A woodcut depicts a human face mask centered within elaborate, swirling acanthus leaves and floral ornamentation.

ON THE CONTEST OF WISDOM WITH FOLLY

BOOK ONE

The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth of God in unrighteousness. Romans 1:18.

CHAPTER I

In which the malice of Marin Mersenne toward Robert Fludd is explained, in that he has attributed matters pertaining to the physics of the same Robert to a group of uncertain plurality, while omitting Robert's name.

After Marin Mersenne had made mention of the opinions of Paracelsus and Campanella by name regarding the fabric of the world in columns 707 and 708, he proceeded to the subject of Robert Fludd's Macrocosm the great world/universe in columns 708, 709, and 710. However, he is so far from granting Robert the honor of his own opinion that, in his entire recapitulation of the history of Robert's worldly fabric, he did not deign to make any mention of him at all. Perhaps he thought that by doing so, he would be doing him too much honor. Thus, in the margin after the mention of Campanella, he placed (The opinion of others), when in truth, everything he wrote at the end of column 708 and throughout columns 709 and 710, he took verbatim from my own history of the physics of the Macrocosm. We have deemed it worthwhile to transcribe all of this from the aforementioned columns of Mersenne here, so that benevolent readers might better understand the malevolence, not to mention the envy, of that man toward me. It is his custom, on one hand, to derogate me as much as he can by publishing what is truly mine under a number of uncertain plurality while suppressing my name. On the other hand, in place of a refutation, he subjects me to insults and calumnies by name without any evident cause, as will be shown more clearly in the following contexts.

1. Text of Marin from Column 708.

Col. 708.

Others confess that matter was created like darkness, which chemists sometimes signify by the name of the black crow Latin: "corvus niger", a term for the nigredo or putrefaction phase in alchemy: but they maintain that whatever we have seen afterward was concluded within it, which the Sun brought forth with its most powerful heat. To explain this, they use certain examples and believe that when the heat of the sun ceases, everything will return to its original state. From these, some think that the light which God made constituted the empyrean the highest heaven of pure fire/light heaven, and then communicated itself to all things, especially to the sun. Others think that light was placed in that matter, which afterward produced our fire, by the power of which the elements were distinguished. They call the fiery spirit the origin of forms and the most lively effect of light. Thus he says.