Newton

Within the depth-psychology corpus, Isaac Newton functions as a pivotal civilizational figure whose mechanistic physics is read less as a contribution to science per se than as a decisive rupture in the Western imagination of cosmos, God, and psyche. Karen Armstrong situates Newton at the precise juncture where the divine is subordinated to a self-running mechanical system, forcing theology into increasingly strained accommodations with absolute space and time. Hoeller reads the Newtonian revolution as delivering an ‘irreparable blow’ to any personally directed universe, clearing the ontological ground on which Darwin and Freud would subsequently stand. Joseph Campbell invokes Newton mythologically — the astronauts’ ‘Newton!’ cry making the physicist a kind of secular miracle-worker — and historically, as the man who supplied Kepler’s clockwork its ‘single weight.’ Richard Tarnas frames Newton’s birth and the entire Copernican-Newtonian revolution within Uranus-Neptune cyclical alignments, inscribing him in an archetypal pattern of cosmological disclosure. Hillman approaches Newton through alchemy: Newton captured Iris in a prism, dissecting mediating color into seven analytic bands, an act paradigmatic of the modern desouling of nature. Pauli and Abram trace Newton’s absolute space and time as the epistemic preconditions — and eventual limitations — of classical mechanics. Together these readings construct Newton as the archetypal boundary figure between an ensouled and a disenchanted cosmos.

In the library 12 passages

with the coming of Isaac Newton, a now irreparable blow was struck against the old world-image, which transformed the model of the universe from one ruled personally by a great heavenly man, to another, resembling a self-regulating and self-propelled machine.

Hoeller frames Newton as the decisive agent who annihilated the personally governed Jehovian universe and installed a mechanistic cosmos that neither needs nor possesses a directing divine agent.

Hoeller, Stephan A., The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1982thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

In Newton’s physics, nature was entirely passive: God was the sole source of activity. Thus, as in Aristotle, God was simply a continuation of the natural, physical order.

Armstrong argues that Newton, by making God the sole active principle in an otherwise passive mechanical system, inadvertently reduced the divine to a function of natural philosophy rather than its transcendent ground.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Newton himself had to resort to some startling solutions to find room for God in his system… Was not space itself somehow divine, possessing as it did the attributes of eternity and infinity?

Armstrong shows that Newton’s absolute space, possessing divine attributes of eternity and infinity, created an irresolvable tension between God’s transcendence and the self-sufficiency of his mechanical universe.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

In his early work on light Newton had captured Iris, the mediating rainbow (and anima mediatrix), in a prism of glass and dissected her into seven colors. Iris, the Rainbow Girl, and colors themselves lost their mediating role.

Hillman reads Newton’s prismatic dissection of light as the archetypal act by which the modern mind destroyed the soul’s mediating function between the phenomenal and invisible worlds.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

to this clockwork figure of Kepler’s, Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), with his formulation of the laws of gravity, ‘supplied the single weight.’ God had been the Creator of the machine, but it could run without his interference.

Campbell presents Newton as the figure who completed Kepler’s celestial clockwork by supplying gravity as its motive principle, thereby rendering divine ongoing intervention conceptually superfluous.

Campbell, Joseph, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

‘absolute, true and mathematical time’ is, for Newton, an independent reality that we cannot perceive directly, but which underlies all material events and their relations.

Abram exposes Newton’s foundational epistemic move — positing absolute space and time as imperceptible yet ontologically prior — as the basis on which the Principia’s mechanics, and its estrangement from lived perception, rests.

Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

They were riding back securely on the mathematics of the miracle of Isaac Newton’s brain. This stunning answer brought to my mind the essential problem of knowledge considered by Immanuel Kant.

Campbell mythologizes Newton’s mathematics as a kind of secular miracle, using the Apollo astronauts’ invocation of his name to segue into Kant’s question about the a priori validity of mathematical judgments across space.

Campbell, Joseph, Myths to Live By, 1972supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the development of mechanics which concluded with Newton’s ‘Principia’ (1687)… This dissociation was inevitable, and is reflected particularly clearly in Descartes’ philosophy and in Newton’s theological writings.

Pauli reads the completion of mechanics in Newton’s Principia as the culmination of the seventeenth-century dissociation between rational science and religious meaning, a split mirrored in Newton’s own theological writings.

Pauli, Wolfgang, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The astronomer in fact continues to calculate planetary orbits with considerable success by Newton’s law of gravitation, unconcerned in practice with the achievements of modern physics.

Pauli argues that Newtonian gravitation retains its practical validity as a limiting case within the broader development of modern physics, illustrating the historical continuity rather than simple supersession of earlier scientific stages.

Pauli, Wolfgang, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The God of Newton, and indeed of many conventional Christians, who was supposed to be literally responsible for everything that happens, was not only an absurdity but a horrible idea.

Armstrong traces how Diderot’s critique exposed the Newtonian God of mechanical providence as both logically untenable and morally repugnant when confronted with blind natural accident.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

both events thus coincided with the Uranus-Neptune opposition that took place halfway in the cycle that unfolded between the conjunctions of Copernicus’s birth and Newton’s.

Tarnas inscribes Newton’s birth within an archetypal Uranus-Neptune cycle, situating the Copernican-Newtonian cosmological revolution as a single trans-generational pattern of cosmological disclosure timed by planetary alignments.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

My interpretation and reference to Newton follow Sir James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1930), p. 95. Sir Isaac Newton, Philosophia naturalis principia mathematica (1687), Definition VIII, Scholium IV.

Campbell cites Newton’s Principia and James Jeans as bibliographic sources underpinning his account of the mechanical universe, indicating the primary textual authorities for his broader mythological reading.

Campbell, Joseph, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Related terms