Isaac Newton (1642–1727) is the textbook figure of the three laws of motion, the law of universal gravitation and the Principia Mathematica of 1687 – one of the founding fathers of modern natural science. In the historical original he is also something else: an alchemist for almost three decades, an anti-Trinitarian theologian in the Arian tradition, a student of the prophetic books of Daniel and Revelation, a reconstructor of the geometry of Solomon's Temple. This second half of his work – by present-day estimates more voluminous than his mathematical-physical output – was locked away by Cambridge and the Royal Society for more than two hundred years after his death. Only a Sotheby's auction in 1936 and a now-famous lecture by John Maynard Keynes in 1946 brought it back into the light.
Who was Newton?
Born on 25 December 1642 (Julian calendar) at Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire, three months after his father's death. From 1661 at Trinity College, Cambridge; MA 1668; in 1669, at only 26 years old, he became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics – succeeding Isaac Barrow. He held this chair until 1701, then became Master of the Royal Mint in London, served as President of the Royal Society from 1703 to 1727, was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705, and was buried with state honours in Westminster Abbey.
One biographical peculiarity becomes important later: Cambridge fellows were required after a certain period to take holy orders in the Anglican Church. In 1675 Newton requested a special exemption – and Charles II granted, by royal warrant, a permanent exemption for the Lucasian Professor from this duty. Newton never publicly justified this exemption. We know today why: had he been required to sign the Anglican confession of faith, he would have had to betray his anti-Trinitarianism – and his academic career would have ended.
The alchemical lifework (c. 1666–1696)
Newton began to engage with alchemy in the late 1660s. Within a few years his initial reading and excerpting became a private laboratory behind his rooms at Trinity College. His servant Humphrey Newton (no relation) later reported that the furnace fire was often kept burning for weeks at a time; that Newton experimented most intensively between February and May and again between September and March; and that he sometimes went to bed for only three or four hours a night.
Estimates of the extent of this work come from today's editorial projects. The alchemical manuscripts alone amount to around one million words in Newton's own hand – more than the Principia, the Opticks and his principal mathematical writings combined. Newton read and excerpted the entire Hermetic tradition: the Tabula Smaragdina of Hermes Trismegistus, the writings of Michael Maier, Eirenaeus Philalethes (George Starkey), Michał Sędziwój (Sendivogius), Jakob Boehme, the Atalanta fugiens, the Rosicrucian manifestos.
Newton was not after the gold of charlatans. He sought the lapis philosophorum as a key to a unified order of nature in which spirit and matter were not separate. In a famous manuscript fragment, the Index Chemicus, he catalogued and cross-referenced over 5,000 alchemical terms. He signed some of his alchemical writings with the pseudonym Jeova Sanctus Unus – an exact anagram of his Latinised name Isaacus Neuutonus (in 17th-century Latin I/J and U/V were interchangeable) and at the same time a theological statement: "Jehovah, the only holy one" – the one, undivided God.
The bridge to gravitation
The alchemical line had, beyond Newton's private life, a decisive effect in the history of science, on which Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs drew systematic attention in The Janus Faces of Genius. The Role of Alchemy in Newton's Thought (Cambridge 1991): contemporary Cartesian mechanics held an interaction across empty space – an action at a distance – to be physically inconceivable. Matter, on Descartes' view, could act on other matter only through direct impact, like billiard balls; anything else was unnatural, a regression to medieval scholasticism with its qualitates occultae, the "occult qualities" of substances.
It is precisely this Cartesian position that Newton had to refute publicly with the law of gravitation in the Principia Mathematica (1687): the Sun attracts the Earth across 150 million kilometres without a mediating mechanical medium; two masses act on each other through empty space by a mathematically precisely describable but physically invisible force. This conception was a scandal for Newton's Cartesian contemporaries; Leibniz accused him of a regression to hermetic superstition, in the famous Leibniz-Clarke correspondence 1715–1716 even with theological arguments.
In Newton's own self-understanding it was the opposite. Through three decades of alchemical reading and laboratory work he was familiar with the hermetic conception of invisible attractive and repulsive sympathies between substances. The qualitates occultae of the alchemical tradition – the non-mechanically transmitted attractions and repulsions that had been a working assumption in hermetic workshops for centuries – were the intellectual training ground on which Newton found the methodological assurance to assert the action-at-a-distance of gravity against the Cartesian mainstream. Without alchemy he would probably not have formulated the law of gravitation in this form. Dobbs' thesis is today consensus in serious Newton scholarship. It has not arrived in the textbook.
The theological heresy
Parallel to the alchemy – and on roughly the same scale or larger – ran Newton's private theological research. His key text, An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture, which he sent to John Locke around 1690, is a textual analysis of two New Testament passages (1 John 5:7 and 1 Timothy 3:16) that are central to the doctrine of the Trinity. Newton showed by philological means that these passages are absent from the oldest Greek manuscripts and were inserted into Latin texts only in the 4th and 5th centuries – as a later dogmatic adjustment to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed imposed by Constantine.
From this Newton concluded that the Trinity is a 4th-century forgery and that original Christianity was strictly monotheistic. This is the position of Arianism – in 17th-century England an offence that would have cost a Cambridge fellow his position and reputation. Newton never published these writings in his lifetime. His letter to Locke was first printed anonymously in 1754; the Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John appeared in 1733, six years after his death, in a very cautious family-approved form.
To these were added thousands of pages on biblical chronology, on the geometry of Solomon's Temple (Newton was convinced the Temple was built according to a sacred geometric proportion that encoded the measures of the earth and the universe), on the prophetic interpretation of Revelation and on the history of the Church. In total, editors today estimate the extent of Newton's theological manuscripts at well over three million words. Newton thus wrote more on theology than on physics and mathematics combined.
The suppression after 1727
When Newton died in 1727, his manuscripts – alchemical and theological alike – passed to his half-niece Catherine Conduitt, who lived with him in London, and through her and her husband John Conduitt to the Wallop family, Earls of Portsmouth. The official inheritance to the Royal Society was a different one: the Principia, the Opticks, the mathematical work. A commission under Thomas Pellet sorted through the estate papers and stamped most of the alchemical and theological writings as "not fit to be printed".
This classification remained de facto in force for more than 200 years. The Royal Society cultivated the public image of the rational, religiously moderate Anglican Newton who had disenchanted the world through modern science. A narrow selection of theological texts was printed in heavily curated form in 1733 and 1754; the alchemy remained for two centuries practically invisible to the history of science. Standard biographies – such as David Brewster's Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (1855) – did mention the alchemical manuscripts, but as a regrettable aberration that had touched the "genius" Newton in times of crisis.
The Sotheby's auction of 1936
In summer 1936 the 9th Earl of Portsmouth, Gerald Wallop, decided to send a large part of the Newton papers from the family holdings to auction. Sotheby's, London, offered the Newton Papers in 329 lots on 13–14 July 1936. The auction was one of the great sensations of 20th-century history of science – though scarcely noticed as such at the time. The total proceeds were just under £9,000, a laughably small sum for the importance of the material. No one fought over the writings of the "aberrant" Newton.
Two buyers ended up acquiring more than all others combined. John Maynard Keynes, the economist, painstakingly assembled in the following years roughly half of the alchemical lots – some directly at the auction, many later from other buyers. The orientalist scholar Abraham Yahuda bought the theological holdings. Today the Keynes papers are in King's College, Cambridge; the Yahuda holdings came by detours to the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, where they are now fully digitised.
Keynes 1946: "the last of the magicians"
With the first manuscripts he had acquired, Keynes already understood that the official Newton image of his time was historically false. Over several years he worked on a lecture that would correct the received picture. He died on 21 April 1946 before he could deliver it himself; his brother Geoffrey delivered it at the Royal Society's 300th-anniversary celebrations of Newton's birth in 1946 (postponed from 1942 because of the Second World War). The text was published in 1947 in Essays in Biography.
The central passage is one of the most quoted lines in 20th-century history of science:
"Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago."
— John Maynard Keynes, Newton, the Man (1946/1947)
Keynes made the point plainly: Newton did not understand himself as the first of a new Enlightenment, but as the last of an old tradition. His lifework was the recovery of an original, unified wisdom which – he believed – had been known to the patriarchs, to Pythagoras, to Moses and to Hermes Trismegistus, and which had been lost through history. Mathematics, alchemy and theology were for Newton three languages for the same thing: for the unified order God had inscribed into the world.
The Newton Project: today's edition
Only in the 1970s did historians of science begin to read the alchemical material systematically. Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs published The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy at Cambridge University Press in 1975 – the first serious monograph showing that Newton's alchemy was not a hobby but an integral part of his natural-philosophical programme. Her follow-up The Janus Faces of Genius (1991) tied the alchemy systematically to the Principia.
Since 1998 the Newton Project (originally at Imperial College, then Sussex, now Oxford under Rob Iliffe) has been preparing a scholarly online edition of the theological and other non-mathematical writings. In parallel, Bill Newman at Indiana University has been running since 2005 The Chymistry of Isaac Newton, a complete digital edition of the alchemical manuscripts including transcriptions, translations and even reproductions of the laboratory experiments. Newman has reproduced Newton's recipes in the laboratory and shown that many "puzzling" Newtonian instructions describe reproducible chemical procedures (for instance the preparation of the "net" substance, a copper-bearing bronze alloy with a peculiar surface).
The result: Newton is today more editorially accessible than ever. Anyone who wishes to know what Newton actually thought can read his manuscripts in the original – a comfort that Brewster in 1855 and the Royal Society between 1727 and 1936 did not allow.
What remains
- A different history of science. Newton did not stand at the beginning of an "age of reason" that had left the mystical tradition behind. He stood at the end of a Hermetic-Pythagorean lineage that he himself still experienced as unified and in which mathematics, alchemy and theology shared a common root. The separation "serious science here, esoterica there" is a later construction – not Newton's.
- Alchemy as a precondition of gravitation. The assumption of action at a distance across empty space – the centrepiece of the Principia – was for Newton's Cartesian contemporaries physically unacceptable and was castigated by Leibniz as a regression to hermetic superstition. Newton's three decades of alchemical work had prepared the intellectual ground on which he could assert the immaterial efficacy of gravity against the mechanistic mainstream. The law of gravitation did not arise despite alchemy but in a mind that had been opened by alchemy to invisible, mathematically describable actions at a distance (Dobbs 1991).
- Institutional history-tidying with archival evidence. That the Royal Society and the Cambridge tradition kept the alchemical and theological manuscripts as not fit to be printed for over 200 years is not a conspiracy but documented editorial policy. Only the auction of 1936 removed them from this institutional filter – a stroke of luck to which we owe today's Newton picture.
- The Kepler parallel. Exactly the same selective remembrance applies to Johannes Kepler: court astrologer, author of 800 horoscopes, theorist of a reformed astrology – in the schoolbook reduced to the three laws of planetary motion. Newton and Kepler are not exceptions, but the rule in the history of science before the modern divide.
- Theology as core work, not marginal note. Newton wrote more on theology than on physics. The claim that he was "essentially" a natural scientist who "only marginally" reflected on religion is quantitatively refuted. The order in his own self-understanding was a different one.
- Anti-Trinitarianism. Newton's philological arguments for the later insertion of the Trinitarian proof-texts (1 John 5:7; 1 Tim 3:16) are today text-critical standard – they appear in every serious apparatus to the Greek New Testament. Newton recognised this privately in the 17th century and did not dare to publish it. This is a scientific finding suppressed by an institutional threat – not by lack of argument.
Including Newton in this way does not mean diminishing the Principia. It remains one of the greatest intellectual achievements in history. It only means reading it in the context in which its author actually produced it: as one part of a much larger attempt to recover a lost unified worldview in which spirit and matter are not separate. Exactly this programme is again discussed today, in quantum-physical and consciousness-scientific terms, as a legitimate question – see our articles on Wolfgang Pauli, Eugene Wigner and Hans-Peter Dürr. And for the institutional line that has systematically displaced precisely this programme since the 19th century, see our article on Mediumship and Power.
Sources
- John Maynard Keynes: Newton, the Man. Lecture, delivered in 1946 by Geoffrey Keynes at the Royal Society's Newton Tercentenary Celebrations; printed in: Essays in Biography, Hart-Davis, London 1947.
- Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs: The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy. Or, "The Hunting of the Greene Lyon". Cambridge University Press, 1975.
- Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs: The Janus Faces of Genius. The Role of Alchemy in Newton's Thought. Cambridge University Press, 1991.
- Richard S. Westfall: Never at Rest. A Biography of Isaac Newton. Cambridge University Press, 1980 – the standard scholarly biography, with extensive chapters on alchemy and theology.
- Rob Iliffe & Scott Mandelbrote (eds.): The Oxford Handbook of Newton. Oxford University Press, 2016.
- Rob Iliffe: Priest of Nature. The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton. Oxford University Press, 2017.
- William R. Newman: Newton the Alchemist. Science, Enigma, and the Quest for Nature's "Secret Fire". Princeton University Press, 2019.
- The Newton Project – online edition of the theological and non-mathematical writings, Oxford.
- The Chymistry of Isaac Newton – digital edition of the alchemical manuscripts, Indiana University.
- Sotheby & Co., London: Catalogue of the Newton Papers Sold by Order of the Viscount Lymington. Auction of 13–14 July 1936.