Project MUSE - Newton's Arian Epistemology and the Cosmogony of Paradise Lost (original) (raw)

Abstract:

It has long been understood that Isaac Newton and his older contemporary John Milton were Arian heretics--both of them asserting the createdness of the Son of God. Explaining the likelihood of the cosmologist Newton's familiarity with Milton's cosmological epic Paradise Lost, this essay mounts an argument for Newton's turn to theology as the basis for the idiosyncratic epistemologizing of both the Principia and the Optics. It is the long-anathematized Arian understanding of Christ's role in the work of creation, I suggest, that permits both men to justify their unprecedented claims to know the truth of the nature and origin of the cosmos.

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