In 1973 John Pocock observed that ‘‘scholarship has suffered until recently from a fixed unwillingness to give the Hebrew and eschato-logical elements in seventeenth-century thought the enormous signifi-cance which they possessed for contemporaries.’’1 Since that time there has been an impressive start in uncovering this defining dimen-sion within early modern culture, and perhaps never more so than in the history of science. But it remains surprising how reluctant scholars have been to consider the apocalypse as having a history integrated into broader cultural patterns. We have already encountered an indi-cation of the Judaic and apocalyptic dimensions to the rise of science with our examination of Francis Bacon in chapter 4. Their role in shaping scientific practice and outlook persisted throughout the cen-tury and figured prominently in the work of a great many individuals, including such familiar figures as Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and Thomas Burnet. These three, like so many of their lesser-known col-leagues and competitors, were born in the years running up to the British revolutions, but their work spoke to the intense political and cultural conservatism that followed the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Modern science acquired many of its central attitudes not only contemplating the physical world but also the implications of that world for the fraught environment of the great reaction.
THE GREAT REACTION: JOHN DRYDEN
Within two years of Oliver Cromwell’s death in 1658, the British republic disintegrated. Its downfall was far from inevitable, as recent studies have made increasingly clear, and resulted from conflicting visions of the republic and the meaning of its revolution. The result was political implosion which in turn precipitated an economic implo-sion, a response to the burden of world-power status. By 1662 the Brit-ish Isles had become a much more authoritarian place. Hierarchy and clientage had become the norm, passive obedience its watchword. The social attitudes of the Great Chain of Being were now constantly pro-claimed and made frantically reflexive. Institutionalized mechanisms of repression were securely in place within two years of the proclama-tion of the restored monarchy. The English church, now restored along with the monarchy, permanently lost its Calvinist moorings; the conservatism that found its faintest origins no earlier than the 1590s would hereafter define the official Protestant future. Still further but-tressing authority was the new cult of Charles I, the ‘‘martyr king,’’
envisioned in the ‘‘figure’’ of Christ. Anti-revolutionary and anti-Calvinist iconography, literature, festivals suffused society in all parts of Britain. From public burnings of ‘‘Jack Presbyter’’ and a reconfigured calendar to the creation of high art, the message was one of authority and counter-revolution—while radicalism and dissent most often man-ifested themselves through rhetorics of disguise.
Events in Britain formed part of a general European reaction. In 1660 Louis XIV assumed the reins of government and initiated a revived program for the Last World Empire. The destruction of surviv-ing French Protestantism became a mandate, not simply a goal. Protes-tant ‘‘heresy’’ throughout Europe could expect the same fate. Dutch republicanism did not long survive, and, it briefly seemed, neither would the United Provinces themselves. Where the Hapsburgs had failed, the Bourbons came very close to succeeding. The British king-doms became, albeit covertly, a French satrap. More generally, Haps-burg-Bourbon culture, Catholic and absolutist, became universally defining norms, even if universal monarchy did not.
In England, however, unlike the continent, reaction meant not only the elimination of religious dissent, but also the destruction of civic values and public life, which both underwrote the revolution and lay
at its heart. It meant an all-out attack on the ‘‘patriot.’’ For John Dry-den (1631–1700)—the leading poet of the reaction and the counter-point to Marvell—the term was the ‘‘All-attoning Name.’’ It served simply to disguise self-serving private interests, greed, and usurpation.
So easie still it proves in Factious Times, With publick Zeal to cancel private Crimes:
How safe is Treason, and how sacred ill, When none can sin against the peoples Will:
Gull’d with a Patriots name, whose Modern sense Is one that would by Law supplant his Prince:
The Peoples Brave, the Politicians Tool;
Never was Patriot yet, but was a fool.2
The point was to marginalize the political and the civic as being almost always bogus, and to supplant them with the familial and the paternal.
Cold impersonal equality would be replaced with the warmth of personal dependence, patriotic posture by heartfelt gratitude, public values by family values, the fraudulent by the authentic. Against the revolution-aries’ ungrateful, unnatural, indeed satanic rejection of authority, a David-like Charles II might need to turn from mercy to judgment and show the other side of his divine paternity. ‘‘Why am I forc’d, like Heaven, against my mind, / To make examples of another kind? / Must I at length the Sword of Justice draw? / Oh curst Effects of necessary Law!’’3Authority was both double-edged and unassailable. Can one elect one’s father? Is God a political choice?
The new authoritarian regime sought to terminate what had for-merly been the daily life of civic society. Petitioning had formed the most immediate and commonplace form of political expression during the revolutionary period, and with the Restoration petitioning became proscribed. Dryden was firm on the matter. He has the king link peti-tions to treason and irreligious behavior.
From plots and treasons Heaven preserve my years, But save me most from my Petitioners.
Unsatiate as the barren Womb or Grave;
God cannot Grant so much as they can Crave.4
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Petitions framed the issues and constructed political debate. They had been probably the preeminent Leveller activity. Direct action, going to the seat of government, public responsibility, the fundamentals of citi-zenship, were precisely what the new order sought to foreclose. The American Bill of Rights, if not the Constitution itself, can be read as a resolutely anti-Stuart document.
In a profound way the revolution could not be completely undone, for the Restoration simply could not abolish civic society by fiat. Ironi-cally, then, Dryden and people like him had no choice but to enter the public realm in order to discredit it, or at least to counteract it. Doing so could only enjoin a public vocabulary. Although the ‘‘patriot’’ was associated with republicanism and radical religion, the term could never be completely suppressed and abandoned. Efforts were made, especially in times of political crisis, to co-opt it and give it a royalist reading.
Even Charles himself had used the term in the first, fragile moments of the Restoration. Despite these efforts, the world of the patriot could not sit comfortably with the reaction. When Dryden began speaking posi-tively of patriots after the 1689–1691 revolution had swept away his patrons (along with his title as poet laureate), he gave the term an anti-political twist: ‘‘There are Times and Seasons when the best Patriots are willing to withdraw their Hands from the Commonwealth.’’5 Dryden’s statement is, of course, an oxymoron. It anticipated a conservative strat-egy that marked much of the eighteenth century, that period’s ultimate oxymoron being, ‘‘the patriot king.’’
The efforts to attack and deflect the ‘‘patriot’’ inevitably extended to the apocalyptic thought with which the civic had become inti-mately associated. But political eschatology had reached so deeply into English and British self-consciousness that it needed to be redir-ected and reconfigured rather than rejredir-ected. Only the truly prophetic could identify false prophecy and expose its dangers. Only the apoc-alypse itself could upend the apocapoc-alypse. Again, Dryden took up the challenge. Right from the beginning in 1660 Dryden portrayed the restoration of Charles II as the return of King David: divine in his authority from both the commonplace scriptural ‘‘type’’ and the pat-tern of nature. But, like David, he was more: a prophetic and escha-tological figure, the true leader of latter-day Israel and the legitimate king of the redeemer nation. False prophets and notorious rebels, analogues to Korah, Balaam, Shimei, and Zimri, had led the English
Israelites to perverted faith, the most monstrous abominations (the regicide), and the Egyptian bondage that was the republic. ‘‘Priest-craft’’ came after the days of the monarchy’s true Davidic piety and had led to the radicals’ ‘‘old belov’d Theocracy’’—a total inversion of Overton, Harrington, and the Revolution, yet a canard so power-ful that modern scholars still somehow accept it.6 English Israel, still the elect nation, required the restored prophetic order; and ‘‘Th’ Al-mighty, nodding, gave Consent; / And Peals of Thunder shook the Firmament. / Henceforth a Series of new time began, / The Might Years in long Procession ran.’’7 David-Charles will lead England into a new era, a new order of the ages. Dryden has embraced the apoca-lypse in order to neutralize it and subvert its alarming implications.
Calvin may have become eclipsed, but eschatology had not. Modern people will likely prefer Marvell’s moral edge to Dryden’s ironic cleverness. But both poets shared a common denominator that had suffused their age.
Empirical falsification has rarely, if ever, buried the apocalypse.
Instead, the apocalypse (in this respect like witch belief) had become supplanted through alternate ways of thinking, rather than being marginalized or rejected through refutation. Restoration royalism in itself did not provide such an alternative—even if King Charles rather than King Jesus had in fact returned.
ISAAC NEWTON AND THE POLITICS OF GRAVITY
The British Revolution had proven drastically disturbing politically, religiously, and, integral to this upheaval, even in the understanding of nature. So too had the ferocious reaction, and the patently fractured society that had resulted from it. Few reflected on these matters more tellingly than did a group of moderate Anglicans—known then and since as Latitudinarians—among whom Isaac Newton (1642–1727) emerged by far as the most prominent.
On the one hand, the Revolution had led to a radical spiritualism that achieved one of its fuller expressions with Gerrard Winstanley.
Religiously, Winstanley’s Creator seemed to disappear into his creation and become irrelevant. Politically, this line of thought pointed to de-mocracy and to the subversion of organized religion. On the other, a no less threatening materialism had appeared with the thought of Thomas
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Hobbes. There the deity seemed to disappear altogether. Furthermore, the sovereign state might provide security, but it did so in a way that utterly threatened the churches. Beyond both of these lay the grow-ing Counter-Reformation, the Great Chain of Begrow-ing, and neo-scholasticism, which received highly skilled and hugely effective poetic promotion to English Protestants from John Dryden.
It would be signally Newton’s mission to foreclose the world of radi-cal spirit: ‘‘This Being [God] governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all.’’ He did not rule over ‘‘his own body . . . but over servants.’’8 At the same time, Newton was no less concerned to reject a purely mechanical world of matter and motion which, he believed, could only lead to infidelity and atheism. A universe imag-ined as a great machine, held together through physical causes and totally separated from spirit—as Rene Descartes had proposed (and Hobbes had pushed to its logical conclusions)—made the deity a
‘‘dwarf God.’’9 Newton’s God was a powerful and providential figure, not a being abstracted away into some parallel universe. This ‘‘Lord God of Dominion,’’ as Newton called him, governed and sustained the universe. He was very much the God of Israel, possessing an emphati-cally Jewish and, we might add, neo-Calvinist character. He was a God of history and prophecy, manifested through his will, not through Greek logic and human contrivance.
Newtonian mechanics assumed the task of redeeming just this God.
To be sure, Newton did not invent gravity simply to justify his notion of the deity. His concept of nature and his religious (and political) commitments are enmeshed within a single intellectual complex. But God and gravity went together. Newton’s science synthesized Win-stanley and Hobbes, while avoiding the terrible dangers inherent in each. Put another way, Newton had a foot in both the magical and mechanical traditions, and from them succeeded in creating something altogether new.
Newton’s connections with British radicalism have only recently received serious examination. His notion of hidden active spirits, liter-ally the occult, has sat poorly with post-Enlightenment science, and rightly so. Consequently, his voluminous alchemical writings after hav-ing long met with neglect, if not embarrassment, have become the sub-ject of significant study within the past fifteen to twenty years.
Moreover, Newton’s all-consuming Lord God of Dominion precluded
the notion of the trinity: Jesus might be God’s prophesied agent, but to make him divine compromised God’s sovereignty and comprised the grossest idolatry. It was in fact anti-Christian. Accordingly, the Athana-sian creed marks the rise of Antichrist—making the Church of England (in which Newton remained a life-long member) a false church. From this belief, the difference between Judaism and Christianity became sur-prisingly marginal. Jesus emerges a Moses redivivus, a unique prophet and lawgiver but disconnected from the godhead. Again like the revolu-tionaries, Newton is philo-Semitic in that his thinking draws heavily and self-consciously on Judaism. Newton’s intellectual radicalism mani-fested itself in still other ways: mortalism. Soul-slumber at death made salvation occur only at the resurrection and the completion of history.
One modern scholar has suggested that Newton’s source for this doc-trine may actually be the Leveller Richard Overton.
Whatever his spiritualist heresies, Newton was nevertheless em-phatic about the autonomy and uniformity of matter, as well as the crucial role of mathematics in describing nature. Gravity held the uni-verse together, Newton insisted, by operating through a vacuum with-out any evident physical connection. Universal attraction was a hidden force; one domino did not strike another domino, in turn strik-ing yet another, and so on to cause motion. Rather, motion comprised an effect that resulted from some unknown agency. Such attraction might be a universal property of matter, but that property, that behav-ior, could not be deduced from matter itself. We could describe gravity quite well through a series of highly effective formulae: most notably, the inverse square law, which held that attraction between two bodies was directly proportionate to their mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centers (f ¼ Sm1 m2 / r2).
But these formulae offered no explanation whatsoever why matter needed to behave that way. Nothing within the structure of matter required this relationship. Not a thing within Newton’s mechanics assured us that the sun would in fact rise tomorrow. What was gravity?
What caused gravity? Newton famously failed to answer: ‘‘hypotheses non fingo’’ (I don’t fashion [¼ invent, fabricate] hypotheses). The structure of the universe was thus completely arbitrary, an act of will.
And there was little doubt as to whose will that might be. The uni-verse was therefore at once utterly certain (we could predict its behav-ior confidently) and utterly contingent (there existed no reason for
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any of this). Newton had created a world of effects without cause—
beyond of course the all-powerful, unknowable Jewish God.
God and gravity therefore came as a package. More formally, empiricism and theism became not only allies, but inextricably entangled. Precisely for this reason, John Locke (1632–1704) has been associated then and now with Newtonian science. Locke did not share Newton’s religious convictions at all. But he did argue at considerable length that our knowledge came entirely though our senses. We could only work with what we encountered, for effectively there was nothing else, and that fit very well with a world, like Newton’s, offering no final answers, no ultimate truths, no complete coherence. In the next century the debate about human reason and its ambivalent connection to nature, about empirical science as against rational science, would generate a number of the assumptions underlying modernity and secu-lar culture. People such as Gottfried Leibniz objected strenuously to Newtonianism because it seemed to validate the occult and, still more, because it appeared to make the universe ‘‘a perpetual miracle.’’
Others such as Jonathan Edwards found Newton attractive precisely for that reason, the utter contingency that made us all ‘‘sinners in the hands of an angry God.’’
Newton’s God, however, maintained the creation in still other ways. Even if nature’s laws sustained the universe, brute matter still had a way of running down, and at moments that required restorative intervention from the divine which, Newton theorized, manifested itself in the form of comets. But the laws of physics themselves, being arbitrary, were contingent and could be changed. That could and indeed would happen, resulting in a new heaven, a new earth.
Newton insisted that the Bible was to be taken literally and could not be allegorized away, except where allegory was obviously and man-ifestly intended. The events described in it about the end of days could only be literal. They therefore had to be anchored in nature and in a restructuring of the physical order. That restructuring would result from the effects comets once again had on all the heavenly bodies, fully realizing the ancient prophecies. In this epoch, the risen Christ would literally rule from Jerusalem for a thousand years over a believ-ing world, and, in addition, over what Newton significantly called
‘‘the mortal Jews.’’ The millennial era, he believed, comprised the ful-fillment of God’s covenant with Abraham.
Christ would not rule alone. Interspersed among ‘‘the mortal Jews,’’
would appear ‘‘the children of the Resurrection’’: the saints, martyrs, and heroes of the faith would awaken from their slumbers and assume a physical form. That form, like Christ’s, would be both material and spir-itual: as Christ immediately after his crucifixion had hovered for a time invisibly about the earth assuming physical shape at will, so too would Christ and his saints during the millennial age. Not only would Christ and his saints have this dual nature, but the latter would travel with Christ about the heavens—‘‘that no region in the Univers may want its inhabitants.’’10 At the end of the thousand years there would occur a revolt of the nations, now deceived by the unleashed ‘‘dragon’’; ‘‘the beloved city’’ would find itself surrounded by these forces, but ultimately overthrow them (of course). Thereafter the general resurrection would take place, along with the final transformation of the earth.
Newton’s contingent universe mandated the Lord God of Dominion while at the same time it opened the prospect of alternative universes governed by alternate physics. Prophecy became plausible by being
Newton’s contingent universe mandated the Lord God of Dominion while at the same time it opened the prospect of alternative universes governed by alternate physics. Prophecy became plausible by being