Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton by Rob Iliffe
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Who Is God?

Isaac Newton took his religion as seriously as he took his science. His was a dangerous time in English history when bowing one’s head at the name of Jesus or using a bit of incense could have dire consequences for one’s prospects. It was just these sorts of liturgical trivialities that provoked the Puritan exodus to the New World and split the country between parliamentary and royalist factions in the seventeenth century.

But Newton wasn’t much bothered by liturgical ritual. As in his science, he penetrated to the core of his subject: Christian doctrine and traditions of belief. He found these grossly inadequate, deformed from their biblical purity by an institutional church which used them to further its own power. This sort of dissent would be more than career limiting if made public. It was heresy for which the established precedent provided death as a reward.

Newton’s primary target was in fact the central doctrine of Christianity, that of the Holy Trinity. This doctrine claims not only the divinity of Christ but also his equivalence to God the Father in terms of unlimited power, eternal existence, and universal presence in the world. Newton’s detailed biblical exegesis and historical research had convinced him that this central doctrine was a pernicious lie, the principle source of which was the fourth century church leaders who had led the charge against the man Arius, whom they proclaimed an arch-heretic.

As demonstrated in the doctrine of the Trinity, Christianity is anything but a ‘simple’ religion. The amount of ink spilt trying to formulate the separate but unified Divine Persons of the Christian God is incalculable. The fact that the church considers the Trinity a ‘mystery’ even to itself, hasn’t stopped its theologians from continually reinterpreting and reformulating the doctrine generation after generation with no improvement in its intelligibility.

It is this obscure nature of the doctrine that most upset Newton in Iliffe’s account. Obscurity meant uncertainty. Uncertainty meant lack of rigorous thought, which implied obfuscation with intent. In a sense the doctrine of the Trinity destroys the credibility of language, and not just ordinary language but also the language of mathematics which provides the best description we are able to construct about the world. The Trinity, in other words, is a trick played on the ignorant and an insult to the educated. If it cannot be expressed adequately in language, even if only approximately, then it cannot be.

If Newton’s trinitarian cat had been let out of the bag during his lifetime, some of his greatest works would likely never had been written, his grave would not be revered in Westminster Abbey, and his reputation as the greatest scientist of the seventeenth century would have been fatally compromised. Despite his rather fervent, if rationalistic, theism, he would have lost not just his position at Cambridge, but also his credibility within respectable scientific society. He would have become, in short, an outcaste.

So with such high stakes, the central historical question is why would Newton pursue such an apparently arcane and purely metaphysical investigation? Surprisingly, in the first instance, he had a distinct suspicion of human imagination. He distrusted flights of intellectual fancy which were not verifiable by observation. And that which formed the empirical foundation for religion was Scripture. If theological assertions could not be correlated with scriptural texts, they were likely, he believed, to be as reliable as the mountain of other scholastic imaginings about the nature of the world and its Creator. For Newton even metaphysics was an empirical discipline.

Second, he took the scriptural dictum of human beings created in the image of God quite seriously. This description worked two ways: people shared God-like powers; but God also had characteristics analogous to those of people. One of these characteristics is some sort of psychological identity which persists despite changing circumstances. This similarity between God and human beings was necessary, among other reasons, for divine communication, revelation, to take place at all - a rather prescient observation that would be the subject of great debate among theologians in the twentieth century. It is this anthropological analogy which seems to have led him to first question the validity of the Christian Trinity.

So Newton’s theology may be seen, although Iliffe doesn’t conclude this, as a statement of the rationality of the universe as a necessary condition for the impetus to investigation, and not merely for the production of reliable results from such investigation. My interpretation is that the issue of the Trinity is raised because it potentially inhibits on a metaphysical level precisely what Newton was devoting his life to - the uncovering of pre-existing, intelligible order in the universe. He believed this order was a result of a design by a Being that was comprehensible, even if not entirely understood, by the human mind. And whatever else the Trinity might be, it was not comprehensible; it was a surd, a block to the ultimate order of reality, and therefore not part of that reality.

This line of thinking, if I am correct, is both novel and powerful. What Newton has done is supply a very cogent explanation for what, at the time was called Socinianism, the anti-trinitarian heresy that arose during the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation. The implications of Socinian theology are profound, touching on almost every aspect of established Christian metaphysics from the nature of creation to the need for and means of its salvation. In a sense Newton anticipated what Immanuel Kant was to do a century later in his ‘transcendental deduction’. By inferring what must be true in metaphysics from what can be observed physically, specifically its intelligibility, Newton concludes the impossibility of the Trinitarian doctrine. The doctrine was, at best, the product of inflamed religious imagination, and at worst purposeful obfuscation perpetrated even by the Church of England. This was explosive thinking and it is little wonder that he kept his mouth shut about it.

Iliffe concedes that “Newton’s descent into heterodoxy is shrouded in an archival fog.” There simply is no documentation that proves when and why the man came to his rejection of this essential doctrine. But reject it he did as he made clear in subsequent notes and unpublished papers. The publicly visible face of this rejection was an increasingly vehement attack on the institution he credited with its imaginative invention, the Roman Church. Newton’s general philosophy, despite his impatience and acerbic character was one of tolerance, not just in science but in theological views. But when it came to Roman Catholicism, he drew the line. For whatever misguided reason, evil or not, this institution had created a doctrine which had the potential to destroy not only his life’s work but all of science as it was emerging from its scholastic lethargy. Iliffe’s title therefore is inspired: indeed he was a priest of nature.

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