Annotatio CVIII

”And Jacob saw in his sleep a ladder standing upon the earth.” — Genesis 28:12

Philo the Jew, in the book On Dreams, intent on the elucidation of this vision, says: “In heaven there are stars, which severally are not only living beings [but rational]”¹ [the stars] are not only called living beings, but are also most pure minds.” Explaining which opinion more clearly in the book On the Making of the Six Days, he wrote this: “Of the things which are in nature, some are considered participant neither of virtue nor of vice, as plants and brutes; others, likewise endowed with virtue alone, have nothing at all of vice, as the star: for these are living beings, and indeed intelligences — or rather singular minds — wholly good, and not capable of any vice; again, others [are] mixed of both, as man, who is capable of contraries.” And lower in the same book he adds: “The stars are rational, and of a divine nature, partly intelligible and incorporeal, partly indeed corporeal.”

Origen followed Philo, dissenting from him in this one [point]: that [Philo] believes the nature of the stars devoid of all vice, but [Origen] judges the same [nature] capable of no less vice than virtue. For thus he spoke of the stars in the first Tome of the commentaries on John: “For it is absurd to say that Christ died only for human sins, and not also for something else besides man which was in sin — as, for instance, for the stars; since not even the stars are wholly clean before God, as we read in Job: ‘The stars are not clean in his sight.’”² Again, disputing more fully about the animation of the stars in the first [book] περὶ ἀρχῶν [On First Principles], chapter 7, he shows that the stars are living beings endowed with reason, which advance and fall short in virtues; and that a spirit was infused into them from without by God, so that within the body of the stars they may exercise the ministry of illuminating, for the utility of men, until the end of the world — in which, when the saints of God shall have attained [their] consummated glory, then these too shall be freed from the servitude of this ministry. And this very thing he frequently inculcates in the last homily on the [book of] Numbers, and in very many other places.

To the same opinion Jerome seemed to allude, in the commentaries on Ecclesiastes, where, weighing that which is read at the beginning of that book — “The spirit goeth circling round about”³ — he brought forward these things: “That he says, ‘The spirit goeth circling round about, and returneth in its circuits,’ [means] either that he named the Sun itself ‘spirit,’ because it animates, and breathes, and is vigorous, and completes the yearly courses of the orb, as the poet says: ‘Meanwhile the Sun rolls round the great year’; and elsewhere: ‘And the year rolls round in its own footsteps’; or because: ‘The shining globe of the Moon, and the Titanian stars, a Spirit within nourishes, and, infused through all the members, Mind moves the mass and mingles itself with the great body’” — he speaks not of the annual course of the Sun, but of its daily paths.

Not far from these seems to stand Cardinal Cajetan, who, expounding on Psalm 135 that [saying], “He made the heavens in understanding,” says: “In understanding — that is, [made them] intellectual: which is true either as to the substance of the heavens, if they are animate (as many philosophers reasonably think), or as to [their] motion, because their motion is doubtless intellectual, that is, from an intellect.” And in another place, incidentally expounding what is sung in the preface of the divine sacrifice — “The heavens, and the Powers of the heavens, celebrate together in fellowship of exultation” — he judged that this can be understood of the heavens which, since they are animate, they too, together with the other angels, praise God. Nor did Augustine altogether shrink from this opinion, who — not daring to disapprove it — left it in doubt,⁴ thus writing in the second book On Genesis to the Letter, chapter 18: “It is also wont to be asked whether the luminaries of the heavens are only conspicuous bodies, or whether they have certain governing spirits of their own; and if they have [them], whether they are vitally animated by them (as the flesh is animated by the souls of animals), or [are present] alone, without any mixture. Which, though it cannot easily be comprehended at present, I judge nevertheless that, in the course of treating the Scriptures, more opportune places may occur, where it will be permitted us — concerning this matter, according to the letters of holy authority — even if not to show anything certain, yet to believe [something].” And in the Enchiridion to Laurentius, [chapter] 58, repeating the same, he adds: “But neither do I hold this as certain: whether to the same society of the Angels there pertain the Sun, and the Moon, and all the stars — although to some they seem to be luminous bodies, [but] not with sense and intelligence.”

On the opposite side, Basil, surnamed the Great, in the third homily on the Hexaemeron, refuting this opinion, says: “For neither are the heavens animate [merely] because they declare the glory of God, nor is the firmament a sentient animal [merely] because it announces the works of his hands. For thus also dew, and frost, and cold would be a spiritual and rational nature, because in Daniel they seem to praise God,” etc. Agreeing with whom, John Damascene, book 2 On the Orthodox Faith, chapter 6, says: “Let no one think the heavens or the luminaries animate; for they are inanimate and insensible. Wherefore, if Scripture says, ‘Let the heavens rejoice,’ it calls the Angels who are in heaven to joy. Scripture also knows how to employ prosopopoeia and the fiction of persons, and to speak of inanimate things as of animate: as, ‘The sea saw and fled.’” Jerome likewise, in the epistle to Avitus, among the heresies which he warns must be guarded against in Origen’s books On First Principles, enumerates also the assertion about stars endowed with a rational soul.

But St. Thomas, in the first volume of the Summa Theologica, question 70, article 3, settles this controversy by adducing a distinction of this kind:⁵ “That the stars and the other celestial bodies are animate, or living beings, can be understood in two ways: either univocally — that is, by an informing soul, which is the form of the body (such as are the souls of plants and animals); or equivocally — that is, by an assisting soul, which is united to the body not as a form, but as a mover to a movable thing.” And so Basil, and Damascene, and Jerome in the epistle to Avitus, do not reprehend those who, according to the latter understanding, believe the stars to be animate or living beings — as it is likely that Philo thought, and Jerome himself in the book on Ecclesiastes, and perhaps even Origen; but they refute only those who taught the stars [to be] animate and the heavenly bodies [to be] living beings according to the former mode of understanding. Whether Philo and Origen are to be reckoned among these is not sufficiently clear — although Nicephorus, book 17 of the Ecclesiastical History, among the anathematisms hurled against Origen in the Fifth Synod, sets down this one too: “If anyone says that heaven, and the Sun, and the Moon, and the stars are certain animate and mobile powers, let him be anathema.”