He lays down the old cometary
superstition as one of the foundations of orthodox teaching:
Begging the question, after the fashion of his time, he argues
that comets can not be stars, because new stars always betoken
good, while comets betoken evil.
The same teaching was given in the Catholic universities of the
Netherlands. Fromundus, at Louvain, the enemy of Galileo,
steadily continued his crusade against all cometary heresy.[105]
[105] For Vossius, see the De Idololatria (in his Opera, vol. v,
pp. 283-285). For Torreblanc, see his De Magia, Seville, 1618,
and often reprinted. For Fromundus, see his Meteorologica.
But a still more striking case is seen in Italy. The reverend
Father Augustin de Angelis, rector of the Clementine College at
Rome, as late as 1673, after the new cometary theory had been
placed beyond reasonable doubt, and even while Newton was working
out its final demonstration, published a third edition of his
Lectures on Meteorology. It was dedicated to the Cardinal of
Hesse, and bore the express sanction of the Master of the Sacred
Palace at Rome and of the head of the religious order to which De
Angelis belonged. This work deserves careful analysis, not only
as representing the highest and most approved university teaching
of the time at the centre of Roman Catholic Christendom, but
still more because it represents that attempt to make a
compromise between theology and science, or rather the attempt to
confiscate science to the uses of theology, which we so
constantly find whenever the triumph of science in any field has
become inevitable.
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