The armillary sphere survives as useful for teaching, and may be described as a skeleton celestial globe, the series of rings representing the great circles of the heavens, and revolving on an axis within a horizon. With the earth as centre such a sphere is known as Ptolemaic; with the sun as centre, as Copernican.
The designer of the instrument shown no doubt thought that the north pole might suitably have the same ornament as was used to mark N. on the compass card, and so surmounted it with the fleur-de-lys, traditionally chosen for that purpose on the compass by Flavio Gioja in honour of Charles of Anjou, king of Sicily and Naples.
Armillary spheres occur in many old sculptures, paintings and engravings; and from these sources we know that they were made for suspension, for resting on the ground or on a table, for holding by a short handle, or either for holding or for resting on a stand.
Authorities.—Tycho Brahe, Astronomiae Instauratae Mechanica; M. Blundeville, his Exercises; N. Bion, Traité des instrumens de mathématique; also L’Usage des globes célestes; Sédillot, Mémoire sur les instrumens; J. B. Delambre, Histoire de l’astronomie ancienne; R. Grant, History of Physical Astronomy. (M. L. H.)
ARMINIUS, the Latinized form of the name of Hermann, or more probably Armīn (17 B.C.–A.D. 21), the German national hero. He was a son of a certain Segimer, a prince of the tribe of the Cherusci, and in early life served with distinction as an officer in the Roman armies. Returning to his own people he found them chafing under the yoke of the Roman governor, Quintilius Varus; he entertained for them hopes of freedom, and cautiously inducing neighbouring tribes to join his standard he led the rebellion which broke out in the autumn of A.D. 9. Heavily laden with baggage the troops of Varus were decoyed into the fastnesses of the Teutoburger Wald, and there attacked, the completeness of the barbarian victory being attested by the virtual annihilation of three legions, by the voluntary death of Varus, and by the terror which reigned in Rome when the news of the defeat became known, a terror which found utterance in the emperor’s despairing cry: “Varus, give me back my legions!” Then in A.D. 15 Germanicus Caesar led the Romans against Arminius, and captured his wife, Thusnelda. An indecisive battle was fought in the Teutoburger Wald, where Germanicus narrowly escaped the fate of Varus, and in the following year Arminius was defeated. The hero’s later years were spent in fighting against Marbod, prince of the Marcomanni, and in disputes with his own people occasioned probably by his desire to found a powerful kingdom. He was murdered in A.D. 21.
In 1875 a great monument to Arminius was completed. This stands on the Grotenburg mountain near Detmold. Klopstock and other poets have used his exploits as material for dramas.
Much discussion has taken place with regard to the exact spot in the Teutoburger Wald where the great battle between Arminius and Varus was fought. There is an immense literature on this subject, and the following may be consulted:—T. Mommsen, Die Ortlichkeit der Varusschlacht (1885); E. Meyer, Untersuchungen über die Schlacht im Teutoburger Walde (1893); A. Wilms, Die Schlacht im Teutoburger Walde (1899); F. Knoke, Das Schlachtfeld im Teutoburger Walde (1899); E. Dünzelmann, Der Schauplatz der Varusschlacht (1889); and P. Höfer, Die Varusschlacht (1888). For more general accounts of Arminius see: Tacitus, Annals, edited by H. Furneaux (1884–1891); O. Kemmer, Arminius (1893); F. W. Fischer, Armin und die Römer (1893); W. Uhl, Das Portrait des Arminius (1898); and F. Knoke, Die Kriegszüge des Germanicus in Deutschland (1887).
ARMINIUS, JACOBUS (1560–1609), Dutch theologian, author of the modified reformed theology that receives its name of Arminian from him, was born at Oudewater, South Holland, on the 10th of October 1560. Arminius is a Latinized form of his patronymic Hermanns or Hermansen. His father, Hermann Jakobs, a cutler, died while he was an infant, leaving a widow and three children. Theodorus Aemilius, a priest, who had turned Protestant, adopting Jakob, sent him to school at Utrecht, but died when his charge was in his fifteenth year. Rudolf Snellius (Snel van Roijen, 1546–1613), the mathematician, a native of Oudewater, then a professor at Marburg, happening at the time to visit his early home, met the boy, saw promise in him and undertook his maintenance and education. But hardly was he settled at Marburg when the news came that the Spaniards had besieged and taken Oudewater, and murdered its inhabitants almost without exception. Arminius hurried home, but only to find all his relatives slain. In February the same year (1575), the university of Leiden had been founded, and thither, by the kindness of friends, Arminius was sent to study theology. The six years he remained at Leiden (1576–1582) were years of active and innovating thought in Holland. The War of Independence had started conflicting tendencies in men’s minds. To some it seemed to illustrate the necessity of the state tolerating only one religion, but to others the necessity of the state tolerating all. Dirck Coornhert argued, in private conferences and public disputations, that it was wrong to punish heretics, and his great opponents were, as a rule, the ministers, who maintained that there was no room for more than one religion in a state. Caspar Koolhaes, the heroic minister of Leiden—its first lecturer, too, in divinity—pleaded against a too rigid uniformity, for such an agreement on “fundamentals” as had allowed Reformed, Lutherans and Anabaptists to unite. Leiden had been happy, too, in its first professors. There taught in theology Guillaume Feuguières or Feuguereius (d. 1613), a mild divine, who had written a treatise on persuasion in religion, urging that as to it “men could be led, not driven”; Lambert Danaeus, who deserves remembrance as the first to discuss Christian ethics scientifically, apart from dogmatics; Johannes Drusius, the Orientalist, one of the most enlightened and advanced scholars of his day, settled later at Franeker; Johann Kolmann the younger, best known by his saying that high Calvinism made God “both a tyrant and an executioner.” Snellius, Arminius’s old patron, now removed to Leiden, expounded the Ramist philosophy, and did his best to start his students on the search after truth, unimpeded by the authority of Aristotle. Under these men and influences, Arminius studied with signal success; and the promise he gave induced the merchants’ gild of Amsterdam to bear the further expenses of his education. In 1582 he went to Geneva, studied there awhile under Theodore Beza, but had soon, owing to his active advocacy of the Ramist philosophy, to remove to Basel. After a short but brilliant career there he turned to Geneva, studied for three years, travelled, in 1586, in Italy, heard Giacomo Zarabella (1533–1589) lecture on philosophy in Padua, visited Rome, and, open-minded enough to see its good as well as its evil, was suspected by the stern Dutch Calvinists of “popish” leanings. Next year he was called to Amsterdam, and there, in 1588, was ordained. He soon acquired the reputation of being a good preacher and faithful pastor. He was commissioned to organize the educational system of the city, and is said to have done it well. He greatly distinguished himself by fidelity to duty during a plague that devastated Amsterdam in 1602. In 1603 he was called, in succession to Franz Junius, to a theological professorship at Leiden, which he held till his death on the 19th of October 1609.
Arminius is best known as the founder of the anti-Calvinistic school in Reformed theology, which created the Remonstrant Church in Holland (see Remonstrants), and contributed to form the Arminian tendency or party in England. He was a man of mild and liberal spirit, broadened by varied culture, constitutionally averse from narrow views and enforced uniformity. He lived in a period of severe systematizing. The Reformed strengthened itself against the Roman Catholic theology by working itself, on the one hand, into vigorous logical consistency, and supporting itself, on the other, on the supreme authority of the Scriptures. Calvin’s first principle, the absolute sovereignty of God, had been so applied as to make the divine decree determine alike the acts and the destinies of men; and his formal principle had been so construed as to invest his system with the authority of the source whence it professed to have been drawn. Calvinism had become, towards the close of the 16th century, supreme in Holland, but the very rigour of the uniformity it exacted provoked a reaction. Coornhert could not plead for the toleration of heretics without assailing the dominant Calvinism, and so he opposed a conditional to its unconditional predestination. The two ministers of Delft, who had debated the point with him, had, the better to turn his arguments, descended from the
