Annotatio XV

”He set the stars in the firmament.” — Genesis 1:17

Origen, in the Tomes on Genesis — as Eusebius relates in the 6th [book] of the Preparation for the Gospel, chapter 9 — when he expounded this particle, said that the stars were placed by God in heaven to be “for signs”;¹ that is, that through their various aspects and conjunctions [God] might signify all and each of the causes of human affairs — though they would not effect them. For God painted in the stars the significations and reasons of all the future events of the human race, so that the powers of the supernal spirits might read in them, as in books, whatever things would come to pass among men (yet without any compulsion of free will) through the several intervals of time; and thence they might reveal to men, the observers of the stars, some part of this science, which exceeds the powers of human wit. And according to this sense Origen thought a certain opinion was to be understood, [taken] from a book whose title is The Narration of Joseph — once received into authority among many catholics — in which the Patriarch Jacob is introduced saying these things to his sons: “Read in the tablets of heaven whatever things are to come upon you and your sons.” Augustine, in the fifth [book] The City of God, chapter 1, writes that this opinion — although it belonged to men not mediocrely learned, and although it decrees that the stars do not make but only signify — is nevertheless convicted as fallacious and false by argument and experience:² namely of two twins, sown in the same intercourse and at the same moment, and coming into the light at the same time — of whom, since there is the greatest diversity in their actions, events, professions, arts, honors, and the rest pertaining to human life and death, it cannot be that the same star, set in the same station of heaven, at the same time and same aspect, portends such contrary significations of diverse events. Procopius, in his commentaries on this chapter, reprobates Origen’s opinion as by no means catholic and unworthy of a Christian, because Christians have no need of the significations of the stars in order to know what is to be followed or fled, since the divine Law admonishes whatever they must do or avoid. St. Thomas, in the opusculum which he entitled On the Judgments of the Stars, declares that they sin gravely who use the significations and judgments of the stars in those things which depend on the free will of men.³ But an observation of nearly the like argument you have below, in Annotation 81 of this book, and in book 6, Annotation 10.