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A thirteenth-century dilemma
The re-assimilation of Aristotle’s works and the translation of Avicenna’s
Metaphysics in the thirteenth century reinvigorated the matter of the
animated universe. Albertus Magnus was aware of the Arabic sources
that advocated the animation of the heavens. He writes in In Secundum
sententiarum that Aristotle, Avicenna, Averroes, Algazel, Alpharabi,
Albumasar and Maimonides say that there are three movers: God is the
First Cause; then there is the intelligence which desires God and acts
as the immobile mover of its own orbit; the third is the Universal Soul
which directs the motion of the intellectual orb to move the rest of the
heavens and also to deploy the ideas in the Intellect as forms in the pro-
cess of generation.
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Albertus himself seems to accept this view in his
commentary on the Liber de causis. He distinguishes between the celes-
tial intellects and souls and ascribes an intellect and soul to each of the
celestial spheres.
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The celestial bodies require the existence of moving
principles from which they receive their regularity and uniformity. This
must be the intellect which is their immovable mover, and the soul,
their proximate mover.
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The celestial soul, unlike the celestial intellect,
is conjoined to the celestial body and is the principle of its life and
motion; it also distributes the forms she receives from the intellect in
composite bodies.
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Albertus in this instance incorporates the soul and
the intellect in astral causality and generation which he found in the
works of Abu Ma‘shar where the motion of the planets and stars is con-
sidered responsible for the union of form and matter although without
explaining exactly by what means it achieves this. Furthermore, Albertus
posits that the celestial soul performs this causal mediation by means of
an intellectual light, bringing to mind the rays of al-Kindi that act as the
threads which make up the tapestry of the cosmos and actualize all of
its existents.
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In his commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Albertus is care-
ful in maintaining orthodoxy by qualifying the meaning of ‘animation’
itself and the soul as a celestial animating principle. Echoing the passage
from Aristotle’s Metaphysics concerning myths as inspired relics, Albertus
writes that divine intellects were considered gods due to the universal-
ity of their causation and regularity; however, they are everlasting in
Celestial Souls and Cosmic Daemons
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God but not gods themselves.
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Albertus stresses that the heavens are
not alive in the same way a terrestrial animal is. In the animal, the
soul is the perfection and actualization of its body, but in the case of
a planet or star it is a separate substance – an intellect – that effects
things essentially and receives its power ultimately from God, the first
cause and first mover.
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Thus, he contradicts Avicenna to whom the
celestial soul is a non-separate substance. Albertus has this distinction
in mind when he declares in De quatuor coaequaevis that the soul of the
heavens must be understood metaphorically,
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the life-principle merely
likened to the souls of terrestrial creatures. Another restriction he places
on animation is a rejection of Avicenna’s attribution of an imaginative
faculty to the celestials, ‘that is, an imaged representation of particu-
lars and a willing of particular [things]’.
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This is declared monstrous by
Albertus in his On Minerals; ‘for what he [Avicenna] calls imagination is
not at all fitting for the heavenly intelligences unless they have thoughts
other than those displayed in the motion of the heavens and the qual-
ities of the elements’.
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In the Speculum astronomiae, it seems that the
heavens are stripped of animation altogether. God is living but the heav-
ens themselves are not; God only operates through created things and
uses the stars as instruments mute and deaf. However, we must under-
stand Albertus’s denial of ‘life’ to the celestial bodies in the context of
the aforementioned restrictions on the type of animation they receive.
In the Speculum he concedes that God ordered it so that the intellect,
which is supercelestial, guides the soul, in moving inferior things. The
celestial soul here, rational only without corporeal and sensible faculties,
is not denied but it is not seen as an actualization of or resident in the
celestial body though having an affinity with it.
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So, intellects receive
divinity from their supercelestial position, eternally apprehending God
only, and the celestial bodies are animated only by a rational psychic
force, functioning in obedience to God free from sense and imagination
which are faculties belonging to the souls of the terrestrial creatures.
In the context of the Speculum itself, stripping the celestial bodies of
an inherent psychic agency is necessary in order to firmly legitimize
astronomical talismans which ‘obtain virtue solely from the celestial
figure’ without demonic interference, and to remain distant from the
addressative ‘abominable’ and ‘detestable’ kinds of magical practices.
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The illicit magics of Albertus can be classified under the ‘nefarious
art’ that Aquinas mentions in Summa theologica. It is defined as ‘con-
structed images which produce certain effects by the power of demons’.
This includes the god-making statues of Hermes which were objects of
worship. He also condemns the theurgic practices of Platonists directed
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