Newton and the Origin of Civilization, Jed Z. Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold, Princeton U. Press, 2013. $49.50 (528 pp.). ISBN 978-0-691-15478-7
Isaac Newton is well known for his three laws of motion, his theory of universal gravitation, and his work with prisms to clarify the nature of light. But how many people know that Newton also participated in the 17th-century discussion of the number “666” as the sign of the Antichrist? Or that he published work in support of the infamous claim of Archbishop James Ussher that the universe was created in the late autumn of 4004 BC?
Newton’s deep immersion in the thoroughly un-modern world of 17th-century scientific learning is the focus of Jed Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold’s fascinating new book, Newton and the Origin of Civilization. However, their study is anything but an antiquarian pageant recounting only Newton’s exotic theological preoccupations. Their book is rather the first serious attempt to solve what might be called the “Newton three-body problem,” a conundrum at the very center of Newton scholarship today.
The Newton three-body problem arises whenever historians attempt to unify three distinct aspects of Newton’s historical legacy. Newton’s first body is the historical person who left behind gargantuan piles of paper documenting his many and varied pursuits from 1642 to 1725. The second body is a historical distillation of the first and is the Newton who is claimed as the singularly influential figure in the making of modern science. Of that body, Alexander Pope wrote in 1727, “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said, ‘Let Newton Be,’ and all was light.” A long and venerable tradition of Newtonian historiography has traced the life and the scientific legacy outlined by those verses.
Until the 1930s the “Newton, first modern scientist” tradition defined the scholarship; then a trove of little-known Newton manuscripts revealed his intense studies of alchemy and biblical scripture, especially prophecy. After perusing those papers, John Maynard Keynes, who purchased many of the manuscripts for the University of Cambridge archive, famously called Newton not the first modern scientist but “the last magus.” With the exposure of this third, seemingly unscientific Newtonian body, the unity of the existing scholarship was shattered.
What makes Newton and the Origin of Civilization so important is its effort to restore the unity of the Newton found in this diverse archival record. Two insightful early chapters, “Troubled Senses” and “Troubled Numbers,” illustrate the project at its best by showing how Newton’s innovative methods for ratifying empirical and experimental inferences were integral to both his work in the early modern scriptural science of chronology and his radically innovative argument for universal gravitation in the Principia mathematica. Throughout the book, Newton’s integrity as a coherent scientific thinker is sustained by showing the common intellectual practices found in both his theology and his work in mathematical physics, astronomy, and optics.
Less successful is the book’s effort to show how Newton’s unwavering Christian convictions, including his unquestioned belief in the literal truth of scriptural revelation, helped forge his unified scientific thought. Newton and the Origin of Civilization focuses primarily on his work in chronology, a discipline that was saturated with religious motivations and Christian theological agendas. Overall, Newton’s deeply held religious convictions and the chronological science they sustained are presented fairly, respectfully, and thoroughly. The authors also show the importance of those studies from early in Newton’s scientific work.
But by framing their study within a larger history of that dying un-modern science—Newton was one of its last serious practitioners—the narrative ultimately marginalizes Newton’s chronology from his other scientific work, despite its connection to his labors in the more youthful disciplines of mathematical and experimental physics. As a result, Newton’s theological and religious studies appear as though they were produced late in life, after his major scientific accomplishments were achieved, and were tangential to his more famous and modernizing scientific work.
Newton’s scientific cosmology and physics as articulated in his Principia were deeply connected to his work in theology, and it is precisely the influence of the second on the first that this book downplays. To give a brief example, the authors show that Newton was one of the rare chronologers who refused to use his science to predict the arrival of the Apocalypse. In his celestial mechanics as well, Newton did not want his theory of universal gravitation to be conceived as a deterministic system that could alone predict all future events.
To drive home the indeterminacy thesis, he included demonstrations in the Principia that purported to show the natural instability of the cosmos. In response, his enemy Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz quipped that Newton’s God was akin to a bad watchmaker who “had not sufficient insight” to make a well-ordered universe and who “must wind up his watch from time to time” and “clean it by an extraordinary concourse.” Newton’s reasons for sustaining this of all cosmological positions were deeply Christian, yet in this book, the Christian dimensions of his natural science are far less explored than the scientific character of his theology.
Despite its imbalance, there is no better starting point for thinking about the Christian theology entangled in Newton’s natural science than this book. To play with Newton’s own words from the “General Scholium” of the Principia, ’tis enough that Newton’s deep religiosity really exists and acts in his thought in all the ways that Buchwald and Feingold set forth in this book. All future work on the Newton three-body problem should begin with Newton and the Origin of Civilization, and future researchers will be grateful to work from such a thoughtful, erudite, and insightful study.
J. B. Shank is an associate professor of history and director of the Center for Early Modern History at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He is author of The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2008).
