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Food for Thought
The Comet Cometh
Tim Madigan hears Pierre Bayle’s 17th century plea for religious toleration.
“Comets, importing change of times and states,
Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky,
And with them scourge the bad revolting stars
That have consented unto Henry’s death!
King Henry the Fifth, too famous to live long!
England ne’er lost a king of so much worth.”– Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part One
Recently the night sky has been filled with meteors and asteroids coming uncomfortably close to the Earth, or even landing on us, as the Chelyabinsk meteor in Russia did in February 2013. Comet Lovejoy (or C/2011 W3 for the less romantic) fascinated stargazers for much of 2011 and beyond. But just what do such celestial sightings mean? Are they portents of things to come, messages from an angry God telling us to repent, or perhaps auguries of doom?
In his 1683 work, Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet, French philosopher Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) tackled these very questions head-on, poking fun at popular superstitions connected with panic over objects in the sky. Like an anti-Chicken Little, he argued that all such appearances must have a natural basis, and should not be interpreted as any more than that.
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