John Milton and Isaac Newton as 'Charismatic' Prophets

Obvious to anyone who has ever read Paradise Lost is the fact that John Milton considered himself something of a 'prophet' -- or at least a divinely inspired writer -- although he doesn't look especially 'charismatic' in this well-known image:


Rather more wild and woolly looking is the following image of Isaac Newton by Godfrey Kneller, painted in 1689 when Newton was 46 -- some 15 years after Milton's death in 1674 at age 65:


I've not kept up with the scholarship on Newton since I moved away from the history of science, but a lot has apparently been done on his more 'occult' interests. I don't recall him being described as a 'prophet' when I was at Berkeley in the early 1980s, but in a lecture given in 2008 on "Physics and History: Fractured in Modernity," John Heilbron had an interesting response to a question posed at about 54 minutes and 30 seconds into the video by a scientist who found incomprehensible that Newton would pour so much credulous energy into religious studies and who asked why Newton had done this sort of unbelievable work, to which John replied:

Well, I think Newton thought himself a prophet, and he took all knowledge as his sphere and was trying to recover what the ancients knew, and he felt that certain ancient texts required his particular study, mainly -- or among others -- the prophecies of Daniel, and he spent a lot of time trying to identify events subsequent to the prophecy that did occur with their prophetic description. That was part of his self-image. And to employ an analogy, from science you have the quantum Newton. You cannot have Newton the world-system builder, the mathematician -- the towering mathematician -- without Newton the prophet because they come together. They are responding to the same set of problems of the time in which he lived. And so for me, it's a puzzle indeed to think that a man had the energy to devote himself with such ferocity to so wide a range of subjects, but I'm not surprised at all that a mind as capacious as his would have wished, at that time, to undertake such studies. I decline the terms of the question insofar as it implies that we could have had Newton of the Principia without Newton of the Prophecies of Daniel or the Ancient Kingdoms Amended.

I found intriguing John's response that Newton thought himself a prophet, and I wondered if anyone had compared him to Milton, so I inquired on the Milton List:

I was struck by . . . [John Heilbron's] remark in response to a question from a scientist about Newton's 'other' interests . . . . [Heilbron] stated that Newton considered himself a "prophet." What struck me was the fact that Milton thought the same of himself. I wonder if anyone has written a comparison of Milton and Newton, for the former not only seems to have considered himself a prophet but busied himself in all areas of knowledge. Something about the 17th century seems to have driven individuals -- or Milton and Newton, anyway -- to attempt a regrounding of all knowledge. I suppose that it's part of that great historical process set in motion by the collapse of the Medieval worldview.

Professor Todd Butler, of Washington State University, directed me to a recent conference -- Newton: Milton, Two Cultures? (July 22, 2009 – July 24, 2009) -- that included a paper by Professor Stephen M. Fallon on "Milton and Newton: Harmonies and Dissonances." According to the "Abstract":

Coming to Isaac Newton from the perspective of immersion in Milton studies is a heady experience. One learns quickly that Newton, like Milton, is vast and complex. This paper's modest goal is to open some fruitful areas for conversation between Newton scholars and Milton scholars. Both Milton and Newton, as has been pointed out for some time, are quasi-Arians. Both downplay the importance of the atonement in Christian theology. Both think of themselves, though in significantly different ways, as prophets. Both are interested in origins and both write histories, though their relations to fathers and to the political symbolism of fathers are sharply opposed. Perhaps most surprising and interesting to scholars of Milton and of Newton will be the resonances between the two figures' understanding of body and space. Newton's ambivalent relation to the mathematical abstraction of space and bodies, as expressed in his interest in alchemy, recalls in surprising ways Milton's idiosyncratic views on matter and spirit.

This sounds fascinating, as do several other papers at the conference. It also, by the way, hints at why we should reject the so-called Whig histories of scientific progress -- insofar as they force us to divide into rigid categories of "truths" and "errors" the ideas that we find in the past. As John pointed out, we cannot have "Newton of the Principia without Newton of the Prophecies of Daniel or the Ancient Kingdoms Amended." That's partly what makes history fascinating.

And since both Milton and Newton considered themselves 'prophets', I think that applying Max Weber's analysis of charisma to these two towering figures might lead to some interesting insights since both were responding to the collapse of the Medieval worldview and were attempting to reconstruct a system of knowledge grounded in truth and therefore needed something to guarantee that truth. For them, that something would be God.

"Deep verst in books and shallow in himself..."

Johann Georg Faust

... a Faustian bargainer?

(Image from Wikipedia)

Reflections toward the close of a final semester at Korea University turn me to Milton and Newton on the gathering of knowledge ... and the danger of Faustian pacts.

John Milton (1608-1674), in his late work Paradise Regained, has Christ reply to Satan's tempting, Faustian offer of the knowledge that books offer:

... However many books
Wise men have said are wearisom; who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior
(And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek) [ 325 ]
Uncertain and unsettl'd still remains,
Deep verst in books and shallow in himself,
Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys,
And trifles for choice matters, worth a spunge;
As Children gathering pibles on the shore. (PR 4.321-330)

Christ resists the proffered Faustian bargain, possibly because he had no need of what it offered, but the offer is a tempting one for us despite his reply.

Consider the singular case of Isaac Newton (1642-1727). As an old man, Newton was asked what he thought of his achievements, to which he replied:

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

We have this from Sir David Brewster (1781-1868), Memoirs of Newton (1855) Vol. 2, Chapter 27, which I don't have before me, but I assume that Brewster is citing a letter.

Newton had perhaps been reading Milton, but did he then place himself among those fallen prey to the temptation of knowledge?

Yet, a child is such a figure of innocence, hardly Faustian, and Newton -- not usually known as a humble man -- frames his words with humility in admitting ignorance of the great ocean of truth that stretched out unexplored before his childlike eyes.

All the while, however, he was secretly working on alchemical researches -- like Johann Georg Faust himself -- and calculating the end of the world based on his investigations of the biblical works of Daniel and the Apocalypse of John.

Perhaps he believed, but did not say, that had already launched himself onto that enormous ocean of Faustian knowledge...