Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

Halles. In 1564 he predicted a life of ninety years for Charles

IX, `063713 who died ten years later at the age of twenty-four. At his

own death (1566) he left a book of prophecies so wisely ambiguous that

some line or another could be applied to almost any event in later

history.

Because Christians of the sixteenth century believed in the

possibility of obtaining supernatural powers from demons, and

because the fear of demons was ingrained in their rearing, they felt

an obligation to burn witches. Luther and Calvin seconded Pope

Innocent VIII in urging the prosecution of witches. "I would have no

compassion on these witches," said Luther; "I would burn them

all." `063714 Four were burned at Wittenberg on June 29, 1540;

thirty-four at Geneva in 1545. `063715 The Reformers, of course, had

Biblical warrant for these bonfires, and Protestant dependence upon

the Scriptures gave new urgency to Exodus 22:18. The Catholic practice

of exorcism encouraged the belief in witchcraft by assuming the

power of devils lodged in human beings. Luther claimed that his

Leipzig opponent, Johannes Eck, had signed a pact with Satan; and

Johannes Cochlaeus retorted that Luther was a by-product of Satan's

dalliance with Margaret Luther. `063716

Accusations of witchcraft were sometimes used to get rid of personal

enemies. The accused had a choice of prolonged torture to elicit a

confession, or death as the result of a confession; and in

sixteenth-century Europe the administration of torture was

systematized "with a cold-blooded ferocity unknown... to the heathen

nations." `063717 Many victims seem to have believed in their own

guilt- that they had had transactions, sometimes sexual, with

devils. `063718 Some of the accused committed suicide; a French

judge noted fifteen such cases within a year. `063719 Secular

magistrates often exceeded ecclesiastics in the enthusiasm of this

persecution. The laws of Henry VIII (1541) punished with death any

of several practices ascribed to witches, `063720 but the Spanish

Inquisition branded stories and confessions of witchcraft as the

delusions of weak minds, and cautioned its agents (1538) to ignore the

popular demand for the burning of witches. `063721

Fewer voices were raised to protect witches than in defense of

heretics, and the heretics themselves believed in witches. But in 1563

Johannes Wier, a physician of Cleves, issued a treatise De

praestigiis daemonum ( On Demonic Deceptions ) which timidly dared to

mitigate the mania. He did not question the existence of demons, but

suggested that witches were the innocent victims of demonic

possession, and were deluded by the Devil into believing the

absurdities that they confessed. Women, and persons suffering from

illness of body or mind, were, he thought, especially subject to

possession by demons. He concluded that witchcraft was not a crime but

a disease, and he appealed to the princes of Europe to stop the

execution of these helpless women. A few years later Wier replaced

himself in his time by writing a detailed description of hell, its

leaders, its organization, and its operation.

-

The spirit of the age spoke in the story of Faust. We first

hear of Georg Faust in 1507, in a letter of Johannes Trithemius, who

calls him a mountebank; and then in 1513, when Mutianus Rufus

accords him no gentler term. Philip Begardi, a Worms physician,

wrote in 1539: "Of late years a remarkable man has been traveling

through nearly every province, principality, and kingdom... and has

boasted highly of his great skill not only in medicine but in

chiromancy, physiognomy, crystal gazing, and other kindred arts... and

has not denied that he is called Faustus"- `063722 i.e., favored or

fortunate. The historic Faust seems to have died in 1539- by the Devil

wringing his neck, said Melanchthon. Four years later the legend of

Faust as in league with the Devil made its appearance in the Sermones

conviviales of Johannes Gast, a Protestant pastor at Basel. Two old

notions combined to transform the historical charlatan into a figure

of legend, drama, and art: that man might obtain magic powers by

compacts with Satan, and that secular learning is an insolent

conceit likely to lead a man to hell. In one phase the legend was

supposed to be a Catholic caricature of Luther; in a deeper view it

expressed the religious repudiation of "profane" knowledge as

opposed to a humble acceptance of the Bible as in itself sufficient

erudition and truth. Goethe repudiated the repudiation, and allowed

the hunger for knowledge to purify itself by its application to the

common good.

The legend of Faust came to bitter life in Henry Cornelius

Agrippa. Born of good family at Cologne (1487), he found his way to

Paris, and fell in there with some mystics or quacks who claimed

esoteric wisdom. Hungry for knowledge and fame, he took up alchemy,

studied the Cabala, and became convinced that there was a world of

enlightenment unattainable by ordinary perception or reasoning. He

sent to Trithemius a manuscript De occulta philosophia, with a

personal letter:

-

I wondered much, and indeed felt indignant, that up to this time

no one had arisen to vindicate so sublime and sacred a study from

the accusation of impiety. Thus my spirit was aroused, and... I too

conceived the desire to philosophize, thinking that I should produce a

work not unworthy of praise... if I could vindicate... that ancient

Magic, studied by all the wise, purged and freed from the errors of

impiety, and endowed with its own reasonable system. `063723

-

Trithemius replied with good counsel:

-

Speak of things public to the public, but of things lofty and secret

only to the loftiest and most private of your friends. Hay to an ox

and sugar to a parrot. Rightly interpret this, lest you, as some

others have been, be trampled down by oxen. `063724

-

Whether through caution or lack of a publisher, Agrippa refrained

for twenty years from sending his book through the press. The

Emperor Maximilian summoned him to war in Italy; he gave a good

account of himself on the battlefield, but took occasion to lecture on

Plato at the University of Pisa, and to receive degrees in law and

medicine at Pavia. He was appointed town advocate at Metz (1518),

and soon lost that position by interfering with the prosecution of a

young woman: accused of witchcraft; he procured her release from the

Inquisition, but he thought it wise then to change his habitat (1519).

For two years he served Louise of Savoy as physician; however, he

entered into so many disputes that she stopped his salary. He moved to

Antwerp with his second wife and his children, was made

historiographer and court librarian to the Regent Margaret of Austria,

and managed to eat regularly. Now he composed his most important work,

De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum; he published it in 1530,

and then, strangely enough, issued his youthful De occulta

philosophia, with a preface disclaiming continued belief in the

mystic abracadabra there detailed. The two books together offended all

the cognizant world.

The Occult Philosophy urged that as the human soul pervades and

governs the body, so the spiritus mundi pervades and governs the

universe; that this great reservoir of soul-force can be tapped by a

mind morally purified and patiently instructed in Magian ways. So

reinforced, the mind can discover the hidden qualities of objects,

numbers, letters, words, can penetrate the secrets of the stars, and

can gain mastery over the forces of the earth and the demons of the

air. The book circulated widely, and its many posthumous editions

led to legends about Agrippa's compact with a devil, who accompanied

him in the guise of his dog, `063725 and enabled him to fly over the

globe and sleep in the moon. `063726

The vicissitudes of life abated Agrippa's claims on supersensual

experience; he learned that no magic or alchemy could feed his

family or keep him out of jail for debt. He turned in angry

disillusionment upon the pursuit of knowledge, and wrote at the age of

thirty-nine On the Uncertainty and Vanity of the Sciences, the

most skeptical book of the sixteenth century before Montaigne. "I well

perceive," ran his exordium, "what a bloody battle I have to fight....

First of all, the lousy ( pediculose ) grammarians will make a stir,

and... peevish poets, trifle-selling historians, blustering orators,

obstinate logicians... fatal astrologers... monstrous magicians...

contentious philosophers..." All knowledge is uncertain, all science

is vain, and "to know nothing is the happiest life." It was

knowledge that destroyed the happiness of Adam and Eve; it was

Socrates's confession of ignorance that brought him content and

fame. "All sciences are only the ordinances and opinions of men, as

injurious as profitable, as pestilent as wholesome, as ill as good, in

no part perfect, but doubtful and full of error and

contention." `063727

Agrippa begins his devastation with the alphabet, and upbraids it

for its bewildering inconsistencies of pronunciation. He laughs at the

grammarians, whose exceptions are more numerous than their rules,

and who are repeatedly outvoted by the people. Poets are madmen; no

one "well in his wits" can write poetry. Most history is a fable;

not une fable convenue, as Voltaire would mistakenly call it, but an

ever-changing fable which each historian and generation transforms

anew. Oratory is the seduction of the mind by eloquence into error.

Occultism is a sham; his own book about it, Agrippa now warns, was

"false, or, if you will, lying"; if formerly he practiced astrology,

magic, divination, alchemy, and other such "nesciences," it was mostly

through the importunate solicitation of patrons demanding esoteric

knowledge, and able to pay. The Cabala is "nothing else but a

pestilent superstition." As for the philosophers, the self-canceling

diversity of their opinions puts them out of court; we may leave

them to refute one another. So far as philosophy seeks to deduce

morality from reason, it is stultified by the irrational contrariety

of morals in place and time; "whereof it cometh to pass that that

which at one time was vice, another time is accounted virtue, and that

which in one place is virtue, in another is vice." The arts and

occupations are as vitiated as the sciences with falsehood and vanity.

Every court is "a school of corrupt customs, and a refuge of

detestable wickedness." Trade is treachery. Treasurers are thieves;

their hands are sticky with bird-lime, their fingers end in hooks. War

is the slaughter of many in the sport of the few. Medicine is "a

certain art of manslaughter," and often "there is more danger in the

physician and the medicine than in the sickness itself."

What is the upshot of all this? If science is transient opinion, and

philosophy is the vain speculation of mental maggots on the nature

of the infinite, what shall a man live by? Only by the Word of God

as revealed in the Bible. This has an evangelical ring, and indeed,

scattered among Agrippa's doubts, are sundry affirmations of reform.

He rejects the temporal power of the popes, and even their spiritual

authority when this contravenes Scripture. He denounces the

Inquisition as persuading men not with reason and Scripture but with

"fire and faggots." He wishes the Church would spend less on

cathedrals and more on charity. But he goes beyond the Reformers

when he admits that the authors of the Old and the New Testament

were liable to error. Christ alone is always right and true; Him

only should we trust; in Him is the last refuge of the mind and the

soul.

Agrippa enjoyed the furor caused by his rampage, but he paid for the

pleasure through his remaining years. Charles V demanded that he

recant his criticism of the Church. When he refused, his salary was

cut short. Imprisoned for debt, he laid responsibility on the Emperor,

who was behind in payments to his court historiographer. Cardinal

Campeggio and the Bishop of Liege secured his release, but Charles

banished him from Imperial territory (1531). Agrippa moved to Lyons,

where, says an uncertain tradition, he was again imprisoned for

debt. Set free, he passed on to Grenoble; and there, aged forty-eight,

he died. Probably he had a share in forming the skepticism of

Montaigne, but his only popular book was on the occultism that he

had renounced. Occult thought and practices flourished to the end of

the century.

II. THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION

-

Mathematical advances that now seem trivial sharpened the tools of

calculation in this age. Michael Stifel's Arithmetica integra (1544)

introduced our plus and minus signs, and Robert Recorde's Whetstone

of Wit (1557) first used our equals sign in print. The once famous

arithmetics of Adam Riese persuaded Germany to pass from reckoning

with counters to written computation. Johannes Werner published (1522)

the first modern treatise on conic sections; and Georg Rheticus,

besides serving as midwife to Copernicus, carried on the work of

Regiomontanus in trigonometry.

Astronomy had at its disposal better calculations than

instruments. On the basis of these calculations some astrologers

predicted a second Deluge for February 11, 1524, when Jupiter and

Saturn would join in Pisces; thereupon Toulouse built an ark of

refuge, and cautious families stored food on mountaintops. `063728

Most of the astronomical instruments were of medieval origin:

celestial and terrestrial spheres, Jacob's staff, an astrolabe, an

armillary sphere, quadrants, cylinders, clocks, compasses, and several

other devices, but no telescope and no photography. With this

equipment Copernicus moved the earth.

Mikolai Kopernik, as Poland calls him, Niklas Koppernigk, as Germany

calls him, Nicolaus Copernicus, as scholars call him, was born in 1473

at Thorn (Torun) on the Vistula in West Prussia, which, seven years

before, had been ceded to Poland by the Teutonic Knights; he was a

Prussian in space, a Pole in time. His mother came of a prosperous

Prussian family; his father hailed from Cracow, settled in Thorn,

and dealt in copper. When the father died (1483), the mother's

brother, Lucas Watzelrode, Prince Bishop of Ermland, took charge of

the children. Nicolaus was sent at eighteen to the University of

Cracow to prepare for the priesthood. Not liking the Scholasticism

that had there suppressed humanism, he persuaded his uncle to let

him study in Italy. The uncle had him appointed a canon of the

cathedral at Frauenburg in Polish East Prussia, and gave him leave

of absence for three years. *06069

At the University of Bologna (1497-1500) Copernicus studied

mathematics, physics, and astronomy. One of his teachers, Domenico

de Novara, once a pupil of Regiomontanus, criticized the Ptolemaic

system as absurdly complex, and introduced his students to ancient

Greek astronomers who had questioned the immobility and central

position of the earth. Philolaus the Pythagorean, in the fifth century

before Christ, had held that the earth and the other planets moved

around Hestia, a central fire invisible to us because all known

parts of the earth are turned away from it. Cicero quoted Hicetas of

Syracuse, also of the fifth century before Christ, as believing that

the sun, the moon, and the stars stood still, and that their

apparent motion was due to the axial rotation of the earth. Archimedes

and Plutarch reported that Aristarchus of Samos (310-230 B.C.) had

suggested the revolution of the earth around the sun, had been accused

of impiety, and had withdrawn the suggestion. According to Plutarch,

Seleucus of Babylonia had revived the idea in the second century

before Christ. This heliocentric view might have triumphed in

antiquity had not Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria, in the second

century of our era, restated the geocentric theory with such force and

learning that hardly anyone thereafter dared to challenge it.

Ptolemy himself had ruled that in seeking to explain phenomena,

science should adopt the simplest possible hypothesis consistent

with accepted observations. Yet Ptolemy, like Hipparchus before him,

to explain the apparent motion of the planets, had been compelled by

the geocentric theory to assume a bewildering complexity of

epicycles and eccentrics. *06070 Could any simpler hypothesis be

found? Nicole Oresme (1330-82) and Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64) had

renewed the proposal of terrestrial motion; Leonardo da Vinci

(1452-1519) had recently written: "The sun does not move.... The earth

is not in the center of the circle of the sun, nor in the center of

the universe." `063730

Copernicus felt that the heliocentric theory could "save the

appearances"- explain the observed phenomena- more compactly than

the Ptolemaic view. In 1500, now twenty-seven, he went to Rome,

presumably for the Jubilee, and gave lectures there in which, a

tradition reports, he tentatively propounded the motion of the

earth. Meanwhile his leave of absence expired, and he returned to

his duties as canon in Frauenburg. But geocentric mathematics confused

his prayers. He begged permission to resume his studies in Italy,

proposing now to take up medicine and canon law- which to his

superiors seemed more to the point than astronomy. Before the

fifteenth century ended he was back in Italy. He received the degree

of law at Ferrara (1503), apparently took no degree in medicine, and

again reconciled himself to Frauenburg. Soon his uncle, probably to

give him time for further study, appropriated him as secretary and

physician (1506); and for six years Copernicus lived in the

episcopal castle at Heilsberg. There he worked out the basic

mathematics of his theory, and formulated it in manuscript.

When the kindly bishop died, Copernicus resumed his place in

Frauenburg. He continued to practice medicine, treating the poor

without charge. `063731 He represented the cathedral chapter on

diplomatic missions, and prepared for King Sigismund I of Poland a

plan for reforming the Prussian currency. In one of many learned

essays on finance he stated what was later to be known as Gresham's

law: "Bad money... drives the old, better money away"- `063732 i.e.,

when a government issues a debased coinage, the good coins are hoarded

or exported and disappear from circulation, the bad coins are

offered as taxes, and the king is "paid in his own coin." But amid

these diverse concerns Copernicus continued his astronomic researches.

His geographical location was unpropitious: Frauenburg was near the

Baltic, and was half the time shrouded in mists or clouds. He envied

Claudius Ptolemy, for whom "the skies were more cheerful, where the

Nile does not breathe fogs as does our Vistula. Nature has denied us

that comfort, that calm air"; `063733 no wonder Copernicus almost

worshiped the sun. His astronomical observations were neither numerous

nor precise, but they were not vital to his purpose. He used for the

most part the astronomic data transmitted by Ptolemy, and proposed

to prove that all received observations accorded best with a

heliocentric view.

About 1514 he summarized his conclusions in a Little Commentary

( Nicolai Copernici de hypothesibus motuum coelestium a se constitutis

commentariolus ). It was not printed during his lifetime, but he

sent out some manuscript copies as "trial balloons." He stated his

conclusions with a matter-of-fact simplicity as if they were not the

greatest revolution in Christian history:

-

1. There is no one center of all the celestial circles or spheres.

2. The center of the earth is not the center of the universe,

but only of gravity and of the lunar sphere.

3. All the spheres [planets] revolve about the sun as their

midpoint, and therefore the sun is the center of the universe.

4. The ratio of the earth's distance from the sun to the height of

the firmament is so much smaller than the ratio of the earth's

radius to its distance from the sun that the distance from the earth

to the sun is imperceptible in comparison with the height of the

firmament.

5. Whatever motion appears in the firmament arises not from any

motion of the firmament, but from the earth's motion. The earth

together with its circumjacent elements performs a complete rotation

on its fixed poles in a daily motion, while the firmament and

highest heaven abide unchanged.

6. What appear to us as motions of the sun arise not from its

motion but from the motion of the earth and our sphere, with which

[motion] we revolve around the sun like any other planet....

7. The apparent retrograde and direct motion of the planets arises

not from their motion but from the earth's. The motion of the earth

alone, therefore, suffices to explain so many apparent inequalities in

the heavens. `063734

-

The few astronomers who saw the Commentariolus paid no great

attention to it. Pope Leo X, informed of the theory, expressed an

open-minded interest, and asked a cardinal to write to Copernicus

for a demonstration of his thesis; for a time the hypothesis won

considerable favor at the enlightened papal court. `063735 Luther,

toward 1530, rejected the theory: "People give ear to an upstart

astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens

or the firmament, the sun and the moon.... This fool wishes to reverse

the entire scheme of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us that

Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth." `063736

Calvin answered Copernicus with a line from Psalm XCIII, 1: "The world

also is stabilized, that it cannot be moved"- and asked, "Who will

venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy

Spirit?" `063737 Copernicus was so discouraged by the response to

the Commentariolus that when, about 1530, he completed his major

work, he decided to withhold it from publication. He calmly

proceeded with his duties, delved a bit into politics, and, in his

sixties, was accused of having a mistress. `063738

Into this resigned old age burst, in 1539, an enthusiastic young

mathematician, Georg Rheticus. He was twenty-five, a Protestant, a

protege of Melanchthon, and a professor at Wittenberg. He had read the

Commentariolus, he was convinced of its truth, he longed to help the

old astronomer who, far off in an obscure Baltic outpost of

civilization, was waiting so patiently for others to see, with him,

the invisible rotation and revolution of the earth. The youth fell

in love with Copernicus, called him "the best and greatest of men,"

and was deeply impressed by his devotion to science. For ten weeks

Rheticus studied the big manuscript. He urged its publication.

Copernicus refused, but agreed to have Rheticus publish a simplified

analysis of its first four books. So in 1540 at Danzig the young

scholar issued his Narratio prima de libris revolutionum - First

Account of the Books of the Revolutions of the celestial bodies. He

sent a copy hopefully to Melanchthon. The kindly theologian was not

convinced. When Rheticus returned to Wittenberg (early in 1540), and

commended the Copernican hypothesis in his class, he was "ordered," he

says, to lecture instead on the Sphaera of Johannes de

Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

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