SOURCE: "Magic and Skepticism in Agrippa's Thought," in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. XVIII, April, 1957, pp. 161-82.

[In the following excerpt, Nauert examines the interrelationship between belief in occult science and skepticism about the limits of human knowledge, suggesting that both elements were present in all phases of Agrippa's work.]

From his own age down to the present, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486-1535) has received widely varying evaluations from students of his thought. Some have dismissed him cursorily as an intellectual lightweight or as a wicked familiar of demons. Even those who have valued him highly have often done so for most contradictory reasons. Much of this disagreement results from uncertainty about which Agrippa to believe: Agrippa the credulous magician, author of a widely used magical compilation, De occulta philosophia libri tres, or Agrippa the skeptical doubter, writer of De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum declamatio inuectiua. This dual personality as magician and skeptic is evident not only in Agrippa's numerous writings but also in the reaction of others to these writings. To some, such as Giordano Bruno in the sixteenth century and Thomas Vaughan in the seventeenth, the exposition of a magical world, a universe the parts of which are intimately connected by occult bonds, was the fruitful element in Agrippa's thought. Bruno found in De occulta philosophia much of the detail of his own De monade; and his world-view was little different from Agrippa's except that it was more consistently worked out. To others, however, the stimulating element in Agrippa's writings was the universal doubt which in De vanitate he cast on all human learning. One late sixteenth-century French writer complained of the existence of a whole school of "atheists" or doubters who called themselves Agrippans, while there is no doubt that De vanitate furnished both ideas and illustrative material for the skeptical thought of Michel de Montaigne, especially for his "Apology for Raymond Sebond." Some of the themes of De vanitate also show similarity to the thought of the Libertines of seventeenth-century Italy.

The presence of these two apparently contradictory elements, magic and skepticism, in the thought of the same man made his writings disturbing to many readers. The clash between these elements and the anguished doubts of De vanitate helped to mold the legend which symbolizes the intellectual malaise of the sixteenth century, that of Faust. Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus explicitly took Agrippa as his ideal when he renounced human sciences in favor of magic. Much later, Agrippa contributed to the concept of Faust in the mind of Goethe, who admitted that as a youth he passed through an intellectual crisis after reading the pessimistic De vanitate. Thus the juxtaposition of magic and skepticism in Agrippa's thought has been fruitful in the artistic world; but no modern student of his writings has satisfactorily analyzed the relations between these elements and the way in which Agrippa's own thought developed them….

In his brilliant though much-criticized book, The Counter-Renaissance, Hiram Haydn suggests a dialectical interpretation of the development of the European mind in the sixteenth century. In opposition to the orderly world-view which the Thomists and humanists shared, there arose a general skepticism concerning the power of the human mind to gain truth. This skepticism in turn produced, two results, sometimes at odds but often found in the same person: unsystematic empiricism, which granted truth only to sensory knowledge, and occultism, which appealed rather to gnostic traditions of revealed truth, especially the Hermetic and the cabalistic. Finally, these two tendencies, especially the empirical, contributed in some measure to the birth of modern scientific methodology, which restored faith in the power of the human mind, but on a different level from that of medieval rationalism….

This pattern is particularly fruitful in interpreting the thought of Agrippa. In particular, it hints at quite another pattern than the credulity-incredulity-charlatanry one which has been most common, for distrust in the powers of the human mind to attain truth becomes the basic presupposition of occultism rather than the product of disgust with the results of occultism. It is not true that Agrippa represents the full course of this dialectical movement, nor is it true that his mind proceeds steadily from step to step without contradiction and without backtracking. But it is true that even De occulta philosophia is not the product of a man with confidence in the powers of the human mind, but rather an appeal from bankrupt reason to an occult tradition based ultimately on a divine revelation.

This first major work is highly complex. In large part it is just a compilation of facts and alleged facts from earlier writers, and as such it reveals an astounding degree of erudition (and of credulity) on the part of its author. The vast wealth of medieval literature and the rediscovered treasures of Antiquity have been laid under contribution. Authority of the past, not human powers in the present, receives the author's emphasis. Agrippa's underlying intention, although he does not adhere to it consistently, is to rediscover the truths known to the past, truths which, insofar as they concern ultimate matters, are the product not of human reason but of divine revelation to man. This revelation, traced back in the last analysis to the revelation given to Moses, supposedly included an esoteric interpretation which passed into the cabala of the Jews and into the Hermetic literature of the Egyptians, and from the latter into the philosophical mysticism of the Pythagoreans and the Platonists. This myth of a continuous esoteric tradition was a commonplace of the fifteenth-century Italian Neoplatonists, finding expression, for instance, in the writings of Gemistos Plethon, Marsilio Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola.

Although one cannot draw out of De occulta philosophia any explicit and coherent statement of an epistemological skepticism, it is quite clear that human reason is not primary to the work. Agrippa admits, to be sure, that man can accomplish great works, seeming miracles, and this not with the aid of demons but by natural powers. These natural powers, however, are not what we mean by the same phrase today. Sometimes Agrippa means merely "terrestrial" when he writes "natural." Generally, however, he uses the latter term to describe any thing or any event which exists or occurs without the direct action of some divine or angelic power. Thus the use of celestial influences to accomplish mighty works is "natural," in Agrippa's terminology. But man does not by his rational powers learn to use such natural forces; he depends, Agrippa argues, on divine inspiration for his control over them. Hence the magus may construct images which will accomplish great things; but such images are useless "unless they be so brought to life that either a natural, or celestial, or heroic, or animastic, or demonic, or angelic power is present in them or with them." The soul of the magician who employs these images draws its ability to use them not from reason but from a mystical ascent aided by ceremonial preparation but dependent for its consummation on divine illumination. More than twenty years later, writing a dedication for Book Three of De occulta philosophia, Agrippa repeated his assertion that the mind is unable to make this ascent to God, the ultimate truth, if it trusts in merely worldly things rather than in divine things.

Clearer proof that Agrippa saw no inconsistency between belief in the truth of the esoteric tradition and a thoroughgoing denial of the power of the human mind to grasp ultimate reality appears in a somewhat later work, De triplici ratione cognoscendi Deum. This book is a product of Agrippa's years in Italy, being inscribed to Guglielmo Paleologo, marquis of Monferrato, in 1516. It bears strong traces of the influence of Hermetic literature, on which Agrippa had lectured at the University of Pavia the preceding year, and also of cabala, on which he had lectured at the University of Dole in 1509. Original sin, Agrippa teaches, has so beclouded man's mind that he cannot know God by his own powers. There remain open to him three ways of knowing God. The first, the Book of Nature, depends on the power of his mind to know God as His creatures reflect Him. But this way cannot lead to knowledge of God in Himself; and even the limited knowledge that we can gain from the created world is distorted by the passions of the soul. The second way to know God is the Book of the Law, the revelation of God to Moses and the secret, revealed interpretation of it found in the cabala. But this book, even interpreted by cabala, reaches its perfection only with the coming of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, who fulfilled the Old Law and gave mankind the third way to know God, the Gospel. This Gospel, like the Old Testament, is divided into an open revelation contained in the words of Scripture and a secret revelation which interprets the published words in gnostic fashion. These last two ways, the Law and the Gospel, can truly lead man to God, the ultimate truth, but only through faith and grace, not through the unaided powers of human reason.

The first two stages in Agrippa's development, then, were a fundamental doubt concerning the powers of the human mind, and an effort to escape this doubt by an appeal to the authority of the past, especially Antiquity. The Antiquity to which he turned was not primarily the aesthetic and reasonable Antiquity of Cicero but the mystical Antiquity of Neoplatonism, an Antiquity which included the Hermetic and cabalistic writings. Ultimately this ancient wisdom depended on an esoteric tradition supposedly based on divine revelation.

An obvious next step in Agrippa's development was the growth of doubts concerning the validity of the authorities on which his occult system was founded. The germ of this process was present even in De occulta philosophia, for Agrippa felt that the usual authorities in the various occult sciences, Albertus Magnus, Robert of Lincoln, Roger Bacon, Arnold of Villanova, Picatrix, Pietro d'Abano and Cecco d'Ascoli, had mixed much nonsense with their writings and so were largely responsible for the ill repute in which magic (which, to Agrippa, was the generic term for all the occult sciences) was generally held. Agrippa throughout his life appears to have searched avidly for more knowledge about occult subjects. Perhaps he never felt completely satisfied with what he knew, but continued to hope that just round the next corner, just on the next page he read, he might find satisfaction. His lecture on the Pimander in 1515 and his lecture on the Symposium of Plato, undated but probably of the same period, show no weakening of his trust in ancient occult tradition. His Dialogus de homine, a work about contemporary with De triplici ratione cognoscendi Deum, exalts man's powers almost beyond the confines of the occultist tradition.

On the other hand, Agrippa's De originali peccato, completed between 1516 and early 1519, shows considerable doubts about the various arts of prognostication, especially astrology, a pseudo-science which Agrippa may have questioned as early as 1509. It appears that astrology was the first of the occult sciences to suffer from the growth of doubt in Agrippa's mind. It was perhaps the weak link in his whole occult system, for Agrippa gave celestial influences a central position in his occultism. One must distinguish, however, between a form of occultism which used celestial influences to control nature and one which attempted to predict the future from the stars. Attack on astrological prophecy might well lead Agrippa to a more general renunciation of belief in occult forces coming from the stars, but this result did not necessarily follow.

An unusually frank letter of early 1519 shows both the extensiveness and the limitations of Agrippa's doubts about not only human learning but occult sciences as well. Dialectic and philosophy are "diabolical and seductive artifices and errors" [Agrippa to Theodoricus, bishop of Cyrene, Metz, February 6, 1518 (1519, n. s.), Lyons, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS. No. 48, fols. 31v-32v]. After studying dialectic, natural science, and astrology, Agrippa feels that he has wasted his time, effort, and substance and has got nothing in return but sin, "for all these are not from faith." Finally, "by the grace of God at length realizing how great [is] the vanity of human sciences," and after taking doctorates in medicine and both laws, Agrippa has turned to sacred letters. This letter contains no trace of the epistemological critique of the early chapters of his later (1526) work. De vanitate no extended demonstration of the vanity of arts and sciences, and no reference to the thought of ancient skepticism. It also fails to strike very clearly at any of the occult sciences but astrology, the most vulnerable one in Agrippa's estimation. In particular, it makes no attack on the gnostic myth of an esoteric revelation which justified study of Hermetic and cabalistic writings. Nevertheless, this letter does show two important facts. One is that by 1519 Agrippa had progressed far toward the rejection of human learning and had begun to question natural philosophy and astrology as well. The other is the intimate connection between his interest in the Bible and his depreciation of human learning. His thought since at least 1516 had assumed an increasing tendency to stress simple, Biblical religion; and this religious coloration of his thought was working to the detriment of human reason and of at least some of the occult sciences.

From mid-1519 to early 1526, Agrippa wrote no books at all; then in 1526 came an apparently sudden proliferation of works, especially De vanitate, which call in question not only the fruits of human reason but occult sciences as well, and which go far beyond the doubts which we have seen in these earlier works. It seems obvious that Agrippa's doubts must have matured gradually during these years.

When, however, lacking any books from this period, one turns to Agrippa's numerous letters, one finds few evidences of this growth of doubt, and no hint at all of the emotional and explosive rejection of learning that was to follow. Most of the letters show Agrippa following with interest (though also with a bit of amusement) the alchemical enthusiasms of his friend Tyrius at Metz; interpreting prodigies on the model of similar instances in Roman history; studying the writings of Trithemius, Ptolemy, and the unidentified Marcus Damascenus; and giving and taking opinions on occult matters. Perhaps one is justified in seeing a certain reluctance to commit himself on occult questions, but mention of such subjects is as frequent as ever. A letter of early 1524 shows Agrippa painfully aware of the contradictory doctrines and procedures of various astrological texts, but still eager to find from his correspondent an explanation which would resolve these difficulties.

One may conjecture that one source of the crisis of 1526 was his study of the great religious controversy which was unfolding. From the time he went to Metz early in 1518, Agrippa had been reading avidly the works of Erasmus, Lefèvre d'Étaples, and Martin Luther. This reading would have stimulated the anti-rational element already present in his thought, for all three writers stressed the Bible and deprecated what they regarded as the excessive and contentious rationalism of the Schoolmen. Erasmus's ideal of philosophia Christi was that of a reasonable faith, but not of a rationalistic one. Luther, of course, would impel his reader to an even more extreme depreciation of all human learning, for although many have exaggerated his irrationalism, his own unbridled and intemperate statements are much to blame. This influence is not the only root of Agrippa's skeptical development, and in any case it is directed against rational theology rather than against the occult tradition of Hermes and the cabalists; but its general effect was adverse to any knowledge except that gained from the Bible.

Another source of the growth of skepticism in Agrippa's thought was some acquaintance, probably at second hand and perhaps in part through Erasmus's translation of Galen's De optimo docendi genere, with the ancient skeptical schools. Personal experience was yet another influence on this development. The inability of all his learning to relieve the want of himself and his family from early 1526 onward must have created a feeling that his studies had been futile, as well as a bitterness against court life, both elements which are very pronounced in De vanitate.

The year 1526 saw the full development of Agrippa's doubts concerning occultism, the maturation of his earlier depreciation of the powers of human reason, and the introduction of specific reference to the ancient skeptical schools. It was the year which produced not only two letters denouncing astrology but also two treatises which called the whole occult system into question. The first of these, Dehortatio gentilis theologiae, existed by June 10, 1526, and may date back to an earlier year. The composition of De vanitate took place in the summer of 1526 and was completed by September 16, when Agrippa mentioned the book in a letter to Chapelain. The tone of the little treatise and the much larger book is quite consistent. Both of them elaborate Agrippa's earlier skepticism about the power of human reason. What is more, both of them indicate disillusionment with the occult sources to which Agrippa had once turned for refuge from intellectual anarchy; and both contain an appeal to simple faith in the words of the Bible.

There is nothing surprising about the denunciation of pagan philosophy in the Dehortatio. The idea that pagan philosophers were pernicious or at best superfluous in the study of Christian theology is a commonplace of almost all of Agrippa's earlier works, and the real basis of his denunciation of scholastic theology in both his published works and his private letters. But now the distinction which he once made between profane and sacred authors in Antiquity has disappeared. The little treatise opens by reproving certain friends for urging Agrippa to expound Hermes' Pimander, as he had earlier done at Pavia, rather than the Epistles of Paul, as he had proposed:

I marvel greatly and am astounded and angered that you, who have been baptized in the Gospel of Christ, who fulfill the priesthood in the church of Christ, after sacred baptism, after the sacred chrism, are seeking knowledge of God from the heathen, as if the Gospel were imperfect and it were pardonable to sin against the Holy Ghost; for whoever think they can get knowledge of God elsewhere than from the Gospel, they truly are those who attack the Holy Ghost, a blasphemy which is pardoned neither in this nor in the next world.

All truth is in the Gospel, and pagan letters are at best superfluous and usually lead to destruction. Agrippa flatly denies any special value to the doctrines of Hermes or the sibyls; and with them fall Plato, Plotinus, and Proclus, and all those who had benefitted by the Neoplatonic myth of esoteric revelation.

De vanitate goes much further. This treatise, the pungent invective and sometimes startling argumentation of which make it the one work of Agrippa which can still be read with enjoyment, contains four chief elements. The first is a full elaboration of Agrippa's denial of the power of human reason to achieve truth. This denial … is not wholly new, though its elaboration and development are. The second element is an attack on the occult sciences and their authorities. We shall return to this subject shortly. The third ingredient of Agrippa's declamation is a denunciation of abuses in contemporary society, both secular and ecclesiastical. The final element, which contains Agrippa's effort to resolve the problems he has raised, is his appeal to the Bible and the grace of God as the only real source of truth. In itself, this element in his thought is no innovation, for it strongly marks works produced as early as his Italian period and in a sense is presupposed by his interest in the cabalistic interpretation of Scripture expressed in De occulta philosophie. But the statement is much more complete than in his earlier writings.

Agrippa's De vanitate certainly seems to mark the end of his belief in the occult sciences. He directly recants the errors of De occulta philosophia, and this recantation was printed along with other similar material in an appendix to the 1533 edition of his occultist writing:

But I while yet a youth wrote in a quite large volume three books of magical things, which I called De occulta philosophia, in which whatever was then erroneous because of my curious-youth, now, more cautious, I wish to retract by this recantation, for formerly I spent much time and goods on these vanities. At length I have gained this, that I know by what arguments one must dissuade others from this destruction.

Elsewhere in the same book he retracts his little treatise In geomanticam disciplinant lectura: "I also wrote a certain geomancy quite different from the others, but not less superstitious and fallacious, or, if you want me to say it, even mendacious."

Agrippa then proceeds to destroy the authorities to which he once had appealed to escape the feebleness of human reason. Medieval writers on magical subjects had already received criticism in De occulta philosophia itself. Dehortatio gentilis theologiae had abolished the esoteric myth of Neoplatonism, and with it the special authority of the Hermetic writings and the Platonists and Neoplatonists. Now, in Dè vanitate, the authority of the Jewish cabala also falls. After a careful study of cabala, Agrippa says, he found it to be "nothing but a mere rhapsody of superstition." If it had had any real merit, he felt, God would not so long have concealed it from His church, for the Holy Ghost had abandoned the synagogue and had come to teach Christians all truth. Agrippa notes with satisfaction that since the Incarnation the Jews have been able to accomplish few if any miraculous works with divine names. He concludes:

And so this cabala of the Jews is nothing but a certain most pernicious superstition, by which according to their own will they gather, divide, and transfer words and names, and letters placed here and there in Scripture,… constructing from this [practice] words, conclusions, and parables from their own imaginings; they want to fit the words of God to them, defaming the Scriptures and saying that their imaginings arise from them; they calumniate the law of God and by impudently twisted computations of words, syllables, letters, and numbers, try to infer violent and blasphemous proofs of their perfidy.

Having thus renounced the occult authorities, Agrippa felt no compunction in denouncing one by one the occult sciences as vain and superstitious: geomancy, dicing, Pythagorean lots, astronomy and astrology, physiognomy, metoposcopy, chiromancy, auspices, interpretation of dreams, prophetic madness, the various branches of magic. The several arts of divination and prognostication suffer particularly heavily. Surely, one would think, any later activity by this man in the field of occult sciences must be the work of a charlatan and swindler.

Yet the break with the occult sciences was neither so sudden nor so complete as a superficial comparison of the two major books suggests. We have already seen that Agrippa's position on astrological prognostication had long been wavering, even unfavorable to this pseudo-science. It is worth nothing that Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, like Agrippa, had directed his attack against astrology and divinatory arts, especially because they undermined the freedom of the human will. But Pico did not so attack those parts of the occult system which presented themselves as means for the human mind to use in controlling the universe. Agrippa, who cites Pico's attack on astrology in his own chapter on judicial astrology, does not really go so far as Pico, who reduced the influence of the heavens on the earth to a merely physical one. Agrippa points to the conflicts among authorities, the lack of objective existence of astrological and astronomical constructions, the ambiguity and subterfuges of those who practice astrology, and the impiety of seeking to read in the stars a future which is determined not by celestial influences but by God. This latter phrase, that "in truth, neither do the stars govern a wise man, nor a wise man the stars, but God governs both," is as close as Agrippa comes to a frontal assault on the doctrine that the stars influence terrestrial events. His main line of argument is rather that even if such influences do exist, there is no certain science of them and probably never can be one, and that anyway a desire to know the future betokens an impious lack of trust in divine providence.

Even in the case of cabala, Agrippa's break with his earlier views is neither so sudden nor so complete as one might think. He had long taught that Jewish cabala was imperfect until the coming of Jesus Christ. And he still did not deny that God gave to Moses a secret and divinely revealed interpretation of the external teachings of the old Testament. He merely denied that the currently circulating Jewish writings were a true cabala. His efforts as late as 1532 to learn of new cabalistical discoveries of his friends in Italy are not inconsistent with his dissatisfaction with what he already knew of cabala. He had serious doubts, but he still did not exclude the possibility of a true cabala.

One more example of the persistence of his old views will be illuminating, especially as it takes us out of the realm of both prognostication and mystical exegesis and into the relations of man with the natural world. Agrippa's chapter on natural magic leaves that field of endeavor almost unscathed. Just like De occulta philosophia, De vanitate defines natural magic as "the highest peak of natural philosophy and its most absolute consummation." It was professed not only by the Brahmans, Gymnosophists, and Zoroastrians, but also by the three Magi of the New Testament. It produces works seemingly marvellous but actually natural, though the ignorant masses think that they are miracles. Examples of its works are the growing of plants out of season, the causation of thunder, and transmutations of things. Of course Agrippa has reservations about natural magic, for all its authorities have mixed superstition with it; and its works are often impious and subject to serious misuse. The most serious abuses, however, occur in the other major subdivision of magic, the ceremonial, which consists of goetia (necromancy and witchcraft) and theurgy. These arts depend on the summoning of spirits, a most dangerous practice even if one calls on good spirits, for good angels rarely appear because they are obedient to God, while evil spirits often disguise their true nature and lure the rash conjurer to his destruction. Awareness of the admixture of superstition in natural magic appears almost as clearly in Agrippa's letter of 1510 dedicating De occulta philosophia to Trithemius as it does in De vanitate. Thus again we see the roots of Agrippa's doubts extending back to his earliest years, just as we see that his great declamation does not utterly destroy (in this case, it hardly does more than mildly criticize) his earlier teaching. Perhaps something could yet be salvaged from occult arts, though even if it could, it would be relatively unimportant, since no science, occult or not, can make any significant contribution to man's beatitude, which depends not on a rich intellect but on a virtuous will.

Agrippa's subsequent work in the occult arts (and one must never forget that his studies and researches continued through every period of his life) is nevertheless an effort at such a salvage operation. A letter written about a year after the completion of De vanitate suggests that mere rejection of occult sciences did not satisfy Agrippa, that he shrank back from the destruction which his critical thought had accomplished. He warned his correspondent not to be misled as others had been:

Oh, how many writings are read about the insuperable power of the magical art, about the prodigious images of the astrologers … which are all found to be vain, fictitious, and false as often as they are practiced to the letter. And yet they are related and written by great and weighty philosophers and holy men…. Indeed it would be impious to believe that, having taken pains, they wrote lies. Therefore there is another sense than what is given in the letters, a sense concealed by various mysteries, but up to now expounded openly by none of the masters, which sense I doubt whether anyone can attain solely by the mere reading of books without a skilled and trusty master, unless he be illuminated by a divine spirit, a thing which is granted to very few; and so, many strive in vain who pursue these most recondite secrets of nature, applying their mind to a mere course of reading.

A key exists to these secrets, Agrippa adds; and it is the human soul. But how the spirit in man can unlock these secrets is a matter not to be committed to a letter, he darkly concludes, but only to be revealed by word of mouth. A letter written later in 1527 further explains that the key to the occult sciences is the intellect, which can achieve the deification of man, but only if it is freed from the bonds of the flesh by a mystical ascent, a death to the world and to the flesh which Agrippa admits he has never achieved, offering only to point the way to others. His final refuge, then, is mysticism, as is also clear from the later chapters of De vanitate. Like Nicholas of Cusa, he turned to a mystical experience which he himself had never personally known.

Yet the restless mind of Cornelius Agrippa did not stop with mysticism. The real philosophical justification of his continued alchemical experiments, of his unceasing search for new books of cabala and natural magic is not just a confidence that there must be in the works of such distinguished authors a deeper truth visible only to the mind illumined by mystical experience. Even in the midst of his most critical passages, there are materials for an attempt at reconstruction on an intellectual plane. Agrippa had really never denied the validity of sensory knowledge in theory, although he felt that the passions of the soul and man's liability to error made it unreliable in practice. His real skepticism concerned rather the jump from this sensory knowledge of singulars to the higher levels of ratiocination. Thus in attacking the various occult arts of prognostication, he does not deny that there may be some factual truth in their predictions. Rather, his favorite charge against such arts as chiromancy (or palmistry) is that their defenders can allege no solid reasons but only fortuitous experiences to uphold their claims. Any higher patterns of explanations in these arts or in any science, he argues, are merely arbitrary constructs of the human mind without any objective existence. This is true of the various astronomical cycles, epicycles, signs, and houses; it is also true of metaphysical concepts. Real but possibly erroneous sensory knowledge and arbitrary intellectual patterns: after all has been said, these still survive the general intellectual wreckage produced by De vanitate.

How, then, could Agrippa have excused his continued practice of the occult arts had anyone in his own lifetime thought to accuse him of being a charlatan? One way, as we have seen, was the vague claim that a mystically illumined mind could see the real truth under the apparent inconsistencies. Another way was empiricism or authoritarianism, for they could be much alike: passive acceptance of brute fact as discovered by his alchemical experiments and daily observations, or passive acceptance of the reports of others concerning their observations. That he accepted many ridiculous tales in his final recension of De occulta philosophia is not surprising, for simple empiricism and skepticism do not offer an adequate basis for criticism of fact. Michel de Montaigne, a far greater skeptic than Agrippa, used many of the same anecdotes (and probably believed or half-believed many of them) that appear in Agrippa's writings. A third way of justifying his occult practices, even in their theoretical aspects, could have been Agrippa's own doctrine of the arbitrariness of mental constructs. All patterns of interpretation, he teaches, are artificial and arbitrary, the magical ones no more than any others. So one may adopt them provisionally as long as they are useful.

It is precisely on this utilitarian basis that Agrippa defends magical arts in a letter of February 13, 1528, to a friend at the French court, clearly the royal physician Chapelain. Natural sciences, metaphysical arts, and occult devices do exist, he says, whereby one can licitly defend kingdoms, increase wealth, and cure sickness. Similarly in his dedication of Book One of De occulta philosophia to Hermann von Wied, dated January 1531, Agrippa after admitting that even in its revised form the book contains much that is not true, adds that it nevertheless contains many useful and necessary things. His preface to the reader justifies its publication partly by fears of an offensive and imperfect pirated edition but also because many of the things that it contains are useful for overcoming magical spells and for the conservation of health, honor, and fortune. Agrippa urges his readers to accept what they find useful and reject the rest, for he himself merely relates the opinions of others and does not approve all that the book contains. What Agrippa is really approaching with his pragmatic attitude toward conjectures and empirical facts is an adumbration of the idea of hypothesis and its subjection to the test of facts, a procedure that characterizes the methodology of modern science. He has, of course, no clear awareness of this principle, and there is no hint of either controlled experimentation or quantitative expression; but his mind is tending in this direction.

This attempt to trace the movement of Agrippa's mind would not be complete without some mention of the restlessness of his thought. No path seemed too much out of the way to be explored, even though Agrippa might on another occasion develop its opposite just as fully. For instance, he could extol the excellences of women in De sacramento matrimonii and especially in De nobilitate et praecellentia fóeminei serus, and yet could cry out against the fickleness and gullibility of the sex during his troubles with Louise of Savoy at Lyons from 1526 to 1528, and again when he fell from the favor of Margaret of Austria in 1530.

The most striking example of the flexibility of his mind, however, appears in what one might call his minority report on the powers of the human mind. Most of the statements where he seems to exalt the power of human reason are not really rationalistic, for he is referring to the power of the divinely illuminated mind, not to native reason. But in one work his In artem brevem Raymundi Lullii commentaria, he seems to grant almost unlimited powers to the mind of man. By the use of the Lullian art, he claims, man can easily and quickly master all sciences. This art judges all sciences and can attain all knowledge, even without the aid of Scripture. In illustrating its powers, Agrippa undertakes logical proof of even the most abstruse dogmas of religion, for example, that God contains a coeternal spirit. The mind, he argues, is perfectly justified in holding a given proposition because it seems more pleasant and reasonable than its opposite. This rationalistic tendency seems logically to fit into the earliest stage of Agrippa's intellectual development, before growing doubt had driven him first to occult traditions and then to the near-despair which his works of 1526 show. Unfortunately, there is no sure way of dating the Lullian treatise. Its dedication to Jean de Laurencin probably occurred about 1517 and certainly no later than 1523. But the book itself may well be considerably older than the dedication; and Agrippa's contact with that Andreas Canterius, whom in the preface he calls his teacher in the Lullian art, occurred early in his life, probably while he was still an undergraduate in the University of Cologne. Thus the introduction of this rationalistic element into his thought, and perhaps the composition of the treatise itself, does lie, as one would expect, near the beginning of Agrippa's intellectual development. It is true that Agrippa in 1533 published this one rationalistic work; but one may note that even this apparent contradiction of his usual epistemological pessimism requires that reason be sustained by a highly rigid (one might almost say magical) set of logical artifices and mnemonic aids.

Finally, one must not forget that Agrippa lived in the age of humanism, of enthusiasm for ancient literature, and that he spent some seven years in Italy, the center of humanistic activities. He avowed to Erasmus that he was a loyal follower of Erasmian learning. Some of the optimistic trust of the age in the value of ancient literature (bonae literae) is reflected in Agrippa's writings. On two occasions, he urged students to study classical letters and to return to the sources of Roman law, disregarding modern (that is, medieval) legal commentaries. In 1518, sending advice to the young Claudius Cantiuncula, he sounded very optimistic, urging his friend not to confine himself to one field of study but, trusting in the powers of the mind, to master the whole of human learning. But in a second letter to the same friend, Agrippa made it clear that while law and humane letters were praiseworthy studies, they also had their dangers and were in the last analysis vain and perishable in comparison with the study of sacred letters, to which he strongly urged his young acquaintance. Thus even in this exchange of 1518, Agrippa's optimism concerning humane letters was subservient to a stress on sacred letters.

Like so many of the northern humanists Agrippa found the best of the bonae literae in the Bible. Perhaps the highest recommendation of literary endeavor which Agrippa could make was that a good mastery of the three languages, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, was necessary for a thorough mastery of the Bible and so for the education of a theologian. Grammar alone among human sciences, he said, is useful for understanding Scripture; and even in this one science of grammar, the danger of pride and of willful misinterpretation of the Bible is great. Even it can be praised only when it is confined to its most elementary stage, the understanding of a text. If one passes on to a study of elegance of diction and a critique of the language, grammar becomes like all the other human sciences: vain, uncertain, leading to perdition.

The general development of Agrippa's mind, then, proceeded not by a sudden intellectual revolution in the mid-1520's but in three stages. His early position, as represented especially by De occulta philosophia, already doubted the power of unaided human reason to grasp reality but found refuge from intellectual anarchy by an appeal to the wisdom of an occult Antiquity, a wisdom that came ultimately from divine revelation. The second stage in Agrippa's intellectual odyssey was the growth of doubts about the validity of those occultist writings in which he had first acknowledged ancient wisdom. Parallel to this growth was the further maturation of his early doubts about the validity of human reason. These two movements of his thought found their chief expression in his works of 1526, especially De vanitate. But Agrippa recoiled from the glimpse he had had of utter intellectual anarchy. So the third stage, an attempt at reconstruction, is evident even in De vanitate and also in some of his later writings. His attempt at reconstruction followed three lines. Most prominent of these was his fideistic appeal to the pure and unadulterated Gospel as the only source of truth. A second way of escape was the doctrine that magical writings contained a deeper meaning open only to the initiate or to the man whose mind has been illumined by an act of God's grace. The third line was an attitude of which Agrippa himself surely did not see the full implications. By continuing to uphold the reality of sense perception of singulars, by teaching that all intellectual abstractions are equally arbitrary, and by hinting that one might in practice follow any abstract system as long as it met the pragmatic test of facts, Agrippa was unconsciously moving toward the epistemological doctrines underlying modern science: scientific hypothesis and its subjection to the test of facts. The only element which does not fit into this three-stage movement of Agrippa's mind is his interest in Lullian rationalism. But this interest is probably an expression of an even earlier stage of his development, for his studies of Lull almost certainly occurred during his undergraduate days at Cologne. In any case, it is a subordinate element in his thought and finds expression in only one of his works.