Your Humble Servant

I have arrived and gotten myself settled in Cambridge, and am already struck by how much history the University has been witness to. I’ve seen where Newton first had the idea for Universal Gravitation, where Ernest Rutherford split the atom, and the real home of the Yales (mythical antelope-like creatures) that now adorn the entryways to Davenport and Timothy Dwight Colleges of my academic home in Connecticut. The University of Cambridge is almost a full five centuries older than my beloved Yale, so I guess I really should not have been surprised by the incredible history that surrounds me. I’ll go ahead and just call myself flummoxed.

In the famous Wren Library of Trinity College, at the end of a hall of marble and wood where you can practically feel the scholarship about you, there is a stained glass window that dates from 1771. In it, Isaac Newton is being presented to King George III as the Father of Empiricism—Francis Bacon—looks on (with a particularly fluffy collar). Above, there are angels and all sorts of heavenly creatures heralding the entirely new type of intellect of Newton: where one can come to know God through nature and through its laws. The observable universe suddenly became fair game, so to speak. Analysis of God’s natural works beyond His Word were no longer off limits, thus giving rise to volumes upon volumes of the knowledge humans have since come to know.

 Cambridge, England: Trinity College: Wren Library stained and enamelled glass window (Isaac Newton being presented to George III with Francis Bacon looking on) (1771, designed by Giovanni Battista Cipriani, made by Peckitt of York)

Isaac Newton, in inventing calculus, formulating the Universal Law of Gravitation, and in recognizing the composite nature of light, was in his own very personal way paying tribute to God, a God that he believed was still very active in the world. Today, there are surely those like Newton who undertake years of study to better know their faith— some of the students I’ve met at the Yale Divinity School and the priesthood of my home church come to mind. Still, I can’t imagine that the all the Ph.D. candidates and researchers at Yale who spend countless hours in their respective labs do so to better understand the mind of God or their own faith. Was Newtonian logic the start of a never-ending human campaign to know everything? Is there anything that humans simply cannot come to know (or should not know)? Can that which cannot be explained by reason be explained by God?

I worry about the modern day implications of Newton’s novel intellectualism. Newton, seeing himself as a servant of God (though he was considered a heretic of his age), would not have used his mind to do anything of truly suspect ethical foundations. Certainly, Newton would never have engaged in the science of weaponry that is so prevalent today. I daresay even Isaac Newton would struggle with the modern manipulation of “God’s genetic code”. Today’s science and medical advances are of a more secular sort, but there comes a moral responsibility with the endowment of such power. Perhaps today’s world would be better off if the magisteria of science and religion overlapped more. I can only hope that those on the cutting edge of science today heed Dr. Rowan Williams’ advice to be “cautious” with those questions we choose to explore and take to heart Newton’s analysis of the natural world rooted firmly in his own ethical foundation.  

The group with the former Archbishop of Canterbury-- Dr. Rowan Williams

Newton, in a letter to Robert Hooke explaining gravity using the analogy of a stone falling to earth, signs off with the phrase “your humble servant”. Though it is questionable whether he actually saw himself as a humble servant or “standing on the shoulders of giants”, I’m choosing to be optimistic and see myself as yet another humble servant with the immense privilege of learning from the history around me. For now, I’ll take solace in knowing that, because of Newton and the new type of intellectualism he heralded, I’ll have the grand privilege of exploring these weighty questions under the tutelage of the smartest minds of the world and in a place of immense historical consequence.

The view of the city and King's College from Great St. Mary's Church