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interests and probably not the most important. The theory of gravity cut into the time he could devote to deciphering hidden messages in the book of Daniel. To Newton and all his contemporaries, that made perfect sense—the heavens and the Earth were God’s work, and the Bible was as well, and so all contained His secrets. To moderns, it is as if Shakespeare had given equal time to poetry and to penmanship, as if Michelangelo had put aside sculpture for basket weaving.
    Look only at scientific questions, and the same gulf yawns. We take for granted, for instance, that we know more than our ancestors did, at least about technical matters. We may not have more insight into human nature than Homer, but unlike him we know that the moon is made of rock and pocked with craters. Newton and many of his peers, on the other hand, believed fervently that Pythagoras, Moses, Solomon, and other ancient sages had anticipated modern theories in every scientific and mathematical detail. Solomon and the others knew not only that the Earth orbited the sun, rather than vice versa, but they knew that the planets travel around the sun in elliptical orbits.
    This picture of history was completely false, but Newton and many others had boundless faith in what they called “the wisdom of the ancients.” (The belief fit neatly with the doctrine that the world was in decline.) Newton went so far as to insist that ancient thinkers knew all about gravity, too, including the specifics of the law of universal gravitation, the very law that all the world considered Newton’s greatest discovery.
    God had revealed those truths long ago, but they had been lost. The ancient Egyptians and Hebrews had rediscovered them. So had the Greeks, and, now, so had Newton. The great thinkers of past ages had expressed their discoveries in cryptic language, to hide them from the unworthy, but Newton had cracked the code.
    So Newton believed. The notion is both surprising and poignant. Isaac Newton was not only the supreme genius of modern times but also a man so jealous and bad-tempered that he exploded in fury at anyone who dared question him. He refused to speak to his rivals; he deleted all references to them from his published works; he hurled abuse at them even after their deaths.
    But here was Newton arguing vehemently that his boldest insights had all been known thousands of years before his birth.
    The belief in ancient wisdom was overshadowed by other doctrines. By far the most important of the seventeenth century’s bedrock beliefs was this: the universe had been arranged by an all-knowing, all-powerful creator. Every aspect of the world—why there is one sun and not two, why the ocean is salty, why lobster is delicious and deer are swift and gold is scarce, why one man died of plague but another survived—represented an explicit decision by God. We may not grasp the plan behind those decisions, we may see only disarray, but we can be certain that God ordained it all.
    â€œAll disorder,” wrote Alexander Pope, was “harmony not understood.” The world was an orderly text to those who knew how to read it, a tangle of blotches and squiggles to those who did not. God was the author of that text, and mankind’s task was to study His creation, secure in the knowledge that every word and letter reflected divine purpose. “Things happen for a reason,” we tell one another nowadays, by way of consolation after a tragedy, but for our forebears everything happened for a reason. At the core, the reason was always the same: God had willed it. 7 God was a daily presence and used events great and small—earthquakes, fires, victories in war, illness, a stumble on the stairs—to demonstrate his wrath or his mercy. To imply that anything in the world happened by chance or accident was to malign Him. One should not speak of “fate,” Oliver Cromwell had scolded, because it was “too paganish a