Yes, we all know Newton was a strange dude, with interests in alchemy and esoteric religion, but this review
in TLS gives some further insights:
Newton tends to come across in popular biographies as a prickly and
profoundly ornery recluse whose mind was more at home in the heavens
than in conversation with his fellow men, let alone women. Some of this
is not exactly wrong. Newton prickled all right. Even as a child,
growing up at Woolsthorpe Manor in rural Lincolnshire during the English
Civil War and the early years of the Commonwealth, he threatened to set
his mother and stepfather on fire and “burn the house over them”.
He was not what you would call a science communicator. The Principia Mathematica,
for all its importance as the foundational text of modern mechanics, is
written in a fabulously dense and sprawling thicket of Latin that makes
the Greek of Euclid’s Elements look positively vulgar. His
lecturing style at Cambridge was so wilfully obscure that “ofttimes”, in
the words of his early biographer David Brewster, “he did in a manner,
for want of hearers, read to the walls”. For a man who professed to
despise controversy, Newton feuded like a Homeric hero, dismantling the
reputation of Robert Hooke and perhaps even having Hooke’s portrait at
the Royal Society destroyed in a final damnatio memoriae....
The jottings in Newton’s copy of a Latin and Greek thesaurus give some
impression of his fixations. Under the letter S, he added: Sluggard,
Swearer, Sabbath-breaker, Shuhite, Sadducie, Sophister, Schismatick and
Sodomite. Under P, he wrote: Pagan, Papist, Pharisie, Philistine,
Pelagian and Priscillianist. He policed his own diet for signs of
gluttony like a desert father. Another Trinity notebook lists under the
heading Otiosa et frustra expensa (“vain and frivolous spending”): cherries, milk, butter, cheese, China ale, tarts and custards.
As for his specific religious theories:
It is not clear exactly how or at what point Newton slipped from the
Presbyterianism of his Lincolnshire childhood into an idiosyncratic
species of Arianism, an ancient school of thought that held Christ had
been created by God and was therefore inferior to him. The
transformation was certainly complete by the end of the 1670s, though,
and there is no good reason to think that Newton had anyone other than
himself to blame.
By the middle of the following decade, when he gave much of his
energies over to alchemy and the decoding of apocalyptic prophecy, he
had an even more remarkable idea. When mankind was still young, “before
the first memory of things”, Newton surmised, Noah and his sons had come
up with a pure and pristine form of worship that subsequent prophets –
Christ among them – had contrived only to debase.
The original religion had found its expression in holy flames
surrounded by vestal temples such as Stonehenge and St Bridget’s fire, a
Christianized pagan observance that persists today in the grounds of
Kildare Cathedral in Ireland. These shrines, Newton wrote, stood
allegorically for the place of the Sun at the centre of God’s cosmos.
Over time, the metaphors had gradually come to obscure the truths they
depicted, and as the sacred learning was passed down by Moses and the
ancient Egyptians, the prisca sapientia had degenerated into idolatry.
This sort of claim was unusual but not exceptional in Newton’s time.
What was extraordinary was his belief that the Noachian faith had
embodied a better and truer conception of the universe than anything
that came after it. Modern philosophers could only hope to unravel its
insights from the tangle of esoteric riddles in which they were
preserved....
This conviction led Newton down some strange byways. At one point he defended the account of Egyptian theology in Aristophanes’ The Birds,
where Night is said to have spread her black wings over the chaotic
void and laid an egg containing Love, which eventually hatched and
created all the gods and living things. Night, Newton explained, was the
unseen deity, and Love the spirit that had moved over the face of the
waters in Genesis 2. He also thought that Plato had ultimately inherited
an understanding of universal gravitation from the same source, and
that before him Pythagoras had hit on the inverse-square law by hanging
hammers of different weights from taut sheep intestines.
I'm pretty sure that's the first time "taut sheep intestines" has appeared in this blog....
Anyway, there is still more to read at the review.
