(218) For St. Jerome, see his Com. in Ep. ad Ephesios (lib. iii, cap.6):
commenting on the text, "Our battle is not with flesh and blood," he
explains this as meaning the devils in the air, and adds, "Nam et in
alio loco de daemonibus quod in aere isto vagentur, Apostolus ait:
In quibus ambulastis aliquando juxta Saeculum mundi istius, secundum
principem potestatis aeris spiritus, qui nunc operatur in filos
diffidentiae (Eph, ii,2). Haec autem omnium doctorum opinio est, quod
aer iste qui coelum et terram medius dividens, inane appellatur, plenus
sit contrariis fortitudinibus." See also his Com. in Isaiam, lib. xiii,
cap. 50 (Migne, Patr. Lat., vol. xxiv, p. 477). For Augustine, see the
De Civitate Dei, passim.
During the Middle Ages this doctrine of the diabolical origin of storms went on gathering strength. Bede had full faith in it, and narrates various anecdotes in support of it. St. Thomas Aquinas gave it his sanction, saying in his all authoritative Summa, "Rains and winds, and whatsoever occurs by local impulse alone, can be caused by demons." "It is," he says, "a dogma of faith that the demons can produce wind, storms, and rain of fire from heaven."
Albert the Great taught the same doctrine, and showed how a certain salve thrown into a spring produced whirlwinds. The great Franciscan—the "seraphic doctor"—St. Bonaventura, whose services to theology earned him one of the highest places in the Church, and to whom Dante gave special honour in paradise, set upon this belief his high authority. The lives of the saints, and the chronicles of the Middle Ages, were filled with it. Poetry and painting accepted the idea and developed it. Dante wedded it to verse, and at Venice this thought may still be seen embodied in one of the grand pictures of Bordone: a shipload of demons is seen approaching Venice in a storm, threatening destruction to the city, but St. Mark, St. George, and St. Nicholas attack the vessel, and disperse the hellish crew.(219)
(219) For Bede, see the Hist. Eccles., vol. i, p. 17; Vita Cuthberti,
c. 17 (Migne, tome xliv). For Thomas Aquinas, see the Summa, pars I, qu.
lxxx, art. 2. The second citation I owe to Rydberg, Magic of the Middle
Ages, p. 73, where the whole interesting passage is given at length. For
Albertus Magnus, see the De Potentia Daemonum (cited by Maury, Legendes
Pieuses). For Bonaventura, see the Comp. Theol. Veritat., ii, 26. For
Dante, see Purgatorio, c. 5. On Bordone's picture, see Maury, Legendes
Pieuses, p. 18, note.
The popes again and again sanctioned this doctrine, and it was amalgamated with various local superstitions, pious imaginations, and interesting arguments, to strike the fancy of the people at large. A strong argument in favour of a diabolical origin of the thunderbolt was afforded by the eccentricities of its operation. These attracted especial attention in the Middle Ages, and the popular love of marvel generalized isolated phenomena into rules. Thus it was said that the lightning strikes the sword in the sheath, gold in the purse, the foot in the shoe, leaving sheath and purse and shoe unharmed; that it consumes a human being internally without injuring the skin; that it destroys nets in the water, but not on the land; that it kills one man, and leaves untouched another standing beside him; that it can tear through a house and enter the earth without moving a stone from its place; that it injures the heart of a tree, but not the bark; that wine is poisoned by it, while poisons struck by it lose their venom; that a man's hair may be consumed by it and the man be unhurt.(220)
(220) See, for lists of such admiranda, any of the early writers—e. g.,
Vincent of Beauvais, Reisch's Margarita, or Eck's Aristotle.
These peculiar phenomena, made much of by the allegorizing sermonizers of the day, were used in moral lessons from every pulpit. Thus the Carmelite, Matthias Farinator, of Vienna, who at the Pope's own instance compiled early in the fifteenth century that curious handbook of illustrative examples for preachers, the Lumen Animae, finds a spiritual analogue for each of these anomalies.(221)
(221) See the Lumen animae, Eichstadt, 1479.
This doctrine grew, robust and noxious, until, in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, we find its bloom in a multitude of treatises by the most learned of the Catholic and Protestant divines, and its fruitage in the torture chambers and on the scaffolds throughout Christendom. At the Reformation period, and for nearly two hundred years afterward, Catholics and Protestants vied with each other in promoting this growth. John Eck, the great opponent of Luther, gave to the world an annotated edition of Aristotle's Physics, which was long authoritative in the German universities; and, though the text is free from this doctrine, the woodcut illustrating the earth's atmosphere shows most vividly, among the clouds of mid-air, the devils who there reign supreme.(222)
(222) See Eck, Aristotelis Meteorologica, Augsburg, 1519.