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Bodleian Library, MS Locke c. 27, f. 88r. Reproduced by permission of The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
This is not to deny that Lockean and Newtonian ideas are closely bound up with the thought of the Age of Reason. It is just that the relationships between these two thinkers and the Enlightenment \u2014 particularly the French, rationalistic variants \u2014 are complicated, multilayered, and all too often distorted in favor of secularizing readings that shun the profoundly religious and biblical impulses in their thought. If an apocalyptic chart strikes us as an unexpected artifact to emerge from the decade-and-a-half friendship between Locke and Newton, celebrated respectively as philosopher and physicist, it is probably because they have for too long been viewed through the lens of the Enlightenment from the eighteenth century to the present. Newton, especially, has for many years, and to a large extent even today, been seen as a paragon of modernity who represents humanity\u2019s supposed victory over the superstitions of antiquity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But several decades of scholarship, along with some propitious twists of fate, have undone the Enlightenment interpretation of Newton. Unquestionably, the single most important cause of its demise is the astonishing evidence provided in Newton\u2019s vast unpublished theological, alchemical, and personal papers. By the 1960s \u2014 an iconoclastic era in the academy as well as in society \u2014 many of these previously inaccessible manuscripts fortuitously became available and led to the first significant wave of revisionist publications based on them. Revolution was in the air, and the disciplines of history and philosophy of science were no exceptions. In 1962, Thomas Kuhn published his epochal book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions<\/i><\/a>, in which he argued that radical changes in our scientific understanding (his famous \u201cparadigm shifts\u201d) could happen on other than rational grounds. Scholars were becoming more receptive to the non-scientific contexts of science \u2014 be they political, social, cultural, or religious \u2014 that were thought to motivate and shape scientific inquiry. These were heady times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The changes in the 1960s were dramatic not only for the history and philosophy of science, but for science itself. At the time, James Lighthill held the same position that Newton once did as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. When some years later, in a 1986 paper<\/a>, Lighthill (by then Sir James) reflected on the shifting currents of the 1960s, he offered a formal apology on behalf of physicists for misleading the public about Newton\u2019s physics: \u201cWe collectively wish to apologize for having misled the general educated public by spreading ideas about the determinism of systems satisfying Newton\u2019s laws of motion that, after 1960, were to be proved incorrect.\u201d Lighthill was referring to the recent understanding of chaotic features of these systems, and explained that it was mainly the work of eighteenth-century mathematicians and physicists, such as Pierre-Simon Laplace, that projected onto Newton the belief in a strictly determined, mechanical cosmos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Among the first to attack this false view of Newton was a young historian of science named David Kubrin, who in 1967 published his revolutionary paper \u201cNewton and the Cyclical Cosmos<\/a>\u201d in the Journal of the History of Ideas<\/i>. Kubrin\u2019s paper did much to overturn the old and cherished image of Newton the rationalist architect of the clockwork universe. The radical nature of the paper consisted not in its argument that Newton believed in a cosmos over which God is sovereign, for by the 1960s this was known well enough to scholars. Instead, it consisted in the evidence Kubrin provided for Newton\u2019s conception of an explicitly dynamic<\/i> cosmos \u2014 one that worked quite unlike a perfect mechanism and was instead subject to dramatic change \u2014 and its association with, of all things, biblical prophecy. Partway into the paper, Kubrin revealed his purpose:<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is a commonplace that the Newtonian world-picture consisted of a cosmos which since its Creation ex nihilo<\/i>, had remained substantially the same through the course of time, changing, if at all, only insignificantly. It is, however, a commonplace well worth challenging.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n And challenge it he did, in good measure. Kubrin marshaled an impressive array of primary sources to show that \u201cNewton declared, in the 1706 Latin Opticks<\/i>, that <\/i>the world by itself tended to dissolution, and consequently needed periodic reformation by the Creator.\u201d Newton\u2019s statement was part of a new query he had added to the end of this book that had first been published in English in 1704. In the words of the 1718 English edition<\/a>, the world could not have originated \u201cout of a Chaos by the mere Laws of Nature,\u201d and although \u201cit may continue by those Laws for many Ages,\u201d over time \u201csome inconsiderable Irregularities … may have risen from the mutual Actions of Comets and Planets upon one another, and which will be apt to increase, till this System wants a Reformation.\u201d Kubrin went on to explain \u2014 confounding then-common conceptions both of Newton and of the Scientific Revolution \u2014 how Newton came to believe that the cosmos tended to decline over long periods of time and that God used the agency of comets to \u201crenew the amount of motion and the regularity of the motions of the heavenly bodies,\u201d as the cosmos experienced a \u201ccontinual cyclical recreation.\u201d Along the way, Kubrin also discussed Newton\u2019s interest in ethereal spirits and his engagement with prophetic and millenarian thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, almost a half-century since Kubrin\u2019s account, we can update it based on additional manuscript evidence not available in the 1960s, including one document that only resurfaced in 2004. These materials not only support Kubrin\u2019s finding that Newton believed in a dynamic (changing) rather than static (unchanging) cosmos, but also suggest that the points of contact between Newton\u2019s cosmological views and his understanding of biblical prophecy are even more numerous and more profound than previously thought. To be sure, there are other possible sources besides the Bible for Newton\u2019s ideas of cosmic dynamism and decline, such as the writings of the ancient Greek poet Hesiod and the Epicurean philosopher Lucretius (both of which we know Newton had read), or the alchemical tradition, with its own dynamic views of nature. But given Newton\u2019s decades-long engagement with biblical prophecy and his massive output of writings about it, not to mention biblical prophecy\u2019s concern with the future of the cosmos, I will argue that (beyond his physics) it is principally to the ancient Hebrews that he owes his views of cosmic change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I will also suggest that an arrow of time \u2014 pointing in one direction and toward a particular goal \u2014 is the dominant principle governing Newton\u2019s understanding of both prophecy and cosmic change (although I nevertheless affirm Kubrin\u2019s insight that there are cyclical elements in Newton\u2019s cosmos as well). This arrow of time is often degenerative, corruptive, and, if the reader will excuse a bald anachronism, entropic, even if it is ultimately progressive. In sum, Newton\u2019s universe winds down, but God also renews it and ensures that it is going somewhere. The analogy of the clockwork universe so often applied to Newton in popular science publications, some of them even written by scientists and scholars, turns out to be wholly unfitting for his biblically informed cosmology.<\/p>\n\n\n