First, if faith in the very person who is to heal is required for the production of the effect, as, for example, believing that this man can heal.
Second, if the effect is attributed to magical images, figures, seals, characters, the words themselves, rhyme, touch, and so forth, and not to God. We discussed these things in the first book, and in them for the most part there is incantation and mortal sin.
Third, if someone uses certain prayers or sayings, even sacred ones, or pious works, in vain matters and in things not directly or indirectly pertaining to the worship and honor of God. I say “indirectly” when the matters are not vain because they are useful to neighbors, as bringing health either to them or to ourselves. In matters of this kind it could sometimes happen that, although we do not know the reason or beginning of some practice, nevertheless some holy man instituted it and obtained from God the grace of this efficacy.
Therefore, in such matters, if someone applies them from mere devotion and expects healing from God alone, he would surely refer this indirectly to the honor of God, the author of every miraculous healing, and the one who promised healings to the prayer, faith, and fasting of Christians.
[margin: St. Thomas, Secunda Secundae, question 96, article 1; Alexander of Hales, second part, question on sortilege; Ciruelo’s Spanish work against superstition]
This, unless I am mistaken, was the opinion of Cajetan, who writes as follows: “The fourth superstition is that of observations in sacred words or things carried, spoken, or used, with certain conditions attached which are not evil but whose reason is unknown. For example, those suffering from contraction of the nerves, after a coin has first been offered to Christ crucified in Paraclete, use as a remedy a ring made from it, and so in similar cases. So far as appears, superstition intervenes in such things, because the conditions appear vain. Yet if they are done from mere devotion, and if they intend and expect the effect from God alone, thinking that God inspired such conditions in some holy man, I do not dare condemn it, but it seems tolerable to me.”
Thus Cajetan. I embrace his opinion only to this extent: I think a distinction must be made between before the fact and after the fact. As regards someone asking advice whether it would be lawful for him to do such things, I would altogether advise him to desist; indeed I would answer that it is not lawful. Since God, according to ordinary law, is not accustomed to inspire in the saints conditions of this kind, in which some appearance of vanity is present, it is rash to persuade oneself of any such thing, and at least the thing is considered suspect by law. For that reason, too, a person who has been warned is bound to avoid it.
But if someone, after the thing has been done in good faith and with the opinion Cajetan describes, and who had never been warned about it, either confessed it or sought advice, I would not dare condemn him for past sin. Still, I would advise him to abstain in the future.
If you ask whether, strictly speaking, it is vain observance, I answer that at the very least it bears a very likely appearance of it. Let this be said once for all concerning this doctrine of Cajetan, which is useful, as I have said, for the consolation of many after the fact, and should be considered in most of the particular cases that follow, in which manifest evil or the deformity of sin does not appear.
Fourth, to expect or seek doubtful indulgences, remissions of sins, and the attainment of a desired thing through fixed fasts and certain prayers, which for that reason are contained in certain little books condemned by Pope Pius V, is vain observance.
But to acquire knowledge by infusion, without human labor, through fixed fasts and prayers according to the institutions of a certain art, belongs to the first species of magic. For it is done from an express pact with a demon, and it is mortal sin. They call this art the Notory Art. It was condemned at Paris in the year 1320. St. Thomas writes of it in the place just cited, and so do Alexander of Hales and others. Among them, Ciruelo, in a Spanish work but with accuracy, argued to this conclusion.
Certain people claim to be self-taught. They imagine that, without any labor, reading, hearing, teacher, or study, they can obtain in a very short time, by divine inspiration alone, knowledge of all divine and human things, provided only that certain ceremonies are observed. They falsely say that Solomon, relying on this art, acquired wisdom in the space of one night and gathered the method of this art into a little book which they circulate. The narrative of sacred Scripture in Third Kings 3 refutes them concerning Solomon’s attainment of wisdom. The book is a mere fabrication. Nor do the artificers of the fable agree among themselves about it. They agree only in this, that they all hand down certain rites, though various ones, which in appearance are pious and acceptable to God.
The more common method is of this kind. At the beginning it orders the disciple to wash away the stains of his whole life by general confession and to communicate frequently; whenever he falls into any sin, he must confess it on the same day at once; he must diligently observe the fasts prescribed by the Church, and add other voluntary days besides, especially every Friday, when it is lawful to use nothing but bread and water; and each day he must offer the seven psalms and certain prayers.
All these things are to be observed exactly for seven weeks, and during that time a person must abstain entirely from every tumult and thought of worldly business. When these things have been completed, the little book prescribes other formulas of prayers then to be uttered, and displays certain figures then to be adored. It also fixes certain hours at which these prayers and acts of adoration are to be performed: namely, the first seven days of the new moon, each day as the sun itself rises.
After these rites have been carried out three times through three new moons, the man must choose for himself some day on which he is more devout and more suited to receiving inspiration. Then, at the third hour, he must place himself alone in a church or some oratory, or in the middle of some field, with knees bent on the ground, hands and eyes lifted to heaven, and first pronounce three times the first verse of the hymn “Come, Holy Spirit.” When he has done this, he will suddenly be filled with all knowledge, no less than Solomon, the prophets, and the apostles, so much so that he himself will be amazed at so sudden a change of himself, as though he had passed into an angel or another man.
You have all the mysteries of this art. In them, what should I wonder at first? The stupidity of those who ascribe these rites to Solomon? Did he know Friday, or our confession of sins, or Eucharistic reception, or the hymn “Come, Holy Spirit”? Or should I rather wonder at the blasphemy that suggests such a thing about Solomon, the prophets, and the apostles? Or at the sacrilegious audacity which, by the height of hypocrisy, so abuses things most holy? For they offer this worship and this whole apparatus of adoration to the Devil. They offer sacred prayers and the sacraments of the Church to the one into whose service they are initiated.
These ruined men expose both body and soul at once to manifest danger of destruction. Ciruelo testifies that many who devote themselves to this art have suffered the loss of both lives. Some known to him, he says, were lifted by the Devil into the air by a whirlwind, carried everywhere across the earth, and so afflicted that for the whole course of their life they labored under incurable sickness. This was a sign of divine mercy, wishing them to pay in this life the penalties for so atrocious a crime. Others, for whom some result answered their very wicked attempt, seem to him to have had a worse lot, since God justly permitted this for their greater blindness and damnation.
Concerning these people it must be known that no true knowledge is infused into them by the demon. He cannot do this by way of true infusion, as was said in Book II, question 4. Rather, he is accustomed, by besieging or possessing them, to speak through them, disturbing their phantasy and moving their tongue so that they utter certain things unknown and hidden to them. He is accustomed to do the same when witches after ecstasy recount wonderful things which they think they have seen, heard, or done in very remote places, when in truth they were not moved from their place.
An evident sign of this matter is that, when the demon leaves these self-taught initiates of his, none of the knowledge remains to them. They do not even remember the things they had said a little before. Then, by the best right, this art is condemned because it uses ceremonies not instituted for this effect, which is always suspect; it observes days and hours that have no relevance to this; it orders those figures to be adored, which are neither of God nor of the saints, but vain and magical.
Those to whom God wishes to infuse knowledge, he does so without any prescribed rites. He formerly infused it in a few, today perhaps in none. This art contends that knowledge is infused only when all things have been kept exactly to the rule, and indeed to all people if they observe them. Therefore the one who infuses is not God, nor a good angel, but the Devil. They offer prayers to the Devil, adore the Devil, fast for the Devil, and will have the Devil as their rewarder. John Baptist Segnius writes more against this in chapter 7 of On True Christian Study.
[margin: Ciruelo, On Superstition, part 3, chapter 1; Book II, question 4 of the present work; John Baptist Segnius, On True Christian Study, chapters 7-9]
There are various branches or shoots of this vanity. One they call the Pauline art, because they pretend that it was handed down by God to blessed Paul when he was in ecstasy, and that the apostle handed it down to posterity. What could be called more foolish, more wicked, more blasphemous?
I find another art, though I do not know whether I should call it a species of the Notory Art. For it agrees with it in many things, yet differs in this: they say the Notory Art is done by way of sudden infusion, but this one otherwise. They call it the art of spirits, or the angelic art, by which they say a person receives, whenever he wishes, knowledge of all the things he wishes to know, by the ministry of the guardian angel or of other good angels.
They hand down two species of it: one obscure, which is done by way of elevation, passage, rapture, or ecstasy; another clear, by which they say it is done when angels appear in visible form with an assumed body and converse pleasantly. Perhaps Cardano used this when he disputed with those three spirits who followed Averroes. But this art is in fact nothing other than impious Goetia, or white magic, of which we spoke in Book I. Nor are these angels any others than attendant demons, striving eagerly to procure the deception and destruction of human beings.
The impious falsity of the art is clearer than daylight, because all its formulas are mere conjurations or adjurations by which those spirits are forced into service. Yet it is established that good angels neither are adjured nor wish to be adjured, but wish and ought to be honored and implored by prayers. John Baptist Segnius also wrote against this vanity in chapters 8 and 9 of the same little work.
From this it is clear what should be thought of those who boast that they have a spirit by whom all things are taught to them, as a certain magician of Parma used to say, or that they are endowed with and directed by a certain spirit so powerful that they can even command other people’s imaginations, as that Maltese impostor was reported to have been accustomed to boast in these very years in Brabant. Plainly they have struck a covenant with death and belong most manifestly to the tribe of necromancers.