wanting in these latter days. The attempt in the Church of England,
in 1864, to fetter science, which was brought to ridicule by Herschel,
Bowring, and De Morgan; the assemblage of Lutheran clergy at Berlin, in
1868, to protest against "science falsely so called," are examples
of these. Fortunately, to the latter came Pastor Knak, and his
denunciations of the Copernican theory as absolutely incompatible with a
belief in the Bible, dissolved the whole assemblage in ridicule.
In its recent dealings with modern astronomy the wisdom of the Catholic
Church in the more civilized countries has prevented its yielding to
some astounding errors into which one part of the Protestant Church has
fallen heedlessly.
Though various leaders in the older Church have committed the absurd
error of allowing a text-book and sundry review articles to appear which
grossly misstate the Galileo episode, with the certainty of ultimately
undermining confidence in her teachings among her more thoughtful
young men, she has kept clear of the folly of continuing to tie her
instruction, and the acceptance of our sacred books, to an adoption of
the Ptolemaic theory.
Not so with American Lutheranism. In 1873 was published in St. Louis, at
the publishing house of the Lutheran Synod of Missouri, a work entitled
Astronomische Unterredung, the author being well known as a late
president of a Lutheran Teachers' Seminary.
No attack on the whole modern system of astronomy could be more bitter.
On the first page of the introduction the author, after stating the two
theories, asks, "Which is right?" and says: "It would be very simple to
me which is right, if it were only a question of human import. But the
wise and truthful God has expressed himself on this matter in the Bible.
The entire Holy Scripture settles the question that the earth is the
principal body (Hauptkorper) of the universe, that it stands fixed, and
that sun and moon only serve to light it."
The author then goes on to show from Scripture the folly, not only of
Copernicus and Newton, but of a long line of great astronomers in more
recent times. He declares: "Let no one understand me as inquiring first
where truth is to be found--in the Bible or with the astronomers. No; I
know that beforehand--that my God never lies, never makes a mistake; out
of his mouth comes only truth, when he speaks of the structure of the
universe, of the earth, sun, moon, and stars....
"Because the truth of the Holy Scripture is involved in this, therefore
the above question is of the highest importance to me.... Scientists and
others lean upon the miserable reed (Rohrstab) that God teaches only the
order of salvation, but not the order of the universe."
Very noteworthy is the fact that this late survival of an ancient belief
based upon text-worship is found, not in the teachings of any zealous
priest of the mother Church, but in those of an eminent professor in
that branch of Protestantism which claims special enlightenment.(70)
(70) For the amusing details of the attempt in the English Church to
repress science, and of the way in which it was met, see De Morgan,
Paradoxes, p. 42. For Pastor Knak and his associates, see the Revue des
Deux Mondes, 1868. Of the recent Lutheran works against the Copernican
astronomy, see especially Astronomische Unterredung zwischen einem
Liebhaber der Astronomie und mehreren beruhmten Astronomer der Neuzeit,
by J. C. W. L., St. Louis, 1873.
Nor has the warfare against the dead champions of science been carried
on by the older Church alone.
On the 10th of May, 1859, Alexander von Humboldt was buried. His labours
had been among the glories of the century, and his funeral was one of
the most imposing that Berlin had ever seen. Among those who honoured
themselves by their presence was the prince regent, afterward the
Emperor William I; but of the clergy it was observed that none
were present save the officiating clergyman and a few regarded as
unorthodox.(71)
(71) See Bruhns and Lassell, Life of Humboldt, London, 1873, vol. ii, p.
411.
V. RESULTS OF THE VICTORY OVER GALILEO.
We return now to the sequel of the Galileo case.
Having gained their victory over Galileo, living and dead, having used
it to scare into submission the professors of astronomy throughout
Europe, conscientious churchmen exulted. Loud was their rejoicing that
the "heresy," the "infidelity" the "atheism" involved in believing that
the earth revolves about its axis and moves around the sun had been
crushed by the great tribunal of the Church, acting in strict obedience
to the expressed will of one Pope and the written order of another. As
we have seen, all books teaching this hated belief were put upon the
Index of books forbidden to Christians, and that Index was prefaced by
a bull enforcing this condemnation upon the consciences of the faithful
throughout the world, and signed by the reigning Pope.
The losses to the world during this complete triumph of theology
were even more serious than at first appears: one must especially be
mentioned. There was then in Europe one of the greatest thinkers ever
given to mankind--Rene Descartes. Mistaken though many of his reasonings
were, they bore a rich fruitage of truth. He had already done a vast
work. His theory of vortices--assuming a uniform material regulated by
physical laws--as the beginning of the visible universe, though it was
but a provisional hypothesis, had ended the whole old theory of the
heavens with the vaulted firmament and the direction of the planetary
movements by angels, which even Kepler had allowed. The scientific
warriors had stirred new life in him, and he was working over and
summing up in his mighty mind all the researches of his time. The
result would have made an epoch in history. His aim was to combine all
knowledge and thought into a Treatise on the World, and in view of this
he gave eleven years to the study of anatomy alone. But the fate of
Galileo robbed him of all hope, of all courage; the battle seemed lost;
he gave up his great plan forever.(72)
(72) For Descartes's discouragement, see Humboldt, Cosmos, London,
1851, vol iii, p. 21; also Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, English
translation, vol. i, pp. 248, 249, where the letters of Descartes are
given, showing his despair, and the relinquishment of his best thoughts
and works in order to preserve peace with the Church; also Saisset,
Descartes et ses Precurseurs, pp. 100 et seq.; also Jolly, Histoire du
Mouvement intellectuel au XVI Siecle, vol. i, p. 390.
But ere long it was seen that this triumph of the Church was in reality
a prodigious defeat. From all sides came proofs that Copernicus and
Galileo were right; and although Pope Urban and the inquisition held
Galileo in strict seclusion, forbidding him even to SPEAK regarding the
double motion of the earth; and although this condemnation of "all
books which affirm the motion of the earth" was kept on the Index; and
although the papal bull still bound the Index and the condemnations
in it on the consciences of the faithful; and although colleges and
universities under Church control were compelled to teach the old
doctrine--it was seen by clear-sighted men everywhere that this victory
of the Church was a disaster to the victors.
New champions pressed on. Campanella, full of vagaries as he was, wrote
his Apology for Galileo, though for that and other heresies, religious,
and political, he seven times underwent torture.
And Kepler comes: he leads science on to greater victories. Copernicus,
great as he was, could not disentangle scientific reasoning entirely
from the theological bias: the doctrines of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas
as to the necessary superiority of the circle had vitiated the minor
features of his system, and left breaches in it through which the enemy
was not slow to enter; but Kepler sees these errors, and by wonderful
genius and vigour he gives to the world the three laws which bear his
name, and this fortress of science is complete. He thinks and speaks
as one inspired. His battle is severe. He is solemnly warned by the
Protestant Consistory of Stuttgart "not to throw Christ's kingdom into
confusion with his silly fancies," and as solemnly ordered to "bring
his theory of the world into harmony with Scripture": he is sometimes
abused, sometimes ridiculed, sometimes imprisoned. Protestants in Styria
and Wurtemberg, Catholics in Austria and Bohemia, press upon him but
Newton, Halley, Bradley, and other great astronomers follow, and to
science remains the victory.(73)
(73) For Campanella, see Amabile, Fra Tommaso Campanella, Naples, 1882,
especially vol. iii; also Libri, vol. iv, pp. 149 et seq. Fromundus,
speaking of Kepler's explanation, says, "Vix teneo ebullientem risum."
This is almost equal to the New York Church Journal, speaking of John
Stuart Mill as "that small sciolist," and of the preface to Dr. Draper's
great work as "chippering." How a journal, generally so fair in its
treatment of such subjects, can condescend to such weapons is one of the
wonders of modern journalism. For the persecution of Kepler, see Heller,
Geschichte der Physik, vol. i, pp. 281 et seq; also Reuschle, Kepler und
die Astronomie, Frankfurt a. M., 1871, pp. 87 et seq. There is a poetic
justice in the fact that these two last-named books come from Wurtemberg
professors. See also The New-Englander for March, 1884, p. 178.
Yet this did not end the war. During the seventeenth century, in France,
after all the splendid proofs added by Kepler, no one dared openly teach
the Copernican theory, and Cassini, the great astronomer, never declared
for it. In 1672 the Jesuit Father Riccioli declared that there
were precisely forty-nine arguments for the Copernican theory and
seventy-seven against it. Even after the beginning of the eighteenth
century--long after the demonstrations of Sir Isaac Newton--Bossuet,
the great Bishop of Meaux, the foremost theologian that France has ever
produced, declared it contrary to Scripture.
Nor did matters seem to improve rapidly during that century. In England,
John Hutchinson, as we have seen, published in 1724 his Moses' Principia
maintaining that the Hebrew Scriptures are a perfect system of natural
philosophy, and are opposed to the Newtonian system of gravitation; and,
as we have also seen, he was followed by a long list of noted men in
the Church. In France, two eminent mathematicians published in 1748 an
edition of Newton's Principia; but, in order to avert ecclesiastical
censure, they felt obliged to prefix to it a statement absolutely false.
Three years later, Boscovich, the great mathematician of the Jesuits,
used these words: "As for me, full of respect for the Holy Scriptures
and the decree of the Holy Inquisition, I regard the earth as immovable;
nevertheless, for simplicity in explanation I will argue as if the
earth moves; for it is proved that of the two hypotheses the appearances
favour this idea."
In Germany, especially in the Protestant part of it, the war was even
more bitter, and it lasted through the first half of the eighteenth
century. Eminent Lutheran doctors of divinity flooded the country with
treatises to prove that the Copernican theory could not be reconciled
with Scripture. In the theological seminaries and in many of the
universities where clerical influence was strong they seemed to sweep
all before them; and yet at the middle of the century we find some
of the clearest-headed of them aware of the fact that their cause was
lost.(74)
(74) For Cassini's position, see Henri Martin, Histoire de France, vol.
xiii, p. 175. For Riccioli, see Daunou, Etudes Historiques, vol. ii,
p. 439. For Boussuet, see Bertrand, p. 41. For Hutchinson, see Lyell,
Principles of Geology, p. 48. For Wesley, see his work, already cited.
As to Boscovich, his declaration, mentioned in the text, was in 1746,
but in 1785 he seemed to feel his position in view of history, and
apologized abjectly; Bertrand, pp. 60, 61. See also Whewell's notice
of Le Sueur and Jacquier's introduction to their edition of Newton's
Principia. For the struggle in Germany, see Zoeckler, Geschichte der
Beziehungenzwischen Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, vol. ii, pp. 45 et
seq.
In 1757 the most enlightened perhaps in the whole line of the popes,
Benedict XIV, took up the matter, and the Congregation of the Index
secretly allowed the ideas of Copernicus to be tolerated. Yet in 1765
Lalande, the great French astronomer, tried in vain at Rome to induce
the authorities to remove Galileo's works from the Index. Even at a
date far within our own nineteenth century the authorities of many
universities in Catholic Europe, and especially those in Spain, excluded
the Newtonian system. In 1771 the greatest of them all, the University
of Salamanca, being urged to teach physical science, refused, making
answer as follows: "Newton teaches nothing that would make a good
logician or metaphysician; and Gassendi and Descartes do not agree so
well with revealed truth as Aristotle does."
Vengeance upon the dead also has continued far into our own century. On
the 5th of May, 1829, a great multitude assembled at Warsaw to honour
the memory of Copernicus and to unveil Thorwaldsen's statue of him.
Copernicus had lived a pious, Christian life; he had been beloved for
unostentatious Christian charity; with his religious belief no fault had
ever been found; he was a canon of the Church at Frauenberg, and over
his grave had been written the most touching of Christian epitaphs.
Naturally, then, the people expected a religious service; all was
understood to be arranged for it; the procession marched to the church
and waited. The hour passed, and no priest appeared; none could be
induced to appear. Copernicus, gentle, charitable, pious, one of the
noblest gifts of God to religion as well as to science, was evidently
still under the ban. Five years after that, his book was still standing
on the Index of books prohibited to Christians.
The edition of the Index published in 1819 was as inexorable toward the
works of Copernicus and Galileo as its predecessors had been; but in the
year 1820 came a crisis. Canon Settele, Professor of Astronomy at Rome,
had written an elementary book in which the Copernican system was taken
for granted. The Master of the Sacred Palace, Anfossi, as censor of the
press, refused to allow the book to be printed unless Settele revised
his work and treated the Copernican theory as merely a hypothesis. On
this Settele appealed to Pope Pius VII, and the Pope referred the matter
to the Congregation of the Holy Office. At last, on the 16th of August,
1820, it was decided that Settele might teach the Copernican system as
established, and this decision was approved by the Pope. This aroused
considerable discussion, but finally, on the 11th of September, 1822,
the cardinals of the Holy Inquisition graciously agreed that "the
printing and publication of works treating of the motion of the earth
and the stability of the sun, in accordance with the general opinion of
modern astronomers, is permitted at Rome." This decree was ratified by
Pius VII, but it was not until thirteen years later, in 1835, that there
was issued an edition of the Index from which the condemnation of works
defending the double motion of the earth was left out.
This was not a moment too soon, for, as if the previous proofs had not
been sufficient, each of the motions of the earth was now absolutely
demonstrated anew, so as to be recognised by the ordinary observer.
The parallax of fixed stars, shown by Bessel as well as other noted
astronomers in 1838, clinched forever the doctrine of the revolution of
the earth around the sun, and in 1851 the great experiment of Foucault
with the pendulum showed to the human eye the earth in motion around its
own axis. To make the matter complete, this experiment was publicly made
in one of the churches at Rome by the eminent astronomer, Father Secchi,
of the Jesuits, in 1852--just two hundred and twenty years after the
Jesuits had done so much to secure Galileo's condemnation.(75)
(75) For good statements of the final action of the Church in the
matter, see Gebler; also Zoeckler, ii, 352. See also Bertrand,
Fondateurs de l'Astronomie moderne, p. 61; Flammarion, Vie de Copernic,
chap. ix. As to the time when the decree of condemnation was repealed,
there have been various pious attempts to make it earlier than the
reality. Artaud, p. 307, cited in an apologetic article in the Dublin
Review, September, 1865, says that Galileo's famous dialogue was
published in 1714, at Padua, entire, and with the usual approbations.
The same article also declares that in 1818, the ecclesiastical decrees
were repealed by Pius VII in full Consistory. Whewell accepts this;
but Cantu, an authority favourable to the Church, acknowledges that
Copernicus's work remained on the Index as late as 1835 (Cantu, Histoire
universelle, vol. xv, p. 483); and with this Th. Martin, not less
favourable to the Church, but exceedingly careful as to the facts,
agrees; and the most eminent authority of all, Prof. Reusch, of Bonn,
in his Der Index der vorbotenen Bucher, Bonn, 1885, vol. ii, p. 396,
confirms the above statement in the text. For a clear statement of
Bradley's exquisite demonstration of the Copernican theory by reasonings
upon the rapidity of light, etc., and Foucault's exhibition of the
rotation of the earth by the pendulum experiment, see Hoefer, Histoire
de l'Astronomie, pp. 492 et seq. For more recent proofs of the
Copernican theory, by the discoveries of Bunsen, Bischoff, Benzenberg,
and others, see Jevons, Principles of Science.
VI. THE RETREAT OF THE CHURCH AFTER ITS VICTORY OVER GALILEO.
Any history of the victory of astronomical science over dogmatic
theology would be incomplete without some account of the retreat made by
the Church from all its former positions in the Galileo case.
The retreat of the Protestant theologians was not difficult. A little
skilful warping of Scripture, a little skilful use of that time-honoured
phrase, attributed to Cardinal Baronius, that the Bible is given to
teach us, not how the heavens go, but how men go to heaven, and a free
use of explosive rhetoric against the pursuing army of scientists,
sufficed.
But in the older Church it was far less easy. The retreat of the
sacro-scientific army of Church apologists lasted through two centuries.
In spite of all that has been said by these apologists, there no longer
remains the shadow of a doubt that the papal infallibility was committed
fully and irrevocably against the double revolution of the earth. As the
documents of Galileo's trial now published show, Paul V, in 1616, pushed
on with all his might the condemnation of Galileo and of the works of
Copernicus and of all others teaching the motion of the earth around its
own axis and around the sun. So, too, in the condemnation of Galileo in
1633, and in all the proceedings which led up to it and which followed
it, Urban VIII was the central figure. Without his sanction no action
could have been taken.
True, the Pope did not formally sign the decree against the Copernican
theory THEN; but this came later. In 1664 Alexander VII prefixed to
the Index containing the condemnations of the works of Copernicus and
Galileo and "all books which affirm the motion of the earth" a papal
bull signed by himself, binding the contents of the Index upon the
consciences of the faithful. This bull confirmed and approved in express
terms, finally, decisively, and infallibly, the condemnation of "all
books teaching the movement of the earth and the stability of the
sun."(76)
(76) See Rev. William W. Roberts, The Pontifical Decrees against the
Doctrine of the Earth's Movement, London, 1885, p. 94; and for the text
of the papal bull, Speculatores domus Israel, pp. 132, 133, see also St.
George Mivart's article in the Nineteenth Century for July, 1885. For
the authentic publication of the bull, see preface to the Index of 1664,
where the bull appears, signed by the Pope. The Rev. Mr. Roberts and
Mr. St. George Mivart are Roman Catholics and both acknowledge that the
papal sanction was fully given.
The position of the mother Church had been thus made especially
difficult; and the first important move in retreat by the apologists was
the statement that Galileo was condemned, not because he affirmed the
motion of the earth, but because he supported it from Scripture. There
was a slight appearance of truth in this. Undoubtedly, Galileo's letters
to Castelli and the grand duchess, in which he attempted to show that
his astronomical doctrines were not opposed to Scripture, gave a new
stir to religious bigotry. For a considerable time, then, this quibble
served its purpose; even a hundred and fifty years after Galileo's
condemnation it was renewed by the Protestant Mallet du Pan, in his wish
to gain favour from the older Church.
But nothing can be more absurd, in the light of the original documents
recently brought out of the Vatican archives, than to make this
contention now. The letters of Galileo to Castelli and the Grand-Duchess
were not published until after the condemnation; and, although the
Archbishop of Pisa had endeavoured to use them against him, they were
but casually mentioned in 1616, and entirely left out of view in 1633.
What was condemned in 1616 by the Sacred Congregation held in the
presence of Pope Paul V, as "ABSURD, FALSE IN THEOLOGY, AND HERETICAL,
BECAUSE ABSOLUTELY CONTRARY TO HOLY SCRIPTURE," was the proposition that
"THE SUN IS THE CENTRE ABOUT WHICH THE EARTH REVOLVES"; and what was
condemned as "ABSURD, FALSE IN PHILOSOPHY, AND FROM A THEOLOGIC POINT
OF VIEW, AT LEAST, OPPOSED TO THE TRUE FAITH," was the proposition that
"THE EARTH IS NOT THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE AND IMMOVABLE, BUT HAS A
DIURNAL MOTION."
And again, what Galileo was made, by express order of Pope Urban, and
by the action of the Inquisition under threat of torture, to abjure in
1633, was "THE ERROR AND HERESY OF THE MOVEMENT OF THE EARTH."
What the Index condemned under sanction of the bull issued by Alexander
VII in 1664 was, "ALL BOOKS TEACHING THE MOVEMENT OF THE EARTH AND THE
STABILITY OF THE SUN."
What the Index, prefaced by papal bulls, infallibly binding its contents
upon the consciences of the faithful, for nearly two hundred years
steadily condemned was, "ALL BOOKS WHICH AFFIRM THE MOTION OF THE
EARTH."
Not one of these condemnations was directed against Galileo "for
reconciling his ideas with Scripture."(77)
(77) For the original trial documents, copied carefully from the Vatican
manuscripts, see the Roman Catholic authority, L'Epinois, especially
p. 35, where the principal document is given in its original Latin;
see also Gebler, Die Acten des galilei'schen Processes, for still more
complete copies of the same documents. For minute information regarding
these documents and their publication, see Favaro, Miscellanea Galileana
Inedita, forming vol. xxii, part iii, of the Memoirs of the Venetian
Institute for 1887, and especially pp. 891 and following.
Having been dislodged from this point, the Church apologists sought
cover under the statement that Galileo was condemned not for heresy, but
for contumacy and want of respect toward the Pope.
There was a slight chance, also, for this quibble: no doubt Urban VIII,
one of the haughtiest of pontiffs, was induced by Galileo's enemies
to think that he had been treated with some lack of proper etiquette:
first, by Galileo's adhesion to his own doctrines after his condemnation
in 1616; and, next, by his supposed reference in the Dialogue of 1632 to
the arguments which the Pope had used against him.
But it would seem to be a very poor service rendered to the doctrine
of papal infallibility to claim that a decision so immense in its
consequences could be influenced by the personal resentment of the
reigning pontiff.
Again, as to the first point, the very language of the various sentences
shows the folly of this assertion; for these sentences speak always of
"heresy" and never of "contumacy." As to the last point, the display
of the original documents settled that forever. They show Galileo from
first to last as most submissive toward the Pope, and patient under the
papal arguments and exactions. He had, indeed, expressed his anger at
times against his traducers; but to hold this the cause of the judgment
against him is to degrade the whole proceedings, and to convict Paul V,
Urban VIII, Bellarmin, the other theologians, and the Inquisition, of
direct falsehood, since they assigned entirely different reasons
for their conduct. From this position, therefore, the assailants
retreated.(78)
(78) The invention of the "contumacy" quibble seems due to Monsignor
Marini, who appears also to have manipulated the original documents to
prove it. Even Whewell was evidently somewhat misled by him, but Whewell
wrote before L'Epinois had shown all the documents, and under the
supposition that Marini was an honest man.
The next rally was made about the statement that the persecution of
Galileo was the result of a quarrel between Aristotelian professors on
one side and professors favouring the experimental method on the other.
But this position was attacked and carried by a very simple statement.
If the divine guidance of the Church is such that it can be dragged
into a professorial squabble, and made the tool of a faction in bringing
about a most disastrous condemnation of a proved truth, how did the
Church at that time differ from any human organization sunk into
decrepitude, managed nominally by simpletons, but really by schemers? If
that argument be true, the condition of the Church was even worse than
its enemies have declared it; and amid the jeers of an unfeeling world
the apologists sought new shelter.
The next point at which a stand was made was the assertion that
the condemnation of Galileo was "provisory"; but this proved a more
treacherous shelter than the others. The wording of the decree of
condemnation itself is a sufficient answer to this claim. When doctrines
have been solemnly declared, as those of Galileo were solemnly declared
under sanction of the highest authority in the Church, "contrary to the
sacred Scriptures," "opposed to the true faith," and "false and
absurd in theology and philosophy"--to say that such declarations
are "provisory" is to say that the truth held by the Church is not
immutable; from this, then, the apologists retreated.(79)
(79) This argument also seems to have been foisted upon the world by the
wily Monsignor Marini.
Still another contention was made, in some respects more curious
than any other: it was, mainly, that Galileo "was no more a victim
of Catholics than of Protestants; for they more than the Catholic
theologians impelled the Pope to the action taken."(80)
(80) See the Rev. A. M. Kirsch on Professor Huxley and Evolution, in The
American Catholic Quarterly, October, 1877. The article is, as a whole,
remarkably fair-minded, and in the main, just, as to the Protestant
attitude, and as to the causes underlying the whole action against
Galileo.
But if Protestantism could force the papal hand in a matter of this
magnitude, involving vast questions of belief and far-reaching questions
of policy, what becomes of "inerrancy"--of special protection and
guidance of the papal authority in matters of faith?
While this retreat from position to position was going on, there was a
constant discharge of small-arms, in the shape of innuendoes, hints,
and sophistries: every effort was made to blacken Galileo's private
character: the irregularities of his early life were dragged forth, and
stress was even laid upon breaches of etiquette; but this succeeded so
poorly that even as far back as 1850 it was thought necessary to cover
the retreat by some more careful strategy.
This new strategy is instructive. The original documents of the Galileo
trial had been brought during the Napoleonic conquests to Paris; but in
1846 they were returned to Rome by the French Government, on the express
pledge by the papal authorities that they should be published. In 1850,
after many delays on various pretexts, the long-expected publication
appeared. The personage charged with presenting them to the world was
Monsignor Marini. This ecclesiastic was of a kind which has too often
afflicted both the Church and the world at large. Despite the solemn
promise of the papal court, the wily Marini became the instrument of
the Roman authorities in evading the promise. By suppressing a document
here, and interpolating a statement there, he managed to give plausible
standing-ground for nearly every important sophistry ever broached
to save the infallibility of the Church and destroy the reputation of
Galileo. He it was who supported the idea that Galileo was "condemned
not for heresy, but for contumacy."
The first effect of Monsignor Marini's book seemed useful in covering
the retreat of the Church apologists. Aided by him, such vigorous
writers as Ward were able to throw up temporary intrenchments between
the Roman authorities and the indignation of the world.
But some time later came an investigator very different from Monsignor
Marini. This was a Frenchman, M. L'Epinois. Like Marini, L'Epinois was
devoted to the Church; but, unlike Marini, he could not lie. Having
obtained access in 1867 to the Galileo documents at the Vatican,
he published several of the most important, without suppression or
pious-fraudulent manipulation. This made all the intrenchments based
upon Marini's statements untenable. Another retreat had to be made.
And now came the most desperate effort of all. The apologetic army,
reviving an idea which the popes and the Church had spurned for
centuries, declared that the popes AS POPES had never condemned the
doctrines of Copernicus and Galileo; that they had condemned them as men
simply; that therefore the Church had never been committed to them; that
the condemnation was made by the cardinals of the inquisition and index;
and that the Pope had evidently been restrained by interposition of
Providence from signing their condemnation. Nothing could show the
desperation of the retreating party better than jugglery like this. The
fact is, that in the official account of the condemnation by Bellarmin,
in 1616, he declares distinctly that he makes this condemnation "in the
name of His Holiness the Pope."(81)
(81) See the citation from the Vatican manuscript given in Gebler, p.
78.
Again, from Pope Urban downward, among the Church authorities of the
seventeenth century the decision was always acknowledged to be made by
the Pope and the Church. Urban VIII spoke of that of 1616 as made by
Pope Paul V and the Church, and of that of 1633 as made by himself
and the Church. Pope Alexander VII in 1664, in his bull Speculatores,
solemnly sanctioned the condemnation of all books affirming the earth's
movement.(82)
(82) For references by Urban VIII to the condemnation as made by Pope
Paul V see pp. 136, 144, and elsewhere in Martin, who much against
his will is forced to allow this. See also Roberts, Pontifical decrees
against the Earth's Movement, and St. George Mivart's article, as above
quoted; also Reusch, Index der verbotenen Bucher, Bonn, 1885, vol. ii,
pp. 29 et seq.
When Gassendi attempted to raise the point that the decision against
Copernicus and Galileo was not sanctioned by the Church as such, an
eminent theological authority, Father Lecazre, rector of the College of
Dijon, publicly contradicted him, and declared that it "was not certain
cardinals, but the supreme authority of the Church," that had condemned
Galileo; and to this statement the Pope and other Church authorities
gave consent either openly or by silence. When Descartes and others
attempted to raise the same point, they were treated with contempt.
Father Castelli, who had devoted himself to Galileo, and knew to his
cost just what the condemnation meant and who made it, takes it for
granted, in his letter to the papal authorities, that it was made by the
Church. Cardinal Querenghi, in his letters; the ambassador Guicciardini,
in his dispatches; Polacco, in his refutation; the historian Viviani,
in his biography of Galileo--all writing under Church inspection
and approval at the time, took the view that the Pope and the Church
condemned Galileo, and this was never denied at Rome. The Inquisition
itself, backed by the greatest theologian of the time (Bellarmin), took
the same view. Not only does he declare that he makes the condemnation
"in the name of His Holiness the Pope," but we have the Roman Index,
containing the condemnation for nearly two hundred years, prefaced by
a solemn bull of the reigning Pope binding this condemnation on the
consciences of the whole Church, and declaring year after year that "all
books which affirm the motion of the earth" are damnable. To attempt
to face all this, added to the fact that Galileo was required to abjure
"the heresy of the movement of the earth" by written order of the Pope,
was soon seen to be impossible. Against the assertion that the Pope
was not responsible we have all this mass of testimony, and the bull of
Alexander VII in 1664.(83)
(83) For Lecazre's answer to Gassendi, see Martin, pp. 146, 147. For the
attempt to make the crimes of Galileo breach of etiquette, see Dublin
Review, as above. Whewell, vol. i, p. 283. Citation from Marini:
"Galileo was punished for trifling with the authorities, to which
he refused to submit, and was punished for obstinate contumacy, not
heresy." The sufficient answer to all this is that the words of the
inflexible sentence designating the condemned books are "libri omnes
qui affirmant telluris motum." See Bertrand, p. 59. As to the idea
that "Galileo was punished for not his opinion, but for basing it on
Scripture," the answer may be found in the Roman Index of 1704, in which
are noted for condemnation "Libri omnes docentes mobilitatem terrae et
immobilitatem solis." For the way in which, when it was found convenient
in argument, Church apologists insisted that it WAS "the Supreme Chief
of the Church by a pontifical decree, and not certain cardinals," who
condemned Galileo and his doctrine, see Father Lecazre's letter to
Gassendi, in Flammarion, Pluralite des Mondes, p. 427, and Urban
VIII's own declarations as given by Martin. For the way in which,
when necessary, Church apologists asserted the very contrary of this,
declaring that it was "issued in a doctrinal degree of the Congregation
of the Index, and NOT as the Holy Father's teaching," see Dublin Review,
September, 1865.
This contention, then, was at last utterly given up by honest Catholics
themselves. In 1870 a Roman Catholic clergy man in England, the Rev. Mr.
Roberts, evidently thinking that the time had come to tell the truth,
published a book entitled The Pontifical Decrees against the Earth's
Movement, and in this exhibited the incontrovertible evidences that
the papacy had committed itself and its infallibility fully against the
movement of the earth. This Catholic clergyman showed from the original
record that Pope Paul V, in 1616, had presided over the tribunal
condemning the doctrine of the earth's movement, and ordering Galileo
to give up the opinion. He showed that Pope Urban VIII, in 1633, pressed
on, directed, and promulgated the final condemnation, making himself
in all these ways responsible for it. And, finally, he showed that Pope
Alexander VII, in 1664, by his bull--Speculatores domus Israel--attached
to the Index, condemning "all books which affirm the motion of the
earth," had absolutely pledged the papal infallibility against the
earth's movement. He also confessed that under the rules laid down by
the highest authorities in the Church, and especially by Sixtus V and
Pius IX, there was no escape from this conclusion.
Various theologians attempted to evade the force of the argument. Some,
like Dr. Ward and Bouix, took refuge in verbal niceties; some, like Dr.
Jeremiah Murphy, comforted themselves with declamation. The only result
was, that in 1885 came another edition of the Rev. Mr. Roberts's work,
even more cogent than the first; and, besides this, an essay by
that eminent Catholic, St. George Mivart, acknowledging the Rev. Mr.
Roberts's position to be impregnable, and declaring virtually that the
Almighty allowed Pope and Church to fall into complete error regarding
the Copernican theory, in order to teach them that science lies outside
their province, and that the true priesthood of scientific truth rests
with scientific investigators alone.(84)
(84) For the crushing answer by two eminent Roman Catholics to the
sophistries cited--an answer which does infinitely more credit to the
older Church that all the perverted ingenuity used in concealing the
truth or breaking the force of it--see Roberts and St. George Mivart, as
already cited.
In spite, then, of all casuistry and special pleading, this sturdy
honesty ended the controversy among Catholics themselves, so far as
fair-minded men are concerned.
In recalling it at this day there stand out from its later phases
two efforts at compromise especially instructive, as showing the
embarrassment of militant theology in the nineteenth century.
The first of these was made by John Henry Newman in the days when he was
hovering between the Anglican and Roman Churches. In one of his sermons
before the University of Oxford he spoke as follows:
"Scripture says that the sun moves and the earth is stationary, and
science that the earth moves and the sun is comparatively at rest. How
can we determine which of these opposite statements is the very truth
till we know what motion is? If our idea of motion is but an accidental
result of our present senses, neither proposition is true and both are
true: neither true philosophically; both true for certain practical
purposes in the system in which they are respectively found."
In all anti-theological literature there is no utterance more hopelessly
skeptical. And for what were the youth of Oxford led into such
bottomless depths of disbelief as to any real existence of truth or
any real foundation for it? Simply to save an outworn system of
interpretation into which the gifted preacher happened to be born.
The other utterance was suggested by De Bonald and developed in the
Dublin Review, as is understood, by one of Newman's associates. This
argument was nothing less than an attempt to retreat under the charge
of deception against the Almighty himself. It is as follows: "But it may
well be doubted whether the Church did retard the progress of scientific
truth. What retarded it was the circumstance that God has thought fit to
express many texts of Scripture in words which have every appearance of
denying the earth's motion. But it is God who did this, not the Church;
and, moreover, since he saw fit so to act as to retard the progress of
scientific truth, it would be little to her discredit, even if it were
true, that she had followed his example."
This argument, like Mr. Gosse's famous attempt to reconcile geology to
Genesis--by supposing that for some inscrutable purpose God deliberately
deceived the thinking world by giving to the earth all the appearances
of development through long periods of time, while really creating it in
six days, each of an evening and a morning--seems only to have awakened
the amazed pity of thinking men. This, like the argument of Newman, was
a last desperate effort of Anglican and Roman divines to save something
from the wreckage of dogmatic theology.(85)
(85) For the quotation from Newman, see his Sermons on the Theory of
Religious Belief, sermon xiv, cited by Bishop Goodwin in Contemporary
Review for January, 1892. For the attempt to take the blame off the
shoulders of both Pope and cardinals and place it upon the Almighty, see
the article above cited, in the Dublin Review, September 1865, p.
419 and July, 1871, pp. 157 et seq. For a good summary of the various
attempts, and for replies to them in a spirit of judicial fairness, see
Th. Martin, Vie de Galilee, though there is some special pleading to
save the infallibility of the Pope and Church. The bibliography at the
close is very valuable. For details of Mr. Gosse's theory, as developed
in his Omphalos, see the chapter on Geology in this work. As to a still
later attempt, see Wegg-Prosser, Galileo and his Judges, London, 1889,
the main thing in it being an attempt to establish, against the honest
and honourable concessions of Catholics like Roberts and Mivart,
sundry far-fetched and wire-drawn distinctions between dogmatic and
disciplinary bulls--an attempt which will only deepen the distrust of
straightforward reasoners. The author's point of view is stated in
the words, "I have maintained that the Church has a right to lay her
restraining hand on the speculations of natural science" (p. 167).
All these well-meaning defenders of the faith but wrought into the
hearts of great numbers of thinking men the idea that there is a
necessary antagonism between science and religion. Like the landsman who
lashes himself to the anchor of the sinking ship, they simply attached
Christianity by the strongest cords of logic which they could spin to
these mistaken ideas in science, and, could they have had their way, the
advance of knowledge would have ingulfed both together.
On the other hand, what had science done for religion? Simply this:
Copernicus, escaping persecution only by death; Giordano Bruno, burned
alive as a monster of impiety; Galileo, imprisoned and humiliated as
the worst of misbelievers; Kepler, accused of "throwing Christ's kingdom
into confusion with his silly fancies"; Newton, bitterly attacked for
"dethroning Providence," gave to religion stronger foundations and more
ennobling conceptions.
Under the old system, that princely astronomer, Alphonso of Castile,
seeing the inadequacy of the Ptolemaic theory, yet knowing no other,
startled Europe with the blasphemy that, if he had been present at
creation, he could have suggested a better order of the heavenly bodies.
Under the new system, Kepler, filled with a religious spirit, exclaimed,
"I do think the thoughts of God." The difference in religious spirit
between these two men marks the conquest made in this long struggle by
Science for Religion.(86)
(86) As a pendant to this ejaculation of Kepler may be cited the words
of Linnaeus: "Deum ominpotentem a tergo transeuntem vidi et obstupui."
Nothing is more unjust than to cast especial blame for all this
resistance to science upon the Roman Church. The Protestant Church,
though rarely able to be so severe, has been more blameworthy. The
persecution of Galileo and his compeers by the older Church was
mainly at the beginning of the seventeenth century; the persecution
of Robertson Smith, and Winchell, and Woodrow, and Toy, and the young
professors at Beyrout, by various Protestant authorities, was near the
end of the nineteenth century. Those earlier persecutions by Catholicism
were strictly in accordance with principles held at that time by all
religionists, Catholic and Protestant, throughout the world; these later
persecutions by Protestants were in defiance of principles which all
Protestants to-day hold or pretend to hold, and none make louder
claim to hold them than the very sects which persecuted these eminent
Christian men of our day, men whose crime was that they were intelligent
enough to accept the science of their time, and honest enough to
acknowledge it.
Most unjustly, then, would Protestantism taunt Catholicism for excluding
knowledge of astronomical truths from European Catholic universities
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while real knowledge
of geological and biological and anthropological truth is denied
or pitifully diluted in so many American Protestant colleges and
universities in the nineteenth century.
Nor has Protestantism the right to point with scorn to the Catholic
Index, and to lay stress on the fact that nearly every really important
book in the last three centuries has been forbidden by it, so long as
young men in so many American Protestant universities and colleges are
nursed with "ecclesiastical pap" rather than with real thought, and
directed to the works of "solemnly constituted impostors," or to sundry
"approved courses of reading," while they are studiously kept aloof from
such leaders in modern thought as Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Draper, and
Lecky.
It may indeed be justly claimed by Protestantism that some of the former
strongholds of her bigotry have become liberalized; but, on the other
hand, Catholicism can point to the fact that Pope Leo XIII, now
happily reigning, has made a noble change as regards open dealing with
documents. The days of Monsignor Marini, it may be hoped, are gone. The
Vatican Library, with its masses of historical material, has been thrown
open to Protestant and Catholic scholars alike, and this privilege has
been freely used by men representing all shades of religious thought.
As to the older errors, the whole civilized world was at fault,
Protestant as well as Catholic. It was not the fault of religion; it
was the fault of that short-sighted linking of theological dogmas to
scriptural texts which, in utter defiance of the words and works of the
Blessed Founder of Christianity, narrow-minded, loud-voiced men are ever
prone to substitute for religion. Justly is it said by one of the most
eminent among contemporary Anglican divines, that "it is because they
have mistaken the dawn for a conflagration that theologians have so
often been foes of light."(87)
(87) For an exceedingly striking statement, by a Roman Catholic
historian of genius, as to the POPULAR demand for persecution and the
pressure of the lower strata in ecclesiastical organizations for cruel
measures, see Balmes's Le Protestantisme compare au Catholicisme, etc.,
fourth edition, Paris, 1855, vol. ii. Archbishop Spaulding has something
of the same sort in his Miscellanies. L'Epinois, Galilee, p. 22 et seq.,
stretches this as far as possible to save the reputation of the Church
in the Galileo matter. As to the various branches of the Protestant
Church in England and the United States, it is a matter of notoriety
that the smug, well-to-do laymen, whether elders, deacons, or vestrymen,
are, as a rule, far more prone to heresy-hunting than are their better
educated pastors. As to the cases of Messrs. Winchell, Woodrow, Toy,
and all the professors at Beyrout, with details, see the chapter in this
series on The Fall of Man and Anthropology. Among Protestant historians
who have recently been allowed full and free examination of the
treasures in the Vatican Library, and even those involving questions
between Catholicism and Protestantism, are von Sybel, of Berlin, and
Philip Schaff, of New York. It should be added that the latter went with
commendatory letters from eminent prelates in the Catholic Church in
America and Europe. For the closing citation, see Canon Farrar, History
of Interpretation, p. 432.
CHAPTER IV. FROM "SIGNS AND WONDERS" TO LAW IN THE HEAVENS.
I. THE THEOLOGICAL VIEW.
Few things in the evolution of astronomy are more suggestive than the
struggle between the theological and the scientific doctrine regarding
comets--the passage from the conception of them as fire-balls flung by
an angry God for the purpose of scaring a wicked world, to a recognition
of them as natural in origin and obedient to law in movement. Hardly
anything throws a more vivid light upon the danger of wresting texts
of Scripture to preserve ideas which observation and thought have
superseded, and upon the folly of arraying ecclesiastical power against
scientific discovery.(88)
(88) The present study, after its appearance in the Popular Science
Monthly as a "new chapter in the Warfare of Science," was revised
and enlarged to nearly its present form, and read before the American
Historical Association, among whose papers it was published, in 1887,
under the title of A History of the Doctrine of Comets.
Out of the ancient world had come a mass of beliefs regarding comets,
meteors, and eclipses; all these were held to be signs displayed from
heaven for the warning of mankind. Stars and meteors were generally
thought to presage happy events, especially the births of gods, heroes,
and great men. So firmly rooted was this idea that we constantly find
among the ancient nations traditions of lights in the heavens preceding
the birth of persons of note. The sacred books of India show that
the births of Crishna and of Buddha were announced by such heavenly
lights.(89) The sacred books of China tell of similar appearances at
the births of Yu, the founder of the first dynasty, and of the inspired
sage, Lao-tse. According to the Jewish legends, a star appeared at the
birth of Moses, and was seen by the Magi of Egypt, who informed the
king; and when Abraham was born an unusual star appeared in the east.
The Greeks and Romans cherished similar traditions. A heavenly light
accompanied the birth of Aesculapius, and the births of various Caesars
were heralded in like manner.(90)
(89) For Crishna, see Cox, Aryan Mythology, vol. ii, p. 133; the Vishnu
Purana (Wilson's translation), book v, chap. iv. As to lights at
the birth, or rather at the conception, of Buddha, see Bunsen, Angel
Messiah, pp. 22,23; Alabaster, Wheel of the Law (illustrations of
Buddhism), p. 102; Edwin Arnold, Light of Asia; Bp. Bigandet, Life
of Gaudama, the Burmese Buddha, p. 30; Oldenberg, Buddha (English
translation), part i, chap. ii.
(90) For Chinese legends regarding stars at the birth of Yu and
Lao-tse, see Thornton, History of China, vol. i, p. 137; also Pingre,
Cometographie, p. 245. Regarding stars at the birth of Moses and
Abraham, see Calmet, Fragments, part viii; Baring-Gould, Legends of Old
Testament Characters, chap. xxiv; Farrar, Life of Christ, chap. iii. As
to the Magi, see Higgins, Anacalypsis; Hooykaas, Ort, and Kuenen,
Bible for Learners, vol. iii. For Greek and Roman traditions, see Bell,
Pantheon, s. v. Aesculapius and Atreus; Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol.
i, pp. 151, 590; Farrar, Life of Christ (American edition), p. 52; Cox,
Tales of Ancient Greece, pp. 41, 61, 62; Higgins, Anacalypsis, vol. i,
p. 322; also Suetonius, Caes., Julius, p.88, Claud., p. 463; Seneca,
Nat. Quaest, vol. 1, p. 1; Virgil, Ecl., vol. ix, p. 47; as well as
Ovid, Pliny, and others.
The same conception entered into our Christian sacred books. Of all the
legends which grew in such luxuriance and beauty about the cradle of
Jesus of Nazareth, none appeals more directly to the highest poetic
feeling than that given by one of the evangelists, in which a star,
rising in the east, conducted the wise men to the manger where the
Galilean peasant-child--the Hope of Mankind, the Light of the World--was
lying in poverty and helplessness.
Among the Mohammedans we have a curious example of the same tendency
toward a kindly interpretation of stars and meteors, in the belief of
certain Mohammedan teachers that meteoric showers are caused by good
angels hurling missiles to drive evil angels out of the sky.
Eclipses were regarded in a very different light, being supposed
to express the distress of Nature at earthly calamities. The Greeks
believed that darkness overshadowed the earth at the deaths of
Prometheus, Atreus, Hercules, Aesculapius, and Alexander the Great. The
Roman legends held that at the death of Romulus there was darkness for
six hours. In the history of the Caesars occur portents of all three
kinds; for at the death of Julius the earth was shrouded in darkness,
the birth of Augustus was heralded by a star, and the downfall of Nero
by a comet. So, too, in one of the Christian legends clustering about
the crucifixion, darkness overspread the earth from the sixth to the
ninth hour. Neither the silence regarding it of the only evangelist who
claims to have been present, nor the fact that observers like Seneca
and Pliny, who, though they carefully described much less striking
occurrences of the same sort and in more remote regions, failed to
note any such darkness even in Judea, have availed to shake faith in an
account so true to the highest poetic instincts of humanity.
This view of the relations between Nature and man continued among both
Jews and Christians. According to Jewish tradition, darkness overspread
the earth for three days when the books of the Law were profaned by
translation into Greek. Tertullian thought an eclipse an evidence of
God's wrath against unbelievers. Nor has this mode of thinking ceased
in modern times. A similar claim was made at the execution of Charles I;
and Increase Mather thought an eclipse in Massachusetts an evidence
of the grief of Nature at the death of President Chauncey, of Harvard
College. Archbishop Sandys expected eclipses to be the final tokens of
woe at the destruction of the world, and traces of this feeling have
come down to our own time.
The quaint story of the Connecticut statesman who, when his associates
in the General Assembly were alarmed by an eclipse of the sun, and
thought it the beginning of the Day of Judgment, quietly ordered in
candles, that he might in any case be found doing his duty, marks
probably the last noteworthy appearance of the old belief in any
civilized nation.(91)
(91) For Hindu theories, see Alabaster, Wheel of the Law, 11. For Greek
and Roman legends, See Higgins, Anacalypsis, vol. i, pp. 616, 617.; also
Suetonius, Caes., Julius, p. 88, Claud., p. 46; Seneca, Quaest. Nat.,
vol. i, p. 1, vol. vii, p. 17; Pliny, Hist. Nat., vol. ii, p. 25;
Tacitus, Ann., vol. xiv, p. 22; Josephus, Antiq., vol. xiv, p. 12; and
the authorities above cited. For the tradition of the Jews regarding
the darkness of three days, see citation in Renan, Histoire du Peuple
Israel, vol. iv, chap. iv. For Tertullian's belief regarding the
significance of an eclipse, see the Ad Scapulum, chap. iii, in Migne,
Patrolog. Lat., vol. i, p. 701. For the claim regarding Charles I, see
a sermon preached before Charles II, cited by Lecky, England in the
Eighteenth Century, vol. i, p. 65. Mather thought, too, that it might
have something to do with the death of sundry civil functionaries of
the colonies; see his Discourse concerning comets, 1682. For Archbishop
Sandy's belief, see his eighteenth sermon (in Parker Soc. Publications).
The story of Abraham Davenport has been made familiar by the poem of
Whittier.
In these beliefs regarding meteors and eclipses there was little
calculated to do harm by arousing that superstitious terror which is
the worst breeding-bed of cruelty. Far otherwise was it with the belief
regarding comets. During many centuries it gave rise to the direst
superstition and fanaticism. The Chaldeans alone among the ancient
peoples generally regarded comets without fear, and thought them bodies
wandering as harmless as fishes in the sea; the Pythagoreans alone among
philosophers seem to have had a vague idea of them as bodies returning
at fixed periods of time; and in all antiquity, so far as is known, one
man alone, Seneca, had the scientific instinct and prophetic inspiration
to give this idea definite shape, and to declare that the time would
come when comets would be found to move in accordance with natural law.
Here and there a few strong men rose above the prevailing superstition.
The Emperor Vespasian tried to laugh it down, and insisted that a
certain comet in his time could not betoken his death, because it was
hairy, and he bald; but such scoffing produced little permanent effect,
and the prophecy of Seneca was soon forgotten. These and similar
isolated utterances could not stand against the mass of opinion which
upheld the doctrine that comets are "signs and wonders."(92)
(92) For terror caused in Rome by comets, see Pingre, Cometographie, pp.
165, 166. For the Chaldeans, see Wolf, Geschichte der Astronomie, p. 10
et seq., and p. 181 et seq.; also Pingre, chap. ii. For the Pythagorean
notions, see citations from Plutarch in Costard, History of Astronomy,
p. 283. For Seneca's prediction, see Guillemin, World of Comets
(translated by Glaisher), pp. 4, 5; also Watson, On Comets, p. 126. For
this feeling in antiquity generally, see the preliminary chapters of the
two works last cited.
The belief that every comet is a ball of fire flung from the right hand
of an angry God to warn the grovelling dwellers of earth was received
into the early Church, transmitted through the Middle Ages to the
Reformation period, and in its transmission was made all the more
precious by supposed textual proofs from Scripture. The great fathers of
the Church committed themselves unreservedly to it. In the third century
Origen, perhaps the most influential of the earlier fathers of the
universal Church in all questions between science and faith, insisted
that comets indicate catastrophes and the downfall of empires and
worlds. Bede, so justly revered by the English Church, declared in the
eighth century that "comets portend revolutions of kingdoms, pestilence,
war, winds, or heat"; and John of Damascus, his eminent contemporary
in the Eastern Church, took the same view. Rabanus Maurus, the great
teacher of Europe in the ninth century, an authority throughout the
Middle Ages, adopted Bede's opinion fully. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great
light of the universal Church in the thirteenth century, whose works the
Pope now reigning commends as the centre and source of all university
instruction, accepted and handed down the same opinion. The sainted
Albert the Great, the most noted genius of the medieval Church in
natural science, received and developed this theory. These men and
those who followed them founded upon scriptural texts and theological
reasonings a system that for seventeen centuries defied every advance of
thought.(93)
(93) For Origen, se his De Princip., vol. i, p. 7; also Maury, Leg.
pieuses, p. 203, note. For Bede and others, see De Nat., vol. xxiv; Joh.
Dam., De Fid. Or.,vol. ii, p. 7; Maury, La Magie et l'Astronomie, pp.
181, 182. For Albertus Magnus, see his Opera, vol. i, tr. iii, chaps.
x, xi. Among the texts of Scripture on which this belief rested was
especially Joel ii, 30, 31.
The main evils thence arising were three: the paralysis of self-help,
the arousing of fanaticism, and the strengthening of ecclesiastical
and political tyranny. The first two of these evils--the paralysis of
self-help and the arousing of fanaticism--are evident throughout
all these ages. At the appearance of a comet we constantly see all
Christendom, from pope to peasant, instead of striving to avert war
by wise statesmanship, instead of striving to avert pestilence by
observation and reason, instead of striving to avert famine by skilful
economy, whining before fetiches, trying to bribe them to remove these
signs of God's wrath, and planning to wreak this supposed wrath of God
upon misbelievers.
As to the third of these evils--the strengthening of ecclesiastical
and civil despotism--examples appear on every side. It was natural that
hierarchs and monarchs whose births were announced by stars, or whose
deaths were announced by comets, should regard themselves as far above
the common herd, and should be so regarded by mankind; passive obedience
was thus strengthened, and the most monstrous assumptions of authority
were considered simply as manifestations of the Divine will. Shakespeare
makes Calphurnia say to Caesar:
"When beggars die, there are no comets seen; The heavens themselves
blaze forth the death of princes."
Galeazzo, the tyrant of Milan, expressing satisfaction on his deathbed
that his approaching end was of such importance as to be heralded by a
comet, is but a type of many thus encouraged to prey upon mankind;
and Charles V, one of the most powerful monarchs the world has known,
abdicating under fear of the comet of 1556, taking refuge in the
monastery of San Yuste, and giving up the best of his vast realms to
such a scribbling bigot as Philip II, furnishes an example even more
striking.(94)
(94) For Caesar, see Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, act ii, sc. 2. For
Galeazzo, see Guillemin, World of Comets, p. 19. For Charles V, see
Prof. Wolf's essay in the Monatschrift des wissenschaftlichen Vereins,
Zurich, 1857, p. 228.
But for the retention of this belief there was a moral cause. Myriads
of good men in the Christian Church down to a recent period saw in the
appearance of comets not merely an exhibition of "signs in the heavens"
foretold in Scripture, but also Divine warnings of vast value to
humanity as incentives to repentance and improvement of life-warnings,
indeed, so precious that they could not be spared without danger to
the moral government of the world. And this belief in the portentous
character of comets as an essential part of the Divine government,
being, as it was thought, in full accord with Scripture, was made for
centuries a source of terror to humanity. To say nothing of examples in
the earlier periods, comets in the tenth century especially increased
the distress of all Europe. In the middle of the eleventh century a
comet was thought to accompany the death of Edward the Confessor and to
presage the Norman conquest; the traveller in France to-day may see this
belief as it was then wrought into the Bayeux tapestry.(95)
(95) For evidences of this widespread terror, see chronicles of
Raoul Glaber, Guillaume de Nangis, William of Malmesbury, Florence
of Worcester, Ordericus Vitalis, et al., passim, and the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle (in the Rolls Series). For very thrilling pictures of this
horror in England, see Freeman, Norman Conquest, vol. iii, pp. 640-644,
and William Rufus, vol. ii, p. 118. For the Bayeau tapestry, see Bruce,
Bayeux Tapestry Elucidated, plate vii and p. 86; also Guillemin, World
of Comets, p. 24. There is a large photographic copy, in the South
Kensington Museum at London, of the original, wrought, as is generally
believed, by the wife of William the Conqueror and her ladies, and is
still preserved in the town museum at Bayeux.
Nearly every decade of years throughout the Middle Ages saw Europe
plunged into alarm by appearances of this sort, but the culmination
seems to have been reached in 1456. At that time the Turks, after a long
effort, had made good their footing in Europe. A large statesmanship
or generalship might have kept them out; but, while different religious
factions were disputing over petty shades of dogma, they had advanced,
had taken Constantinople, and were evidently securing their foothold.
Now came the full bloom of this superstition. A comet appeared. The
Pope of that period, Calixtus III, though a man of more than ordinary
ability, was saturated with the ideas of his time. Alarmed at this
monster, if we are to believe the contemporary historian, this
infallible head of the Church solemnly "decreed several days of prayer
for the averting of the wrath of God, that whatever calamity impended
might be turned from the Christians and against the Turks." And, that
all might join daily in this petition, there was then established that
midday Angelus which has ever since called good Catholics to prayer
against the powers of evil. Then, too, was incorporated into a litany
the plea, "From the Turk and the comet, good Lord, deliver us."
Never was papal intercession less effective; for the Turk has held
Constantinople from that day to this, while the obstinate comet, being
that now known under the name of Halley, has returned imperturbably at
short periods ever since.(96)
(96) The usual statement is, that Calixtus excommunicated the comet by
a bull, and this is accepted by Arago, Grant, Hoefer, Guillemin, Watson,
and many historians of astronomy. Hence the parallel is made on a noted
occasion by President Lincoln. No such bull, however, is to be found in
the published Bulleria, and that establishing the Angelus (as given by
Raynaldus in the Annales Eccl.) contains no mention of the comet. But
the authority of Platina (in his Vitae Pontificum, Venice, 1479, sub
Calistus III) who was not only in Rome at the time, but when he wrote
his history, archivist of the Vatican, is final as to the Pope's
attitude. Platina's authority was never questioned until modern science
changed the ideas of the world. The recent attempt of Pastor (in his
Geschichte der Papste) to pooh-pooh down the whole matter is too evident
an evasion to carry weight with those who know how even the most careful
histories have to be modified to suit the views of the censorship at
Rome.
But the superstition went still further. It became more and more
incorporated into what was considered "scriptural science" and "sound
learning." The encyclopedic summaries, in which the science of the
Middle Ages and the Reformation period took form, furnish abundant
proofs of this.
Yet scientific observation was slowly undermining this structure. The
inspired prophecy of Seneca had not been forgotten. Even as far back as
the ninth century, in the midst of the sacred learning so abundant
at the court of Charlemagne and his successors, we find a scholar
protesting against the accepted doctrine. In the thirteenth century we
have a mild question by Albert the Great as to the supposed influence of
comets upon individuals; but the prevailing theological current was too
strong, and he finally yielded to it in this as in so many other things.
So, too, in the sixteenth century, we have Copernicus refusing to accept
the usual theory, Paracelsus writing to Zwingli against it, and Julius
Caesar Scaliger denouncing it as "ridiculous folly."(97)
(97) As to encyclopedic summaries, see Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum
Naturale, and the various editions of Reisch's Margarita Philosophica.
For Charlemagne's time, see Champion, La Fin du Monde, p. 156; Leopardi,
Errori Popolari, p. 165. As to Albert the Great's question, see Heller,
Geschichte der Physik, vol. i, p. 188. As to scepticism in the sixteenth
century, see Champion, La Fin du Monde, pp. 155, 156; and for Scaliger,
Dudith's book, cited below.
At first this scepticism only aroused the horror of theologians and
increased the vigour of ecclesiastics; both asserted the theological
theory of comets all the more strenuously as based on scriptural truth.
During the sixteenth century France felt the influence of one of her
greatest men on the side of this superstition. Jean Bodin, so far before
his time in political theories, was only thoroughly abreast of it in
religious theories: the same reverence for the mere letter of Scripture
which made him so fatally powerful in supporting the witchcraft
delusion, led him to support this theological theory of comets--but
with a difference: he thought them the souls of men, wandering in space,
bringing famine, pestilence, and war.
Not less strong was the same superstition in England. Based upon
mediaeval theology, it outlived the revival of learning. From a
multitude of examples a few may be selected as typical. Early in the
sixteenth century Polydore Virgil, an ecclesiastic of the unreformed
Church, alludes, in his English History, to the presage of the death of
the Emperor Constantine by a comet as to a simple matter of fact; and
in his work on prodigies he pushes this superstition to its most extreme
point, exhibiting comets as preceding almost every form of calamity.
In 1532, just at the transition period from the old Church to the new,
Cranmer, paving the way to his archbishopric, writes from Germany to
Henry VIII, and says of the comet then visible: "What strange things
these tokens do signify to come hereafter, God knoweth; for they do not
lightly appear but against some great matter."
Twenty years later Bishop Latimer, in an Advent sermon, speaks of
eclipses, rings about the sun, and the like, as signs of the approaching
end of the world.(98)
(98) For Bodin, see Theatr., lib. ii, cited by Pingre, vol. i, p. 45;
also a vague citation in Baudrillart, Bodin et son Temps, p. 360.
For Polydore Virgil, see English History, p. 97 (in Camden Society
Publications). For Cranmer, see Remains, vol. ii, p. 535 (in Parker
Society Publications). For Latimer, see Sermons, second Sunday in
Advent, 1552.
In 1580, under Queen Elizabeth, there was set forth an "order of
prayer to avert God's wrath from us, threatened by the late terrible
earthquake, to be used in all parish churches." In connection with this
there was also commended to the faithful "a godly admonition for the
time present"; and among the things referred to as evidence of God's
wrath are comets, eclipses, and falls of snow.
This view held sway in the Church of England during Elizabeth's whole
reign and far into the Stuart period: Strype, the ecclesiastical
annalist, gives ample evidence of this, and among the more curious
examples is the surmise that the comet of 1572 was a token of Divine
wrath provoked by the St. Bartholomew massacre.
As to the Stuart period, Archbishop Spottiswoode seems to have been
active in carrying the superstition from the sixteenth century to the
seventeenth, and Archbishop Bramhall cites Scripture in support of
it. Rather curiously, while the diary of Archbishop Laud shows so much
superstition regarding dreams as portents, it shows little or none
regarding comets; but Bishop Jeremy Taylor, strong as he was, evidently
favoured the usual view. John Howe, the eminent Nonconformist divine
in the latter part of the century, seems to have regarded the comet
superstition as almost a fundamental article of belief; he laments the
total neglect of comets and portents generally, declaring that this
neglect betokens want of reverence for the Ruler of the world; he
expresses contempt for scientific inquiry regarding comets, insists that
they may be natural bodies and yet supernatural portents, and ends by
saying, "I conceive it very safe to suppose that some very considerable
thing, either in the way of judgment or mercy, may ensue, according as
the cry of persevering wickedness or of penitential prayer is more or
less loud at that time."(99)
(99) For Liturgical Services of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, see Parker
Society Publications, pp. 569, 570. For Strype, see his Ecclesiastical
Memorials, vol. iii, part i, p. 472; also see his Annals of the
reformation, vol. ii, part ii, p. 151; and his Life of Sir Thomas Smith,
pp. 161, 162. For Spottiswoode, see History of the Church of Scotland
(Edinburgh reprint, 1851), vol. i, pp. 185, 186. For Bramhall, see his
Works, Oxford, 1844, vol. iv, pp. 60, 307, etc. For Jeremy Taylor, see
his Sermons on the Life of Christ. For John Howe, see his Works, London,
1862, vol. iv, pp. 140, 141.
The Reformed Church of Scotland supported the superstition just as
strongly. John Knox saw in comets tokens of the wrath of Heaven; other
authorities considered them "a warning to the king to extirpate the
Papists"; and as late as 1680, after Halley had won his victory, comets
were announced on high authority in the Scottish Church to be "prodigies
of great judgment on these lands for our sins, for never was the Lord
more provoked by a people."
While such was the view of the clergy during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, the laity generally accepted it as a matter of
course, Among the great leaders in literature there was at least general
acquiescence in it. Both Shakespeare and Milton recognise it, whether
they fully accept it or not. Shakespeare makes the Duke of Bedford,
lamenting at the bier of Henry V, say:
"Comets, importing change of time and states, Brandish your crystal
tresses in the sky; And with them scourge the bad revolting stars, That
have consented unto Henry's death."
Milton, speaking of Satan preparing for combat, says:
"On the other side, Incensed with indignation, Satan stood. Unterrified,
and like a comet burned, That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge In the
arctic sky, and from its horrid hair Shakes pestilence and war."
We do indeed find that in some minds the discoveries of Tycho Brahe
and Kepler begin to take effect, for, in 1621, Burton in his Anatomy of
Melancholy alludes to them as changing public opinion somewhat regarding
comets; and, just before the middle of the century, Sir Thomas Browne
expresses a doubt whether comets produce such terrible effects, "since
it is found that many of them are above the moon."(100) Yet even as late
as the last years of the seventeenth century we have English authors
of much power battling for this supposed scriptural view and among the
natural and typical results we find, in 1682, Ralph Thoresby, a Fellow
of the Royal Society, terrified at the comet of that year, and writing
in his diary the following passage: "Lord, fit us for whatever changes
it may portend; for, though I am not ignorant that such meteors proceed
from natural causes, yet are they frequently also the presages of
imminent calamities." Interesting is it to note here that this was
Halley's comet, and that Halley was at this very moment making those
scientific studies upon it which were to free the civilized world
forever from such terrors as distressed Thoresby.
(100) For John Knox, see his Histoire of the Reformation of Religion
within the Realm of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1732), lib. iv; also Chambers,
Domestic Annals of Scotland, vol. ii, pp 410-412. For Burton, see his
Anatomy of Melancholy, part ii, sect 2. For Browne, see the Vulgar and
Common Errors, book vi, chap. xiv.
The belief in comets as warnings against sin was especially one of those
held "always, everywhere, and by all," and by Eastern Christians as well
as by Western. One of the most striking scenes in the history of the
Eastern Church is that which took place at the condemnation of Nikon,
the great Patriarch of Moscow. Turning toward his judges, he pointed to
a comet then blazing in the sky, and said, "God's besom shall sweep you
all away!"
Of all countries in western Europe, it was in Germany and German
Switzerland that this superstition took strongest hold. That same depth
of religious feeling which produced in those countries the most terrible
growth of witchcraft persecution, brought superstition to its highest
development regarding comets. No country suffered more from it in the
Middle Ages. At the Reformation Luther declared strongly in favour of
it. In one of his Advent sermons he said, "The heathen write that the
comet may arise from natural causes, but God creates not one that does
not foretoken a sure calamity." Again he said, "Whatever moves in the
heaven in an unusual way is certainly a sign of God's wrath."
And sometimes, yielding to another phase of his belief, he declared them
works of the devil, and declaimed against them as "harlot stars."(101)
(101) For Thoresby, see his Diary, (London, 1830). Halley's great
service is described further on in this chapter. For Nikon's speech, see
Dean Stanley's History of the Eastern Church, p. 485. For very striking
examples of this mediaeval terror in Germany, see Von Raumer, Geschichte
der Hohenstaufen, vol. vi, p. 538. For the Reformation period, see Wolf,
Gesch. d. Astronomie; also Praetorius, Ueber d. Cometstern (Erfurt,
1589), in which the above sentences of Luther are printed on the title
page as epigraphs. For "Huren-Sternen," see the sermon of Celichius,
described later.
Melanchthon, too, in various letters refers to comets as heralds of
Heaven's wrath, classing them, with evil conjunctions of the planets and
abortive births, among the "signs" referred to in Scripture. Zwingli,
boldest of the greater Reformers in shaking off traditional beliefs,
could not shake off this, and insisted that the comet of 1531 betokened
calamity. Arietus, a leading Protestant theologian, declared, "The
heavens are given us not merely for our pleasure, but also as a warning
of the wrath of God for the correction of our lives." Lavater insisted
that comets are signs of death or calamity, and cited proofs from
Scripture.
Catholic and Protestant strove together for the glory of this doctrine.
It was maintained with especial vigour by Fromundus, the eminent
professor and Doctor of Theology at the Catholic University of Louvain,
who so strongly opposed the Copernican system; at the beginning of the
seventeenth century, even so gifted an astronomer as Kepler yielded
somewhat to the belief; and near the end of that century Voigt declared
that the comet of 1618 clearly presaged the downfall of the Turkish
Empire, and he stigmatized as "atheists and Epicureans" all who did not
believe comets to be God's warnings.(102)
(102) For Melanchthon, see Wolf, ubi supra. For Zwingli, see Wolf, p.
235. For Arietus, see Madler, Geschichte der Himmelskunde, vol. ii. For
Kepler's superstition, see Wolf, p. 281. For Voight, see Himmels-Manaten
Reichstage, Hamburg, 1676. For both Fromundus and Voigt, see also
Madler, vol. ii, p. 399, and Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, vol. i, p.28.
II. THEOLOGICAL EFFORTS TO CRUSH THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW.
Out of this belief was developed a great series of efforts to maintain
the theological view of comets, and to put down forever the scientific
view. These efforts may be divided into two classes: those directed
toward learned men and scholars, through the universities, and those
directed toward the people at large, through the pulpits. As to the
first of these, that learned men and scholars might be kept in the paths
of "sacred science" and "sound learning," especial pains was taken to
keep all knowledge of the scientific view of comets as far as possible
from students in the universities. Even to the end of the seventeenth
century the oath generally required of professors of astronomy over a
large part of Europe prevented their teaching that comets are heavenly
bodies obedient to law. Efforts just as earnest were made to fasten into
students' minds the theological theory. Two or three examples out of
many may serve as types. First of these may be named the teaching of
Jacob Heerbrand, professor at the University of Tubingen, who in 1577
illustrated the moral value of comets by comparing the Almighty sending
a comet, to the judge laying the executioner's sword on the table
between himself and the criminal in a court of justice; and, again, to
the father or schoolmaster displaying the rod before naughty children.
A little later we have another churchman of great importance in that
region, Schickhart, head pastor and superintendent at Goppingen,
preaching and publishing a comet sermon, in which he denounces those who
stare at such warnings of God without heeding them, and compares them
to "calves gaping at a new barn door." Still later, at the end of the
seventeenth century, we find Conrad Dieterich, director of studies at
the University of Marburg, denouncing all scientific investigation of
comets as impious, and insisting that they are only to be regarded as
"signs and wonders."(103)
(103) For the effect of the anti-Pythagorean oath, see Prowe,
Copernicus; also Madler and Wolf. For Heerbrand, see his Von dem
erschrockenlichen Wunderzeichen, Tubingen, 1577. For Schickart, see
his Predigt vom Wunderzeichen, Stuttgart, 1621. For Deiterich, see his
sermon, described more fully below.
The results of this ecclesiastical pressure upon science in the
universities were painfully shown during generation after generation, as
regards both professors and students; and examples may be given typical
of its effects upon each of these two classes.
The first of these is the case of Michael Maestlin. He was by birth a
Swabian Protestant, was educated at Tubingen as a pupil of Apian, and,
after a period of travel, was settled as deacon in the little parish
of Backnang, when the comet of 1577 gave him an occasion to apply his
astronomical studies. His minute and accurate observation of it is to
this day one of the wonders of science. It seems almost impossible that
so much could be accomplished by the naked eye. His observations agreed
with those of Tycho Brahe, and won for Maestlin the professorship of
astronomy in the University of Heidelberg. No man had so clearly proved
the supralunar position of a comet, or shown so conclusively that
its motion was not erratic, but regular. The young astronomer, though
Apian's pupil, was an avowed Copernican and the destined master and
friend of Kepler. Yet, in the treatise embodying his observations, he
felt it necessary to save his reputation for orthodoxy by calling
the comet a "new and horrible prodigy," and by giving a chapter of
"conjectures on the signification of the present comet," in which he
proves from history that this variety of comet betokens peace, but
peace purchased by a bloody victory. That he really believed in this
theological theory seems impossible; the very fact that his observations
had settled the supralunar character and regular motion of comets proves
this. It was a humiliation only to be compared to that of Osiander
when he wrote his grovelling preface to the great book of Copernicus.
Maestlin had his reward: when, a few years, later his old teacher,
Apian, was driven from his chair at Tubingen for refusing to sign the
Lutheran Concord-Book, Maestlin was elected to his place.
Not less striking was the effect of this theological pressure upon the
minds of students. Noteworthy as an example of this is the book of the
Leipsic lawyer, Buttner. From no less than eighty-six biblical texts
he proves the Almighty's purpose of using the heavenly bodies for the
instruction of men as to future events, and then proceeds to frame
exhaustive tables, from which, the time and place of the comet's first
appearance being known, its signification can be deduced. This manual
he gave forth as a triumph of religious science, under the name of the
Comet Hour-Book.(104)
(104) For Maestlin, see his Observatio et Demonstration Cometae,
Tubingen, 1578. For Buttner, see his Cometen Stundbuchlein, Leipsic,
1605.
The same devotion to the portent theory is found in the universities
of Protestant Holland. Striking is it to see in the sixteenth century,
after Tycho Brahe's discovery, the Dutch theologian, Gerard Vossius,
Professor of Theology and Eloquence at Leyden, lending his great weight
to the superstition. "The history of all times," he says, "shows comets
to be the messengers of misfortune. It does not follow that they are
endowed with intelligence, but that there is a deity who makes use of
them to call the human race to repentance." Though familiar with the
works of Tycho Brahe, he finds it "hard to believe" that all comets are
ethereal, and adduces several historical examples of sublunary ones.
Nor was this attempt to hold back university teaching to the old view of
comets confined to Protestants. The Roman Church was, if possible,
more strenuous in the same effort. A few examples will serve as types,
representing the orthodox teaching at the great centres of Catholic
theology.
One of these is seen in Spain. The eminent jurist Torreblanca was
recognised as a controlling authority in all the universities of Spain,
and from these he swayed in the seventeenth century the thought of
Catholic Europe, especially as to witchcraft and the occult powers
in Nature. He lays down the old cometary superstition as one of the
foundations of orthodox teaching: Begging the question, after the
fashion of his time, he argues that comets can not be stars, because new
stars always betoken good, while comets betoken evil.
The same teaching was given in the Catholic universities of the
Netherlands. Fromundus, at Louvain, the enemy of Galileo, steadily
continued his crusade against all cometary heresy.(105)
(105) For Vossius, see the De Idololatria (in his Opera, vol. v, pp.
283-285). For Torreblanc, see his De Magia, Seville, 1618, and often
reprinted. For Fromundus, see his Meteorologica.
But a still more striking case is seen in Italy. The reverend Father
Augustin de Angelis, rector of the Clementine College at Rome, as late
as 1673, after the new cometary theory had been placed beyond reasonable
doubt, and even while Newton was working out its final demonstration,
published a third edition of his Lectures on Meteorology. It was
dedicated to the Cardinal of Hesse, and bore the express sanction of
the Master of the Sacred Palace at Rome and of the head of the religious
order to which De Angelis belonged. This work deserves careful analysis,
not only as representing the highest and most approved university
teaching of the time at the centre of Roman Catholic Christendom, but
still more because it represents that attempt to make a compromise
between theology and science, or rather the attempt to confiscate
science to the uses of theology, which we so constantly find whenever
the triumph of science in any field has become inevitable.
As to the scientific element in this compromise, De Angelis holds, in
his general introduction regarding meteorology, that the main material
cause of comets is "exhalation," and says, "If this exhalation is thick
and sticky, it blazes into a comet." And again he returns to the
same view, saying that "one form of exhalation is dense, hence easily
inflammable and long retentive of fire, from which sort are especially
generated comets." But it is in his third lecture that he takes up
comets specially, and his discussion of them is extended through the
fourth, fifth, and sixth lectures. Having given in detail the opinions
of various theologians and philosophers, he declares his own in the form
of two conclusions. The first of these is that "comets are not heavenly
bodies, but originate in the earth's atmosphere below the moon; for
everything heavenly is eternal and incorruptible, but comets have a
beginning and ending--ergo, comets can not be heavenly bodies." This,
we may observe, is levelled at the observations and reasonings of Tycho
Brahe and Kepler, and is a very good illustration of the scholastic
and mediaeval method--the method which blots out an ascertained fact by
means of a metaphysical formula. His second conclusion is that "comets
are of elemental and sublunary nature; for they are an exhalation
hot and dry, fatty and well condensed, inflammable and kindled in
the uppermost regions of the air." He then goes on to answer sundry
objections to this mixture of metaphysics and science, and among other
things declares that "the fatty, sticky material of a comet may be
kindled from sparks falling from fiery heavenly bodies or from a
thunderbolt"; and, again, that the thick, fatty, sticky quality of the
comet holds its tail in shape, and that, so far are comets from having
their paths beyond the moon's orbit, as Tycho Brahe and Kepler thought,
he himself in 1618 saw "a bearded comet so near the summit of Vesuvius
that it almost seemed to touch it." As to sorts and qualities of
comets, he accepts Aristotle's view, and divides them into bearded and
tailed.(106) He goes on into long disquisitions upon their colours,
forms, and motions. Under this latter head he again plunges deep into
a sea of metaphysical considerations, and does not reappear until he
brings up his compromise in the opinion that their movement is as yet
uncertain and not understood, but that, if we must account definitely
for it, we must say that it is effected by angels especially assigned to
this service by Divine Providence. But, while proposing this compromise
between science and theology as to the origin and movement of comets,
he will hear to none as regards their mission as "signs and wonders" and
presages of evil. He draws up a careful table of these evils, arranging
them in the following order: Drought, wind, earthquake, tempest, famine,
pestilence, war, and, to clinch the matter, declares that the comet
observed by him in 1618 brought not only war, famine, pestilence, and
earthquake, but also a general volcanic eruption, "which would have
destroyed Naples, had not the blood of the invincible martyr Januarius
withstood it."
(106) Barbata et caudata.
It will be observed, even from this sketch, that, while the learned
Father Augustin thus comes infallibly to the mediaeval conclusion, he
does so very largely by scientific and essentially modern processes,
giving unwonted prominence to observation, and at times twisting
scientific observation into the strand with his metaphysics. The
observations and methods of his science are sometimes shrewd, sometimes
comical. Good examples of the latter sort are such as his observing that
the comet stood very near the summit of Vesuvius, and his reasoning
that its tail was kept in place by its stickiness. But observations and
reasonings of this sort are always the first homage paid by theology to
science as the end of their struggle approaches.(107)
(107) See De Angelis, Lectiones Meteorologicae, Rome, 1669.
Equally striking is an example seen a little later in another part of
Europe; and it is the more noteworthy because Halley and Newton had
already fully established the modern scientific theory. Just at the
close of the seventeenth century the Jesuit Reinzer, professor at Linz,
put forth his Meteorologia Philosophico-Politica, in which all natural
phenomena received both a physical and a moral interpretation. It was
profusely and elaborately illustrated, and on account of its instructive
contents was in 1712 translated into German for the unlearned reader.
The comet receives, of course, great attention. "It appears," says
Reinzer, "only then in the heavens when the latter punish the earth, and
through it (the comet) not only predict but bring to pass all sorts of
calamity.... And, to that end, its tail serves for a rod, its hair for
weapons and arrows, its light for a threat, and its heat for a sign of
anger and vengeance." Its warnings are threefold: (1) "Comets, generated
in the air, betoken NATURALLY drought, wind, earthquake, famine, and
pestilence." (2) "Comets can indirectly, in view of their material,
betoken wars, tumults, and the death of princes; for, being hot and
dry, they bring the moistnesses (Feuchtigkeiten) in the human body to
an extraordinary heat and dryness, increasing the gall; and, since the
emotions depend on the temperament and condition of the body, men are
through this change driven to violent deeds, quarrels, disputes, and
finally to arms: especially is this the result with princes, who
are more delicate and also more arrogant than other men, and whose
moistnesses are more liable to inflammation of this sort, inasmuch as
they live in luxury and seldom restrain themselves from those things
which in such a dry state of the heavens are especially injurious." (3)
"All comets, whatever prophetic significance they may have naturally
in and of themselves, are yet principally, according to the Divine
pleasure, heralds of the death of great princes, of war, and of other
such great calamities; and this is known and proved, first of all, from
the words of Christ himself: 'Nation shall rise against nation, and
kingdom against kingdom; and great earthquakes shall be in divers
places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs
shall there be from heaven.'"(108)
(108) See Reinzer, Meteorologica Philosophico-Politica (edition of
Augsburg, 1712), pp. 101-103.
While such pains was taken to keep the more highly educated classes
in the "paths of scriptural science and sound learning;" at the
universities, equal efforts were made to preserve the cometary orthodoxy
of the people at large by means of the pulpits. Out of the mass of
sermons for this purpose which were widely circulated I will select just
two as typical, and they are worthy of careful study as showing some
special dangers of applying theological methods to scientific facts.
In the second half of the sixteenth century the recognised capital of
orthodox Lutheranism was Magdeburg, and in the region tributary to this
metropolis no Church official held a more prominent station than the
"Superintendent," or Lutheran bishop, of the neighbouring Altmark. It
was this dignitary, Andreas Celichius by name, who at Magdeburg, in
1578, gave to the press his Theological Reminder of the New Comet.
After deprecating as blasphemous the attempt of Aristotle to explain the
phenomenon otherwise than as a supernatural warning from God to sinful
man, he assures his hearers that "whoever would know the comet's real
source and nature must not merely gape and stare at the scientific
theory that it is an earthy, greasy, tough, and sticky vapour and mist,
rising into the upper air and set ablaze by the celestial heat." Far
more important for them is it to know what this vapour is. It is really,
in the opinion of Celichius, nothing more or less than "the thick smoke
of human sins, rising every day, every hour, every moment, full of
stench and horror, before the face of God, and becoming gradually so
thick as to form a comet, with curled and plaited tresses, which at last
is kindled by the hot and fiery anger of the Supreme Heavenly Judge."
He adds that it is probably only through the prayers and tears of
Christ that this blazing monument of human depravity becomes visible to
mortals. In support of this theory, he urges the "coming up before God"
of the wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah and of Nineveh, and especially
the words of the prophet regarding Babylon, "Her stench and rottenness
is come up before me." That the anger of God can produce the
conflagration without any intervention of Nature is proved from the
Psalms, "He sendeth out his word and melteth them." From the position
of the comet, its course, and the direction of its tail he augurs
especially the near approach of the judgment day, though it may also
betoken, as usual, famine, pestilence, and war. "Yet even in these
days," he mourns, "there are people reckless and giddy enough to pay
no heed to such celestial warnings, and these even cite in their own
defence the injunction of Jeremiah not to fear signs in the heavens."
This idea he explodes, and shows that good and orthodox Christians,
while not superstitious like the heathen, know well "that God is not
bound to his creation and the ordinary course of Nature, but must often,
especially in these last dregs of the world, resort to irregular means
to display his anger at human guilt."(109)
(109) For Celichius, or Celich, see his own treatise, as above.
The other typical case occurred in the following century and in another
part of Germany. Conrad Dieterich was, during the first half of the
seventeenth century, a Lutheran ecclesiastic of the highest authority.
His ability as a theologian had made him Archdeacon of Marburg,
Professor of Philosophy and Director of Studies at the University of
Giessen, and "Superintendent," or Lutheran bishop, in southwestern
Germany. In the year 1620, on the second Sunday in Advent, in the great
Cathedral of Ulm, he developed the orthodox doctrine of comets in a
sermon, taking up the questions: 1. What are comets? 2. What do they
indicate? 3. What have we to do with their significance? This sermon
marks an epoch. Delivered in that stronghold of German Protestantism
and by a prelate of the highest standing, it was immediately printed,
prefaced by three laudatory poems from different men of note, and sent
forth to drive back the scientific, or, as it was called, the "godless,"
view of comets. The preface shows that Dieterich was sincerely alarmed
by the tendency to regard comets as natural appearances. His text was
taken from the twenty-fifth verse of the twenty-first chapter of St.
Luke: "And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the
stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea
and the waves roaring." As to what comets are, he cites a multitude of
philosophers, and, finding that they differ among themselves, he uses a
form of argument not uncommon from that day to this, declaring that this
difference of opinion proves that there is no solution of the problem
save in revelation, and insisting that comets are "signs especially sent
by the Almighty to warn the earth." An additional proof of this he
finds in the forms of comets. One, he says, took the form of a trumpet;
another, of a spear; another of a goat; another, of a torch; another, of
a sword; another, of an arrow; another, of a sabre; still another, of a
bare arm. From these forms of comets he infers that we may divine their
purpose. As to their creation, he quotes John of Damascus and other
early Church authorities in behalf of the idea that each comet is a
star newly created at the Divine command, out of nothing, and that it
indicates the wrath of God. As to their purpose, having quoted largely
from the Bible and from Luther, he winds up by insisting that, as God
can make nothing in vain, comets must have some distinct object; then,
from Isaiah and Joel among the prophets, from Matthew, Mark, and
Luke among the evangelists, from Origen and John Chrysostom among the
fathers, from Luther and Melanchthon among the Reformers, he draws
various texts more or less conclusive to prove that comets indicate evil
and only evil; and he cites Luther's Advent sermon to the effect that,
though comets may arise in the course of Nature, they are still signs
of evil to mankind. In answer to the theory of sundry naturalists that
comets are made up of "a certain fiery, warm, sulphurous, saltpetery,
sticky fog," he declaims: "Our sins, our sins: they are the fiery heated
vapours, the thick, sticky, sulphurous clouds which rise from the
earth toward heaven before God." Throughout the sermon Dieterich pours
contempt over all men who simply investigate comets as natural objects,
calls special attention to a comet then in the heavens resembling a long
broom or bundle of rods, and declares that he and his hearers can only
consider it rightly "when we see standing before us our Lord God in
heaven as an angry father with a rod for his children." In answer to the
question what comets signify, he commits himself entirely to the idea
that they indicate the wrath of God, and therefore calamities of every
sort. Page after page is filled with the records of evils following
comets. Beginning with the creation of the world, he insists that
the first comet brought on the deluge of Noah, and cites a mass of
authorities, ranging from Moses and Isaiah to Albert the Great and
Melanchthon, in support of the view that comets precede earthquakes,
famines, wars, pestilences, and every form of evil. He makes some parade
of astronomical knowledge as to the greatness of the sun and moon, but
relapses soon into his old line of argument. Imploring his audience not
to be led away from the well-established belief of Christendom and the
principles of their fathers, he comes back to his old assertion, insists
that "our sins are the inflammable material of which comets are made,"
and winds up with a most earnest appeal to the Almighty to spare his
people.(110)
(110) For Deiterich, see Ulmische Cometen-Predigt, von dem Cometen, so
nechst abgewischen 1618 Jahrs im Wintermonat erstenmahls in Schwaben
sehen lassen,... gehalten zu Ulm... durch Conrad Dieterich, Ulm, 1620.
For a life of the author, see article Dieterich in the Allgemeine
Deutsche Biographie. See also Wolf.
Similar efforts from the pulpit were provoked by the great comet of
1680. Typical among these was the effort in Switzerland of Pastor
Heinrich Erni, who, from the Cathedral of Zurich, sent a circular letter
to the clergy of that region showing the connection of the eleventh and
twelfth verses of the first chapter of Jeremiah with the comet, giving
notice that at his suggestion the authorities had proclaimed a solemn
fast, and exhorting the clergy to preach earnestly on the subject of
this warning.
Nor were the interpreters of the comet's message content with simple
prose. At the appearance of the comet of 1618, Grasser and Gross,
pastors and doctors of theology at Basle, put forth a collection
of doggerel rhymes to fasten the orthodox theory into the minds of
school-children and peasants. One of these may be translated:
"I am a Rod in God's right hand threatening the German and foreign land."
Others for a similar purpose taught:
"Eight things there be a Comet brings, When it on high doth horrid
range: Wind, Famine, Plague, and Death to Kings, War, Earthquakes,
Floods, and Direful Change."
Great ingenuity was shown in meeting the advance of science, in the
universities and schools, with new texts of Scripture; and Stephen
Spleiss, Rector of the Gymnasium at Schaffhausen, got great credit by
teaching that in the vision of Jeremiah the "almond rod" was a tailed
comet, and the "seething pot" a bearded one.(111)
(111) For Erni, see Wolf, Gesch. d. Astronomie, p. 239. For Grassner and
Gross, see their Christenliches Bedenken... von dem erschrockenlichen
Cometen, etc., Zurich, 1664. For Spleiss, see Beilauftiger Bericht von
dem jetzigen Cometsternen, etc., schaffhausen, 1664.
It can be easily understood that such authoritative utterances as that
of Dieterich must have produced a great effect throughout Protestant
Christendom; and in due time we see their working in New England. That
same tendency to provincialism, which, save at rare intervals, has been
the bane of Massachusetts thought from that day to this, appeared; and
in 1664 we find Samuel Danforth arguing from the Bible that "comets
are portentous signals of great and notable changes," and arguing from
history that they "have been many times heralds of wrath to a secure and
impenitent world." He cites especially the comet of 1652, which appeared
just before Mr. Cotton's sickness and disappeared after his death.
Morton also, in his Memorial recording the death of John Putnam, alludes
to the comet of 1662 as "a very signal testimony that God had then
removed a bright star and a shining light out of the heaven of his
Church here into celestial glory above." Again he speaks of another
comet, insisting that "it was no fiery meteor caused by exhalation, but
it was sent immediately by God to awaken the secure world," and goes
on to show how in that year "it pleased God to smite the fruits of the
earth--namely, the wheat in special--with blasting and mildew, whereby
much of it was spoiled and became profitable for nothing, and much of
it worth little, being light and empty. This was looked upon by the
judicious and conscientious of the land as a speaking providence against
the unthankfulness of many,... as also against voluptuousness and abuse
of the good creatures of God by licentiousness in drinking and fashions
in apparel, for the obtaining whereof a great part of the principal
grain was oftentimes unnecessarily expended."
But in 1680 a stronger than either of these seized upon the doctrine
and wielded it with power. Increase Mather, so open always to ideas
from Europe, and always so powerful for good or evil in the cloonies,
preached his sermon on "Heaven's Alarm to the World,... wherein is shown
that fearful sights and signs in the heavens are the presages of great
calamities at hand." The texts were taken from the book of Revelation:
"And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven,
burning, as it were a lamp," and "Behold, the third woe cometh quickly."
In this, as in various other sermons, he supports the theological
cometary theory fully. He insists that "we are fallen into the dregs
of time," and that the day of judgment is evidently approaching. He
explains away the words of Jeremiah--"Be not dismayed at signs in the
heavens"--and shows that comets have been forerunners of nearly every
form of evil. Having done full justice to evils thus presaged in
scriptural times, he begins a similar display in modern history by
citing blazing stars which foretold the invasions of Goths, Huns,
Saracens, and Turks, and warns gainsayers by citing the example of
Vespasian, who, after ridiculing a comet, soon died. The general shape
and appearance of comets, he thinks, betoken their purpose, and he cites
Tertullian to prove them "God's sharp razors on mankind, whereby he doth
poll, and his scythe whereby he doth shear down multitudes of sinful
creatures." At last, rising to a fearful height, he declares: "For the
Lord hath fired his beacon in the heavens among the stars of God there;
the fearful sight is not yet out of sight. The warning piece of heaven
is going off. Now, then, if the Lord discharge his murdering pieces from
on high, and men be found in their sins unfit for death, their blood
shall be upon them." And again, in an agony of supplication, he cries
out: "Do we see the sword blazing over us? Let it put us upon crying
to God, that the judgment be diverted and not return upon us again so
speedily.... Doth God threaten our very heavens? O pray unto him, that he
would not take away stars and send comets to succeed them."(112)
(112) For Danforth, see his Astronomical Descritption of the Late Comet
or Blazing Star, Together with a Brief Theological Application Thereof,
1664. For Morton, see his Memorial, pp. 251, 252,; also 309, 310. Texts
cited by Mather were Rev., viii, 10, and xi, 14.
Two years later, in August, 1682, he followed this with another sermon
on "The Latter Sign," "wherein is showed that the voice of God in
signal providences, especially when repeated and iterated, ought to be
hearkened unto." Here, too, of course, the comet comes in for a large
share of attention. But his tone is less sure: even in the midst of all
his arguments appears an evident misgiving. The thoughts of Newton in
science and Bayle in philosophy were evidently tending to accomplish
the prophecy of Seneca. Mather's alarm at this is clear. His natural
tendency is to uphold the idea that a comet is simply a fire-ball flung
from the hand of an avenging God at a guilty world, but he evidently
feels obliged to yield something to the scientific spirit; hence, in the
Discourse concerning Comets, published in 1683, he declares: "There are
those who think that, inasmuch as comets may be supposed to proceed from
natural causes, there is no speaking voice of Heaven in them beyond what
is to be said of all other works of God. But certain it is that many
things which may happen according to the course of Nature are portentous
signs of Divine anger and prognostics of great evils hastening upon the
world." He then notices the eclipse of August, 1672, and adds: "That
year the college was eclipsed by the death of the learned president
there, worthy Mr. Chauncey and two colonies--namely, Massachusetts and
Plymouth--by the death of two governors, who died within a twelvemonth
after.... Shall, then, such mighty works of God as comets are be
insignificant things?"(113)
(113) Increase Mather's Heaven's Alarm to the World was first printed
at Boston in 1681, but was reprinted in 1682, and was appended, with the
sermon on The Latter Sign, to the Discourse on Comets (Boston, 1683).
III. THE INVASION OF SCEPTICISM.
Vigorous as Mather's argument is, we see scepticism regarding "signs"
continuing to invade the public mind; and, in spite of his threatenings,
about twenty years after we find a remarkable evidence of this progress
in the fact that this scepticism has seized upon no less a personage
than that colossus of orthodoxy, his thrice illustrious son, Cotton
Mather himself; and him we find, in 1726, despite the arguments of his
father, declaring in his Manuductio: "Perhaps there may be some need for
me to caution you against being dismayed at the signs of the heavens,
or having any superstitious fancies upon eclipses and the like.... I am
willing that you be apprehensive of nothing portentous in blazing stars.
For my part, I know not whether all our worlds, and even the sun itself,
may not fare the better for them."(114)
(114) For Cotton Mather, see the Manuductio, pp. 54, 55.
Curiously enough, for this scientific scepticism in Cotton Mather there
was a cause identical with that which had developed superstition in the
mind of his father. The same provincial tendency to receive implicitly
any new European fashion in thinking or speech wrought upon both,
plunging one into superstition and drawing the other out of it.
European thought, which New England followed, had at last broken away in
great measure from the theological view of comets as signs and wonders.
The germ of this emancipating influence was mainly in the great
utterance of Seneca; and we find in nearly every century some evidence
that this germ was still alive. This life became more and more evident
after the Reformation period, even though theologians in every Church
did their best to destroy it. The first series of attacks on the old
theological doctrine were mainly founded in philosophic reasoning. As
early as the first half of the sixteenth century we hear Julius Caesar
Scaliger protesting against the cometary superstition as "ridiculous
folly."(115) Of more real importance was the treatise of Blaise de
Vigenere, published at Paris in 1578. In this little book various
statements regarding comets as signs of wrath or causes of evils are
given, and then followed by a very gentle and quiet discussion, usually
tending to develop that healthful scepticism which is the parent of
investigation. A fair example of his mode of treating the subject is
seen in his dealing with a bit of "sacred science." This was simply
that "comets menace princes and kings with death because they live more
delicately than other people; and, therefore, the air thickened and
corrupted by a comet would be naturally more injurious to them than to
common folk who live on coarser food." To this De Vigenere answers that
there are very many persons who live on food as delicate as that enjoyed
by princes and kings, and yet receive no harm from comets. He then goes
on to show that many of the greatest monarchs in history have met death
without any comet to herald it.
(115) For Scaliger, see p. 20 of Dudith's book, cited below.
In the same year thoughtful scepticism of a similar sort found an
advocate in another part of Europe. Thomas Erastus, the learned and
devout professor of medicine at Heidelberg, put forth a letter dealing
in the plainest terms with the superstition. He argued especially that
there could be no natural connection between the comet and pestilence,
since the burning of an exhalation must tend to purify rather than to
infect the air. In the following year the eloquent Hungarian divine
Dudith published a letter in which the theological theory was handled
even more shrewdly, for he argued that, if comets were caused by the
sins of mortals, they would never be absent from the sky. But these
utterances were for the time brushed aside by the theological leaders of
thought as shallow or impious.
In the seventeenth century able arguments against the superstition, on
general grounds, began to be multiplied. In Holland, Balthasar Bekker
opposed this, as he opposed the witchcraft delusion, on general
philosophic grounds; and Lubienitzky wrote in a compromising spirit to
prove that comets were as often followed by good as by evil events. In
France, Pierre Petit, formerly geographer of Louis XIII, and an intimate
friend of Descartes, addressed to the young Louis XIV a vehement protest
against the superstition, basing his arguments not on astronomy, but on
common sense. A very effective part of the little treatise was devoted
to answering the authority of the fathers of the early Church. To do
this, he simply reminded his readers that St. Augustine and St. John
Damascenus had also opposed the doctrine of the antipodes. The book
did good service in France, and was translated in Germany a few years
later.(116)
(116) For Blaise de Vigenere, see his Traite des Cometes, Paris, 1578.
For Dudith, see his De Cometarum Dignificatione, Basle, 1579, to which
the letter of Erastus is appended. Bekker's views may be found in
his Onderzoek van de Betekening der Cometen, Leeuwarden, 1683. For
Lubienitsky's, see his Theatrum Cometicum, Amsterdam, 1667, in part
ii: Historia Cometarum, preface "to the reader." For Petit, see his
Dissertation sur la Nature des Cometes, Paris, 1665 (German translation,
Dresden and Zittau, 1681).
All these were denounced as infidels and heretics, yet none the less did
they set men at thinking, and prepare the way for a far greater genius;
for toward the end of the same century the philosophic attack was taken
up by Pierre Bayle, and in the whole series of philosophic champions he
is chief. While professor at the University of Sedan he had observed the
alarm caused by the comet of 1680, and he now brought all his reasoning
powers to bear upon it. Thoughts deep and witty he poured out in volume
after volume. Catholics and Protestants were alike scandalized. Catholic
France spurned him, and Jurieu, the great Reformed divine, called his
cometary views "atheism," and tried hard to have Protestant Holland
condemn him. Though Bayle did not touch immediately the mass of mankind,
he wrought with power upon men who gave themselves the trouble of
thinking. It was indeed unfortunate for the Church that theologians,
instead of taking the initiative in this matter, left it to Bayle; for,
in tearing down the pretended scriptural doctrine of comets, he tore
down much else: of all men in his time, no one so thoroughly prepared
the way for Voltaire.
Bayle's whole argument is rooted in the prophecy of Seneca. He declares:
"Comets are bodies subject to the ordinary law of Nature, and not
prodigies amenable to no law." He shows historically that there is no
reason to regard comets as portents of earthly evils. As to the fact
that such evils occur after the passage of comets across the sky, he
compares the person believing that comets cause these evils to a woman
looking out of a window into a Paris street and believing that the
carriages pass because she looks out. As to the accomplishment of some
predictions, he cites the shrewd saying of Henry IV, to the effect that
"the public will remember one prediction that comes true better than all
the rest that have proved false." Finally, he sums up by saying: "The
more we study man, the more does it appear that pride is his ruling
passion, and that he affects grandeur even in his misery. Mean and
perishable creature that he is, he has been able to persuade men that he
can not die without disturbing the whole course of Nature and obliging
the heavens to put themselves to fresh expense. In order to light his
funeral pomp. Foolish and ridiculous vanity! If we had a just idea of
the universe, we should soon comprehend that the death or birth of a
prince is too insignificant a matter to stir the heavens."(117)
(117) Regarding Bayle, see Madler, Himmelskunde, vol. i, p. 327.
For special points of interest in Bayle's arguments, see his Pensees
Diverses sur les Cometes, Amsterdam, 1749, pp. 79, 102, 134, 206. For
the response to Jurieu, see the continuation des Pensees, Rotterdam,
1705; also Champion, p. 164, Lecky, ubi supra, and Guillemin, pp. 29,
30.
This great philosophic champion of right reason was followed by a
literary champion hardly less famous; for Fontenelle now gave to the
French theatre his play of The Comet, and a point of capital importance
in France was made by rendering the army of ignorance ridiculous.(118)
(118) See Fontenelle, cited by Champion, p. 167.