Newton's Arian Epistemology and the Cosmogony of Paradise

Lost

John Rogers

ELH, Volume 86, Number 1, Spring 2019, pp. 77-106 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/718867

Access provided by Ebsco Publishing (7 Mar 2019 06:56 GMT)

NEWTON’S ARIAN EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE
COSMOGONY OF PARADISE LOST

BY JOHN ROGERS

Heretics both, John Milton and Isaac Newton were, as most

scholars now agree, Arians. In reasoned opinions that during their
lifetimes they voiced safely outside the public space of the printed
theological treatise, both Milton and Newton asserted a version of
the fourth-century theology of Arius and his followers, who argued for
the autonomy and individualism of the Son of God, whom they took
to be the first of God’s creatures. Known as Christianity’s “archetypal
heresy,” Arianism had provoked the early church to consolidate its
thinking about the godhead, and the orthodox theology that eventually
emerged in opposition to Arianism would deny the Son’s independence,
and require belief that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were co-equal,
co-eternal, and co-essential.1 Passionate in their private confutations
of this most central of Christian doctrines, the poet and the physicist
both denied the existence of a Trinity that tied the Son to the Father
and Holy Spirit in a shared essence. Milton and Newton argued for
the singular primacy of the heavenly Father, who alone is the “most
high” God, although, as we will see, both men permitted belief that
the Father could appoint other divine beings, when he so chose, to
assume the provisional and generic appellation “God.”2 The Son, or
Christ, they insisted, like Arius before them, was created by the Father
at a specific point in time before the creation of the universe. And it
is this heretically imagined creature, the Arian Christ, who would play
a crucial role for both Milton and Newton in supplying the means by
which they could justify their unprecedented claims to understand
the secrets of creation. Milton and Newton, as we will see, relied
on idiosyncratic versions of the Arian belief in Christ’s createdness
to sanction their own efforts, as created beings, to create works as
monumental, and as seemingly divinely inspired, as Paradise Lost and
the Principia Mathematica.3
The anti-Trinitarianism engaged by the poet and his younger
scientific contemporary is a feature of the intellectual lives of these
two men that has pressed itself on the disciplinarily distinct fields of
Milton studies and Newton studies since the nineteenth century, when

ELH 86 (2019) 77–106 © 2019 by Johns Hopkins University Press 77

the manuscript evidence of their unmistakably heterodox religious
convictions was brought to light. But while scholars in both worlds
have conceded the fact of Milton’s and Newton’s heretical leanings,
they have not pursued to any great extent the question of why either
figure would cultivate such a passionate commitment to a system of
beliefs as culturally remote as Arianism. My intentions in this essay are
simple. I seek to pose the question of why either of these men would
adopt an arcane theological heresy that boasted so few seventeenth- or
eighteenth-century adherents. I test the hypothesis that an examina-
tion of the Arian theory of creation in Paradise Lost can assist us in
understanding Newton’s own commitment to that notorious, ancient
heterodoxy. And I argue, further, that for Newton theology subtended
scientific epistemology: he used the idiosyncratic Arianism associated
with Milton as the private conceptual foundation for the true knowledge
he knew he had acquired of the mechanics of the material universe.

I. THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD

Our inquiry into the filiations that tie Newton to Milton must be
prefaced by an acknowledgment of the profound differences that
separate both their persons and their theological sensibilities. In the
theological treatise he wrote in Latin during the 1650s, and in his
late poems Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Milton was perhaps
overwhelmingly concerned to articulate a version of Arminianism, the
seventeenth-century Protestant movement that emerged from the
conceptual struggles of the Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius with the
Reformed theology of predestination tied to the Genevan theologian
John Calvin and his later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century disciples.
Milton was inescapably drawn to those arguments of Arminius that
freed the human will from the bonds of Calvinist predestination and
irresistible grace. But Milton would go beyond the faith of Arminius
himself and adopt aspects of the more daring religious thought of
Arminius’s successors, the Remonstrants, some of whom were willing
to extend that freedom to God the Father and his Son, liberating those
two divine beings from what Milton appears to have considered to
be the metaphysical stranglehold of the falsely imagined Trinitarian
godhead.4 For Milton, the freedom of the human will was logically
tied to the freedom of the divine will: God the Father had been free
to create, or not, his created Son; and the created Son, just like man,
was free to obey, or not, the will of God.5 It was this extraordinary
degree of contingency structuring the interactions of Father and Son
that guaranteed for Milton the radical freedom of the human will.

78 Newton’s Arian Epistemology

 The theological pressures under which Newton labored were
different. A biblical literalist who held strenuously to concepts such as
that of God’s personhood, Newton was dismayed to learn that the early
readers of his magisterial study of the laws of motion, his 1687 Principia
Mathematica, or Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, found
in his work a conceptual tie to deism, the early modern theological
school emergent in the years of the very Scientific Revolution of which
Newton was such an important part.6 For deists, who denied the deity
anything like a personality, or personhood, God could be imagined as
an impersonal abstraction nearly indistinguishable from the universe
itself.7 But Newton, whose complex relation to deism is still a matter
of scholarly disagreement, appears to have been discomfited by the
seemingly deist implications of his discovery of vast, impersonal laws
and processes in the universe.8 And it was partly in response to what
he took to be the enthusiastic deist response to his work as a physicist
that Newton wrote a brief and remarkable theological essay that he
appended to a second, 1713 edition of the Principia, in a supplementary
section of the new edition he titled the “General Scholium.” Attempting
to counter any idea that the physical laws of the universe he discov-
ered might be subtended by a novel, rationalizing theology such as
deism, Newton begins the famous “Scholium” essay with the forceful
claim that the creation of the universe could only be the product of
intelligent design: “This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets,
and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of
an intelligent and powerful being.”9 And this intelligent and powerful
divine being could not be imagined, pace the deists, as identical to the
universe: “This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world,
but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be
called Lord God . . . or Universal Ruler” (M, 2:389).
In the reflective, explanatory space of the essay on God’s dominion
in the 1713 Principia, Newton was able to launch his argument against
the abstractly diffuse God of deism by pressing a unique case for God’s
status as a coherently conscious, sentient, and deliberative being. For
Newton, the unified personhood of God, like the personhood of man,
was consistently defined by the possession of three distinct capacities:
the living God is in possession of “all power to perceive, to understand,
and to act” (M, 2:391). For a theocentric physicist such as Newton,
one might think, it is God’s capacity to act that would be the most
consequential of his powers: it is divine action that would have been
seen to produce the creation, to maintain that creation by means of
the mechanical laws of the universe, and to violate those mechanical

John Rogers 79
laws when God has chosen to intervene in the natural world by means
of an extraordinary miracle. But as important as action is, or at least
logically should be, for the physicist, it was, remarkably, the first two
of the three capacities of personhood that dominated Newton’s theo-
logical speculations in the “General Scholium.” Perception, because
it makes possible the work of understanding, lies at the foundation of
both man and God’s unique and unified personhood:

Every soul that has perception is, though in different times and in
different organs of sense and motion, still the same indivisible person.
There are given successive parts in duration, coexistent parts in space,
but neither the one nor the other in the person of a man, or his thinking
principle; and much less can they be found in the thinking substance
of God. Every man, so far as he is a thing that has perception, is
one and the same man during his whole life, in all and each of his
organs of sense. God is the same God, always and everywhere. He is
omnipresent not virtually only, but also substantially; for virtue cannot
subsist without substance. (M, 2:390)

Substantial perception and substantial understanding are the defining

attributes of both the human and the divine person. And as we will
see, the phenomena of divine perception and divine understanding
lie at the heart of Newton’s struggle, over what appears to be many
years, to fashion a theology capable of underwriting his unavowed
vocation as an original, indeed revolutionary, inquirer into the laws
of God’s creation.
In the passage cited above, Newton posits perception and under-
standing as the basis for any analogy or homology between God and
man. But with a maddening refusal to acknowledge any conceptual
irony or paradox, Newton will quickly move on in the same paragraph
to discuss the way in which the radical difference between divine and
human modes of perception and understanding bespeak a fundamental
ontological distinction between God and man, a distinction so great that
any human attempt to acquire knowledge of God is virtually impos-
sible. Both man and God, for Newton, are committed to knowing.
But God’s knowledge of his creation differs so vastly from ours not
simply because of his palpable, corporeal omnipresence, but because
of the radically distinct way in which his mode of perception has been
framed within his “substantial,” omnipresent being:

’Tis allowed by all that the supreme God exists necessarily; and by the
same necessity he exists always and every where. Whence also he is

80 Newton’s Arian Epistemology

 all similar, all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all power to perceive, to
understand, and to act; but in a manner not at all human, in a manner
not at all corporeal, in a manner utterly unknown to us. (M, 2:391)

Man shares with God the capacity to perceive, understand, and act.
But while our corporeal frames are constituted of highly differenti-
ated organs of perception, understanding, and action, God’s being is
not compounded, or composed of parts, at all. God’s being, rather, is
homogeneous, or “similar”: “he is all similar, all eye [totus visus], all ear
[totus auditus], all brain, all arm, all power to perceive, to understand,
and to act” (M, 2:391). God’s uncompounded being is superior to our
own, as our highly differentiated human bodies are marked by distinct
and separate organs of perception (exemplified by eye and ear) and
understanding (as represented by the brain), and of distinct limbs of
action (embodied in the arm). The homogeneity of God’s perceptive,
understanding, and active substance, diffused throughout the plenum
of the material creation that is constituted, it would seem, by his very
body, means that God sees and understands and acts, as Newton says
in the same passage in the “General Scholium” essay, “in a manner
not at all human, in a manner not at all corporeal, in a manner utterly
unknown to us.”
Surely this passage about the unimaginably diffuse divine being
Newton insists is a personal God is one of early modern England’s
most imaginatively exuberant representations of the deity. “All eye,
all ear, all brain, all arm,” Newton’s God both is and is not like the
human person. In possession of faculties of perception and will, such as
sight, hearing, thought, and action, which are unquestionably like ours,
Newton’s living God is empowered to exercise a deliberate, voluntary,
and conscious power over his creation that is distinctly human in its
operative assumptions. But because those faculties are configured in
the divine being in so radically different a manner than in the human
being, God’s creation of and governance over the natural world is at
the same time radically not human. How, then, Newton puzzles, are
we as humans to know something of God’s substance and governance?
We can know in part, Newton seems to imply in conclusion, because
of our access to the scriptural language describing God: “[B]y way of
allegory, God is said to see, to speak, to laugh, to love, to hate, to desire,
to give, to receive, to rejoice, to be angry, to fight, to frame, to work,
to build” (M, 2:391). And these actions allegorically attributed to God
both can and cannot be understood by virtue of our knowledge of the
human: “For all our notions of God are taken from the ways of mankind,

John Rogers 81
by a certain similitude which, though not perfect, has some likeness,
however” (M, 2:391). The imperfect similitude between man and God
makes impossible, but also in another sense possible, our knowledge
of God and his creation. To settle the problem of how it is we can
understand the secrets of creation, Newton conjoins the discourses of
theology and science to focus on the even thornier problem of how
it is we can understand God. But the result is hardly the explanatory
clarification that the term “Scholium” implies.

II. “ALL EYE, ALL EAR” AND THE PERSONHOOD OF GOD

We can begin our inquiry into the logic of Newton’s treatment of

the problem of our knowledge of God and of his creation by tracing
the literary history of the image of a divine being who is “all eye, all
ear.” Certainly one of Newton’s primary sources for the image of God
as universally diffused perception, understanding, and action is the
early church father Irenaeus, whose account of the early church in
his Adversus Haereses, or Against Heresies, served as the basis for a
history of early Christianity that Newton was himself preparing to write.
Many draft versions of Newton’s own history of the early church have
survived, and the archive reveals that he took a particular interest in
Irenaeus’s account of the wrong-headed Gnostic theologian Ptolemy,
whose understanding of the divine being was founded on an elaborate
allegorization of God’s distinct functions and “affections.”10 As Newton
explains in his paraphrases and translations of Irenaeus, the Gnostics
subdivided the deity into the discrete, individual components of percep-
tion, understanding, and will: they “assigned to the supreme father
two wives Ennœa & Thelesis, Vnderstanding & Will & called them
the affections of the unknown father & said that the Vnderstanding
was the older wife because the understanding precedes the will”
(“D,” 15.6, 109v). Invoking Homer’s vulgar personification of the gods,
Irenaeus, in Newton’s translation, mocked the metaphysical (and
domestic) drama the Gnostics imagined was continually unfolding
within the godhead:

They err therefore in ascribing to God the affections & passions of

men & making him a compound. For God is not as man, nor are his
thoughts like ours. He is simple & not compound. He is all like & equal
to himself, all sense all spirit, all perception all Ennœa, all λόγος all
ear, all eye, all light. He is all sense which cannot be separated from
it self, nor is there any thing in him which can be emitted from any
thing else. (“D,” 15.6, 109v)

82 Newton’s Arian Epistemology

The image of God Newton shares in the “General Scholium,” the
deity who is all eye and all ear, has its origin in the description of
God with which the early church father Irenaeus attempted to refute
the Gnostics. In his characterization of the abstract mechanics of
Gnosticism’s divine psychomachia, Irenaeus accuses the Gnostics,
in their ascription to God of the affections and passions of men, of
a mistaken understanding of the nature of divinity. He allows for
the possibility that the faculties of perception, understanding, and
will might interact within any given man in the highly differentiated
manner described by the Gnostics. But God, Irenaeus insists, is not
a “compound”: he is “not as man, nor are his thoughts like ours”
(“D,” 15.6, 109v).
Why Newton would bother to devote so much energy and attention
to the early critiques of the Gnostics is not, on the surface, self-evident.
But Newton saw in the Gnostics’ elaborate subdivision of divinity an
anticipation of the Trinitarianism that would come later to contaminate
Christianity in the fourth century. Like the orthodox partitioning of
the one God into the discrete entities of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
the Gnostic segregation of God into the individual components of
perception, understanding, and will ruled out any possibility that the
deity governed the universe in the anthropomorphically conscious and
deliberate manner that Irenaeus’s and Newton’s scriptural literalism
demanded. Newton found in Irenaeus’s refutation of Gnosticism an
important precedent for his own, largely secret, campaign against the
theological corruption occasioned by what he felt to be the dread
orthodoxy of Trinitarianism.
Perhaps more important, Irenaeus also supplied Newton with
an ancient voice in support of his opposition to the contemporary
specter of deism. The problem of the representation of God, for both
Irenaeus and Newton, was a complex one. It was in no simple sense
that Irenaeus dismissed the Gnostics for their anthropomorphizing
tendencies. It is the case rather that for Irenaeus the Gnostics were
improperly anthropomorphic in their understanding of God. Although
not a human person with respect to the composition of his faculties, the
Irenaean and Newtonian deity was, quite unlike that of the Gnostics,
a single personal being with a deliberative and unified consciousness,
and in no way identifiable with the created world external to himself.
Further, he may be “all eye, all ear, all light,” but the Irenaean God
was for Newton the personal God of his own Unitarian faith, founded
on the theologically minimalist ground of the Apostles’ Creed: “the
Christian religion is founded in beleiving one God & one Lord &

John Rogers 83
acknowledging the incarnation & passion of this Lord, & the Gnosticks
generally eluded all the articles of this faith” (“D,” 15.6, 108r). “Thus,”
writes Newton, in concluding his translation of the early church father’s
heresiography, “does Irenæus represent & confute the Metaphysicks
of the Gnosticks” (“D,” 15.6, 109v)
Newton turned to Irenaeus for conceptual ammunition against
both the ancient but persistent error of Trinitarianism and the more
contemporary error of deism, what he saw as two pernicious theo-
logical systems conspiring to corrupt the truths of Christianity. But it
is important to note that Irenaeus’s particular figuration of his personal,
unitary God was by no means the only available representation of a
divine being who is “all eye, all ear.” In fact, it was just this image
of the homogeneously percipient deity that had emerged in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth century as a central focal point in
the period’s controversies about deism. It was well known that the
source for Irenaeus’s image of a God whose faculties of perception
and understanding are diffused throughout the material world was the
ancient Eleatic philosopher Xenophanes, whose philosophical frag-
ments would be described in detail by the early modern philosophical
encyclopedists Gerardus Vossius, Ralph Cudworth, Thomas Stanley,
and Pierre Bayle.11 Like Irenaeus after him, Xenophanes countered the
vulgar polytheism of Homer and Hesiod by forwarding a sophisticated
monistic image of a divinity who is “all eye, all ear”: “He resembles
man neither in form nor understanding; being all eye, all ear, all intel-
lect, by the power of his mind and without extraneous effort he sways
and governs all things.”12 But in this original ancient formulation of
the image of the homogeneously percipient God, Xenophanes did not
emphasize, as Irenaeus would later, the unified consciousness of this
universally dissipated God. As many in the eighteenth century argued,
Xenophanes seemed to point not to the personal God of scripture,
but to the deist God identical to nature. The historian Jonathan Israel
has described in fact a controversy that broke out on the subject of
whether Xenophanes should be seen to support, as Cudworth had
suggested, a more comfortable theistic conception of God “as pure
mind and hence not identical with nature,” or, as Bayle would argue, a
God like that of Spinoza or of the deists, who could not meaningfully
be distinguished from the universe itself.13 When Newton makes his
claim in the “General Scholium” for the unified personhood of the
God who is “all eye, all ear,” his gesture is a powerfully dialectical one:
the Irenaean assertion of the personal, willful God of scripture can’t
be fully disentangled from the contemporary controversy over the
possible deist implications of Xenophanes’s original use of the image.
84 Newton’s Arian Epistemology
 And Xenophanes was not alone in using the image of a God of
diffused percipience to forward a pantheistic proto-deism. Among those
who followed Xenophanes to score the same point against theological
anthropomorphism and the personalization of God was a later literary
figure, far more familiar than Xenophanes in Newton’s time, the first-
century Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, whose Naturalis Historia
was not only the natural philosophical and geographic encyclopedia of
its own day, but also a popular text, both in the original Latin and in
English translation, throughout the seventeenth century. In a chapter
of his work’s second book, titled “Of God,” Pliny warns against the
lamentable human instinct to “to seek after any Shape of God, and to
assign a Form and Image to him, [which] is a Proof of Man’s Folly”:
“For God, whosoever he be (if haply there be any other, but the World
itself), and in what Part soever resident, all Sense He is, all Sight [totus
visus], all Hearing [totus auditus]: He is the whole of the Life and of
the Soul, all of Himself.”14 Far from consciously exercising dominion
over the world, Pliny’s God, as he tells us, may be nothing other than
“the World itself.”
The conceptual dilemma underlying the conflicted literary history
behind the Irenaean God who is “all eye” and “all ear” should be
apparent at once. The image of the unitary deity who is “all similar”
may have worked, for Newton, as an important counter against the
bad logic of orthodox Trinitarianism, which mistakenly subdivided the
unitary God into the distinct entities of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
But the image of the homogeneously pan-perceptive God surely also
troubled Newton’s struggle to differentiate himself from the contem-
porary abstraction of God performed by the deists. The examples of
Xenophanes and Pliny seem in fact to damage Newton’s argument
against the deist image of a God whose omnipresent physicality is
coextensive with the universe itself. They are much more easily read,
rather, to figure forth a version of deism avant la lettre, an early
version of the God of impersonal natural process who is precisely
the being whose existence Newton has set out to confute. Newtonian
physics seemed logically to demand a deist God of impersonal regu-
larity, while Newtonian theology required a personal God who freely
and deliberately effects the events of creation and redemption. The
conflicted message of the collated precursors behind Newton’s image
of the God who is “all eye, all ear” exposes the anxiety informing the
most challenging of the physicist’s intellectual ambitions: the desire
to square his theocentrism with the uncompromising impersonality of
his own mechanical model of the universe.

John Rogers 85
 III. THE ANCIENT WISDOM OF THE ARIAN EPIC

Our speculation concerning the cultural energies informing Newton’s

conflicted image of a God whose capacity for perception and under-
standing was mysteriously all in all is not quite complete. There was
at least one more source to which Newton was likely indebted for the
representation of God as an omnipresent mass of non-localized percep-
tivity, intellection, and action. I want to venture here the conjecture
that Newton is additionally obliged, for his claim that God is “all eye,
all ear,” to the grand old heretic John Milton, whose Paradise Lost had
attributed pan-corporeal percipience not to God, but to God’s angels.
In fact, as I will suggest here, it is Milton who articulates a heretical
theory of creation of the world that enables Newton to manage the
conceptual contradiction we have seen manifest in the literary history
of the image of the divine being who is “all eye, all ear.” It is the
idiosyncratic, heretical Arianism of Milton’s epic, as we shall see, that
best modeled for Newton a way to square the fact of his discoveries of
the truths of nature with his ongoing theological and epistemological
struggle to understand how it is that he, the imperfect creature Isaac
Newton, could be in a position to make those discoveries.
For a recent, seventeenth-century instance of the ancient image
of a divine being whose capacities of perception and understanding
were diffused throughout his being, Newton needed only to turn to
book six of Paradise Lost. In the representation of the war in heaven
in Milton’s epic, the narrating archangel Raphael describes for Adam
the impassability of angels on the battlefield of heaven:
for Spirits that live throughout
Vital in every part, not as frail man
In Entrails, Heart or Head, Liver or Reins
Cannot but by annihilating die;
Nor in thir liquid texture mortal wound
Receive, no more that can the fluid Air:
All Heart they live, all Head, all Eye, all Ear,
All Intellect, all Sense, and as they please,
They Limb themselves, and colour, shape or size
Assume, as likes them best, condense or rare.15

Explaining to Adam that the liquid texture of angelic bodies makes

mortal wounds impossible, Raphael launches into a digression,
informed, as we have seen, by Xenophanes, Pliny, and Irenaeus, on
the homogeneous constitution of the angelic body.16 The Miltonic
angel is not, as frail man, vital merely in his organs and central parts:

86 Newton’s Arian Epistemology

“In Entrails, Heart or Head, Liver or Reins.” Milton’s angels, rather,
“live throughout / Vital in every part”: “All Heart they live, all Head,
all Eye, all Ear, / All Intellect, all Sense.”17
There is an important question we can no longer delay posing. Did
the great physicist, whose interests in literature are not overwhelmingly
in evidence in the enormous body of his published and unpublished
writings, actually read the epic poem by the great puritan poet of an
earlier generation?18 We should not be surprised to find Newton’s
signature on the flyleaves of copies of Pindar in Greek and of Ovid
in Latin: those are texts that any student of a Renaissance grammar
school might have owned.19 And there is evidence of Newton’s owner-
ship of other classical literary texts in editions dating to his later years
at Cambridge. But it has been pointed out as well that Newton,
years after attending university, as Warden and then Master of the
Mint, appears not to have had any of the English classics—“Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, etc., etc.”—in his library.20 As Richard
Westfall notes in his biography, a possibly apocryphal remark was made,
years after Newton’s death, that Newton had “described poetry as ‘a
kind of ingenious nonsense.’”21 But even if poetry in general could be
dismissed by Newton as “nonsense,” we need not rule out entirely
the possibility that one particular poem, Paradise Lost, might have
made a special claim on his attention. It was, I would like to suggest,
the public declarations of the scandalous Arianism that so many early
readers detected in Paradise Lost that would have recommended that
earlier generation’s masterpiece to the physicist.
In the years before the appearance of the 1713 edition of the
Principia, in the “General Scholium” of which, as we have seen,
Newton paints his God in the colors of Milton’s angels, the evidence
of the heretical Arianism of Milton’s epic had been proclaimed in print
a number of times. As noted above, Milton would not articulate in
print a formal theology of the Arian Son’s createdness; that explicitly
heretical discourse Milton reserved for the daring theological treatise
he would not publish in his lifetime. But Milton would nonetheless use
the palate of his epic poem to paint an implicitly Arian image of the
created Son of God; and the subtler heresy of his poem would not be
lost on his eighteenth-century readers. In 1698, John Toland, whose
notorious deism Newton and his friend Samuel Clarke vehemently
opposed, had written that Paradise Lost had long been “brand[ed]”
with anti-Trinitarian “heresy.”22 Also in 1698, Charles Leslie had
published his thoughts on the heretical Arianism of Paradise Lost, as
would the literary critic John Dennis in 1704. And in 1710 the Earl

John Rogers 87
of Shaftesbury had taken Milton to task for the tacit Arianism of the
scene in book five of the Father’s elevation of the Son, the scene in
which the Son, in Shaftesbury’s words, is “declared generalissimo of all
the armies of heaven.”23 Perhaps most important, Newton had since
the 1690s been engaged in a serious intellectual relationship with Dr.
Richard Bentley, the classicist and later the controversial editor of
Paradise Lost, who surely knew Milton’s epic as intimately as anyone
in the early eighteenth century. We should for all these reasons permit
ourselves to think that Newton had been drawn to read, or, at the very
least, to explore the most controversial passages of Milton’s notoriously
Arian epic. And we may proceed, then, to speculate about the possible
meanings of Newton’s engagement with Raphael’s account of the all-
eye-all-ear constitution of the Miltonic angel.
As Frank Manuel has clearly demonstrated, Newton had scoured not
only ancient philosophy but the fictional world of ancient mythology
for evidence that the mechanical laws of nature he himself discovered
had been discovered long before, intuitable as they were by the light of
nature.24 According to Manuel, Newton “was so terrified by the hubris
of discovery of which he was possessed that, as if to placate God the
Father, he assured his intimates and himself that he had broken no
prohibitions against revealing what was hidden in nature, that he had
merely uttered in another language what the ancients had known before
him.”25 Given the insistence with which Newton argued that his own
discoveries were but recoveries of past knowledge, an earlier genera-
tion’s Arian epic of creation, with its presumption to sing of chaos and
eternal night, might well have been difficult to overlook entirely. When,
in the 1713 essay on God’s dominion as “Universal Ruler” of the world,
Newton had attributed this undifferentiated state of being to God, his
stated purpose was to emphasize God’s otherness and unknowability,
traits that distinguished Newton’s God from the impersonal, flattened-
out God of the deists. But in reproducing the rhetorical structure and
the conceptual import of Milton’s distinction between the angelic and
human body, Newton manages, perhaps unwittingly, to break down
the very distinction between familiar creature and inscrutable creator
he had been working in this passage to establish.
Needless to say, to suggest, as I do in this essay, that Newton read
Milton and found a heretical kinship in the radical poet’s representa-
tion of the interaction of divine and earthly matter, is not to rule out
the possibility that Milton and Newton had gravitated independently
to a decidedly idiosyncratic cluster of related natural philosophical
and theological figures and principles. Whether the relation between

88 Newton’s Arian Epistemology

them is one of influence or of mere coincidence, we are nonetheless
obliged to determine why either Milton or Newton would reach back
to the fourth century to a heretical theology so long out of currency.
A reading of Newton’s Christological heresy in relation to Milton’s,
I propose, can supply an explanation for the striking and unpredict-
able turn both writers make toward the archetypal heresy of ancient
Christianity.
Before we can fully understand the importance of Arianism for
these two thinkers, let us first consider why Newton and Milton
rejected the form of anti-Trinitarianism that did in fact enjoy a
strong currency among many early modern English intellectuals.
Socinianism was by far the most notorious, most rigorously argued,
and most culturally dominant anti-Trinitarian theology throughout
both Milton’s and Newton’s lifetimes. Forged initially by a Sienese
jurist, Laelius Sozzini, and developed further in formal theological
treatises by Laelius’s nephew Fausto Sozzini (the Sozzini generally
referred to as “Socinus”), Socinianism was the intellectually bristling,
relentlessly logical reinvention of Christian theology that had scandal-
ized Protestant Europe since 1594, when Faustus Socinus published
a treatise on the Christian atonement that would prove one of the
most controversial works of intellectual theology in the early modern
period.26 Although the cluster of beliefs that generally circulate under
the name of Socinianism are rarely ever articulated, many aspects of
Socinus’s theology proved to be influential and were eventually taken
up by various forms of Protestantism, in particular his redefinition of
the concepts of faith and justification.27
But the feature of Socinian theology that was most shocking both
in the early modern as well as our own period was its critique of the
doctrine of the Trinity. The term “Socinian” had in fact by the middle
of the seventeenth century come specifically to denote someone who
accepted Socinus’s refutation of the idea of the Trinity. The doctrine of
the co-equality and co-essentiality of the three persons of the Trinity,
forged at the fourth-century Council of Nicaea, is surely to this day
the foundation of most Christian theologies, which still see the three
persons of the godhead as distinct and distinguishable as they are
inseparably, and unimaginably, united in one divine being, “God.”
Noting the absence of credible scriptural evidence to the contrary,
the Socinians propounded the belief that Christ, although begotten
on Mary by the Holy Spirit himself (as reported in scripture), had
no existence in heaven before the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. It
is true that for Socinus and his followers, Christ would come to be

John Rogers 89
“adopted” by the Father into a subordinate position of divinity upon
his ascension to heaven after his crucifixion and resurrection. And it
is true that the Socinian Christ, after that post-ascension exaltation
to a heavenly lordship, could at later points in time be deputized by
the Father to perform heavenly work as if he were “God,” or, as the
Socinian preferred to call the Son when acting as the Father’s proxy,
“the Lord God.” But the Socinian Son nonetheless had no existence
either in heaven or on earth before Jesus’s nativity. Throughout the
seventeenth century, Socinians were widely denounced as modern-
day Arians, that sect anathematized at the Council of Nicaea in 318.
But Socinians did not, as the notoriously anti-Trinitarian Arians had
twelve centuries before, date the generation of the Son of God to a
premundane point in time, to a moment before the creation either of
the heavens or of the known universe.
There is, to be sure, ample evidence of both Newton’s and Milton’s
serious engagements with the philosophically rigorous, juridically
minded writings of Socinus and of second-generation Socinians
like Jan Crell. The pages of Maurice Kelley’s edition of Milton’s On
Christian Doctrine are filled with notes of Milton’s specific borrowings
from Socinian theology for his argument against the existence of the
Trinity in chapter five of the treatise. And Newton’s manuscripts seem
everywhere to evince a range of Socinian positions that Newton took
up, and sometimes discarded, over what is likely a period of many
years; there is in addition the smoking gun of Newton’s ownership of
at least eight volumes of Socinian theology.28 But as invested as Milton
and Newton may have been in some of the ethical and philosophical
questions about Christianity that Socinianism had pushed so rigorously,
neither the physicist nor the poet could commit to the Socinian doctrine
that Christ had had no existence in heaven before the birth of Jesus.
For both men, a motive for rejecting the Socinian dating of the
creation of the Son flowed from a shared commitment, though on
different grounds, to the ancients. Unable to imagine a world in
which the sages of classical culture and the prophets of the Bible were
excluded from the truths of Christianity, Milton and Newton gravitated
to the oldest of Christianity’s anti-Trinitarian heresies, which happened
also to posit the oldest anti-Trinitarian Christ. For Milton, the pres-
sure to reject Socinianism involved the problem of the salvation of the
ancients. If one can only be “saved by means of Christ,” as Milton would
argue in one of the chapters in On Christian Doctrine (De Doctrina
Christiana) most influenced by the final section of Socinus’s treatise
De Jesu Christo Servatore, then, it would seem for Milton, Christ had

90 Newton’s Arian Epistemology

to be created in time to save the virtuous Hebrews and pagans who
lived before the life of Jesus:

It does not seem surprising that there are a lot of Jews, and Gentiles
too, who are saved although they believed or believe in God alone,
either because they lived before Christ or because, even though they
have lived after him, he has not been revealed to them. In spite of
this they are saved by means of Christ, for he was given and sacrificed
from the beginning of the world even for those to whom he was not
known and who believed only in God the Father. Thus those illustrious
men who lived under the law, Abel, Enoch, Noah, etc., are honoured
with an attestation of their true faith, although it is stated that they
believed only in God.29

God honors Abel, Enoch, and Noah as Christians, as attesters of the

true faith in Christ, even though they only knew to believe in God the
Father. Tolerant and inclusive, Milton’s God, as is suggested by the
mention of the Gentiles, seemed likely also to consider as Christians the
likes of Socrates and Quintius.30 Paradise Lost would make especially
plain the importance, with respect to the salvation of the ancients,
of Christ’s existence before the nativity of Jesus. Adam and Eve will
at the beginning of book eleven offer to God their heartfelt repen-
tance for their sin. Eager to assure us of their salvation, despite their
existence before the earthly revelation of Christ, Milton will daringly
depict a hitherto unrepresented act of mediation performed by the
preexisting Son of God.31 Because man, however earnestly repentant,
is “Unskilful with what words to pray,” the Son offers to accommodate
for the Father man’s feeble prayers: “Let me / Interpret for him”
(PL, 11.32–33). Long before his incarnation as the human Jesus, the
Son works to save Adam and Eve by performing an act of interpretive
verbal mediation for the benefit of the Father. Committed to saving
the greatest of the ancient Hebrews and the Gentiles, Milton had no
choice but to spurn the Socinianism of his own day and revive the most
ancient of the heretical anti-Trinitarian theologies available to him.
Like Milton, Newton was led to reject modern-day Socinianism out
of a concern for the long period of ancient history before the birth of
Christ. The manuscript drafts of Newton’s projected history of the early
church reveal his strong, heterodox belief that Christ had appeared,
in person, to the great Hebrew Patriarchs: he “appeared to Adam in
Paradise & to Cain & Noah & the Patriarchs & Moses & Ioshuah”
(“D,” 85r). A good deal of research into the rich trove of Newton’s
still-unpublished manuscript speculations has shown us, additionally,

John Rogers 91
an image of the scientist deeply invested in the epistemological fantasy
of the prisca sapientia, or ancient wisdom, the belief that in both
scripture and classical literature there is expressed a hidden knowledge
of the truths commonly thought to be discovered first in the modern
age. For Newton, an examination of the ancients, whether Hebrew,
Greek, or Roman, could bring to light the previously hidden fact of
the ancient knowledge of the same mechanical laws of nature that
contemporary natural philosophers, Newton in particular, were only
now bringing back into view. An essential feature of Newton’s faith in
the prisca sapientia was the conviction that the ancients were in no
way dependent on divine revelation for the knowledge they acquired
of the laws of nature.32 The mechanical and geometric truths struc-
turing physical existence were discoverable by the natural power of
reason, by means of which man could discern the facts of nature as
well as acquire a rudimentary knowledge of God. And it was by the
same application of natural reason employed by Newton himself that
the ancients had preempted Newton’s scientific discoveries, which
were never anything more than modern re-discoveries. It was not an
anxiety of influence from which Isaac Newton suffered, but an anxiety
of originality. Concerned, as noted earlier, to prove to himself that his
discovery of the physical laws of the universe had involved no trans-
gression of illicit divine secrets, Newton was powerfully motivated to
unearth evidence that he was not the first to reveal the truth of the
mathematical principles by which creation operates. The mechanical
principles at the heart of creation were in no way divine secrets, but
physical truths accessible to man from the beginning of recorded
history. And as we will see, it is his commitment to the transhistorical,
rational accessibility of the world’s mechanical laws that drew Newton
to Arianism.
It must not be thought, I should add, that Arianism was in any
way a likely form of heterodoxy on which Newton, or any of his
contemporaries, might light. There is little evidence to suggest that
there existed in early modern England a serious or widespread Arian
movement, intellectual, congregational, or otherwise. Even Maurice
Wiles, whose book Archetypal Heresy contains the best analysis of
Newton’s Arianism, can find few early modern Arians besides Newton,
Clarke, and William Whiston, all men who knew each other well, and
whose culturally idiosyncratic theological interests seem largely to
have emerged as a consequence of their complex but intimate intel-
lectual and social entanglements with one another. Newton, Clarke,
and Whiston, and Milton in the preceding generation, were not Arians

92 Newton’s Arian Epistemology

because they found themselves gravitating to an exciting contemporary
intellectual movement. The only Arian texts readily available were
the ample, but derogatorily framed, citations of Arius in the writings
of Athanasius (the fourth-century church father who triumphed over
Arius and his followers at the Council of Nicaea, and whose decep-
tive villainy the obsessive and perhaps even paranoid Newton devoted
hundreds of manuscript pages to exposing). Milton and Newton were
attuned to the exciting contemporary analysis of Trinitarian orthodoxy
emerging from the vibrant, and quickly evolving, theological engage-
ments of seventeenth-century Socinians. But they found themselves
rejecting many aspects of that contemporary heresy, and, I conjecture,
for much the same reason. The Socinian creator was the Father,
remote, inscrutable, and ultimately arbitrary in his administration of
the redemption and in his proclamation of commands to be obeyed.
As logically organized as Socinianism itself was, as ready as it was to
think of divine justice in the culturally accessible juridical terms of
Roman law, the Socinian God was bound by no strictures of reason
or necessity; he was the very embodiment of will and arbitrary power;
and his ways could only be known as they were revealed in scripture.33
The Socinian creator was not one whose creation could be known or
experienced with the epistemological certainty that both Milton and
Newton required. Turning instead to the church father Athanasius,
and constructing a version of Arianism out of the fragmented record
that his heresiographical writing had ironically kept alive, Milton
and Newton constructed a version of an ancient heresy that enabled
them to imagine the created world as a phenomenon that could be
understood and known.

IV. TASK TRANSFERRED FROM FATHER TO HIS SON

Who created the world that the poet and the physicist were
determined to understand and know? The evidence suggests that the
answer to that question, for Milton, was not as straightforward as one
might expect. In his theological treatise On Christian Doctrine, likely
written a few years before he began work on Paradise Lost, Milton
takes pains, as he works to confute the errors of Trinitarianism, to
establish the Father as the only supreme God and the only prime
agent in the work of creation. Milton’s Arian Father and his created
and therefore inferior Son were not, Milton insists in the treatise, equal
collaborators in the work of creation: “For the Father is not only he by
whom [a quo], but also he from whom, in whom, through whom, and

John Rogers 93
on account of whom all things are . . . inasmuch as he comprehends
within himself all lesser causes. But the Son is only he through whom
[per quem] all things are, and is therefore the less principal cause.”34
Laboring to assert the traditional Arian position of the superiority of
the uncreated Father to the created Son, Milton would insist in the
treatise that the world could not be considered created “by” the Son,
for the Son was only the vehicle through whom the Father actively
performed the work of creation. In Paradise Lost, however, Milton
will wrest from the Father some of his exclusive creative agency and
ascribe it to the Son. With respect to the first act of creation—the
production of heaven and the angels—the pious angel Abdiel, in his
argument with Satan after the Son’s exaltation to his headship over
the angels, describes the begotten Son as he
by whom
As by his Word the mighty Father made
All things, ev’n thee, and all the spirits of Heav’n.
(PL, 5.835–37; emphasis mine)

Abdiel will go even further to add an appositive phrase to the line

just quoted about the createdness of “all the spirits of Heav’n”: “By
him created in thir bright degrees” (PL, 5.838). The spirits of heaven
are created by him? Who is he? The zealous Abdiel, we are obliged
to assume, is likely toeing the official Miltonic theological line here,
reproducing Milton’s argument from On Christian Doctrine to imply
that the angels were “created by” the Father. But the syntactically
most obvious reading of Abdiel’s “him” in line 538 is the created
Son, who will unquestionably occupy the pronouns “he” and “his”
in the lines just following: the pronominal antecedent in “his reign”
(PL, 5.841) and “he the head” (PL, 5.842) is unmistakably the Son.
Where the treatise is unequivocal in its attribution of the primary action
of creation to the Father, the poem, eager to establish the bona fides
of its hero the Son, permits itself to waver on the crucial question of
creation’s principal cause. Satan, to be sure, senses immediately the
implications of Abdiel’s lack of clarity on the question of the agency
behind creation. He hears in Abdiel’s argument not Milton’s official
claim that the Son was merely he through whom the Father performed
the work of creation, but a claim rather that the Son was the creator
himself, having been given by the Father sole responsibility for that
originary act of creation that produced heaven and the angels. Abdiel
has implicitly asserted, Satan suggests, that the creation of heaven and
the angels was not the work of the Father, but rather

94 Newton’s Arian Epistemology

 the work
Of secondary hands, by task transferred
From Father to his Son.
(PL, 5.853–55)

Poised to mount his own, far more heretical, argument for angelic
self-creation, Satan is in fact eager to counter any theory of the divine
creation of heaven and the angels, whether that theory posits the
Father or the Son as the principal agent of creation. But in teasing out
the logic of Abdiel’s implicitly Son-centered cosmogony, Satan unveils
for us the boldness with which Milton will make the heretical Arian
theology of his Christian Doctrine even more heretical in Paradise Lost.
The next creation in which the Son plays a part in Paradise Lost
is, at least for us humans, of greater significance than that of heaven
and the angels. The creation of the known universe will be duti-
fully framed by the narrating angel Raphael as the product of “The
Almighty’s will” (PL, 7.181). But the actual work of creation, put into
effect by the Son alone, is presented unequivocally as a task transferred
from the Father to the Son: Milton makes it virtually impossible for
us to imagine the Son as the passive vehicle “through whom” the
Almighty Father creates. “With Radiance crown’d / Of Majesty Divine”
(PL, 7.192–93), the Son begins the work of creation as the grandest
of heroes at the launch of a splendid martial excursion:
the Son
On his great Expedition now appear’d,
Girt with Omnipotence.
(PL, 7.193–95)

Attuned to the etymology of his startling noun “Expedition,” Milton

represents the Son at the verge of this most consequential act of
creation as one who has been literally expedited, or whose feet have
been set free (from Latin ex + pedis). Fully authorized by, and now
unfettered by, the Father, the Son has been released from the shackles
of filial duty and is empowered to make something new. But it is the
poet, Milton, embarking on his heretical representation of the crea-
turely creator, who emerges at this moment as the most unfettered:
freed from the constraints of theological propriety that had in the
treatise limited the agency behind creation to the Father alone, Milton
boldly asks us to imagine the labor of creation as one undertaken
entirely by the first of creatures.
Newton will follow Milton’s lead in the heretical representation of the
creation as a task transferred, a work of secondary hands. Instinctively

John Rogers 95
more cautious than Milton, and less prepared than the poet to face the
consequences of a direct articulation of Christological heresy, Newton
will not permit himself explicitly to say in print that the universe was
created by a creature. But a careful reading of his explanation of the
agent behind creation in the 1713 “General Scholium” reveals Newton’s
unmistakably heretical daring. As we have seen, Newton is at pains to
establish at once the alterity and the familiarity of the creator, to whom
he will refer with prudent, noncommittal opacity as “this Being.” But
he is also concerned to parse the difference between the “Supreme
God,” the uncreated being Milton will call the “Father,” from the “Son
of God,” the created being who can occupy an appointed position of
dominion over the entire world and thus merit the title “Lord God”
or “Universal Ruler”:

This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as
Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called
Lord God . . . or Universal Ruler; for God is a relative word, and
has a respect to servants; and Deity is the dominion of God not over
his own body, as those imagine who fancy God to be the soul of the
world, but over servants. The Supreme God is a Being eternal, infinite,
absolutely perfect; but a being, however perfect, without dominion,
cannot be said to be Lord God; for we say, my God, your God, the
God of Israel, the God of Gods, and Lord of Lords; but we do not say,
my Eternal, your Eternal, the Eternal of Israel, the Eternal of Gods;
we do not say, my Infinite, or my Perfect: these are titles which have
no respect to servants. The word God usually signifies Lord; but every
lord is not a God. (M, 389)

In Paradise Lost, the Arian Milton had exposed his heretical under-
standing of the essential distinction between Father and Son only
to the fittest of readers. When Milton’s Father proclaims the Son’s
“Vice-gerent Reign” (PL, 5.609) to the assembled angels in heaven
in book five of Paradise Lost, he announces the honorific to which
the promoted Son will be entitled: you “shall confess him Lord”
(PL, 5.608). Elsewhere in the epic, Milton’s Son passes as “God,” and
is called “God” by the narrator of Paradise Lost, even the “King of
Glory,” when he plays his official role in the events of the creation and
of the judgment of Adam and Eve after the fall (PL, 7.208). But while
in Paradise Lost, Milton’s careful if subtle signposting makes it clear
whether the figure called God is the Father or Son, in the published
writings of the more cautious Newton, that distinction is not always
treated with the precision it might seem logically to deserve. The

96 Newton’s Arian Epistemology

figure to whom Newton refers as God in the “Scholium” seems at
times to have the characteristics of the Father, and is often referred
to by Newton as the “Supreme God,” a title, like that of the Arian’s
designation “most high,” that certainly suggests the Father: uncreated,
he and he alone is “eternal.” But at least as often, the being hailed
as God in the “Scholium” appears to do the work of the Son, or the
figure to whom Newton refers as the “Lord God.”35
In the public space of the “General Scholium” of the second edition
of the Principia, Newton takes pains not explicitly to betray the
heretical identity of the Creator as the creaturely Arian Son of God.
But as Milton had in the theological treatise, Newton articulates the
relative status of the terms “God” and “Lord,” either of which can be
meaningfully applied in different circumstances to either the Father
or the Son. Newton is concerned to avoid any discriminating reference
that mentions either the “Father” or the “Son” in his discussion of
“God,” but the “Being” called “Lord” or “God” can in fact for Newton
be either Father or Son, as Newton makes clear in one of the more
unguarded moments in a manuscript version of his Arian speculation
in the “Scholium.”36
When Newton in the “Scholium” muses on the divine governor’s
provisional entitlement to the appellation “Lord God,” the logic of his
distinction between appointed Lord and the eternal “Supreme God”
obliges us to understand the identity of that “Universal Ruler” not
as the creator Father but the creature Son. It is no one but the Son,
the being who for Newton in the “General Scholium” “governs all
things,” who serves as Newton’s creator. “God does nothing by himself,”
Newton had once speculated, “which he can do by another”; and it is
this radically delegatory impulse of the Father’s by which the work of
creation was placed in the hands of the created Son.37
In one of the drafts of his history of the church, Newton depicts “the
first age of Christianity” as a pre-Trinitarian ecclesiastical community
tolerant of distinct positions on matters of Christology (“D,” 116r).
Mapping onto the religious culture of the early church the theological
tensions by which he was himself riven, Newton pictures the civil
relations between two groups who disagreed on the chronology of the
Father’s creation of Christ:

For in the first age of Christianity there were Christians (especially

among the Iews) who beleived that Iesus took his beginning from
the Virgin Mary, & for his vertue was chosen before other men &
annointed king of the Iews by the Holy Ghost & thence called the

John Rogers 97
 Messiah or Christ that is the annointed, & there were other Christians
(especially among the Gentiles) who beleived that Iesus was before
the world began & that the world was created by him. And these two
sorts of Christians conversed together as brethren & communicated
with one another as members of the Catholick Ch. (“D,” 15.7, 122v)

It was universally understood in the ancient church that Christ was

created. But the early Jewish Christians, “who believed that Iesus took
his beginning from the Virgin Mary,” clearly anticipated, for Newton,
the early modern Socinians, who dated the creation of Christ to the
birth of Jesus. And the early Gentile Christians, “who believed that
Iesus was before the world began,” looked ahead to the Arians whom
Newton himself favored, the early Christians who alone held the real
truth of the Father’s premundane creation of Christ. Newton goes
even further here, and throughout his manuscript drafts, to insist that
the proto-Arian Gentile Christians also maintained the belief—one to
which Newton himself subscribed—that the “world was created by” the
creature Christ. And, in fact, throughout the drafts for his ecclesiastical
history, Newton would insist that the secret truth embraced by the
earliest Gentile Christians, a truth whose content was so unassimilable
that the church would never compel its members to subscribe to it,
was the doctrine of Christ’s creation of the universe. It was under-
standable, Newton explained, that one of the earliest and most liberal
of the church’s creeds, the Apostles’ Creed, held its adherents to the
minimal belief in the Father’s creation of the world. But the higher,
more challenging, truth, for Newton, was the fact that the “God” who
created the universe was not the Father, but the created Son. Newton
would explain repeatedly in these unpublished writings that the early
church wasn’t wrong to teach the simplest of the early Christians the
doctrine of the creation by the Father: the more readily acceptable
belief in the Father’s creation was designed for oral transmission to the
illiterate. But the higher truth, which Newton would always identify
as the Christological position held by the earliest Gentile Christians,
was the doctrine of “the Creation of the world by Iesus Christ”
(“D,” 102v).38 The Arian doctrine of the creation of the world by a
created Christ was so controversial, so difficult to accept, Newton
explains, that the church never required its acceptance for baptism or
communion, and never held it to be a necessary belief for the purpose
of salvation. But, as Newton makes clear in his private heretical
musings, it was true.

98 Newton’s Arian Epistemology

 V. UNDERSTANDING CREATION

Our inferiority to divinity, whether God or angel, is, for both Newton
and Milton, a fact; but despite Newton’s insistence on God’s qualitative
otherness, man’s inferiority emerges in Newton, as it does in Milton,
as one more of degree than of kind. For Milton, it is in part by virtue
of the radical ontological affinity we share with a divine being like that
of the angel that we are able, as human creatures, both to “read the
secrets of the hoary deep” (PL, 2.891) and “justify the way of God to
men” (PL,1.26). For Newton, the implications of our ontological ties
to divinity may be even more radical. More unequivocally than Milton,
Newton abbreviates the epistemological gulf between God and man,
ennobling the human modes of sensory perception by attributing a
version of them not merely to an angel, but to the creating “God”
himself. Against the backdrop of a continuum containing both the
human and divine modes of perception and understanding, the natural
world could be imagined all the more readily to yield to the inquiries
of the perceptive and understanding natural philosopher.
Milton’s Son in Paradise Lost takes his golden compasses from
God’s eternal store, and demonstrates his geometric acumen, or
understanding, by circumscribing “this Universe, and all created
things” (PL, 7.227). Might we not think that the agent of creation in
Paradise Lost must be himself a created being because his very creat-
edness makes possible the seamless continuum of earth and heaven in
Milton’s poem? When wondering how he might “unfould” for Adam
the “secrets of another world” as he begins his narrative of the events
leading up to the war in heaven, Raphael suggests initially that he can
delineate those events solely by the work of analogy, likening spiritual
to corporal forms:
how last unfould
The secrets of another world, perhaps
Not lawful to reveal? yet for thy good
This is dispenc’t, and what surmounts the reach
Of human sense, I shall delineate so,
By lik’ning spiritual to corporal forms,
As may express them best; though what if Earth
Be but a shaddow of Heav’n, and things therein
Each t’ other like, more then on earth is thought?
(PL, 5.568–76)

No sooner has Raphael explained the requirement to accommodate

heavenly truth in a discursive form accessible to man than he offers

John Rogers 99
a speculation about an even closer relation of spiritual to corporal
forms than the one of analogy. What if, he asks, things on earth and
heaven be “each t’ other like, more then on earth is thought?” What
if the tie that binds earth and heaven owes more to their ontological
continuity than to a mere rhetorical trick of analogy, or accommoda-
tion? The creaturely perception of time, Raphael conjectures, may well
be adequate to the work of understanding the seemingly otherworldly
phenomenon of eternity. Our human sense of time may be meaningfully
applied to all matter in motion, measuring present, past, and future
even in the eternity of heaven.
When Milton’s narrating archangel Raphael resumes the topic of
creation next, in the epic’s book 7, it becomes clearer why Milton would
in Paradise Lost counter his own theological position in the Christian
Doctrine and encourage our sense that the world’s real creator is not
the uncreated Father but the created Son. The Son has also been
given the honorific title of the “Word,” and it is as God’s “Word” that
the Son “g[i]ve[s] effect” to the Father’s verbal command of creation:
So spake th’ Almightie, and to what he spake
His Word, the Filial Godhead, gave effect.
Immediate are the Acts of God, more swift
Then time or motion, but to human ears
Cannot without process of speech be told,
So told as earthly notion can receave.
(PL, 7.174–79)

In juxtaposing in this passage the Son’s work of creation and the poet’s
(and our) work of understanding that creation, Milton minimizes any
significant distinction between the theological problem of creation
and the epistemological problem of the human comprehension of that
creation. It is a “process of speech” by which Raphael accommodates
the divine truth of creation, making it assimilable to the “earthly notion”
by which Adam can receive the truth. And, in a manner that Milton
does not assert, but certainly implies, it is also a “process of speech”
by which the Son will create at the Father’s command: the Almighty
speaks, and the Son, who almost seems begotten into existence as the
very “Word” spoken, puts the command of creation into effect. Through
the mediatory work of Milton’s created Son, a mysteriously verbal form
of creaturely understanding, straddling the seemingly distinct spheres
of the divine and human, at once effects the creation itself and makes
that creation knowable by the human creature.

100 Newton’s Arian Epistemology

 Newton, I suggest, follows Milton’s Raphael in his hopeful equivoca-
tion on the epistemologically loaded question of the likeness of earth
to heaven. Where Milton’s Raphael suggested that earth and heaven
may be more like one another than we typically think here on earth,
Newton would in the “General Scholium” posit a “certain similitude”
between man and God, “which, though not perfect, has some like-
ness.” If the Arian myth of the creature’s creation of the universe could
provide a conceptual foundation for some of the more radical aspects
of Raphael’s epistemological musings in Paradise Lost, in Newton
the myth would do even more. Newton’s Arian speculations suggests
that he was able, at least at times, to imagine a Son far more radically
creaturely than anything Milton asks us to envision in Paradise Lost.
In what form did Newton’s Arian Christ create the world? Was
it in this shockingly personal, human shape, in the “consistence of
flesh and bones,” that the Son created the universe and the human
beings therein?39 In a daring conjecture he never published, Newton
explained that the Son, as the “Word” invoked in the gospel of
John, “was made flesh” because his being could be knowable only
through the senses of the flesh (John 1:1, Authorized Version). As
his corporeality was that by “which he had been visible & audible
& tangible,” it was only by his embodiment that we could see, hear,
and touch—in short, for the empiricist Newton, to know—his being
(“D,” 15.5, 96v). Creation can be understood and known through the
senses only because the embodied creator could be sensed.
Or was it in a different, more alien, consistency altogether, in which
Newton’s Son of God chose to perform the work of creation? We had
noted earlier Newton’s suggestion in the “General Scholium” that
God was a living, personal, deliberative being. And we had noted the
tension between that living, personal God and the impersonal God of
natural process celebrated by Xenophanes, Pliny, and surely others
who invoked an image of an impersonal divine being, all eye, all ear,
whose diffusely extended corporeality was, like the God of the deists,
identical to the world itself. The difference between a thinking being
external to creation and a being-as-process identical with creation may
have struck us as a stark one, and one that exposed a contradiction in
Newton’s thinking about God and his creation. But Newton’s use of
Milton’s radical image of free, unfettered divine choice may well have
enabled him to imagine his creator as either a personal God or a God
of impersonal process. The decidedly Miltonic freedom that Newton
accords his Son enables that creator to choose, “by the power of his
will,” whether to assume a familiarly personal shape in the human form

John Rogers 101

of “flesh and bones,” or to distribute, or dissipate, his perceptual and
comprehensive faculties throughout the entirety of creation, willing
himself into the form, when he chooses, of the abstract God of the
deists, or of the God of Xenophanes and Pliny before them.40
Or is it, finally, that Newton’s Son of God chooses both modes of
being as he performs the work of creation, in the way, say, that Milton’s
angels “Can either Sex assume, or both” (PL, 1.424)? It is, I would
suggest, both the personal God and the God of impersonal spatial
extension of whom Newton writes in one of the most famous, indeed
notorious, passages of the 1706 edition of the Opticks, in which space is
described as God’s “boundless uniform Sensorium”: “God, a powerful,
ever-living Agent, who being in all Places, is more able by his Will to
move the Bodies within his boundless uniform Sensorium, and thereby
to form and reform the Parts of the Universe, than we are by our Will
to move the Parts of our own Bodies.”41 Here in the Opticks, it is not
just that the living, deliberative God has willed himself into the form
of the Miltonic angel who is all eye, all ear. All of space—saturated, it
would seem, by God’s homogeneously diffused sensation—is itself all
eye, all ear, all brain. And this space, which certainly seems coextensive
with God as a disintegrated form of homogeneously percipient omni-
presence, is at the same time inexplicably governable by the personal
will of the ever-living, but created, creator Son. Newton’s creator
must be both the personal God of Irenaeus and the impersonal God
of Xenophanes and Pliny, because both modes of divine manifestation
are required if the human inquirer is to understand and know creation.
The “uniform Sensorium” by which God accommodates himself in
the radically sensate world makes creation perceivable by the senses
of the scientist. But the creator God must also be a God of delibera-
tive will, because the human inquirer’s will to understand must find
its answer in the divine creator’s will to be understood. Because the
creator God invoked in the published editions of the Principia and
the Opticks is discoverable as the creaturely Arian Son of God, then
the physical space of the universe, materially constituted by Christ’s
bodily capacities for perception and understanding, is lying in wait for
the perception and understanding of the natural philosopher seeking
both to know God and to divine his invisible laws.
Newton nowhere draws together the coordinated actions of creation
and inquiry so clearly as in a letter he wrote to the future editor and
annotator of Paradise Lost, Dr. Bentley. No first agent, or God, Newton
explains to Bentley, could have created “the beautiful system of sun,
planets, and comets” had he not

102 Newton’s Arian Epistemology

 understood & compared together the quantities of matter in the several
bodies of the Sun & Planets & the gravitating powers resulting from
thence. . . . And to compare & adjust all these things together in so
great a variety of bodies argues that cause to be not blind & fortuitous,
but very well skilled in Mechanicks & Geometry.42

In this most shocking of all Newton’s accounts of creation, the creator

is seen not merely to make possible the human scientist’s discovery
of the laws that govern the universe’s system of planets and stars.
The creator is not even presented unequivocally here as the origin of
those physical laws. The creator rather must be a “very well skilled”
scientist himself, since the work of creation is dependent on his prior
understanding of the mechanical laws of nature whose origin may well
exist outside himself. The created Son, or the “Lord God” of creation,
and the created physicist, or Sir Isaac Newton of the Principia and the
Opticks, are engaged in a mutual, creative activity of perceiving and
understanding. As a percipient and understanding being himself, the
inquirer into the mechanic and geometric laws of nature reproduces
the filial God’s labor at the creation, a labor that appears in the letter
to Bentley to be one of skilled scientific understanding. Newton’s
version of the time-honored heresy of Arianism lays the groundwork
for a shockingly level epistemological playing field: the mechanical laws
of the universe can be understood by the natural philosopher skilled
in mechanics and geometry because they have first been understood
by the creator, likewise skilled in mechanics and geometry, and like-
wise tasked with the obligation to perceive and understand. Perhaps
the only creator that Newton could believe in, and certainly the only
creator Newton could know, was a fellow creature whose genius for
understanding the laws of the universe could begin to rival his own.
Yale University
NOTES
I would like to thank Brian Cummings, Andrew Hadfield, and Rob Iliffe for their
invitation to participate in a conference on Milton and Newton at the University of
Sussex, and to thank Stephen Fallon and Andrea Walkden for their valuable comments
on an earlier version of this essay.
1
Maurice Wiles, Archetypal Heresy: Arianism through the Centuries (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1996).
2
The common scriptural phrase “most high,” one of the most common Old Testament
epithets for God (Gen. 14:20, for example), was frequently cited by anti-Trinitarians
as scriptural proof that the Father alone was the supreme deity. See John Smith, A
Designed End to the Socinian Controversie: Or a Rational and Plain Discourse to Prove
that No Other Person but the Father of Christ is God Most High (London, 1695). The

John Rogers 103

epithet could function as code for an anti-Trinitarian perspective, as in Paradise Lost
(12.120), or Newton’s Observations on the Prophesies of Daniel and the Apocalypse
of St. John (London, 1733), 31.
3
Other considerations of the ties connecting John Milton and Isaac Newton
include Joseph Anthony Wittreich, “The Poetry of the Rainbow: Milton and Newton
among the Prophets,” in Poetic Prophecy in Western Literature, ed. Jan Wojcik and
Raymond-Jean Frontain (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1984), 94–105;
Rachel Trubowitz, “Reading Milton and Newton in the Radical Reformation: Poetry,
Mathematics, and Religion,” ELH 84.1 (2017): 33–62; and Stephen M. Fallon, “Milton,
Newton, and the Implications of Arianism,” Milton in the Long Restoration, ed. Blair
Hoxby and Ann Baynes Coiro (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2016), 319–34.
4
For a detailed discussion of the Socinian influence on later Arminian, or
“Remonstrant,” theology, see Jan Rohls’s excellent essay, “Calvinism, Arminianism
and Socinianism in the Netherlands until the Synod of Dort,” in Socinianism and
Arminianism: Antitrinitarians, Calvinists, and Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-
Century Europe, ed. Martin Mulsow (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 1–48.
5
Milton argues for the arbitrary, as opposed to the necessary, creation of the Son in
On Christian Doctrine; see Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 7 vol., ed. Maurice
Kelley (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1972), 6:211. For a discussion of Milton’s reliance
on the principle of divine freedom for the notion of human freedom, see my essay,
“The Political Theology of Milton’s Heaven,” in The New Milton Criticism, ed. Peter
C. Herman (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012), 68–84.
6
On Newton’s opposition to deism, see James E. Force, “Newton’s God of Dominion:
The Unity of Newton’s Theological, Scientific, and Political Thought,” in Essays on
the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton’s Theology, ed. Force (Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), 75–90.
7
One of the best discussions of deism, and of Milton’s relation thereto, can be found
in Abraham Stoll, Milton and Monotheism (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, 2009).
8
Richard S. Westfall makes the case for the implicit deism of Newton’s theology;
see “Isaac Newton’s Theologiae Gentilis Origines Philosophicae,” in The Secular Mind:
Transformations of Faith in Modern Europe, ed. W. W. Wagar (New York: Holmes &
Meier, 1982), 15–34. Force argues strenuously against the idea; see “The Newtonians
and Deism,” in Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton’s
Theology, 43–76.
9
Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 2 vol., trans. Andrew
Motte (London: Benjamin Motte, 1729), 2:387. Hereafter abbreviated M and cited
parenthetically by volume and page number.
10
Newton, “Drafts on the history of the Church (Section 6),” Yahuda Manuscript 15.6,
fol. 109v, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, circa 1710–1720. Hereafter abbreviated
“D” and cited parenthetically by manuscript and folio number.
11
Robert M. Grant discusses Irenaeus’s several Christianized versions of Xenophanes’s
image of God; see Gods and the One God, in Library of Early Christianity, ed. Wayne
A. Meeks (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986), 89–90.
12
Translation of Xenophanes by James Adams, Religious Teachers of Greece; being
Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Aberdeen (Edinburgh: T. & T.
Clark, 1908), 198–211.
13
Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the
Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006), 439.

104 Newton’s Arian Epistemology

 14
Pliny the Elder, Pliny’s Natural History, in Thirty-Seven Books, 2 vol., trans.
Philemon Holland (London: Wernerian Club, 1847): 1:35. Jacob Bryant noted Newton’s
indebtedness to Pliny’s “totus visus totus auditus” in Treatise upon the Authenticity of
the Scriptures and the Truth of the Christian Religion (Cambridge: T. Cadell, 1793).
15
Milton, The Complete Poetry of John Milton, ed. John T. Shawcross (New York:
Anchor, 1971), book 6, lines 344–53. Hereafter abbreviated PL and cited parentheti-
cally by book and line number.
16
Noel K. Sugimura has noted the debt here to Pliny; see “Matter of Glorious
Trial”: Spiritual and Material Substance in “Paradise Lost” (New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press, 2009), 177.
17
I discuss Milton’s later use of the Xenophanic image in Samson Agonistes; see “The
Secret of Samson Agonistes,” in The Miltonic Samson, ed. Michael Lieb and Albert
Labriola (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1996).
18
Although it is with perhaps too much confidence that he suggests that “Newton did
not read Milton,” Fallon offers a valuable account of the “active intellectual networks”
by which the two men were likely connected (329).
19
See Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1983), esp. 57.
20
Richard De Villamil, Newton: The Man (London: Gordon D. Knox, 1931), 9.
21
Quoted in Westfall, Never at Rest, 581.
22
Quoted in Michael Bauman, Milton’s Arianism (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1986), 283.
23
Quoted in Bauman, 283. See also Fallon, who offers evidence of some later
eighteenth-century opinions on the heretical Christology of Paradise Lost (324). The
importance for Milton of his turn to Arianism is discussed by John Rumrich, “Milton’s
Arianism: Why It Matters,” in Milton and Heresy, ed. Stephen B. Dobranski (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 76.
24
Frank Manuel explains that “in manuscript scholia to the Principia that date from
the end of the seventeenth century he [Newton] expounded his belief that a whole
line of ancient philosophers had held to the atomic theory of matter, a conception of
the void, the universality of gravitational force, and even the inverse square law” (The
Religion of Isaac Newton [Oxford: Clarendon, 1974], 23–24).
25
Manuel, 23.
26
See the excellent account of the early modern response to the De Jesu Christo
Servatore (1594) in the first chapter of Sarah Mortimer’s Reason and Religion in the
English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 2009). Although his focus isn’t trained on Socinianism, the same phenomenon
is traced, with respect to Anglican theology of the later seventeenth century, by C. F.
Allison, The Rise of Moralism: The Proclamation of the Gospel from Hooker to Baxter
(New York: Seabury Press, 1966).
27
See Dewey D. Wallace, Jr., “Socialism, Justification by Faith, and the Sources of
John Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity,” Journal of the History of Ideas,
45.1 (1984): 49–66.
28
Treatments of Newton’s interest in Socinianism can be found in Robert Wallace,
Antitrinitarian Biography, 3 vol. (London: Whitfield, 1850), 3:428–68; and especially
in Stephen David Snobelen, “Isaac Newton, heretic: the strategies of a Nicodemite,”
The British Journal for the History of Science 32 (1999): 381–419; and “Isaac Newton,
Socinianism and ‘The One Supreme God,’” in Socinianism and Arminianism, 241–97.
29
Milton, On Christian Doctrine, ed. Maurice Kelley and trans. John Carey, in
Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vol. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1953–82),
6:475.

John Rogers 105

 30
In Paradise Regained the Son of God names Socrates the “first and wisest” of all
the ancient philosophers (4.293–94). David Quint has suggested to me that the Son in
that poem also, perhaps more surprisingly, “esteem[s] the names of” the upstanding
Romans “Quintius, Fabricius, Curius, Regulus” (2.446–47).
31
See my discussion of the heretical anti-Trinitarian conceptual foundation of this
scene in Paradise Lost (“Milton and the Heretical Priesthood of Christ,” in Heresy,
Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, ed. David Loewenstein
[Cambridge: Cambridge: Univ. Press, 2006], 203–20).
32
On Newton’s belief in the prisca sapientia, see J. E. McGuire and M. Rattansi,
“Newton and the ‘Pipes of Pan,’” Records of the Royal Society of London, 21.2 (1966):
126–134; and Manuel, 23–24, 43, 88.
33
See John C. Godbey, “Interpretations of Socinian Theology,” Proceedings of the
Unitarian Universalist Historical Society 20.2 (1985): 62–75, esp. 66.
34
Milton, On Christian Doctrine, 302.
35
See Newton, “Passage on the faith Christ taught the disciples,” Manuscript Source
SL255.8, fol. 1r, location unknown, circa 1710–1720, http://www.newtonproject.sussex.
ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00358. Here Newton identifies Christ, as Milton
had, as the being through whom God created the universe and the judge of Adam and
Eve. For a different perspective on the reasons for which Milton and Newton imagine
a preexistent Son of God acting as creator, see Fallon.
36
“If the father or son be called God, they take the name in a metaphysical sense
as if it signified Gods metaphysical perfections of infinite eternal omniscient omnipo-
tent whereas it relates only to Gods dominion to teach us obedience. The word God
is relative and signifies the same thing with Lord and King, but in a higher degree”
(quoted in Manuel, 21).
37
Quoted in Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy
in Newton’s Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), 37. See also Wiles, 83.
38
For the idea that the doctrine of the Father’s creation of the world was one “easily
remembred & propagated down to posterity by oral tradition amongst the barbarous
nations,” see “D,” 15, 100r.
39
Newton, “On the Church,” Martin Bodmer manuscript C-H 33, chapter 1, 10,
cited in Wiles, 82.
40
“[B]y the power of his will” is from Newton, “On the Church,” 10.
41
Newton, Opticks: Or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflexions and
Colours of Light. The Second Edition, with Additions (London: 1718), 379.
42
Newton to Richard Bentley, 10 December 1692, fol. 4A-5, 4r, Trinity College
Library, Cambridge, emphasis mine.

106 Newton’s Arian Epistemology

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