JEROME CARDAN 221 



waiting in Milan for the appointment as Professor at 

 Bologna, Cardan submitted his books to the Congrega- 

 tion of the Index for approval. He was known to be 

 a fellow-citizen and friend of the reigning Pope : the 

 corpus of his work had by that time reached a por- 

 tentous size, wherefore it is quite possible that the official 

 readers may have been lenient, or cursory, over their 

 work ; but when Pius V., the strenuous ascetic foe of 

 heresy, stepped into the place of the indolent Pius IV., 

 jurist and politician rather than Churchman, it is more 

 than probable that certain amateurinquisitors at Bologna, 

 fully as anxious to work Cardan's ruin as to safeguard 

 the faith, may have busied themselves in hunting through 

 his various works for passages upon which to base a 

 charge of unorthodoxy. Such passages were not hard 

 to find. There was the horoscope of Jesus Christ, which 

 subsequently affronted the piety of De Thou. There 

 was the passage already noticed in which he said such 

 hard things of the Dominicans (De Varietate Rerum, 

 1557, p. 572). He had indeed disclaimed it, but there 

 it stood unexpunged in the subsequent editions of the 

 book ; and, while considering this detail, it may be re- 

 marked that Pius V. began his career as a member of 

 the Dominican Order, the practices of which Cardan had 

 impugned. In the first and second editions of the De 

 Subtilitate was another passage in which the tenets of 

 Islam and the circumstances of the birth of Christ were 

 handled in a way which caused grave scandal and offence. 1 



1 " Alii multis diebus abstinent cibo, alii igne uruntur, ac ferro 

 secantur, nullum doloris vestigium preferentes ; multi sunt vocem 

 e pectore mittentes, qui olim engastrimuthi dicebantur ; hoc autem 

 maxime eis contingit cum orgia quaedam exercent, atque circum- 

 feruntur in orbem. Quas tria ut verissima sunt et natural! ratione 

 mira tamen constant, cujus superius mentionem fecimus, ita illud 

 confictum nasci pueros e mulieribus absque concubitu." De Sub- 

 tilitate, p. 353. 



