‘A duty of the greatest moment’: Isaac Newton and the writing of biblical criticism

Abstract

Will Ladislaw's words, which so disillusion the young Dorothea, might also depress the modern interpreter of Newton's theology. Encountering the bulk of Newton's manuscript theology, it is tempting to sympathize with Dorothea's eventual response to The Key to all Mythologies, and to want nothing of it. The assessment of John Conduitt, Newton's son-in-law and executor, that his ‘relief and amusement was going to some other study, as history, chronology, divinity, and chemistry’ has in the past provided an ample excuse for those who have wished to take such a course, and to ignore Newton's biblical criticism. In the last three decades, however, Newton scholarship has come to terms with its hero's twilight activities, and reclassified them as being at least as important to him as the natural philosophy of the Principia, and intimately bound up with the thinking behind that philosophy. But although many modern scholars are now reluctant to see Newton as Stephen Hawking in breeches, historians of science have tended to concentrate on the implications for Newton's philosophy of his religious and alchemical writings, and in the process often have distorted their religious context. Historians of ideas have been beguiled by Newton's disciples, and by the esoteric texts from Newton's library, to ride hobbyhorses of their own which do not always illuminate Newton's reasons for writing theology. There is a danger of ‘knowing what is being done by the rest of the world’ before troubling with what Newton was up to when he worried about religion and theology, channelling his energies into treatise after treatise on the interpretation of prophecy. I want to suggest what some of Newton's concerns may have been, by looking at his ideas of religious duty and of the Church, and to liberate Newton from his disciples for long enough to consider some of his ideas about the relationships of prophetic and natural philosophical explorations of divinity.

The Body, the Temple and the Newtonian Man Conundrum

“…Notes 1. There has been some excellent research carried out on the theological implications of the role of the Temple of Solomon in Newton's work (see [Mandelbrote 1993[Mandelbrote & 2007Faur 2004;Goldish 1998]). However, none of these have examined Newton's knowledge of architectural and Vitruvian theory.…”

Did Newton use his calculus in the Principia?

“…As Dobbs and Figala have shown, in the mid 1670s he was led to look for a restoration of the ancient knowledge of alchemy (Dobbs 1975 andFigala 1977). Most notably, Newton began, exactly in these years, to conceive of himself as a man who belonged to a remnant of interpreters who could restore, through the deciphering of Biblical texts, the original religion of mankind, revealed by God to Noah (Mandelbrote 1993). He believed that this knowledge had passed, through Moses, from Noah and the sages of Israel to Egypt.…”

Isaac Newton, scholar: An exceptional example of normal erudition

“…Scott Mandelbrote () and Stephen Snobelen () have both explored how Newton's hermeneutics of accommodation—the interpretive principle that reads the biblical text as accommodated to the unphilosophical understanding of the original hearer—compared to the accommodationism of his contemporaries, such as Thomas Burnet. Mandelbrote () additionally demonstrates how Newton's intense scrutiny of patristic sources represents a specific strain of English Nonconformity, as Newton employed humanist scholarship to challenge Restoration Anglicanism and head off the resurgent Catholic threat at the hands of James II. Snobelen (), furthermore, situates the heterodox connotations of Newton's descriptions of God in the second edition of the Principia ()—as well as the blatant heterodoxy in his private writings—within the framework of Socinian and other anti‐Trinitarian textual criticism.…”