Later in the same century stands forth the famous figure of Roger Bacon, the stout defender of mathematics and physics against scholasticism. Some have ascribed to him numerous important innovations in the realm of natural science and of the mechanical arts, and have regarded his promulgation of the experimental method, guided by the mathematical method, as the first herald note of that modern science which was not destined really to appear for yet several centuries. Yet he held that the alchemist, if given sufficient time and money, could discover a way not only to meet the state’s expenses by converting baser metals into gold, but also to prolong human existence beyond that limit to which it can be drawn out by nature.[26] Indeed these objects constituted two of the three examples he gave of the great advantages to be gained from the pursuit of that experimental science which was to disprove and blot out all magical nonsense.[27]
How far Bacon let the principles of astrology carry him a citation or two will show. That a woman had succeeded in living twenty years without eating was, he explained, no miracle, but due to the fact that during that period some constellation was able to reduce the concourse of the four elements in her body to a greater degree of harmony than they usually attain.[28] Nor is it health alone that the stars control; they affect human character.[29] They implant in the babe at birth good or evil dispositions, great or small talents. Human free will may either better these innate tendencies through God’s grace or modify them for the worse by yielding to Satan’s temptings; but in general the stars so far prevail that there are different laws and customs and national traits under different quarters of the heavens.[30] Nay more, astrology offers proof of the superiority of Christianity to other religions and gives insight into the nature of Antichrist.[31]
As one might surmise from Bacon’s belief in the potent effect of sidereal emanations, he makes much of the theory that every agent sends forth its own virtue and species into external matter. This leads him to accept fascination as a fact. Just as Aristotle tells that in some localities mares become pregnant by the mere odor of the stallions, and as Pliny relates that the basilisk kills by a glance, so the witch by the vapor from her bleary eye draws her victims on to destruction. In short, “Man can project virtue and species outside himself, the more since he is nobler than all corporeal things, and especially because of the virtue of the rational soul.”[32] Hence the great effects possible from spoken words or written characters; although one must beware of falling into the absurdities and abominations of the magicians. Bacon, moreover, was like Scot a believer in the doctrine of signatures.[33]
Other men of the same period prominent in science who held similar beliefs we can scarcely stop to mention. There was Vincent de Beauvais, the great encyclopedist, and Bernard Gordon, a physician of Montpellier and a medical writer of considerable note, who nevertheless recommended the use of a magic formula for the treatment of epilepsy.[34] There was Albertus Magnus with his trust in such wonderful powers of stones as to cure ulcers, counteract potions, conciliate human hearts, and win battles; and his theory that ligatures and suspensions, and gems carved with proper images possess similar strange virtues.[35] There was Arnald of Villanova who propounded such admirable doctrines as that a physician ought first of all to understand the chief functions of life and chief organs of the body and that the science of particular things is the foundation of all knowledge, and yet who believed in astrological medicine, wrote on oneiromancy and interpreted dreams, translated treatises on incantations, ligatures and other magic devices, and composed a book on the Tetragrammaton or ineffable name of Jehovah.[36] That marvelous power of words — especially of the divine names of angels and of the Supreme Deity — which we may suppose Arnald to have touched upon in his Tctragrammaton, was discussed at length by a series of scholars at the close of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century whose names are most familiar to the student of those times. These men pushed the practice of allegorical interpretation of sacred writings, which had been in constant vogue among religious and theological writers from the days of the early Christian Fathers, to the extreme of discovering sublime secrets not only by regarding every incident and object in Scripture as a parable, but by treating the text itself as a cryptogram. Not only, like Isidore, did they see in every numerical measurement in the Bible mystic meaning, but in the very letters they doubted not there was hidden that knowledge by which one might gain control of all the processes of the universe; nay, penetrate through the ten sephiroth to the unspeakable and infinite source of all. For our visible universe is but the reflected image of an invisible, and each has subtle and practically unlimited power over the other. The key to that power is words. Such were the doctrines held by Pico Della Mirandola (1463–1494) who asserted that no science gave surer proof of Christ’s divinity than magical and cabalistic science;[37] such were the doctrines of the renowned humanist, John Reuchlin, who connected letters in the sacred text with individual angels;[38] of Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535) who, inspired by Reuchlin’s De verbo mirifico and De arte cabalistica, declared that whoever knew the true pronunciation of the name Jehovah had “the world in his mouth;”[39] of Trithemius from whom Paracelsus is said to have acquired the “Cabala of the spiritual, astral and material worlds.”[40]
26
27
32
34
“Gaspar fert myrram, thus Melchoir, Balthasar aurum.
Haec tria qui secum portabit nomina regum
Solvitur a morbo Christi pietate caduco.”
36
Two good accounts of Arnald are those in the
38
Janssen,
39
Henry Morley,