IN THE PRESENCE OF THE CREATOR: Isaac Newton and His Times

by Gale E. Christianson ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 1984

As complete a Newton life-and-times as we're likely to see. Historian Christianson (Indiana State U., This Wild Abyss) has digested the massive Newton legacy, put at close to five million words. He is so well steeped in the period that we can envision walking through the great gate of Trinity College, Cambridge, and seeing the scarlet-robed holder of the Lucasion chair in mathematics himself, perhaps stooped over to make a sketch with a stick in the gravel. Here is literally a cradle-to-grave portrait of this recluse of a man. Already known, to be sure, is Newton of the short fuse, the venomous jealousy, the surpassing pride, the paranoiac possessiveness in regard to his experiments. His excoriation of Hooke, of Flamsteed, of Leibniz were enough to make lesser contenders shrink back and peace-making middlemen cower. Christianson retells these tales, but he is particularly revelatory on the not-so-well-known Newton-devoted to alchemical and religious studies. Newton was a Baconian but not a rationalist; he despised Cartesian deism and always sought first principles and grand unities that reflected a divinity who not only created, but maintained, the universe. He elaborated a chronology of ancient civilizations, for one thing, whose leaders he considered principals in the development of primitive Christianity: the Christianity, not that papish apostasy with its latter-day doctrine of a triune god. Newton was thus a secret heretic. (He was also able to gain special dispensation from Charles II himself not to take holy orders.) Christianson explains some of Newton's eccentricity in terms of childhood scars. His father had died before Newton's premature birth; he was not expected to live. When he was three, his widowed mother married an elderly widower, and abandoned him to a grandmother's care. The adolescent Isaac felt affection for one young lady, we hear; but, once at Trinity, strict rules of celibacy for scholars ruled out marriage, and save for a niece who lived with him in later years, women played no part in his life. The 17th century presents a formidable and exciting backdrop to the life, and Christianson's abundant quotations and apposite digressions on Cromwell, bubonic plague, the Great London Fire, on Wren, Pepys and other notables, do more than swell the scene. The one area where he is not at home is the science itself--but there are other sources for that information. On the other hand, general readers of some perseverance, and a penchant for slightly archaic prose, cannot do better.

Pub Date: June 16, 1984

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Free Press/Macmillan

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1984

Categories: NONFICTION