Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
We notice that among the trades there are also certain professions liable to idolatry. Of astrologers there is scarcely need even to speak. But because a certain someone lately came forward to argue that he was entitled to go on practicing that art, let me offer a brief reply. I will not dwell on the fact that astrology does homage to the idols whose names it has stamped across the heavens, handing over to them the entire authority that belongs to God — so that men, supposing there is then no need to search after God, imagine themselves ruled instead by the fixed sentence of the stars. I will urge only this single point: that those very stars are runaways from God, besotted with mortal women, the traitors who first betrayed this prying art, and are for that very reason under God's condemnation. O divine sentence, pursuing its point clear down to earth, to which even the ignorant bear witness! Astrologers are expelled, just as their angels were; the City and Italy are barred to astrologers, just as heaven is barred to their angels. Exile is the same penalty for both pupils and masters. But — it will be said — the magi came from the east, and were astrologers too. We know there is a partnership between magic and astrology. So then, it was the first interpreters of the stars who announced the newborn Christ, the first who brought him gifts. By this act, I suppose, they bound Christ to themselves. What of it? Will the religion of those magi therefore now stand as patron to astrologers as well? Is mathematics today, then, about Christ — does it watch and proclaim the stars of Christ, not of Saturn and Mars and whichever other member of that same company of the dead? But this science, it is said, was allowed only up until the gospel, so that once Christ had appeared, no one thereafter should read anyone's nativity from the sky. For indeed that frankincense and myrrh and gold were offered then to the infant Lord precisely as the closing act of the old sacrificial system and worldly glory — the very thing Christ was about to take away. For that reason,
God's will without a doubt prompted those same magi, by a dream, to go back to their own country by another way, not the one they had come by — that is, so that they would not walk their old path again; not so that Herod would not pursue them, for he did not pursue them, being ignorant even that they had left by a different route, since he did not know the route by which they had come either. So thoroughly ought we to understand "road" as meaning sect and discipline. The magi, then, were commanded to walk differently from then on. So too that other branch of magic, the one that works by miracles — even though it had rivaled Moses — the patience of God dragged it along all the way to the gospel. For from that point on, even Simon Magus, though already professedly a believer, since he still had some notion left over from his charlatan sect — namely, to hawk the Holy Spirit for sale among the miracles of his profession, by the imposition of hands upon them — found himself denounced by the apostles and thrown out of the faith entirely. And that second sorcerer, who set himself against the apostles before Sergius Paulus, paid for it with blindness. Astrologers, I suspect, would tell the same story, had fortune ever thrown them into the apostles' path. But once magic itself is punished — and astrology is only a limb of magic — then plainly the whole family stands condemned along with that one member. Once the gospel had come, nowhere thereafter will you find sophists, Chaldeans, enchanters, diviners, or magicians, save as men openly undergoing punishment. Where, then, is your wise man now, your scholar, your inquirer after this present age? Has God not turned the wisdom of this world into foolishness? You knew nothing, astrologer, if you failed to foresee your own conversion to Christ. And supposing you had foreseen it, you should equally have grasped this further point: that this trade would leave you with no future at all. The very art that foretells other men's fatal turning-points should have warned you of your own danger. You have no part nor lot in this reckoning. No one whose finger or wand traffics in the sky can hope for the kingdom of heaven.
X.