SOURCE: "Cornelius Agrippa's De vanitate: Polemic or Paradox?," in Bibliotheque D'Humanisme et Renaissance, Vol. XXXIV, No. 2, 1972, pp. 249-56.

[Below, Bowen elaborates on On the Uncertainty and Vanity of the Sciences as an example of the literary paradox, a genre popular in the sixteenth century. Bowen's remarks were originally delivered as a lecture in 1971.]

Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim (1486-1535), one of the most intriguing figures of the Renaissance, has received a good deal of critical attention but remains a tantalisingly shadowy figure. He has proved most interesting to historians of magic and science, because of his De Occulta philosophia, and to intellectual historians, because of his disputed place in the intellectual development of the Renaissance. He has been curiously neglected by literary specialists, despite his acknowledged influence on Rabelais, Montaigne, Sidney and Marlowe among others. There has been only one full-length study on him in recent years, Charles Nauert's Agrippa and the crisis of Renaissance thought, and this too, as its title indicates, is concerned with Agrippa's relationship to the intellectual climate of his time.

In spite of the quantity of critical work done on Agrippa, one puzzle has remained unsolved, at least for most critics.

Why did he publish, within a few years of each other, a textbook of magic and occult philosophy (De Occulta philosophia, Book I 1531, first complete edition 1533) and a condemnation of all philosophy and all learning (De Incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum, first edition 1530)? I should like to suggest here that the literary specialist may provide the answer to this 'problem', which would never have been considered a problem at all if the early writers on Agrippa had known as much about the Renaissance as we do today.

The striking contradictions between these two works of Agrippa's have been discussed by many critics, and various ingenious solutions have been proposed. Some critics, from Morley in 1856 to Hiram Haydn in 1950, have assumed that the De vanitate is entirely serious in its concentration of the evils brought about by knowledge. This would imply that the De Occulta philosophia was the less serious, or less important, work. Other critics have gone to the other extreme, maintaining, from Pierre Villey to Richard Popkin, that the De vanitate is merely a joke and need not be taken seriously. Yet others, like Prost, Thorndike and Leon Blau, have assumed that Agrippa changed his mind, so that he believed what he was writing in both books at the time he wrote them. It has also been suggested that the De vanitate was written out of disgust and discouragement, because knowledge had not brought Agrippa success, or as a safety valve in case the De Occulta philosophia got him into trouble. And it has been maintained, especially by Garin, Zambelli and Nauert, that the two books are not fundamentally contradictory, but represent different aspects of the same 'Renaissance mentality.' The number and variety of these solutions show that the contradictions between Agrippa's two books do represent a serious problem for his modern readers. Let us see if by slightly re-stating this problem we can come closer to a solution.

There are, I suggest, two separate questions to be asked: 1) is the De vanitate a paradox? and 2) is a Renaissance paradox nothing but a frivolous rhetorical exercise?

There is, I think, no doubt whatever that the book is intended as a paradox, and there is ample external and internal evidence to prove it. The title of the 1531 Cologne edition begins as follows: De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum declamatio invectiva… When the book was denounced by the University of Louvain and by the Sorbonne, Agrippa defended it in two works, an Apologia and a Querela. In the Apologia he gives the following definition of a declamatio:

Proinde declamatio non judicat, non dogmatizat sed que declamationis conditiones sunt, alia joco, alia serio, alia false, alia saevere dicit: aliquando mea, aliquando aliorum sententia loquitur, quaedam vera, quaedam falsa, quaedam dubia proununciat… nec omni loco animi mei sententiam declarat … multa invalida argumenta adducit…

Now certainly he is taking care in this work to deny that the attacks on the Church contained in the De vanitate were serious, but his definition of a declamatio is borne out by Cotgrave's dictionary, which gives for the French declamation: "A declamation; an Oration made for a fained subject, or onely for exercise," and the O.E.D. confirms that the earliest meaning of the verb to declaim was: "to speak aloud with rhetorical expression; to make a speech on a set subject as an exercise in elocution." The French translation of the De vanitate by Louis Turquet de Mayerne was first published in 1582 with the title Déclamation sur l'incertitude, vanité et abus des sciences, and the full title of the 1608 edition runs as follows:

Paradoxe sur l'incertitude, vanité et abus des sciences. Traduit en françois, du latin de Henry Corneille Agrippa. Oeuvre qui peut profiter, et qui approte merveilleux contentement à ceux qui frequentent les cours des grands seigneurs, et qui veulent apprendre à discourir d'une infinité de choses contre la commune opinion.

This contemporary acceptance of the work as a paradox, shared by Jacques Tahureau, who discusses Agrippa's "moquerie feinte et dissimulee" [Les Dialogues de Jacques Tahureau Gentilhomme du Mans, 1565], and by Sidney who refers to him as a "smyling rayler" [Apologie for Poetrie], has been obscured by the more energetic contemporary denunciations of Agrippa by bigots like Jean Bodin, who calls him "le plus grand Sorcier qui fut onques de son aage" [De la Demonomanie des sorciers, 1580], and André Thevet, who renders him responsible for the prevalence of atheism in his time [Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres, 1584].

The De vanitate is not the only work of Agrippa's in the paradox genre. He had already published in 1529 the De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus, which demon strates that women are not merely equal but superior to men. Now this is a piece of polemic of a type very common at this time. The so-called Querelle des Femmes lined up feminists and anti-feminists against each other, in verse and prose, Latin and French, during the whole first half of the sixteenth century, and a hundred years ago it was assumed that all these writers were seriously expounding their own point of view. We know today that the entire quarrel was more literary than real, and that most of the participants have their tongues firmly in their cheeks. Agrippa's contribution makes use of most of the stock arguments 'for' women, but some of his 'evidence' could surely not be taken seriously by the most ardent feminist in 1971 (e. g. that women are more attractive because they don't have beards, that they are more eloquent speakers than men, or that they know everything naturally).

Nor is Agrippa the only writer of his time to produce works which contradict each other. One of the participants in the Querelle des Femmes, Jean Nevizan, wrote a Sylvae nuptialis libri sex (1540) whose first two books attack marriage while the second two defend it, and the French writer Boaystuau wrote, and had published in one volume in 1561, a Theatre du Monde, ou il est faict un ample discours des miseres de l'homme, and a Bref discours de l'excellence et dignité de l'homme which takes exactly the opposite point of view.

This is, in fact, the great age of paradox, as literary critics have come to recognize more and more in recent years. It is an anachronism to assume that a Renaissance writer must always have his heart and soul engaged in what he is doing. Literature is still based on rhetoric, Erasmus praises Folly, French poets have imaginary mistresses, and Ortensio Landi's Paradossi is one of the most popular works of the age. The post-Romantic concepts of 'originality' and 'sincerity' should never have been applied to Renaissance literature.

So much, very briefly, for external evidence that the De vanitate is a literary paradox. Examining the work itself in the light of this, we first notice the title: De incertitudine et vanitate… One can take this as a summary of the book's intention; it will demonstrate that human knowledge is uncertain on the one hand, and vain on the other hand. But vanitas also means 'emptiness, nothing,' and the 'praise of nothing' is a very popular Renaissance topos, in both art and literature. Jean Passerat's poem Nihil and Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing are the best-known examples, but more relevant to Agrippa is Montaigne's essay De la Vanité (III, ix). The title alone would make a sixteenth century reader laugh, as this is one of his longest essays, and in the opening paragraph he plays upon the two meanings of vanité, 'emptiness, nothing,' and the Biblical meaning in the well-known quotation from Ecclesiastes: "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."

If the 'praise of nothing' is a conventional topos, so too is the condemnation of arts and sciences. Villey [in his Les Sources et l'évolution des Essais de Montaigne, 1933] cites several contemporary authors and compilers who use it, including Ravisius Textor and Gyraldi, but there is no need to look so far afield. One of Landi's Paradoxes (No. 3) maintains that ignorance is better than wisdom, and a good deal of Erasmus's Praise of Folly, of which more in a moment, is devoted to a condemnation of learning in various forms. There is, in fact, nothing in this purely conventional subject to shock a sixteenth century reader.

The next question a literary specialist will ask is, how is the book constructed? And curiously enough I have not found a single critic who is interested in this. Since the book is called a declamatio, and since the conclusion is styled Operis peroratio, one would expect it to be constructed like a demonstrative oration, but this is not the case. There are 103 chapters (counting the conclusion), and it is quite clear from the grouping of these chapters that Agrippa intends a systematic refutation-of-knowledge-by-means-of-knowledge, as A. C. Hamilton pointed out [in his "Sidney and Agrippa," Review of English Studies n. s. VII (1956)]. The first ten chapters deal with the trivium: grammar (plus poetry and history), rhetoric and logic (plus sophistry and the art of memory which belong to them). Chapters 11-48 deal with the quadrivium and related subjects; thus for instance dicing (14) belongs with arithmetic (12), "Rhetoricall daunsing" (21) with music (17), perspective (26) and architecture (28) with geometry (22). Under astronomy we find the largest subgroup, comprising sixteen chapters on methods of divination and magical practices, arranged in the same order as they appear in Book I of the De occulta philosophie (chapters 52-60).

Chapters 49-81 are also deliberately grouped, in a roughly Aristotelian order, as follows: philosophy, physics, metaphysics, ethics, politics, Chapter 52, Of the Soule, comes after Of the Worlde (51) and before Metaphisickes (53), as Aristotle's De Anima is normally printed between the Physics and the Metaphysics. Politics occupies chapters 55-81, dealing with such diverse aspects of society as religion (in a social context), prostitution, courtiers, merchants, agriculture, fishing, war and heraldry. This apparently deliverate Aristotelian order is particularly entertaining in view of Agrippa's violent denunciations of Aristotle—referred to in chapter 52, for instance, as "the divelish Aristotle."

The remainder of the book (82-99) comprises three groups: medicine, law and "divinitie" (theology), which represent the three faculties of the University and correspond to the traditional three main preoccupations of man's life: his body, his wordly goods and his soul. In chapter 29 of Rabelais's Tiers Livre Pantagruel advises. Panurge to consult a theologian, a doctor and a lawyer about his marriage problem, because:

tout ce que sommes et qu'avons consiste en trois choses, en l'ame, on corps, es biens. A la conservation de chascun des trois respectivement sont au jourd'huy destinées troys manieres de gens: les theologiens à l'ame, les medecins au corps, les jurisconsultes aux biens.

Pantagruel subsequently adds a philosopher to the group, and Agrippa has already dealt with philosophy in the previous grouping. Medicine, for Agrippa, includes such sidelines as "the crafte to cure brute beastes" (87), dieting (88), cooking (89) and even "alcumie" (90), by which he means chemistry, not the occult art. And theology comes last in this grouping because it leads naturally into his final chapter, Of Gods Woorde. In exactly 100 chapters he has demolished knowledge by the use of knowledge—by grouping his chapters according to the trivium, the quadrivium, the books of the Aristotelian corpus and the three traditional domains of human life, and of course by use of his immense erudition in each area under discussion.

The book might appear symmetrical complete at chapter 100, but Agrippa has not finished. Chapter 101, Of Maisters of Artes in general, resumes the entire argument and states that since all arts and sciences are "not so uncertaine as deceiptfull, as also wicked." "It is better therefore and more profitable to be Idiotes." And this is the perfect transition to chapter 102: A digression to the praise of the Asse. Digressio, like declamatio, is a rhetorical term, and the praise of the ass is yet another well-known topos. Agrippa ends his work with a clear reference to Erasmus' Praise of Folly, even in the terms he uses. The Latin title of this final chapter is Ad encomium asini digressio, and the title of Erasmus's work, published in 1511, not so long before Agrippa was writing his in 1526, is Encomium Moriae. The conclusion of the De vanitate makes this resemblance clearer yet. In Sanford's translation it is obviously a sermon, beginning:

Wherefore O yee Asses, which are now with your Children under the commaundement of Christ by his Apostles the messengers and readers of true wisdome in his holy Gospel…

and ending:

But leaste that thorow using more woordes I shoulde declame as it is saide, beyonde the hower, let this be the ende of our Oration.

What we have just read was not a demonstrative oration, but a sermon joyeux, like the one preached by Erasmus's Folly. And a sermon which paradoxically undermined, not merely the evils of this world, but especially the evils of that same Church which normally preaches sermons.

I have spent so long answering my first question: is Agrippa's book a literary paradox? because it seems to me that the second question: is a Renaissance paradox merely frivolous? neither needs nor deserves a lengthy answer. The importance of Agrippa as a humanist, and his debt to the Hermetic and Italian philosophers, have been amply demonstrated, and it is quite clear from his tone that many of his condemnations of human folly and hypocrisy are genuine. The sober critical mind of the nineteenth century may have wanted to divide literature into paradoxical frivolous works on the one hand, and 'sincere' serious works on the other, but the critical mind of today no longer practises such a division, and of course the critical mind of the Renaissance never did. One of the sixteenth century's favourite quotations is Horace's Ridentem dicere verum Quid vetat? (Satires). Placed as he is between Erasmus and Rabelais, Agrippa has the right to as full recognition as they of his paradoxical technique and his many serious points of view. He is looking back to Folly's multi-level and often ambiguous attach on society, including monks and churchmen, and including arts and sciences. And for us he is looking forward to Rabelais's comic giants, heroes of folklore and pornographic exploits, and at the same time participants in the struggle of Stoic and Evangelical humanism against the Pope, Luther and the forces of repression.

In fact the 'problem' of the De vanitate is a false problem. Like the works in similar vein of Erasmus, Rabelais and many others, Agrippa's book is a literary paradox and at the same time a work of polemic. It is often difficult to determine which of the points of view expressed in the book represent the author's 'sincere' convictions. The evidence would suggest that Agrippa genuinely detests abuses within the Church (though this does not necessarily make him a Protestant), and that his denunciations of occult arts are artificial and produced for the purpose of the topos. The organisation of the book suggests that he had a sense of humour, though undoubtedly not the charming light touch of an Erasmus. And the book is still worth reading today, not as a revelation of a tormented hero's state of mind, but as a brilliantly constructed exercise on a very conventional theme.