F o r e w o r d t o P a r a d i s e I s N o w
b y R a v i R a v i n d r a
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I am delighted to recommend Paradise Is Now: Decrypting the Secret Cosmology of Isaac Newton’s Principia, an intriguing and remarkable work by Cynthia Kravitz. By any measure Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was one of the greatest scientists in human history. His famous book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, briefly known simply as Principia, is justifiably regarded as the greatest scientific work ever produced. It integrated into one coherent whole diverse data and mathematical principles concerning the motion of material particles and gravitation. As the publication of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543 marked the beginning of the great Scientific Revolution, the publication of the Principia in 1687 marked its completion and the beginning of the modern scientific age. Indeed, Newton is often described as the inaugurator of the “Age of Reason.” The poet Alexander Pope hailed him thus:
Nature, and Nature’s laws lay hid in night.
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.
Throughout his life Newton was greatly interested in theological, chronological, and alchemical studies. It is estimated that he wrote some six million words on these subjects, a total far surpassing that of his writings in mathematics and physics. Much of this material, particularly that on alchemy, consists of the writings of others that Newton copied for his own use, but he also wrote books of his own on these subjects. He wrote books like Observations on the Prophesies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John, and The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended. He also wrote alchemical works. But none of these works were published during Newton’s lifetime, except an Abstract of his Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms (Abregé de la Chronologie) was published in 1725, embroiling Newton, as with practically all of his other publications, in a great controversy. Newton himself seems to have hinted that his real interest lay in a wide and comprehensive knowledge that he hoped to acquire through alchemy and theology, and that he viewed his scientific studies only as amusing diversions. Here is a well-known remark that Newton made toward the end of his life:
I do not know what I may seem to the world; but as to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Newton was a strong adherent of the prisca sapienta, an ancient wisdom that had existed among Priest-Scientists such as the Chaldeans in Babylonia, the Brahmans in India, and Moses and Pythagoras among the Hebrews and the Greeks. He believed that the ancients had possessed secret wisdom about the truths of nature; that this wisdom was now largely lost; that he, Newton, was one of the esoteric brotherhood extending back to ancient times, and that he was rediscovering and re-disclosing this knowledge in a new form, more mathematical than metaphysical or mythological. He regarded his scientific work to be in continuation of, and in harmony with, this ancient wisdom.
After Isaac Newton died in 1727, he left behind many notes, manuscripts, and correspondence dealing with alchemical and theological subjects. Fearing Newton would be seen as a heretic, his family and friends burned or hid some of his papers. Some of Newton’s alchemical papers became public only in the 1960s. The well-known economist John Maynard Keynes concluded after examining Newton's alchemical papers: "Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and the intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago . . . . He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty."
Cynthia Kravitz shows in her manuscript that Newton regarded his work very much in harmony with, and a continuation of, the ancient wisdom, but in a mathematical form. Newton had great admiration for many of the ancient sages and mystics, including the early Jews, Pythagoras, Democritus, Plato, Archimedes, and early Christians. Newton asserted that the cosmologies of all of these sages were examples of “that mystic philosophy which flowed down to the Greeks from Egypt and Phoenicia,” which illustrated a very strong monist view in which every moment of time—past or future—is present in the eternal now, and every material particle is animated by the spirit, showing the indivisible presence of YHWH (ego eimi, I AM) in the material world. For Newton, the natural world was also permeated by a mysterious force: “The vital agent diffused through everything in the earth is one and the same/ And it is a mercurial spirit, extremely subtle and supremely volatile.”
Cynthia traces, with great scholarly expertise and numerous references, how the monistic view of the spirit pervading the material world has been largely ignored or opposed, but sometimes supported and reestablished, by subsequent significant philosophers and mathematicians. Both Galileo, who was celebrated by Einstein as “the father of modern physics and in fact of the whole of modern natural science,” and Newton, whose work brought the Scientific Revolution to its culmination, were very interested in the reflections of the great sages mentioned earlier and very much believed that spirit is present throughout nature. For them the Universe was a sacred text. Galileo wrote, “Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze.” And Newton remarked that wisdom and insight are “not only to be found in ye volume of nature but also in ye sacred scriptures.” For Newton, all of his scientific work was a hymn of glory in the praise of God, and his effort was to show the presence of Divinity in the natural world.
It is ironic that contrary to Newton’s own understanding about the intimate and essential relationship between the Divine and the manifested cosmos, his work enhanced the later empirical science in which, as Cynthia remarks, the knowledge which Newton had regarded as Relative, Apparent, and Common was prized, and the knowledge which Newton had regarded as the Absolute, Mathematical, and True was lost. Following only the Relative, Apparent, and Common understanding of Newton’s cosmology, further extended by Einstein’s theories of relativity, the scientific understanding of cosmology is only externally verifiable physical cosmology bereft of the sacred. Physical theories concerning the static or the dynamic nature of the Universe are not about the dimension of the significance or the purpose of human existence.
Cynthia Kravitz has done a wonderful job, with remarkable scholarship, in pointing out the spiritual dimension in the cosmologies of the many ancient seers, really prophets in the domain of pristine wisdom, focusing on Newton. It is good to end this foreword with a remark attributed to Isaac Newton: “Live your life as an exclamation rather than an explanation.”
—Ravi Ravindra, professor emeritus of physics, of philosophy, and of religion at Dalhousie University, and former member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton