Disputations Against Divinatory Astrology

to be observed in the making of a house or in the forming of marriages, or indeed under the name of an aruspice with the decree of the younger Gregory, he pronounces anathema. And in the Council of Toledo: If he be a priest or deacon, let him be relegated to a monastery, there to pay the penalties of his crime through perpetual detention. For they are wont, as Augustine teaches in the book On the Nature of Demons, to be designated among our own people under the name of aruspices, who observe days and hours in conducting business and works. Where that part of astrology which concerns elections seems especially to be noted. Who, therefore, would now dare, as a Christian man (since all are finished for me now), to defend astrology, which is prohibited by law, condemned by the prophets, mocked by the saints, and interdicted by pontiffs and sacred synods? If, however, you oppose me with Albert the Great, that most eminent theologian and yet a patron of astrologers, I shall first warn you that many things are attributed to Albert which are not Albert’s, a point which we also touched upon above. Then, if by chance you cast at me the book On Lawful and Unlawful Things, in which he rejects magicians but approves of astronomers, I shall reply that although it is believed by many to be that work of Albert, yet neither Albert himself nor the inscription of the book confirms this in any way, since the author himself, whoever he may finally be, has deliberately and expressly concealed his name. Because in it many things are read which are unworthy of a learned man and a good Christian, such as those things about the possibility of making images by which not one man, but an entire city, might become either fortunate or unfortunate; then that magical books are not to be cast away, which are to be useful to the Church at some time. This is clearly against the judgments of the Church herself, which orders those books, wherever they may be found, to be used and entirely exterminated. For by what reason will it be useful to keep intact books which it would have been most useful never to have written? Which, surely, either Albert did not write, or if he did write them, it must be said with the Apostle: "In other things I praise you, in this I do not praise you." But just as it is an envy to seek in great men what you may condemn rather than what you may extol, so it is madness, if they have erred somewhere, to wish not to condemn but to imitate. I shall praise in Peter of Ailly his study of letters, his experience of things, his manifold reading, and that he wrote and treated certain theological matters knowingly and subtly; but that in one little work he wished to reconcile astrology to history, and in another to theology—so that he might prove the former to be true and the latter to be pious—this I clearly do not praise, but I condemn, I abhor, and I detest, since we can defend no position that is either more false or more adverse to religion. Concerning which matter, since we shall discuss it widely in the following books, nothing more needs to be said in this place. For there, indeed, as it remains for its supporters, we shall abundantly leave it that those booklets are both enemies to religion and full of so many historical and astrological errors that our own saying might be spoken: "If you wish to remove the error, remove the book." We have spoken of philosophers and of prophets; there remain the civil laws, that is, the edicts and judgments of Caesars and prudent men, whose end is primarily to consult the utilities by which the life of men might be passed well and happily; which, since they are aided most by all good arts and perturbed by harmful ones, they took care with the greatest study that the former should abound and the latter (as much as could be done) should not exist in cities, in order that the professions of the latter might be...