by Will Durant
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” 22—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.23
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.24
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,25 and enabled him to fly over the globe and sleep in the moon.26
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.” 27
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 Liège 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.28 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.*
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, † 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.30
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.31 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”32—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”;33 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 th
e 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.34
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.35 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.” 36 Calvin answered Copernicus with a line from Psalm XCIII, I: “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?“37 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.38
