History, Prophecy, and the Stars: The Christian Astrology of Pierre d'Ailly, 1350-1420 by

Laura Ackerman Smoller

Review by: Robert E. Lerner
The Journal of Religion, Vol. 76, No. 4 (Oct., 1996), pp. 655-656
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1206207 .
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 Book Reviews
There are, of course, no faultless works created by man, and Davis's study is no
exception. There are several minor errors and cases of incomplete information in
the sections dealing with the prewar and pre-Revolutionary periods, which we
shall ignore as that is not the main subject of the book. But there are some prob-
lems with the most recent past as well, of secondary nature, to be sure. Thus, his
explanation of the change in Stalin's church policies after 1948 misses the crucial
point of the failure of the 1948 pan-Orthodox conference in Moscow to turn the
Moscow Patriarchate into the new center of Orthodoxy in place of Constantino-
ple. Then, discussing Chernenko's repressive religious policies and presenting in
contrast Gorbachev's religious policy in a positive light, Davis fails to note that
the man in charge of ideology, hence also of the religious policies, under Cher-
nenko was Gorbachev, which then makes Gorbachev's 1985-86 moves to rekindle
and rejuvenate active state atheism logical and self-explanatory. Contrary to Dav-
is's and Nikita Struve's assertions, there were no reductions in clergy's income
tax levels after World War II, not until January 1981.
Now, turning to the most recent events, of the 1990s, it appears that Davis has
somewhat inflated views on the so-called Catacomb or "True Orthodox" move-
ment and on the emigr6 "Russian Church Abroad" (RCA). What has remained of
the former after the mass return of the "catacombers" to the established church
in the 1940s and again after the end of the persecutions in 1988-89 are new
sectarians with a strange mixture of Orthodoxy and various forms of paganism
and the occult. Moreover, most hard-core catacombers have not joined with the
RCA. The latter, on the other hand has failed morally in Russia by attracting, with
only rare exceptions, clergy of very low moral repute. It is surprising that Davis,
who makes no secret of being a religious believer himself and who undoubtedly
is at home with the basic canons of the church, ignores the theologically untenable
intrusion of the RCA onto the canonical territory of the Moscow Patriarchate.
These and some other oversights and debatable statements do not diminish,
however, the overall exceptional quality and informative value of the book, which
should become a priority in the library of anybody seriously interested in the
contemporary history of the peoples of Russia and the Commonwealth of Inde-
pendent States.
DIMITRYV. POSPIELOVSKY, Universityof WesternOntario.

SMOLLER, LAURA ACKERMAN. History,Prophecy,and the Stars: The ChristianAstrology

of Pierre d'Ailly, 1350-1420. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.
xii+231 pp. $35.00 (cloth).

Pierre d'Ailly (1350-1420), natural philosopher, theologian, and ecclesiastical pol-

itician, was one of those who, in Laura Smoller's felicitous formulation, assumed
that the world was in its eleventh hour, yet who still needed to know "how many
minutes were left" (p. 80). Recognizing that d'Ailly wrote about the timing of Last
Things in numerous works whose dates of composition are seldom in question,
that astrology ultimately played a central role in these writings, and that d'Ailly
was a cool-headed personality who never seriously offended mainstream thought,
Smoller posits that a case study of d'Ailly's views on "history, prophecy, and the
stars" ought to be more firmly based than most and might offer new insights into
astrology's late medieval appeal. Her resulting study, consistently thoughtful and
fluently written, attains the first of these goals more fully than the second.
Smoller describes d'Ailly's decades-long pursuit of the "minutes left" problem

655

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The Journal of Religion
scrupulously and minutely. Barring some improbable discovery of a new text, her
work will not have to be repeated. At the beginning of his intellectual career, in
the 1370s and 1380s, d'Ailly's attitude toward astrology as a tool for measuring
time and predicting events was dismissive. Concurrently, during the 1380s, the
malignity of the Great Schism led him to rely on supernaturally inspired proph-
ecy to announce that Antichrist was coming soon; in a sermon of 1385 he said
with hardly any hedging that the exact year would be 1400. Then came a change
of mind. By 1403 d'Ailly appears to have abandoned expectations of an imminent
End, and in a series of treatises written between 1410 and 1414 he employed
astrological reckonings to argue that the world would probably endure for an-
other three and a half centuries. (His new specific date for Antichrist's coming of
1789 has led many an under-subtle modern commentator to deem him "the
prophet of the French Revolution.") Smoller proposes that d'Ailly postponed the
End because of a new commitment to church reform and that he used astrology
as a means for convincing himself and others of a late date after having immersed
himself in the astrological writings of Roger Bacon.
The argument as stated is unexceptionable, but it is not original and could
probably have been developed satisfactorily in an article. D'Ailly's change of mind
regarding astrology has been noticed before (see B. Guenbe, BetweenChurchand
State [Chicago, 1991; original French edition, 1989], pp. 229-30). So too has his
debt to Bacon and his post-1400 commitment to reform in place of apocalpytic
despair. Smoller's detail will prove useful to specialists, but not her filler-long
explanations of how judicial astrology worked, what Saint Augustine thought of
it, how it came into favor in the high Middle Ages, how it was criticized by Oresme
and Langenstein, and so on. (There is still more filler on Joachim of Fiore and
other theologians of history whose thought had no bearing on d'Ailly's; unfortu-
nately the further the author moves away from the subject of astrology the less
sure-footed she is regarding details.) Perhaps most useful to specialists will be
Smoller's account of d'Ailly's late work, the De persecutionibusecclesieof 1418, in
which he drew on both biblical exegesis and astrology to reiterate his position
that the End would not come soon, for she cites from the sole surviving manu-
script rather than relying on Valois's inadequate summary and partial edition.
One wonders, however, why she did not provide a complete edition of this inter-
esting work of moderate length.
Smoller's largest concern is interpreting astrology's status as a late medieval
belief system. On this subject she writes with sensitivity and intelligence. Her ac-
counts of the implicit contradictions between Christianity and astrology are
among the deftest I know. Yet she is continually knocking on an open door when
she insists that for d'Ailly and his contemporaries astrology was a rational under-
taking. The battle between George Sarton and Lynn Thorndike was won at least
a half-century ago by Thorndike. Thus it surprises no one to read in Johannes
Kepler: "The belief in the effect of the constellations derives in the first place
from experience, which is so convincing that it can be denied only by people who
have not experienced it" (cited by A. Koestler, The Sleepwalkers[New York, 1959],
p. 244). As R. W. Southern stated in 1961, "[since] it was believed that the stars
had an influence over human behaviour, astrology offered the finest field for
human thought that could be found" (in A. C. Crombie, ScientificChange [New
York, 1963], p. 302). Smoller has drawn some good charts, so to speak, but has
not discovered a nova.
ROBERTE. LERNER,NorthwesternUniversity.

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