John built a temple in his mind—and, lo and behold, God walked in. Let’s recall that not in any synagogue, but only in the Holy of Holies in the sanctuary of the temple, could God reside on Earth; the destruction of God’s home on Earth was the reason many pious Jews grieved so deeply for the loss of the temple; and, on some lofty level of creative genius, John welcomed God back into that temple in his mind that would become the narrative vehicle of the Book of Revelation.
The Book of Revelation was for Newton an immensely intricate and complex artifact. We’re used to thinking of John’s Apocalypse as having been composed in a single intense burst of inspiration. Newton did not believe this. John of Patmos was a divinely inspired prophet, to be sure. But he was no eye-rolling ecstatic. Rather, he was an artist in the classical mode, wholly in command of his creation—divinely inspired by but not intimidated by God—calm in the presence of the sublime and prophesying, as one seventeenth-century divine wrote, “from the still voice of a great humility, a sound mind, and a heart reconciled to himself and all the world.”7
The true prophet wasn’t without passion, but he was coolly scientific—almost like Isaac Newton! John constructed the Book of Revelation carefully, piece by piece, rationally, deliberately, like Praxiteles sculpted parts of the Parthenon in ancient Athens or Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican in Rome or Johann Sebastian Bach composed the Mass in B minor in the tranquillity of the Collegium Musicum in Leipsig—maybe, perhaps, a little like Isaac Newton composed the Principia Mathematica!
Still, we get the impression when we read the Book of Revelation that it is a “channeled” text; that John didn’t exactly write it but, rather, that God transmitted it to John through Jesus Christ. As such, it poses the same problem as all channeled texts: how is it that something that is ineffable, numinous, not graspable by the senses—something coming from a higher level of reality—can possibly be communicated to the hard-as-rocks physical time-space continuum in which we live? Les Misérables author Victor Hugo’s spirit guides told him this wasn’t something that could really be done: “There is no alphabet of the uncreated, there is no grammar of heaven. You don’t learn Divine like you learn Hebrew. . . . Angels are not Professors of Divine Language. . . . All that which is uncreated is unnamed, the speech of celestial language is bedazzlement, to express oneself is to be resplendent, clarity of speech is luminosity.”8
James Merrill (1926–95), the Pulitzer Prize–winning American poet whose masterpiece The Changing Light at Sandover (1981) is built out of channeled texts, explained that such texts are by nature highly subjective: “The powers they [the spirits] represent are real—as, say, gravity, is ‘real’—but they’d be invisible, inconceivable, if they’d never passed through our heads and clothed themselves out of the costume box they’d found there. How they appear depends on us, on the imaginer.”9
Isaac Newton reveals yet another unknown facet—that of an expert on channeling—when he describes what he calls the “Preamble to the Prophetic Visions,” which is Revelation 5:6–7. This preamble explains the mechanics of John’s prophesying: God gives Christ a scroll with seven seals. Christ, loosening the seals one by one, reads the scroll. The essence of the scroll is transmitted to John—but what Christ reads is not what John writes. Newton writes movingly that the contents of the scroll are “of so transcendent excellency that they were fit to be communicated to none but the Lamb. . . . You are to conceive that the Lamb opened the book for his own perusal only & that the concomitant visions which appeared to Saint John were but general & dark emblems of what was particularly & perspicuously revealed to the Lamb in this book.”10
The contents of Revelation are merely “certain visions which Saint John saw concomitant to the opening of the seals.” Christ reads, and transmits raw creative energy to John, who, seizing “the motions of some and voices of others”11 from the costume box of the Temple of Jerusalem through which the Book of Revelation is unfolding, clothes that energy in Apocalyptic visions.*19
But Isaac Newton isn’t interested in explaining channeling. His concern is to demonstrate that God wrote the “Preamble to the Prophetic Visions” to demonstrate the true nature of the relationship between God and Christ. That true nature is that Christ is not equal, but subordinate, to God. The proof of this? Christ doesn’t know the future history of the world until he reads it in the scroll God has given him. Christ doesn’t already possess the knowledge of the future history of mankind that God possesses; he is not equal to God.
The God we meet in Revelation is the God of Arius and Newton, not the God of Athanasius. Otherwise, asks Newton, “Why were we told of this book [the scroll] if it contained a revelation for the Lamb only, & not for us?” Why did God bring up the subject at all? Newton answers that
it was done in prosecution of the main design of the Apocalypse [John’s Book of Revelation], which was to describe & obviate the Great Apostasy. That Apostasy was to begin by corrupting the truth about the relation of the Son to the Father in putting them equal [as in the Doctrine of the Trinity], & therefore God began this prophecy with a demonstration of the true relation: showing the Son’s subordination, & that by an essential character: his having the knowledge of futurities only so far as the father communicates it to him. And lest you should think he had this knowledge given him from all eternity, the book was represented in the hand of God alone sealed at first.†212
This equating of Christ with God is at the heart of what Newton calls the Great Apostasy. According to Webster’s an apostasy is the “renunciation or abandonment of a former loyalty (as to a religion).” As has been mentioned in an earlier chapter, the Great Apostasy really got under way in 325, when the Council of Nicaea adopted an early form of the doctrine of the Trinity. It took on more power when it was ratified by the Council of Constantinople as the Nicene Creed in 380. So Newton is telling us that (according to the Word of God as expressed in the preamble in Revelation 5:6–7) the Book of Revelation is not only the future history of the Roman Empire and Christianity, but it is also, over and above that, the future history of the developing evil of the Great Apostasy, which will become a very dangerous idolatry because, by making Christ the equal to God, it will encourage the worship of Christ at the expense of the worship of God. And nothing is more dangerous for the soul of man, Newton seems to believe, than the failure to worship God.
To the modern reader, this seems a little exaggerated. Why not worship Jesus and God at the same time? Or why worship either? Surely Newton is taking the doctrine of the Trinity too seriously—or not. Let us recall that, according to Newton’s most intimate colleagues, the great mathematician possessed an intuitive faculty, almost a “seeing eye . . . that deep original instinct which peers through the surface of words and things—the vision which sees dimly but surely the other side of the brick wall or which follows the hunt two fields before the throng.”13 Let us bear with him through this chapter and the next, and the next, and see if a doctrine revered today by the Roman Catholic Church is actually one of the most heinous spiritual crimes in the history of mankind.*20
But the Book of Revelation is also the future history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, in that Christianity developed within its confines, and the fortunes and failures of Christianity were intertwined with those of the empire, the one continually affecting the other, as Newton will vigorously strive to demonstrate in his deciphering of the Book of Revelation.
So Newton’s interpretation of Revelation is part of his grand scheme of mapping the progressive corruption of the soul of man; in so being, it intersects with Newton’s letters to John Locke on twenty-seven corruptions of scripture and Newton’s formidable exposé of Athanasius, the man who single-handedly, and in Newton’s view fraudulently, kept the doctrine of the Trinity alive and enabled it to triumph, to, as Newton saw it, the everlasting sorrow of mankind.
As the Book of Revelation opens John finds himself in the Temple of Jerusalem. A high priest enters, li
ghts the lamps, mounts the altar, and reads from the Torah. A religious ceremony has begun. But John’s mind is already operating on two levels. Newton explains:
On the first day of that month, in the morning, the High-Priest dressed the lamps: and in allusion hereunto, this Prophecy begins with a vision of one like the Son of man in the High-Priest’s habit, appearing as it were in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks, or over against the midst of them, dressing the lamps, which appeared like a rod of seven stars in his right hand: and this dressing was performed by sending seven Epistles to the Angels or Bishops of the seven Churches of Asia, which in the primitive times illuminated the Temple or Church Catholick.14
The Book of Revelation will foretell the future history of mankind—and the mundane religious ceremonies John will witness in the temple provide a terrestrial foundation for that exalted purpose. Newton writes: “For the Temple & ceremonies of the law were types and shadows of things to come. . . . The allusions to the Law [in Revelation] are partly in describing the Christian worship & partly in predicting things future. The first is done by allusions to the Jewish daily worship, the second by allusions to the Feast of the seventh month.”15 The feast of the seventh month has become the feast of Hannukah, which is wholly bound up with the future history of every Jew.
Now John stands before the temple altar, which is decorated with cherubim, and immediately finds himself standing before the throne of God, of which he says, “in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind. And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle” (Rev. 4:6–7). John also tells us, “And round about the throne were four and twenty seats & upon these seats I saw four and twenty Elders sitting clothed in white raiment; & they had on their heads crowns of gold.”
And then the lamb—Jesus Christ—appears and, as has already been described, from his throne God hands Jesus Christ a scroll sealed with seven seals. Christ loosens the seals one by one; visions explode in the head of John, who is standing nearby; and the prophet of Patmos commences writing the Book of Revelation.
Such, as set forth above, is the narrative pattern of Revelation. And it should be obvious from the above that this literary masterpiece of John of Patmos breathes a God-orientation, a numinosity, a plenitude and sumptuousness of religiosity, piety, and awe in the face of sublimity that we men and women living in a twenty-first century, almost completely denuded of God and numinosity, may find it difficult to understand.
There is a twentieth-century equivalent of the Book of Revelation, and we will include it in our discussion of John’s Apocalypse because, this may help us understand the Book of Revelation.
In 1899, the British-Polish author Joseph Conrad wrote a novel, Heart of Darkness, that is the Book of Revelation without a trace of God or a scintilla of numinosity, so much so that it becomes a demonic, or anti-, Book of Revelation. The narrator, Marlow, comes to Brussels in Belgium to sign a contract with La Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo (The Belgian Company for Trade in the Upper Congo), a company that will send him to the Congo, in Africa, then a Belgian colony, to pilot a steamboat up the Congo River.
This corporate headquarters—which is a front for a rapacious Belgian government operation pillaging the Congo for all it is worth under the guise of bringing Christianity to it—is an anti-temple, a demonic temple, a temple to Mammon, or money. All of the action in Heart of Darkness emanates from this anti-temple insofar as La Société Anonyme Belge controls everything that goes on in the Congo.
Marlow enters a large, almost empty room and sees “a deal table in the middle, plain chairs all around the walls, on one end a large shining map marked with all the colors of the rainbow.” Conrad means us to compare this with the sumptuous numinosity of Revelation 4:3–4: “There was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight unto an Emerald. And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold.” In this executive headquarters of La Société Anonyme Belge in Brussels, God on his throne is a “pale plumpness in a frock-coat” seated behind a heavy desk. He gives Marlow not a scroll foretelling the future, but a bare contract listing Marlow’s future duties in the Congo. That Marlow’s destiny—his future, his fate—is bound up with this contract is indicated by the presence of two ladies continuously knitting black wool, like the Fates of antiquity continuously wove the fate of mankind.16
That Heart of Darkness is a bitterly ironic novel mirroring Saint John’s Apocalypse is borne out by its having been adapted by Francis Ford Coppola as the 1970 blockbuster film Apocalypse Now. Vietnam is Coppola’s Congo; his overriding theme is the imperialistic aspirations of the United States that bring blight and destruction to Vietnam, while one of Conrad’s themes is the imperialistic aspirations of Belgium, which bring atrocities, plundering, and destruction to the Congo. In both cases the imperialists are deluding themselves or patently lying; “‘defending democracy’ was the American equivalent of the ‘civilizing work’” of the European imperialists in the Age of Empire.17
Marlow makes an explicit allusion to the Roman occupation of Britain (which serves to link the reader to the Roman imperialism that is, according to Isaac Newton, a major thread in Revelation’s future history of mankind): “And this [England] also has been [like the Congo] one of the dark places of the earth. I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago—the other day.” While John of Patmos is a fiery prophet flushed with the presence of the divine, Conrad gives Marlow as storyteller just the barest hint of spirituality, describing the storyteller as “lifting one arm from the elbow, the palm of the hand outwards, so that with his legs folded before him he had the pose of a Buddha.”18
Revelation is a part of the history of the corruption of the soul of man; it tells the story of that Great Apostasy that will end with the Apocalypse, beyond which lies a thousand years of peace and, ultimately, the redemption of mankind. Heart of Darkness is also about the corruption of the soul of man, but this dark tragedy offers no hope of redemption, and at the end we gaze wordlessly into the heart of darkness that is the fully corrupted soul of its evil genius, Kurtz.
In Heart of Darkness, Marlow boards a ship and begins his journey down the coast of Africa to the Congo. In the Book of Revelation, Christ loosens the first seal of the scroll, and John begins his journey through the future history of mankind, which is also a stroll through the Temple of Jerusalem. We’ll recall the “four beasts full of eyes before and behind” around God’s throne about whom John says that “the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle” (Rev. 4:6–7). Newton takes this information and connects it with the twelve tribes of Israel encamped around the four sides of the tabernacle 1,500 years before John wrote. These tribes are the raw tabernacle- and temple-related data—the “costume boxes”—out of which John will mold into prophetic hieroglyphic form the divine visions now bursting one after the other from beneath the first four seals. Drawing on rabbinical as well as biblical sources, Newton tells us:
on the east side [of the Tabernacle] were three tribes under the standard of Judah, on the west were three tribes under the standard of Ephraim, on the south were three tribes under the standard of Reuben, and on the north were three tribes under the standard of Dan, Numb. ii. And the standard of Judah was a Lion, that of Ephraim an Ox, that of Reuben a Man, and that of Dan an Eagle, as the Jews affirm. Whence were framed [centuries later, on the sides of the Temple of Jerusalem’s altar] the hieroglyphics of Cherubims and Seraphims, to represent the people of Israel. A Cherubim had one body with four faces, the faces of a Lion, an Ox, a Man and an Eagle.19
Newton interprets “the faces of a Lion, an Ox, a Man and an Eagle” as po
inting to the heraldic animals of the tribes of Judah (a lion), Ephraim (a calf), Reuben (a man), and Dan (an eagle). From another rabbinic source, he identifies the heraldic colors of the four tribes as white, red, black, and pale. He factors in on what side of the tabernacle each tribe is encamped. From this he decides that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are four Roman emperors and their dynasties. From all this we can draw up a table as shown on page 145.
Newton writes: “The visions of the opening of these seals relate only to the civil affairs of the heathen Roman Empire. So long the apostolic traditions prevailed, and preserved the Church in its purity: and therefore the affairs of the Church do not enter into these first four seals.”20
These four emperors and their dynasties, whose reigns stretch from about AD 9 to 297, do not come into conflict with Christianity, which remains untouched by apostasy and “apostolic”; that is, “what the apostles taught.” Newton piles on further proofs that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are who he says they are. He tells us that the differing colors of the four horses tell us how much blood the emperors have spilled, and whose.
The winner of this bloodletting sweepstakes is Trajan (53–117), the second horseman, whose horse is red (Rev. 6:4). This isn’t surprising, since Trajan and his dynasty span the Jewish-Roman War of 66–70 and the Jewish revolt of 113–117 that saw a million and a half Jewish men, women, and children killed. This tribe’s heraldic animal is the ox, sometimes the calf, and these were the beasts that were most often sacrificed, and therefore the beasts that gave the most blood to God.
The third horseman (Rev. 6:6) rides a black horse; this color, says Newton, denotes the type of men killed by Emperor Septimus Severus and his dynasty, who reigned from 145 to 211. Newton says Severus and his armies usually killed only distinguished people in battle, for instance, generals or politicians, who deserved to be properly mourned, and black was the proper color of mourning.
The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton Page 15
