Yıldızlar, Erdem ve İrade Üzerine

Meanwhile, their most powerful and vehement argument against us is their claim that, according to the principles of this art, all the duties of virtue are removed from human affairs. If temperance, fortitude, prudence, and justice are granted by the decrees of the stars and not by our own wills, then we no longer depend on the constant practice of virtue, but solely on the influences of the stars. On the contrary, if someone breaks the bond of society and charity, neglects the laws of human reconciliation, and hands himself over entirely to ferocity and treachery following his own crime and the perverse desires of his mind, he may ascribe it to the judgments of the stars. Let him be unjust, treacherous, malevolent, and irreligious, because a bad constellation of Mercury with Mars performs these vices; he may then attribute the vice not to himself, but to the stars that impel him.

Why then do we strengthen our minds with the pursuit of fortitude; why, formed by an upright spirit, a lofty constancy, and the discipline of the divine virtues, do we scorn death and pain when placed in bitter circumstances—if, even without our seeking it, the Sun grants us the praise of glory and the insignia of the highest dignity only through a favorable conjunction with Jupiter?

In vain, then, do we restrain the faults of an erring mind by counsel and reason; in vain do we temper the luxurious enticements of desire; in vain, moved by gravity, do we seek out the moderation and rights of justice—if Mercury, tempered by the good rays of Jupiter and the Moon, inflames us toward the desires and appetites belonging to that very virtue.

They approach individual men, too, with this same argument: 'In vain, good man, do you hold the desire to choose good things and flee evil ones! Why do you arm yourself with honest foresight and the support of diligence, if all of this is granted to you not by knowledge but by Saturn or Jupiter? Let us, if it seems right, despise the gods, and with the sacrilegious ardor of despair let us profane the sacred and venerable rites of religion!

Why do you invoke the gods, farmer? Without the care of your deity, the furrow of the field is leveled all the same by its own nature. You who set your rows of olive trees in careful order across the open ridges—in vain do you devote the young vine-shoots to your Liber with pious trembling, since, without the protection of any divinity, they are granted or denied solely by the course of the stars.

You who publish laws and ratify statutes, abolish the decrees, tear up the tablets, and free us from these harshest punishments: it is Mercury, as the astrologers claim, who made that man sacrilegious; Venus who made him an adulterer; the star of Mars that armed him for the killing of men. It is Mercury, too, who compels him to falsify records, to mix poisons, and even to rouse with wicked incantations the untroubled souls of the dead already purified by the forgetfulness of the river Lethe.

See how one man burns with incestuous passions, another you see clinging to the embrace of boys: we attribute the cause of so great an evil to Mars or to Venus. That man was struck down without cause by the executioner's hand at your command; sentence was passed on him by the magistrate—yet if he was compelled to sin not by his own will but by the vicious radiation of the stars, then you, magistrates, have no just ground for punishment, since you know that we are forever driven to these vices by the malignant kindling of the stars.'

These and other arguments of a similar kind they compose, asking further whether we should say the stars are living or lifeless beings, so that, thrown into confusion by the outcome of this question, we can scarcely produce any judgment or opinion of our own; for whatever answer is given, they twist it to the contrary with the barbs of their syllogisms, so that the response of whoever answers is forced, constrained, to agree with their own conclusion.