in the House of Mr. John Mompesson: with some Reflections on Drollery, and atheisme. By a member of the Royal Society (London, 1668), sigs. A5r-v. See also Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus: or, full and plain evidence concerning witches and apparitions. In two parts. The first treating of their possibility, the second of their real existence. By Joseph Glanvil late Chaplain in ordinary to his Majesty, and Fellow of the Royal Society. With a letter of Dr. Henry More on the same subject (London, 1681). For an overview of GlanvilĿs project, see Moody E. Prior, “Joseph Glanvill, Witchcraft, and Seventeenth-Century Science,” Modern Philology 30 (1932), pp. 167–93. For general background on early modern belief in witches and demons, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997; orig. publ. 1971) and Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997).
[Glanvill], A Blow at Modern Sadducism, p. 2. Further examples of rhetoric that associates disbelief in witches to infidelity or atheism are noted in Prior, “Joseph Glanvill,” pp. 178–9.
Ibid., p. 2–3.
Ibid., p. 3.
On which, see Frank E. Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), pp. 57–63; Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 310–20.
William Whiston, A Collection of Authentick Records belonging to the Old and New Testament (London, 1728), Part II, pp. 1074–5. This revelation is confirmed by Newton’s private manuscripts. See Newton, King’s College, Cambridge, Keynes MS 3, pp. 1, 3, 9–11, 23, 31, 43, 44; Keynes MS 6, fol. 1r; Newton, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Geneva, MS, 2, fols 20–22, 26, 34.
James E. Force, “The God of Abraham and Isaac (Newton),” The Books of Nature and Scripture, ed. James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), 179–200; see also, James E. Force, “‘Children of the Resurrection’ and ‘Children of the Dust’: Confronting Mortality and Immortality with Newton and Hume,” in Everything Connects: In Conference with Richard H. Popkin: Essays in his Honor, ed. James E. Force and David S. Katz (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 119–42.
Smolinski, “The Logic of Millennial Thought: Sir Isaac Newton Among his Contemporaries,” in Newton and Religion: Context, Nature, and Influence, ed. James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), pp. 259–90.
More, a leading member of the Cambridge Platonists, employed an inductive methodology to demonstrate the existence of evil spirits from the reports of witnesses as part of his programme to develop proofs for the existence of God. The results were published in his Immortality of the Soul (1659) and Antidote to Atheism (1653.) It is worth noting that More shared Glanvilľs position on evil spirits and witchcraft and the editing of the latter’s Sadducismus triumphatus (1681) is attributed to him. In any case, Glanvill was consciously continuing the project initiated by More. See the DNB and especially Sarah Hutton, “The Cambridge Platonists”, in The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia, ed. Gary B. Ferngren (New York: Garland, 2000), pp. 155–7.
Manuel, Religion of Newton, pp. 63–4 (quotation from p. 64.) Manuel earlier wrote briefly about the banishment of demons from Newton’s theology in his Isaac Newton, Historian (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1963), pp. 149–50. Very little on this aspect of Newton’s beliefs has been published since.
Newton, Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem, Yahuda MS 1.1a, fol. 38r; Yahuda MS 1.1b, fol. 16r.
Newton, Yahuda MS 1.2, fol. 11r.
Newton, Yahuda MS 10.2, fol. 15v.
Newton, Keynes MS 5, fol. 19r.
Newton, Keynes MS 5, fol. 48r. Similarly, Newton identifies Lucifer in the prophetic dirge of Isaiah 14, another helpful litmus test for belief in the devil, not as Satan, or as Satan working through the King of Babylon, but simply as the King of Babylon (Newton, Keynes MS 5, fol. 98r.)
Newton, Keynes MS 5, fol. 138r. Newton also equates the Dragon with the spirit of error in Yahuda MS 6, another prophetic manuscript from the early eighteenth century (Newton, Yahuda MS 6, fol. 3r.).
Newton’s reduction of devil language in the Apocalypse to a single signification fits into of a broader interpretative trend in his writings of the reduction of the symbolic to the mundane. This feature of Newton’s hermeneutics was first noted by Manuel in his Isaac Newton, Historian, p. 149. Although mundane (human, political etc.) interpretations of apocalyptic symbols are also seen in the writings of other historicist commentators like Mede, Newton applied this method in a more thorough-going way by extending it to the language of Satan.
Mede, The Key of the Revelation, Searched and Demonstrated out of the Naturall and Proper Charecters [sic] of the Visions (London, 1643), Part 2, pp. 51–2.
Whiston, An Essay on the Revelation of St. John, so far as concerns the Past and Present Times (London, 1744), p. 245.
Newton, Yahuda MS 9.1, fol. 19v.
Ibid., fols 19v–20v.
Ibid., fol. 20v.
Newton, Yahuda MS 1.1a, fol. 12r.
Newton, Yahuda MS 9.1, fol. 20v.
Ibid., fol. 20v.
Ibid., fol. 21v.
Ibid., fol. 21v.
Newton to Locke, 3 May 1692, The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, ed. H. W. Turnbull (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 3:214.
Newton, Bodmer MS, 5A, fol. 8v.
Ibid.
Newton, Keynes MS 7, p. 2. The first two of the four descriptions of idols Newton gives here are from the Bible: 1 Corinthians 8:4 (cf. Isaiah 41:24); Jeremiah 8:19, 10:15, 14:22, 18:15, 51:18.
Mede, The Apostasy of the Latter Times (London, 1641.) Newton owned a copy of Mede’s works, which contained the Apostasy. See John Harrison, The Library of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), item 1053.
Ibid., p. 8.
Ibid., pp. 9–14.
Ibid., p. 14.
See, for example, Newton, Yahuda MS 9.2, fol. 103r; Newton, Bodmer MS, 2, fol. 21r.
One example of this is found in William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA, Newton, “Paradoxical Questions concerning ye morals & actions of Athanasius & his followers” (**N563M3 P222), fol. 55r.
Newton, New College Oxford MS 361.2, fol. 133r. For other examples, see Newton, Yahuda MS 7.1n, fol. 22r; Newton, Bodmer MS, 5A, fol. 8v; Newton, Keynes MS 3, p. 43; Newton, Chronology of Ancient kingdoms amended (London, 1728), p. 160.
Newton, Clark MS, fol. 55r.
Richard H. Popkin (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999) Smolinski, “The Logic of Millennial Thought,” pp. 287–9.
De la Pryme, entry for 19 May 1694, The Diary of Abraham de la Pryme, the Yorkshire Antiquary (London, 1870), p. 42. The ghostly disturbances emanating from this house were later discovered to have been caused by a malicious prankster (pp. 39–42).
Although in other contexts the language used by Newton could be mistaken for that of some curmudgeonly proto-Enlightenment sceptic who rejected all belief, the words credited to Newton ring true and are consistent with the vocabulary of this man of deep faith who abhorred religious fraud. In his private writings, Newton applies the term “cheats” to enchanters, magicians, sorcerers, necromancers and witches who used deception to create the illusion of supernatural powers (Newton, New College, Oxford MS 361.2, fol. 133r.) The expression “imposture,” Manuel has noted, was “a strongly pejorative word in [Newton’s] religious vocabulary—akin to false prophecy” (Manuel, Religion of Newton, p. 45).
On this, see Rob Iliffe, “Those ‘Whose Business it is to Cavill’: Newton’s Anti-Catholicism,” in Newton and Religion, ed. Force and Popkin, pp. 97–119, esp. 109–12.
Newton, Clark MS, fol. 67Ar.
Ibid.
Ibid., fol. 66r.
Newton, Butterfields Lot 3089, recto. Unlike Newton, when mentioning “the spurious Miracles so current under Athanansianism and Popery”, Whiston had no trouble suggesting that “there have frequently been Dæmoniacal Operations and Illusions intermixed with them: and that from the very days of Anthony the Monk, to our own Age” (Whiston, Reflexions on an anonymous pamphlet, entituled, a Discourse of free thinking (London, 1713), p. 26). Given Newton’s animus towards Athanasianism and Catholicism, it is all but certain that he would have attributed their teachings to demons had he believed such were ontologically real. As Newton records from another historical account in this same manuscript fragment, the Arians went further in their scepticism of these accounts than did Eunomius, the founder of the Anhomoians (neo-Arians), who attributed the deception to the “juggling tricks” of real demons, who “did not truly cry out but counterfeit their torments” (Butterfields Lot 3089, recto).
Newton, Keynes MS 3, p. 1.
Ibid., pp. 9, 23, 25, 31, 39, 43; Newton, Keynes MS 6, fol. 1r (“We are to forsake the Devil & his works that is fals gods & idols”).
Ibid., p. 43
The Book of Common Prayer: and Administration of the Sacraments: and other Rites and Ceremonies in the Church of England (London, 1639), sig. C5v.
Harrison, Library of Newton, item 240.
Newton, Keynes MS 3, p. 51.
Ibid., p. 9.
Newton, Yahuda MS 9.1, fol. 21v.
Newton, CUL MS Add. 4005, Sec. 7, published in I. Bernard Cohen, “Isaac Newton’s Principia, the Scriptures, and the Divine Providence,” in Philosophy, Science, and Method, ed. Sidney Morgenbesser et al. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969), p. 544.
Mede, Diatribæ. Discovrses on Divers Texts of Scripture (London, 1642), pp. 120–31 (quotations from p. 123).
Newton, New College, Oxford MS 361.2, fol. 133r, cited in Manuel, Isaac Newton, Historian, p. 149.
Newton, Yahuda MS 9.1, fol. 20v.
Newton, Bodmer MS, 5A, fol. 8v.
Newton, Yahuda MS 8.1, 2r, cited in Kenneth Knoespel, “Interpretive Strategies in Newton’s Theologiae gentilis origines philosphiae,” in Newton and Religion, ed. Force and Popkin, p. 190. I have replaced “sephizoths” with “sephiroths” in this transcription.
[Glanvill], A Blow at Modern Sadducism, 4.
On which, see James E. Force, “Newton’s God of Dominion: The Unity of Newton’s Theological, Scientific, and Political Thought,” in James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin, Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton’s Theology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990), pp. 75–102.
Deuteronomy 32:39; Isaiah 45:7.
On this, see Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 75–103.
John Edwards, Some Thoughts Concerning the Several Causes and Occasions of Atheism, especially in the Present Age (London, 1695), pp. 100–1. Already in 1669, John Wagstaffe, who expressed doubt in the reality of witchcraft, complained that “[t]he zealous affirmers of Witchcraft, think it no slander, to charge those who deny it with Atheism. As if forsooth the denyal of Spirits and of God did necessarily follow the denial of Witches: An errour so gross, that it doth not deserve a confutation.” See, Wagstaffe, The Question of Witchcraft Debated; or a Discourse against their Opinion that Affirm Witches (London, 1669), sigs. A3r-v. On Wagstaffe’s work, in which he depowered but did not deny the devil, see Michael Hunter, “The Witchcraft Controversy and the Nature of Free-thought in Restoration England: John Wagstaffe’s The Question of Witchcraft Debated (1669),” in Michael Hunter, Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy: Intellectual Change in Late Seventeenth-century Britain (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1995), pp. 286–307.
Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 395.
Entry for 21 August 1712, The Diary of Ralph Thoresby, ed. J. Hunter (London, 1830), 2:159. For the reaction of a contemporary American puritan to Sadducism, see Reiner Smolinski, “Salem Witchcraft and the Hermeneutical Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Cotton Mather’s Response to Thomas Hobbes and the ‘Modern Sadducees’,” in Die Salemer Hexenverfolgungen: Perspektiven, Kontexte, Repräsentationem/The Salem Witchcraft Persecutions: Perspectives, Contexts, Representations (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1994), pp. 143–83.
Cf. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 573; Andrew Fix, “Angels, Devils, and Evil Spirits in Seventeenth-Century Thought: Balthasar Bekker and the Collegiants,” Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989), pp. 536–
A. Cohen, Everyman’s Talmud (London: J. M. Dent, 1949), p. 55.
On the doctrine of the yetzer ha-ra, see Jeffrey Burton Russell, Satan: The Early Christian Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 28–9, 32, 41–3, 49, 137–8, and 182; idem, The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 176, 213, and 236; Roy A. Stewart, Rabbinic Theology: An Introductory Study (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1961), pp. 81–5, and 88; Cohen, Everyman’s Talmud, pp. 54–5, 88–93. It is significant that both the vocabulary and underlying conceptualization of the Jewish yetzer ha-ra derive from the Bible, in particular, Genesis 6:5, which thus summarizes the wickedness of antediluvian humanity: “And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination [yetzer] of the thoughts of his heart was only evil [ra] continually” (see also Genesis 8:21.) For a full study of Newton’s engagement with Jewish theology, see Matt Goldish, Judaism in the Theology of Sir Isaac Newton (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998).
Stewart, Rabbinic Theology, p. 81.
I elsewhere illustrate other points of contact between Newton’s theology and that of the Polish Brethren (particularly in the areas of baptism, mortalism, and antitrinitarianism) in Snobelen, “Isaac Newton, Heretic: The Strategies of a Nicodemite,” British Journal for the History of Science 32 (1999), pp. 384–7; and Snobelen, “ ‘God of Gods, and Lord of Lords’: The Theology of Isaac Newton’s General Scholium to the Principia,” Osiris 16 (2001), pp. 191–6.
Alfred Coutts, Hans Denck 1495–1527: Humanist & Heretic (Edinburgh: MacNiven & Wallace, 1927), p. 165.
There is a growing literature on this theological trend. See Israel, Radical Enlightenment, pp. 375–405; Auke Jelsma, Frontiers of the Reformation: Dissidence and Orthodoxy in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 25–39; Gary K. Waite, “From David Joris to Balthasar Bekker?: The Radical Reformation and Scepticism Towards the Devil in the Early Modern Netherlands (1540–1700),” Fides et Historia 28 (1996), pp. 5-26; idem, “‘Man is a Devil to Himself ‘: David Joris and the Rise of a Sceptical Tradition Towards the Devil in the Early Modern Netherlands, 1540–1600,” Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis/Dutch Review of Church History 75 (1995), pp. 1–30.
Gary K. Waite, “Demonic Affliction or Divine Chastisement? Conceptions of Illness and Healing Among Spiritualists and Mennonites in Holland, c.1530–c.1630,” in Illness and Healing Alternatives in Western Europe, ed. Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Hilary Marland, and Hans de Waardt (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 59–79.
For this, see Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 571.
Bauthumley, The Light and Dark Sides of God (London, 1650), p. 30.
Muggleton, A True Interpretation of the Witch of Endor (London, 1669), p. 3.
Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 56–8, 269–79, 288, 417–18, 440–57.
Ibid., p. 58.
Ibid., p. 418.
Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 443.
On Van Dale, see Israel, Radical Enlightenment, pp. 361–73. Newton does not appear to have owned this work, although he did posses a copy of van Dale’s Dissertationes de origine ac progressu idolatriæ et superstitionum (Amsterdam, 1696). See Harrison, Library of Newton, item 483.
On Bekker, see Andrew Fix, “Balthasar Bekker and the Crisis of Cartesianism,” History of European Ideas 17 (1993), pp. 577–88; idem, “Angels, Devils, and Evil Spirits,” pp. 527–47; Robin Attfield, “Balthasar Bekker and the Decline of the Witch-craze: The Old Demonology and the New Philosophy,” Annals of Science 42 (1985), pp. 383–95. Newton does not appear to have owned any of the editions of Bekker’s work, but his theological interlocutor John Locke owned the French translation of Betoverde Weereld. See John Harrison and Peter Laslett, eds., The Library of John Locke, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), item 254.
Bekker, The World Bewitch’d; or, an Examination of the Common Opinions Concerning Spirits: their Nature, Power, Administration, and Operations ([London], 1695), sigs. c11v–c12r.
On which, see Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) Israel, Radical Enlightenment, pp. 382–405.
Newton, Bodmer MS, 3, fol. 22r.
Ibid.
On which, see Ian Bostridge, Witchcraft and its Transformations c.1650–c.1750 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), pp. 180–202, and Ian Bostridgeidem, in “Witchcraft Repealed,” in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief, ed. Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 309–34.
Cf. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, pp. 475, 573.
James E. Force exorcized this historiographical demon in a brilliant and incisive reply to Richard Westfall’s ill-founded attempt to situate Newton on the slippery slope towards deism. See James E. Force, “Newton and Deism,” Science and Religion / Wissenschaft und Religion, ed. Ănne Băumer and Manfred Büttner (Büchum: Brockmeyer, 1989), pp. 120–32.
Richard S. Westfall, “Newton and Christianity,” Facets of Faith and Science, Volume 3: The Role of Beliefs in the Natural Sciences, ed. Jitse M. van der Meer (Ancaster, Ontario: The Pascal Centre/ Lanham, MD: The Univ. Press of America, 1996), p. 73.
Religion of Newton Manuel
A pioneering study in this regard is Simon Schaffer, “Comets & Idols: Newton’s Cosmology and Political Theology,” Action and Reaction: Proceedings of a Symposium to Commemorate the Tercentenary of Newton’s Principia, ed. Paul Theerman and Adele F. Seeff (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993), pp. 206–31.
Newton, Yahuda MS 15.5, fol. 97r. For more on this, see “‘God of Gods, and Lord of Lords’.” Snobelen
For more on Newton’s epistemological dualism, see “‘God of gods, and Lord of lords,’” Snobelen, pp. 205–6.
Whiston, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr. William Whiston, 2 vols (London, 1753), 2:195–7. On this, see Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton, pp. 98–9. Whiston also had little difficulty in attributing charismatic revelation to demonic influence. When Whiston met with the French Prophets in or about 1713, he gave them his reasons “why, upon supposition of their agitations and impulses being supernatural, [he] thought they were evil and not good spirits that were the authors of those agitations and impulses,” and affirmed that “Wild agitations are rather signs of dæmonical possessions, than of a prophetic afflatus.” See Whiston, Memoirs, 1:119–20.
Sykes, An Enquiry into the Meaning of Demoniacks in the New Testament (London, 1737). See also, idem, A Further Enquiry into the Meaning of Demoniacks in the New Testament (London, 1737).
Sykes, Enquiry into Demoniacks, p. 54.
Ibid., p. 55.
Ibid., pp. 55–6.
Ibid., p. 60.
Among the responses to Sykes’ work advocating the orthodox literal demonology, was William Whiston’s tract An Account of the Dæmoniacks, and of the Power of Casting out Dæmons, both in the New Testament, and in the Four First Centuries (London, 1737.)
Mead, Medica sacra; or, a Commentary on the Most Remarkable Diseases, Mentioned in the Holy Scriptures (London, 1755; orig. publ. in Latin in 1749.)
On this, see “Isaac Newton, Heretic,” Snobelen, pp. 401–8.
Bostridge, Witchcraft and its Transformations, pp. 182–3; idem, “Witchcraft Repealed,” in Barry, Hester, and Roberts, Editors, Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, p. 319.
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Snobelen, S.D. (2004). Lust, Pride, and Ambition: Isaac Newton and the Devil. In: Force, J.E., Hutton, S. (eds) Newton and Newtonianism. International Archives of the History of Ideas/Archives internationales d’histoire des idées, vol 188. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-2238-7_8
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