Despite the allusion just made to royal horoscopes, Albert makes an exception to the control of the stars over this world in the case of man. Strictly speaking, however, this is no exception, since man is not to be classed with other inferiors inasmuch as his soul is a superior being, derived from the First Intelligence and still subject to Its illumination. “The essence of the soul is wholly and solely from the first cause.”[1934] It is true that Plato says that the soul receives something in each sphere or heaven, memory from the sphere of Saturn and so on; but Albert regards this doctrine as simply a description of the process of fitting the mind or soul to the body which it must occupy.
Free will.
But the human reason and will remain free and are not necessarily subjected to the movements of the stars. Thus in his theological Summa Albert admits that the stars govern even the souls, vegetable and sensitive, of plants and brutes, but denies that they coerce the loftier rational soul and will of man, who is made in the image of God, except as he yields to sin and the flesh.[1935] But this last is a very important exception as we see from a passage in the treatise on minerals.[1936] “There is in man a double spring of action, namely, nature and the will; and nature for its part is ruled by the stars, while the will is free; but unless it resists, it is swept along by nature and becomes mechanical (induratur).”
Ptolemy on free will.
Albert is aware that neither the Peripatetic philosophy nor the art of astrology itself slavishly subjects the human mind and will to the stars.[1937] Rather he keeps citing Ptolemy to show that the astrologers themselves do not believe in fatal necessity and that consequently the art of astrology is not incompatible with Christianity.[1938] Ptolemy declares that the mind apprehends the superior bodies in their spheres, and can freely turn away from those things towards which the motions of the stars incline it, and can turn towards other things by the wisdom of its intellect.[1939] In another passage Ptolemy is quoted as saying that the effects of the stars can be impeded by the science of men skilled in astrology.[1940] If the average “astronomer and augur and magician and interpreter of dreams and visions” has brought divination into disrepute, it is, says Albert in a third passage, because “almost all men of this class delight in deception and, being poorly educated, they think that what is merely contingent is necessary, and they predict that some event will certainly occur; and when it does not, those sciences are cheapened in the sight of unskilled men, although the defect is not in the science, but in those who abuse it. For this reason wise Ptolemy says that no judgment should be made except in general terms and with the cautious reservation that the stars act per aliud et accidens (subject to other forces and to accidents) and that their significations meet many impediments. Moreover, the pursuit of sciences dealing with the future would be idle, if one could not avoid what one foresaw.”[1941]
Nativities.
But free will no more restrains Albert than it did Ptolemy from accepting the art of genethlialogy[1942] or casting of nativities, as his mention of royal horoscopes has already suggested. He states elsewhere that the astrologer who understands the virtues of the signs of the zodiac and of the stars situated in them at the moment of birth can prognosticate so far as lies within the influence of the sky concerning the entire life of the person born.[1943] Indeed, Albert ascribed to Ptolemy a treatise De accidentibus parvis particularibus[1944] concerning the events in the life of the individual born under this or that constellation, as contrasted with great social events involving large numbers of men such as political revolutions, racial migrations, and religious movements, of which Ptolemy is said by Albert to have treated in another work in eight parts called De accidentibus magnis universalibus in mundo.[1945]
Galen on the stars and human generation.
Albert even believed that the influence of the stars upon man was stronger in some respects than upon other animals. He attributed to Galen in the treatise De spermate a statement, which I have failed to find in Galen’s De semine or other works, that “in the generation of brutes the sperm is not altered according to the order of the hours and the operations of the planets and signs as it is in man.” Albert prefers his own explanation of this circumstance to that offered by Galen. It is that the human body is less material and terrestrial than those of the brutes and more nearly resembles the heavens, and so more readily follows the impressions from the sky, and is a sort of microcosm as a beast is not. On the other hand, Albert grants that changes of the atmosphere and weather are felt more quickly by the beasts, who have little else to distract their attention.[1946]
Plato on boys and the stars.