Annotatio LXXXI

”The floodgates of heaven were opened.” — Genesis 7:11

Peter of Ailly [Pierre d’Ailly], Cardinal-Priest, disputing in the questions on Genesis upon this sentence, asserts that, although Noah foreknew the coming Flood by prophetic revelation, God announcing it, yet he could have foreseen this same thing long before it happened, from Astronomical rules¹ — namely, from the knowledge of the constellations, which not only presignified that universal cataclysm, but even, by God’s command, effected it — not as primary causes, but as handmaids and ministers, applying, in obedience to their omnipotent Lord, the powers and faculties which they had received from him for inundating and submerging the globe of the earth. These constellations, the producers of the inundations, Moses called “the floodgates of heaven,” signifying, through their opening, that time in which God released all the inundating powers and influences — enclosed in the aforesaid constellations — as if, the barriers being unlocked, to the flooding of the whole earth. This same assertion he confirms, in the volume On Sects and Laws, and in the book On the Concordance of Astronomy and Theology, by the example of the Rainbow: which, just as God willed to be a sign, for the security of men, of a universal Flood no more to come, so it is probable that God, from the prognostics and signs of the stars, foretold the Flood for the penitence of sinners.

In this very opinion had been, long before, William [of Auvergne], Bishop of Paris, who, in the first part of his work On the Universe, expounding this passage, wrote thus: “Moses, the Prophet of the Hebrews, called ‘floodgates of heaven’ those parts of heaven which are generative of rains and inundations of waters — such as are the watery signs, like Cancer and Pisces, the Pleiades, the Hyades, and Orion among the stars, and Mars, and Venus, and the Moon among the Planets. The floodgates of heaven, therefore, are understood [to be] then opened, when causes of this kind are loosed and confirmed, by the nod of the Creator, unto the operations of rains and inundations.” These things William: with whom agreeing, Henry of Mechlin, a disciple of Albert the Great, in the commentaries which he published on the great Conjunctions of Albumasar, reports that he found, from Astronomical reckonings, that a certain conjunction of the stars preceded the Noachic Flood, inducing a general flooding of waters — namely [the conjunction] of Jupiter and Saturn at the end of Cancer, in the region of the Argive ship [the constellation Argo], by which also Noah’s ark is signified. This opinion — proposed forty years ago by Tiberio Calabro, a philosopher, in public disputations, and also defended in writings — Jerome Armellini, a Dominican, confuted in a particular volume published against him, and condemned as heretical.² See an annotation of nearly this same argument above, Annotation 15, and in book 6, Annotation 10.