This view of the relations between Nature and man continued among both Jews and Christians. According to Jewish tradition, darkness overspread the earth for three days when the books of the Law were profaned by translation into Greek. Tertullian thought an eclipse an evidence of God's wrath against unbelievers. Nor has this mode of thinking ceased in modern times. A similar claim was made at the execution of Charles I; and Increase Mather thought an eclipse in Massachusetts an evidence of the grief of Nature at the death of President Chauncey, of Harvard College. Archbishop Sandys expected eclipses to be the final tokens of woe at the destruction of the world, and traces of this feeling have come down to our own time.
The quaint story of the Connecticut statesman who, when his associates in the General Assembly were alarmed by an eclipse of the sun, and thought it the beginning of the Day of Judgment, quietly ordered in candles, that he might in any case be found doing his duty, marks probably the last noteworthy appearance of the old belief in any civilized nation.(91)
(91) For Hindu theories, see Alabaster, Wheel of the Law, 11. For Greek
and Roman legends, See Higgins, Anacalypsis, vol. i, pp. 616, 617.; also
Suetonius, Caes., Julius, p. 88, Claud., p. 46; Seneca, Quaest. Nat.,
vol. i, p. 1, vol. vii, p. 17; Pliny, Hist. Nat., vol. ii, p. 25;
Tacitus, Ann., vol. xiv, p. 22; Josephus, Antiq., vol. xiv, p. 12; and
the authorities above cited. For the tradition of the Jews regarding
the darkness of three days, see citation in Renan, Histoire du Peuple
Israel, vol. iv, chap. iv. For Tertullian's belief regarding the
significance of an eclipse, see the Ad Scapulum, chap. iii, in Migne,
Patrolog. Lat., vol. i, p. 701. For the claim regarding Charles I, see
a sermon preached before Charles II, cited by Lecky, England in the
Eighteenth Century, vol. i, p. 65. Mather thought, too, that it might
have something to do with the death of sundry civil functionaries of
the colonies; see his Discourse concerning comets, 1682. For Archbishop
Sandy's belief, see his eighteenth sermon (in Parker Soc. Publications).
The story of Abraham Davenport has been made familiar by the poem of
Whittier.
In these beliefs regarding meteors and eclipses there was little calculated to do harm by arousing that superstitious terror which is the worst breeding-bed of cruelty. Far otherwise was it with the belief regarding comets. During many centuries it gave rise to the direst superstition and fanaticism. The Chaldeans alone among the ancient peoples generally regarded comets without fear, and thought them bodies wandering as harmless as fishes in the sea; the Pythagoreans alone among philosophers seem to have had a vague idea of them as bodies returning at fixed periods of time; and in all antiquity, so far as is known, one man alone, Seneca, had the scientific instinct and prophetic inspiration to give this idea definite shape, and to declare that the time would come when comets would be found to move in accordance with natural law. Here and there a few strong men rose above the prevailing superstition. The Emperor Vespasian tried to laugh it down, and insisted that a certain comet in his time could not betoken his death, because it was hairy, and he bald; but such scoffing produced little permanent effect, and the prophecy of Seneca was soon forgotten. These and similar isolated utterances could not stand against the mass of opinion which upheld the doctrine that comets are "signs and wonders."(92)
(92) For terror caused in Rome by comets, see Pingre, Cometographie, pp.
165, 166. For the Chaldeans, see Wolf, Geschichte der Astronomie, p. 10
et seq., and p. 181 et seq.; also Pingre, chap. ii. For the Pythagorean
notions, see citations from Plutarch in Costard, History of Astronomy,
p. 283. For Seneca's prediction, see Guillemin, World of Comets
(translated by Glaisher), pp. 4, 5; also Watson, On Comets, p. 126. For
this feeling in antiquity generally, see the preliminary chapters of the
two works last cited.
The belief that every comet is a ball of fire flung from the right hand of an angry God to warn the grovelling dwellers of earth was received into the early Church, transmitted through the Middle Ages to the Reformation period, and in its transmission was made all the more precious by supposed textual proofs from Scripture. The great fathers of the Church committed themselves unreservedly to it. In the third century Origen, perhaps the most influential of the earlier fathers of the universal Church in all questions between science and faith, insisted that comets indicate catastrophes and the downfall of empires and worlds. Bede, so justly revered by the English Church, declared in the eighth century that "comets portend revolutions of kingdoms, pestilence, war, winds, or heat"; and John of Damascus, his eminent contemporary in the Eastern Church, took the same view. Rabanus Maurus, the great teacher of Europe in the ninth century, an authority throughout the Middle Ages, adopted Bede's opinion fully. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great light of the universal Church in the thirteenth century, whose works the Pope now reigning commends as the centre and source of all university instruction, accepted and handed down the same opinion. The sainted Albert the Great, the most noted genius of the medieval Church in natural science, received and developed this theory. These men and those who followed them founded upon scriptural texts and theological reasonings a system that for seventeen centuries defied every advance of thought.(93)
(93) For Origen, se his De Princip., vol. i, p. 7; also Maury, Leg.
pieuses, p. 203, note. For Bede and others, see De Nat., vol. xxiv; Joh.
Dam., De Fid. Or.,vol. ii, p. 7; Maury, La Magie et l'Astronomie, pp.
181, 182. For Albertus Magnus, see his Opera, vol. i, tr. iii, chaps.
x, xi. Among the texts of Scripture on which this belief rested was
especially Joel ii, 30, 31.
The main evils thence arising were three: the paralysis of self-help, the arousing of fanaticism, and the strengthening of ecclesiastical and political tyranny. The first two of these evils—the paralysis of self-help and the arousing of fanaticism—are evident throughout all these ages. At the appearance of a comet we constantly see all Christendom, from pope to peasant, instead of striving to avert war by wise statesmanship, instead of striving to avert pestilence by observation and reason, instead of striving to avert famine by skilful economy, whining before fetiches, trying to bribe them to remove these signs of God's wrath, and planning to wreak this supposed wrath of God upon misbelievers.
As to the third of these evils—the strengthening of ecclesiastical and civil despotism—examples appear on every side. It was natural that hierarchs and monarchs whose births were announced by stars, or whose deaths were announced by comets, should regard themselves as far above the common herd, and should be so regarded by mankind; passive obedience was thus strengthened, and the most monstrous assumptions of authority were considered simply as manifestations of the Divine will. Shakespeare makes Calphurnia say to Caesar:
"When beggars die, there are no comets seen; The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes."