But in another way . . . antiquity exercised a perilous influence. It imparted to the Renaissance its own forms of superstition. ... The belief in a Divine government of the world was in many minds destroyed by the spectacle of so much injustice and misery. Others, like Dante, surrendered at all events this life to the caprices of chance . . .. But when the belief in immortality began to waver, then Fatalism got the upper hand, or sometimes the latter came first and had the former as its consequence. The gap thus opened was in the first place filled by the astrology of antiquity, or even of the Arabs. ... It is profoundly instructive to observe how powerless culture and enlightenment were against this delusion; since the latter had its support in the ardent imagination of the people, in the passionate wish to penetrate and determine the future. Antiquity, too, was on the side of astrology.
-- Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Phaidon, 1945), 313f.
