Nature
I ask not that for me aside be cast
The solemn veil that hides what is decreed;
I crave the resurrection of the past,
That I may know what Delphi was indeed!
—Richard Monckton Milnes, ‘Delphi: An Elegy’1
WHAT CONSTITUTES A ‘NATURAL’ CAUSE? The word nature, and before it natura and physis, have never been easy to define, as will be attested by any dictionary entry on the subject.2 Trepidation on this subject even—so the story goes—prompted the editors of the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, working otherwise alphabetically, to skip straight from M to O. More pertinently, the definition was debated by many early modern philosophers.3
One prominent difficulty was whether or not nature—however defined—included the demonic realm. For as Stuart Clark has demonstrated, demons, by virtue of being created spirits, were widely understood by early modern thinkers as belonging to the natural world.4 They could not, therefore, work miracles, which contravene the laws of nature, but only marvels, that is, deviations from the usual run of things, effects with unknown causes.5 This latter category included divination.6 A few sixteenth-century writers labelled such effects praeter naturam, to distinguish them from divine miracles, which were super naturam: this distinction allowed them to preserve a concept of natura as absolutely regular when taken as a whole.7 The utility of such a category has not disappeared even today: the modern scientist works on the assumption that no event, no matter how bizarre or unusual, may transcend the ‘laws of nature’, although it may transcend—and so revise or expand—our knowledge of them. But we should be careful not to exaggerate early modern precision on the matter: the category of the ‘preternatural’, despite being ‘one that historians can adopt without being anachronistic’, was invoked by few.8 The majority of writers on divination and oracles, in fact, simply ignore the paradox: again and again, ‘natural causes’ are put in opposition, or subordination, to the work of demons.
With this in mind, we can adopt, in most cases, the unsatisfactorily ad hoc definition of a natural cause as one that does not depend on created spirits. Two such causes in particular cover the great majority of positions on the pagan oracles: inflamed melancholy and terrestrial exhalations, both concepts drawn from classical sources, and both resting comfortably within the early modern picture of the material world.9 Melancholy, especially, had long been known as a cause of marvellous behaviour; even those who insisted on the reality of demonic possession accepted it as a proximate cause, labelling it the ‘Devil’s bath’, and so in this respect the natural and the supernatural accounts could overlap without conflict.10
Very few early modern writers claimed unequivocally that natural causes alone could account for the oracles. The claim, when it was made, turned on a notion of natura that extended across the entire field of apparent marvels and came into close contact with the divinity, since it was unmediated by the activity of demons. This posed a serious problem to the intellectual edifice sketched in the previous chapter: since natura is always the same, a naturalist account of divination was intrinsically unable to distinguish between the pagan oracles and Christian prophecy—a distinction on which the Christian narrative depended. This is why the oracles of the natural philosophers were rather abstract and lifeless entities, and why those who argued against the picture increasingly invoked particular facts about the oracles, as they were known from Christian or pagan history. It was history, ultimately, that triumphed over nature: Christian humanist scholarship, even of a rudimentary character, over scholastic abstraction.
The blurring of Christian and pagan prognostication is evident in the cryptic remarks on divination in the Platonic Theology of the Florentine scholar-philosopher Marsilio Ficino. Here the oracles are compassed in a scheme of explanation alongside Sibyls, dreams, and the Hebrew prophets; in each case, according to Ficino, the diviner experiences a vacatio mentis, a suspension of the sensory and rational faculties, to make way for the divinity to impart knowledge of the future.11 In the case of the oracles, the vacatio is brought about by an ‘awe’ (admiratio) of the god in the diviner’s mind, and Ficino’s utter lack of interest in the oracles as a historical phenomenon is betrayed by his apparent belief that this process occurs in the souls of the priests, not of the Pythia herself.12 The assumption of the whole passage is that oracular divination, no less than Hebrew prophecy, actually worked.
A fuller discussion of oracles from a Platonic perspective would appear in the next generation. Niccolò Leonico Tomeo (1456–1531), born in Venice to Greek parents, taught philosophy at Padua from 1497, and became known as a translator and interpreter of Aristotle.13 In 1524 he published a collection of philosophical dialogues, written in an elaborate humanist Latin; the first of these is entitled ‘Trophonius, sive, De divinatione’.14 In this piece the author, in the company of his brother Fosco and the Venetian diplomat Alessandro Capella, attempts to explain the ancient oracles, and divination more generally. He concentrates on the oracle of Trophonius at Lebadeia and that of Delphi; several details of the latter—the prophetic vapours, their sweet smell, the sacrifices and other rituals required for the oracular ceremony—are taken directly from Plutarch’s Delphic treatises, which were at that time relatively unknown.15
Like Ficino, Leonico Tomeo expresses no doubts on the oracles’ benign operation and genuine divinatory power. But his explanation, while grounded in classical Platonism, is original in its angle. Oracular divination, he writes, is one of the many marvellous phenomena to be attributed to the perpetual and cyclical motions of the cosmos, described as a ‘living being, both eternal and blessed, seeing all, hearing all, and endowed moreover with a rational soul and a divine mind’.16 The warming spirit of the cosmos, diffused throughout the earth, generates exhalations and vapours; some of these are harmful, others divinatory.17 Following Plutarch, the soul can be brought to prognosticate if it is in harmony with the vapour, which Leonico Tomeo repeatedly labels divinus halitus. This vapour, he writes,
can excite and clearly illuminate the ideas otherwise hidden in souls, and the presentiments of the future still in shadow within them: for it is not absurd that the soul itself, which has lived for all eternity, and dwelt among innumerable other souls, and moreover seen all things which exist in nature,18 should be able to foretell the future by certain indicative signs.19 For future things, as Cicero said,20 do not come about suddenly; rather, the passing of time is like the unfurling of a rope, effecting nothing new, but only unfolding what was already there.21
Leonico Tomeo retells from Plutarch the story of Coretas and the discovery of Delphi, indicating that oracular inspiration was limited to certain individuals—the Pythia’s mind must be pure, and her bodily temperament attuned to the vapours. These vapours derived from ‘the mother of all things’, that is, from the natura altrix. Accordingly, they, and their divinatory effects, should be counted among the ‘variety of natural phenomena’.22
This account is grounded in a philosophical vision of natura. The terrestrial vapour is at once natural and divinus—‘prophetic’, but also an element of the intelligent and providential divinum animal.23 The divinatory process thus forms part of a holistic description of the natural world, not clearly demarcated from the realm of immortal souls, or even from that of the deity himself. In this respect, Leonico Tomeo is closer to Pliny and Iamblichus than to his contemporaries.24 Like Pietro Pomponazzi, whose work will be addressed shortly, he deliberately draws the boundaries of natura to encompass the marvellous. Without this move, other scholars and philosophers struggled to explain how nature could effect divination: some allowed nature a partial or occasional rôle, others rejected the idea altogether. In any event, subsequent writers felt compelled, as Leonico Tomeo did not, to assess the problem from a historical and Christian perspective. Conspicuously absent from his account is any reliance on Christian concepts, such as the Devil, or the cessation of the oracles: in 1524, he could still afford to deal directly with the pagan sources, without reference to the views of either the Fathers or their modern inheritors. As a subject, the oracles were not yet theologically charged.
Thirty years later, the subject had acquired a stronger theological significance. This change is demonstrated by an important confrontation between the Christian worldview and one naturalist exposition of the oracles from antiquity. For Caspar Peucer, whose 1553 treatise on divination we examined in the previous chapter, it was Plutarch who represented the most serious philosophical challenge to the demon thesis; he thus devotes two chapters to outlining and refuting the position of Lamprias in De defectu oraculorum, which he presents as that of Plutarch. Lamprias, we recall, had made a clear distinction between the divine primary cause of the oracle and the natural secondary causes—that is, the sympathy between the Delphic vapours and the Pythia’s temperament.25
Peucer caricatures the position according to which, he claims, the oracles were inspired by no ‘divine force’, but rather by a terrestrial force that was entirely ‘natural’; predictive success turned on the harmony of the diviner’s phusis with that of the earth.26 Against this, Peucer denies that any premonition can derive from a natura that is ‘brute, devoid of all reason and sense, and born from the elements’, or, in other words, the material world around us.27 Instead, it must derive from a natura that is intelligent and hidden from men, and that fully understands the natura rerum, the natural world—a god or a demon.28 Peucer’s stylistic infelicity betrays the conceptual fluidity intrinsic to the word natura, and allows him to renegotiate prognostication as a theological idea while appearing to remain within the realm of natural philosophy. It was only in the latter context that the Lamprian view could genuinely be refuted, or indeed supported. Peucer ignores Lamprias’s distinction between primary and secondary causes, because his true aim is not philosophical but theological. In other words, his concern is not nature at all but rather religion, and so he must preserve the distinction between Christianity and paganism, God and the Devil—a distinction that cannot be formulated from within natura.
The implication of Peucer’s analysis is that the Christian narrative, not philosophy, provides the surest evidence on the nature of the pagan oracles. The information he adduces from the pagan histories not only confirms the demon thesis: it gives that thesis a convincing experiential bulwark against the naturalistic theses of the philosophers, both ancient and modern.29 Indeed, the piety and forceful simplicity of his critique suited later scholars and theologians well. In the next century, some followed him verbatim, usually without acknowledgement.30 Others reached similar results, whether they knew his work or not.31 The Dutch scholar Gerard Vossius, for instance, in a much-quoted discussion of the oracles from his 1641 treatise De theologia gentili, flatly denied, contra Plutarch and Aristotle, that natural causes explained predictions ‘which the acuity of the human mind could by no means attain’.32 More generally, many writers of the next century seemed to feel, and not without justification, that prophecy and divination were not phenomena of the right sort to be explained by natura.
Not everyone read Plutarch this way. Kircher, oddly, thought he had accepted a Christian cause for the cessation.33 A number of prominent voices identified his position on the oracles with that of Cleombrotus—in other words, that they were delivered by demons or gods of some sort.34 Of these, one scholar is of particular interest. In his 1586 treatise Della poetica, the Platonist and polymath Francesco Patrizi explicitly maintained Plutarch’s distinction between primary and secondary (proximate) causes, allowing the Delphic vapours, or in other places the diviner’s ingenium, to constitute the latter, while insisting that daemones (or demons) constituted the former.35 Other writers appreciated that Plutarch had offered a range of possible causes, or else thought he had struggled in vain—for the Christian truth was unknowable to him.36
Despite the respect widely accorded to Plutarch, there was little imperative to save his authority on the issue of the oracles. The same could not be said of Aristotle, over whom the debate on the natural causes of the oracles was chiefly fought. For a large number of late scholastic and other university thinkers, the authority of Aristotle was paramount, at least within the domain of natural philosophy; the question, then, was to determine the extent to which the oracles fell within this domain. For his more radical interpreters, divination, including that of the oracles, was a wholly natural matter, in that it could be explained entirely within the mechanics of regular cause and effect. The possibility of supernatural divination or prophecy, as demanded by Catholic doctrine, was beyond their remit. For moderate Peripatetics, by contrast, divination was one of a number of ring-fenced marvels to be left principally or entirely to theological authority: Christian prophecy lay in God’s realm; the oracles in that of the Devil.
It was almost universally accepted that Aristotle denied the existence of demons.37 Therefore, if a follower of Aristotle wanted to explain divination, he had to do so without invoking the demonic realm. But how? Mediaeval writers had offered remarks on the subject, but not extended arguments. The Averroist physician Pietro d’Abano had claimed in 1310 that some divinatory dreams were ‘natural’, caused by the dominance of certain humours and temperaments; in his commentary on the Pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata, he ascribed ‘demonic possession’ likewise to an imbalance of melancholy, following his source.38 Half a century later the Parisian philosopher Nicole Oresme dismissed the predictions of both dreamers and pretended demoniacs: ‘if sometimes they speak the truth, it is by chance’.39 A late epitome of Oresme, probably by the Celestine monk Claude Rapine, goes into more detail: those who deliver predictions in a state of frenzy are merely suffering from a disturbance of their ‘cognitive powers’ by fumes that have risen to their heads—a natural disorder.40 Rapine further insists that the ascription of such phenomena to demons, or to astral influences, is simply the recourse of the unlearned:
When something marvellous or unusual has occurred, the cause of which is not at hand, many people, who feel that they have a little knowledge, have recourse to the heavens and their occult influence—truly, the last refuge of the scoundrel. The devout, meanwhile, attribute it to God if it is good, and to the Devil if bad. In most cases this is from ignorance, as they do not want to pay attention to or inquire into the natural causes of things, or they disregard them, or count them for little out of inexperience.41
Rapine, whose epitome was published in 1542, became the chief conduit of Oresme’s views on this subject in the sixteenth century.42 The passage quoted here had no particular influence, but represents well the core attitude of a certain class of thinkers during this period, especially physicians and natural philosophers—and many were both. Among the former, one writer often cited by contemporaries in this connection was the Dutchman Levinus Lemnius, who followed the Problemata in attributing prophetic frenzy to melancholy.43 It was with this background that Michel Marescot would later conduct his report on Marthe Brossier. But the first major thinker to bring the pagan oracles into this framework, though trained as a physician, was better known as a philosopher: this was Pietro Pomponazzi, who addressed the issue in his late treatise, De naturalium effectuum causis, sive, De incantationibus opus. His view of the oracles was very different from those of antiquity, or those of his contemporaries: he followed, and in rather radical terms, the astrological position dismissed by Rapine in the passage above. In this he had a predecessor in Andrea Cattaneo, professor of medicine and natural philosophy at Pisa, whose 1505 exposition of Avicenna had ascribed astral causes to the pagan oracles while dismissing their predictions as the ambiguous nonsense of priests.44 It was this position, most of all, that provided the foil for moderate Peripatetics in the second half of the century, keen to reclaim Aristotle as a natural philosopher acceptable to the Christian faith.
Pomponazzi, born in Mantua in 1462, was educated at the University of Padua, receiving his doctorate in 1487, and went on to teach natural philosophy there until 1509, when he moved first to Ferrara, and then to Bologna in 1512, where he remained until his death in 1525.45 It was at Bologna that Pomponazzi wrote most of his works; but it was at Padua that his ideas had most likely come to maturity.46 De incantationibus was completed in 1520, following the theological controversy over his most notorious work, De immortalitate animae, but it remained in manuscript until 1556, when it was published at Basel by the exiled Protestant physician Guglielmo Gratarolo.47 By a historical coincidence, this was the year that Plutarch’s treatise on the oracles appeared in Latin—together the two works served, for the next half-century, as the key sources for a natural understanding of oracular divination. Pomponazzi knew of Plutarch’s work but was unable to read it, for he had no Greek.48
De incantationibus is an attempt to explain the marvellous by natural causes—that is, without recourse to demonic activity.49 Marvels commonly attributed to demons—and especially those of healing and divination—are here reascribed to natura. In this respect its author follows the lead of figures such as Pietro d’Abano and Oresme, although he extends their assertions into a powerful and programmatic critique of the traditional Christian view of demons and their involvement in the world. Any interpreter of the work immediately runs into the problem of sincerity: for Pomponazzi repeatedly professes his faith in the doctrines of the Church, and asserts that the views he outlines at such length, and with such conviction, are not his own but merely those of a hypothetical Peripatetic. The most widely cited of these protestations appears at the end:
Whatever is affirmed by canonical Scripture, and is universally decreed by the Roman Church, is to be held, without any doubt whatsoever, as completely firm, certain, inviolable and unshakeable: and whatever it has condemned, we must reject.50
These statements, both here and in the earlier De immortalitate animae, have occasioned a great deal of modern debate, since one’s understanding of his work as a whole must turn on the value one accords them.51 Also controversial is their relation to the late mediaeval doctrine of ‘double truth’, according to which a thinker could arrive at claims that were true only with respect to philosophy, but false with respect to theology; the real existence and nature of this doctrine, however, are themselves open to question.52 For our present purposes, we need not come down on one side or the other, for Pomponazzi’s professions of faith occasioned little controversy in the sixteenth century—whether explicitly or implicitly, his readers all brushed aside the piety and focused on the radicalism.
To understand Pomponazzi’s view of the oracles, we must first outline his argument against the use of demons in explaining marvels. If demons exist, he argues, they operate wholly within natura; it is accepted by all modern theologians that demons cannot immediately alter objects but only ‘apply actives to passives’—that is, bring to actuality something already existent in potentiality—and that this is done naturaliter.53 The point was indeed orthodox, and the quoted expression, of obscure origin, would become standard. As John Donne later preached,
The Devils grammar is Applicare Activa Passivis, to apply Actives to Passives; where he sees an inclination, to subminister a temptation; where he seeth a froward choler, to blow in a curse.54
But if demonic activity can be reduced to natura, continued Pomponazzi, there is little need to invoke it at all. Demons are useless explanatory elements; although accepted by a credulous and superstitious people, they are ‘introduced in vain, for it is ridiculous and completely foolish to cast aside that which is manifest and can be proved with natural reason, and seek instead those things which are invisible and have no probability’.55
All knowledge of the future, argues Pomponazzi, derives from God: it is transmitted to men by the mediation of immaterial celestial intelligences, which use the stars as instruments of communication and influence. This influence operates only at certain times, and only upon men of a certain humoral temperament: the temperament is thus the material cause of divination, as the stars are the efficient cause.56 The entire process, from high to low, occurs within natura—which is to say that it follows a prescribed structure and order: each element remains in its proper place, interacting only with those elements immediately above and below. As Pomponazzi puts it, ‘natura proceeds with order, and never conjoins two extremes without mediation’.57 It is contrary to Aristotle to suggest, as Christian theologians do, that God or demons can act immediately on their prophets; the similarity to Lamprias’s position is evident.58 Moreover, nature is absolutely regular, and marvels only appear to violate its laws:
These are not miracles, since if they were, they should be absolutely contrary to natura and beyond the order of the celestial bodies: rather, they are simply called miracles because they are uncommon and performed very rarely, not in the ordinary course of natura, but at very great intervals.59
This notion of the ‘ordinary course of natura’ is essential to Pomponazzi’s argument, as it allows him to define marvels without reference to natura in its absolute aspect. From such a perspective, a demon, free to move between high and low, and so to communicate with men, is not only superfluous as an explanatory element; it is ad hoc, lacking any rigid connection to the regularities of cause and effect that constitute natura. As for Oresme and Rapine, demons are brought in by the ignorant or unphilosophical as a fudge, to fill a gap in an account:
Demons and angels were introduced because, when such marvels as we have been discussing, like oracles, aerial apparitions etc., were witnessed repeatedly, the common people could not grasp their true causes—for these men, who were no philosophers, and indeed more like beasts, could not understand that God, the heavenly spheres and natura were able to effect them.60
In another passage, Pomponazzi argues that divinatory signs and omens are provided for men by ‘Deus et natura’—not yet the Deus sive natura of Spinoza, but nonetheless an inextricable compact of primary cause and secondary instrument.61 God, the spheres, and natura form a coherent explanatory unit; demons lie outside, just as they had done for Plutarch’s Lamprias.
The oracles of ancient Greece are introduced into this framework as a historical example. Pomponazzi explicitly defends his decision to treat historical subjects in a philosophical work, as is it necessary to furnish knowledge of the facts to be explained, especially when they are obscure.62 Despite this, the oracles remain rather abstract in his account, rarely more than an instance of inspired divination, and individuated with none of the material available from the classics, or from Rhodiginus. Nor, strangely, does Pomponazzi make much use of Aristotle’s explicit remarks on the subject, despite his frequent references to broader aspects of the Philosopher’s cosmology.63
The problem of how to explain the oracles by natural means alone is first raised in chapter seven, along with other apparent prodigies; it is then addressed at more length in chapter ten, but merely as a scholastic analysis of the metaphysics of divination in general.64 Only in chapter eleven are the oracles given a historical dimension, and here one fact alone distinguishes them from other examples of divination—their cessation. If the oracles ceased with the advent of Christ, Pomponazzi asks, must it not be that they were the work of demons? The stars then are the same as they are now: if they were the cause of the oracles, we should expect to find such divination still in practice.65 In replying to this objection, Pomponazzi expounds one of the most significant theses in the entire work: the ‘horoscope of religions’, an Averroist doctrine grounded in Aristotelian metaphysics.66 All created things, he argues, are finite: they have a beginning, and so they must have an end. This is true for groups as well as individuals: it is not only organisms that must decline and die, but also cultures and religions, whose life cycles are determined, like everything else, by the celestial intelligences, as embodied in the heavens. Although the stars in themselves are the same now as then, their conjunctions and arrangements are different. The worship of Delphi grew, and so in time it decayed, yielding its place to the religion of Christ; it was only natural that when the stars prescribed the rise of Christianity, the powers of Apollo waned and those of the apostles waxed—thus the cessation. These rising and falling faiths are referred to not as religiones but, in the Averroist tradition, as leges, laws.67 The unsettling implication of this argument is that Christianity, like paganism, is just one religion of many—having grown, it too will one day decay and fall, to be replaced by something else. As such, Pomponazzi judges the doctrine to require a special disclaimer of faith.68
The horoscope of religions was not invented by Pomponazzi, but it acquired with him a greater theoretical significance than it had for his mediaeval predecessors. De incantationibus is an attempt, as we have said, to articulate a natura of absolute regularity, governed by the motions of the stars: the horoscope of religions, and the concomitant doctrine of eternal return, allows him to extend this regularity and dominion to the realm of history.69 Whereas Peucer rejected natura in his explanation of the oracles, turning instead to Christian history, Pomponazzi reduces religious difference to a series of local alterations in an invariant system, natura. Human history suffers the same reduction sub specie aeternitatis. In other words, the horoscope of religions permits him, as it would later permit Nietzsche, to overcome history, at least in its linear and teleological form.70 It is no coincidence that Augustine, in the foundational work of teleological history in the Christian West, should denounce that doctrine.71 The cessation of the oracles, which would later be counted so pivotal as a historical event, is here the springboard for an argument that subsumed history into the invariant natura central to Pomponazzi’s philosophical vision.
For Pomponazzi, as for his contemporary Leonico Tomeo, the pagan oracles had actually worked, though the point is not stressed. It is worth briefly comparing the two accounts. While differing in content, they share both historical circumstance and underlying motive. Both men wrote before the sharpening of orthodoxy on the oracles, and before the parameters of the subject had become established by textual debate; their views are therefore rather unconventional, and adapted to individual argumentative ends. Neither addressed the subject as historians, or drew attention to those aspects of the oracles that supported a Christian interpretation, namely, their ambiguity and immorality. For both, moreover, the pagan oracles served as the key illustration of a natura not mediated from divinity, and one whose explanatory jurisdiction encompassed all marvellous phenomena—a natura, that is, approaching divinity itself.72 It is no coincidence that one later writer, discussing the very subject of the pagan oracles, lumped their two accounts together as unchristian.73 But the natura of Pomponazzi is not that of Leonico Tomeo: the one is regular and Aristotelian, the other organic and Platonist.74 For Pomponazzi to say that apparent marvels, such as oracular divination, were natural was not to undermine God’s power but to insist on the rationality of his operation in the world. Although Pomponazzi believed, as we do not, in celestial intelligences, he shared our commitment to a concept of nature, of cause and effect, without exceptions—one of the cornerstones of science as we know it today.75
• • •
To most early modern writers, Pomponazzi was a name to be condemned. François Garasse, to cite one notorious example, identifies him as the first of the modern atheists.76 The best part of this hostility can be attributed to his explosive work on the immortality of the soul, but the reception of his De incantationibus, after its eventual publication, was little different.77 Prior to this, it circulated in manuscript among Pomponazzi’s colleagues and pupils, and it is from this latter group that the first response to his views on the oracles appears.
Ludovico Boccadiferro (1482–1545), an Averroist teaching natural philosophy at Bologna, had probably studied under Pomponazzi in the second decade of the sixteenth century.78 He addresses the De incantationibus in the course of his commentary on Aristotle’s De divinatione per somnum, composed in 1544–45 and published posthumously by a student in 1570.79 Within this analysis, the pagan oracles play an important rôle, since they provide historical evidence for Boccadiferro’s arguments on divination in general. The fundamental likeness between oracles and dream divination, his primary focus, is assumed throughout. And his view of the oracles is of particular interest, for it reflects a ‘conventional’ Averroist reading of Aristotle, against which Pomponazzi’s idiosyncrasies can usefully be measured.80 Specifically, Boccadiferro relies on the separation of faith and philosophy, and on the cycle of leges or religions, constructing an explanation of the oracles according to natura, without demons; but he rejects, and with some vehemence, the doctrine of astral influence, as well as the idea, implicit in De incantationibus, that pagan divination was genuinely able to predict the future.
Boccadiferro begins his analysis with the disclaimer that he is ‘speaking always according to the opinion of the Peripatetics, and casting aside for now those things which in faith we believe true and indubitable, and which are demonstrated by our theologians, to whom we give our assent now and in all cases’.81 This allows him to defend a purely Aristotelian account of the oracles, and also to refute Pomponazzi on his own terms. Furthermore, it allows him to take certain parameters for granted: notably, the nonexistence of demons.82 Boccadiferro does not argue for this principle, as his predecessor had done: it is not a point of personal importance, but only a matter of procedure, a hypothetical assumed for the sake of demonstration. Although both writers construct their arguments outside the boundaries of orthodox theology, the subtle difference of emphasis indicates a divergence of underlying purpose.
Divination, for Boccadiferro, occurs when melancholy excites the imaginatio with phantasms or simulacra, either in dreams or, as with the ancient oracles, in waking life. In this respect he simply follows the object of his commentary.83 The prognostication of a melancholiac is natural ‘because of the individual complexion, according to the natural temperament in the individual himself’.84 That is, the cause of any given divination lies within the diviner—it must be a particular rather than a universal cause. And each case is different: melancholy, like wine, affects men in a variety of ways. Some diviners understand what they predict; others do not; still others can only interpret predictions, not predict themselves. In any event, the prediction, being wholly natural, is only a matter of chance.85
Three objections are raised to this account, and each is answered in turn. All three turn on the pagan oracles as a historical phenomenon. First, if the oracles were simply a matter of chance, how can we explain their apparent veracity, as testified by the pagan historians? After all, ‘that which happens by chance is rarely true’.86 To solve this, Boccadiferro rejects the premise that the oracles really did come true—rather, ‘they were false, insofar as they were ambiguous’; according to Aristotle it was ‘false that all those pronouncements were [genuine] predictions’.87
Second, if the oracles occurred by chance, how can we account for their cessation? Boccadiferro is apparently following De incantationibus here, given his citation of the same passage of Augustine.88 His answer, like that of Pomponazzi, relies on the cycle of leges: ‘the oracles ceased upon the coming of Christ, because just as the lex of the heathens was banished, so too were their oracles’.89 Likewise, although melancholics indeed still exist, the present lex no longer permits them to give oracles.90
Third, Aristotle himself, in the Problemata, wrote that ‘prophets, sibyls and oracles were infused with the divine spirit’, which cannot be the case if their divination was caused by melancholy.91 Boccadiferro is referring to the word ἐνθουσιαστικος, ‘divinely inspired’.92 But, as he observes, Aristotle was here speaking ‘according to the custom of the people, who say that all effects derive directly from God’—thus the word should not be taken literally.93
Given the similarities of Boccadiferro’s position to that of Pomponazzi, we might expect him to praise the account given in De incantationibus. But instead he asserts that the work contains ‘many falsehoods, and many great absurdities’.94 Pomponazzi’s chief error, he claims, is to give oracular prophecy a divine provenance, even if this provenance is mediated by the movement of the heavenly bodies; and to ‘assert this to be the opinion of Aristotle’.95 For a start, it is no such thing, since ‘the opinion is gainsaid in many places in Aristotle, and its foundation is weak’—Boccadiferro is thus the first, but not the last, of Pomponazzi’s readers to deny this view its Peripatetic mantle, as we shall see.96
More importantly, he argues, such a position is metaphysically untenable, since it is caught on the horns of a trilemma. God—and here is meant the Aristotelian god, the unmoved mover—either knows the future knowledge he gives man specifically (signate), that is, in its particulars; or he knows it universally; or he does not know it at all. If either of the latter two, then how can he—or why does he—bestow a particular item of knowledge on one man and not on another? Astral influence, after all, works naturaliter, rather than by intention. But it is contrary to Averroes to suggest that separate substances, being universals, can know particulars.97 And if god does know the future in its particulars, then ‘why does he give a man this foreknowledge ambiguously, rather than distinctly, since as a natural agent he works, as far as possible, in a swifter and more perfect manner?’98 The complete reductio thus depends on arguments from reason, authority, and experience: all three, for Boccadiferro, are inimical to Pomponazzi’s position.
The upshot of his reasoning is this: if we restrict our analysis to Aristotle, to natura, then we must conclude that divination occurs merely through the melancholic temperament of an individual, and that the accuracy of any prediction is a matter of chance alone. Specifically, ‘the divination of the sibyl and the oracle occurred by accident and by chance’,99 grounded not on any actual knowledge of the future but only on the ‘commotion of sensible simulachra’ in the mind.100 The ancient diviners lived in caves in order to be free from material distractions, and because these caves were full of dry, warm vapours, which excited their phantasms.101
Boccadiferro, then, appears to support a naturalist theory of the pagan oracles, in line with the Aristotelian and pseudo-Aristotelian texts—De divinatione per somnum, Problemata XXX.1, and De mundo—on which he relies. But his agreement with these texts is only apparent. For although he refers to the operation of the oracles as divinatio, in reality it is no such thing: divination by chance is not divination but only a confused raving. Quite simply, for Boccadiferro there is no genuine prognostication at all—at least when speaking naturaliter. When speaking theologically, we must accept the existence of demons and the authenticity of prophecy, such as that presented in the Bible. In this respect, his divergence from Pomponazzi is important, for he denies that divination can be explained naturally without losing its fundamental character. Prophecy is in essence a religious concept, not a philosophical one, and so its validity cannot be safeguarded by natural reason, only by scriptural and Catholic doctrine. Pomponazzi had wanted it both ways: that is, he insisted that the oracles could remain oracles, despite being shifted from a religious frame of reference to one circumscribed by natura. For Boccadiferro, the distinction between paganism and Christianity, raving oracles and true revelation, which had to be preserved from the perspectives of both history and theology, could not survive this transition.
In 1556, De incantationibus appeared in print. Within a few years it was facing sustained criticism from a succession of moderate Aristotelians, who sought to balance a natural account of the oracles with the strictures of sacred history—that is, with the demon thesis. The remainder of this section is devoted principally to a chronological teichoscopia of these figures and their positions: Antonio Bernardi, Giulio Sirenio, Jacques Charpentier, Francesco Piccolomini, Tommaso Giannini, and Giorgio Raguseo. The arguments of these writers vary in style and sophistication; but more important than this variance is an underlying similarity of purpose. Each attempted to negotiate a limited place within divination for natural causes, taken primarily from Aristotle, and Pomponazzi in each case represented the chief threat to their claim over the Philosopher’s corpus. Their efforts can therefore be read in the context of an ongoing territorial dispute on the interpretation and use of Aristotle in the sixteenth century. As with Boccadiferro, the pagan oracles served as the key historical example of divination, and one to which Aristotle’s views could fruitfully be applied. In most cases, these scholars were not content to condemn Pomponazzi as impious: they wanted to refute him philosophically, on his own terms. If this met with little success, it was because they were working with a far more circumscribed idea of natura than his—one subordinated, as for Peucer, to the strictures of the Christian historical narrative, with its irreconcilable categories of true and false worship.
The first of these scholars was Antonio Bernardi (1502–65), bishop of Caserta, a former student of both Pomponazzi and Boccadiferro at Bologna, and a distant relative of the Pico della Mirandola family.102 Bernardi turned his attention to the oracles, and to De incantationibus, in the course of a long and miscellaneous treatise of 1562, ostensibly on duelling, with a long and miscellaneous title—here referred to, for the sake of brevity, as the Disputationes.103
On the problem of the oracles, Bernardi asserts that his task is to find a solution, if he can, ‘not from Christian truth, but from the opinion of Aristotle himself, who spoke naturaliter’.104 This solution is straightforward—some oracles were caused by melancholy, as in the Problemata, while others can be attributed only to fraud, as implied in the Rhetoric. The latter, moreover, were mocked up in imitation of the former.105 But Aristotle’s explanation only takes us so far, since Bernardi also believes that some oracles were demonic in origin:
Perhaps it could have happened that oracles were discovered which came not only from the disposition of the body, or from artifice [i.e., fraud], but also from the Devil himself. But Aristotle knew only the two first kinds of oracles about which we have spoken.106
There follows a long discussion of Aristotle’s rejection of demons or separate substances.107 It should not be surprising, Bernardi argues, that Aristotle sought to reduce all oracles, and indeed all miracles, to natural causes, for he had no knowledge of Christian revelation:
If Aristotle had known what we Christians know, it cannot be doubted that he would have drawn the same conclusions as we have.108
Bernardi concludes that ‘some oracles were given by the Devil; others occurred from the disposition of the body; others by the artifice and deception of men’.109 The three possibilities coexist in paratactic series: Church doctrine supplies what was missing from Aristotle, whose merit as a wise heathen is nonetheless intact. But the parataxis is incoherent, for the same reason that Peucer’s critique of Plutarch is ineffective: the Devil is of a causal order different from that of corporal temperament. In other words, Bernardi’s list implies that a religious account of the oracles has terms in common with a philosophical one, which it does not.
Bernardi’s real enemy is Pomponazzi, presented as a bad Aristotelian as well as a bad Christian. If the heathen Aristotle was not to be blamed for his ignorance of the faith, Pomponazzi was certainly to be censured for his. After all, as Bernardi insists, anyone with a knowledge of biblical and Catholic miracles ‘is forced to admit, whether he likes it or not, if he concedes that these effects are genuine, the existence of causes which act above the order of causes constituted by nature’.110 Divination is a case in point: while much pagan prognostication came from the Devil, true prophets drew their power from God:
It is false that the predictions of prophets can be attributed to the heavens, as Pomponazzi claimed, since the heavens possess no such power. We must instead say that, since such predictions manifestly existed, they should be attributed to God as their true and genuine cause, and that God acted not naturaliter [i.e., deterministically], but freely and of his own will.111
Even by Pomponazzi’s own standards his position is faulty, for it ‘is obviously in disagreement with Peripatetic teaching’.112 If Aristotle had been aware of demonic oracles, ‘we must think that he would have referred them to supernatural causes, and not to the heavens’.113 In conclusion, Pomponazzi’s idea of astral influence is to be strongly rejected because it stands in opposition to ‘both natural philosophy and, which is much worse, our most holy religion’.114
The attack is not much of a critique. Bernardi asserts that he has been able to solve the problem of the oracles purely from Aristotle; but this turns out to be untrue. He cannot sustain the Peripatetic solution even for the sake of hypothesis, as Boccadiferro had done, but is compelled to invoke demons. He is correct to observe that Pomponazzi’s view is not directly supported by Aristotle, but fails to explain, beyond the level of authority—whether Peripatetic or Christian—why it must be wrong. Bernardi presents his argument as philosophical, but his insistence on an order of causes beyond nature is not justified, only asserted on the grounds of theological orthodoxy. For this reason he cannot, in fact, meet Pomponazzi on his own turf.
In 1563, Giulio Sirenio (d. 1593), a professor of theology and metaphysics at Bologna, published a long treatise, De fato, digressing to analyse the oracles in two separate sequences of chapters.115 Sirenio, like Bernardi, expresses a moderate attitude toward philosophy, making good use of Aristotle and Plutarch as authorities on natural causes but supplementing their positions with Christian doctrine where necessary. And, like Bernardi, he allows that some oracles came from terrestrial vapours or melancholy, while others came from demons, and, in this case, demonic statues.116 But his treatment, beyond this, has a character different from that of Pomponazzi, Boccadiferro, and Bernardi, for here the oracles—and in particular, Trophonius and Delphi—are given some historical colour, rather than being mere examples in a broader account of divination.117 Furthermore, we find an engagement with an impressive range of ancient views on the subject, including some unusual choices.
This scope gives a good deal of authority to Sirenio’s grasp of the pagan oracles as a phenomenon in history; likewise, the relevant problems are outlined with a clearer view of their historical specificity. Of these, first and foremost is the oracles’ ambiguity. Against the Neoplatonists, represented here chiefly by Iamblichus, he asks,
If the gods can have foreknowledge of future contingents and random events with, as has been said, a very certain, determinate, and infallible knowledge—why, then, did the ancients frequently think the responses of the oracles (which are really the responses of the gods) ambiguous and uncertain?118
This is similar to the problem raised by Boccadiferro, although, since Sirenio is writing in a less scholastic context, he ignores the distinction between universal and particular knowledge. In this simpler form, the question of oracular ambiguity was a commonplace. We may briefly review the solutions he adduces from antiquity, before giving his own: Syrianus attributes the ambiguity to the imperfection of the gods’ human prophets, or to the gods’ deliberate misdirection to protect their consultants;119 Lucian and John Philoponus also suggest a deliberate ambiguity, but one devised to train men’s ingenuity; Carneades thinks that the gods themselves cannot predict future contingents;120 and Plutarch, finally, puts the ambiguity down to an imperfect sympathy or harmony between the vapours and the bodily humours on which they acted.121
The ‘true and Catholic response’ to the problem is not quite straightforward: the ambiguity of the oracles, Sirenio asserts, derives ‘either from the excessive alteration and perturbation of the prophet, or from the wickedness of evil demons’.122 These two possibilities correspond to the natural and demonic explanations mentioned above, although there is no very clear indication of explanatory priority, or of which oracles were natural and which demonic; he simply writes that ‘some prophets seem to have been instructed by an evil demon’.123 This balance proved unsatisfactory to Sirenio’s early modern readers, who widely interpreted him to be espousing a naturalist view of the subject—a view they condemned.124 Indeed, De fato is not only a confusing jumble of opinions; despite its apparent separation of natura and theology, an interpenetration of the two categories is noticeable at key junctures. Thus Sirenio appears to sanction the existence of natural divination, although its validity as divination is not clarified. Impostors who peddle a phoney knowledge of the future for money are also those who lead us into devil worship. At any rate, he is clear that the oracles, whether natural or demonic, were false and confused, and it is clear from the Ciceronian examples that the predictions of Delphi need have rested on no more than chance. He is certain also that they were cruel and immoral, giving as a historical example the oracle’s command that the young men and women of Athens be sacrificed to the Minotaur.125
Despite his moderate attraction to natural causes, Sirenio is eager to confute Pomponazzi, and his attempt at this is launched not from a theological but from a ‘physical and Peripatetic’ standpoint.126 He first observes, as both Boccadiferro and Bernardi had done, that Aristotle had never attributed the oracles to astral influence:
[Pomponazzi and his followers], certainly very learned and eminent in other respects, although they seemed to themselves to be saying something, actually said nothing according to the chief doctrine of Aristotle, who denied the starry influences and those occult celestial qualities tricked up by the horoscopists and false Egyptian astrologers.127
Instead, Aristotle had suggested melancholic ecstasy as the cause of oracular divination: such a solution was ‘more solid, and more natural, better suited to the nature of things’, than that offered by Pomponazzi.128 But like Boccadiferro, and unlike Bernardi, Sirenio argues ex ratione, not merely ex auctoritate. For one thing, the Mantuan has not explained how celestial influences can transmit knowledge of distant contingent futures to a human soul. Second, if the heavenly spheres are perfect and never deviate from their course, how can the ambiguity and falsity of the oracles be explained? Finally, even if the celestial intelligences and their bodies were the universal causes of all sublunary phenomena, Pomponazzi has given us no account of the particular, proximate causes of any individual divination.129 The first objection is rather generic, a variant on the common theological complaint against the plausibility of astrology; the last, meanwhile, is the least merited, since De incantationibus, as we have seen, specifies the human temperament as a proximate material cause for individual cases of divination. The second is the most characteristic of Sirenio’s overall analysis since it rests on the historical fact of the Pythia’s ambiguity.
These early responses of Bernardi and Sirenio—not that of Boccadiferro—set the terms of the debate. De fato had barely been published when the Franciscan theologian Miguel de Medina placed Sirenio’s name, alone among moderns, in the margin of a passage outlining, and then critiquing, the naturalist view of the oracles.130 Pomponazzi is ignored;131 Medina focuses instead on earthly vapours and melancholy, against which he brings two arguments. Just as Sirenio saw no means by which the stars could effect genuine prognostication, so Medina sees no means for a mere vapour-induced frenzy to do the same. The specific problem is that, for the oracles to have had ‘so much authority’ among the heathens, they must have delivered at least some true predictions. In addition is the argument from testimony: many pagan divinations were uttered by trees, statues, and other things incapable of frenzy—Medina offers an extensive list.132 Therefore, although vapours and other natural phenomena may have constituted secondary causes in some instances, the oracles’ primary cause can only have been demons. Ten years after Peucer, the theological argument has grown noticeably more sophisticated, even in so succinct a form.
It is unsurprising that a professional theologian, writing on the oracles, should direct his energies against vapour and melancholy, and not against celestial influence—these, after all, were by far the more widely countenanced versions of the natural explanation. In the following decade, moderate Aristotelians, such as Jacques Charpentier and Francesco Piccolomini, would attack the natural thesis in the same form.133 Both strongly reject Pomponazzi, but neither gives any notice of his specific views. Piccolomini, curiously, aligns the Mantuan with Aristotle on the matter, awarding both the belief that the oracles ‘came about either by melancholy, or by a force of the imagination, or by various kinds of vapour’. Such a belief, he argues, was insane: not only were many of these diviners engastrimyths, ‘seeming to speak with mouth closed and tongue unmoved’, but it was surely impossible for the humours alone to form images of things that had not yet passed under the senses.134 Finally, there was the matter of the oracles’ cessation, ‘which would not have occurred if they had drawn their origin from natural causes only’.135 The cessation had also been invoked by Charpentier against Pomponazzi’s denial of demons.136 For both, the active existence of demons is not so much a point of argument as something plainly obvious from history and experience—the attempt to explain all phenomena by natural causes is therefore a foolish and impious mistake. Charpentier in particular explicitly attacks Pomponazzi’s impiety, and what he sees as the philosopher’s thin pretence of orthodoxy:
[Pomponazzi] is manifestly seen to attack our religion, albeit tricking us, I think, by adding at the end that if anything in his work should offend against or even displease the holy Catholic Church, he would take it back completely and let it be corrected.137
During the same period there appeared a treatise by the late Nuremberg scholar Joachim Camerarius, entitled Commentarius de generibus divinationum, after the magnum opus of his old colleague Caspar Peucer. In a short passage on the heathen oracles, Camerarius alludes to the debate over natural causes, listing vapours, melancholy, and ‘the disposition of the heavens’—the latter, of course, referring to Pomponazzi.138 But although clearly more interested than Peucer in these causes, he too found them insufficient to explain divination, which, as he put it, also requires ‘a greater and more powerful agitation, which exploits [natural causes] as tools to perform its work’.139 Another decade later, the short-lived monk Tommaso Garzoni, in a long Italian treatise on occult and heretical practices, followed Bernardi and Sirenio almost verbatim on the oracles, including their critique of Pomponazzi.140 His own sympathies, however, were explicitly Platonic rather than Aristotelian, and he had no difficulty reconciling his orthodox view that demons had given the oracles with Platonist teaching.141 Garzoni’s work was published posthumously in 1613, as the debate over the natural causes of divination was in decline. Two years later, another moderate Aristotelian contribution to the discussion appeared, in a disputation on demons by the Ferrarese scholar Tommaso Giannini.142 Giannini had little new to offer: the veracity of the oracles, he reasons, is evident from pagan testimony, and natural causes by themselves cannot explain them. Aristotle saw in the oracles only natural causes and fraud, but he had no knowledge of demons, and if he had, he would have accepted the Christian explanation. Pomponazzi, according to Giannini, not only differs from Aristotle; he cannot provide the specific cause of the oracles by means of astral influence—this critique from Sirenio, possibly via Garzoni. By now the arguments and authorities had become standard.
One of the last works of this kind to discuss the subject was a letter, ‘De oraculis’, written by Giorgio Raguseo in 1616.143 Raguseo (1580–1622) taught natural philosophy at Padua for two decades until his death, and his various philosophical analyses centre largely on Aristotle, as we might expect.144 His attitude toward Aristotle, much the same as that of the other scholars we have been discussing, is precisely expressed at the end of his letter:
I respect, heed, and admire Aristotle, but I think one should not grant him any more than he deserves as a human being. ‘I would not have believed the Gospel,’ Augustine once wrote, ‘unless the authority of the Catholic Church made me assent to it.’145 I say, however, that I will not believe Aristotle unless natural reason has compelled me to agree with what he wrote.146
‘Natural reason’, then, not the force of authority, is the ultimate arbiter in philosophical matters. To a historian, of course, Raguseo’s ‘natural reason’ will not seem as pure and objective as it appeared to him. He continues:
But there is no natural reason which persuades me that an ignorant person can become learned [i.e., so as to prophesy], and skilled in various languages, by the force of melancholy or exhalations from the earth.… I think it less absurd to concede [the existence of] demons, and to make them the authors of many things, than to seek from nature that for which one can give no reason.147
‘Natural reason’ has here led Raguseo precisely to the position he wanted, as a professional scholar expounding a moderate Peripateticism: this statement is essentially no different from the many objections of implausibility put forward by his predecessors, going back to Peucer. But the foregoing letter is considerably more learned, and represents an excellent summary of the philosophical tradition sketched here: the positions of Pomponazzi, Leonico Tomeo, and Sirenio are described and discounted in turn, before Raguseo’s own opinion is given. This is not to say that these critiques are sophisticated. Pomponazzi’s view is rejected rather peremptorily for the reason that celestial powers cannot interact with individual men, but can only create and maintain species or forms: a variant on the standard complaint.148 Leonico Tomeo, whose ideas are here expounded more succinctly than they had been in the Dialogi, is dismissed as a mere crank.149 The comment on Sirenio, classified as a proponent of exhalations, is more interesting:
I am stupefied that Giulio Sirenio, a man otherwise very learned, and a very eminent theologian, should fall into this trap only so as to vaunt himself as a great philosopher.150
Even standard accounts of natural causes are thus represented as a philosophical threat to theology. Indeed, for Raguseo there is simply no reason to believe that either a material vapour or the human soul has any intrinsic ability to predict the future. In the end, claiming ‘to philosophise freely, without relying on authorities or opinions’, he plumps for a mixed position superficially like that of Bernardi: ‘the cause of the oracles is threefold: natural, artificial, and supernatural’.151 But here, unlike before, the relationship between the three causes is specific and hypotactic. First of all, he speculates, there were the earthly vapours of Trophonius and Delphi, which possessed a natural force capable only of exciting faculties already present in the soul: those predisposed to talk became so loquacious that they occasionally foretold the future.152 Second, cunning pagan priests capitalised on this state of affairs: they cherry-picked those susceptible to frenzied prognostication, and instituted oracles from which they could dupe money from the gullible. As Raguseo jokes, scabrously,
Did the Pythia not utter oracles when she had been corrupted by Philip?153 … This, then, is that sympathy which they said was required between the vapour and the prophet. This is that purer and sharper spirit which emanated from the bowels of the earth, or rather, from the consultants’ purses.154
Finally, malicious demons, seeing an opportunity to prey on the credulity and curiosity of men, joined in the game; they thus ‘increased the authority of the oracles, so that their responses were believed to be not human, but divine’.155 The demonic aspect is the most important, for it is this that meets the objections raised earlier, and that ultimately explains anything marvellous, though of course not miraculous, in the oracles. Of natural causes, only the narcotic effects of the vapours on the soul have any bearing, and even these effects are strictly circumscribed.
It is noteworthy that, among all the proponents of natural causes attacked by the moderate Aristotelians, Pomponazzi is the name that recurs most often. While Plutarch and Aristotle were not quite correct on the matter, their views could be accepted with some qualification; Pomponazzi’s opinion, however, was respuenda, to be confuted outright.156 On one level, he was already notorious as a dangerous thinker, and De incantationibus was more generally condemned for its complete denial of demonic activity, and for its arguments contra fidem. His account of divination raised specific philosophical problems: principally, that it lacked the support of Aristotle, and that celestial intelligences could not know particulars, and therefore that the stars could not cause individual instances of divination.
But the problem of the oracles was more specific still. The moderates’ objection to Pomponazzi on this matter is less palpable, more implicit, than those on divination more broadly; nonetheless, the degree of their consensus prompts us to consider more carefully what was at stake in the controversy. A minor point, in my opinion, is the perceived danger that Pomponazzi’s analysis collapsed the question of the oracles into the more pressing problem of astrology, which Catholic philosophers, especially since Giovanni Pico, had laboured to confute.157 Bernardi, a relative of the Picos, states one of his aims in the subtitle of the Disputationes: ‘to refute astrological divination with almost every authority’, and later defends Pico’s critique of astrology against Pomponazzi.158 Sirenio, meanwhile, attacks Pomponazzi’s astrological fatalism, which he classes as Stoic, in an early chapter of De fato.159 Likewise, Raguseo, in his own treatment, refers the reader to his earlier critique of astrology; his addressee Flavio Querenghi, a professor of moral philosophy at Padua, would later attack astrology himself.160 For all these writers, astrology must be rejected for two reasons: because it calls into doubt free will, and with it the individual’s ability to effect his own salvation, and because it reduces the supernatural to the natural.161
But in the thickets of De incantationibus lurked a more dangerous bugbear. From Bernardi to Raguseo, Pomponazzi’s moderate critics were all committed to the philosophical authority of Aristotle; they were much more deeply committed, however, to the theological authority of the Bible and the Church Fathers. Their attempts to partition these domains, as I have shown, were not thoroughgoing: the Christian narrative always superseded, in the end, the Peripatetic. And this narrative demanded that the oracles, in contradistinction to other forms of divination—geomancy, say, or the study of dreams—were, as an institution particular to a time and place, the product of diabolic agency, and that they were overcome by Christ. One need not even assume the miraculous character of the cessation, or its apologetic importance: as the religious centre of paganism, the oracles were, by nature, diametrically opposed to the true faith. The Incarnation guaranteed that such an opposition was not merely conceptual but also historical: the pagan, pre-Christian world could not be comprehended in the same terms as the Christian. Nature, from a theological perspective, was not invariant with respect to this point in time.
Pomponazzi’s analysis, by contrast, treated pagan and Christian forms of divination as equals. Both forms, taken together, appear almost as innocent explicanda in the course of his broader rejection of miracles—that is, his defence of a natura without exceptions. Both derive purely from this nature, and beyond, from God: a metaphysical compact that, it need hardly be said, is historically invariant. Despite his assertion of the importance of history for philosophy, Pomponazzi’s history consists merely of a decontextualised stock of exempla: thus Ficino and Albertus Magnus mix freely with Livy, Suetonius, and Plutarch’s Lives. Even the cessation of the oracles, for Pomponazzi, as still for Boccadiferro, is simply an objection to be overcome. This should not be taken as an anomaly since there is little evidence that, in 1520, the cessation was seen as more than a minor fact of Christian history, even in the intellectual mainstream. But Pomponazzi, like his student, takes the cessation as an opportunity to expound the horoscope of religions—a doctrine that makes fully explicit his antipathy, qua philosopher, to the Christian historical narrative, and even, perhaps, to the legitimacy of historical reasoning altogether. Like Leonico Tomeo, Pomponazzi ignores those aspects of the oracles that were essential from a Christian perspective: their ambiguity and immorality, and most of all their paganism.
It was only logical that these very aspects should be central to the theological view of the oracles, to which the moderate positions outlined here are essentially in debt. They were consonant not only with a diabolical origin but also with certain proximate natural causes as well: hot vapours coming up from underground—as if, perhaps, from Hell—or violent disorders in the human temperament. They were hardly consonant with the measured influence of celestial intelligences, closely bound to God. By the 1550s, natural accounts of the pagan oracles were acceptable only insofar as they could incorporate demonic interference, which, we recall, was considered wholly natural—that is, wholly inscribed within the laws of creation. Thus melancholy could be conceptualised as the ‘Devil’s bath’, while Peucer thought the vapours demonic. Pomponazzi was to be condemned, ultimately, because his theory legitimised the ancient oracles, and seemed to diminish, by comparison, the miraculous importance of Christ and his Church.
• • •
One of Pomponazzi’s most important early readers, the polymath Girolamo Cardano (1501–76), remains to be examined. Cardano, born and educated in Pavia, taught medicine there and at Bologna, and practised as a professional physician and astrologer around Europe; he published widely, not only on medicine and astrology, but also on mathematics and statistics, natural philosophy, music, and ethics.162 Like Boccadiferro, Cardano saw De incantationibus in manuscript, as we know from his explicit engagement with the treatise in a 1548 collection of Contradictiones.163 Here he outlines a number of theses from its third book, including the doctrine of astral causes and the horoscope of religions—with explicit reference to the Delphic oracle and its cessation—before commenting,
What Pomponazzi has written is not only false and impious, but also mostly foreign to the doctrine of the Peripatetics, and also ridiculous, and even self-contradictory.… These things are false, not only because he thinks ill of Christ in these matters, but because he undermines, as far as he can, the power of miracles: this would make our religion entirely uncertain, or even false.164
This early judgement appears to have nothing in common with Cardano’s various later accounts of the oracles and their cessation, nor with his obvious debt to De incantationibus in one of these accounts.165 Cardano discusses the oracles in three further works; as with Pomponazzi, the problem is closely intertwined with the question of the existence of demons. It is no easy matter to construct a clear position on the latter subject from his extant writings, and still less to ascertain a definite view of the oracles.166 Cardano’s idiosyncratic Latinity, and his rather ad hoc, tactical approach to argumentation, leave us struggling with fragments and apparent contradictions.167 His early modern readers fared little better, as we shall see.
He first raises the problem in his early treatise on natural phenomena, De subtilitate (1550), in the course of a notorious chapter on demons; we will here discuss the expanded second edition of 1554.168 After listing the three principal explanations—demonic influence, priestly fraud, and terrestrial exhalations—he quotes Pausanias’s description of Trophonius at length, and rejects the possibility of fraud.169 The demonic explanation, meanwhile, must stand or fall with the existence of the demons themselves, which is addressed finally at the end of the chapter:
Not only among the elements, but also in the heavens, we should believe that this entire mechanism of the upper air is full of those beings which we call demons, that is, wise ones.170 But I do not want to pursue these things to the point of judgement, like Porphyry, Psellus, Plotinus, Proclus, and Iamblichus, who wrote copiously on what they hadn’t seen, as if on something born. For I am a philosopher, adhering to the tenets of the Peripatetics as far as is licit. And this sect does not accept the existence of demons; nor is it probable that they exist in such great quantities, for they should be around us like birds, or far more common, while in fact we hardly see one trace of them in an entire province over the course of many years.171
This is neither a straight yes nor a straight no: Cardano professes to belong to a group that denies demons—but it is unlikely, he then states, only that there are many demons. The implications of this for his position on the pagan oracles are unclear. On the matter of their ambiguity, Cardano refers his reader to an earlier discussion in his De fato, now lost.
Cardano’s third treatment of the subject, in his dream-book, Synesia somnia (1562), is less ambiguous. Here he states forcefully, ‘Divination both exists and is natural’, adding, ‘but this is not to be revealed to the common people’.172 For Cardano, following the sceptical medical tradition, the masses, in their ignorance, rushed to ascribe natural effects to demons or gods. It had been the same among the pagans: the oracles, whose origins were merely natural, ‘were turned into a religion by false priests as well as by an ignorance of natural causes’.173 Cardano specifies several of these natural causes of divination: stones, waters, and especially vaporous caves—he here mentions Trophonius and Delos, which must be a mistake for Delphi.174
In both De subtilitate and the Synesia somnia, Cardano limits his view of natural divination at Delphi to terrestrial exhalations; he also insists on the corporal and spiritual purity of the diviner. The ghost of Pomponazzi, and with it the notion of celestial influence, appears only in Cardano’s longest analysis of the oracles, found scattered about his 1557 masterpiece, De rerum varietate. It is here that our interpretive difficulties properly begin, for in different places Cardano seems to support demons, vapours, celestial intelligences, and fraud as explanations of the oracles, as well as combinations thereof. But, as he concludes his final mention of the subject, ‘I know that some will think that I have forgotten what I’ve already written, but I do not contradict myself. If only they would apply their intelligence!’175 To resolve the apparent anomaly, we must turn again to the more basic problem of demons, on which Cardano is more precise than he had been in De subtilitate. This issue is addressed at considerable length in a chapter (XVI.93) near the end of the work. Cardano begins by announcing its supreme importance: ‘No discussion is at once so difficult and so noble as that which concerns demons’.176 He goes on to detail Platonic arguments in favour of, and Epicurean and Peripatetic arguments against, their existence, before giving his own, rather nuanced view:
When everything has been weighed up, then, we should conclude that it is difficult to uphold with reasons that the souls of demons and dead men are scattered about; but it is agreed by experience, and by the order of things, and natural inclination, that we should believe without doubt in their existence. For so many and such great things are seen around the dying, and especially great men, that these cannot happen without demons.177
Whereas in De subtilitate Cardano had emphasised the scarcity of demons, here he puts the stress on their frequency and power, at least in certain situations; accordingly, this chapter is full of accounts of demonic apparitions and interactions, from both written sources and personal testimony. Among his contemporaries, moreover, Cardano was infamous for insisting that he, like Socrates, possessed his own personal daimonion.178
This careful conclusion appears, as we have said, toward the end of De rerum varietate. Before this, Cardano assumes the nonexistence of demons as a point of procedure; this allows him to construct a system of natural explanations for marvellous phenomena. Thus, twenty-five chapters earlier, in XIV.68, he writes of the pagan oracles, ‘We can scarcely agree that Apollo is their cause, since it has not yet been established whether demons exist.’179 The extended treatment of the oracles in this chapter, then, is limited to natural causes, including the celestial intelligences advanced by Pomponazzi.180 As Cardano here puts it, with unusual succinctness:
The oracle was composed of three elements: the force of the earth, which agitated the mind, the celestial force in the girl [i.e., the Pythia], and the celestial force in the cave.181
It is clear that Cardano is thinking specifically of Delphi. The first item, by which he means the terrestrial vapours, is taken from Plutarch and Aristotle.182 The second and third are taken, broadly, from Pomponazzi; by these are meant the divinatory powers generated by the heavens in the Pythia’s soul and in the vapours issuing from her cave. In a slightly later passage, Cardano is careful to stipulate that these powers derive not from the stars themselves but from the intelligences that regulate them, and behind those, from God—‘the supreme intellect and ruler of the stars’.183 In this respect, his account differs little from that of Pomponazzi. But Cardano has added to his source in two ways. First, he has supplemented it with astrological particulars, familiar to him from his own practice: thus, for instance, he stipulates that the Pythia and her vaporous cave are dominated by the conjunction of Venus, the Sun, and Saturn.184 Second, and more importantly, he uses the movements of the heavens to explain the fluctuation and eventual waning of the oracle’s clarity and power, a historical explicandum missing from Pomponazzi’s work. The guiding question of this analysis is, why were the oracles often but not always true? And the answer is that the arrangement of the stars changed over time, in a manner unfavourable to the Pythia’s ability to divine, although the dwindling of the vapours and the variable purity of the prophetic soul are also invoked as relevant factors.185
The picture outlined in XIV.68 is simply what is most likely if demons do not exist. And pending the close analysis of demons in XVI.93, Cardano is vague on the actual nature of the oracles: in XV.87 he describes them as ‘partly natural, partly demonic, some occurring by afflatus or the conjunction of souls [i.e., human and demonic] … but many devised by the tricks of priests’.186
Once the existence of demons has been cautiously accepted, in XVI.93, Cardano discusses the oracles from a supernatural perspective. Again, the leading problem is their ambiguity, and his solution now represents conventional theology:
It is reasonable that the demons themselves know a part of the future, and much more than men, but very little in comparison to the heavenly powers. And some more than others, just as it is among men. For this reason, then, the oracles deceived [men] with ambiguous, and therefore harmful responses.187
Likewise, the oracles ceased, from this point of view, because demons, ‘like men, although later, grew old and died’.188 Cardano here allows that fraud played some part in the decline: as the priests became corrupted by lucre and power, they were found to do more harm than good. But even here, in a chapter conciliatory to conventional theology, he refuses to accept, on purely chronological grounds, that the cessation was miraculous: ‘since [the oracles] came to an end before the Pharsalian War,189 their cessation cannot be ascribed to the birth of Christ’.190
We cannot demand from Cardano’s works a clear, unequivocal position on the oracles. From the historian’s perspective, the thrust and animus of his various arguments appear on balance to favour a naturalistic explanation; one notices, for instance, his repeated reliance on the old notion that the common people, quick to resort to a demonic interpretation of mirabilia, cannot be trusted with the truth grasped by philosophical initiates. The account of the oracles given in De rerum varietate XIV.68 is the longest, most detailed, and most consonant with the astrological principles Cardano clearly espoused. But if Pomponazzi’s expressions of piety cannot be wholly dismissed, those of Cardano, developed at far greater length, and with apparent sincerity, must be taken still more seriously. As a good physician, that is to say a good empiric, he adheres to experience over reason on the existence of demons, and insists, finally, that a supernatural interpretation of the oracles is compatible with that given by natural philosophy.
Over the next century, few of Cardano’s readers addressed his views on the oracles; neither his most prominent critic, the elder Scaliger, nor his most vocal defender, Gabriel Naudé, had much to say on this front.191 But his name does appear in some of the works discussed above. Jacques Charpentier criticises Cardano (along with Pomponazzi) for his attempt to reason philosophically without attention to the tenets of Christian faith, first on the existence of demons, and then on the cessation of the oracles. Cardano’s discussion of the latter, he writes, ‘is worthy of neither philosopher nor Christian’; what is needed is ‘a greater piety and Christian moderation of his liberty in philosophising’.192 Charpentier goes on to insist that ‘the power of hindering the oracles and repressing demons flowed from Christ not only into his disciples while they were still alive, but also into the tombs of the martyrs, and the sign of the Cross’193—a fact not reducible to the natural laws so beloved of the philosophers. Garzoni and Raguseo, meanwhile, on the basis of De rerum varietate XIV.68, lump Cardano together with Plutarch and Sirenio as attributing oracular divination to terrestrial vapours. Garzoni also notes his inconsistency.194
By the middle of the seventeenth century, the debate over natural causes had died down. There were still theologians asserting that the oracles could only have been given by demons, and still philosophers and other scholars allowing natural phenomena—most often vapours and melancholy—some place in the framework, but these parties were no longer in dialogue. When the theologians came to criticise the naturalists on the subject, their arguments were no more sophisticated than those of Peucer, and in some cases much less so.195
By this stage, debates on the nature of the oracles were no longer the exclusive domain of university philosophers: the subject was now discussed among the broader ranks of the literati, as it would continue to be for a century afterward. The Scottish humanist George Crichton had touched on the natural causes of the oracles in his 1597 oration De Apollinis oraculis. But here it is only an antiquarian matter: in Crichton’s adjudication between waveworn bits of Plutarch and Aristotle, nothing is at stake.196 The speech was delivered in Paris, and in that city the general popularity of the topic was evident by 1633. It was in this year that Théophraste Renaudot (1586–1653), a physician and journalist under Richelieu’s patronage, established weekly debates, open to all, at the Bureau d’Adresse he had founded around 1630.197 These debates, published in five collections from 1634 to 1655, ranged widely over humanistic and philosophical topics, among which appeared the pagan oracles.198
In the debate on the oracles, four views are presented. The first attributes them to demons, on the authority of scripture, listing individual oracles briefly in turn.199 The remaining three each present a particular kind of natural explanation. For the second, divination is a conjectural, that is to say a probabilistic science, like medicine; although the Devil was mixed up to some degree in the oracles, genuine prognostication, on the authority of the Problemata, can be caused by melancholy.200 The third adheres essentially to the views of Leonico Tomeo and Pomponazzi, although neither is named: knowledge of the future is to be sought in ‘the heavens, from which, the astrologers assure us, this divinatory quality is communicated to men by means of the intelligences moving those huge bodies’. From Leonico Tomeo, whether directly or not, comes the importance of the ‘universal spirit, which animates the entire world’.201 The fourth, finally, approximates the views of a Sirenio or Raguseo: the oracles had artificial, natural, and supernatural causes, that is, fraud, terrestrial vapours, and the Devil.202
These four positions neatly summarise the range of options available to an educated man on the subject of the pagan oracles, ‘from the slavishly orthodox to the most rational, secular, or radical’.203 In the conference on the oracles, indeed, we find an ‘intellectual microcosm’ of the views produced over the preceding century.204
The published debates, as well as going through many editions, were also translated into English, first as a few individual questions in 1640, and then in two collections in 1664–65.205 The debate on the oracles appears in the second collection, the preface of which declares its questions to have been ‘chosen from such Subjects as are most inquir’d into at this day by the Curious of our own Nation’.206 The oracles were indeed among the many points of conversation for the learned men of Britain by the 1660s. On the one hand were the pious reminiscences of the cessation by figures of the Church, such as Edward Sparke, or Jeremy Taylor, who, recently installed in Antrim, wrote with a typical prolixity of the Apostles hunting ‘the Daemons from their Tripods, their Navels, their Dens, their hollow Pipes, their Temples, and their Altars’.207 The motif could be turned also to apologetic ends, as with Thomas Sprat, official historian to the Royal Society, who phrased his colleagues’ experimental practices as a new triumph over ‘false oracles’, and thus consonant with the essence of Christ’s teaching.208 On the other hand was the susurrus of scepticism from Hobbes and his peers, to be discussed in the next chapter.
Between these two parties could be found prominent intellectuals from a range of backgrounds, none of whom denied the Devil his due, engaging in print with the problem of natural causation. Edward Stillingfleet firmly rejected the idea, adducing the second half of Cicero’s treatise on divination, while turning to the first to confirm the reality of true prophecy, saving what needed to be saved.209 For others of the era, it was simply obvious from the classical sources that melancholy and vapours played some part in the oracles, so long as one understood these as dependent on the Devil, and having nothing in common with divine inspiration.210
The most sophisticated of this group was perhaps Isaac Casaubon’s tenth son, Meric (1599–1671), born in Geneva, but raised in England under royal patronage. The scholar handles oracular divination in the second chapter of his Treatise concerning Enthusiasme (1655), analysing at length the possibility that such divination has or had natural causes. His first move is apologetic, strongly dissociating himself from the radical Italians of the previous century, Pomponazzi and Leonico Tomeo, both of whom he denounces as irreligious—and ‘as contrary to sense and reason, as they are to faith’.211 Raguseo, whom he cites with approval, is a closer intellectual match. Casaubon then specifies that the ‘distemper of humors’, a natural phenomenon, can prepare the human body for diabolic operations, such as divination or speaking in tongues: natural causes, in other words, ‘contribute’ to marvels but are not sufficient to produce them.212 He finds support for this view in Problemata XXX.1, which, given its use of the term ἔνθεος, he reads as propounding a double cause of divination:
the one natural in preparing the bodie, without which preparation nothing would be done; the other supernatural, the formal and immediate cause of the operation.213
Aristotle is, by this reading, no pure materialist; here, as elsewhere, Casaubon is confident enough to reinterpret well-known passages as he sees fit. The testimony of Iamblichus is also handled with some dexterity: his discussion of the ‘divine spirit’ at the Delphic oracle is here read as further evidence for the presence of natural causes, even though, as Casaubon acknowledges, the ancient Neoplatonist was ‘much against it, that any natural thing should be conceived as a partial or concurrent cause’ of divination.214 Iamblichus’s argument, in other words, is read against his conclusion. Casaubon himself concludes that while natural causes may be present in some genuine ‘enthusiastic divination’, he will ‘easily grant other causes then natural’ in the oracles.215
Like Casaubon, his younger contemporary Edmund Dickinson insisted that the oracles were demonic in origin, but he also allowed a place for the vapours, whose natural properties he briefly analyses in his Delphi Phoenicizantes, published the same year as the Treatise concerning Enthusiasme.216 Again, Benjamin Whichcote’s student John Smith (1618–52), in his important treatise on prophecy, which appeared posthumously in 1660, classed the pagan oracles, alongside Montanist ecstasy and modern witchcraft, with the ‘Pseudo-prophetical Spirit being not able to rise up above this low and dark Region of Sense or Matter’, relying on the imaginative faculty, and manifesting itself in melancholic alienation—all at the behest of Satan.217 The Hebraist John Spencer (1630–93), in his Discourse concerning Vulgar Prophecies (1665), agreed with Plutarch that the oracles declined with the ‘languishing of that Enthusiastick Vapor which inspired the Prophetess’, but saw no contradiction in speaking also of the rôle of the Devil and the ‘light of the Gospel’.218 Joseph Glanvill, a clergyman and moderate sceptic who supported the natural philosophy of Henry More’s circle and later became a fellow of the Royal Society, vigorously defended the existence of demons and the efficacy of witchcraft. In his 1671 Philosophia Pia, Glanvill dismissed the ‘Exstatick Priests of the Heathen Oracles’ as no different from the religious enthusiasts of his own day, whose ravings he attributed to ‘no diviner a cause, then a strong fancy impregnated by Heated Melancholy’.219 In a later edition of his Saducismus triumphatus, he accepts that the cessation was caused by Christ’s expulsion of the Devil from public worship.220 There were no contradictions in any of these views: Satan’s influence over the proximate causes of bodily disorder, in oracles as in the witches of the day, needed no defence.
Apart from Meric Casaubon, these writers—clergymen, professors, fellows of the Royal Society—addressed the pagan oracles in passing: what they wrote was not the result of a sustained argument but something taken for granted on the subject. Transcending the particularities of their milieux and aims, their view of the oracles may be taken as something like an official line. On the one hand, it played out against a recurrent anxiety about religious enthusiasm, a key point of tension in early modern thought, in England as elsewhere.221 On the other, it was the product of an extensive debate, conducted in Italy through the previous century, over the extent of natural causes in divination and other human marvels: a compromise of moderate Aristotelians—Bernardi, Sirenio, Raguseo, and others—between the radical naturalism of Pomponazzi, and to a lesser extent Leonico Tomeo, and the inflexible supernaturalism of Catholic theologians. This compromise revealed both the virtue and the limitation of natural causes as a putative foundation for the pagan oracles. On the one hand, these causes helped make sense of pagan testimony on the subject, and especially that of Aristotle. On the other, without a holistic explanation of all marvellous phenomena by natural causes, such as that of the radical thinkers they attacked, it was very difficult to see how such causes by themselves could explain something as intuitively unnatural as divination. This was the complaint of the theologians—Peucer, for instance, or Miguel de Medina—and it was a justified one. Since a disordering of the temperament, whether internally by an inflamed melancholy or externally by terrestrial vapours, could not introduce new species into the mind, how could it produce any knowledge of the future? It should not surprise us that Boccadiferro, who, without any more extensive apparatus, seriously endeavoured to reduce oracular divination to natural causes, ended up denying the actuality of such divination tout court.
Boccadiferro aside, the various accounts outlined in this section, like those of the previous chapter, all accepted some reality for divination, and did so on the authority of historical testimony—of those who claimed to have witnessed it, and of the ancient historians who simply assumed the veracity of oracular predictions. The pagan oracles, by this means, were conflated with the demoniacs of the present: rather than being granted much historical particularity, they were simply a familiar exemplum of natural divination. Those who saw imposture at Delphi, by contrast, showed not only a greater awareness of the oracles’ historical context, but also a new scepticism toward the very testimony on which their predecessors had relied.
1 Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton, ‘Delphi: An Elegy’, ll. 45-48, in his Poetical Works, 2 vols. (London, 1876), I, 48–50, p. 50.
2 Much has been written on the word natura, but see in particular Robert Lenoble, Esquisse d’une histoire de l’idée de Nature (Paris, 1969), especially pp. 217–307, and Eckhard Kessler, ‘Naturverständnisse im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert’, in Naturauffassungen in Philosophie, Wissenschaft, Technik, ed. Lothar Schäfer and Elisabeth Ströker, 4 vols. (Munich, 1993–96), II, 13–57.
3 For instance, Philipp Melanchthon, Initia doctrinae physicae (Wittenberg, 1549), book II, fols. 12r–15v; [Francesco Piccolomini] Stefano Tiepolo, Academicarum contemplationum libri decem (Venice, 1576), pp. 122–123 (I.2), and his Libri ad scientiam de natura attinentes (Venice, 1596), fols. 105r–107r; Nicolaus Biesius, De natura libri quinque (Antwerp, 1573), fols. 1r–3r (I.1); and Girolamo Lombardo, De natura libri tres (Padua, 1589), pp. 1–62, admitting, p. 27, that natura ‘definitione absolute perfecta caret’.
4 Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (London, 1997), p. 152: ‘In early modern Europe it was virtually the unanimous opinion of the educated that devils … not merely existed in nature but acted according to its laws.’ See Jan R. Veenstra, Magic and Divination at the Courts of Burgundy and France (Leiden, 1998), p. 167: ‘demons were assigned a place in the natural order of things, and thus, in principle, they became an object of natural philosophy’.
5 The locus classicus of this argument was Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles III.102–103. On the mediaeval background, it is worth consulting Robert Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 4–27.
6 See chapter two, pp. 52–54, on the standard account of demonic divination.
7 To give two very different examples, see Francesco Vimercato, De principiis rerum naturalium libri tres (Venice, 1596), fol. 142v, and Martin del Rio, Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex (1599: Cologne, 1657), p. 133b (II.7). The ultimate origin of the phrase, via Thomas, is Cicero, De divinatione II.28. Certain modern scholars have recovered this category of the ‘preternatural’ for historiographical purposes: see Clark, Thinking with Demons, pp. 170–171, and, more influentially, Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York, 1998), pp. 120–133.
8 Clark, Thinking with Demons, p. 171.
9 On the classical sources for each concept, see chapter one. The early modern context of melancholy theory has been well studied, especially in two large monographs—Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (London, 1964), and Noel L. Brann, The Debate over the Origin of Genius during the Italian Renaissance (Leiden, 2002). The background on exhalation theory has received much less attention. Beyond the oracular context, the locus classicus for this theory is Aristotle’s Meteorologica, which holds, 341b, that dry exhalations are generated within the earth by the heat of the sun. The most important work of the sixteenth century on this subject was a pair of treatises by Georgius Agricola, De ortu et causis subterraneorum (1544) and De natura eorum quae effluunt ex terra (1545), book IV; these are collected in an edition of his works, [Opera] (Basel, 1546). Agricola, De ortu, p. 34, rejects the Aristotelian view of exhalations; on the background to this, see Rienk Vermij, ‘Subterranean Fire: Changing Theories of the Earth during the Renaissance’, Early Science and Medicine 3 (1998), 323–347. Agricola does not mention the disruptive effects of the dry exhalatio on the human temperament, but see the little-known treatise by Gottlieb Kenntman, De exhalationibus fumosis et vaporosis, flatuosisque spiritibus in macrocosmo et microcosmo existentibus (Halle, 1591), p. 20.
10 A penetrating discussion of natural and demonic causes in early modern possession cases is offered by H. C. Erik Midelfort, ‘Natur und Besessenheit: Natürliche Erklärungen für Besessenheit von der Melancholie bis zum Magnetismus’, in Dämonische Besessenheit: Zur Interpretation eines kulturhistorischen Phänomens, ed. Hans de Waardt et al. (Bielefeld, 2005), 73–86. On the ‘Devil’s bath’, see Brann, Debate, p. 6.
11 Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology, ed. and trans. Michael Allen, 6 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 2001–), IV, p. 148 (XIII.2.23).
12 Ficino, Platonic Theology IV, p. 166 (XIII.2.36).
13 There is little written on Tomeo; but see Daniela de Bellis, ‘Niccolò Leonico Tomeo interprete di Aristotele naturalista’, Physis 17 (1975), 71–93, and her ‘La vita e l’ambiente di Niccolò Leonico Tomeo’, Quaderni per la Storia dell’Università di Padova 13 (1980), 37–75; Deno J. Geanakoplos, ‘The Career of the Little-Known Renaissance Greek Scholar Nicholas Leonicus Tomaeus and the Ascendancy of Greco-Byzantine Aristotelianism at Padua University (1497)’, Byzantina 13, no. 1 (1985), 357–371; and E. Russo’s entry in the Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, sv. ‘Leonico Tomeo, Niccòlo’.
14 Niccolò Leonico Tomeo, ‘Trophonius, sive, De divinatione’, in his Dialogi (Venice, 1524), fols. 3r–18r.
15 Henri Busson, Le Rationalisme dans la litterature française de la Renaissance (1533–1601) (Paris, 1957), pp. 29–30, notes that Plutarch’s religious works, although available in Greek from 1509, had little influence until the middle of the century. Niccolò Leonico Tomeo had invoked Plutarch’s authority in a work completed in 1523: see his De varia historia libri tres (Venice, 1531), I.61, where he cites De defectu oraculorum 414e against the idea that the deity can enter the bodies of his prophets; on this, see chapter one above, n. 69.
16 Leonico Tomeo, ‘Trophonius’, in his Dialogi (Venice, 1524), fol. 11v: ‘Hoc Graeci quidem κόσμον, nostri vero mundum, cum ob illius exactum excellentem ornatum, tum propter omnimodam rerum varietatem, non ineleganter sane appellaverunt, animal aeternum beatumque omnia videns, audiens omnia, rationalique insuper animo et divina praeditum mente.’ In the Renaissance this conception of the divinum animal was a Neoplatonic commonplace; see, e.g., Marsilio Ficino, Theologica Platonica IV.1.23. It derives ultimately from the cosmology outlined in Plato, Timaeus 30b–31b, 32c–33b.
17 Leonico Tomeo, ‘Trophonius’, in Dialogi, fol. 12v.
18 This is a specific version of the well-known Platonic doctrine of anamnesis or recollection, deriving from Plato, Meno 81b, where Socrates claims that the immortal soul has seen, and therefore knows, everything in existence, ‘both in this world and in the world below’; this in contrast to Phaedrus 247, or Phaedo 73–75, where the soul has seen only the world of Forms before birth.
19 That is, the soul can know the future per causas, not per se. See chapter two, p. 53, on the three ways in which the Devil could foretell future events, according to traditional Christian theology; the second of these is by ‘long experience’.
20 Cicero, De divinatione I.127.
21 Leonico Tomeo, ‘Trophonius’, in his Dialogi, fol. 12v:
Sic animorum latentes alioqui notiones, futurorumque in ipsis adumbratis praesensiones, loci illius divinus anhelitus excitare, et perspicue collustrare potest: non enim absurdum est, animum ipsum, qui ab omni aeternitate vixerit, et cum innumerabilibus versatus sit animis, omniaque insuper quae in rerum natura sunt viderit, signis quibusdam consequentia declarantibus futura praesentire posse. Non enim illa quae futura sunt (ut inquit Cicero) subito existunt, sed est quasi rudentis explicatio, sic traductio temporis nihil novi efficientis, sed primum quodque replicantis.
22 Leonico Tomeo, ‘Trophonius’, in Dialogi, fol. 13v: ‘clarissime patere potest, Delphicum oraculum ab ipsa rerum omnium parente, et eadem altrice natura, effectrices sortitum fuisse causas’, ‘rerum naturae varietate’. On natura parens, see André Pellicier, Natura: Étude sémantique et historique du mot latin (Paris, 1966), p. 273.
23 Leonico Tomeo, ‘Trophonius’, in Dialogi, fol. 13r: ‘Pythia vero ipsa deo plena, in sacro residens adyto, exametris versibus certa fundebat oracula.’
24 On Pliny and Iamblichus, see chapter one above, p. 19.
25 See chapter one, pp. 28–29.
26 Caspar Peucer, Commentarius de praecipuis divinationum generibus (Frankfurt, 1593), p. 245: ‘Non divina aliqua vi terram incitatam vatidicos anhelitus edidisse vult, quam nulla unquam confecisset vetustas, sed prorsus naturali’.
27 Peucer, Commentarius, p. 247: ‘prorsus bruta, rationisque et sensus omnis experte, et nata ex elementis natura’.
28 Peucer, Commentarius, p. 248: ‘Solius haec sunt naturae intelligentis, atque eiusmodi quidem, quae ex oculis hominum abdita, naturam rerum penitus intelligit, et intimos animorum recessus vel perspicit, vel ex gestibus externis coniectat’.
29 On Pico and Peucer, see chapter one, pp. 55–60.
30 Simon Maiolus, Colloquiorum sive dierum canicularium continuatio et supplementum (1608), published with the Dies caniculares, 2 vols. (Mainz, 1607), II, pp. 141–142; Antonius Thysius, Exercitationes miscellaneae (Leiden, 1639), pp. 78–80 (no. 13); Georg Moebius, Tractatus philologico-theologicus de oraculorum ethnicorum origine, propagatione et duratione (Leipzig, 1657), pp. 12–13; Giuseppe Maria Maraviglia, Pseudomantia veterum, et recentiorum explosa, sive, De fide divinationibus adhibenda tractatus (Venice, 1662), pp. 16–20; Tobias Wagner, Inquisitio in oracula sibyllarum de Christo (Tübingen, 1664), p. 10; Ole Borch, ‘De oraculis antiquorum’, July 1, 1682, in Dissertationes academicae, 2 vols. (Copenhagen, 1714), I, 440–488.
31 Melchior Guilandinus, In C. Plinii Maioris capita aliquot, ut difficilima, ita pulcherrima, et utilissima commentarius (Lausanne, 1576), p. 145; Gerard Joannes Vossius, De theologia gentili et physiologia christiana, sive de origine ac progressu idololatriae, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1641), I, pp. 43–44 (I.6); and Walter Charleton, The Darknes of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature: A Physico-Theologicall Treatise (London, 1652), p. 149, where the natural causes ascribed to the oracles by Plutarch are scorned as ‘weak, remote, inconsistent, impertinent and so contemptible’.
32 Vossius, De theologia gentili, I, p. 43 (I.6): the oracles ‘multa praedixerint, ad quae nulla ratione humanae mentis acumen pertigisset’. The latter expression is taken from Johann Crellius; see chapter two, n. 70. The importance of Vossius’s work was noted by a friend of his son Isaac, the librarian Paul Colomiés, Bibliothéque choisie (La Rochelle, 1682), pp. 87–88: ‘De tant de Livres qu’a fait le fameux Gérard Vossius, il n’y en a point qui ait eu et qui ait encore plus de reputation que celui-ci.’
33 Athanasius Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus, 3 vols. (Rome, 1652–54), II, p. 443 (II.XI.3).
34 Philippe de Mornay, De la verité de la religion chrestienne (Antwerp, 1581), pp. 803–804; Pierre le Loyer, IIII Livres des Spectres ou apparitions et visions d’esprits (Angers, 1586), p. 523; Cesare Baronio, Annales Ecclesiastici, 12 vols. (Rome, 1593), II, p. 3; Jean Bodin, Colloquium heptaplomeres de rerum sublimium arcanis abditis, ed. Ludwig Noack (Schwerin, 1857), p. 135; John Rainolds, Censura librorum apocryphorum Veteris Testamenti, adversum Pontificios, 2 vols. (Oppenheim, 1611), II, col. 1405; and, of rather less importance, Peter Hausted, Ten Sermons (London, 1636), pp. 13–14, who suggests that the notion of half-human daemones fathered on mortal women was a pagan fiction intended to ‘preserve the honour of some of their great Ladies, who were not altogether so true to their Husbands, or their vowe of Virginity as they ought to have been’. According to John Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (London, 1677), p. 127, Plutarch believed that ‘an evil spirit ab extra did but work upon their [i.e., the Pythias’] minds, and so inspired them with these Divinations’.
35 Francesco Patrizi da Cherso, Della poetica, ed. Danilo Aguzzi Barbagli, 3 vols. (Florence, 1969), II, p. 23: ‘senza dubbio … ci [Plutarco] risponderebbe che quel dio, che in ciascuno de gli altri oracoli rispondea, v’era cagion movente principale, il genio del sacerdote come cagion immediata della illuminazione della sua fantasia e la lingua come istromento prossimo notificante’, also noting ‘la malinconia e la esalazione’, emphasis mine. Patrizi, as a good Christian, believed the spiritual force to be demonic rather than divine: ‘il demone, genio di quella donna, fossevi come motore della sua fantasia’.
36 Adrien Turnèbe, in Plutarch, De defectu oraculorum, trans. Turnèbe (Paris, 1556), sig. A3v; Sebastian Münster, Cosmographia, trans. and rev. François de Belleforest, 2 vols. (Paris, 1575), II, col. 141, observing that the learned Plutarch lacked ‘la plus belle, et necessaire piece de son harnoys, à sçavoir, la foy du baptesme, et du mystere de la croix’; Peter Martyr Vermigli, Loci communes (London, 1576), p. 72 (I.9.32); Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimage (London, 1613), p. 495 (VI.7); Christophorus de Castro, Commentariorum in duodecim prophetas libri duodecim (Lyon, 1615), p. 37a (II.13); Giovanni Antonio Venier, De oraculis et divinationibus antiquorum tractatus (1624: Basel, 1628), pp. 615–616; Tommaso Campanella, Atheismus triumphatus, seu reductio ad religionem per scientiarium veritates (Rome, 1631), p. 113; Pierre Du Moulin, Vates, seu De praecognitione futurorum, et bonis malisque prophetis libri v (Leiden, 1640), p. 175 (III.11); Pierre Mussard, Historia deorum fatidicorum, vatum, sibyllarum, phoebadum (Cologne, 1675), p. 25; Étienne de Courcelles, Institutio religionis christianae (Amsterdam, 1675), p. 336a (V.25.8).
37 The principal obstacle to this claim was Aristotle’s use of the difficult word δαιμονία to describe nature in De divinatione per somnum 463b14–15. Most commentators found a way around this problem; see Gabriel Naudé, Apologie pour tous les grands personnages qui ont este faussement soupconnez de magie (Paris, 1625), pp. 321–322, for a list of sixteenth-century authorities on the matter. A notable exception was the Arezzan Peripatetic Andrea Cesalpino, who argued, Daemonum investigatio peripatetica, in Quaestionum peripateticarum libri v (Venice, 1593), 145r–168v, at fol. 151v, that the use of the word proved Aristotle’s belief in demons: ‘Qui asserit Daemonia esse, ex necessitate fateri cogitur Daemones esse.’ In actuality the word has a rather different connotation; as David Ross puts it in his edition of Aristotle, Parva naturalia (Oxford, 2000), p. 282, it means ‘something mysterious and superhuman, something that has a touch of the divine about it, but is not a direct work of God’.
38 Pietro d’Abano, Liber conciliator, ed. Joannes de Aquila (Venice, 1521), fol. 202va (diff. 157); Pseudo-Aristotle, Problemata, trans. Theodore Gaza, comm. Pietro d’Abano (Venice, 1482), fol. 236va.
39 Nicole Oresme, De causis mirabilium, ed. and trans. Bert Hansen as Nicole Oresme and the Marvels of Nature (Toronto, 1985), pp. 256: ‘si quandoque verum dicant hoc est a casu’. Oresme does not directly discuss the ancient oracles, although elsewhere he quotes with approval Cicero’s judgement of them in De divinatione II.115 (q.v. chapter one, n. 44): see Oresme, Livre de divinacions, ed. Coopland, pp. 94–96.
40 ‘Claudius Coelestinus’, De his quae mundo mirabiliter eveniunt, ed. Oronce Finé (Paris, 1542), fol. 14v: ‘tales aegri turbarum habent cerebrum, et instrumenta potentiarum cognoscitivarum, propter fumos pessimos multos sursum ascendentes’. Antoine Becquet, Coelestinorum congregationis ordinis S. Benedicti monasteriorum fundationes (Paris, 1719), p. 125, identifies ‘Coelestinus’ as Claude Rapine. See also Lynn Thorndike, ‘Coelestinus’s Summary of Nicolas Oresme on Marvels: A Fifteenth Century Work Printed in the Sixteenth Century’, Osiris 1 (1936), 629–635; Jean Céard, La nature et les prodiges: L’insolite au XVIe siècle, en France (Geneva, 1977), 175–178.
41 ‘Coelestinus’, De his, fol 1r: ‘Cum aliquid mirabile contigerit vel insolitum, cuius causa non est in promptu, recurrunt plurimi (qui scioli sibi videntur) ad caelum et influentiam caeli ignotam, tanquam ad ultimum et vere miserorum refugium: devoti autem, si bonum est quod evenerit, Deo attribuunt: si malum est, daemoni. Quod plurimum ex ignorantia est: eo quod causas rerum naturales advertere, vel inquirere non volunt, vel certe negligunt, aut non valent pro imperitia.’ See Oresme, De causis mirabilium, p. 262: ‘illi qui nesciunt causas immediatas et naturales fugiunt ad demones, alii ad celum alii ad Deum’.
42 Thorndike, ‘Coelestinus’s Summary’, p. 631.
43 Levinus Lemnius, Occulta naturae miracula (Antwerp, 1559), fols. 102v–104v (II.2). Another influential physician, by contrast, accepted the reality of demonic possession; see Jean Fernel, De abditis rerum causis (1548), ed. and trans. John Henry and John M. Forrester as On the Hidden Causes of Things: Forms, Souls, and Occult Diseases in Renaissance Medicine (Leiden, 2005), p. 658. Fernel outlines his notion of demons, from both a Christian and a Platonic perspective, on pp. 572–595. In the next century the physician Peter Schmilauer, Ad praemissam quaestionem de melancholicorum divinatione responsio analytica, in Dissertationes physicae-medicae, ed. Tobias Tandler (Wittenberg, 1613), p. 168, would name the Pythia among those possessed by the Devil, and so beyond the remit of medical theory.
44 Andrea Cattaneo, De intellectu et de causis mirabilium effectuum (Florence, 1505), fol. 4v (III.1). On Cattaneo, see Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. (New York, 1923–58), IV, pp. 90–92.
45 For a good English account of Pomponazzi’s life and career, see Martin L. Pine, Pietro Pomponazzi: Radical Philosopher of the Renaissance (Padua, 1986), pp. 39–53.
46 For an up-to-date bibliography on the intellectual context of Renaissance Padua, see Guido Giglioni, ‘Nature and Demons: Girolamo Cardano Interpreter of Pietro d’Abano’, in Continuities and Disruptions between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Proceedings of the Colloquium held at the Warburg Institute, 15–16 June 2007, ed. Charles Burnett (Turnhout, 2008), 89–112, p. 89, n. 3.
47 On Gratarolo, see Manuela Doni, ‘Il “De incantationibus” di Pietro Pomponazzi e l’edizione di Guglielmo Grataroli’, Rinascimento, 2nd s., 15 (1975), 183–200, and Ian Maclean, ‘Heterodoxy in Natural Philosophy and Medicine: Pietro Pomponazzi, Guglielmo Gratarolo, Girolamo Cardano’, in Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion, ed. John Brooke and Ian Maclean (Oxford, 2005), 1–29, pp. 17–19.
48 Pietro Pomponazzi, De incantationibus, ed. Vittoria Perrone Compagni (Florence, 2011), p. 147.
49 See Kessler, ‘Naturverständnisse’, pp. 38–43, on Pomponazzi’s conception of natura.
50 Pomponazzi, De incantationibus, p. 166: ‘quicquid affirmatum est per Scripturam Canonicam et universaliter decretum est per Romanam Ecclesiam, illud totum firmum, ratum, inviolabile, inconcussibile et prorsus et sine aliqua dubitatione tenendum est: quicquid vero damnaverit, a nobis reiciendum est.’
51 The interpretation of the protestations as bogus, and of Pomponazzi as an actual atheist, or at least a protolibertine, has always been the more popular, going back to the libertines themselves, and principally Gabriel Naudé. It was influentially formulated by Ernest Renan, Averroès et l’Averroïsme: Essai historique (Paris, 1852), chap. 3.6, and again by René Pintard, Le libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1943), p. 43, and Martin Pine, ‘Pomponazzi and the Problem of “Double Truth”‘, Journal of the History of Ideas 29 (1968), 163–176. More balanced assessments, meanwhile, are offered by Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘The Myth of Renaissance Atheism and the French Tradition of Free Thought’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 6, no. 1 (1968), 233–243, and, most recently, Vittoria Perrone Compagni’s introduction to her translation of Pietro Pomponazzi, Il fato, il libero arbitrio e la predestinazione, ed. Richard Lemay (Marene, 2004), pp. xxvi–xxxix. For a summary of the issue, see Brian Copenhaver, ‘Did Science Have a Renaissance?’, Isis 83, no. 3 (1992), 387–407, especially pp. 389–392.
52 On various aspects of this doctrine, from Averroes to his Latin followers in the Middle Ages, see Fernand van Steenberghen, ‘Une légende tenace: La théorie de la double vérité’ (1970), in his Introduction à l’étude de la philosophie médiévale (Louvain, 1974), 555–570; Bernardo Carlos Bazán, ‘La réconciliation de la foi et de la raison était-elle possible pour les aristotéliciens radicaux?’, Dialogue 19 (1980), 235–254; Oliver Leaman, Averroes and His Philosophy (London, 1988), pp. 144–160, 165–173; R. C. Taylor, ‘“Truth Does Not Contradict Truth”: Averroes and the Unity of Truth’, Topoi 19 (2000), 3–16; and Luca Bianchi, Pour une histoire de la ‘double vérité’ (Paris, 2008).
53 Pomponazzi, De incantationibus, pp. 12, 27.
54 John Donne, Sermons, ed. Evelyn Simpson and George Potter, 10 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1954), VII, p. 367 (Sermon no. 14, dated Feb. 11, 1626/27).
55 Pomponazzi, De incantationibus, p. 13: ‘in vanum daemones ponuntur. Ridiculum enim et omnino fatuum est relinquere manifesta, et quae naturali ratione probari possunt, et quaerere immanifesta quae nulla verisimilitudine possunt persuaderi’.
56 Pomponazzi, De incantationibus, p. 81.
57 Pomponazzi, De incantationibus, p. 83: ‘natura ordinate procedat, primaque infimis non coniunguntur sine mediis’.
58 Pomponazzi, De incantationibus, p. 78, citing Physics VIII (i.e. 266a5–9) and Metaphysics II (i.e., 994b6–28); we might also add Metaphysics XII, 1073a3–4.
59 Pomponazzi, De incantationibus, p. 154: ‘Non sunt autem miracula quia sint totaliter contra naturam et praeter ordinem corporum coelestium: sed pro tanto dicuntur miracula, quia insueta et rarissime facta, et non secundum communem cursum naturae, sed in longissimis periodis’.
60 Pomponazzi, De incantationibus, pp. 109–110: ‘daemones sive angeli introducti sunt, quoniam cum talia quae retulimus multoties visa sunt, veluti de oraculis, de hominibus [ominibus, 1556] apparentibus in aere, et de reliquis recitatis, et rude vulgus veras caussas non potest capere, nam homines non philosophi, qui revera sunt veluti bestiae, non possunt capere Deum, Coelos, et Naturam haec posse operari.’
61 Pomponazzi, De incantationibus, p. 95.
62 Pomponazzi, De incantationibus, p. 155: ‘cum philosophi sit caussam naturalium effectuum reddere, hoc autem fieri non potest ignorato quia est.… Tales autem effectus rarissime sunt: ideo fuit necessarium eos declarare. Nulla autem ars melius et accommodatius hoc facere potest ipsa historia. Hinc est quod historia usi sumus.’ This passage responds to the ninth objection raised in the previous chapter, p. 120. Pomponazzi also mentions, p. 82, an unlearned Mantuan woman who spoke various languages under the influence of a sickness, and who was cured by a physician named Galgerandus or Galcerandus. The case would be much cited by later writers as a parallel to instances of melancholiac divination.
63 The Pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata XXX.1 (on which see below, p. 20) merits two mentions: the first on p. 138, and the second on p. 152, n. 56.
64 Pomponazzi, De incantationibus, pp. 57, 77–81.
65 Pomponazzi, De incantationibus, pp. 119–120. Pomponazzi is unusual in adducing, as an ancient authority for the cessation, Augustine, De civitate Dei XX.8, where it is simply claimed, following John 12:31, that the Devil was bound on the advent of Christ.
66 Versions of the doctrine, usually girded with disclaimers about its limitations, can be found in the works of several orthodox authors of the Middle Ages; best known among these are Roger Bacon, Opus Maius, ed. John Henry Bridges, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1897), I, p. 262–268 (IV.4.16), and Pierre d’Ailly, De legibus et sectis contra superstitiosos astronomos, in De imagine mundi et varia alia (Louvain, 1483), sig. F4v (chap. 6). On the general background, see Pine, Pietro Pomponazzi, pp. 269–272, and Paola Zambelli, ed., ‘Astrologi hallucinati’: Stars and the End of the World in Luther’s Time (Berlin, 1986), especially Zambelli’s ‘Introduction: Astrologers’ Theory of History’, pp. 20–21, and Krzysztof Pomian, ‘Astrology as a Naturalistic Theology of History’, 29–43. Marco Bertozzi, ‘Il fatale ritmo della storia: La teoria delle grandi congiunzioni astrali tra XV et XVI secolo’, I Castelli di Yale 1 (1996), 29–49, discusses Giovanni Pico and Pomponazzi in this context.
67 Pomponazzi, De incantationibus, pp. 149–150: ‘cum ritus illorum priorum deorum erant oracula talia qualia conveniebant diis illis, ideo per adventum novae Legis, novae dispositiones, et novae consuetudines debebant induci, priores corrumpi; et sic rationabiliter illa oracula defecerunt.’ On the specific connotations of lex, see Renan, Averroès et l’Averroïsme, p. 286; Giorgio Spini, Ricerca dei libertini: La teoria dell’impostura delle religioni nel seicento italiano (Rome, 1950), pp. 16–17; Harry Wolfson, ‘The Twice-Revealed Averroes’, Speculum, 36 (1961), 373–392, p. 379.
68 Pomponazzi, De incantationibus, p. 155.
69 See also Pine, Pietro Pomponazzi, p. 263, who reaches a similar conclusion from a different angle: ‘Nature, so to speak, has here devoured history. Natural categories should then be used to explain fully the historical processes and a comprehensive theory should be worked out.’
70 The Nietzschean doctrine, recovered from ancient Greek philosophy during his time at Basel, and most famously expounded in the third book of Also sprach Zarathustra (1885), is already present in his 1874 essay, Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben.
71 Augustine, De civitate Dei XII.13–14.
72 See Lenoble, Esquisse d’une histoire, p. 295: ‘Pour l’homme de la Renaissance, la Nature prend donc la place de Dieu, parce qu’elle-même a une âme, qu’elle réalise des intentions constantes, qu’elle veille sur l’homme comme une Providence’. See also the comment on this line in Tullio Gregory, Theophrastus redivivus: Erudizione e ateismo nel Seicento (Naples, 1979), p. 150, where it is invoked to connect Pomponazzi to the later transformations of natural philosophy in the Theophrastus redivivus.
73 This was Meric Casaubon, on whom see pp. 132–133 below.
74 See Kessler, ‘Naturverständnisse’, p. 22.
75 At least since Hume (Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, X.1), this point has been treated in terms of the uniformity of nature; a principle widely accepted, even if its theoretical basis is controversial. See, e.g., Alexander Bird, Philosophy of Science (London, 1998), for a recent analysis.
76 François Garasse, La Doctrine curieuse des beaux esprits de ce temps (1623), ed. Jean Salem (Paris, 2009), p. 700: ‘Le premier [athée] et le chef de tous est le Pomponace, esprit méchant et enragé.’
77 Giancarlo Zanier, Ricerche sulla diffusione e fortuna del “De incantationibus” di Pomponazzi (Florence, 1975), p. 114, concludes his survey of the work’s immediate fortuna thus: ‘il trattato venne preso in considerazione per lo piú al fine di confutarne le teorie, raramente per accoglierle, magari parzialmente.… Comun denominatore di queste interpretazioni è tuttavia l’accusa di irreligiosità’. See also Doni, ‘Il “De incantationibus”’, p. 188, and Ivan Jadin, ‘Pomponace mythique: La sincérité religieuse de Pietro Pomponazzi dans le miroir de sa réputation française’, Tijdschrift voor de Studie van de Verlichting en van het Vrije Denken 14–15 (1986–87), 7–101.
78 On Boccadiferro, see Charles H. Lohr, Latin Aristotle Commentaries. II. Renaissance Authors (Florence, 1988), sv. ‘Buccaferrea, Ludovicus’, pp. 57–58.
79 Ludovico Boccadiferro, Lectiones in Aristotelis Stagiritae libros quos vocant Parva Naturalia (Venice, 1570). See Lohr, Latin Aristotle Commentaries, sv. ‘Buccaferrea’, pp. 63–64, on the history of the text. On Boccadiferro’s critique of Pomponazzi, see Zanier, Ricerche, pp. 18–24.
80 Boccadiferro’s philosophical allegiances were not straightforward, as Luca Bianchi has argued, Studi sull’Aristotelismo del Rinascimento (Padua, 2003), pp. 126–127.
81 Boccadiferro, Lectiones, fol. 102ra: ‘loquendo semper ad mentem Peripateticorum, dimittendo pro nunc ea, quae ex fide habemus vera esse, et indubitata, et apud Theologos nostros demonstrata, quibus assentimur nunc et ubique.’
82 Within a Christian framework, demons are accepted, for which see Boccadiferro, Lectiones, fol. 105ra: ‘ex fide nostra quae veritas est, certe habemus illos [sc. daemones] esse’.
83 Aristotle, De divinatione per somnum 463b15.
84 Boccadiferro, Lectiones, fol. 102vb: ‘ista praevisio est naturalis non totius speciei, sed ratione individuali complexionis insequentis temperamentum naturae in ipso individuo’.
85 Boccadiferro, Lectiones, fol. 102vb. Compare Cicero, De divinatione II.115, and Boethus apud Plutarch, De Pythiae oraculis 398f–399a.
86 Boccadiferro, Lectiones, fol. 103ra: ‘quod est a casu raro est verum’.
87 Boccadiferro, Lectiones, fol. 103ra: ‘debemus dicere, quod [sc. oracula] erant falsa, eo quia sub enigmate, et vult Aristoteles, quod omnia illa dicta essent praedictura falsum’. Compare Aristotle, Rhetoric III.5.
88 Boccadiferro, Lectiones, fol. 103ra, citing Augustine, De civitate Dei XX.8; on Pomponazzi’s use of this unusual reference, see above, n. 65.
89 Boccadiferro, Lectiones, fol. 103ra: ‘cessarunt oracula in adventu Christi, quia tunc fuit sublata lex gentilium, ideo fuerunt sublata oracula.’
90 Boccadiferro, Lectiones, fol. 103ra: ‘non dant tamen oracula, quia lex nostra non permittit, prohibentur autem ab hac actione’.
91 Boccadiferro, Lectiones, fol. 101vb: ‘ipse Aristote[les] … dixit, quod vates sybillae oracula fuerint afflatae spiritu divino: ista ergo praevisio erat a flatu divino, ergo non est verum, quod sit ab habitu melancolico’.
92 Pseudo-Aristotle, Problemata 954a (XXX.1).
93 Boccadiferro, Lectiones, fol. 103rb: ‘Aristoteles loquitur more vulgarium, dicentes omnes effectus a Deo provenire’. In this interpretation can be seen again the anti-popular tradition noted above, n. 96.
94 Boccadiferro, Lectiones, fol. 102ra: ‘multa falsa … et multas nugas et magnas’.
95 Boccadiferro, Lectiones, fol. 102rb: ‘Haec asserit Pomponatius esse ad mentem Aristotelis.’
96 Boccadiferro, Lectiones, fol. 102rb: ‘ista opinio contradicitur in multis Arist[oteli] et fundamentum suum debile est’.
97 Boccadiferro, Lectiones, fol. 102rb: ‘coelum non operatur, nisi naturaliter’; ‘signate hoc erit contra Aver[roem] qui dicit, quod substantiae sunt universales, et non comprehendunt particularia’. Averroes’s views on this vexed subject were in fact rather subtle and difficult; see Leaman, Averroes and His Philosophy, pp. 71–81, and Herbert A. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes on Intellect (Oxford, 1992), pp. 346–347.
98 Boccadiferro, Lectiones, fol. 102rb: ‘cur dat homini istam praevisionem sub enigmate, et non expressam cum agens naturale perfectiori modo, quo potest, operatur, et breviori’.
99 Boccadiferro, Lectiones, fol. 102vb: ‘divinatio sybillae et oraculi fieret per accidens et a casu’.
100 Boccadiferro, Lectiones, fol. 103ra: ‘ex sola commotione simulachrorum sensibilium, quae erant in ipsis melancholicis, circumloquebantur ista futura’.
101 Boccadiferro, Lectiones, fol. 103ra. The latter point follows De mundo, on which see chapter one, n. 25. The work is here attributed to Theophrastus, on which tradition see Jill Kraye, ‘Daniel Heinsius and the Author of De mundo’, in The Use of Greek and Latin: Historical Essays, ed. A. C. Dionisotti, A. Grafton, and J. Kraye (London, 1988), 171–197, p. 173.
102 On Bernardi’s life and career, see Paola Zambelli, ‘Bernardi, Antonio’, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, IX, pp. 148–151, and Bruno Andreolli, ‘Un filosofo per la corte: Antonio Bernardi tra i Pico e i Farnese’, in Antonio Bernardi della Mirandola (1502–1565): Un aristotelico umanista alla corte dei Farnese, ed. Marco Forlivesi (Florence, 2009), 1–12.
103 Antonio Bernardi della Mirandola, Disputationes: in quibus primum ex professo monomachia … philosophicis rationibus astruitur, etc. (Basel, 1562); the oracles are treated in book 29.
104 Bernardi, Disputationes, p. 491: ‘Quare danda nobis opera est, ut has quaestiones, si modo nostris viribus id assequi possumus, dissoluamus ex sententia ipsius Aristotelis naturaliter loquentis, non ex veritate ipsa Christiana.’ See also p. 518, where Aristotle is described as ‘ex fundamentis naturae loquentem’.
105 Summarising a longer discussion, pp. 517–518, Bernardi concludes, p. 518: ‘Dicerem tempore Aristotelis oracula quae ipse vidit, alia fuisse ex habitu corporis, alia ex arte, ut deciperent homines: quae quidem videntur excogitata fuisse occasione eorum quae ex habitu corporis vera praedicerent.’ The theme of fraud is later expanded in Bernardi’s In tertium librum Rhet[oricae] Arist[otelis] egrega explicatio (Bologna, 1595), p. 140. On the oracles as imitations, see chapter two above, pp. 65–93.
106 Bernardi, Disputationes, p. 518: ‘Respondeo, fieri fortasse potuisse ut reperirentur oracula, quae non solum ex habitu corporis, et ex arte proficiscerentur, sed etiam ab ipso daemone. Sed Aristotelem non cognovisse nisi duo illa superiora genera oraculorum, quae diximus.
107 Bernardi, Disputationes, pp. 518–519. Naudé, Apologie, p. 321, cites Bernardi approvingly.
108 Bernardi, Disputationes, p. 520: ‘si cognovisset ea quae nos Christiani cognovimus, in dubium venire non debet, quin eadem ipse quoque asseruisset, quae nos asserimus’.
109 Bernardi, Disputationes, p. 519: ‘Quae cum ita sint, in dubium venire non potest, quin fieri potuerit, ut temporibus antiquis, aliqua ex Daemone, aliqua ex habitu corporis, quaedam etiam ex arte et deceptione hominum essent oracula’.
110 Bernardi, Disputationes, p. 520: ‘velit nolit, cogitur ponere, si concedit effectus illos esse veros, alias causas, quae supra ordinem causarum natura constitutarum agant’.
111 Bernardi, Disputationes, p. 520: ‘Falsum etiam est, vaticinia Prophetarum posse redigi ad coelum, ut dixit Pomponatius, quoniam coelum non est tantae virtutis, sed dicendum est, quum manifeste fuerint, ad Deum optim[um] maxim[um] non naturaliter agentem, sed ex voluntate et libere, tanquam ad suam veram et germanam causam esse redigenda.’
112 Bernardi, Disputationes, p. 520: ‘eam [i.e., sententiam Pomponatii].… Peripateticae doctrinae aperte repugnare’.
113 Bernardi, Disputationes, p. 518: ‘quod si tertiam genus [sc. oraculorum], quod est ex daemonum deceptione, cognovisset, putandum est, id eum relaturum fuisse ad causas supra naturam, non ad coelum’.
114 Bernardi, Disputationes, p. 519: ‘Quocirca eius sententia in illo suo libro de Incantationibus, plane respuenda est, atque detestanda, tanquam exitialis quaedam pestis, quae et philosophiae naturali, et quod multo peius est, sanctissimae religioni nostrae omnino repugnet atque adversetur.’
115 Giulio Sirenio, De fato (Venice, 1563); the oracles are treated in VI.24–25 (and VII.13), and then in IX.4–14. On Sirenio, see Zanier, Ricerche, pp. 75–76, and Brann, Debate, pp. 354–360.
116 Sirenio, De fato, fol. 148r (IX.12): ‘de oraculis, quae non solum ex terra, sed etiam ab idolis, et daemonibus prodeunt sermonem fecerimus’.
117 Sirenio, De fato, IX.7 on Trophonius, and IX.8 on Delphi.
118 Sirenio, De fato, fol. 104v (VI.24): ‘Si Dii futuros contingentes, et temerarios eventus, certissima (ut dictum fuit) et determinatissima, infallibilique prorsus cognitione praecognoscunt: cur ab oraculis (sunt enim oracula Deorum responsa) ambiguas, et incertas saepenumero antiquitas responsiones habebat.’
119 Sirenio, De fato, fols. 104v–105r (VI.24). Syrianus, Commentarium in Hermogenis librum περὶ στασεων, 7.
120 Sirenio, De fato, fol. 105r (VI.24); compare Lucian, Juppiter tragoedus, 31, Philoponus, Commentary on the Posterior Analytics, I; Carneades apud Cicero, De fato, 32.
121 Sirenio, De fato, fol. 146v (IX.10); compare Plutarch, De defectu oraculorum 438a.
122 Sirenio, De fato, fol. 113v (VII.13): ‘vera iam et catholica responsio’, ‘ambiguae responsiones, vel ex nimia vatis alteratione, ac perturbatione, vel ex ipsa malorum daemonum improbitate, proveniunt’. The latter ambiguity is explained in turn by both the ignorance and the malice of the demons.
123 Sirenio, De fato, fol. 113v: ‘non nullos a malo daemone instructos, prophetas videri’.
124 Miguel de Medina, on whom see below; Tommaso Garzoni, Il serraglio de gli stupori del mondo (Venice, 1613), p. 286; Giorgio Raguseo, Epistolarum mathematicarum seu de divinatione libri duo (Paris, 1623), p. 568; Théophile Raynaud, Theologia naturalis, in Opera, 20 vols. (Lyon, 1665), V, p. 129; and [Nicolas de Montfaucon de Villars], Le Comte de Gabalis, ou entretiens sur les sciences secrètes (Paris, 1670), p. 144—here Sirenio is listed alongside Pietro d’Abano, Pomponazzi, Levinus Lemnius, and Giulio Cesare Vanini, as writers preferring a natural account of the oracles.
125 Sirenio, De fato, fols. 148v–149v (IX.12–13).
126 Sirenio, De fato, fol. 146v (IX.10): ‘physice, et Peripatetice’.
127 Sirenio, De fato, fol. 146v (IX.10): ‘ii viri certe alioqui doctissimi ac praestantissimi; cum aliquid sibi dicere videantur; nihil dicunt, ad doctrinam praesertim Aristotelis; qui influxus sidereos, et coelestes illas occultas qualitates, quas sibi effinxerunt Genethliaci, et vani mathematici Aegyptii … negavit.’
128 Sirenio, De fato, fol. 147r (IX.10): ‘solidiorem, καὶ φυσικοτέραν, idest et magis physicam, et rerum naturae magis accommodatam’.
129 Sirenio, De fato, fols. 146v–147r (IX.10).
130 Miguel de Medina, Christianae paraenesis, sive de recta in deum fide libri vii (Venice, 1564), fol. 35r (II.1). Celio Calcagnini and Leonico Tomeo are mentioned in neighbouring passages.
131 Medina does cite the case of Galgerandus, on which see n. 62 above, but the anecdote had been repeated so often that we need not assume he had it from the original source.
132 Medina, Christiana paraenesis, fol. 36r (II.1).
133 Jacques Charpentier, Platonis cum Aristotele in universa philosophia comparatio (Paris, 1573), pp. 341, 365; Stefano Tiepolo [Francesco Piccolomini], Academicarum contemplationum libri decem (Venice, 1576), pp. 102–111. See Eugenio Garin, History of Italian Philosophy, trans. and ed. Giorgio Pinton, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 2008), I, pp. 438–439, on the evidence for Piccolomini’s authorship of the latter work.
134 [Piccolomini], Academicarum contemplationum libri decem, p. 104 (VI.3): ‘Asserere autem ea fieri, vel per bilem atram, vel per vim imaginandi, vel per varia halituum genera; ut asserit Aristoteles, et cum eo Pomponatius, et alii nonnulli; delirare est’; ‘huiusmodi homines saepe, immota lingua, et ore clauso loqui videntur’.
135 [Piccolomini], Academicarum contemplationum libri decem, pp. 104–105 (VI.3): ‘oracula illa omnia evanuerunt: quod non contingisset, si ex causis pure naturalibus duxissent ortum’.
136 Charpentier, Platonis cum Aristotele comparatio, p. 340.
137 Charpentier, Platonis cum Aristotele comparatio, p. 340: ‘nostram religionem manifeste convellere videatur, nobis credo illudens, ad extremum in ipsa peroratione subiicit, si quid in eo opere offendatur quod Sanctae ecclesiae Catholicae adversetur, vel eidem minus placeat, se illud totum revocare, huiusque correctione subiicere’.
138 Joachim Camerarius, Commentarius de generibus divinationum, ac graecis latinisque earum vocabulis (Leipzig: 1576), p. 16: ‘vapores et alitus telluris, et coeli habitus, et corporum constitutiones, imprimis quae atra bile abundant’. The treatise was published with an edition of Plutarch’s De defectu oraculorum and De Ei apud Delphos, both in Adrien Turnèbe’s Latin.
139 Camerarius, Commentarius, p. 16: ‘altera quapiam maiore et potentiore agitatione, quae illis abutatur tanquam ad suum opus absolvendum ferramentis’.
140 Garzoni, Il serraglio, pp. 282–284. See Brann, Debate, pp. 368–370 on Garzoni’s views.
141 Garzoni, Il serraglio, pp. 290–292.
142 Tommaso Giannini, De daemonibus et mentibus a materia separatis disputatio aristotelica, in Disputationes aristotelicae (Ferrara, 1615), pp. 295–302.
143 Raguseo, ‘De oraculis’, in Epistolarum mathematicarum seu de divinatione libri duo,, pp. 543–583 (Epistle II.11). The epistle can also be found, with some variants, in a larger collection of Raguseo’s letters in British Library Add MS 10810, fols. 237v–246r.
144 On Raguseo’s life, see Marko Josipovic´, Il pensiero filosofico di Giorgio Raguseo nell’ambito del tardo Aristotelismo Padovano (Milan, 1985), pp. 31–37.
145 Augustine, Contra epistolam Manichaei, 5.
146 Raguseo, ‘De oraculis’, pp. 575–576: ‘Aristotelem ego revereor, observo, suspicio; ei tamen nihil plus arbitror, quam homini tribuendum. Non crederem Evangelio, scripsit aliquando D Augustinus, nisi Ecclesiae Catholicae autoritas me ad illi assentiendum commoneret. Non credam Aristoteli, inquam ego, nisi ad illius dicta comprobanda naturalis ratio me coegerit.’
147 Raguseo, ‘De oraculis’, pp. 576–577: ‘Nulla autem est naturalis ratio, quae mihi suadeat, ignarum hominem, atri humoris, aut terrestris exhalationis vi, doctum, et variis linguis eruditum evadere posse … minus absurdum puto, Daemones concedere, eosque multarum rerum autores facere, quam a natura id petere, quod dare nulla ratione potest.’
148 Raguseo, ‘De oraculis’, p. 549.
149 Raguseo, ‘De oraculis’, p. 557.
150 Raguseo, ‘De oraculis’, p. 568: ‘obstupesco, Iulium Sirenium, virum alioquin doctissimum, et Theologum praestantissimum, ut se magnum Philosophum praeberet, hanc eandem in foveam cecidisse’.
151 Raguseo, ‘De oraculis’, p. 569: ‘nullis autoribus, nullisque sententiis addicti, libere philosophari’; ‘Oraculorum itaque causam triplicem esse existimo, naturalem, artificiosam, et supernaturalem.’
152 Raguseo, ‘De oraculis’, p. 572: ‘qui ad loquendum proclivis est, tam multa loquatur, ut casu aliqua praenunciet, quae ventura sunt, hincque fatidicus censeatur.’
153 Cicero, citing Demosthenes; see chapter one above, p. 24.
154 Raguseo, ‘De oraculis’, p. 573: ‘Haec igitur est sympathia illa, quam inter halitum, et Vatem desiderari dicebant. Hic est purior, et acrior ille spiritus, qui ex terrae visceribus, aut potius ex consulentium crumenis egrediebatur.’
155 Raguseo, ‘De oraculis’, p. 574: ‘Oraculorum autoritatem ita auxerunt, ut eorum responsa non humanitus, sed divinitus reddita crederentur.’
156 See n. 114 above.
157 See Laura Ackerman Smoller, History, Prophecy, and the Stars: The Christian Astrology of Pierre d’Ailly, 1350–1420 (Princeton, 1994), chap. 2, on the mediaeval background, and especially on the futile attempt to reconcile astrology and free will. Steven vanden Broecke, The Limits of Influence: Pico, Louvain, and the Crisis of Renaissance Astrology (Leiden, 2003), discusses the arguments and impact of Pico’s Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem.
158 Bernardi, Disputationes, title page, ‘Astrologiae quoque divinatio omni pene auctoritate spoliatur’. Bernardi’s defence of Pico appears on p. 495.
159 Sirenio, De fato III.25. As Zanier, Ricerche, p. 76, observes, Sirenio’s objection to Pomponazzi is allied to his wider rejection of astrology and fatalism: ‘La critica è dunque integrata nell’antifatalismo del trattato, e il Serina [i.e., Sirenio] si mostra piú attento a salvare il concetto di contingenza in generale, che quello di intervento sovrannaturale, che ne costituisce, per lui, solo un aspetto.’
160 Raguseo’s critique is spread over three letters in Epistolarum mathematicarum seu de divinatione libri duo, pp. 167–215 (Epistles I.13–15). Flavio Querenghi, Discorsi morali, politici et naturali (Padua, 1644), pp. 284–290.
161 On the latter, see, e.g., Anthony Parel, The Machiavellian Cosmos (New Haven and London, 1992), p. 9, on Savonarola; and Vanden Broecke, The Limits of Influence, p. 60, on the elder Pico. The situation was no different in the seventeenth century; as Marin Mersenne, L’Impiété des déistes (1624), ed. Dominique Descotes (Paris, 2005), p. 165 (I.10) succinctly remarks, ‘C’est en quoi tous les Astrologues ignorants font naufrage, manque de faire distinction entre les oeuvres naturelles, et les surnaturelles, entre la grâce, et la nature.’
162 The literature on Cardano is extensive; of particular relevance to our discussion are Giancarlo Zanier, ‘Cardano e la critica delle religione’, Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana 54 (1975), 89–98; Alfonso Ingegno, Saggio sulla filosofia di Cardano (Florence, 1980); and Maclean, ‘Heterodoxy in Natural Philosophy’.
163 Ingegno, Saggio, pp. 1–71.
164 Girolamo Cardano, ‘Praecantationes an in cura aliquid possint’, in Contradicentium medicorum libri duo, 3 vols. (Marburg, 1607), II, 482–541 (II.2.7), p. 514: ‘Haec sunt quae non solum falsa et impia, sed etiam a Peripateticis aliena magna ex parte, ac etiam ridicula, invicemque pugnantia scripsit Pomponatius… Impia sunt, non solum quod male de Christo sentiat in his, sed quod omnem miraculorum vim, quantum potest, labefactet: incertamque omnino, imo falsam religionem nostram reddat.’ Cardano had earlier, p. 510, summarised Pomponazzi’s view of the horoscope of religions that ‘hac est causa, quod tot Propheta annunciaverunt de CHRISTO venturo, et quod cessaverunt miracula Delphici oraculi’.
165 For Zanier, Ricerche, p. 105, ‘La connessione del problema della genesi delle religioni con quello, più specifico, del defectus oraculorum, è, invece, tipicamente pomponaziana.’ Nancy Siraisi, The Clock and the Mirror: Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance Medicine (Princeton, 1997), p. 166, remarks that ‘Pomponazzi’s naturalism, his recourse to the stars, and his insistence on the falsity of many of the beliefs that attributed effects to the power of demons clearly appealed to Cardano.’
166 Zanier, Ricerche, p. 52, remarks that Cardano ‘non si mostra eccessivamente sicuro sul problema demonologico’.
167 On Cardano’s obscurity, see Kristian Jensen, ‘Cardanus and His Readers in the Sixteenth Century’, in Girolamo Cardano: Philosoph, Naturforscher, Artzt, ed. Eckhard Kessler (Wiesbaden, 1994), 265–308.
168 Girolamo Cardano, De subtilitate (Basel, 1554). The earlier editions of Nuremberg (1550) and Paris (1550, 1551) contain a much briefer account of the subject.
169 Cardano, De subtilitate, p. 534: ‘historiam hanc huic loco subtexui, in qua fraudes sacerdotum quantascunque confingas licet, fraudi ascribi nequit, quod intus velut a gurgite raperetur, quodque pedibus ejiceretur … cum in tam violento loco, nemo ad confingendam technam stare potuisset’. Emphasis mine. The quotation is from Pausanias, Periegesis IX.39.3.
170 A commonplace, from Lactantius, Divinae institutiones II.15, and Augustine, De civitate Dei IX.20, ultimately based on Plato, Cratylus 398b.
171 Cardano, De subtilitate, p. 540:
nec in elementis tantum, sed etiam coelo, credendum est hanc totam machinam aeris sublimioris animalibus his, quae nos Daemonas quasi sapientes vocamus, plenam esse. Nolim ego ad trutinam haec sectari, velut Porphirius, Psellus, Plotinus, Proclus, Iamblichus, qui copiose de his quae non videre, velut historiam natae rei, scripserunt. Philosophus sum ego, placitis quantum licet Peripateticorum haerens: Hi vero non admittunt Daemonas: nec probabilis est opinio quae illos concedit in tam vasta mole, nam hic ut aves, et longe plus frequentes adessent: cum vix in una provincia tota semel vestigium, et in pluribus annis appareat.
172 Girolamo Cardano, Synesiorum somniorum, omnis generis insomnia explicantes libri iv (Basel, [1562]), p. 222 (III.15): ‘Verum et divinatio est, et naturalis: sed non in vulgus propalanda.’ Synesius himself, De insomniis, II, had drawn a connection between the Delphic oracle and dream divination, arguing that neither should be rejected merely on account of its ambiguity.
173 Cardano, Synesiorum somniorum libri iv, p. 221 (III.15): ‘Idque in religionem a falsis sacerdotibus, seu etiam ignorantia naturalium causarum, versum est.’ On the sceptical tradition of the physicians, see n. 96 above.
174 Cardano, Synesiorum somniorum libri iv, p. 221 (III.15); although he writes, ‘in Delo, virgo vaticinabatur’, there was neither cave nor virgin at Delos, nor was there believed to be in the sixteenth century. See, e.g., Alessandro d’Alessandro, Genialium dierum libri sex, 2 vols. (Rome, 1522), II, p. 399.
175 Girolamo Cardano, De rerum varietate (Basel, 1557), p. 653 (XVI.93): ‘Scio quosdam existimaturos, me oblitum esse eorum quae ibi scripserim, sed non contradico mihi: utinam hi mentem habeant.’
176 Cardano, De rerum varietate, p. 624 (XVI.93): ‘Nulla tam difficilis, nulla tam nobilis tractatio est, quam ea, quae de daemonibus habetur’.
177 Cardano, De rerum varietate, pp. 648–649 (XVI.93): ‘Omnibus igitur ad trutinam diligenter redactis, censendum est rationibus difficile esse tueri, daemonum ac mortuorum animos hincinde dispersos esse: quod tamen experimento, et ordini rerum, et naturali inclinationi convenit, est ut illos haud dubie esse credamus. Nam tot tantaque circa morituros, maxime viros egregios, cernuntur, ut sine daemonibus fieri haec non possunt.’ The connection between demons and the dead is made explicit from the start of the chapter, p. 624: ‘de daemonibus simul ac mortuis loquamur, idque praesertim hac de causa, quod unum ab altero seiungere in experimentis non liceat’. All emphases mine. See also Siraisi, The Clock and the Mirror, p. 167.
178 Girolamo Cardano, De vita propria, ed. Gabriel Naudé (Paris, 1643), pp. 261–269 (chap. 47). See Gabriel Naudé’s comments on this, in his Apologie, pp. 320, 349.
179 Cardano, De rerum varietate, p. 526 (XIV.68): ‘Apollinem autem esse, cum nondum an daemones sint constitutum sit, causam dicere haud convenit.’
180 Cardano, De rerum varietate, p. 530 (XIV.68): ‘nos naturalia sectari et principia rebus correspondentia’.
181 Cardano, De rerum varietate, pp. 526–527 (XIV.68): ‘Componebatur igitur oraculum ex tribus: vi terrae quae agitabat mentem, et vi coelesti in puella, et vi coelesti in antro.’ As Mersenne would later observe, Quaestiones in Genesim (Paris, 1623), cols. 379–380, Cardano’s three causes ‘in unam facile redigantur, utpote coelestem influxum, cui omnia propemodum attribuit’.
182 See Cardano, De rerum varietate, p. 526 (XIV.68) on Plutarch, and p. 642 (XVI.93) on ‘Aristoteles et Theophrastus’—by the latter is meant the author of De mundo, on which see n. 101 above.
183 Cardano, De rerum varietate, p. 530 (XIV.68) ‘Intellectus supremus, aut astri rector’.
184 Cardano, De rerum varietate, p. 526: (XIV.68) ‘Nam et antro et virgini, quia virgo futura erat Veneris cum Sole vis atque Saturno dominabatur.’ The importance of Saturn is ultimately from Abu Ma’shar’s De magnis coniunctionibus, on which see Pomian, ‘Astrology’, in Zambelli, ed., ‘Astrologi hallucinati’, p. 37. On the earlier Western diffusion of Abu Ma’shar’s ideas, see Richard Lemay, Abu Ma’shar and Latin Aristotelianism in the Twelfth Century (Beirut, 1962).
185 Cardano, De rerum varietate, p. 527 (XIV.68): ‘Quod non solum antri vis vetustate corrupta esset: sed mundus qui tunc sub Anaëlis praefectura fuit, ad Sachielem transiit. Porro ut Veneri Mars, ita Iovi Saturnus commiscebatur’. See also Cardano, De immortalitate animorum, in his Opera, 10 vols. (Lyons, 1663), II, pp. 533–534 on the natural causes of prophecy.
186 Cardano, De rerum varietate, pp. 600–601 (XV.87): ‘Atque haec partim natura, partim daemonio, alia afflatu, vel animae coniunctione … plurima autem sacerdotum dolis conficta’.
187 Cardano, De rerum varietate, p. 652 (XVI.93): ‘par est daemonas, et ipsos scire partem futurorum, longeque maiorem quam homines, minimam tamen in comparatione ad coelorum potestates. Atque aliquos longe plus aliis, velut et inter homines. Ob haec igitur oracula ambiguis responsis fallebant, unde inutilia reddita.’
188 Cardano, De rerum varietate, p. 652 (XIV.93): ‘ut homines, licet serius, ad mortem tendere’.
189 Presumably on the evidence of Lucan, Pharsalia, V.112–114; q.v. chapter one above, n. 35.
190 Cardano, De rerum varietate, p. 652 (XVI.93): ‘Cum vero esse desierint ante Pharsalicum bellum, non est ut defectus eorum ad Christi natiuitatem transferatur.’ He adds that ‘post Christum dedere responsa, sed laesa, manca, omnino inutilia’.
191 Naudé objected only to Cardano’s ambiguity on the existence of demons, exclaiming in his Apologie, p. 320, that Cardano had violated the teaching of Averroes, ‘qui n’a iamais creu qu’il y eust des Diables, quand il introduit un Demon qui se disoit l’un de ses disciples et sectateurs’.
192 Charpentier, Platonis cum Aristotele comparatio, p. 341: ‘Oratio, ita me Deus amet, neque philosopho ne Christiano digna’, and: ‘In quo dissimulare non possum me in Cardano pietatem maiorem requirere et in philosophandi licentia Christianam moderationem.’
193 Charpentier, Platonis cum Aristotele comparatio, p. 341: ‘Addam vero … virtutem hanc impediendorum oraculorum et daemonum reprimendorum, a Christo non modo in huius discipulos vivos adhuc emanasse, sed in martyrum sepulchra crucisque signum’.
194 Garzoni, Il serraglio, p. 286; Raguseo, Epistolae, p. 568. Garzoni observes: ‘Cardano … altro non propone, se ben poi più di sotto alquanto non si mostra constante, attribuendo con insania astrologica simil vaticinio alle constellationi, con professare che Pithia hor più chiaro, e hor più veridicamente indovinasse, e anco con più elegante verso s’udisse per la diversa constitutirne delle Stelle.’
195 De Castro, Commentarii, pp. 32b (II.8) and 37a–38b (II.13), against Plutarch and Cicero, with reference on pp. 22a–23a (I.22) to Thomas Aquinas; Vossius, De theologia gentili, I, pp. 43–44 (I.6), and Moebius, Tractatus (1657), pp. 11–13, against Aristotle, Plutarch, and Cicero; Maraviglia, Pseudomantia veterum, pp. 18–19, and Daniel Clasen, De oraculis gentilium et in specie de vaticinis sibyllinis libri tres (Helmstadt, 1673), pp. 22–25 (I.6), against Plutarch; Martin Brunner, in Palaephatus, De incredibilibus, trans. Cornelius Tollius, ed. Brunner (Uppsala, 1663), pp. 206–207, against Plutarch, Aristotle, and Levinus Lemnius; Heinrich Kipping, Recensus antiquitatum romanarum (Bremen, 1664), pp. 69–70, recycling Peucer, against Aristotle, Cicero, Plutarch, Pomponazzi, and Lemnius. Théophile Raynaud, Theologia naturalis, in his Opera, V, p. 129 (IV.1.3.82), dismisses, without any attempt at argumentation, Aristotle, Apuleius, Plutarch, Leonico Tomeo, Sirenio, Pomponazzi, and Ficino.
196 George Crichton, Oratio de Apollinis oraculis et de sacro principis oraculo (Paris, 1596).
197 Howard M. Solomon, Public Welfare, Science, and Propaganda in Seventeenth Century France: The Innovations of Théophraste Renaudot (Princeton, 1972), pp. 60–81; Simone Mazauric, Savoirs et philosophie à Paris dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle: Les confèrences du Bureau d’adresse de Thèophraste Renaudot, 1633–1642 (Paris, 1997), and Kathleen Wellman, Making Science Social: The Conferences of Théophraste Renaudot, 1633–1642 (Norman, OK, 2003).
198 There are many editions of the conference proceedings; I have used Recueil general des questions traitees dans les conferences du Bureau d’Adresse, ed. Eusèbe Renaudot, 5 vols. (Paris, 1666), in which the ‘Conference des oracles’ appears at vol. V, pp. 238–252 (no. 319). On the publication history, see Mazauric, Savoirs et philosophie, pp. 55–56.
199 [Renaudot], Recueil, V, p. 243. This conferee refers earlier, pp. 238–239, to ‘fausses divinitez, que l’Escriture Sainte nous assurant n’avoir esté autres que les Demons qu’elle dit estre les Dieux des Gentils’. His account is theologically conventional in all respects. See also Mazauric, Savoirs et philosophie, p. 289.
200 [Renaudot], Recueil, V, pp. 245–248.
201 [Renaudot], Recueil, V, p. 248: ‘les Cieux, d’où les Astrologues asseurent que cette qualité diviniatrice se communique aux hommes par le moyen des intelligences motrices de ces vanes corps’; and p. 249: ‘l’Esprit universel, qui anime également tout le monde et les parties qui le composent’.
202 [Renaudot], Recueil, V, pp. 250–252.
203 Solomon, Public Welfare, p. 81.
204 Mazauric, Savoirs et philosophie, p. 245.
205 Five pamphlets appeared in 1640, each given to a different question. The two anthologies are A General Collection of Discourses of the Virtuosi of France upon Questions of all Sorts of Philosophy, and other Natural Knowledg, trans. G. Havers (London, 1664), and Another Collection of Philosophical Conferences of the French Virtuosi, etc., trans. G. Havers and J. Davies (London, 1665).
206 Another Collection, sig. A2. The conference on the oracles appears at pp. 442–447 (no. 227).
207 Jeremy Taylor, Doctor Dubitantium, Or, The Rule of Conscience in All her Generall Measures Serving as a Great Instrument for the Determination of Cases of Conscience (London, 1660) p. 135 (IV.2); and see also Edward Sparke, ΘΥΣΙΑΣΤΗΡΙΟΝ vel Scintilla Altaris, or Primitive Devotion in the Feasts and Fasts of the Church of England (London, 1663), p. 231.
208 Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (London, 1667), pp. 362–363 (III.21)
209 Edward Stillingfleet, Origines sacrae (London, 1662), pp. 244–245.
210 The same was true in equivalent contexts elsewhere. For instance, the French scholar and teacher Claude Guillermet Berigard, in a summary of his lectures on Aristotle at Padua, Circulus Pisanus, De veteri et Peripatetica philosophia in priores libros Phys[icorum] Arist[otelis] (Oldenburg, 1643), p. 135, mentions both vapours and melancholy. The papal physician Paolo Zacchia, Quaestiones medico-legales, 3 vols. (Lyon, 1674), I, p. 290a (IV.1.5), mentions the oracle of Colophon, with its divinatory waters, as evidence ‘ad firmandum prophetiam naturaliter posse contingere’.
211 Meric Casaubon, A Treatise concerning Enthusiasme (London, 1655), p. 28.
212 Casaubon, Treatise, p. 31.
213 Casaubon, Treatise, p. 40. Compare Boccadiferro’s different interpretation of the similar word ἐνθουσιαστικος, discussed above, p. 107.
214 Casaubon, Treatise, p. 31, stipulating of Iamblichus’s text that ‘the understanding Reader may make his own observations upon divers particulars’. On Iamblichus, see chapter one above, p. 19.
215 Casaubon, Treatise, p. 31. See also Ryan J. Stark, Rhetoric, Science and Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (Washington, DC, 2009), p. 155.
216 Edmund Dickinson, Delphi Phoenicizantes (Oxford, 1655), pp. 83–85. On Dickinson, see chapter two above, pp. 69–70.
217 John Smith, ‘Of Prophecy’, in his Select Discourses (London, 1660), pp. 190–99.
218 John Spencer, A Discourse concerning Vulgar Prophecies (London, 1665), pp. 106–107.
219 Joseph Glanvill, Philosophia Pia, or, A Discourse of the Religious Temper and Tendencies of the Experimental Philosophy which is Profest by the Royal Society (London, 1671), pp. 57, 60.
220 Joseph Glanvill, Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion (London, 1676), p. 50: ‘Christ Jesus drove the Devil from his Temples and his Altars, (as is clear in the Cessation of Oracles, which dwindled away, and at last grew silent shortly upon his appearance)’. This line does not appear in earlier versions of the Saducismus triumphatus.
221 Michael Heyd, “Be Sober and Reasonable”: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden, 1995).