a cosmic view of religion - william r. halstead

4 A key factor in approaching Newtonians on something closer to their own terms is their continuing belief in the fundamental significance of God’s early revelations as preserved by the ‘wise ancients’. There is an otherness at the heart of the English Newtonian culture of this period that inevitably eludes its persistent presentation by a number of influential historians as the gateway to modernity. In what follows I intend to explore the ways in which Stukeley used his essay as a means of establishing the status of Newtonian natural philosophy as a modern rehabilitation of the ancient wisdom, the prisca sapientia, and to throw light on the role of the concept of celestial music within this aim. Yet, upon closer examination, it can be seen that Stukeley employed the concept of the music of the spheres in an examination of the spectrum of ancient wisdom and modern knowledge that constituted an early eighteenth-century Newtonian’s worldview: the sequence of pristine revelation, corruption, and recovery at the heart of Newton’s own philosophy of providential history and that of some of his closest followers. 3 At first glance, the essay might seem a curious, even ill-matched hybrid of compendious Renaissance treatise and detached, modern scholarly history. 2 Though the work was to remain unpublished, its meticulous preparation in multiple versions suggests the importance it held for its author, who may indeed have felt it to be a part of that arcane knowledge which, as he wrote elsewhere, ‘prudence forbids. On 1 January 1719/20, William Stukeley (1687-1765) – Cambridge medical doctor, antiquarian, and Newtonian natural philosopher – noted the completion of a manuscript essay on ‘The Music of the Spheres’.

William Stukeley’s ‘Music of the Spheres’ manuscript:Īncient Wisdom and Modern Newtonianism, c.

A cosmic view of religion - william r. halstead