No material advance was made on Ptolemy's instrument until Tycho Brahe,
whose elaborate armillary spheres passing into astrolabes are figured in
his _Astronomiae Instauratae Mechanica_. The armillary sphere survives
as useful for teaching, and may be described as a skeleton celestial
globe, the series of rings representing the great circles of the
heavens, and revolving on an axis within a horizon. With the earth as
centre such a sphere is known as Ptolemaic; with the sun as centre, as
Copernican.
The designer of the instrument shown no doubt thought that the north
pole might suitably have the same ornament as was used to mark N. on the
compass card, and so surmounted it with the _fleur-de-lys_,
traditionally chosen for that purpose on the compass by Flavio Gioja in
honour of Charles of Anjou, king of Sicily and Naples.
Armillary spheres occur in many old sculptures, paintings and
engravings; and from these sources we know that they were made for
suspension, for resting on the ground or on a table, for holding by a
short handle, or either for holding or for resting on a stand.
AUTHORITIES.--Tycho Brahe, _Astronomiae Instauratae Mechanica; M.
Blundeville, his Exercises_; N. Bion, _Traite des instrumens de
mathematique_; also _L'Usage des globes celestes_; Sedillot, _Memoire
sur les instrumens_; J.B. Delambre, _Histoire de l'astronomie
ancienne_; R. Grant, _History of Physical Astronomy_. (M. L. H.)
ARMINIUS, the Latinized form of the name of HERMANN, or more probably
ARMIN (17 B.C.-A.D. 21), the German national hero. He was a son of a
certain Segimer, a prince of the tribe of the Cherusci, and in early
life served with distinction as an officer in the Roman armies.
Returning to his own people he found them chafing under the yoke of the
Roman governor, Quintilius Varus; he entertained for them hopes of
freedom, and cautiously inducing neighbouring tribes to join his
standard he led the rebellion which broke out in the autumn of A.D. 9.
Heavily laden with baggage the troops of Varus were decoyed into the
fastnesses of the Teutoburger Wald, and there attacked, the completeness
of the barbarian victory being attested by the virtual annihilation of
three legions, by the voluntary death of Varus, and by the terror which
reigned in Rome when the news of the defeat became known, a terror which
found utterance in the emperor's despairing cry: "Varus, give me back my
legions!" Then in A.D. 15 Germanicus Caesar led the Romans against
Arminius, and captured his wife, Thusnelda. An indecisive battle was
fought in the Teutoburger Wald, where Germanicus narrowly escaped the
fate of Varus, and in the following year Arminius was defeated. The
hero's later years were spent in fighting against Marbod, prince of the
Marcomanni, and in disputes with his own people occasioned probably by
his desire to found a powerful kingdom. He was murdered in A.D. 21.
In 1875 a great monument to Arminius was completed. This stands on the
Grotenburg mountain near Detmold. Klopstock and other poets have used
his exploits as material for dramas.
Much discussion has taken place with regard to the exact spot in the
Teutoburger Wald where the great battle between Arminius and Varus was
fought. There is an immense literature on this subject, and the
following may be consulted:--T. Mommsen, _Die Ortlichkeit der
Varusschlacht_ (1885); E. Meyer, _Untersuchungen uber die Schlacht im
Teutoburger Walde_ (1893); A. Wilms, _Die Schlacht im Teutoburger
Walde_ (1899); F. Knoke, _Das Schlachtfeld im Teutoburger Walde_
(1899); E. Dunzelmann, _Der Schauplatz der Varusschlacht_ (1889); and
P. Hofer, _Die Varusschlacht_ (1888). For more general accounts of
Arminius see: Tacitus, _Annals_, edited by H. Furneaux (1884-1891); O.
Kemmer, _Arminius_ (1893); F.W. Fischer, _Armin und die Romer_
(1893); W. Uhl, _Das Portrait des Arminius_ (1898); and F. Knoke, _Die
Kriegszuge des Germanicus in Deutschland_ (1887).
ARMINIUS, JACOBUS (1560-1609), Dutch theologian, author of the modified
reformed theology that receives its name of Arminian from him, was born
at Oudewater, South Holland, on the 10th of October 1560. Arminius is a
Latinized form of his patronymic Hermanns or Hermansen. His father,
Hermann Jakobs, a cutler, died while he was an infant, leaving a widow
and three children. Theodorus Aemilius, a priest, who had turned
Protestant, adopting Jakob, sent him to school at Utrecht, but died when
his charge was in his fifteenth year. Rudolf Snellius (Snel van Roijen,
1546-1613), the mathematician, a native of Oudewater, then a professor
at Marburg, happening at the time to visit his early home, met the boy,
saw promise in him and undertook his maintenance and education. But
hardly was he settled at Marburg when the news came that the Spaniards
had besieged and taken Oudewater, and murdered its inhabitants almost
without exception. Arminius hurried home, but only to find all his
relatives slain. In February the same year (1575), the university of
Leiden had been founded, and thither, by the kindness of friends,
Arminius was sent to study theology. The six years he remained at Leiden
(1576-1582) were years of active and innovating thought in Holland. The
War of Independence had started conflicting tendencies in men's minds.
To some it seemed to illustrate the necessity of the state tolerating
only one religion, but to others the necessity of the state tolerating
all. Dirck Coornhert argued, in private conferences and public
disputations, that it was wrong to punish heretics, and his great
opponents were, as a rule, the ministers, who maintained that there was
no room for more than one religion in a state. Caspar Koolhaes, the
heroic minister of Leiden--its first lecturer, too, in divinity--pleaded
against a too rigid uniformity, for such an agreement on "fundamentals"
as had allowed Reformed, Lutherans and Anabaptists to unite. Leiden had
been happy, too, in its first professors. There taught in theology
Guillaume Feuguieres or Feuguereius (d. 1613), a mild divine, who had
written a treatise on persuasion in religion, urging that as to it "men
could be led, not driven"; Lambert Danaeus, who deserves remembrance as
the first to discuss Christian ethics scientifically, apart from
dogmatics; Johannes Drusius, the Orientalist, one of the most
enlightened and advanced scholars of his day, settled later at Franeker;
Johann Kolmann the younger, best known by his saying that high Calvinism
made God "both a tyrant and an executioner." Snellius, Arminius's old
patron, now removed to Leiden, expounded the Ramist philosophy, and did
his best to start his students on the search after truth, unimpeded by
the authority of Aristotle. Under these men and influences, Arminius
studied with signal success; and the promise he gave induced the
merchants' gild of Amsterdam to bear the further expenses of his
education. In 1582 he went to Geneva, studied there awhile under
Theodore Beza, but had soon, owing to his active advocacy of the Ramist
philosophy, to remove to Basel. After a short but brilliant career there
he turned to Geneva, studied for three years, travelled, in 1586, in
Italy, heard Giacomo Zarabella (1533-1589) lecture on philosophy in
Padua, visited Rome, and, open-minded enough to see its good as well as
its evil, was suspected by the stern Dutch Calvinists of "popish"
leanings. Next year he was called to Amsterdam, and there, in 1588, was
ordained. He soon acquired the reputation of being a good preacher and
faithful pastor. He was commissioned to organize the educational system
of the city, and is said to have done it well. He greatly distinguished
himself by fidelity to duty during a plague that devastated Amsterdam in
1602. In 1603 he was called, in succession to Franz Junius, to a
theological professorship at Leiden, which he held till his death on the
19th of October 1609.
Arminius is best known as the founder of the anti-Calvinistic school in
Reformed theology, which created the Remonstrant Church in Holland (see
REMONSTRANTS), and contributed to form the Arminian tendency or party in
England. He was a man of mild and liberal spirit, broadened by varied
culture, constitutionally averse from narrow views and enforced
uniformity. He lived in a period of severe systematizing. The Reformed
strengthened itself against the Roman Catholic theology by working
itself, on the one hand, into vigorous logical consistency, and
supporting itself, on the other, on the supreme authority of the
Scriptures. Calvin's first principle, the absolute sovereignty of God,
had been so applied as to make the divine decree determine alike the
acts and the destinies of men; and his formal principle had been so
construed as to invest his system with the authority of the source
whence it professed to have been drawn. Calvinism had become, towards
the close of the 16th century, supreme in Holland, but the very rigour
of the uniformity it exacted provoked a reaction. Coornhert could not
plead for the toleration of heretics without assailing the dominant
Calvinism, and so he opposed a conditional to its unconditional
predestination. The two ministers of Delft, who had debated the point
with him, had, the better to turn his arguments, descended from the
supralapsarian to the infralapsarian position, i.e. made the divine
decree, instead of precede and determine, succeed the Fall. This seemed
to the high Calvinists of Holland a grave heresy. Arminius, fresh from
Geneva, familiar with the dialectics of Beza, appeared to many the man
able to speak the needed word, and so, in 1589, he was simultaneously
invited by the ecclesiastical court of Amsterdam to refute Coornhert,
and by Martin Lydius, professor at Franeker, to combat the two
infralapsarian ministers of Delft. Thus led to confront the questions of
necessity and free will, his own views became unsettled, and the further
he pursued his inquiries the more he was inclined to assert the freedom
of man and limit the range of the unconditional decrees of God. This
change became gradually more apparent in his preaching and in his
conferences with his clerical associates, and occasioned much
controversy in the ecclesiastical courts where, however, he successfully
defended his position. The controversy was embittered and the
differences sharpened by his appointment to the professorship at Leiden.
He had as colleague Franz Gomarus, a strong supralapsarian, perfervid,
irrepressible; and their collisions, personal, official, political,
tended to develop and define their respective positions.
Arminius died, worn out by uncongenial controversy and ecclesiastical
persecution, before his system had been elaborated into the logical
consistency it attained in the hands of his celebrated successor, Simon
Episcopius; but though inchoate in detail, it was in its principles
clear and coherent enough. These may be thus stated:
1. The decree of God is, when it concerns His own actions, absolute, but
when it concerns man's, conditional, i.e. the decree relative to the
Saviour to be appointed and the salvation to be provided is absolute,
but the decree relative to the persons saved or condemned is made to
depend on the acts--belief and repentance in the one case, unbelief and
impenitence in the other--of the persons themselves.
2. The providence or government of God, while sovereign, is exercised in
harmony with the nature of the creatures governed, i.e. the sovereignty
of God is so exercised as to be compatible with the freedom of man.
3. Man is by original nature, through the assistance of divine grace,
free, able to will and perform the right; but is in his fallen state, of
and by himself, unable to do so; he needs to be regenerated in all his
powers before he can do what is good and pleasing to God.
4. Divine grace originates, maintains and perfects all the good in man,
so much so that he cannot, though regenerate, conceive, will or do any
good thing without it.
5. The saints possess, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, sufficient
strength to persevere to the end in spite of sin and the flesh, but may
so decline from sound doctrine as to cause divine grace to be
ineffectual.