Regarding the history of astrology and the Christian church:- You have to remember first, that astrology and Christianity were the pan-pervasive and predominant philosophies throughout Europe, including England, from the 10th century AD until the 18th century and the period known as the Enlightenment. Christianity and astrology had an uneasy truce but coexisted, particularly in England, where many of the priests were students and covert practitioners of astrology. There was an academic reason for this. First, the translations of the works of the Greek philosophers, including Boethius, Averroes, Avicenna, Plato, Aristotle and Herodotus, into Latin, by the Arab scholars and the introduction of those texts into Britain in the 10th century; secondly, their entry into the monastries of Britain, which at that time were the sole sources of education for the young boys of the country; and thirdly, the necessity that anyone training for the priesthood at university (a degree in theology) necessarily had to study the seven liberal arts, the quadrivium and the trivium, one of which was astronomia/astrologia. Studying astronomy meant studying astrology too, and studying philosophy meant studying medical astrology also. St. Augustine, one of the first Catholic theologians studied astrology and believed in it as a young man, but in his Civitate Dei (City of God) he denounced it, saying that he couldn't reconcile the fact that identical twins led different lives, with the astrological claim that people born at the same time would have identical destinies; and secondly, that many people who died in battle on the same day were born with birth times and birth dates widely varying from each other and very different horoscopes. So, the Church, taking its lead from him, in the 3rd-4th century, similarly condemned astrology for a millenium, until 1300-1400, when St. Thomas Aquinas, the second and greatest Catholic theologian wrote his Summa Theologiae in which he made concessions to astrology. |
They were that: no-one could deny the validity of stellar influences upon the weather, upon human health, plant life and growth and the seasons, fishing and horticulture, but with regard to human beings it affected only the 'sublunary' nature, the corporeal instincts. He claimed that if men allied their will to the spirit of Christ, which he equated to the intellect, then they could over-ride stellar determinism and free themselves from astral influences. This became official church doctrine until about two hundred years ago. The chief bone of contention between astrology and Christianity, in the west, was the belief or perception by non-astrologers in particular, that astrology was fatalistic. The great polemical debates of the late Middle Ages (Nichole Oresme, for example) and during the Renaissance, was about fate versus free will. The Italian astrologer Cecco d'Ascoli was burned at the stake in 1327 for holding a too deterministic philosophy which was seen to have political implications, for example. Pope John XXII in 1317 had issued a decree banning alchemy, with which astrology was associated, as well as with demonology, the casting of spells under the right constellations as set out in the medieval text Picatrix. It wasn't until the early part of the 20th century, however, that astrology came under fire from the more fundamentalist churches, chiefly because they hadn't existed until the schismatic variations developed in the late 19th century. This concern with free will versus fatalism is a western philosophical preoccupation that doesn't exist in the east, but it explains in part why it is necessary for astrologers to use terms like "you are likely", "you may", "you could" etc., instead of "you will". It preserves the western championship of free will, the concept of which is rooted in Christianity.Dr. Garth Chivalle Carpenter, |
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