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| Not Even the Most Experienced Men Could Persuade Him of the Vanity of Astrology to Which He Was Devoted.
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Chapter III.—Not Even the Most
Experienced Men Could Persuade Him of the Vanity of Astrology to
Which He Was Devoted.
4. Those impostors, then, whom they designate
Mathematicians, I consulted without hesitation, because they used
no sacrifices, and invoked the aid of no spirit for their
divinations, which art Christian and true piety fitly rejects and
condemns.277
| 277 Augustin classes the votaries of both wizards and
astrologers (De Doctr. Christ. ii. 23; and De Civ.
Dei, x. 9; compare also Justin Martyr, Apol. ii. c. 5)
as alike “deluded and imposed on by the false angels, to whom the
lowest part of the world has been put in subjection by the law of
God’s providence;” and he says, “All arts of this sort are
either nullities, or are part of a guilty superstition springing
out of a baleful fellowship between men and devils, and are to be
utterly repudiated and avoided by the Christian, as the covenants
of a false and treacherous friendship.” It is remarkable that
though these arts were strongly denounced in the Pentateuch, the
Jews—acquiring them from the surrounding Gentile nations—have
embedded them deeply in their oral law, said also to be given by
Moses (e.g. in Moed Katon
28, and Shabbath 156, prosperity
comes from the influence of the stars; in
Shabbath 61 it is a question whether the influence of
the stars or a charm has been effective; and in Sanhedrin 17 magic is one of the
qualifications for the Sanhedrim). It might have been expected that
the Christians, if only from that reaction against Judaism which
shows itself in Origen’s disparagement of the letter of the Old
Testament Scriptures (see De Princip. iv. 15, 16), would
have shrunk from such strange arts. But the influx of pagans, who
had practiced them, into the Christian Church appears gradually to
have leavened it in no slight degree. This is not only true of the
Valentinians (see Kaye’s Clement of Alex. vi.) and other
heretics, but the influence of these contacts is seen even in the
writings of the “orthodox.” Those who can read between the
lines will find no slight trace of this (after separating what they
would conceive to be true from what is manifestly false) in the
story told by Zonaras, in his Annals, of the controversy
between the Rabbis and Sylvester, Bishop of Rome, before
Constantine. The Jews were worsted in argument, and evidently
thought an appeal to miracles might, from the Emperor’s
education, bring him over to their side. An ox is brought forth.
The Jewish wonder-worker whispers a mystic name into its ear, and
it falls dead; but Sylvester, according to the story, is quite
equal to the occasion, and restores the animal to life again by
uttering the name of the Redeemer. It may have been that the
cessation of miracles may have gradually led unstable professors of
Christianity to invent miracles; and, as Bishop Kaye observes
(Tertullian, p. 95), “the success of the first attempts
naturally encouraged others to practice similar impositions on the
credulity of mankind.” As to the time of the cessation of
miracles, comparison may be profitably made of the views of Kaye,
in the early part of c. ii. of his Tertullian, and of Blunt,
in his Right Use of the Early Fathers, series ii. lecture
6. | For good it
is to confess unto Thee, and to say, “Be merciful unto me, heal
my soul, for I have sinned against Thee;”278
and not to abuse Thy goodness for a
license to sin, but to remember the words of the Lord, “Behold,
thou art made whole; sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto
thee.”279
All of which
salutary advice they endeavour to destroy when they say, “The
cause of thy sin is inevitably determined in heaven;” and,
“This did Venus, or Saturn, or Mars;” in order that man,
forsooth, flesh and blood, and proud corruption, may be blameless,
while the Creator and Ordainer of heaven and stars is to bear the
blame. And who is this but Thee, our God, the sweetness and
well-spring of righteousness, who renderest “to every man
according to his deeds,”280
and despisest not “a broken and a
contrite heart!”281
5. There was in those days a wise man, very
skilful in medicine, and much renowned therein, who had with his
own proconsular hand put the Agonistic garland upon my distempered
head, not, though, as a physician;282
| 282 This physician was Vindicianus, the “acute old
man” mentioned in vii. sec. 8, below, and again in Ep.
138, as “the most eminent physician of his day.” Augustin’s
disease, however, could not be reached by his remedies. We are
irresistibly reminded of the words of our great poet:—
“Canst thou minister to a mind diseased;
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow;
Raze out the written troubles of the brain;
And, with some sweet oblivious antidote,
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous
stuff
Which weighs upon the heart!”
—Macbeth, act. v. scene 3.
| for this disease Thou alone
healest, who resistest the proud, and givest grace to the humble.283
But didst
Thou fail me even by that old man, or forbear from healing my soul?
For when I had become more familiar with him, and hung assiduously
and fixedly on his conversation (for though couched in simple
language, it was replete with vivacity, life, and earnestness),
when he had perceived from my discourse that I was given to books
of the horoscope-casters, he, in a kind and fatherly manner,
advised me to throw them away, and not vainly bestow the care and
labour necessary for useful things upon these vanities; saying that
he himself in his earlier years had studied that art with a view to
gaining his living by following it as a profession, and that, as he
had understood Hippocrates, he would soon have understood this, and
yet he had given it up, and followed medicine, for no other reason
than that he discovered it to be utterly false, and he, being a man
of character, would not gain his living by beguiling people. “But
thou,” saith he, “who hast rhetoric to support thyself by, so
that thou followest this of free will, not of necessity—all the
more, then, oughtest thou to give me credit herein, who laboured to
attain it so perfectly, as I wished to gain my living by it
alone.” When I asked him to account for so many true things being
foretold by it, he answered me (as he could) “that the force of
chance, diffused throughout the whole order of nature, brought this
about. For if when a man by accident opens the leaves of some poet,
who sang and intended something far different, a verse oftentimes
fell out wondrously apposite to the present business, it were not
to be wondered at,” he continued, “if out of the soul of man,
by some higher instinct, not knowing what goes on within itself, an
answer should be given by chance, not art, which should coincide
with the business and actions of the questioner.”
6. And thus truly, either by or through him, Thou
didst look after me. And Thou didst delineate in my memory what I
might afterwards search out for myself. But at that time neither
he, nor my most dear Nebridius, a youth most good and most
circumspect, who scoffed at that whole stock of divination, could
persuade me to forsake it, the authority of the authors influencing
me still more; and as yet I had lighted upon no certain
proof—such as I sought—whereby it might without doubt appear
that what had been truly foretold by those consulted was by
accident or chance, not by the art of the star-gazers.
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