Sir Isaac Newton's "Principia Mathematica" and British Physico-Theological Poetry at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

The turn of the eighteenth century was a time in which science and literature were not as diametrically distinct as they are today. What has been labelled the 'heroic age of science' witnessed extraordinary advancements and transformations in natural philosophy which represented both a productive source of inspiration for poets and a powerful instrument for theologians. These fields conflated into physico-theology, the branch of natural philosophy that employed the new science to demonstrate the existence and attributes of God, and that was often given expression in poetry. The purpose of the dissertation will be to study this unique crossway between science, literature, and religion as embodied in the Newtonian physico-theological poetry of the early eighteenth century. In the first chapter a presentation of the scientific background of the revolutionary work of Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) will be followed by an introduction to the "Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis" (1687, 1713, 1726) and its theological implications. The second chapter will then explore the phenomenon known as Newtonianism to understand how Newton’s ideas became an integral part of western culture, while also showing their impact on the thriving tradition of British physico-theology. On these premises, the last chapter will be entirely devoted to the contextualisation and analysis of Sir Richard Blackmore’s (1654–1729) didactic poem "Creation" (1712) with the aim of assessing how it was influenced by Newtonian theories.