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Fr dear Fr: With Christmas quickly approaching, what is your private take as a private philosopher on the 3 Magi, the 3 Wise men as Astrologers, being one of the First Groups to recognize the baby Jesus as the King of the Jews - What does it means for subjects such as Astrology?

A fine and topical Quaesitum on a subject that has often occurred to many fresh young minds. This one comes from London. The 3 Wise Men are described even in the Jewish-Christian Gospels as 3 Magi, or as the finely crafted hymn goes,"We Three Kings of Orient are, bearing gifts we travel afar." Tradition outside of the Gospels and affirmed by the Infancy narratives of the zone itself has these 3 Magi as travelling kings from the region of the Zoroastrians, a region and population that only just barely managed to survive the lates round of German inspired ethnic cleansing by terror groups such as Isis and A-Qanon in recent years. Germany calling, Germany calling. Right up to the present times, the Zororastrians proudly boast to be the peoples from which the 3 Magi arose to find the young baby Jesus during the nights of the First Christmas, following a star - his star, as we are told mysteriously and almost mythically by the Infancy Narratives. Nowadays the debates and discussions surrounding these 3 Magi often fall between two stools, the Astronomers vs the Astrologers, with one claiming to be a strict observational science, the former, while the other also puts in claims to be saying something important too about the origins of human kings even up to modern times. The distinctions between the two disciplines are very clear cut in the modern debates and in the modern world. But at the time of Jesus no such clarity existed, since both were inextricably intertwined as saying something hope-filled about the world and the universe of meaning of humankind, and especially surrounding the birth of royal babies. Only woke cynics from California would dispute such an optic.  

We see this too in the later debates about Halley's Comet at the time of the Norman Conquest of 1066 - both disciplines vied with one another to be able to offer some meaning on human history and human affairs. Both purported to be offering accounts of meaning to the providence of human life. Signs and portents were a potent sign of the things to come, and of events to unfold in those time frames, and the Astrologers and Astronomers did not always distinguish each other from each other in terms of their methods and instruments. Both used the observation of heavenly bodies to tell the future, since both believed that the celestial bodies in space were indicators of supernatural and super-terran meaning for human beings. Astronomy has come a long way since then. Really only among the Greek philosophers do we see the incipient signs of a growing apart of the two disciplines, as we read in the work ascribed to Aristotle called the Peri Kosmou, no relative of Perry Rhodan, just the original Greek title of a pseudo-Aristotelean work from the time of Jesus pointing to the planets of the solar system. so yes, certainly, there was interest in the heavenly bodies from Greek philosophers of that time-frame. Astrology since that time, possibly because of that Christ-Event, in which the following of a star comes to play so important a role in the unfolding drama of the birth of the infant King and then of his escape into Egypt pursued by the violent potentate Herod, astrology has come a long way, and is followed more and more in out own time by young people desirous to read of their fates and their futures in the contemporary populism of the star gazing Horoscopes according to which the sky at night is divided up by signs and symbols of the heavenly bodies as indicators of some sort of fortune and fates for the people, the ordinary people, the common people. Both church and state astronomers turn up their noses at such a belief in the providence of the heavenly bodies, but here we are 2,000 years later, and people are stil lavidly reading about their place in the universe of meaning according to the following of stars. More and more people at times of great crisis look for signs from such Horoscopes, not so much a horror, as a simple and general relatively innocent way of looking beyond the mortal gaze of material man and material earth in order to find some directionality in the heavenly spaces and places.

Philosophers of the Ordinary, as young Martina, an acolyte of ours from Heythrop College Oxford put its, in her very avid study of the subject, for which she obtained a Doctorate , remind us that such men and women from the time of the Dawn of the so-called new age of Aquarius in modern times, people like Chesterton, like to point out that "when moderne young people cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing, rather they begin to believe in everything." But these are Philosophes of the Ordinary Way, the way of science in the main as a guide to meaning in the world and in the ordinary space of proximate space. While Chesterton seems to offer a negative judgement on the past-time of millions of Londoners for instance in reading their weekly Horoscopes, this does not mean there is no explanation contained therein - after all people, ordinary people, have gotten into such past-times precisely to find meaning in the universe, in the cold savage universe of the Seventies atheist astronomers and Komsomol cosmologists, in order also to seek meaning in very busy workaholic lives surrounded by the sheer NOISE of modern living. Busy, active, noisy - such are the hallmarks of modern city living, and in such a climate, beyond the luxury of the philosophers who have created much silence and study and solitude for their studies, it is not wholly unsurprising that ordinary people and ordinary dollar a dime philosophers have sought meaning in such circles and past-times. Clinging on to the underlying doctrine of a workable and invisible Divine Providence in their little city lives, the mass of ordinary British people have stuck to their belief that their lives are guided not just by Astronomy but also by Astrology, and neither the Inquisitors of church or state, as per the Golden Compass and other works, have succeeded in all this time to dislodge their simple uncomplicated faith in that Divine Providence. Call me old fashioned as a philosopher of the ordinary working in British life, but a saying comes to mind from the poetry of the same Chesterton above. It is a providence thing. Chesterton the denizen of such beliefs of the unsung but not unnoticing British public puts it thus - "pay us, pass us but do not quite forget, we are the People of England, and we have not spoken yet."

Even the newfound interest in the Astrological Prophecies of Nostrodamus are an indicator that yes, the field of Astrology has acquired fresh impetus and interest since the 3 Magi of the Christ Event came to light and were retained in the gospels of the Judaeo-Christians and sometimes very stubbornly, as finer younger minds such as Marcion worked overtime and hard day and night to erase such features of the Infancy Narratives, as being simply too Jewish for his young Greek mind, but eventually stigmatised by the successors to the apostles of his day as "yet just another rat from Pontus, nibbling away at the inspired New Testament." The gospel writers did not make any apology about including our 3 Astrologers in this cosmic event, and we must trust to their judgement that the 3 Magi represent not just the inner truth of a cosmic messiah, but also the belief that the ordinary events of space can be vehicles of a divine meaning for human kings and queens. Queen Anne Boleyn believed it so, and went to her death at the hands of the jealous young king Henry VIII, insanely jealous of her faith and her love of her priest-confessor, unshaken in her belief in Divine Providence in the stars - she was a moderne icon and a shortly to become patron saint of that unshakeable populist British faith in the 3 Magi - whatever potentates and dictatora kings tried to force out of her. It ill behoves us as philosophers of the ordinary to baulk and dissent and deny this humble role of cosmology in the Christ Event. Certainly at the time of Jesus the two spheres were bound up with one another, they were inextricably intertwined, and it has been the unenviable task of young philosophers of science but also of theologians of prophecy in the Nostrodamus vein to try to unpick those threads without tearing the seamless robe of the common unsung faith of the multitudes. Francis of Assisi is perhaps the best defender of such faiths in the world when he began his charismatic movement for populist appropriations of the Christian events of the bible chiefly through his tradition of the Christmas Crib in the rural country churches and church ruins, left abandoned in the countryside by the rich and comfortable merchant classes of the new cities, a tradition which is to this day jealously guarded by the peoples and the cardinals and even the very cerebral popes of the modern world. Why Francis of Assisi? Because Francis when he began his charismatic movements consciously tied in cosmology to those movements. "Brother sun, sister moon, I rarely see you, seldom hear your tune, preoccupied with selfish misery." Even in our own story of the Clique of philosophers of Bedford, led by a fine young mind now in New Zealand as something of a wandering Socrates, we did not grasp our place in the unfolding meaning of the world without some cosmology, in that border line world of haze and mystery between the clashing Titans of Astronomy and Astrology, much like Francesco the First and his team of young Franciscan philosophers from Rieti and Subiaco in these modern e-times. So that is the Scripture, Tradition, and Magisterium of the matter, pace the reservations of the modern Magisterium on the subject of Horoscopes, which could just be a guide for prudence but may yet be a Copernican style manifestation of a private snobbery of young academic philosophers of science toward the common people's faith, since many of the young philosophers like Copernicus, liked to propose their systems as a true science, but our very own Sir Isaac Newton also had to endure much misunderstanding and much questioning from the young self-appointed Inquisitors of the faith of the British people of his own day, when he too espoused such unscientific views and refused to condemn the faith of ordinary people so adroitly or so quickly. And I retain a little twig on a keyring myself inside my Sunday clerical suit from his famous apple tree at Woolthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire, under which he devised his own Theory of Gravity when an apple fell on his head, as a lasting testament to the young genius and as a timely and permanent physical reminder and private talisman of the importance of the Philosophy of the Ordinary for ordinary people. Martina expects it. Newton loved it so. We do need such icons, they remind us to stay humble, and close to our flocks, not of ordinary people, but of extraordinary genii. Floreat Newton.