Abstract
Although it is now fairly well known that the great Sir Isaac Newton wrote much about religion, little attention has been devoted to assessing the merit of his theological views or any influence which they may have had. Some have assumed that Newton’s religious writings, most of which have not yet been published, resulted either from madness or, possibly, from the emotional trauma of a young child who realized that his father died two months prior to the child’s birth. Rumors of Newton’s insanity had been circulating since Newton’s death and were so persistent that, in 1844, the Christian Observer published a lengthy article on Newton’s alleged insanity and its supposed connection with his religious writings. More recently, Frank E. Manuel, in his Religion of Isaac Newton, has argued that Newton’s religious views are possibly best understood against the psychological background of his posthumous birth which may have led him to seek for a super-father all of his life.1
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Notes
Frank E. Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), chap. I, “His Father in Heaven,” pp. 17ff.
Catalogue of the Newton Papers Sold by Order of the Viscount Lymington to whom they have descended from Catherine Conduitt, Viscountess Lymington, Great-niece of Sir Isaac Newton. Which will be Sold by Auction by Messrs. Sotheby and Co.…. At their Large Galleries, 34 & 35 New Bond Street W.I. On Monday, July 13th, 1936, and Following Day, at One O’clock Precisely (London, 1936.)
Keynes’ collection is located in King’s College Library, Cambridge. Yahuda’s is in the Hebrew National and University Library, Jerusalem.
Henry More to John Sharp, August 16, 1680, in Conway Letters. The Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More, and their Friends, ed. Marjorie Hope Nicolson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), pp. 478–9. In this letter, More describes an episode which occurred during a visit by Newton to More’s rooms in Cambridge to discuss one of More’s interpretations of some apocalyptic prophecies in the Book of Revelation. More writes that Newton’s ordinarily “melancholy and thoughtful” countenance was then “Mighty lightsome and chearfull” and that Newton was “in a maner Transported.” Cf. Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton, p. 14.
See Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest. A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.)
See also B. J. T. Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, or “The Hunting of the Greene Lyon,” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.)
See Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)
and Webster, The Great Instauration. Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660 (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1975.)
See also Richard H. Popkin, “The Third Force in Seventeenth Century Philosophy: Scepticism, Science and Millenarianism,” in E. Ullman-Margalit, The Prism of Science. The Israel Colloquium: Studies in History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1986), Vol. 2, pp. 21–50.
Newton’s manuscript of 1716, a hastily prepared summary which resulted from Princess Caroline’s request to see his work on chronology, is a summary abstract of his chronological research in the form of an annotated list of dates and a very brief statement of his method. When the Abbé Conti, a friend of Newton and Princess Caroline, departed London in 1716, he carried with him a copy of this manuscript which he had prevailed upon Newton — through the intercession of the Princess — to provide him. In Paris, this copy was shown to such leading French historians as Etienne Souciet and Nicolas Fréret. The printer, Guillaume Cavelier, twice wrote to Newton for permission to publish it. Newton ignored the first letter but answered the second and unequivocally refused permission. The manuscript was published anyway in Paris in 1725 in a translation by Fréret, who also appended a devastating series of critical comments, entitled Abrégé de la chronologie de M. le chevalier Isaac Newton, fait par lui-même, et traduit sur le manuscrit Anglois. An English translation, entitled A Short Chronicle from the Memory of Things in Europe to the Conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great, was published in London in 1728. See Westfall, Never at Rest, pp. 805–15.
Newton’s essay on the length of the cubit was first published in Miscellaneous Works of John Greaves, ed. Thomas Birch (London, 1737), Vol. 2, pp. 405–33. Greaves (1602–52) was a mathematician and classicist. He is most remembered for his books on the measure of the Roman foot and on the length of the Egyptian cubit, which he attempted to derive from the dimensions of the Great Pyramid after a visit to Egypt in 1638. Newton owned copies of Greaves’ works on these subjects.
Newton first wrote to John Locke on 14 November 1690 on the subject of the “corruptions” which Newton believed he had detected in 1 John 5.7 and 1 Timothy 3.16. He wrote again shortly thereafter promising to go on and identify further textual corruptions most of which, he believed, originated at the time of the Arian controversy. Newton confidently asked Locke to have these two letters translated into French and published on the continent. Locke then sent the letters to his friend, the Remonstrant theologian Jean Le Clerc, in Amsterdam. Le Clerc set about translating them as Locke had requested. Newton had second thoughts and asked Locke to have all work on the translation project suspended, which Locke instructed Le Clerc to do. Le Clerc did as Locke instructed but he also placed the manuscripts of the letters in the Library of Amsterdam’s Remonstrant Seminary. These letters were eventually published in 1754 by an anonymous editor under the title Two Letters of Sir Isaac Newton to Mr Le Clerc. See Westfall, Never at Rest, pp. 489–91.
Samuel Horsley (1733–1806), Bishop, first, of St. David’s, then of Rochester, and, finally, of St. Asaph’s edited a set of five volumes of the works of Newton entitled Isaaci Newton opera quae existant omnia (London, 1779–85.) The last volume, which appeared in 1785, contained two versions of Newton’s Short Chronology, as well as The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, the Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and, and the Apocalypse of St. John, and another version of Newton’s letters to Locke on An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture based on “a MS in the possession of the Rev Dr Ekins, Dean of Carlisle.”
Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton, pp. 1–2.
See Richard H. Popkin, “Newton and the Origins of Fundamentalism,” in a forthcoming volume of The Israel Colloquium: Studies in the History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science.
It seems possible that Philip Henry Gosse, the distinguished naturalist and stern Fundamentalist, utilized Newton’s work on the interpretation of the Apocalypse in the education of his son. See Edmund Gosse, Father and Son. Biographical Recollections (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907), pp. 62–3. In this remarkable narrative record “of a struggle between two temperaments, two consciences and almost two epochs,” young Gosse tells of growing up in an atmosphere of evangelical fervor. During his mother’s fatal illness, Gosse records that as a seven-year old, he “breathed the atmosphere of pain, saw no other other sight, heard no other sounds, thought no other thoughts, than those which accompany physical suffering and weariness.” Gosse recollects in this memoir how he spent his time reading aloud: “I have now in my mind’s cabinet a picture of my chair turned towards the window, partly that I might see the book more distinctly, partly not to see quite so distinctly that dear patient figure rocking on her sofa…. I read the Bible every day, and at much length; also, — with I cannot but think some praiseworthy patience, — a book of incommunicable dreariness, called Newton’s “Thoughts on the Apocalypse.” It is possible that this is a reference to Newton’s Observations on the Prophecies, and the Apocalypse of St. John.
See Richard H. Popkin, “Newton’s Theological Physics and Physical Theology,” in Newton’s Scientific and Philosophical Legacy, ed. P. B. Scheurer and G. Debrock (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), pp. 81–97.
John Hutchison, Moses’s Principia. Of the Invisible Parts of Matter; of Motion; of Visible Forms; and of their Dissolution, and Reformation (London, 1724.)
On Hutchison, see David S. Katz, Sabbath and Sectarianism in Seventeenth-Century England (Leiden: Brill, 1988), chap. VI.
See James E. Force, William Whiston. Honest Newtonian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.)
See Richard H. Popkin, “Divine Causality: Newton, the Newtonians and Hume,” in Greene Centennial Studies: Essays Presented to Donald Greene in the Centennial Year of the University of Southern California, ed. Paul J. Korshin and Robert R. Allen (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1984), pp. 40–56.
David Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty and his Expectations (London, 1749.)
David Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty and his Expectations (London, 1749.)Ibid., Book II, chaps, ii-iv.
For the background of modern Millenarianism, see Katherine R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530–1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979);
Le Roy Froom, The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, 4 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Review & Herald Pub. Assn., 1950–54), vol. 2
Ernest Lee Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia. A Study in the Background of the Idea of Progress (Gloucester, Peter Smith, 1972)
and Richard H. Popkin, “The Third Force in Seventeenth-Century Thought” and Richard H. Popkin, editor, Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought 1650–1800, Clark Library Lectures 1981–1982 (Leiden: Brill, 1988.)
First published in 1632, it was translated into English at the beginning of the English Revolution.
On Mede’s career, see Katherine Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition, and Richard H. Popkin, “The Third Force,” pp. 23–4.
Cf. Popkin, “The Third Force” and Webster, The Great Instauration.
See Christopher Hill, “Till the Conversion of the Jews’,” in Millenarianism and Messianism, pp. 12–36, and a later version of this essay in The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill, 2 vols. (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1985–6), 2:269–300.
This was the expectation of such leading millenarians as John Dury and Peter Serrarius.
Newton, Observations, pp. 251–2.
Some of this material appears in the first book of the Observations. Much of it is in the still unpublished papers in the Yahuda collection in Jerusalem.
Hartley, Observations, Book II.
Thomas Newton, Dissertations on the Prophecies which have remarkably been fulfilled, and at this time are fulfilling in the World, 3rd ed. (London, 1766.) These lectures were originally given in 1754.
See Horsley’s note in the Opera Omnia. On Le Clerc’s role, see Westfall, Never at Rest, pp. 312–3.
Cf. Richard H. Popkin, “Newton and the Rise of Fundamentalism,” and Richard H. Popkin, “The Age of Reason versus The Age of Revelation. Two Critics of Tom Paine: David Levi and Elias Boudinot,” in Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment. Essays Honoring Alfred Owen Aldridge, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), pp. 158–70
and Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought 1756–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.)
Cf. Popkin, “Divine Causality: Newton and the Newtonians,” pp. 50–3.
Cf. Richard H. Popkin, “La Peyrère, the Abbé Gregoire, and the Jewish Question in the Eighteenth Century,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), Vol. 4, pp. 209–22, and Popkin, “Newton and the Rise of Fundamentalism.”
See Popkin, “La Peyrère, the Abbé Gregoire, and the Jewish Question.”
Froom, Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, 3:344. Sarah Kochav has found many examples of 19th-century Fundamentalists who accepted Newton’s apocalyptic interpretations.
Ibid., 2:661–2.
Ibid., 2:662.
See Popkin, “Newton and the Rise of Fundamentalism.” Since I wrote my original paper, Sarah Kochav of Tel Aviv University, in the course of preparing her doctoral dissertation on English conversionist groups in the nineteenth century, has garnered a great deal of additional material on the utilization of Newton by nineteenth century Millennialists.
Sarah Kochav has informed me that, in Joseph Wolff’s Missionary Journal (London, 1829), Vol. Ill, Wolff uses Newton as an example of a great philosopher who is also a prophet. Wolff had come to the United States in 1837 to tell the government that the Millennium would begin in 1846. Of this date, John Quincy Adams said, in his diary, “Tis rather too soon.” See Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising of Portions of his Diary from 1795 to 1848, 10 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1874–7), 9:7, the diary entry for June 3, 1838.
See Froom, Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, Vol. IV, Part III.
This appears in an article entitled “Sir Isaac Newton’s Alleged Insanity” in the Christian Observer (1844), p. 777.
Ibid., pp. 778–9.
Ibid., p. 785.
Ibid., pp. 785–6.
There are many attempts to calculate the time of the end in Newton’s unpublished papers.
Newton, Observations Upon the Prophecies, p. 251.
Ibid., pp. 251–2.
Ibid., pp. 252–3.
See “Preface de M. Michel Nostradamus a ses Prophéties,” in Nostradamus: Life and Literature. Including all the Prophecies in French and English with Complete Index and Notes (New York: Exposition Press, 1961), pp. 120–31. See also Popkin, “Predicting, Prophecying, Divining and Foretelling from Nostradamus to Hume,” History of European Ideas 5, No. 2 (1984), pp. 117–35.
Isaac T. Hinton, The Prophecies of Daniel and John (St. Louis, 1843), p. 231. Quoted in Froom, Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, 4:874.
Froom, Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, 4:875.
Ibid., 2:660.
Ibid. This manuscript is from the 1936 Sotheby auction sale. The Seventh Day Adventists told me that they have no record as to when they acquired it. It is listed in the National Union Catalog of Manuscripts as having been sold in 1942 by the Library of Congress for $200. The Library of Congress insisted that they do not sell manuscripts when I asked about it and so they could not understand this item.
Froom, Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, 2:665.
The Creed of the Niagara Conference is cited by Ernest R. Sandeen, The Origins of Fundamentalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 273.
See the vast fundamentalist literature on Zionism and Palestine written over the last ninety years.
William Whitla, Sir Isaac Newton’s Daniel and the Apocalypse with an Introductory Study of the Nature and the Cause of Unbelief, of Miracles and Prophecy (London: John Murray, 1922.)
William Whitla, Sir Isaac Newton’s Daniel and the Apocalypse with an Introductory Study of the Nature and the Cause of Unbelief, of Miracles and Prophecy (London: John Murray, 1922.) Ibid., p. v.
William Whitla, Sir Isaac Newton’s Daniel and the Apocalypse with an Introductory Study of the Nature and the Cause of Unbelief, of Miracles and Prophecy (London: John Murray, 1922.) Ibid., p. x.
William Whitla, Sir Isaac Newton’s Daniel and the Apocalypse with an Introductory Study of the Nature and the Cause of Unbelief, of Miracles and Prophecy (London: John Murray, 1922.) Ibid., p. xi.
William Whitla, Sir Isaac Newton’s Daniel and the Apocalypse with an Introductory Study of the Nature and the Cause of Unbelief, of Miracles and Prophecy (London: John Murray, 1922.) Ibid.
William Whitla, Sir Isaac Newton’s Daniel and the Apocalypse with an Introductory Study of the Nature and the Cause of Unbelief, of Miracles and Prophecy (London: John Murray, 1922.) Ibid., p. 45.
William Whitla, Sir Isaac Newton’s Daniel and the Apocalypse with an Introductory Study of the Nature and the Cause of Unbelief, of Miracles and Prophecy (London: John Murray, 1922.) Ibid., p. 49.
William Whitla, Sir Isaac Newton’s Daniel and the Apocalypse with an Introductory Study of the Nature and the Cause of Unbelief, of Miracles and Prophecy (London: John Murray, 1922.) Ibid., p. 47.
William Whitla, Sir Isaac Newton’s Daniel and the Apocalypse with an Introductory Study of the Nature and the Cause of Unbelief, of Miracles and Prophecy (London: John Murray, 1922.) Ibid., pp. 50–1.
William Whitla, Sir Isaac Newton’s Daniel and the Apocalypse with an Introductory Study of the Nature and the Cause of Unbelief, of Miracles and Prophecy (London: John Murray, 1922.) Ibid., p. 67.
William Whitla, Sir Isaac Newton’s Daniel and the Apocalypse with an Introductory Study of the Nature and the Cause of Unbelief, of Miracles and Prophecy (London: John Murray, 1922.) Ibid., p. 68.
William Whitla, Sir Isaac Newton’s Daniel and the Apocalypse with an Introductory Study of the Nature and the Cause of Unbelief, of Miracles and Prophecy (London: John Murray, 1922.) Ibid., p. 112.
William Whitla, Sir Isaac Newton’s Daniel and the Apocalypse with an Introductory Study of the Nature and the Cause of Unbelief, of Miracles and Prophecy (London: John Murray, 1922.) Ibid., p. 113.
William Whitla, Sir Isaac Newton’s Daniel and the Apocalypse with an Introductory Study of the Nature and the Cause of Unbelief, of Miracles and Prophecy (London: John Murray, 1922.) Ibid.
William Whitla, Sir Isaac Newton’s Daniel and the Apocalypse with an Introductory Study of the Nature and the Cause of Unbelief, of Miracles and Prophecy (London: John Murray, 1922.) Ibid., p. 121.
William Whitla, Sir Isaac Newton’s Daniel and the Apocalypse with an Introductory Study of the Nature and the Cause of Unbelief, of Miracles and Prophecy (London: John Murray, 1922.) Ibid., p. 122.
William Whitla, Sir Isaac Newton’s Daniel and the Apocalypse with an Introductory Study of the Nature and the Cause of Unbelief, of Miracles and Prophecy (London: John Murray, 1922.) Ibid.
William Whitla, Sir Isaac Newton’s Daniel and the Apocalypse with an Introductory Study of the Nature and the Cause of Unbelief, of Miracles and Prophecy (London: John Murray, 1922.) Ibid.
Abraham Shalom Yahuda published his theory in The Language of the Pentateuch in its Relation to Egyptian… with a Hieroglyphic Appendix (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933) and in The Accuracy of the Bible. The Stories of Joseph, the Exodus and Genesis confirmed and illustrated by Egyptian Monuments and Language (London: William Heinmann, 1934.) Yahuda’s theory was criticized by Wilhelm Spiegelberg, the Egyptologist.
Yahuda’s unfinished paper is in a box among the many other boxes of the Yahuda Collection in Jerusalem. His markings occur throughout Newton’s manuscripts.
See Popkin, “Newton as a Bible Scholar,” supra. One version of why Newton believes that the Book of Revelation must have been written by someone whose native language was Aramaic appears in his Observations Upon the Prophecies, p. 238.
Yahuda was not present at the 1936 auction. He bought his collection from book dealers who had acquired the auctioned documents. He went on acquiring manuscripts to the end of his life.
A friend of Yahuda’s, who took part in deathbed discussions, has told me this.
Castillejo’s typed catalog is with the collection in Jerusalem. I was told of his efforts by Dr. Mordekhai Nadav, the retired keeper of manuscripts at the National Library of Israel.
This work was published in Madrid by Ediciones de Arte y Bibliofilia in 1981.
Castillejo, The Expanding Force in Newton’s Cosmos, p. 52.
Ibid., p. 54.
Ibid., p. 55.
A fundamentalist writer in Jerusalem, who had read in an Israeli newspaper that I had said that Newton believed that the Jews would return to Palestine, recently telephoned me. He wanted to know where to find the text. For better or worse, I suggested that he read Castillejo’s book. We will see what happens next.
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Popkin, R.H. (1990). Newton and Fundamentalism, II. In: Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton’s Theology. Archives Internationales D’Histoire Des Idées/International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 129. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1944-0_9
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