Fracción. Para comprender el tema de fracciones, se trabajará con el singular

If it hadn’t been for the determination of Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, the doctrine of the Trinity probably would not have sur-vived long enough to be declared, near the end of the fourth cen-tury  AD, the cornerstone doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church.

That’s why the Vatican reveres Athanasius, now Saint Athanasius, call-ing him the Father of Orthodoxy.

Isaac Newton believed the doctrine of the Trinity was erroneous, and that Athanasius had not only led Christianity down the wrong path, but had blood, real blood, on his hands. He believed the Father of Orthodoxy was a murderer, a rapist, a slanderer of his peers, a falsifier of documents, a rewriter of history to serve his own interests, and truly one of the worst men in the world.

In the 1690s, Newton labored over draft after draft of an incen-diary 43,000-word, twenty-four-point legal brief setting out in min-ute detail the evidence to prove that Athanasius had committed all these crimes. The document bears the unexciting title of “Paradoxical Questions Concerning the Morals and Actions of Athanasius and His Followers.” Newton didn’t publish it, and in his lifetime few knew that it existed. Some time after Newton’s death, the manuscript found its way into the Clark Library in Cambridge, where it was kept under lock

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and key; Newton’s heirs didn’t want the world to know that their illus-trious ancestor had been a nonconforming anti-Trinitarian. Edward Gibbon, at work in Lausanne, Switzerland, on The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, wrote to Cambridge for permission to come and read “Paradoxical Questions” in the library, but permission was denied;

his assessment of Athanasius in his masterpiece might have been sig-nificantly different if he’d read Newton’s withering words.¹ Only when Newton’s nonscientific writings were auctioned off in 1936 did

“Paradoxical Questions” become available to the general public and begin to figure in discussions about Sir Isaac Newton.

“Paradoxical Questions Concerning the Morals and Actions of Athanasius and His Followers” is written in a dry-as-dust style that con-tains not a single surplus adjective or adverb. It’s a bare-bones string of sentences as spare as a page of equations. It’s easy to believe that Newton didn’t want anyone to read it, for he makes no concessions whatsoever to the reader. Perhaps his unforgiving style was meant in part to deter people from discovering his heretical beliefs.

Even with a cursory reading, Newton’s hatred of Athanasius shows through. Richard Westfall writes that in “Paradoxical Questions” he

“virtually stood Athanasius in the dock and prosecuted him for a litany of sins, . . . [seeking to show] not only that Athanasius was the author of ‘the whole fornication’—that is, of trinitarianism, ‘the cult of three equal gods’—but also that Athanasius was a depraved man ready even to use murder to promote his ends.”²

That being said, “Paradoxical Questions” is a story—a scoop!—that would whet the appetite of any journalist, provided that person knew enough about its implications to want to work his or her way through its rebarbative phraseology. For, if you look hard beneath the surface, you see that Sir Isaac has written a sordid drama of murder, fraud, char-acter assassination, and interfaith conflict in the best tradition of reli-gious holy wars. It’s what you might get if Agatha Christie had woven a detective thriller out of the more sordid episodes of the New Testament.

The plot includes:

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• The ignominious death of a controversial prelate in a public latrine in Constantinople. This prelate might have been struck down by God, or he might have been murdered by his enemies, or the whole thing might not have happened at all.

• The forgotten other Council of Nicaea, namely its dark twin the Council of Tyre, convened in AD 335. This council, attended by as many bishops as had attended Nicaea, dealt with human sin and folly rather than the divine Word, and came perilously close to reversing the most important decisions made at the Council of Nicaea.

• Rape; a severed hand; a second murdered bishop; falsified letters;

the wholesale rewriting of ecclesiastical history; “Words, Whips, Clubs, and all methods of Cruelty and Severity, not sparing even the devoted Virgins, whom they suffered the very Gentiles to strip naked”; and numerous other elements smacking of the surrealist, the macabre, and the horror entertainment of the Grand Guignol of Paris.

• A notorious ecclesiastic trial of which history has given us two different versions, in some places three, and which transports us to the same subjective, relativistic, and shifting world as the one created by Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece Rashomon.

• A celibate monk so horribly tormented by imaginary visions and demons, against all of which he resisted nobly, that for almost 2,000 years he has been a poster monk promoting the miseries and splendors of the monastic life.

• The most famous collectors in the ancient world of the bones of saints and all other holy relics.

• A bloody battle between Roman legionnaires and ecstatic Christians inside a church in Alexandria, during which “the drawn swords shone by candle light and Virgins were slain and trodden under foot.”

• And much more.

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The story, for those who can penetrate beneath its ultra-austere sur-face, is bizarre and macabre after the manner of the Spanish surreal-ist filmmaker Luis Buñuel, who hated the Catholic Church, but must have known everything about it, because a severed hand appears out of nowhere in his film The Andalusian Dog (1929), and a saint on top of a sixty-foot pole is tempted by an alluring devil in his film Simon of the Desert (1965).

Newton’s “Paradoxical Questions Concerning the Morals and Actions of Athanasius and his Followers” is a detective story, with Isaac Newton in the role of a sleuth relentlessly pursuing what must be the coldest cold case in history, one that took place thirteen hundred years before the investigator was born.

The action of “Paradoxical Questions” unfolds on a wide canvas, including three big cities: (1) Alexandria, the Egyptian port that boasted three miles of colonnades, nine miles of wharves, the body of Alexander the Great (preserved in honey in a glass box), and a hundred bitterly warring religious and philosophical factions; (2) Constantinople, across the Bosporus from the ruins of Troy, turned into the eastern capital of the Empire by Constantine, and today, in a richly expanded version, Istanbul, Turkey, with a population of 14 million; and (3) Phoenician Tyre, the ancient seaport from which, according to legend, Noah launched the Ark and Saint Paul sailed for Rome. And there is the town, that of Nicaea, in Asian Turkey, today a sleepy resort town, but in AD 325 the bustling, agitated site of the paradigm-busting Council of Nicaea.

From time to time the action skids to a stop in the deserts of Egypt, where Athanasius is exiled several times, and where he writes incendiary letters and a brief incendiary biography of a saint.

The dramatis personae consists of:

• Saint Anthony, a desert monk;

• Constantine, an emperor of Rome;

• Constantius, Constantine’s son, also an emperor of Rome;

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• Arius, a heretic, the father of Arianism;

• Athanasius, a Trinitarian, the Father of Orthodoxy;

• Major and minor prelates whose names take on resonance as Newton’s narrative proceeds: Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, Bishop Alexander of Constantinople, Hosnius, Melitius, Arsenius, Macarias, others;

• A number of women, only two of them having names: Helena, the dowager empress, Constantine’s mother; and Irene, Constantine’s sister. The rest are unnamed virgins and unnamed prostitutes;

• The Alexandrian mob in at least two incarnations.

Richard Westfall writes that, for Newton,

The corruptions of Scripture came relatively late. The earlier cor-ruption of doctrine, which called for the corcor-ruption of Scripture to support it, occurred in the fourth century, when the triumph of Athanasius over Arius imposed the false doctrine of the trinity on Christianity.

He became fascinated with the man Athanasius and with the history of the church in the fourth century, when a passionate and bloody conflict raged between Athanasius and his followers, on the one hand, and Arius, on the other. . . . Once started, Newton set himself the task of mastering the whole corpus of patristic literature [literature of the church fathers].³

Westfall lists the myriad church fathers Newton studied to prepare his case against Athanasius. Irenaeus, Tertullian, Cyprian, Eusebius—

the list goes on and on; probably Newton knew a hundred sources, and we’re left in no doubt that, whatever his bias, he knew everything there was to know or could be inferred about the Father of Orthodoxy.

Saint Anthony, the archetypal tortured monk who virtually invented the system of monasteries, appears near the beginning of Newton’s story, since Athanasius as a teenager may have met him in the desert

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and been influenced by his teachings. But Newton reserves the bulk of his discussion of Anthony for the end of “Paradoxical Questions,” and it has made more sense to deal with that part of Athanasius’s story in a separate chapter (see chapter 6, “The Temptation of Saint Anthony”).

Here, however, are some introductory words about Saint Anthony from Newton, which he bases on the historian Sozomen:

[Anthony] received letters from Constantine the great, lost his par-ents in his youth, distributed his father’s lands amongst his towns-men, gave the rest of his goods to the poor, conversed with all wise men and imitated what was best in each, ate only bread & salt &

drank only water, dined at sunset, often fasted two days or more, often watched all night, slept on a mat & frequently on the bare ground, never anointed nor bathed himself nor saw himself naked, was meek, prudent, pleasant, foreknew things, but dissuaded the monks from affecting it, spent his time in working, came often to the cities to defend the injured, interceded for them with the Presidents & great men who delighted to see & hear him, but imme-diately returned to the wilderness saying that as fishes cannot live on dry land so monks in cities lose their virtue.⁴

Athanasius was born in Alexandria around 295 and died in 373.

A tenth-century Arabic chronicle of Coptic patriarchs says his par-ents were pagan and he converted his widowed mother to Christianity when he was a teenager.⁵ At about that time, his family was driven into the desert by Diocletian’s persecutions of the Christians. It may have been then that the zealous, rigid, fiery youth met the pious, charis-matic Anthony and fell under the enchantment of his teachings on the Trinity.

Athanasius returned to Alexandria in 313, immersed himself in the study of the Scriptures, and caught the attention of Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, who made him his personal secretary when Athanasius was only twenty. In 325, Alexander brought Athanasius to the Council

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of Nicaea to argue the case for the doctrine of the Trinity. Athanasius succeeded admirably, if abrasively. He was on his way to becoming a forger.

The adult Athanasius “allied ruthlessness to an acute theological mind,”⁶ writes Diarmaid MacCulloch. This self-appointed guardian of the Trinity could “frame a memorable phrase,” asserting, for example, that the equality of Son and Father was “like the sight of two eyes.”⁷ Edward Gibbon tells us Athanasius’s mind was “clear, forcible, and per-suasive” but “tainted by the contagion of fanaticism.”⁸ Paul Johnson goes a step farther, revealing that the archbishop of Alexandria (whom Athanasius became) was, “a violent man, who regularly flogged his junior clergy and imprisoned his expelled bishops.”⁹ Newton makes the dark side of Athanasius his entire focus of his inquiry in “Paradoxical Questions.” He is, as we will see, not unpersuasive in making the case that the dark side of Athanasius is Athanasius. All the brilliance with which Newton wrote the Principia, he aims with laser sharpness at the archbishop of Alexandria and his deeds. We will find cherry-picking and deductive logic in a wicked and furious partnership.

The Council of Nicaea was convened because of the fiery rhetoric of the Alexandrian prelate Arius (AD 250/256–336), who declared that Christ was divine but not as divine as God. A swarthy, volatile Libyan, not ordained till he was over fifty, Arius “provoked and infuriated opposition in Alexandria, including that of his bishop, Alexander.”¹⁰ Arius preached anywhere he could, subtly promoting his beliefs at the grass-roots level by composing short, simple, sometimes racy songs that the workers in the mills and taverns, on the docks, could learn by heart.

This was an early form of subliminal advertising!Arius was an admirer of Plato, and spent much of his time trying to make Christianity presentable to pagan philosophers. But, despite his obvious rationality, he was hounded by accusations (from his enemies); seventeenth-century scholar David Cave picks up one: “Arius was a man ‘of a subtle and Versatil Wit, of a turbulent and unquiet Head, but which he vail’d with a specious Mask of Sanctity.’”¹¹

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In AD 322, Emperor Constantine the Great (272–337) succeeded in welding the western and eastern parts of the Roman Empire into a single unified whole. He had made Christianity the official religion of Rome in 313, believing it could serve as a crucial binding agent for the empire.

Constantine was a ruthless politician and military strategist who wasn’t without feeling or genius. He was tall and athletic, with a bull neck, a square face, blue eyes, and a peevish mouth. Indifferently edu-cated, Constantine campaigned much of his life and spoke Latin, Greek, Pict, Gaulish, Frankish, and at least one Asiatic dialect. He told the court chronicler, Eusebius Pamphilus, that at the battle of Milvian Bridge, near Rome—the last battle he had to win to become emperor—he saw “a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the inscription, CONQUER BY THIS.”¹² Constantine decided he owed his victory to Christ—that the Christian deity was a god of battles who could be relied upon to protect him as long as he strove to be a decent Christian.

The emperor lapsed badly when he murdered his first wife and one of his sons (perhaps for sound reasons of state) and tried to make up for it by showering Christians with churches, high office, and wealth and buying up entire towns and cities to make sure the inhabitants accepted the new religion. Increasingly he regarded himself as honorary bishop-in-chief, and, says MacCulloch, “regularly delivered sermons to his no doubt slightly embarrassed courtiers.”¹³

The pagan and Christian in Constantine combined to make him an extravagantly ambitious collector of religious relics. Constantine had pieces of the one true Cross packed into a hollow porphyry column on top of which bestrode a statue of himself. He made a nail from the Cross into a bit for his horse and slipped another nail in his tiara.¹⁴ The emperor oversaw the construction of the Church of the Twelve Apostles in Constantinople, placing in it twelve coffins ready to house the great-est relics of all: the remains of the twelve apostles. Peter and Paul had been buried in Rome; he transferred their bones to the church. The only coffin that got filled, however, was the thirteenth, his own, which he’d placed in the center of all the others.¹⁵

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In AD  320, his second year as ruler of a united Roman Empire, Constantine decided he had to deal with Arius’s heretical teachings, which were threatening to split the Christian Church. Constantine couldn’t afford this; Christianity really was helping bind the empire together. For months he tried to be conciliatory, even sending the Spanish bishop Hosnius to Alexandria to try to effect a reconciliation.

But nothing availed, and Constantine, despairing, convened a confer-ence at his summer palace at Nicaea, in Asia Minor, for the summer of 325.

The emperor agreed to pay all transportation and lodging costs along the speedy Roman roads. He would pay all expenses during the conference. He would personally attend the sessions. And, at times, he would—begging the bishops’ indulgence, of course—say a word or two himself. The all-powerful Constantine the Great clearly meant business.

The bishops acquiesced.

In the summer of 325 the sun beat down on the shadowless scorched streets of Nicaea more pitilessly than ever, as if trying to burn through to the truth of every man and woman there. People of every color, trade, shape, size, in tatters, dressed richly, full of hope, fear, despair, surged through.

Often they were brushed aside by clattering chariots that drove away wild dogs feeding on animal guts tossed into the center of the street from the butcher shops. The polyglot uproar was shot through with screams, laugh-ter, and the bellowing of animals. The stench of animal dung, vomit, urine, and garbage mingled with the sharp aroma of fermented sauces and rotting fish. The smell of animal fat rose from burning altars.

Inside the walls of the imperial residence, the heat and stench of the streets yielded to cool breezes from swaying fans and the musky odor of perfumes daubed on by the bishops. There were 318* of them in all,

*Edward Gibbon gives the figure of 380. Eusebius speaks of 250 bishops. Later Arabic manuscripts put the figure at 2,000. Athanasius (in Ad Afros) gives a figure of 318.

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sitting around the white marbled walls like wary, startled birds of prey dressed in purple robes. Many of them bore the scars of Diocletian’s persecutions: an eye gouged out, a thumb sliced off, a leg dragging behind because its hamstring had been cut. At the opening ceremony Constantine, moving piously among these martyred priests, bent for-ward impulsively to kiss an empty eye socket or the flat stump of a thumb. Behind him there trod cautiously Bishop Hosnius, the coun-cil director, very tall, almost ninety years old, and bearing a thick, red, scythe-like scar that ran from the tip of his ear under his eye to his nose; ¹⁶ this he had received during the Cordova persecutions.

Constantine kept his word and attended regularly. Gibbon writes,

“Leaving his guards at the door, he seated himself (with the permission of the council) on a low stool in the midst of the hall.”¹⁶ Eusebius, court chronicler and fawning flatterer, describes the emperor as “clothed in raiment which glittered as it were with rays of light, reflecting the glow-ing radiance of a purple robe.”¹⁷ Years later his nephew, the emperor Julian, remarked scornfully that Constantine “made himself ridiculous by his appearance—weird, stiff eastern garments, jewels on his arms, a tiara on his head, perched crazily on top of a tinted wig.”¹⁸ However he was garbed, that summer at the council he “listened with patience and spoke with modesty,” writes Gibbon.¹⁹

“Leaving his guards at the door, he seated himself (with the permission of the council) on a low stool in the midst of the hall.”¹⁶ Eusebius, court chronicler and fawning flatterer, describes the emperor as “clothed in raiment which glittered as it were with rays of light, reflecting the glow-ing radiance of a purple robe.”¹⁷ Years later his nephew, the emperor Julian, remarked scornfully that Constantine “made himself ridiculous by his appearance—weird, stiff eastern garments, jewels on his arms, a tiara on his head, perched crazily on top of a tinted wig.”¹⁸ However he was garbed, that summer at the council he “listened with patience and spoke with modesty,” writes Gibbon.¹⁹