The Salon Interview: Neal Stephenson

That was one of my reactions, too, when I started getting into this. You see a lot about the late 18th century, the time of the Revolution, you see a lot about the Civil War and the Victorian era. There have been some books about this era published recently -- "An Instance of the Fingerpost," "A Conspiracy of Paper," about the fall of the South Sea company in 1721. But it's strangely underrepresented.

Maybe that's because most novelists tend to be interested in literary history. The age of Johnson is exciting, and the age of Dickens, but not so much this time, in terms of great writers.

Well, in this period you've got Milton. He's coming out with "Paradise Lost" at the same time as the plague, the fire, the founding of the Royal Society. You've got [John] Bunyan, "Pilgrim's Progress," although that's a hard book for people to take these days. That's not anyone's favorite book.

Also, for a modern readership, the religious disputes of that time are pretty complicated and hard to follow. And people took them so seriously, which is difficult to relate to if you're secular-minded.

I think you're on to something in saying that one off-putting thing to people about this period is the religious aspect of it, and also the politics, which are also pretty closely entwined. Milton and Bunyan are intensely religious people and every word they write comes straight from their religion. This was pre-Enlightenment. There were a few people running around with the secular ideas that we accept as being the norm today, but most of these people were religious and really meant it. Newton was that way; Leibniz was that way. They argued about religion, but they did so from the standpoint of people who really took it seriously. I found that an interesting thing to tackle as a writer because these people were so different from the people who are likely to read this book.

You're remarkably sympathetic to the Puritans, too, which is unusual these days.

I have a perverse weakness for past generations that are universally reviled today. The Victorians have a real bad name, and the word "Puritan" is never used except in a highly pejorative way, despite the fact that there are very strong Victorian and Puritan threads in our society today, and despite the fact that the Victorians and Puritans built the countries that we live in. The other one, by the way, is the '50s. Someday I'll have to write a '50s novel.

The reason why people are so vituperative about those generations is not because they know anything about the history, but because they're really talking about splits within our culture today that they're worried about. In the same spirit that I wrote a Victorian novel earlier in my career, I figured it might be a kick to see what to do with some Puritans. Not hip, jaded, cool Puritans, but honest-to-god, fire-breathing Puritans. Drake [Waterhouse, Daniel's father] is an arch-Puritan, but by no means exaggerated. There were a million guys like this running around England in those days. He became the patriarch of this family of people who have to respond to his larger-than-life status and extreme commitment to religion.

What do you admire about the Puritans?

They were tremendously effective people. They completely took over the country and they created an army pretty much from scratch that kicked everyone's ass. This is not always a good thing. They were guilty of some very bad behavior in Ireland, for example. But any way you slice it they were very effective. Cromwell was a tremendous military leader. A lot of that effectiveness was rooted in the fact that they had money, in part because persecuted religious minorities, if they're not persecuted out of existence, often manage to achieve disproportionate wealth. It happened with Jews, Armenians, Huguenots. Earlier in this project, I could have rattled off five more. They have to form private trading networks and lend each other money. They're unusually education conscious. Puritans -- and when we say Puritans, we're talking about a whole grab bag of religious groups -- tended to prize literacy and education. I'm sure they had a higher literacy rate than the general English population. Literacy and education make people more effective.

Another answer is that they very early on adopted a set of views on social topics that everyone now takes for granted as being basic tenets of Western civilization. They were heavily for free enterprise. They didn't want the state interfering in private property. Now our whole system is built on that. We tend to forget that someone had to come up with that idea and fight for it. And those people did. The separation of church and state -- in the absence of that separation, Puritans and other religious minorities couldn't exist. You had to belong to your parish church. Things like registering births, deaths and marriages, which are state functions to us now, were handled solely by the parish churches. If you didn't belong, you didn't exist legally. You had no choice, you had to tithe. It's often said that Cromwell admitted the Jews to England. He disestablished the church and made it possible for churches other than the established one to legally exist. That's what enabled Jews to come back and start living there. Opposition to slavery got its start among different Puritan sects. To be fair, there were Catholic theologians who objected to it, too, but in the English-speaking world it started out as a fringe belief among Quakers and some other groups and spread from there to become a tenet of Methodism and Episcopalianism and basically all churches.

Another thing that some people might find surprising is how religious the scientists are -- though they called themselves natural philosophers back then. We tend to think of science and religion as being fundamentally opposed.

A lot of secular, modern people claim to be disillusioned whenever they learn that any smart person is religious. That's applicable to Newton as it is to any other religious smart person.

And then there was alchemy, which was a major preoccupation for Newton.

Alchemy is a whole different bag because it seems wacky, nuts to us. That's kind of how it's presented in the early part of the "Baroque Cycle." In everything that you've read so far, you're seeing alchemy through Daniel's eyes, and he hates it. He can't believe that Newton is buying into it at all and feels that fooling around with it has caused Newton to associate with the wrong crowd. At the beginning Newton is every bit as much of the correct young Puritan as Daniel is.

These men were discovering properties like gravity and the movement of the planets, but they also believed there was a whole spiritual realm as well.

They certainly believed in sin, temptation, the devil and witches as being real things. They were trying to integrate the new scientific way of thinking into that without destroying the old beliefs that are important to them. At the time, I think alchemy didn't have the occult connotation that it might have now. It was an alternate way of thinking about matter, and it was comparatively modern. A lot of smart people believed in it, and a lot of them were perfectly devout Christians, Jews or Muslims. Since then it's gotten associated with occult practices and one of the chores I've got in this book is to try to keep those two things apart.

Daniel thinks that it's fraudulent. It's old, it's wrong, it's being swept away by the new science, which he sees in Robert Hooke, for example. If you read the text of "Micrographia" [Hooke's famous book of illustrations of objects observed through various lenses], Hooke goes through and demolishes a bunch of alchemical ideas and talks about light and heat and oxygen -- he doesn't use the word "oxygen," but that's what he's talking about -- in ways that are modern. Daniel thinks, why doesn't Newton get with the program and abandon this old system? It's clear that a lot of the people practicing it are frauds and second-raters, when there are people like Hooke inventing a whole new chemistry that actually makes sense. Later on, the vision of this is going to become a little more nuanced.

How did Newton and Leibniz reconcile their scientific studies with their religion?

Newton and Leibniz and other people at the same time are struggling to come up with a system of understanding the world that lets them have their cake and eat it too. There are some holes in the system that Newton presents in "Principia Mathematica" that he's aware of and wants to plug, and you can make a case that the reason he spent so much time on alchemy is that he saw it as a way to finish this grand project. It wasn't like this nutty, eccentric, oddball thing. It was a carefully thought-out part of his grand strategy for his life's work. He was going to publish a book on alchemy called "Praxis" that was going to be as great as or greater than "Principia Mathematica" and supply the missing bits.

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