De peste quaestiones duae explicatae

Resp. 1. But I, besides the fact that I might perhaps not undeservedly call into doubt whether these individual testimonies are brought forward appropriately enough, deny this conclusion as well. For elsewhere also, as in Psalm 17, David calls his enemies the hand of God, who nonetheless attacked him by natural reason. And when it is said that the hand of God has made us, physical generation is not excluded. And it is established in the scriptures that those things are called arrows which the Lord sends upon men, whether using only the ordinary laws of nature, or using the ministry of angels.

Resp. 2. I ask, moreover, what they call the nature of the disease. They will say the nature of it itself. But I say that by those metaphorical expressions of hand, sword, and arrow, the nature of this disease in itself is no more signified than what hail or scabies is when it is said that the Lord struck Egypt with an outstretched hand, or finally, what the force and nature of individual diseases are when they are recounted among the curses to be sent by God in the appendices of the Law. What then? Surely, it is for natural philosophers and physicians to investigate the nature of diseases insofar as they depend on the laws of nature, a thing which we see being done by them so successfully and certainly that they can even predict them and their outcomes. But the theologian explains the supernatural and divine causes of diseases and other calamities, teaching that we ought to rise far above nature and all physical things when it is a matter of avoiding or dispelling them.