Three Attitudes Toward Astrology: Rabelais, Montaigne, and Pontus de Tyard

Burckhardt has remarked that during the Renaissance culture and enlightenment were almost powerless against astrology, kept alive as it was by the ardent imagination of the people, and their passionate wish to penetrate the future. But what he calls the “delusion” of astral influence charmed even the cultured and enlightened, and for rather more complex reasons than he suggests. The modern scholar, in analyzing Renaissance trends, tends to denounce the mind that surrenders to such influences in a rationalist atmosphere. A belief in the occult powers of the stars over Man did not, however, necessarily betray intellectual backwardness, nor was disbelief a proof of great enlightenment. Astrology, though often tolerated by princes of the Church, generally incurred the censure of theologians, and such a fatalistic belief, denying free will and granting powers of revelation to stars named for pagan dieties, appeared to the clerical mind as an incitement to idolatry. In many cases, then, the opponents of the art were conformists, not rebels—nor were they immune to superstition. Even so formidable an enemy of the stars as Pico della Mirandola toyed with magic and the cabala, and often directed his attack at science in general. On the other hand, such a champion of astrology as Mellin de Saint-Gelays argued that Man should remain unhindered in his desire to fathom the mysterious forces of the universe. If man remains earthbound, never lifting eyes or mind heavenward, wrote Mellin, he will sink to a level beneath all earthly creatures instead of becoming their master. For the French poet, prediction by the stars is not the chief purpose of the true astrologer, but a mere accessory of his earthly and heavenly researches. Such a defense of astrology as this stems from a reluctance to forbid any phase of Man's activity in the search for truth, an attitude which, though uncritical, remains consistent with the rationalistic spirit.