at the Commentary he would have discovered that Cardan especially guarded
himself against any accusation of this sort, by setting down that no one
was to believe he had any intention of asserting that Christ's divinity,
or His miracles, or His holy life, or the promulgation of His laws were in
any way influenced by the stars.[283] Naude, in recording the censures of
De Thou, "Verum extremae amentiae fuit, imo impiae audaciae, astrorum
commentitiis legibus verum astrorum dominum velle subjicere. Quod ille
tamen exarata Servatoris nostri genitura fecit," and of Joseph Scaliger,
"impiam dicam magis, an jocularem audaciam quae et dominum stellarum
stellis subjecerit, et natum eo tempore putarit, quod adhuc in lite
positum est, ut vanitas cum impietate certaret,"[284] declares that it was
chiefly from the publication of this horoscope that Cardan incurred the
suspicion of blasphemy; but, with his free-thinking bias, abstains from
adding his own censure. He rates Scaliger for ignorance because he was
evidently under the impression that Cardan was the first to draw a
horoscope of Christ, and attacks Cardan chiefly on the score of plagiary.
He records how divers writers in past times had done the same thing.
Albumasar, one of the most learned of the Arabs, whose _thema natalium_ is
quoted by Roger Bacon in one of his epistles to Clement V., Albertus
Magnus, Peter d'Ailly the Cardinal of Cambrai, and Tiberius Russilanus who
lived in the time of Leo X., all constructed nativities of Christ, but
Cardan makes no mention of these horoscopists, and, according to the view
of Naude, poses as the inventor of this form of impiety, and is
consequently guilty of literary dishonesty, a worse sin, in his critics'
eyes, than the framing of the horoscope itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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