牛顿毕生研究神学的成果有哪些？ 杜瑶，克己复礼，正心修身 导读 原答案原文链接的后面就是我对这个 book review 的摘抄和翻译。大家可以快速滚动只看中文的我翻译的段落（本想只摘抄语句，但是 book review 本身就已经用小篇幅概括了一大本书，为了不漏信息只好整段的引用） 黑体的部分是重点。也可以只看黑体。 最后“笔者个人认为……”开始是本人的想法。 原答案 虽然对这方面了解不多，但是很感兴趣。找到一些东西分享给大家。 简单 Google 了一下，找到了一篇 book review，作者 Jonathan Rée, 一位自由哲学家兼历史学家。现将其中一些摘抄翻译在这里。很多词不知道怎么翻译，见谅。 原文地址：Jonathan Rée reviews ‘Newton and the Origin of Civilisation’ by Jed Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold · LRB 10 October 2013 The life of Isaac Newton falls into two halves, and the main problem for Newton studies is how to fit them together. In the first half he was a sulky Cambridge mathematician who, at the age of 44, astonished the world with a work of natural science that was soon recognised as one of the greatest books ever written. In the second he was a sleek London gentleman wallowing in power, wealth and prestige and devoting his intellectual energy to esoteric studies of the Bible. 牛顿的一生可以分成两个阶段来看，而这两个阶段在常人眼里很难调和。第一个阶段，人们看到的是一个脾气不好的剑桥数学家，在 44 岁就创造了一部自然科学的著作，也是有史以来最伟大的一部著作之一。而另一个阶段，人们看到的是一个醉心于权力，财富和名誉的伦敦绅士，穷极一生致力于让人很难理解的圣经研究。 （第一阶段的部分就不在这里赘述了，有兴趣的可以去看原文，这里主要转述牛顿的神学研究成果以及影响） He was known to have ducked out of ordination in the Church of England, which was formally a condition of his professorship, and his reputation as a divine genius had a whiff of blasphemy about it. He had avoided any discussion of God or creation in the Principia (in the first edition, that is, where God is mentioned only once), and could not pretend to be interested in priests, rituals or religious ceremonies. On top of that there were well-founded rumours that he regarded the doctrine of the Trinity as a papist fabrication. But if his version of orthodoxy differed from that of the established church, there could be no doubt about his reverence for the Bible. 这里有一段小轶事，牛顿本来作为三一学院的教授是需要英国国教（Church of England）的 ordination（授圣职仪式） 的，但是他没有。另外在第一个版本的自然科学原理书中他尽量避开了谈 God（其他版本就不是了，见后文）。整体来说，他是一个不喜欢教会的，对教会的条条框框和教旨很不屑的人。但是他对神学本身尤其是圣经本身是充满崇敬的。 He was convinced the Bible was, essentially, a sacred text, and he sought to honour his maker by studying it closely, every day, sometimes for hours on end. He read it repeatedly, in English, Latin, Greek and Hebrew, weighing every word, syllable and letter. ‘Mr Newton is really a very valuable man,’ as John Locke put it, ‘not onely for his wonderfull skill in Mathematicks but in divinity too & his great knowledge in the scriptures where in I know few his equals.’ 牛顿认为圣经是一部圣书，他将四种语言（英语，拉丁语，希腊语，希伯来语）版本的圣经读了好多遍。他在圣经的方面的知识在原书作者 John Locke 看来很少有人能企及，这其中包括神学研究者。（其实这在某种程度上肯定了牛顿在神学方面的贡献） He fled from controversy in religion as he did in mathematics, but he was convinced that his discoveries in the two domains supported each other, maintaining that the leading doctrines of the Principia– heliocentrism and universal gravitation – had formed part of the primitive biblical religion from which all others derived, and were explicitly endorsed by Moses before being passed to the Greeks and winning general assent in ‘the earliest ages of philosophy’. Mathematics could thus unite with the biblical narrative to proclaim the reasonableness of Christianity. （重点来了）牛顿认为他在数学方面的发现：日心说和万有引力，和宗教／神学是相辅相成的。具体来讲就是这两个自然科学规律是原始基督教（primitive biblical religion）和早期哲学的起源。牛顿的目标是用数学来证明 Christianity（广义基督教？）的合理性以及源头。（这其实是很伟大的构想，就好像霍金用数学证明宇宙起源一样，只不过牛顿比霍金早三百多年，而且受限于当时的文明程度） Newton produced a revised edition of Principia in 1713, adding a scholium generale in which he argued that the solar system in all its beauty ‘could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being’ – not a passive and impersonal ‘soul of the world’, but a domineering potentate and ‘Lord over all’. He extended his list of ‘Queries’ as the Opticks went into further editions, noting a ‘wonderful Uniformity’ in the bodies of animals and the system of stars, and suggesting that it must be ‘the Effect of Choice’, and testimony to the ‘Wisdom and Skill of a powerful ever-living Agent’. 在 1713 年修订的《自然科学原理》中牛顿增编了一个附录 scholium generale，加了一些神学思想在他的太阳系模型中。简单来讲就是科学和自然的美（这种美，一个患有轻度强迫症的科学工作者深有体会，十分受用）一定是在有超越自然的智慧和力量的控制下形成的。在再版的 Opticks 中牛顿也说在动物和太阳系美妙的一致性（wonderful Uniformity）中肯定有超越自然的智慧的媒介的干预。 In 1717, when he was well into his seventies, Newton was summoned to meet Caroline, Princess of Wales, who wanted to know how his biblical researches were progressing. When she realised that he had worked out a comprehensive new chronology of the ancient world, based on the Bible, she persuaded him to prepare a summary for her. Before long an unauthorised copy turned up in Paris, where anything connected with ‘le chevalier Newton’ was greeted with excitement, often seasoned with envy. ‘They say that Newton’s celebrated chronology … is destined to bring marvellous changes to the science of time,’ as one wit put it: ‘otherwise, why would the great mathematician have spent so many years working on it?’ To cast light on the question, a Parisian printer commissioned a translation of the pirated abstract and published it as a pamphlet in 1725, along with a detailed confutation. Newton was incensed, and decided to prepare a full account of his work for publication. He died two years later, and after his spectacular funeral at Westminster Abbey the still incomplete manuscript was found among his papers. It was sold for the huge sum of £350, and printed soon afterwards as The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended. （这段其实就是介绍了牛顿对神学最伟大的贡献《Chronology》的诞生轶事，不仔细翻译了）简单来说就是 1717 年威尔士公主 Caroline 问七十多岁的牛顿说你神学研究的怎样了，牛顿说还不错，然后 Caroline 发现牛顿把整个神学历史都研究明白了就让它出书。盗版书（不全）先在法国流行了，牛顿后来怒了说不能盗版先行啊，就准备全版。可惜没完成就去世了。全版（其实还是不全）在其死后两年出版了，书名《The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended》（《古代王国编年史（修订版）》？） With the publication of the Chronology, the divine Newton at last entered terrain where common readers felt entitled to their own opinions. Anyone who reads through the Old Testament is bound to consider totting up the lifespans of the patriarchs and the reigns of the kings in the hope of arriving at a consolidated biblical dateline. In the second century AD, Jewish scholars had reckoned some four thousand years back to the date of creation: to be precise, they placed it at what we would call 3760 BC or, by the less parochial system of dating known as Anno Mundi, they could say that Christ was born in 3760 AM. The early Christians couldn’t agree: they put their trust in the Greek translation of the Bible (the Septuagint), which added around a hundred years to the age at which the patriarchs begat their offspring, moving creation back to around 5500 BC. In the eighth century, the Venerable Bede returned to the Hebrew text and argued that the date should be brought forward again, to 3952 BC. The proposal got him into trouble at the time, but the later date began to prevail in the 16th century, with Luther, Melanchthon, Scaliger and Kepler all coming up with similar estimates, until Archbishop Ussher settled the controversy in 1650 with an authoritative proposal of 4004 BC. This was the field in which Newton hoped to make his last great contribution to human knowledge. He accepted Ussher’s chronology, but wanted to extend it from the Jews to the Gentile nations. Greek and Roman history had never been satisfactorily synchronised with the biblical narrative, and the problem had sharpened in 1655, when the French theologian Isaac La Peyrère published his Prae-Adamitae, alleging that the annals of other civilisations, including the American and the Chinese, went back far beyond the creation of Adam around 4000 BC. It followed, according to La Peyrère, that these nations had been created separately, long before the Jews, and that they had been spared devastation in the great flood. La Peyrère believed that his doctrine was thoroughly biblical, and entirely compatible with Christianity, but Newton would have none of it. ‘All nations,’ he claimed, ‘have been prone to raise their Antiquities’ – in other words, to overstate their age. The Chaldeans were the worst, pretending that their civilisation went back 473 millennia, followed by the Egyptians, who stuffed their chronicles with ‘feigned Kings, who had done nothing’ in order to claim a pedigree of more than 11,000 years. The Greeks and Romans were much better, but both exaggerated by several hundred years. The Jews were a solitary exception: their bible, in the original Hebrew version, was an honest narrative of their past, and Newton undertook to show that the whole of ancient history could be fitted into the Jewish framework. The universality of the flood would thus be restored, together with a common ancestry for the whole of humanity, going back through Noah and his wife to Adam and Eve. After the flood, according to Newton, the remnants of humanity had ‘lived together in Chaldea under the government of Noah and his sons’. They remained of ‘one language, one society, and one religion’ for about 250 years, and held themselves to ‘the two great commandments, of loving the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind, and our neighbour as ourselves’. (‘This is the primitive religion of both Jews and Christians,’ Newton remarked, ‘and ought to be the standing religion of all nations.’) They bred with gusto, as they had to in order to repopulate the earth, and prospered mightily until they succumbed to the folly of Babel around 1860 BC. At that point they split into several nations, each of which spent the next eight centuries progressing through pastoral and agricultural forms of life until they started building towns and linking them up into kingdoms and empires subject to the rule of judges and kings, thus by gradations arriving at the state of civilisation. Civilisation as such, according to Newton, had its beginnings about 1125 BC among the Egyptians, followed by the Jews under King David in 1059, and then the Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians (and no doubt the Chinese and the Americans too, though Newton didn’t mention them). But the main focus of Newton’s efforts was the Greeks. He dated the beginning of their entry into civilisation to the time of Daedalus, who invented ‘the saw, the turning-lath, the wimble, the chip-ax and other instruments of Carpenters and Joyners’ in 989 BC. The oracles got under way a couple of years later, and then Theseus killed the Minotaur and became king, before sending Jason and his Argonauts on an embassy to Egypt in 937. The Trojan War took place in the decade between 905 and 895 – far later than usually supposed – and Dido founded Carthage in 883, where Aeneas showed up shortly afterwards. Newton’s Chronology elicited dozens of hasty reactions, in France as well as England, but within a year or two it had won acceptance as a worthy sequel to the Principia and the Opticks. The critics found it hard, as Voltaire observed, to ‘allow one and the same Man the Glory of having improv’d natural Philosophy, Geometry and History’, but the fact was that Newton’s revised chronology displayed the same ‘creative Genius’ as the rest of his researches, and the same capacity to ‘unravel and disintangle Chaos’. Diderot agreed, though on different grounds: ‘I prefer Newton’s chronology,’ he wrote, ‘because, if he has calculated accurately, it makes Aeneas the contemporary of Dido,’ thus saving the world’s greatest love story from the charge of anachronism. Gibbon too was enchanted by Newton’s reasoning: ‘His system of chronology alone suffices to ensure him immortality,’ he wrote, and he too approved of the way it allowed for Dido to get her heart broken. After Gibbon, however, Newton’s work as a historian fell into a long oblivion, from which Frank Manuel rescued it in the 1960s; but his elegant study, Isaac Newton: Historian, has now been dwarfed by the labours of Buchwald and Feingold. （高潮来了）这部书牛逼之处在于它颠覆了《圣经（旧约）》的编年，从而颠覆了基督教乃至人类文明的时间线。牛顿之前，基督时间线（biblical dateline）是这样的： 公元 2 世纪：犹太人说，历史开始于 3760 BC。也就是基督是 3760 AM（Anno Mundi）出生的。（Anno Mundi：(latin) the year of the world） 早期基督徒不同意，他们相信希腊人：历史开始于 5500 BC。 公元 8 世纪时候 Bede 又不同意，说应该是 3952 BC。 1650 年，Ussher 主教站出来说都闭嘴，是 4004 BC。 世界安静了。 直到牛顿决定插手。 牛顿大体上同意 Ussher 的说法，不过想发展一下。牛顿觉得所有 nations（在古时候不能叫国家，我也不知道怎么翻译，知友 @名私刻 建议“城邦”）在谈论自己的历史时都会吹牛，觉得越久远越好，这其中 Chaldeans 说自己有 473 世纪的历史（你逗我……把猴算进去了吧），埃及人说自己有 11000 年（题外话，华人觉得自己上下五千年是多么谦虚啊），希腊和罗马人好点儿，都只是多说了几百年。只有犹太人的圣经是靠谱的，牛顿就试图将自己的理论和犹太圣经迎合。 牛顿的结论是人类文明开始于埃及人，1125 BC 左右。 （当然这些编年都是从各种版本的圣经中读出来的） 《Chronology》在出版一两年后就得到了广泛的认可，被大众承认是和牛顿的其他著作《Principia》（自然科学原理）《Opticks》（光学）齐名的作品。 评论家们实在是不愿承认世界上竟然能有这样一个人，以一己之力推动了自然科学，几何学和历史三大领域（牛顿已经超越了学物理的人中神学最屌，学数学的人中物理最屌，学神学的人中数学最屌的境界，达到了三个领域他都最屌的令人发指的地步）。 牛顿的神学研究体现了和他在其他领域研究同样的创新和化腐朽为神奇的能力。Gibbon 甚至宣称《Chronology》这一本书就可以让一个人名垂千古。 Not that they hold the Chronology in much affection: the book to which they have dedicated many years of their lives is, in their opinion, ‘stupefyingly tedious’. On the other hand, they argue, quite persuasively, that it may be the source of one of the formative ideas of our time: that every society must pass through the same stages – savagery, pastoralism and agriculture – on the way to civilised maturity. But their main concern is to demonstrate parallels between the intellectual methods of the Chronologyand those of Newton’s contributions to natural science. Newton questioned the evidence of his historical sources, they say, just as he questioned the evidence of the senses, subjecting it to a characteristic blend of experimental manipulation and mathematical synthesis. When it came to estimating the lengths of reigns and generations in antiquity, he used the technique he had pioneered in making physical measurements: compensating for the lack of any single reliable number by juggling discrepant ones, and arriving at various kinds of averages to fill the gap. 原书作者 Buchwald 和 Feingold 对于《Chronology》本身并不感冒，“stupefyingly tedious”（拉低智商般冗长）。但是他们很赞赏牛顿对神学研究方法上的贡献。牛顿像研究科学一样研究圣经和神学编年史，对现有理论提出疑问，并且提出自己的创新理论。他甚至开发了一个纠正编年史年数的数学模型…… 所以通过 Jonathan 这篇书评可以简单的了解一下牛顿对神学的贡献，有兴趣的可以去看 Buchwald 和 Feingold 的书。 笔者个人认为，之所以牛顿在神学方面的研究没有他在数学和科学方面的研究耀眼是因为神学研究本身不是大众了解的一个领域，而且它还涉及到了信徒本身的个人信仰和想法。我本身不是基督徒，但是做个类比，假如有一天杨振宁说中华历史只有 3000 年，作为华人我还是愿意相信上下五千年的说法，你咬我啊。正经的来说就是神学研究和科学研究本质上有不同另外前者在当代社会远没有后者影响大。 另一方面，牛顿之所以研究神学被人吐槽归根结底是没有达到世人对他太高的期望，44 岁写出著作影响了人类文明，然后剩下几十年就研究圣经去了，没有符合大众的预期。单看牛顿的神学造诣也是凤毛麟角，只是他被自己其他的贡献矮化了。 最后，我个人觉得，牛顿在神学方面的贡献还是不可小觑的。 另外我贡献一张牛顿签的三一学院入学名册（1667），比较难得一见，字很好看： 利益相关：牛顿校友。 查看知乎原文
