James Shire: Wars in the Stars and on Earth: Astrology and its application the late-antique Syriac Chronicle of Zuqnin

Although religious communities in late antique Syria and Mesopotamia employed astrology, many Christian commentators saw it as a blasphemous pseudo-science that impinged upon both the will of God and the free will of humans. Some Syriac Christian authors, however, readily acknowledged that the stars could foretell the workings of the world. The anonymous monk who authored the Syriac Chronicle of Zuqnin (ca. 775 CE) was one of these exceptions to the rule: using astrology, he attempts to regain some sense of control over a seemingly out-of-control world. If, he surmises, humans can read the stars correctly, then they can understand God's warnings and learn how to avoid, and possibly even forestall, traumatic events, such as the violence of the Abbasid revolution in the mid-eighth century. While we know that some Syriac Christians adopted this more positive view towards astrology, we have little to no sense of how a figure like the author of the Chronicle would have combined his knowledge of scriptural and apocalyptic texts with his own observations of the movements of stars, planets, and comets to interpret a system in which God actively sends warnings to his people. This paper addresses this lacuna by placing the Chronicle of Zuqnin in the context of earlier Syriac Christian commentaries about astrology, offering a framework for understanding the Chronicle's more positive approach to integrating scriptural, apocalyptic, and astrological learning as practical and applied sciences for the potential benefit of Christians.