On Idolatry 9

Among the arts we also notice certain professions liable to idolatry. Of astrologers one ought not even to speak. But since someone in these days has challenged us, defending his continuance in that profession, I will say a few words. I do not allege that he honors idols, whose names he has inscribed in the heavens, and to whom he has made over all God's power, so that men think they need not seek God, presuming that we are driven by the unchangeable decree of the stars. I put forward one point: that those angels, deserters of God, lovers of women, were also the betrayers of this curious art, and for that reason too were condemned by God. O divine sentence, holding firm even down to the earth, to which even the ignorant bear witness! Astrologers are expelled, as their angels were. The city and Italy are forbidden to astrologers, as heaven was to their angels. Disciples and masters suffer the same penalty of exile. “But magi came from the east.” We know the kinship between magic and astrology. So interpreters of the stars were the first to announce the birth of Christ, the first to bring him gifts. By this, I suppose, they put Christ in their debt! What then? Shall the religion of those magi now be the patron of astrologers too? Astrology today, no doubt, is about Christ: it observes and proclaims the stars of Christ, not of Saturn and Mars and any other of the same order of the dead! But that science was permitted until the gospel, so that, once Christ was born, no one should thereafter interpret anyone's nativity from the heavens. For they offered that frankincense and myrrh and gold to the infant Lord at that time as the close, as it were, of worldly sacrifice and glory, which Christ was to take away. As for the dream which, no doubt by God's will, was suggested to those same magi, that they should go to their own country, but by another way, not the one by which they had come: it means that they should not walk in their former sect. It was not that Herod might not pursue them, for he did not pursue them, not even knowing that they had departed by another way, since he did not know the way they had come either. So we ought to understand the “way” as sect and discipline. The magi, then, were commanded to walk otherwise from then on. So too that other kind of magic, which works by miracles and even rivalled Moses, God's patience let run on until the gospel. For from then on Simon Magus, too, already a believer, because he was still thinking something of his juggling sect, namely to buy among the miracles of his profession the Holy Spirit too through the laying on of hands, was cursed by the apostles and cast out of the faith; and another magus, who was with Sergius Paulus, because he opposed those same apostles, was punished with the loss of his sight. The astrologers too, I believe, would have met the same fate, if any had come across the apostles. Yet when magic is punished, of which astrology is a species, surely the species is condemned in the genus. After the gospel you will nowhere find sophists, Chaldeans, enchanters, diviners, or magi, except as plainly punished. “Where is the wise man, where the scribe, where the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?” You know nothing, astrologer, if you did not know that you would become a Christian. If you knew it, you ought also to have known that you would have nothing to do with that profession. It, which foretells the critical years of others, should have told you of its own danger. You have neither part nor lot in that system. He cannot hope for the kingdom of heaven whose finger or pointer abuses heaven.