Prognostication

To the most Reverend Father in Christ, Lord Marco, Bishop of Palestrina, Patriarch of Aquileia, Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church of Saint Mark, Johannes Canter Frisius sends greetings.

Decorative initial 'P'Our ancestors, most excellent and learned in every kind of knowledge, made certain divisions of the knowledge of these things, as Ptolemy testifies at the beginning of the magna compositio Great Composition/Almagest. For they left it written that some should be called speculative, others active. Truly, since I could recognize that from these one could possess the greatest fruits, the most pleasant and almost divine pleasures, I decided to devote myself to them. But I was for a long time uncertain as to which of them I should dedicate myself. For I saw that many and diverse honors were bestowed upon professors of diverse sciences. For I saw, if I may speak of the active ones, lawyers hurrying to judgment, accompanied by a great crowd of clients. Others, rendering his own right to each one who asks, and openly pronouncing many sentences. I watched physicians being praised with rewards, with a crowd of men rushing toward them. I heard orators and poets, along with moral philosophers, being extolled to the heavens, and other things similar to these. I considered (to bring forth something of the speculative) that crowd of theologians attending sermons. I was stirred by the very powerful arguments of the physicists, and the knowledge of nature itself. I marveled at the syllogisms and subtleties of the dialecticians. The reason of numbers and dimensions, and that divine knowledge of the stars, moved me. When I had observed that all of these were both most pleasant and most useful, and yet, by some fate, that one divine knowledge of the stars drew me entirely to itself, and has most pleasantly embraced me. In which, when I happened to exercise myself with very great pleasure, there came to my mind what I had read in Cicero: If there are other more weighty and better studies, let us nevertheless measure them by the rule of our own nature. When I was applying effort to this science (which each person’s own pleasure draws, as the poet says), and had made some progress in exercise, for I was assiduous in it, it was fitting that the fruits of my vigils and my labor should be submitted to your note and censure.

ROYAL
MUNICH