NEW BOOK: PRIEST OF NATURE

Priest of Nature is certainly not the first book to acknowledge that Newton was a deeply religious man. It is, though, one of the first to argue seriously that Newton’s faith was as important to him as his natural philosophy – if not more so. Over the past fifteen years or so a series of private papers have emerged that reveal he invested enormous industry and rigour of thought in studying Christian origins. Iliffe’s salutary achievement is to show that the writings emerging from his investigation reveal a different Newton to the man we are familiar with from histories of science. Equal parts litigator, millenarian, numerologist, moralist and paranoid conspiracy theorist, Newton probed the foundations of orthodoxy and found them wanting.

In many ways it is still hard to know quite what to make of Newton. He was so chary of his privacy that in spite of keeping a paper trail voluminous enough to assert his priority in using differential calculus nearly half a century after the event, he left only a few sparse scraps of introspection for future scholars to pick through. One suspects he would have preferred to be known to posterity through his achievements alone.

There is a sense of a life whose constituent parts have never quite been melded cogently together. 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”.

To read the complete article, see:
The oddness of Isaac Newton (https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/isaac-newton-oddness/)

For more information, or to order, see:
Priest of Nature - The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/priest-of-nature-9780199995356?cc=us&lang=en&)

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