BARROW, ISAAC. – English Protestant mathematician and theologian, b. in London in 1630, d. there on 4 May 1677. He lived abroad for many years and studied in France, Italy, Turkey, Germany, and Holland. In 1660 he was appointed professor of Greek; in 1662 professor of mathematics in London, and in 1663 at Cambridge, where Newton was his pupil. He humbly recognized Newton’s superior genius and ceded the chair to him in 1669. His mathematical and geometrical works, continuing the studies of Kepler and anticipating those of Newton, consist of editions of Euclid, Apollonius, and Theodosius, and the Lecciones opticae geometrica. From his uncle, the bishop of St. Asaph, he received a small benefice in Wales, and from the bishop of Sarum a prebend in Salisbury Cathedral. In 1670 he was appointed doctor of theology and in 1672 rector of Trinity College. Disappointed by the unfavorable reception accorded his scientific works, B., after 1670, devoted himself exclusively to the study of theology.
His chief work as a controversialist was the treatise On the Pope's Supremacy (1680), written in a lucid and vigorous style, woven from logical arguments rather than polemical motives. His calm temperament and spirit of broad Christian charity kept him far from the customary anti-papal invective that characterized the disputes of the time. Another work of the same kind, defending the dogmatic positions of the Anglican Church, was the Exposition of the Creed, Decalogue and Sacraments. Highly renowned, more among posterity than among his contemporaries, B. was as a preacher; “the preacher of preachers,” as Charles II, who had him as chaplain, called him, “because he exhausted every subject and left nothing new for those who came after him to say.”
His Sermons, published posthumously by his literary executor, Tillotson (4 folio volumes), testify to a prodigious inventiveness. Locke called them “masterpieces of their kind.” The habit of mathematical study strengthened in B. that conceptual clarity and mental consecutiveness which make each of his sermons a demonstration of a theorem. The apparent fluidity of style and ease of expression are the fruit of arduous and prolonged cultivation. Certainly B. addresses himself more to reason than to feeling; his sermons, always eloquent and often elevated, are nevertheless marred by prolixity, though sustained by an extreme virility of tone and entirely free from all affectation.