The Reenchantment of the World (18 page)

 

 

 

 

The schizophrenic, wrote the anthropologist Géza Róheim, is the magician
who has failed.6 Despite his eventual nervous breakdown, Newton was
no psychotic; but that he bordered on a type of madness, and allayed it
with a totally death-oriented view of nature, is beyond doubt. What is
significant, however, is not his view of nature itself, but the broad
agreement that it found, the excitement that it generated. Newton was
the magician who succeeded. Instead of remaining some sort of isolated
crank, he was able to get all of Europe "to join in the grand obsessive
design," becoming president of the Royal Sodely and being buried, in
1727, amidst pomp and glory in Westminster Abbey in what was literally
an international event. With the acceptance of the Newtonian world view,
it might be argued, Europe went collectively out of its mind.

 

 

Where does Newton's Hermeticism fit into all of this? We have already
seen that he regarded himself as the inheritor of an archaic tradition,
what D.P. Walker has called the 'prisca theologia' (ancient theology),
a collection of church-related texts believed, during the Renaissance,
to have been inspired by knowledge that dated back to the time of Moses
and which embodied the secrets of matter and the universe.7 Newton's
alchemical library was indeed large, and his alchemical experiments were a
major feature of his life down to 1696 when he moved to London to become
master of the Mint. Newton was connected to alchemy by something that
was integrally related to his megalomania about inheriting the sacred
tradition: his conviction that matter was not inert but required an
active, or hylarchic, principle for its motion. In aIchemy Newton hoped
to find the microcosmic correlate to gravitational attraction, which he
had already established on the macrocosmic level. As Gregory Bateson
has rightly remarked, Newton did not discover gravity; he
invented
it.8 This invention, however, was part of a much larger quest: Newton's
search for the system of the world, the secret of the universe -- an
ancient riddle stretching back, as Keynes said, to the Babylonians. The
Hermetic tradition was thus the framework of early Newtonian thought,
and gravity merely a name for the hylarchic principle that he was
certain had to exist.9 Newton was first and foremost the alchemist
Keynes saw in him, then. Over the years, however, as the result of a
self-repression that had an important political motivation behind it,
he gradually evolved into a mechanical philosopher.

 

 

English interest in alchemy, and mysticism in general, became intense
during the period of Newton's childhood, the Civil War and after. More
alchemical and astrological texts were translated into English during
1650-60 than in the entire preceding century.10 The reasons for this
increased interest were largely political. Even today, one's view
of matter and force is inevitably a religious question; and in the
context of the seventeenth century, religious questions were typically
political issues as well. At one level, the Civil War signified the
breakdown of a feudal economy; the opposition of the new bourgeoisie,
with its laissez-faire outlook, to the monopolistic practices of the
crown. This economic struggle was reflected politically in the conflict
between Royalists and Parliamentarians, and religiously in the triumph
of Puritanism. But the war had another dimension, now recovered in the
work of Christopher Hill: the attempt, on the part of a vast number
of sects, to fight the crown, and later the Parliamentarians, with
the ideology of communism, or what Engels called utopian socialism,
and to argue for direct knowledge of God as opposed to salvation either
through works or blind faith.11 The religion of these numerous groups
-- Levellers, Diggers, Muggletonians, Familists, Behmenists, Fifth
Monarchy Men, Ranters, Seekers -- was in many cases some combination
of Hermeticism, Paracelsism, or soteriological alchemy, and hence they
were often linked in the public mind with what was called "enthusiasm,"
that is, immoderation in religious beliefs, including possession by
God or prophetic frenzy. All mystical experiences, naturally enough,
came under this heading, and many of the radicals had clearly had such
ecstatic insights.12 It was among the mystical sects," writes Keith
Thomas, "that alchemy struck some of its deepest roots."13 While there
have been no studies demonstrating the actual extent of such beliefs
among the lower classes and radical groups, there is little problem
in demonstrating that such an association was made in the public
(especially middle-class) mind of the time. At the center of these
beliefs was a view of nature directly opposed to the new science:
the notion that God was present in everything, that matter was alive
(pantheism); that change occurred via internal conflict (dialectical
reason) rather than rearrangement of parts; and that -- in contrast
to the hierarchical views of the Church of England -- any individual
could attain enlightenment and have direct experience of the Godhead
(soteriological alchemy). The attempt of the lower classes to hang onto
Hermetic notions reflected the class split described by Keith Thomas,
who observed that the Protestant/rationalist attack on magic left the
middle class with secular salvation, and the lower classes (in a context
of enclosures and accelerating poverty) with nothing. During this period,
then, Hermeticism had an unmistakably socialist edge.14

 

 

The political threat inherent in the occult world view, however, went far
beyond the attack on property and privilege espoused by most of these
radical sects. It included: outright atheism; rejection of monogamy
and an affirmation of the pleasures of the body; demands for religious
toleration, as well as for the abolition of the tithe and the state
church; contempt for the regular clergy; and rejection of any notions
of hierarchy, as well as of the concept of sin. The ties between occult
and revolutionary thought can be seen in a whole spectrum of leading
radicals, but, as already noted, the popular impression that communism,
libertinism, heresy, and Hermeticism were part of some vast conspiracy
is amply documented in the numerous statements made on the subject by
clergymen.15 This intense political/occult ferment, and the fear of it,
received full expression in the 1640s. In the 1650s, however, the tide
began to turn; and after the Restoration, the mechanical philosophy was
seen by the ruling elites as the sober antidote to the enthusiasm of
the last two decades. From 1655 onward there was a series of conversions
to the mechanical philosophy by men who had previously been sympathetic
to alchemy.

 

 

These conversions were thus part of the reaction against enthusiasm on
the part of the propertied classes and leading members of the Church
of England, groups that coalesced in the Royal society itself. Thomas
Sprat, in the earliest history of the Society (1667), viewed the
mechanical philosophy as helping to instill respect for law and order,
and claimed that it was the job of science and the Royal Society to oppose
enthusiasm. Men like Charleton and Boyle, key figures in the conversion
to mechanism, worried about the influence of an alchemist like Jacob
Boehme among English radicals. They feared that the proliferation of
religions based on mystical insight or individual conscience would end
in no religion at all. "Elevation of the mechanical philosophy above the
dialectical science of radical 'enthusiasts,'" writes Christopher Hill,
"reciprocally helped to undermine such beliefs.16

 

 

As the reader might imagine, Newton, who had his most brilliant insights
regarding the system of the world in 1666, was in something of a quandary.
It must have been as evident to him as to any student at Restoration
Cambridge, writes Kubrin, "that Hermetic knowledge was widely viewed
by his contemporaries as an inducement to enthusiasm, and that extreme
caution should be exercised with regard to such ideas." At the same
time, he saw himself as the inheritor of the sacred tradition, and was
convinced that the answer to the riddle of the system of the world was
buried within it. What Newton did, then, was to delve deeply into the
Hermetic wisdom for his answers, while clothing them in the idiom of
the mechanical philosophy.

 

 

The centerpiece of the Newtonian system, gravitational attraction, was in
fact the Hermetic principle of sympathetic forces, which Newton saw as a
creative principle, a source of divine energy in the universe. Although he
presented this idea in mechanical terms, his
unpublished
writings
reveal his commitment to the cornerstone of all occult systems: the
notion that
mind exists in matter and can control it (original participation). In
his letter to Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, cited in
the epigraph to this chapter, Newton states that "nature is a perpetual
circulatory worker," and then offers a description of nature's mode
of operation -- separating the gross from the subtle, the volatile
from the fixed, and so on -- which is alchemy pure and simple. Draft
versions of published work contain statements that were not publicly
heard in the West, in the modern period, until Lamarck and Blake: "all
matter duly formed is attended with signes of life"; "nature delights in
transformations"; the world is "God's sensorium," and so on. His writings
abound with alchemical notions, such as fermentation and putrefaction,
or the "sociableness" and "unsociableness" of various substances for
each other; and some of these statements even made their way into the
famous 31st Query of the "Opticks."17 As R.S. Westfall puts it, alchemy
was Newton's most enduring passion, and the "Principia" something of an
interruption of this larger quest.18

 

 

Even some of Newton's published work (like the 31st Query) reveals his
intense interest in the occult. The reader may be surprised to learn
that Newton wrote on the ancient temple of King Solomon, and speculated
on the size of that ancient measure, the cubit.19 The notion that the
secrets of the universe were contained in the mathematical relationships
built into the structure of ancient holy buildings was a part of the
Hermetic tradition, one that is making something of a comeback with the
current vogue of "pyramid power." Indeed, Newton had a similar interest
in the Great Pyramid of Cheops, and as with his attempt to use alchemical
experiments to validate the theory of gravity, this interest was much
more than an unrelated hobby. Newton was later to state that Egyptian
priests knew the very secrets of the cosmos which he had revealed in the
"Principia."

 

 

Newton's retreat from these views, as Kubrin is able to show, occurred
in the context of a revival of Hermetic ideas in the late 1670s and
the 1680s, the years leading up to the Glorious Revolution.20 Leveller
and republican sentiments emerged once again, and a leading proponent
of the new Hermeticism, especially in the 1690s, was one John Toland,
who had studied with the Newtonian scholar David Gregory. Toland saw the
animistic notions lurking in Newton's work and pointed to them in his
own publications, claiming that nature was transformative and infinitely
fecund, and drawing an analogy to the polifical arena. Newton's dilemma
was that he secretly agreed with Toland's theory of matter and force,
and had in fact held these views for decades. It thus became imperative
for him to dissociate himself from these ideas; but this necessarily
meant changing his mind about them in what amounted to a rigorous
self-censorship. His disciple Samuel Clarke was entrusted with the job of
attacking Toland in a set of sermons published in 1704, and when Clarke
translated the "Opticks" into Latin two years later, the phrase, the world
is "God's sensorium," was altered to read, is "like God's sensorium."21
Statements such as "we cannot say that all Nature is not alive" were
withdrawn before publications went to press; and most importantly,
Newton adopted the position that matter was inert, that it changed not
dialectically (i.e., internally) but through rearrangement alone. Thus in
the quotation from the "Opticks" cited at the beginning of this chapter,
Newton gives as his purpose "that nature may be lasting"; in other words,
that it may be stable, predictable, regular -- like the social order
ought to be. As a young man, Newton had been fascinated by the fecundity
of nature. Now, its alleged rigidity was somehow all-important.

 

 

In the modern empirical sense, there was nothing "scientific" about this
shift from Hermeticism to mechanism. The change was not the result of
a series of careful experiments on the nature of matter, and indeed,
it is no more difficult to visualize the earth as a living organism
than it is to see it as a dead, mechanical object.22 And at the risk of
stretching a point somewhat, it seems to me, following Kubrin's argument,
that two things must be noted about this transformation, in addition
to its nonscientific character. First, the forces that triumphed in the
second half of the seventeenth century were those of bourgeois ideology
and laissez-faire capitalism. Not only was the idea of living matter
heresy to such groups; it was also economically inconvenient. A dead
earth ruptures the delicate ecological balance that was maintained in
the alchemical tradition, but if nature is dead, there are no restraints
on exploiting it for profit. Loving cultivation becomes rape; and that,
to me, is most clearly what industrial society in general (not just
capitalism) represents. That the current breakdown of such societies,
at least in the West, is being accompanied by an occult revival, with
all its good and bad aspects, is hardly surprising.

 

 

Second, the triumph of the Puritan view of life, which concomitantly
repressed sexual energy and sublimated it into brutalizing labor,23
helped to create the "modal personality" of our time -- a personality that
is docile and sub- dued in the face' of authority, but fiercely aggressive
toward competitors and subordinates. The severely repressed Newton,
as Blake pointed out, was everyman; and various paintings of Newton done
over the period 1689 to 1726 (Plates 12-15) reveal an increasing amount of
what Wilhelm Reich brilliantly termed "character armor." In the earliest
painting, the "Hermetic" Newton retains (despite his childhood) a gentle,
ethereal quality that the artist has captured quite beautifully. In
the end, however, we see the rigidity of the mechanical world view, the
Newton who denied his own internal principles -- what Rilke called the
"unlived lines in our bodies"24 -- or the sake of social approval and
outward conformity. We see, in effect, the tragedy of modern man.25