It’s common to explain the extraordinary results they arrived at by remarking that at the time equal weight was given to scriptural and traditional authority as to one’s own observations, and that as yet people hadn’t developed any sure way of distinguishing fact from speculation. This only fully arrived with Newton, who characteristically enough never publicized the results of his comprehensive alchemical and numerological studies, but throughout his entire life kept this aspect of his activities concealed from everyone apart from a few like-minded people, and as a result stood on the very boundary between new and old: he knew that Christ would return in 1948, but because he couldn’t prove it, that is, eliminate the speculative and hypothetical part of his reasoning, he chose to keep his insight to himself. The same held for his theory of gravity. He had shown in Principia that gravity affects all bodies, and that it operates at a distance. But he wrote nothing about how it operates. During the final years of his life, Newton worked intensively on this question, but since the explanation he arrived at then, that the ether through which gravity works consists of Christ’s spiritual, immaterial body, wasn’t provable, he didn’t publicize this theory either. The distinction between verifiable and nonverifiable was reinforced by Newton’s descendants, who for more than two centuries concealed the speculative part of his research, presumably out of the conviction that the authority of his scientific theories would be weakened if it became known that they were merely a by-product of his tireless search for corroboration of the divine presence in the universe. Their strategy was successful. During the eighteenth century the verifiable became sovereign within science, and has remained so to this day. But the method developed for distinguishing between true and false is based, as we well know, on replication — in order for an observation or experiment to be valid, it must be repeatable, and the results must be the same each time — which naturally condemns things that happen only once, and the unique and exceptional, to fall outside its parameters. And therefore it’s as if they don’t exist. Wonders, miracles, supernatural events — all are swept away in the name of the verifiable. The first consequence of this new method of seeing the world was that divine manifestations began to be regarded as historical. No one doubted that the miracles described in the Bible really had happened, but as nothing of that kind occurred anymore, as far as one could tell, it was assumed that it was a product of the times, and not the world per se. Sir Thomas Browne mulled over these problems in his Religio Medici (1635):
That miracles are ceased, I can neither prove nor absolutely deny, much less define the time and period of their cessation. That they survived Christ is manifest upon record of Scripture: that they outlived the apostles also, and were revived at the conversion of nations many years after, we cannot deny, if we shall not question those writers whose testimonies we do not controvert in points that make for our own opinions: therefore, that may have some truth in it, that is reported by the Jesuits of their miracles in the Indies. I could wish it were true, or had any other testimony than their own pens.
We can see here what enormous problems the new worldview brought with it. When the divine presence could not be confirmed in the world around them, they set up a kind of reserve for it, originally safely ensconced behind the ramparts of history. They wavered between scripture and the world, but the two things were no longer equal; belief in the first was already subordinate to certainty about the second, and it didn’t take long for the desire for it to be “true” to move into the provisional area that had been reserved for divine manifestations. For if the age were a different one, the space was the same. In other words, the divine was equally seen as absent, as its expressions belonged to a past age, and present, because the results of those expressions were integrated in geographical reality: somewhere was the Garden of Eden, somewhere was Noah’s Ark, somewhere was Christ’s grave. This opened the potential, unique to the seventeenth century, to see the divine in the light of what was known about natural history, and not the other way round. When Olof Rudbeck examined the natural history of Atlantis, for example, he described in detail the effects the great flood must have had on the wildlife of Sweden. Using comparisons with various floods he’d witnessed in the area around Uppsala, he worked out how long it would have needed to recover, and tried to discover how many years it took Noah’s descendants to repopulate the world.
To us it seems odd to see items of faith being drawn inside reason’s sphere in this way, there is something impure and almost abominable in this hodgepodge, and only very few would take the results achieved seriously. At best we view them as inadequacies in a system that still hadn’t run itself in, necessary for development, but worthless in themselves. However, this didn’t last long, maybe only a century, before all traces of the old faith had been completely expunged from the domain of reason. By regarding the manifestations of the divine as historical, they were portrayed as rigid and unchanging, and had about as little chance of defending themselves against the advances of reason as a tree has against the woodsman’s ax. In reality, it was just a matter of time before the situation would become what it’s turned into today, where everything connected with the holy is regarded as abstract, so that we literally do not see the materiality of what is holy, whereas everything that concerns physical nature is exclusively seen as concrete, and we lose sight of physical nature’s immaterial aspects, too.
This was the fault line on which philosophy and theology found itself in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But the gap between the verifiable and the non-verifiable, scripture and the world, which increased with each passing year, was only a symptom, the fever of the age, and not the disease itself. Newton was as far away from the divine in his religious speculations as in his purely scientific calculations. The same held true for the sixteenth century’s great alchemists as well as for Pascal and Galileo or for that matter Thomas Aquinas. The Calvinists, Lutherans, Arians, Anglicans, Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans, whether influenced by Plato or Aristotle, Democritus, Hermes Trismegistus, Humanism, or Jewish Kabbalism — every one of them was blind to the true nature of the divine. And the thing that blinded them was scripture. For all of them acknowledged the authority of scripture, it was incontestable, even for the most deviant and idiosyncratic of sects, and all that Newton and his ilk did, when all is said and done, was simply to replace the authority of one writ with another.
It is only against this backdrop that the real significance of Antinous Bellori can be seen. In On the Nature of Angels, he argues that scripture is only one of the myriad manifestations of the divine, neither more nor less important than the others, and so invalidates the contradiction that had arisen between scripture and the world in a different and more sincere way than his contemporaries, who merely exchanged one value for another, without understanding that, in reality, they were two sides of the same coin.