SOURCE: "His Father in Heaven," in The Religion of Isaac Newton, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1974, pp. 1-24.

[In the following essay, Manuel examines the nature of Newton's religious beliefs, as exposed through both his published and unpublished writings. Manuel contends that throughout Newton's life, Newton believed in a "religion of obedience to commandments" in which God the Father, not "Christ the Redeemer," played the dominant role.]

That the task of searching into the religion of Isaac Newton should fall to a historian rather than a theologian may require an apology. Fortunately I discovered one among Newton's manuscripts. In a treatise on the language of Scripture he remarked on the similarity between the historian's method of periodization and the system of chapters in the books of prophecy. 'For if Historians', he wrote, 'divide their histories into Sections, Chapters, and Books at such periods of time where the less, greater, and greatest revolutions begin or end; and to do otherwise would be improper: much more ought we to suppose that the holy Ghost observes this rule accurately in his prophetick dictates since they are no other then histories of things to come." In an area where the Holy Ghost operates according to the prescribed historical canon, we historians are on familiar ground and need not fear to tread. Since it will be one of the contentions of these lectures that Newton's was a historical and a scriptural religion, that the metaphysical disputations in which he was sometimes enmeshed ranked quite low in his esteem, a historian might be as good an expositor as a philosopher or a theologian. Newton's scriptural religion was of course not a dry one; it was charged with emotion as intense as the effusions of mystics who seek direct communion with God through spiritual exercises and illumination—a path to religious knowledge that for Newton was far too facile and subjective to be true.

Newton's printed religious views have exerted no profound influence on mankind, and I doubt whether the witness of his manuscripts, upon which I hope to draw, will contribute anything to a religious revival. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Newton was occasionally cited by English apologists to illustrate the compatibility of science and faith. If the greatest of all scientists was a believer, ran the argument, how could any ordinary mortal have the impudence to doubt? German theologians of the Enlightenment leaned heavily upon Newton's confession of belief in a personal God in the General Scholium to the Principia, and Albrecht von Haller, the paragon of science in the Germanic world of his day, reverently quoted Newton as authority to support his own reconciliation of science and religion.² There are even a few recorded instances of conversion inspired by Newton's Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John. Johann Georg Hamann, the great Magus of the North, who chanced upon the book in London in the 1750s, testified to his sudden enlightenment upon reading it.³ More recently, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in spiritual combat with his government, resurrected Newton as an ally: one of the characters in the First Circle defends the sincerity of Newton's belief in God and refutes Marx's allegation that Newton was a covert materialist. But it must be admitted from the outset that an interest in Newton's religion can hardly be justified by its power as an instrument for the propagation of faith. His scientific discoveries and what Newtonians made of them, not his own religious utterances, helped to transform the religious outlook of the West—and in a way that would have mortified him. My dedication to the man himself and to his reputedly esoteric religious writings rests on the assumption that everything about him is worthy of study in its own right, for he remains one of those baffling prodigies of nature that arouse our curiosity and continue to intrigue us by virtue of their very existence.

Isaac the son of Isaac, a yeoman, was born prematurely on Christmas Day of 1642, and was baptized in the small ancient church of Colsterworth, Lincolnshire, on 1 January. Some eighty-five years later Sir Isaac Newton, Master of the Mint and President of the Royal Society, was borne to his grave in Westminster Abbey by great lords of the realm and eminent prelates who were his friends. The country boy's strict Church of England religion of 1661, when he first went up to Cambridge, as centred round the Bible as any Dissenter's, as repelled by Papists and enthusiasts as any young Englishman's of the Restoration, is still discernible in the latitudinarian religion of the aged autocrat of science who received French Catholic abbes, a notorious Socinian, High-Churchmen, and, thanks to his last illness, just missed a confrontation with Beelzebub himself in the person of an importunate visiting Frenchman named Voltaire. But between the womb and the tomb Newton underwent a great variety of religious experiences. As he strove mightily to acquire a knowledge of his God and to ward off evil, different kinds of religious concerns were successively in the forefront of his consciousness. Nor was he immune to shifting winds of theological doctrine. Over the decades the Church to which he belonged suffered many vicissitudes. In the course of a series of dynastic changes it was bereft of its head, restored, imperilled, established, and more firmly established; its prevailing temper (if not the articles of faith) was modified. In Augustan Anglicanism, undergoing a subtle movement towards a moralist and rationalistic religion, the sacrificial and redemptive quality of Christ was sometimes left by the wayside. Open theological controversies and reports of private conversations among clergymen of all ranks in the hierarchy of the Church of England convey the impression that by the early eighteenth century this Church was suffering what present day popularizers would call an identity crisis: the labels Arminian, Arian, Socinian, Unitarian were bandied about and all manner of secret heterodoxies were tolerated behind a stolid verbal facade, which often betokened indifference.

In examining the religion of the man Isaac Newton, one could investigate the measure of outward conformity of this member of the Anglican Church to those rituals minimally required by his communion. When and how often did he go to church and take the sacrament? Did he genuflect? Therecord holds no great surprises. He occasionally skipped chapel as an undergraduate in Cambridge; and during the height of his feverish creativity, his amanuensis Humphrey Newton (no relation) tells us that Newton was so absorbed with his 'indefatigable studies' that he 'scarcely knew the house of prayer'.⁴ There exists an attestation of his receiving the sacrament of the Last Supper before he went up to London to become Warden of the Mint in 1696.⁵ He paid for the distribution of Bibles among the poor,⁶ and sharply censured any expressions of levity in matters of religion voiced in his presence. Late in life he was a member of a commission to build fifty new churches in the London area. John Conduitt, who married Newton's niece, was somewhat dismayed that Newton on his death-bed had failed to ask for the final rites, but he consoled himself with the reflection that Newton's whole life had been a preparation for another state.⁷

In one critical incident relating to the fortunes of the Anglican Communion under the Restoration, Newton took an uncompromising—one might almost say defiant—public stand. In the Father Alban Francis case, he pushed his more reluctant Cambridge colleagues to ignore an order under James II's sign-manual instructing them to admit a Benedictine monk to the degree of Master of Arts without taking the oath of loyalty to the Established Church. Newton and other members of the University ended up before the Court of High Commission for Inspecting Ecclesiastical Affairs under the redoubtable George, Lord Jeffreys, who fired the Vice-Chancellor and intimidated the rest. of them with a menacing 'Go your way and sin no more lest a worse thing befall you'.⁸

To be sure, when Newton lived in London, many of his chosen disciples and most intimate friends were suspect in matters of religion. Edmond Halley and David Gregory were reputed to be unbelievers; John Locke's views on Christianity were severely censured by the orthodox; the beloved Nicolas Fatio de Duillier was condemned to stand in the pillory for acting as secretary to the Huguenot prophets from the Cevennes who were proclaiming the imminent destruction of London in a bloody holocaust; William Whiston, whom Newton had chosen as his successor to the Lucasian Chair, was ejected from Cambridge University for flagrant heresy and he continued to raise tumults in London churches; Hopton Haynes, Newton's close aid at the Mint for thirty years, was, his writings indicate, a theological humanitarian; Dr. Samuel Clarke, Newton's mouthpiece in the correspondence with Leibniz, was formally charged with spreading antitrinitarian doctrine by the lower house of the Anglican clergy, though the case was quashed by the bishops after a humiliating retraction on Clarke's part. Newton's latter-day irenics even extended far enough to embrace a wildly heterodox Balliol man: James Stirling, a Snell Exhibitioner, a brilliant mathematician and a Jacobite, who had got into trouble for refusing to take an oath to George I, was one of the last of his protegés.

Although the list of deviationists of every kind from the recognized Establishment who were Newton's sometime favourites is rather long, guilt by association was not invoked, and during Newton's lifetime nobody cast aspersions on his Anglican orthodoxy. Never did he join his friends in any public manifesto on matters of doctrine, and when Fatio became entangled in the thickets of activist millenarianism, Whiston of outright Arianism, he pushed them away. In the privacy of his chamber Newton seems to have thought that the Anglican clergymen among whom he dwelt and prospered were not a bad lot after all. While compiling notes on the gross immorality of churchmen in the age of Constantine, he digressed into a comparative study of the clergy in various ages: 'And whilst I compare these times with our own it makes me like our own the better and honour our Clergy the more, accounting them not only men of better morals but also far more judicious andknowing. Tis the nature of man to admire least what he is most acquainted with: and this makes us always think our own times the worst. Men are not sainted till their vices be forgotten.¹⁹

Overt actions and private testimonials of this kind will not preoccupy us overmuch. In public Newton was a reasonable conformist and, so far as I know, it did not occur to him to break with his communion. As for the motives and feelings that underlay his conduct—that, as David Hume would say, is 'exposed to some more difficulty'.

How can one recapture the religious experience of a man who died almost 250 years ago? What can I really know about my neighbour's God?

If for the moment we narrow the horizon and play the positivist, we have two kinds of evidence about Newton's inward religion: those sentiments that he actually published during his lifetime or voiced to reliable witnesses orally and in correspondence; and those manuscripts on religion—more than a million words—that were never printed, nor even intended for publication, but that allow a historian to make inferences about Newton's religious sensibility. Direct expressions of religious emotion are sparse—he was not effusive with intimate revelations. He wrote no autobiography, no Pensees; he left no map of Christian experience with technical terms and categories such as seventeenth-century English Puritans and Gernan Pietists drew. But there are occasional documents both public and private that record outbursts of religious passion whose authenticity is compelling. And he had a plan of salvation uniquely his own. Despite the refractory nature of the materials, with the aid of these papers one may be able to catch a reflection of his actual religious emotion.

Customarily, Newton's religion has been examined in rationalistic terms, framed propositions setting forth what he did and did not believe in matters of theological doctrine or what he thought about God's relation to the physical universe, about time and about space. In an atmosphere heavy with verbose disputation and pretensions to learning, self-aware men like Isaac Newton felt called upon to make explicit their religious position, if only for themselves, to differentiate their beliefs about Christ and the creed from those of other sects and persuasions in the Christian community of Western Europe and from dominant tendencies within their own Anglican Church. Such propositions are largely embedded in polemical writings that Newton directed against opinions he held to be dangerous to the true faith, and they serve as a form of self-definition by negation. But while these dogmatic assertions concern us, they hardly exhaust the content of his religion. And perhaps enough has already been said on the puerile question of whether or not Newton actually implied that space was the sensorium of God.

Finally, if Newton's faith be turned on every side, the relationship of his religion to his work as a scientist may be uncovered. What religious implications did he himself draw from his scientific discoveries? And then a question that is less frequently posed: What effect did his scientific method have on his mode of inquiry into matters of religion? While it is self-evident that Newton was born into a scientific world at a given stage of its development, it may sometimes be forgotten that he was also born into a European religious world which for more than half a century had been grappling with the problem of how to assimilate the growing body of scientific knowledge and that, in England at least, a fairly stable rhetoric governing the relationships between the new science and religion had been evolved. Newton could alter the rhetoric, amend it in fact while adhering to it in principle, buthe could never completely escape it.

Were we confined in our considerations of Newton's religion within the boundaries of the widely known printed documents that have been chewed and rechewed ad nauseam—queries 20 and 23 in the 1706 Latin edition of the Optics, the prefaces and scholia to the later editions of the Principia, and the Clarke-Leibniz correspondence—Newton's religion might appear rather stereotyped. In 1729, shortly after his death, the rejected disciple William Whiston assembled in a little pamphlet everything that Newton had in fact published on religion under his own name, and it ran to a paltry thirty-one small pages.'" Fortunately, there is that vast manuscript legacy that may now allow us to breathe new life into these bones.

Most of Newton's manuscripts on religion were long concealed from the world's notice. Of the major nonscientific works now in print, only one, the Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, was prepared for the press by Newton himself. The Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John was put together after Newton's death by his nephew Benjamin Smith, a cleric not renowned for his piety, a dilettante who had hobnobbed with artists in Paris and Rome and was not very sympathetic to this kind of literature, a man interested in making some money out of his late uncle's papers. In the plan worked out from a heap of manuscripts, the Reverend Mr. Smith favoured the blandest, most conventional, and most commonsensical materials, ignoring the more imaginative excursions. What he sent to the press in 1733 is only an insignificant selection from the vast archive at his disposal. And for two hundred years thereafter most of the manuscripts were suppressed, bowdlerized, neglected, or sequestered, lest what were believed to be shady lucubrations tarnish the image of the perfect scientific genius.

In the Sotheby sale of the Portsmouth Collection in 1936, Newton's non-scientific manuscripts were strewn about rather haphazardly. But since that date, the bulk of them have been reassembled and are now in safe keeping, thanks to the zeal of three ingenious collectors, a most improbable trio, a renowned British economist, an American stockmarket analyst, and an orientalist born in the Middle East who ended up at Yale: special collections in Cambridge, England, Wellesley, Massachusetts, and Jerusalem now bear the names of Keynes, Babson, and Yahuda respectively. Isolated papers still turn up occasionally in American universities and private collections, and there are documents from the Royal Mint (in the Public Record Office) in which accounts of the coinage are interspersed with reflections on the Gnostics and the Cabbala, but they do not materially alter conclusions based on the major repositories. For the first time since the great dispersion, virtually everything that Newton wrote on religion is freely available.

There are extant four separate commentaries on Daniel and the Apocalypse, a church history complete in multiple versions, rules for reading the language of the prophets, many drafts of an Irenicum, a treatise 'De Annis Praedictionis Christi', and extensive notes on Christian heresies through the ages—all this in addition to hundreds of pages of excerpts from contemporary works of scholarly divinity, from Latin translations of the Talmud, and from the writings of the Church Fathers, to say nothing of a commonplace book devoted mainly to theological subjects and papers in the Cambridge University Library that appear to be related to Samuel Clarke's replies to Leibniz. If Newton was Puritan in his devotion to the text of the Bible he was Anglican in his acceptance of the witness of those Fathers of the Church who were closest to the apostolic tradition, and he spentyears scrutinizing their testimony. Manuscripts that are now labelled 'chronology' and even some of those called 'philosophical alchemy' were detached from the theological manuscripts proper by nineteenth-century cataloguers. There were no such rubrics and compartmentalizations in Newton's mind, and wherever possible I shall try to reknit connections among them.

The Keynes collection in King's College includes seven autograph drafts of Newton's 'Irenicum, or Ecclesiastical Polyty tending to Peace', a draft of 'A Short Scheme of True Religion', a reasonably complete version of a commentary on the Apocalypse in nine chapters, and an attack on Athanasius entitled 'Paradoxical Questions Concerning the Morals and Actions of Athanasius and his Followers'—most of these published with varying degrees of accuracy by David Brewster in 1855 and by Herbert McLachlan in 1950." The Babson Institute Library in Wellesley, Massachusetts, has a text of a treatise on the Temple of Solomon complete with an architectural sketch, collections of stray notes, and sundry pieces on church history. By far the greatest part, however, of the historical-theological manuscripts, the church histories, the works on pagan religion, commentaries on prophecy, and long discussions of the nature of Christ, is in the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem. The manuscripts on chronology and different versions of the 'Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture' are largely divided between the New College manuscripts in the Bodleian Library and the Yahuda manuscripts in Jerusalem.

After Newton's death, his friend John Craig, prebendary of Salisbury, author of the indigestible Theologiae Christianae Principia Mathematica (1699), maintained in a letter to John Conduitt that Newton 'was much more sollicitous in his inquirys into Religion than into Natural Philosophy'. And in what appears to be the record of a confidence, Craig went on to give Newton's official explanation for not publishing these writings during his lifetime: 'They showed that his thoughts were some times different from those which are commonly received, which would ingage him in disputes, and this was a thing which he avoided as much as possible."² The historian cannot of course completely silence the protesting shades of Francis Hall, Hooke, Flamsteed, Leibniz, the Bernoullis, Freret, Conti, and other victims of Newton's thunderbolts. But Craig may have had a point. For Newton, religious controversy was a source of great anxiety, and remained in a separate category.

Whether or not to put any of his theological papers into print was a subject about which Newton vacillated throughout his life. In one famous instance in 1690, letters exposing as false the Trinitarian proof-texts in John and Timothy had been transmitted through Locke to Le Clerc for anonymous publication in Holland, but then had been withdrawn in panic. And yet, though Newton in his old age committed numerous documents to the flames, he spared these letters and scores of other theological manuscripts. Many are finished pieces that had been revised time and again; some had been recopied as if they were being readied for the press. Introductions addressed 'to the reader' in a manner that for Newton is extraordinarily ingratiating have been attached. At times these manuscripts are distinguished by a freshness and ease of expression that are rare in Newton's published works; he even lapses into colloquialisms. Many reflections scattered throughout these papers are transparently autobiographical and are among the most revealing sources for an understanding of his religion. In a history of the growth of the great apostasy within the Church, he derided the Eastern monks in terms that reveal his psychological acumen in analysing religious experience:

I find it was general complaint among them that upon their entring into the profession of a Monastick life they found themselves more tempted in the flesh then before and those who became strickter professors thereof and on that account went by degrees further into the wilderness then others did, complained most of all of temptations. The reason they gave of it was that the devil tempted them most who were most enemies and fought most against him: but the true reason was partly that the desire was inflamed by prohibition of lawful marriage, and partly that the profession of chastity and daily fasting on that account put them perpetually in mind of what they strove against, and their idle lives gave liberty to their thoughts to follow their inclinations. The way to chastity is not to struggle with incontinent thoughts but to avert the thoughts by some imployment, or by reading, or by meditating on other things, or by convers. By immoderate fasting the body is also put out of its due temper and for want of sleep the fansy is invigorated about what ever it sets it self upon and by degrees inclines towards a delirium in so much that those Monks who fasted most arrived to a state of seeing apparitions of women and other shapes and of hearing their voices in such a lively manner as made them often think the visions true apparitions of the Devil tempting them to lust. Thus while we pray that God would not lead us into temptation these men ran themselves headlong into it.¹³

In writing about the lives of the monks, Newton did not merely copy mechanically from ecclesiastical histories or from descriptions in the Church Fathers; he relived their experience, disclosing his own personal psychotherapeutic techniques for combating temptation.

The remedy he proposed for such onslaughts of the devil as they suffered was a potion he had often mixed for himself. It was the idle, self-indulgent, day-dreaming of the monks, their neglect of the study of God's actions in the world, that led them into vice and the fabrication of superstitions. This is not a Weberian exposition of the work ethic, nor a Voltairean attack on the emptiness of contemplation, but Newton freely confessing to his own regimen for keeping the demons of lust at bay. Fighting off the threat of evil thoughts with constant labour in search of the specific knowledge of God's word and God's works was the panacea.

Even a cursory study of Newton's manuscripts excludes any bifurcation of his life into a robust youth and manhood, when he performed experiments, adhered to rigorous scientific method, and wrote the Principia, and a dotage during which he wove mystical fantasies and occupied himself with the Book of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John—a legend first propagated by the French astronomer Jean-Baptiste Biot in the early nineteenth century. Some of the livelier versions of Newton's commentaries on prophecy should be dated to the 1670s and 1680s, when he was in his prime. His studies of world chronology and philosophical alchemy, both linked to his theology, began early in his Cambridge University years and continued until his death. A critical edition of the whole manuscript hoard that his executor Thomas Pellet dismissed as 'loose and foul papers' must await a future generation of scholars prepared to wrestle with ten or more variations of the same text and to establish their filiation with authoritative precision; but a rough and tentative chronological order is even now possible, and what I have to say is based on that sequence.

The first intimate religious text of Newton's that has survived, written in 1662 in Shelton shorthand when he was almost twenty and at the University, is perplexing in many respects. It is a confession of his sins, forty-nine before Whit Sunday and nine afterwards. To write out one's sins in private prior to partaking of the Eucharist was common enough. But if one categorizes the sins that Newtonlisted, most of them turn out to be trivial acts of Sabbath-breaking, or worldly thoughts, or minor disobedience to his mother and grand-mother, apparently insignificant aggressions against his schoolfellows and one against his sister, a few instances of lying and petty cheating. This profusion of peccadilloes can be likened to the snowing under of the priest in auricular confession with a barrage of venial sins in order to cover the really grievous one, or to the manner in which the associations of a psychoanalytic patient can become a veritable flood in which the most painful and crucial ones are drowned.

And there are in fact a few serious self-accusations in the mound of petty infractions that Newton assembled: a wish to bum his mother and stepfather and their house over them; a desire for self-slaughter; and unclean thoughts and dreams. But the anguish of the suicidal despair is masked by a laconic statement that takes up less room than a confession of bathing on the Sabbath or surreptitiously using his roommate's towel. As I read and re-read this document, I cannot sustain any presumption of a convulsive religious crisis at the age of twenty—nothing like Robert Boyle's vision in a Genevan thunderstorm. There are, however, a series of eight or nine sins describing Newton's fear of alienation from God in terse but moving phrases that define his religious state: 'Not turning nearer to Thee for my affections. Not living according to my belief Not loving Thee for Thy self. Not loving Thee for Thy goodness to us. Not desiring Thy ordinances. Not long[ing] for Thee … Not fearing Thee so as not to offend Thee. Fearing man above Thee."¹⁴

Newton's copy-books, which were not meant to serve as direct a religious purpose as the shorthand confession, are pervaded by a sense of guilt and by doubt and self-denigration. The scrupulosity, punitiveness, austerity, discipline, and industriousness of a morality that may be called puritanical for want of a better word were early stamped upon his character. He had a builtin censor and lived ever under the Taskmaster's eye. The Decalogue he had learned in childhood became an unrelenting conscience that made deadly sins of lying, coveting, Sabbath-breaking, egotistic ambition, and prohibited any expressions of hostility or any breach of control. Newton took the Biblical injunctions in deadly earnest. His God was a dominus deus, … Imperator universalis, a Master who had issued commandments, and it was his duty as a servant to obey them. From the beginning to the end of his life, Newton's was a religion of obedience to commandments, in which the mercies of Christ the Redeemer played a recessive role. By the turn of the century, the prevailing spirit in the Anglican Church was far less austere and demanding than Newton's personal religion. Sermons soothed self-satisfied parishioners with rationalist reassurances that their faith did not require too much of them, that its burdens were not oppressive. By contrast, the commandments that lie at the heart of the public confession of faith of the seventy-one-year-old Newton in the General Scholium to the Principia, composed more than half a century after his youthful confession of 1662, were exacting and had been borne with pain throughout his life. When Berkeley, Hartsoeker, and Leibniz were advertising the irreligious implications of Newton's system with an array of fancy metaphysical arguments, Newton proclaimed his belief in a personal God of commandments with plain words that harked back to the primitive source of Judaic and Christian religion. William Whiston's translation from the third edition of the Principia, incorporating phrases from the second edition, preserves the stark quality of the original far better than the more commonly quoted English versions:

This Being governs all Things, not as a Soul of the World, but as Lord of the Universe; and upon Account of his Dominion, he is stiled Lord God, supreme over all. For the Word God is arelative Term, and has Reference to Servants, and Deity is the Dominion of God not (such as a Soul has) over a Body of his own, which is the Notion of those, who make God the Soul of the World; but (such as a Governor has) over Servants. The supreme God is an eternal, infinite, absolutely perfect Being: But a Being, how perfect soever without Dominion is not Lord God. For we say, my God, your God, the God of Israel, the God of Gods, and Lord of Lords. But we do not say, my Eternal, your Eternal, the Eternal of Israel, the Eternal of the Gods: We do not say, my Infinite, (your Infinite, the Infinite of Israel:) We do not say, my Perfect, (your Perfect, the Perfect of Israel:) For these Terms have no Relation to Servants. The Term God very frequently signifies Lord; but every Lord is not God. The Dominion of a spiritual Being constitutes him God. True Dominion, true God: Supreme Dominion, supreme God: Imaginary Dominion, imaginary God. And from his having true Dominion it follows, that the true God is living, intelligenit, and powerful; from his other Perfections it follows that he is supreme or most perfect.¹⁵

This is the testament of a believer who feels deeply the power of a personal, not a metaphysical, god. A dominus has been bearing upon him.

In patriarchal religions like Judaism and Christianity, there is a ritual identification of God and Father. Newton was a posthumous child; when he was born his father had been two months dead. The fantasy world of the posthumous has been explored in twentieth-century literature and in clinical practice. While this proves nothing about Isaac Newton in particular, it does cast light on the imagination and emotional experience of some children born after a father's death and on their search for him throughout their lives. In the folklore of many peoples there is a belief that a posthumous is endowed with curative powers. A number of years ago the minister of the little church in Colsterworth where Newton was baptized told me that country folk in the area still clung to the notion that a posthumous was destined to outstanding good fortune. A similar prognostic attaches to those born on Christmas Day, and Newton's first biographer, Dr. William Stukeley, commented on this traditional omen of his hero's future greatness.

Though all children are curious about their origins, the emotions that surround their questioning have different degrees of intensity. Leafing through the New College manuscripts in the Bodleian that trace the genealogies of pagan gods euhemeristically interpreted and of royal dynasties through the ages, and the ancestries of heroes—all of which were duly integrated into Newton's historical and chronological studies—one is overwhelmed by his preoccupation with origins. It has been suggested in recent studies that a passionate quest for the historical genesis of families and kingdoms and civilizations may be related to an anguished desire to recover lost parents; but such analogies will not convince the mockers, and are not meant to.

When Newton was being knighted, he had to present a genealogy to the College of Heralds. The number of extant copies in his own hand—in Jerusalem, in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in Cambridge, in Austin, Texas, and who knows where else—testifies to the anxiety that accompanied the preparation of this document. In the Jerusalem genealogy, he fixed his parents' marriage in 1639, when it is a matter of record that it took place in 1642, seven months before he was born. Perhaps he worried about his legitimacy. He knew neither father nor father's father, except by report; they were dead before he entered the world. Like other abandoned children—and that is the proper definition of his psychic state—he concocted strange ancestors for himself, even a remote lordly one. The mystery of the father and his origins was not dispelled by the submission of an official document to the College of Heralds, and the search continued on different psychic levels throughout his life. Newton had an especially poignant feeling about the Father who was in heaven, a longing to know Him, to be looked upon with grace by Him, to obey and to serve Him. The sense of owing to progenitors is deep-rooted in mankind, and a child has various ways of attempting to requite the debt; but the demands of a father whose face has never been seen are indefinable, insatiable. Since Newton's father was unknown to him and the child Isaac had not received the slightest sign of his affection, he could never be certain that he had pleased or appeased the Almighty Lord with whom this father was assimilated.

For Isaac Newton, theological questions were invested with personal feelings that had their roots in the earliest experiences of childhood. There was a true father and a false father, as there were true and false gods. The Reverend Barnabas Smith, whom Newton was obliged to call father and who was not his real father but his stepfather, who had carried off his mother when he was about three to live with her in a nearby parish and to sire a half-brother and two half-sisters, was the prototype of the false father and of all religious deceivers and idolaters and metaphysical falsifiers, against whom Newton inveighed with great violence. Newton would show himself to be a master of the traditional tools of scriptural exegesis as developed by the rabbis of the Talmud, Church Fathers, medieval commentators, and Protestant divines—this is the learned side of his religious studies, and I hope that I shall neither neglect nor underestimate them; but he also left behind imprints of the search for the true father who had never set eyes upon him.

That Newton was conscious of his special bond to God and that he conceived of himself as the man destined to unveil the ultimate truth about God's creation does not appear in so many words in anything he wrote. But peculiar traces of this inner conviction crop up in unexpected ways. More than once Newton used Jeova sanctus utnus as an anagram for Isaacus Neuutonus.¹⁶ In a manuscript interleaf in Newton's own copy of the second edition of the Principia a parallel between himself and God is set forth in consecutive lines: 'One and the same am I throughout life in all the organs of the senses; one and the same is God always and everywhere."⁷ (In the third edition, the Ego gives place to an omnis homo.) The downgrading of Christ in Newton's theology, which I shall discuss in a later lecture, makes room for himself as a substitute. Another Isaac had once been saved by direct divine intervention, and in patristic literature Isaac was a prefiguration of Christ. Alexander Pope may not have been aware how pithily his fluent couplet expressed Newton's own sense of his intimate relationship to God. The revelation of 'nature and nature's laws' to mankind required Providence to perform a new act of creation: 'God said: let Newton be!' Since the fullness of knowledge had been revealed through him, his election by God had been empirically demonstrated. It is true that Newton left queries for a future scientist in the Optics, and in one manuscript he concedes that even his reading of prophecy is subject to some further perfection of detail.¹⁸ But essentially there was not much left to be disclosed after Newton, either in science or in the interpretation of Scripture or in the fixing of the definitive chronological pattern of world history or in prophecy.

Perhaps for sceptics Newton's passionate yearning to know God's actions is not better understood when we translate it into a longing to know the father whom he had never seen. But that he belongs to the tribe of God-seekers who, feeling they have been appointed through a divine act for a unique mission, live ever in the presence of an exigent God to whom they owe personal service in gratefulobedience is borne out not only by the public confession in the second edition of the Principia in 1713, but by numerous digressions in manuscripts dealing with church history and dogma, which anticipate almost verbatim this more famous epilogue, especially in their attack on excessive emphasis on the abstract attributes of God, in their rejection of metaphysics, and in their exaltation of God as Master.

In defending his system of the world against Leibniz and his followers, who charged him with belittling the omniscience and omnipotence of God, I doubt whether Newton simply scurried to his pile of theological manuscripts and lifted from them religious rhetoric appropriate for the occasion. While I do not wholly exclude this possibility, I am more inclined to believe that these were formulas he had repeated to himself over and not much over again as all great obsessives do, and that they came to mind spontaneously when he felt obliged to write a religious apologia. And it is precisely their reiteration in so many other contexts in the manuscripts that elevates the final affirmations of the General Scholium above the level of a piece de circonstance merely incident to his tragicomic battle with Leibniz. In a fragment entitled 'Of the faith which was once delivered to the Saints', Newton wrote:

If God be called óπα̂υτoκράτωρ the omnipotent, they take it in a metaphysical sense for Gods power of creating all things out of nothing whereas it is meant principally of his universal irresistible monarchical power to teach us obedience. For in the Creed after the words I believe in one God the father almighty are added the words creator of heaven and earth as not included in the former. If the father or son be called God, they take the name in a metaphysical sense as if it signified Gods metaphysical perfections of infinite eternal omniscient omnipotent whereas it relates only to Gods dominion to teach us obedience. The word God is relative and signifies the same thing with Lord and King, but in a higher degree. As we say my Lord, our Lord, your Lord, the King of Kings, and Lord of Lords, the supreme Lord, the Lord of the earth, the servants of the Lord, serve other Lords, so we say my God, our God, your God, the God of Gods, the supreme God, the God of the earth, the servants of God, serve other Gods: but we do not say my infinite, our infinite, your infinite, the infinite of infinites, the infinite of the earth, the servants of the infinite, serve other infinites. When the Apostle told the Gentiles that the Gods which they worshipped were not Gods, he did not meane that they were not infinites, (for the Gentiles did not take them to be such:) but he meant that they had no power and dominion over man. They were fals Gods; not fals infinites, but vanities falsly supposed to have power and dominion over man.¹⁹

A moving presentation of Newton's feeling for his God, in a totally different setting, a manuscript commentary on 2 Kings 17: 15, 16, might serve as a pendant to the emphasis in the General Scholium on God's dominion and will and on His actions, not His attributes or essence.

To celebrate God for his etemity, immensity, omnisciency, and omnipotence is indeed very pious and the duty of every creature to do it according to capacity, but yet this part of God's glory as it almost transcends the comprehension of man so it springs not from the freedom of God's will but the necessity of his nature … the wisest of beings required of us to be celebrated not so much for his essence as for his actions, the creating, preserving, and governing of all things according to his good will and pleasure. The wisdom, power, goodness, and justice which he always exerts in his actions are his glory which he stands so much upon, and is so jealous of … even to the least title.²⁰

In another passage of the manuscript church history he continued the attack on any metaphysical definitions of God:

For the word God relates not to the metaphysical nature of God but to his dominion. It is a relative word and has relation to us as the servants of God. It is a word of the same signification with Lord and King, but in a higher degree. For as we say my Lord, our Lord, your Lord, other Lords, the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, other Lords, the servants of the Lord, serve other Lords, so we say my God, our God, your God, other Gods, the God of Gods, the servants of God, serve other Gods.²¹

To be constantly engaged in studying and probing into God's actions was true worship and the fulfilment of the commandments of a Master. No mystical contemplation, no laying himself open to the assaults of devilish fantasies. The literature on the psychopathology of religious fanaticism was extensive in the seventeenth century and Newton accepted its basic tenets without knowing its name. Working in God's vineyard staved off evil, and work meant investigating real things in nature and in Scripture, not fabricating metaphysical systems and abstractions, not indulging in the 'vaine babblings and oppositions of science falsly so called'.²² If God is our Master He wants servants who work and obey.

Newton could not establish relations with his God through a feeling of His love, either directly or through an intermediary. Neither love, nor grace, nor mercy plays an important role in Newton's religious writings. Only two paths are open to him in his search for knowledge of the will of God as Master: the study of His actions in the physical world, His creations, and the study of the verbal record of His commandments in Scripture, both of which have an objective historical existence. We do not know the reason why God's will manifested itself in the physical world in one way rather than in another, why He issued one commandment rather than another; all we can know is the fact that He did, and we can marvel at the consequences and study them.

The more Newton's theological and alchemical, chronological and mythological work is examined as a whole corpus, set by the side of his science, the more apparent it becomes that in his moments of grandeur he saw himself as the last of the interpreters of God's will in actions, living on the eve of the fulfilment of the times. In his generation he was the vehicle of God's eternal truth, for by using new mathematical notations and an experimental method he combined the knowledge of the priest-scientists of the earliest nations, of Israel's prophets, of the Greek mathematicians, and of the medieval alchemists. From, him nothing had been withheld. Newton's frequent insistence that he was part of an ancient tradition, a rediscoverer rather than an innovator, is susceptible to a variety of interpretations.²³ In manuscript scholia to the Principia that date from the end of the seventeenth century he expounded his belief that a whole line of ancient philosophers had held to the atomic theory of matter, a conception of the void, the universality of gravitational force, and even the inverse square law. In part this was euhemeristic interpretation of myth—many of the Greek gods and demigods were really scientists; in historical terms, it was a survival of a major topos of the Renaissance tradition of knowledge and its veneration for the wisdom of antiquity. But the doctrine may also take us back to the aetiology of Newton's most profound religious emotions, with which we began. He was so terrified by the hubris of discovery of which he was possessed that, as if to placate God the Father, he assured his intimates and himself that he had broken no prohibitionsagainst revealing what was hidden in nature, that he had merely uttered in another language what the ancients had known before him.

To believe that one had penetrated the ultimate secrets of God's universe and to doubt it, to be the Messiah and to wonder about one's anointedness, is the fate of prophets. Newton's conviction that he was a chosen one of God, miraculously preserved, was accompanied by the terror that he would be found unworthy and would provoke the wrath of God his Father. This made one of the great geniuses of the world also one of its great sufferers.

Notes

¹ Jerusalem, Jewish National and University Library, Yahuda MS. 1.1, fol. 16^r. See Appendix A below, p. 122.

² Albrecht von Haller, Briefe uiber die wichtigsten Wahrheiten der Offenbarung (Bern, 1772), p. 6.

³ Johann Georg Hamann, 'Betrachtungen uiber Newtons Abhandlung von den Weissagungen', Sdmtliche Werke, ed. Josef Nadler, i (Vienna, 1949), 315-19, and 'Tagebuch eines Christen', op. cit. 9.

⁴ David Brewster, Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (Edinburgh, 1855), ii. 94.

⁵ Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, Eighth Report, Pt. 1 (London, 1881), 61, official certificate of the vicar and churchwarden of St. Botolph's Church, Cambridge, 18 Aug. 1695.

⁶ Oxford, Bodleian Library, New College MSS. 361, II, fol. 39^r.

⁷ Cambridge, King's College Library, Keynes MS. 130.

⁸ T. B. Howell, compiler, A Complete Collection of State Trials (London, 1816), xi. 1315-40.

⁹ Yahuda MS. 18. 1, fol. 3^r.

¹⁰ William Whiston, Sir Isaac Newton's Corollaries from his Philosophy and Chronology in his own Words (London, 1729).

¹¹ Herbert McLachlan, ed., Sir Isaac Newton: Theological Manuscripts (Liverpool, 1950). See also A. N. L. Munby, 'The Keynes Collection of the Works of Sir Isaac Newton in King's College, Cambridge', Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, x (1952), 40-50.

¹² Keynes MS. 132, letter of 7 April 1727; published in part in Sotheby and Co., Catalogue of the Newton Papers sold by order of the Viscount Lymington (London, 1936), pp. 56-7.

¹³ Yahuda MS. 18. 1, fol. 2^v.

¹⁴ Richard S. Westfall, 'Short-Writing and the State of Newton's Conscience, 662 (1)', Notes and Records Of the Royal Society of London, xviii (1963), 14.

¹⁵ Whiston, Newton's Corollaries, pp. 13-15.

¹⁶ See Keynes MS. 13; Sotheby Catalogue, p. 2, lot 2; H. R. Luard et al., A Catalogue of the Portsmouth Collection of Books and Papers by or belonging to Sir Isaac Newton (Cambridge, 1888), p. 17.

¹⁷ Newton, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, 3rd edn. in facsimile with variant readings, ed. A. Koyré and I. B. Cohen (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), ii. 762.

¹⁸ Yahuda MS. I. 1, fol. 15^r. See Appendix A below, p. 121.

¹⁹ Yahuda MS. 15. 5, fols. 96^v, 97^r, 98^r.

²⁰ Yahuda MS. 21, fol. I^r.

²¹ Yahuda MS. 15. 7, fol. 154^r.

²² Yahuda MS. 15. 5, fol. 79^r.

²³ See J. E. McGuire and P. M. Rattansi, 'Newton and the "Pipes of Pan"', Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, xxi (1966), 108-43.