nets in the water, but not on the land; that it kills one man, and leaves untouched another standing beside him; that it can tear through a house and enter the earth without moving a stone from its place; that it injures the heart of a tree, but not the bark; that wine is poisoned by it, while poisons struck by it lose their venom; that a man's hair may be consumed by it, and the man be unhurt.[1]
These peculiar phenomena, made much of by the allegorizing sermonizers of the day, were used in moral lessons from every pulpit. Thus, the Carmelite, Matthias Farinator, of Vienna, who at the pope's own instance compiled early in the fifteenth century that curious handbook of illustrative examples for preachers, the "Lumen Animæ," finds a spiritual analogue for each of these anomalies.[2]
This doctrine grew robust and noxious, until, in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, we find its bloom in a multitude of treatises by the most learned of the Catholic and Protestant divines, and its fruitage in the torture-chambers and on the scaffolds throughout Christendom. At the Reformation period, and for nearly two hundred years afterward, Catholics and Protestants vied with each other in promoting this growth. John Eck, the great opponent of Luther, gave to the world an annotated edition of Aristotle's "Physics," which was long authoritative in the German universities; and, though the text is free from this doctrine, the woodcut illustrating the earth's atmosphere shows most vividly, among the clouds of mid-air, the devils who there reign supreme.[3]
Luther, in the other religious camp, supported the superstition even more zealously, asserting at times his belief that the winds themselves are only good or evil spirits,* and declaring that he had himself calmed more than twenty storms caused by the devil.[4]
Just at the close of the same century, Catholics and Protestants hailed alike the great work of Delrio.[5] In this the power of devils over the elements is proved first from the Holy Scriptures, since, he declares, "they show that Satan brought fire down from heaven to consume the servants and flocks of Job, and that he stirred up a violent wind, which overwhelmed in ruin the sons and daughters of Job at their feasting"; next, Delrio insists on the agreement of all the orthodox Fathers that it was the devil himself who did this, and attention is called to the fact that the hail with which the Egyptians were punished is expressly declared in Holy Scripture to have been brought
A His "Disquisitiones Magicæ," first printed at Liége in 1599-1600 (in three vols. 4to), but reprinted again and again throughout the seventeenth century.
- ↑ See, for lists of such admiranda, any of the early writers—e. g., Vincent of Beauvais, Reisch's "Margarita," or Eck's "Aristotle."
- ↑ See the "Lumen Animæ," Eichstadt, 1479.
- ↑ See Eck, "Aristotelis Meteorologica," Augsburg, 1519.
- ↑ See his "Memoirs," iii, 172 (cited by Maury, "Légendes Pieuses," 18).
- ↑ See his "Memoirs," p. 190 (cited by Maury, as above, p. 18).
