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Liber III · Black & White Magic

Liber III · Black & White Magic · Chapter VIII: Theories of Magic

The Paris Condemnation of 1277: Tempier, Philosophy and Magic

The Paris condemnation of 1277: Bishop Tempier's 219 propositions, the banned books of necromancy and geomancy, astrology, and medieval fears of magic.

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The Paris condemnation of 1277 was a decree issued on 7 March 1277 by Étienne Tempier, bishop of Paris, which forbade the teaching of 219 philosophical and theological propositions at the University of Paris on pain of excommunication. Its prologue also condemned a treatise on love, a book of geomancy and all books, rolls and booklets of necromancy, sorcery and the invocation of demons. Historians treat it as the most important episode of doctrinal censorship in the medieval university and as a revealing witness to clerical anxiety about learned magic.

The Paris Condemnation of 1277 in Context§

By the middle of the thirteenth century the University of Paris had absorbed almost the whole corpus of Aristotle together with the great Arabic commentaries, above all those of Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and Avicenna (Ibn Sina). These works offered a powerful, self-contained account of nature and the soul, and some masters of the arts faculty, notably Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia, taught Aristotle's conclusions with a boldness that alarmed the theologians. Some of those conclusions, such as the eternity of the world or the existence of a single intellect shared by all human beings, could not be reconciled with Christian doctrine. For the wider background see our article on Islamic philosophy, whose texts lay at the heart of the dispute.

Tempier had already acted once. On 10 December 1270 he condemned thirteen propositions associated with this radical Aristotelianism. The problem did not go away, and on 18 January 1277 Pope John XXI, himself a former Paris master better known as the logician Peter of Spain, wrote to the bishop asking him to find out who was spreading errors and to report back. Tempier went further than the pope requested. Within weeks he had assembled a commission of theologians, reportedly sixteen in number, among them Henry of Ghent, and issued his own sweeping condemnation without waiting for Rome.

The magical and divinatory material in the decree belongs to a longer story. Theologians had inherited from Augustine's City of God the view that magic rested on pacts with demons, while the new translations from Arabic brought image magic, astrology and books of spirits into Latin libraries.

Bishop Tempier and the 219 Propositions§

The decree is a long, poorly ordered list, probably compiled in haste from several sources and sometimes out of context. In 1908 the Dominican historian Pierre Mandonnet rearranged the list by subject, and his numbering was widely used until Roland Hissette's detailed study of 1977 and David Piché's critical edition of 1999 returned attention to the original order.

The condemned propositions fall into several groups:

  • The eternity and necessity of the world: that the world and the human race had no beginning, that God cannot make more than one world, or that God could not have created anything new.
  • The intellect and the soul: that there is one intellect for all humanity, or that the soul separated from the body cannot suffer from fire.
  • God's power: that God cannot do what is impossible according to nature, such as move the outermost heaven in a straight line, because a vacuum would be left behind.
  • Ethics and the philosopher's life: that there is no more excellent state than to devote oneself to philosophy, that the only wise men in the world are the philosophers, or that happiness is found in this life and not another.

The prologue complains of scholars who claimed that certain things were "true according to philosophy but not according to the Catholic faith, as if there were two contrary truths". This passage gave rise to the later label of a "double truth" doctrine, though historians doubt that any master actually defended such a position in those terms.

A few propositions touched positions held by Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274). Eleven days later, on 18 March 1277, Archbishop Robert Kilwardby condemned thirty propositions at Oxford, some bearing on Thomist teaching.

Books of Necromancy, Geomancy and Love Condemned§

The part of the decree that matters most to the history of magic is its prologue. Alongside the philosophical errors, Tempier condemned the book De amore (also called De Deo amoris) of Andreas Capellanus, a twelfth-century treatise on courtly love; a book of geomancy beginning with the words Existimaverunt Indi ("The Indians held"); and books, rolls or quires of necromancy, or containing experiments of sorcery, invocations of demons or conjurations hazardous to souls. Anyone who taught or listened to such material was excommunicated.

The mention of a named geomancy is striking. Geomancy, divination by figures of points, had entered Latin from Arabic in the twelfth century; singling out one treatise suggests it circulated among Paris students, though the text cannot be identified with certainty.

The phrase about "rolls" and "quires" is equally telling. Ritual magic in this period circulated in small, portable booklets and scrolls rather than in grand codices, and the authorities clearly knew it. The necromancy of the Middle Ages, meaning above all the conjuration of demons, was largely a clerical art practised by literate men with access to Latin texts. Works such as the Sworn Book of Honorius (see the catalogue entry) and the Latin Solomonic books show the kind of material that circulated in this milieu.

Astrology, Determinism and the Power of the Stars§

Running through the list are propositions about celestial influence. The commissioners condemned the claims that the human will is necessarily moved by the heavens, that a person's character and fate are fixed at birth by the constellations, that the heavenly bodies govern all events below including the rise and fall of religions, and that after a vast cycle of years (the "great year") all things would return to the same state. They also condemned naturalistic accounts of prophecy and visions, and claims that certain signs could reveal hidden intentions or future events.

None of this amounted to a rejection of astrology as such. Medieval theologians generally accepted that the stars influenced bodies, weather, health and temperament; what they rejected was celestial determinism, which seemed to abolish free will and divine providence. The line between natural astrology and illicit magic was much debated in these decades. The Speculum astronomiae ("Mirror of Astronomy"), usually dated to the 1260s and traditionally attributed to Albertus Magnus, though its authorship is still disputed, distinguished acceptable astronomical images from "abominable" ones that involved suffumigations, invocations and characters addressed to spirits. The same distinction lies behind later medieval debate over astral magic and the Latin Picatrix, translated in Castile only two decades before the Paris decree.

Learned Magic and Clerical Anxiety after 1277§

The condemnation established a pattern. In 1398 the theology faculty of Paris, under the chancellorship of Jean Gerson, condemned twenty-eight articles concerning magic, attacking the claims of ritual magicians that they could command spirits through holy names, purity and prayer without implicitly serving demons. In the fourteenth century the papacy of John XXII issued its own measures against invocation of demons, and inquisitors' manuals increasingly treated learned ritual magic as heresy. The arguments of theologians on these matters are surveyed in how theologians judged demonic magic.

At the same time, the steady stream of magical manuscripts copied in the following century, including the great compilations of the fourteenth century, shows that censorship did not stop interest. Richard Kieckhefer, Frank Klaassen and Jean-Patrice Boudet have shown that clerics continued to read and copy books of image magic and spirit conjuration, sometimes justifying them as pious or natural, sometimes concealing them.

Legacy: Duhem, Science and Historical Debate§

In the early twentieth century the French physicist and historian Pierre Duhem argued that the condemnation of 1277 marked the birth of modern science. By forcing philosophers to admit that God could do things Aristotle declared impossible, such as create a vacuum or several worlds, the decree, he claimed, freed natural philosophy to imagine alternatives. Later historians, including Edward Grant, accepted that the condemnation encouraged speculation about possible worlds and divine omnipotence, but most now regard Duhem's thesis as greatly overstated.

Other scholars stress the decree's limited legal force: it applied only in the diocese of Paris, and in 1325 Bishop Étienne de Bourret revoked it insofar as it touched the teaching of Thomas Aquinas, who had been canonised two years earlier. For historians of magic its importance lies elsewhere: it is one of the clearest official statements that books of necromancy and geomancy were circulating among university men, and that the Church regarded them as a threat comparable to heretical philosophy. Its anxieties recur throughout later theories of magic.

Frequently asked questions§

What was condemned in Paris in 1277?§

Bishop Étienne Tempier condemned 219 propositions taught or discussed in the University of Paris, mostly concerning Aristotelian philosophy, the eternity of the world, the intellect, free will and God's power. The prologue also banned a book on love, a book of geomancy, and books of necromancy and demonic invocation.

Did the 1277 condemnation ban astrology?§

No. It condemned astrological determinism, the claims that the stars necessarily govern the will and fix human destiny, but not the general belief that heavenly bodies influence the physical world. That more moderate astrology remained part of medicine and natural philosophy.

Was Thomas Aquinas condemned in 1277?§

Some propositions resembled positions held by Aquinas, and a separate Oxford condemnation of the same month touched Thomist teaching more directly. After his canonisation in 1323, the bishop of Paris revoked the 1277 condemnation in 1325 insofar as it concerned Thomas's doctrine.

Why does the condemnation of 1277 matter for the history of magic?§

It is official evidence that books of necromancy, sorcery and geomancy circulated among Paris scholars in the thirteenth century. It also shows theologians linking natural philosophy, astrology and magic as related threats, a pattern that shaped later condemnations such as the Paris articles of 1398.

Sources and further reading§