While the saints may regard the heavens as manifold and list as many as seven of them,[1358] the philosophers will admit only one heaven, says Bartholomew, who this time correctly quotes Basil as affirming in the Hexaemeron that “the philosophers would rather gnaw out their tongues than admit that there are many heavens.” Bartholomew also presents Aristotle’s view in the Liber de celo et mundo that the heaven is characterized by the greatest possible simplicity and purity and has no division or contrariety of parts. According to the new translation of De celo et mundo it is “a perfect complete unit to which there is no like, neither fabricated nor generated,” and with an equal, single, and circular motion. In the De causis elementorum Aristotle holds further that the heaven is a fifth element, differing in natural properties and distinct from the four elements and not like them subject to generation and corruption.[1359] Indeed, they would destroy one another by their mutual contrariety and repugnance were it not for the conciliating influence of celestial virtue.[1360] But while the heaven is one, it has many orbs and circles of varying figure and magnitude, and there is a greater aggregation of light in the stars than in other parts of the sky. Such variations account for the varying or even contrary effects produced by the heaven in our lower world at different times and places, and explain why the pure sky causes corruption as well as generation here below.
As the basis of astrology.
The Aristotelian foundation thus laid for the superstructure of astrological science and art is apparently accepted by Bartholomew, who states that “the Creator established the heaven as the cause and origin of generation and corruption, and therefore it was necessary that it should not be subject to generation and corruption.” In short, the universe divides into two parts. The heaven, beginning with the circle of the moon, is the nobler, simpler, superior, and active portion of the universe. The other part, extending from the sphere of the moon downward to earth’s center, is inferior, passive, acted upon and governed by the heaven. In all his later scientific and astrological discussion Bartholomew implies this hypothesis, and, after the two chapters which we have already summarized on the waters above the firmament and the empyrean heaven, pays no more attention to the seven heavens of the saints. The firmament, “called by the philosophers the first heaven and the last, in whose convexity are situated the bodies of stars and planets,” absorbs his attention during the remaining forty-eight chapters of his eighth book. “By means of its motion, it is the effective principle of generation and corruption in the inferior world.” Rabanus explains how its rays converge as toward a center upon the earth’s surface and exert a concentrated impression there; and the science of perspective also illustrates this. The three less stable elements, air, fire, and water, obey the firmament even to the extent of local motion, as is illustrated by the tides. The element earth is not influenced in this way, but produces diverse species from itself in obedience to the celestial impressions which it receives.
Properties and effects of the signs and planets.
Bartholomew discusses the signs of the zodiac in much the usual astrological fashion. They are given animal names because in their effects they represent the properties of those animals.[1361] In their effects, too, they may be distinguished as hot or cold, masculine or feminine, diurnal or nocturnal; and they are grouped in trios with the four elements and cardinal points and in varied relations with the planets. Each governs its portion of the human body; thus the Ram “dominates the head and face, and produces a hairy body, a crooked frame, an oblique face, heavy eyes, short ears, a long neck.”[1362] Each sign also has its bearings on human life; thus Virgo is “the house of sickness, of serfs and handmaids and the domestic animals. It signifies inconstancy and changing from place to place.”[1363] Bartholomew indeed devotes a separate chapter to “the properties and occult virtues” of each sign “according to the astrologers.”[1364] The seven planets by their progress through the signs and conjunctions in them influence every creature on earth.[1365] Bartholomew outlines their successive control of the formation of the child in the womb. He also devotes a chapter to the influence of each planet. Mars, for example, “disposes men to mobility and levity of mind, to wrath and animosity and other choleric passions; it also fits men for arts employing fire such as those of smiths and bakers, just as Saturn produces agriculturists and porters of heavy weights, and Jupiter on the contrary turns out men adapted to lighter pursuits such as orators and money-changers.”[1366] Bartholomew also discusses the head and tail of the dragon as “two stars which are not planets but yet seem to have the nature and influence of the planets.”[1367] The fixed stars, too, have their influence, causing storms or clear weather and, according to the mathematici, presignifying sad or glad events. Bartholomew further sets forth the theory of the magnus annus or return of all the stars to the same positions after an interval of 15,000 or 36,000 years. “But whatever the philosophers have said concerning it, this much is sure that it is not for us to determine the last day.”[1368] God alone knows. Bartholomew’s most frequently cited authorities on the subject of astrology seem to be Albumasar, Messahala[1369] (Ma Sha’ Allah), and Alphraganus.
Bartholomew illustrates the general medieval acceptance of astrology.
Thus Bartholomew, a Franciscan in good standing, who lectured on the Bible at Paris and was called by the General of his Order to lecture in Saxony, in a work intended for elementary students and the general reader, far from engaging in any tilt with the astrologers or attacking their art as involving fatalism and contrary to morality and free will, affirms the general law of the control of earth by sky and repeats with little or no question a mass of astrological detail from Arabian writers. After such an exhibition as this of what a commonplace and matter-of-course affair astrological theory was in the thirteenth century, how impossible it is to have the least sympathy with those specialists in medieval learning who would have the work of Daniel of Morley shunned like the pest because of its astrological doctrine, or account for Bacon’s imprisonment in 1278 by his astrological doctrine, or deny that Albertus Magnus could have written the Speculum astronomiae with its astrological doctrine. But of Bacon and Albertus more later.
Medieval divisions of the day and hour.
Bartholomew’s ninth book deals with time and its parts. He defines a day as the time occupied by a complete revolution of the sun around the earth, and states that a day consists of twenty-four hours, or of four “quarters” of six hours each. But he seems unacquainted with our division of the hour into sixty minutes and the minute into sixty seconds. Instead he subdivides the hour into four “points” or forty “moments.” Each moment is thus equivalent to a minute and a half of our time, and it may be divided further into twelve unciae (ounces), while each uncia includes forty-seven atoms, making 22,560 atoms in an hour as against 3,600 of our seconds. Honorius of Autun in his De imagine mundi, a work written presumably in the first part of the twelfth century, speaks of the hour as a twelfth part of the day, but makes it consist of four “points,” forty “moments,” and 22,560 atoms just as Bartholomew does. But Honorius also divides the hour into ten “minutes,” fifteen “parts,” and sixty ostenta, which last would correspond to our minutes, if his hour was of the same length as ours. Honorius does not mention the unciae of Bartholomew. [1370] Bartholomew further tells us that Sunday is called the Lord’s Day and is privileged in many particulars, since on it the world was created, the Lord was born, rose from the dead, and also sent the Holy Spirit. We have already presented Bartholomew’s discussion of the Egyptian days in an earlier chapter.
Form and matter: fire and coal.