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, in 1663 at Cambridge, where he had Newton as a pupil, whose superior genius he humbly recognized, ceding to him the chair in 1669. His mathematical and geometrical works, a continuation of Kepler's studies and foreshadowing those of Newton, consist of an edition of Euclid, of Apollonius and of Theodosius, and in the Lecciones opticae geometrica. From his uncle, bishop of St. Asaph, he received a small curacy 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 given to his scientific works, B., after 1670, devoted himself to the study of theology alone.
His greatest work as a controversialist was the treatise On the Pope's Supremacy (1680), written in a lucid and vigorous style, woven of logical arguments rather than polemical motives, in which his placid temperament and his spirit of broad Christian charity kept him far from the usual anti-papal invectives that characterize the disputes of the time. Another work of the same kind, in favor of the dogmatic positions of the Anglican Church, was the Exposition of the Creed, Decalogue and Sacraments. B. was very renowned as a preacher, more among posterity than among his contemporaries; "the alele preacher," as Charles II, who had him as chaplain, defined him, "because he exhausted any subject and left to whoever came after him nothing new to say."
His Sermons, published posthumously by his literary executor, Tillotson (4 vols. in folio), testify to a prodigious inventive fecundity. Locke called them "masterpieces of their kind." The habit of mathematical studies strengthened in B. that conceptual clarity and that mental consequentiality which make of each of his sermons the demonstration of a theorem. The apparent fluidity of style and ease of expression are the fruit of prolonged and cultivated labor. Certainly B. addresses himself more to reasoning than to feeling; his sermons, always eloquent and often elevated, are however marred by prolixity, even though sustained by an extreme virility of tone and entirely free from any affectation.
Bibliography
Vittorio Gabrieli