[2018] Peter of Prussia (1621), cap. 15.
[2019] Contra Gentiles, III, 105; Summa, II, ii, 96, artic. 2; De occultis operibus.
[2020] Comment. in Math., cap. 2.
[2021] Summa, III, 36.
[2022] Responsio de vi articulis ad lectorem Bisuntinum.
[2023] As we have already been over their arguments, Aquinas’ presentation thereof may perhaps be better summarized here than in the text. The Gospel account led the Priscillianists to subject all human acts to fate and the Manicheans to repudiate the Book of Matthew as inculcating a belief in fate. Against them are rehearsed the following arguments. First, as Augustine says (Contra Faustum, II, 5), no astrologer asserts that a star will leave its usual position at a man’s birth and go to him, as the Gospel narrative asserts that the star in the east did, and hence Matthew confounds rather than defends the error of astrology. Aquinas then quotes with apparent approval the erroneous assertion of Chrysostom (Homily 6 in Matth.) that “it is not astronomy’s task to tell from the stars who are being born, but to predict the future from the hour of nativity.” He also notes Chrysostom’s objection that it took the Magi over two years to travel to Bethlehem so that the star must have appeared two years before Christ’s birth. This, by the way, would make the date 4 B. C., usually given for the birth of Christ, fit nicely into Münter’s date of 6 B. C. for the constellation which portended it. Aquinas also repeats the argument that the star was probably a new creation of God.
But all these criticisms are really quite beside the point, since even according to the Bible story, the Magi, who were evidently astronomers, knew perfectly well what the star meant. Indeed, Aquinas himself repeats the statement that the birth of Christ was announced to them by a star, although to Simon and Anna and to the shepherds by other methods, because they were used to stars. If it was a very unusual kind of star and had a very unusual meaning, all that simply goes to show that a good astrologer is equal to any emergency. Aquinas, indeed, or rather, his authorities, sees the need of stating some other method than astrological skill by which the Magi comprehended the significance of the star. He adduces two explanations from Augustine (Sermo 374 de Epiphania, and De quaest. vet. et nov. test., Quaest. 63); one that they were admonished by angels, which makes us wonder why there was any star at all; the other, that Balaam had left them a prediction concerning the coming of the star.
Aquinas also repeats something of what the fathers have said on the allegorical significance of the Magi. But on the whole he, like his authorities, fails signally to explain away the astrological significance of the Magi.
[2024] Hist. eccles. XXIII, 13 (Muratori XI, 1170). Michelitsch Thomasschriften, I (1913), p. 126, dates Ptolemy’s list between 1312 and 1317, but I do not know why.
[2025] It is included in Fretté and Maré, Opera, 27, 454-64.