Complete Works

idols, and under these images adores demons. Or he observes the Mosaic law after the fashion of the most abandoned Jews. Or he follows the unspeakable Muhammad, enslaved to his detestable tenets. Or, living a Christian life in hearing only, not in works and a sincere mind, he perverts the evangelical teachings and, not consenting to the Catholic Church, kicks back with an obstinate heart, or receives the gospel not with a chaste faith, but with one adulterated and profaned by various superstitions. Or, although he has received it with a solid, bright, and constant faith, he opposes it with his works. Therefore, intending to fight these seven, as it were, leaders—under whom the rest are contained like common soldiers—with their own weapons, he had summoned them to a contest. Against the impious philosophers who, with necks unbowed by the yoke of any religion and devoted to no divinity, adore only natural reasons, he fought with those same reasons. With the sentences of the Old Testament and the specific authorities of the Jewish school, he battled most strongly against the Hebrews. With the Mohammedans, relying on the Quran, he had engaged in close combat. The worshipers of idols, entangled in vain superstitions, he had prostrated with many wounds and no small force; especially those who worship divinatory astrology, he had sharply rebuked with both true philosophy and the specific arguments of the astrologers. And in twelve books—indeed most perfect ones—out of the thirteen intended by him, he had pursued their ravings. Then he had individually exploded hydromancy, geomancy, pyromancy, haruspicy, and other vanities of that kind. But he had directed his wedge-formation specifically against the prophesying astrologers, and with all his might had wielded the battering ram, since other superstitions seek supports for their errors in their futile and weightless dogmas—either weighing the moments of a birth examined, or in choosing hours, reconciling either hexagonal or trigonal aspects which they call benign, and other things of this sort, which not even a mad Orestes would approach. Nor was he content to have utterly overturned all astrology, so that he might show to the astrologers of our time, who are especially ignorant of the Greek language, that astrology—the vainest of all professions—had been made more vain, if it can be said, by perverse translations. The Fruits of Ptolemy, which they commonly call the Centiloquium, he translated from the Greek into the Latin speech while writing against them, as if doing something else, and honored it with a most elegant exposition;

Ptolemy's Centiloquium translated from Greek into Latin

in which book he demonstrates that more errors, so to speak, than words are contained in that common translation, which nevertheless its ignorant devotees always guarded in secret like a precious treasure. Those feeling wrongly about the faith of Christ, and not obeying the command of Mother Church—whom we call by the name of heretics—he had attacked with an outstanding rebuke, using both the New Testament and reason. Nearly ninety heresies are held in public view, but he, having scrutinized everything, found two hundred, which he proposed not only to eliminate and rout individually, but also to teach from what part of philosophy, not rightly understood, they had drawn or propped up their errors. Finally, he had vehemently inveighed against Christians whose faith is seen without works; moreover, he had diligently explored how it could be that men believe fire is situated in the middle of the earth,

Note

by which the bodies of the damned are perpetually to suffer punishment, and other unthinkable tortures of that kind for both soul and body, as well as the immense joys of the Deity beheld, by which souls joined to bodies are blessed, and yet they are not obedient to the sayings of the Church which compel belief, and nonetheless they rave everywhere in vices and apply themselves to piling up sins, and nothing is less feared by them than punishment, or less desired than the kingdom of God. Likewise, through diseases