Survival of pagan superstition among the laity.
The same attitude toward superstitious medicine is shown in a sermon attributed to Augustine but probably spurious.[2188] Here a tempter is represented as coming to the sick man and saying, “If you had only employed that enchanter, you would be well now; if you would attach these characters to your body, you could recover your health.” Or another comes and says, “Send your girdle to that diviner; he will measure and scrutinize it and tell you what to do and whether you can recover.” Or a third visitor may recommend someone who is skilled in fumigation. The preacher warns his hearers not to succumb to such advice or they will be sacrificing to the devil; whereas if they refuse such treatment and die, it will be a glorious martyr’s death. The preacher, however, is not over-sanguine that his advice will be heeded, as he has often before admonished his hearers against pagan superstitions, and yet reports keep coming to him that some are continuing such practices. He therefore “warns them again and again” to forsake all diviners, aruspices, enchanters, phylacteries, augury, and observance of days, or they will lose all benefit of the sacrament of baptism and will be eternally damned unless they perform a vast amount of penance. The observance of days other than the Lord’s Day is here condemned on the ground that God made the other six days without distinction. In another supposititious sermon[2189] the practice of diligently observing on which day of the week to set out on a journey is censured as equivalent to worshiping the planets, or rather the pagan gods whose names they bear and who are said here to have originally been bad men and women who lived at the time that the Children of Israel were in Egypt. The preacher is even opposed to naming the days of the week after such persons or planets and exhorts his hearers to speak simply of the first day, second day, and so on.
Augustine’s attack upon astrology.
Nor will Augustine, to return to his remarks in the Christian Doctrine,[2190] exempt “from this genus of pernicious superstition those who are called genethliaci from their consideration of natal days and now are also popularly termed mathematici.” He holds that they enslave human free will by predicting a man’s character and life from the stars, and that their art is a presumptuous and fallacious human invention, and that if their predictions come true, this is due either to chance or to demons who wish to confirm mankind in its error.[2191] In his youth, when a follower of the Manichean sect, Augustine had been a believer in astrology and thereby “sacrificed himself to demons” at the same time that, owing to his Manichean scruples against animal sacrifice, he refused to employ a haruspex.[2192] Perhaps on this account he felt the more bound to warn his readers against astrology in his old age. He often attacks the casters of horoscopes in his works and especially in the opening chapters of the fifth book of The City of God, on which we may center our attention as being a rather more elaborate discussion than the other passages and including almost all the arguments which he advances elsewhere. These arguments are not original with him, but his presentation of them was perhaps better known in the middle ages than any other.[2193]
Fate and free will.
The objection to astrology as fatalistic does not come with the best grace from Augustine, the great advocate of divine prescience and of predestination, and in his discussion in The City of God he is forced to recognize this fact. He holds that the world is not governed by chance or by fate, a word which for most men means the force of the constellations, but by divine providence. He starts to accuse the astrologers of attributing to the spotless stars, or to the God whose orders the stars obediently execute, the causing of human sin and evil; but then recognizes that the astrologers will answer that the stars simply signify and in no way cause evil, just as God foresees but does not compel human sinfulness.
Argument from twins.
Thus thwarted in his attempt to show that the astrologers enslave the human will, although in other passages he still gives us to understand that they do,[2194] Augustine adopts another line of argument, that from twins, an old favorite, which he twists first one way and then another, proposing to the astrologers a series of dilemmas as he finds them likely to escape from each preceding one. He seems to have been much impressed by the thought that at the same instant and hence with the same horoscope persons were born whose subsequent lives and characters were different. He brings forward Esau and Jacob as examples, and states that he himself has known of twins of dissimilar sex and life. Moreover, he tells us in his Confessions that he was finally induced to abandon his study of the books of the astrologers, from which the arguments of “Vindicianus, a keen old man, and of Nebridius, a youth of remarkable intellect,” had failed to win him, by hearing from another youth that his father, a man of wealth and rank, had been born at precisely the same moment as a certain wretched slave on the estate.[2195]
Defense of the astrologers.
But the astrologers reply that even twins are not born at precisely the same instant and do not have the same horoscope, but are born under different constellations, so rapidly do the heavens revolve, as the astrologer Nigidius Figulus neatly illustrated by striking a rapidly revolving potter’s wheel two successive blows as quickly as he could in what appeared to be the same spot. But when the wheel was stopped and examined, the two marks were found to be far apart. Augustine’s counter argument is that if astrologers must take into account such small intervals of time, their observations and predictions can never attain sufficient accuracy to insure correct prediction; and that if so brief an instant of time is sufficient to alter the horoscope totally, then twins should not be as much alike as they are nor have as much in common as they do,—for instance, falling ill and recovering simultaneously. To this the astrologers are likely to respond that twins are alike because conceived at the same instant, but somewhat dissimilar in their life because of the difference in their times of birth. Augustine retorts that if two persons conceived simultaneously in the same womb may be born at different times and have different fates after birth, he sees no reason why persons who are born of different mothers at the same instant with the same horoscope may not die at different dates and lead different lives. But he does not recognize that very likely the astrologers would agree with him in this, since they often held that the influence of the stars was received variously by matter. He also asks why a certain sage is said to have selected a certain hour for intercourse with his wife in order to beget a marvelous son—possibly an inaccurate allusion to the story of Nectanebus[2196]—unless the hour of conception controls the hour of birth, and consequently twins conceived together must have the same horoscope. He also objects that if twins fall sick at the same time because of their simultaneous conception, they should not be of opposite sex as sometimes happens.