The Reenchantment of the World (17 page)

 

 

Just as the Mersenne circle's opposition to Hermeticism took the
form of an attack on the occult affiliations of Protestantism, so was
the Protestant attack on magic an integral part of its opposition to
Catholicism. We have already seen how intimate were the ties between
magic and the church on the local level, and how essential these were
to the maintenance of its authority. We should not be surprised, then,
to discover that the Reformation adopted a deliberately rationalist
front. All the sacraments were scrutinized for their magical
affiliations. Lists of popes who had allegedly been conjurers were
compiled and circulated, and even such practices as saying "God bless you"
when a person sneezed were attacked as superstitious claptrap. Ultimately,
the attack succeeded. By 1600 the view that God could not be conjured,
and that ritual ceremonies (such as transubstantiation) could not have
material efficacy, was gaining ground. The idea that physical objects
had Mind, or 'mana' behind them, and could be altered by exorcism or
alchemical procedure, began to be seriously attenuated.61

 

 

In addition, Protestantism was able to undercut the soteriological claims
of Hermeticism with the concept of secular salvation. It is interesting
that this concept adopted the structure of magical practice exactly. As
we have already noted, the efficacy of the practitioner was seen as being
a function of his inner purity or virtue. In the same way, the evidence
of grace in, for example, Calvinism, was worldly success, As Weber
described at length, money was now viewed as salvation made manifest,
the touchstone of real piety. And in the context of nascent capitalism,
the concept of personal salvation through internal psychic regeneration,
which was now openly advocated by groups such as the Rosicrucians, simply
could not compete. For the middle and upper classes, at least, the vacuum
left by the Protestant attack on the supernatural could be filled by
prayer and worldly success. But since secular salvation was so obviously
a "winner's" philosophy, Protestantism was in the position of imposing
a doctrine on a populace long used to other types of explanation.62
Throughout Northern Europe, both the notion of secular salvation
and the mechanical philosophy informed the world view of the rising
bourgeoisie; it was their spiritual needs alone that would be catered
to. The imposition of this new doctrine involved not only oppression of
others, but repression of self. The Puritan values of competitiveness,
orderliness, and self-control came, to typify a world that had previously
regarded such behavior as averrant; or, in the case ol Isaac Newton,
as frankly pathological.63 As Christopher Hill puts it, the "preachers
knew what they were doing. . . . They were up against 'natural man.' The
mode of thought and feeling and repression which they wished to impose
was totally unnatural."64 Today, we have to live with the consequences
of their success, and regard it, and the mechanical world view, as
"normal." But if Hermeticism does correspond to an archaic substrate in
the human psyche, as Jung's work seems to indicate, and if creativity and
individuation are drives inherent in human nature, then our modern view
of reality was purchased at a fantastic price. For what was ultimately
created by the shift from animism to mechanism was not merely a new
science, but a new personality to go with it; and Isaac Newton can rightly
be seen as a microcosm, or epitome, of these changes. I wish, then,
to complete this survey of the collapse of participating consciousness
with a separate examination of Newton's life and work in relation to
the political and religious events of his day. Only then will we be in
a position to assess the cost of the loss of holism in the West and to
open the question of what is still possible for those of us who are, both
philosophically and psychologically, the heirs of the Newtonian synthesis.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4
The Disenchantment
of the World (2)

 

 

For nature is a perpetual circulatory worker, generating fluids out
of solids, and solids out of fluids; fixed things out of volatile,
and volatile out of fixed; subtle out of gross, and gross out of
subtle; some things to ascend, and make the upper terrestrial juices,
rivers, and the atmosphere, and by consequence others to descend
for a requital to the former.
-- Isaac Newton, from a letter to
Henry Oldenberg, 25 January 1675/6

 

 

[I]t seems probable to me that God in the beginning formed matter
in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles, of such
sizes and figures, and with such other properties and in such
proportion to space as most conduced to the end for which he formed
them. . . . And therefore, that nature may be lasting, the changes
of corporeal things are to be placed only in the various separations
and new associations and motions of these permanent particles. . . .
-- Isaac Newton, 31st Query to the
"Opticks," 4th edition, 1730

 

 

 

 

Isaac Newton is the symbol of Western science, and the "Principia"
may rightly be called the hinge point of modern scientific thought. As
we saw in Chapter 1, Newton defined the method of science itself, the
notions of hypothesis and experiment, and the techniques that were to make
rational mastery of the environment a viable intellectual program. Through
the public stance adopted by Newton and his disciple Roger Cotes, the
positivist conception of truth first advanced by Mersenne was stamped upon
the European mind. And although twentieth-century physics has modified the
details of the Newtonian synthesis significantly, all modern scientific
thinking, if not the character of contemporary rational-empirical thought
in general, remains, in essence, profoundly Newtonian.

 

 

It was thus with some amazement that, when masses of Newton's manuscripts
were auctioned off by his descendants at Sotheby's in 1936, the British
economist John Maynard Keynes read through them and discovered that
Newton had been steeped in, if not obsessed by, the occult sciences,
particularly alchemy.1 As a result, Keynes could not avoid making the
following judgment:

 

 

Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the
magicians. . . . He looked on the whole universe and all that is in
it
as a riddle
, as a secret which could be read by applying pure
thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid
about the world to allow a sort of philosophers treasure hunt to the
esoteric brotherhood. He believed that these clues were to be found
partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of
elements (and this is what gives the false suggestion of his being
an experimental natural philosopher), but also partly in certain
papers and traditions handed down by the brethren in an unbroken
chain back to the original cryptic revelation in Babylonia. He
regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty.2

 

 

Keynes realized that the eighteenth century had essentially "cleaned
Newton up" for public viewing; that the "Principia" and the "Opticks"
were but the published portion of a larger quest that had much more
in common with the world view of, say, Robert Fludd than with that of
a nineteenth-century physicist. But the recent biography of Newton by
Frank Manuel, and the brilliant study of Newton and his cultural context
by David Kubrin, have shown that to a great extent, Newton cleaned
himself up as well.3 To find the answer to the riddle of gravity on the
particulate level, Newton turned to the Hermetic tradition; and he came
to see himself, Keynes suggests, as the contemporary representative,
indeed even the God-chosen inheritor of that tradition, But for both
psychological and political reasons, Newton found it necessary to
repress that side of his personality and his philosophy, and to present
a sober, positivist face. In significant ways, the evolution of Newton's
consciousness reflects not only the fate of the alchemical tradition in
Restoration England, but also the evolution of Western consciousness in
general. Indeed, Manuel has suggested that his personality and outlook
were but extreme expressions of the age.4

 

 

Newton's childhood was characterized by an intense dose of the separation
anxiety that is a part of all of our early lives and that later serves
as a model for the sensation of bodily responses that occur whenever we
face object-loss. Newton's father died three months before he was born,
and his mother remarried when he was just about three years of age. She
went to live a mile and a half away with her new husband, the Reverend
Barnabas Smith, leaving Isaac with his grandmother in Woolsthorpe,
Lincolnshire, the town of his birth. She returned to Woolsthorpe only
when her second husband died. by which time Newton was about eleven. Hence
Newton was quite literally abandoned during a crucially formative period,
after a period in which his mother had been the sole parent. As a result,
writes Manuel,

 

 

his fixation upon her was absolute. The trauma of her original
departure, the denial of her love, generated anguish, aggressiveness,
and fear. After the total possession -- undisturbed by a rival,
not even a father, almost as if there had been a virgin birth --
she was removed and he was abandoned.

 

 

"The loss of his mother to another man," continues Manuel, "was a
traumatic event in Newton's life from which he never recovered." Newton
recorded in one of his adolescent notebooks "sins" such as "threat[e]ning
my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them," and
"wishing death and hoping it to some."

 

 

It should also be noted that Newton's belief that he was part of the
'aurea catena,' the "golden chain" of magi, or unique figures designated
by God in each age to receive the ancient Hermetic wisdom, was reinforced
by the circumstances of his birth. He was born prematurely, on Christmas
Day 1642, and was not expected to live. Indeed, that particular parish
had a high rate of infant mortality, and Newton later believed that his
survival (as well as his escaping the ravages of the plague while still
a young man) signified divine intervention. The same parish, according to
Manuel, also credited some form of the widespread belief that a male child
born after his fathers death is endowed with extraordinary powers. This
attitude, combined with Newton's great fear of object-loss, produced his
peculiar stance with respect to past and present thinkers. Moses, Thoth,
Thales, Hermes, Pythagoras, and others like them enjoyed his praise;
contemporary scientists were by and large a threat. Newton went into
extreme rages in his arguments over priority with men such as Hooke
and Leibniz, and regarded the system of the world described in the
"Principia" as his personal property. He was certain that "God revealed
himself to only one prophet in each generation, and this made parallel
discoveries improbable." At the bottom of one alchemical notebook Newton
inscribed as an anagram of his Latin name, Isaacus Neuutonus, the phrase:
'Jeova sanctus unus' --- Jehovah the holy one.

 

 

Alongwith these psychological traits, Newton manifested those common
to Puritan morality: austerity, discipline, and above all, guilt and
shame. "He had a built-in censor," says Manuel, "and lived ever under
the Taskmaster's eye. . . . " Such conclusions emerge from a study of
Newton's adolescent exercise notebooks, which include sentences chosen for
translation into Latin in the manner of free association -- sentences in
which dread, self-disparagement, and loneliness abound as themes. Hence:

 

 

A little fellow.
He is paile.
There is noe roome for mee to sit.
What imployment is he fit for?
What is hee good for?
He is broken.
The ship sinketh.
There is a thing which trobeleth mee.
He should have been punished.
No man understands mee.
What will become of me.
I will make an end.
I cannot but weepe.
I know not what to doe.

 

 

These are remarkable sentences for a youth to choose for Latin exercises,
indeed, the selection is almost unbelievable. "In all these youthful
scribblings," writes Manuel,

 

 

there is an astonishing absence of positive feeling. The word
love never appears, and expressions of gladness and desire are
rare. . . . Almost all the statements are negations, admonitions,
prohibitions. The climate of life is hostile and punitive.

 

 

Had history heard nothing more from Isaac Newton, these notebook entries
would amount to nothing more than a psychiatric curiosity. But we are
talking about the creator of the modern scientific outlook, and that
outlook, the insistence that everything be totally predictable and
rationally calculable ("kill anything that moves," as Philip Slater puts
it) cannot be separated from its pathological basis. "A chief souce of
Newton's desire to know," writes Manuel, "was his anxiety before and his
fear of the unknown." "Knowledge that could be mathematicized ended his
quandaries . . . [The fact] that the world obeyed mathematical law was
his security."

 

 

To force everything in the heavens and on earth into one rigid,
tight frame from which the most minuscule detail would not be
allowed to escape free and random was an underlying need of this
anxiety-ridden man. And with rare exceptions, his fantasy wish was
fulfilled during the course of his lifetime. The system was complete
in both its physical and historical dimensions. A structuring of the
world in so absolutist a manner that every event, the closest and the
most remote, fits nearly into an imaginary system has been called
a symptom of illness, especially when others refuse to join in the
grand obsessive design. It was Newton's fortune that a large portion
of his total system was acceptable to European society as a perfect
representation of reality, and his name was attached to the age.5