De peste themata sacra tria

diseases, physicians do not dispute inaptly about external causes. We only make a distinction here regarding from which fountains the consideration of the plague should be drawn, so that we may proceed orthodoxly in doctrine. Those who inquire into the efficient cause of the plague through physical contemplation confuse this method, which is why they say many things about it not without error. Similarly, the final cause is also obscured, so that what pertains to our true amendment cannot be understood sufficiently. Galen recognizes no scourge of God in all diseases, and blames only the corruption of nature and ἀταξίαν disorder/lack of order. Thus, he can define nothing about the author and end of this disease, and especially about this disease, which has the secret hand of the Lord. Therefore, where physicians treat those things that are subject to human cognition, let them be heard and consulted: if they step out of their boundaries, they must be rebuffed, and it must be answered that whatever is to be established about the author and end of the plague must not be taken from the dark hiding-places of human reason, but from the light of the divine Word. Nor can anything be lacking in the Word which God has not deigned to manifest most amply for the solid investigation of the matter.

Observe, therefore, how the physicians, in passing over the light of Scripture, all shout with one mouth that the air is corrupted, or that something is corrupted and infected from those things by which our life consists, and from there they derive the origin of the plague. But when that opinion begins to seem wanting, they stitch onto it from Theology that God [sends it] from heaven and the air and