SOURCE: "Agrippa and the End of a World" and "Fact and Fantasy: Agrippa's Position in Intellectual History," in Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought, University of Illinois Press, 1965, pp. 292-321, 322-34.

[In the following excerpt, Nauert discusses the influence of Agrippa's works, emphasizing the ways in which they "helped shatter the rational and orderly worldview of the great medieval intellectual syntheses" and pointed the way toward the scientific revolution.]

Despite Agrippa's failure to carry through consistently the exposition of his magical world view, and despite the fact that pessimism about human reason dominated his thinking even in his early years, the universe portrayed in De occulta philosophia is an orderly one. If man is unable by reason to comprehend all its secrets, Agrippa felt, still he may be able to find in the divinely revealed traditions of ancient sages, especially of Hermes and the cabalists, the key to mastery of his surroundings. The idea of a closely interconnected world, a world every part of which is alive, and the idea that the divinely illuminated soul can draw down superior powers, celestial, angelic, and even divine, do not represent a break on Agrippa's part with the cultural heritage of either the remote or the more immediate past. His aim of restoring magic to its ancient purity did not at all prevent him from drawing freely on such medieval magical writers as Albertus Magnus, Arnold of Villanova, Roger Bacon, Pietro d'Abano, and Picatrix. The organic, animistic, aesthetic world view which Agrippa shared with these men was not, after all, alien even to the thought of the greatest minds of the Middle Ages, such as Thomas Aquinas.

Yet some elements in the thought of Agrippa were destructive and disintegrative of the medieval world view in particular and, in general, of all culture. This [essay] will consider these anarchical elements, which appear not only in Agrippa's speculative thought but also in his ethical, political, and social doctrines. This side of his thought found its chief expression in De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum declamatio invectiva, just as his magical thought was expressed principally and most completely in De occulta philosophia; but elements of this tendency appear in other works as well.

It is one of the peculiarities of intellectual history that later generations have found elements of skepticism in the thought of a man who on one occasion wrote that of the three chief modes of philosophizing, the Peripatetic, the Academic, and the Skeptical, he sometimes followed the first and sometimes the second, but always shunned the Skeptics, "among whom nothing is certain that they may follow, but all things are indifferent to them, and so they dispute on both sides concerning all things…." Yet such is the case with Agrippa. Almost all the standard histories of philosophy mention the presence of skeptical elements in his thought, although they generally class him among Neoplatonic occultists or theosophists, and although they agree that his skepticism is only fragmentary and not of much significance. One of the few writers who have taken the skeptical side of his thought seriously, Rossi, explains [in his Agrippa di Nettesheym e la direzione scettica della filosofia nel Rinascimento, 1906] this apparent contradiction by assuming a fundamental change of attitude in the eleven years between the quoted statement and the composition of De vanitate in 1526. Actually, however, there was no major change. The context of the earlier statement makes it clear that what Agrippa had in mind when he attacked the skeptics was those who, often pretending to give rational demonstration of Christian dogmas, often even sincerely intending to do so, actually weakened Christian faith by seeking to confine faith within the bounds of human reason. This attitude, which is strongly reminiscent of the Scotist and Occamist denial of the power of reason to grasp ultimate, divine truths, was the basis of the criticism of scholastic philosophy which fills much of De vanitate. For Agrippa, the essence of the skepticism which he denounced was failure to acknowledge the limitations of human reason in religious matters. He would have agreed with the statement of his contemporary, Giovanni Francesco Pico della Mirandola, that the skeptics' arguments properly ought not to have any force when turned against Christian doctrines, since those doctrines rest solely on faith and revelation and are subject neither to proof nor to disproof [Examen vanitatis doctrinae gentium, et veritatis christianae disciplinae, 1520].

Even Rossi admits that Agrippa's approach to skepticism was inductive, that is, that his main line of argument was to show that all sciences as now taught are full of contradictions and so cannot be regarded as certain. It is certainly true that quantitatively speaking, Agrippa based most of his declamation against the sciences on points which are only peripheral to the main problem of human knowledge. The lines of attack are several. The most important is that a given science is uncertain because all the authorities are at odds with one another. Unlike many of his contemporaries, in particular unlike his favorite modern authors, Ficino and Pico, Agrippa appears to delight in emphasizing the disunity of the various philosophical schools. He also shows a strong inclination to discredit the great authorities of the past, most notably in his repeated aspersions against the moral and intellectual integrity of Aristotle. A second major line which his so-called inductive skepticism follows is to show that the various arts and sciences are often or even usually the source of sin, evil, and heresy. Architecture, for example, is in itself praiseworthy but has led to excessive ornateness in the design of churches and has been employed in construction of engines of war. Rhetoric, to take another instance, is unsure of its principles, subject to misuse in the interests of injustice and untruth, infamous and disgraceful, and a source of heresies such as the apostasy of the Emperor Julian or, more recently, the outbreak of the Lutheran heresy, whose heads only a few years ago were everywhere lauded for their skill in rhetoric. Painting has been misused to depict obscene and inflammatory subjects. Further, if he can think of no other accusation against a science, Agrippa calls it useless for human salvation and happiness, as in the case of mathematics or cosmography. This, of course, is completely to confuse the issue, to divert discussion from the validity of human knowledge to the question of human beatitude and salvation. Finally, Agrippa repeats the common objection that human life is too short to master even one science well, even though he himself had often advised students to master all fields of learning.

Certain aspects of this attack on the individual sciences possess considerable intrinsic interest. There is, for example, his appeal to the reports of Spanish and Portuguese navigators in order to show how baseless were the authoritative opinions of all earlier geographers. This appeal to brute fact to undermine accepted theories shows an empirical side to his thought quite in harmony with the widespread empiricism of the later sixteenth century. It is also a rather early instance of the disturbing effect of the discoveries on the European world view. The chapters on astronomy and astrology have high intrinsic interest in their own right, one of the many interesting ideas being the disquieting possibility that unknown planets and stars may exist, thus vitiating any astrological science based on present knowledge. The whole argument is an example of the influence of Pico della Mirandola north of the Alps. Agrippa's general practice of collecting the opinions of the various philosophical schools on a given point is an example of the spread of knowledge about ancient philosophy and of the unsettling effect which acquaintance with ancient philosophical controversy might have.

But if there were nothing more than these immediately apparent lines of argument in Agrippa's thought, the historians of philosophy would have the best of Rossi on the question of the significance of Agrippa's skeptical tendencies. The most one could make of such statements would be an additional instance of the widespread dissatisfaction with late medieval learning. De vanitate would remain nothing but a flashy bit of paradox without much significance for the history of European thought and with greatly reduced significance even for study of Agrippa's own development. Agrippa would be just Agrippa the Magician or perhaps Agrippa the Charlatan.

In reality Agrippa has at least the germ of a far more thorough-going skeptical development than anyone, even Rossi, has realized. He is quite aware of the skepticism of the Academics and the Pyrrhonists concerning the ability of man to know causes. He sees as the weakness of Peripatetic logic the fact that the force of any argumentation depends on the truth of the premises, which must come from earlier demonstrations of no greater validity, or else from an accepted authority. He had always known this fact, even in his more optimistic treatise on the Lullian art; but by 1526 he was ready to deny not only in specific cases but also in the most general terms the ability of the human mind in any way to arrive at truths which can form adequate premises for truthful as well as formally valid syllogisms: "But so great is the ample liberty of truth, and its free amplitude, that by the speculations of no science, by no urgent judgment of the senses, by no arguments of logical artifice, by no evident proof, by no demonstrating syllogism, and by no discourse of human reason can it be seized upon, but only by faith…." In short, what he is arguing, and this in the most explicit terms, is that "all sciences are nothing but decisions and opinions of men…." If any science is used to good purpose, the goodness comes from its inventor or its user, not from the science itself. He flatly states that anything can be disproved just as easily as it can be proved, that there is no argument so strong that a stronger cannot be presented to overturn it.

These are not mere bald statements unsupported by argumentation. How is man by his own powers to grasp truths from which to construct logical chains of reasoning? The way obviously would be by sensory means. But although Agrippa does not name any source, he here applies arguments ultimately derived from ancient skepticism and later developed, with help from Sextus Empiricus, at much greater length by Michel de Montaigne. Agrippa observes that all knowledge comes from the senses and that the test of a true proposition is whether it corresponds to the sensed object. From this source alone we get all knowledge that is possible. But in the first place, it is evident that the senses are often deceived and hence that they can give no great degree of certitude. What is more, the senses are unable to reach intellectual nature and so can teach us nothing of the causes of lower things, from which must be demonstrated their natures, effects, and properties. The most we can know from the senses is individual objects. So all higher sciences founded on sensory knowledge can be only fallacious, since sensation cannot give us any general principles.

A way out of this dilemma should have been available to one so strongly influenced by Platonism as Agrippa; but he fails to discuss it at this point because his own doctrine of original sin had already closed this way to him. The obvious solution was to teach that the ideas of all things already pre-existed in the soul. This would at least bridge the gap between the sensory and intellectual realms. But by teaching that original sin had veiled these ideas in the human soul by causing the departure of the divine light that had once made man know all truth, Agrippa effectively blocked this means of escape from skepticism. Of course, he clearly and consistently taught that mystical illumination could restore the original condition and grant all knowledge and true wisdom to man. But this doctrine leads out of the realm of epistemology and into the field of religious experience and grace. Although never systematically stated in his earlier writings, this skeptical attitude is intimately associated with his doctrine of mystical illumination. His general message had always been that man needs grace before he can attain ultimate reality.

The theoretical presentation of true skepticism in De vanitate is small in bulk, far smaller than the space devoted to specific and "empirical" attacks on various sciences. When compared to this latter element, the critical analysis of the foundations of human certitude seems hurried, sketchy, and incomplete. Agrippa's declamation against human learning certainly does not mark the systematic introduction of ancient Pyrrhonism into modern philosophical discussion, an introduction foreshadowed by the younger Pico and really accomplished by Montaigne and his disciples only much later in the century. So brief is the Nettesheimer's discussion of truly epistemological issues and so small the evidence of direct contact with the works of Sextus Empiricus, that the author of an important recent work on the growth of skepticism in the Renaissance refuses to call his standpoint skeptical and prefers the phrase "fundamentalist anti-intellectualism" [Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes, 1960]. Whether one chooses to apply the term skeptic to Agrippa depends, of course, on how strictly one wishes to limit the term. Certainly Agrippa did not offer the detailed presentation of ancient Pyrrhonist arguments that one will find in Montaigne and his followers. Whether he drew directly on the principal ancient skeptical source, Sextus Empiricus, is debatable. But although his book does indeed give far more space to gibes against learning than to philosophical analysis (the same is true, in lesser degree, even of Montaigne's "Apology for Raymond Sebond"), his work is not entirely innocent of the profounder philosophical questions. Small in bulk though it is, he does present a brief but effective analysis, framed in terms of broad reference to the problem of man's ability to know. This general consideration of the basis of human knowledge explains why he found so much uncertainty in each of the special sciences which he studied. Furthermore, he made specific reference to the Academics and Pyrrhonists when he wrote his short general discussion of the foundations of human knowledge. This evidence suggests that alongside late medieval disdain for learning, which was reinforced in his lifetime by the tendency of humanists and Reformers to adopt a fundamentalist anti-intellectualism, Agrippa did feel some influence of truly skeptical nature. It is not entirely wrong, therefore, to call him a skeptic, even though strictly skeptical considerations form only a very small portion of De vanitate.

The fundamental inability of unaided human reason to gain valid scientific knowledge of course applies also to man's knowledge of God, the highest form of knowledge. God reveals Himself in three ways, which Agrippa describes as the Book of Nature, the Book of the Law, and the Book of the Gospel. Only from the first of these does man read by use of his own cognitive powers. But the knowledge of God from creatures, while clear enough to make inexcusable anyone who does not know and honor God, cannot attain His essence as He is in Himself, separated from all things. Thus even if man were capable of forming a valid science from created things, the real essentials of a knowledge of God are not discoverable in those created things. Dialectic and philosophy are simply unable to rise to true knowledge of God. Only the purified soul, filled with grace, love, and faith, can do this. In other words, knowledge of God occurs only in the realm of grace, not in that of reason.

As early as 1516, this belief in the inability of reason to comprehend the divine nature had led Agrippa to attack contemporary theology for trying to bend divinity to human reason. Reasoning in divinity, he argues, is the source of all error. It even led to the fall of Adam, since by reasoning with the Serpent instead of blindly obeying God's commandment, Eve made it possible for him to deceive her. Reason does nothing but destroy the simplicity of faith, trying to take heaven by storm, questioning and so undermining the most most sacred beliefs. The Schoolmen, Agrippa charges, while criticizing freely all others, themselves debate the most shocking propositions imaginable. The only theology which he praises is that of the Church Fathers. Needless to say, Agrippa's study of the writings of Luther and other Reformers did not weaken this antischolastic predilection, a fact which appears clearly from De vanitate. It is true that much of his invective is directed against symptoms of scholastic decadence, such as the involved and oversubtle terminology of the later Scotists or the blind and narrow sectarianism of the various schools, Thomists, Albertists, Scotists, Occamists, and others. Yet he clearly believes that even in the less decadent age, of Albert, Thomas, and Scotus themselves, when at least it might have been useful to refute heretics, scholastic theology was a monstrous combination of philosophical reasons and divine revelation. He expressly compares it to a centaur. Rational proof of dogmas may be clever, he admits, but it is not pious. The only theology which he can approve is that which depends on divine illumination or which plainly expounds the text of Scripture, which itself is a product of divine illumination, not of human reasoning.

What this rejection of scholastic theology really amounts to is a restatement by Agrippa of the fideistic attitude of late medieval thinkers, especially the followers of William of Ockham. Man should not proudly strive to know by rational powers, but rather should fervently believe in revelation. In itself, fideism does not necessarily imply a thoroughgoing skepticism, only a sharper division between the realm of grace and the realm of reason than that posited by the Thomists. But Agrippa united this partial skepticism of the fideists with a more general skepticism concerning all human knowledge. This more general skepticism shows traces of a rethinking of the works of ancient skeptics as they were known to the Middle Ages; it also shows the influence of potentially skeptical elements in the thought of Nicholas of Cusa, who believed that all human knowledge is more or less arbitrary, and who compared the relation between human statements and actual truth to that between a polygon and the circle in which it is inscribed. Fideism could easily employ general skeptical arguments if these terminated in counsels to follow probability in daily living and so left the way open for an act of faith. This, for instance, was the teaching of Giovanni Francesco Pico della Mirandola, nephew of the famous Pico. This late-medieval fideism not only survived into the sixteenth century but became accentuated with the appearance of Protestantism. Indeed, this union of skepticism and fideism, already foreshadowed in certain late medieval thinkers and in the younger Pico, became a prime characteristic of French Roman Catholic disciples of Montaigne, and formed a major element in the anti-Calvinist religious polemic of the Catholic Reformation in France.

Not only theology, however, but every field of human learning came in for attack by the restless and pessimistic mind of the Nettesheimer, for his epistemological doubts seriously questioned the conformity between the abstractions of the human mind and the external objects for which they stood. Thus such abstractions as the cycles, epicycles, and spheres of the astral world became for Agrippa mere figments of the astronomer's mind. Similarly, he denied any objective existence to the abstractions of metaphysics and to those of mathematics. The same anarchy of uncontrolled opinion exists in natural philosophy, where philosophers freely put forth opinions, all equally valid and invalid, concerning all questions, ranging from the theoretical problems of the principle of all being or the plurality of worlds to the practical question of the immediate causes of observable phenomena such as earthquakes. Little remained to Agrippa but unreliable sense experience of singulars and arbitrary constructs of the human mind. In later thinkers, this attitude was eventually destined to grow into the modern theory of scientific hypothesis and its subjection to the test of facts; and Agrippa's thought contains hints that he himself was groping blindly in this direction…. But the general effect of Agrippa's thought, and especially of De vanitate, the most widely circulated of his writings, was to present only the negative moment of this philosophical development. The message of De vanitate was overwhelmingly destructive in nature.

A further line of attack on human learning hit not so much at the intellectual validity of the sciences as at their significance. This kind of argument, as noted above, was only peripheral to Agrippa's expression of true skepticism. Yet this argument, that even if true the sciences have no significance for the happiness and well-being of man, was in its own right a disquieting, though hardly original, element in the man's thought. Orthodox Christianity had never given ultimate value to human learning in its own right, but the moderately humanistic tendency represented by Thomas Aquinas had recognized a value, secondary but still real, in secular learning. Now Agrippa denied not only the validity of the sciences as sciences but also their relevance to man's welfare in any case. Man's true happiness, he argued, does not consist in knowledge of any sort but in a good life and a connection with God which unaided human powers cannot achieve. Not a clever mind but a virtuous will is important. Repeatedly Agrippa introduced the question of value. His chief interest regularly seems to be less in the validity of a science than in its significance for man's happiness and salvation. He did not ask whether a science makes a man more knowing but whether it makes him morally better and whether it grants him true wisdom. In his pessimism he was certain that at best human arts and sciences are irrelevant for this purpose, while more often than not they are positively harmful. Sciences do not illumine the Bible but are illumined by it. Any goodness that may be in any human science comes not from the science itself but from the goodness of its founder or of him who uses it in a given instance.

Agrippa did not try to escape this intellectual anarchy by pushing aside all philosophical considerations and stressing the value of ancient literature for its aesthetic and moral content. Despite his broad general acquaintance with classical literature and the writings of such modern authors as Petrarch, Valla, Ficino, and Pico, he was not a humanist in any broad sense of the term. He believed that Roman law should be stripped of medieval accretions; he urged students to study ancient literature; he praised the study of languages; he criticized the barbarisms of the terminology of professional philosophers. But none of these traits of humanism gave him a way out of the intellectual anarchy he had wrought. If he praised the idea of trilingual (Latin, Greek, and Hebrew) learning, it was solely for the sake of Bible study. If he praised the study of ancient authors, it was not with confidence that any ancient philosophical school would provide a system of great value, and it was almost always with an admonition about the greater value of studying sacred letters. If he himself studied ancient texts with avidity, he did so in the belief that they enshrined a secret revelation from God to man. What is more, in addition to becoming disillusioned with Hermetic and cabalistic writings as a source of divine revelation, the later Agrippa reserved some of his sharpest barbs for those who upheld the value of polite letters. He accused some of the proud literary men of scorning the Bible because of its lack of literary adornment. He denied any validity to grammar because it depends on usage rather than on reason; and he pointed out the hypercritical tendency of all grammarians. Grammarians, he said, have shown that not only George of Trebizond and Lorenzo Valla but even Cicero, Ovid, and other ancient writers have committed faults of grammar. He attacked such fields of literature as poetry and history because they tell tales both untrue and depraving, such as the stories of Arthur, Lancelot, and Tristan. Ovid to him was nothing but a teller of bawdy tales, as were Aeneas Sylvius, Dante, Petrarch, Pontano, Leon Battista Alberti, and, above all, Boccaccio. Finally, when he said that pride in learning is the source of all heresies, when he noted that Christendom was tranquil and devout when Alexander Gallus was the only grammarian, Petrus Hispanus dominated dialectic, Laurentius Aquilegius ruled rhetoric, the ecclesiastical calendar was all the mathematics studied, and Isidore sufficed for all the rest of learning, was he not striking almost as hard against the humanists as against the Schoolmen? He concentrated more on the latter because he regarded them as the more pressing danger, but he did not leave humanistic studies and their proponents untouched by any means.

Since Agrippa had left little basis for science except the authority of the past, his readers must have found it still more disconcerting to see how everywhere he assailed the accepted authorities. This was true not only of the medieval Schoolmen and their favorite philosopher, Aristotle, but also of every ancient author. He showed that even Cicero, Demosthenes, Ovid, and the other great ancient writers erred often. If study of Plato makes a man impious, yet study of Aristotle and his followers makes one superstitious, while would-be Ciceronians become pagans. Even such revered authorities as Hippocrates in medicine came under Agrippa's attack. Even the Church Fathers, the only theologians whom he praised, erred on individual points in spite of all their sanctity. A recurring refrain in Agrippa's works is: "Every man is a liar: but only Christ, man and God, never was and never will be found untruthful…." Only divine grace and revelation offer hope of release from human weakness and ignorance.

Thus Agrippa denied the ability of man to know the external world or its Creator, and cast doubt on the arts and sciences which man had constructed on the presumption that he could know reality. Agrippa cast doubt on all past authorities and so could not find satisfactory refuge in any form of ipsedixitism. And he had little use for mere external sensory knowledge of singulars. What [I have] shown, in short, is his denial of any congruity between human reason and reality. The only way in which he softened this discord was by giving a high position to the power of the divinely illuminated mind and to the Bible as the greatest of all products of divine inspiration.

Yet such denial of the powers of human reason does not necessarily call into question the orderly nature of the universe itself. A further question is whether from being a mystical romantic, as Hiram Haydn would call him [in his The Counter-Renaissance, 1950], Agrippa passed on to become a disillusioned naturalist: in other words, whether he denied that there is any order in creation to begin with. His attack on the power of the human mind was consciously, clearly, and pungently worked out. There was no comparable assault on the idea that the universe is orderly and meaningful. Yet there were hints in this direction. Most of these occurred as an underlying and scarcely conscious element in his treatment of specific problems, especially in the realm of practical affairs.

In one sense, of course, the magical world view which he never wholly abandoned was itself a challenge to belief in an orderly universe. The action of the magus and of the multitude of natural, occult, celestial, and spiritual forces which he employs represented an unruly, disorderly principle which broke through the usual hierarchical structure of reality, bending and twisting that order to make it subject to the will of man. Yet at the same time, magic depended on the sympathetic interrelationship of all ranks of being an interrelationship which was no less real merely because human reason could not grasp it but could only learn it from experience. So in a higher sense, Agrippa's acceptance of a magical world view did not really contradict belief in the goodness and orderliness of God's creation. There was still an orderliness in the world, but the order was that of a living, growing, feeling, and even intelligent animal, endowed at once with material body, intermediate spirit, and nonmaterial soul, rather than that of cold, dead matter divided into rigid, easily classified categories. The order was hidden from man's reason, at least since the sin of Adam had robbed the soul of divine illumination. But it was known to the Creator, and also known to glorified, purified man—to Adam before his fall, and to man after the action of divine grace and his own self-purification had restored the light of God to his soul.

In most respects, one must conclude that Agrippa's universe still seemed orderly even though beyond the power of human comprehension. Hence he felt that if only divine illumination would lift the veil of fleshly cares from the soul, man could attain all knowledge by immediate intuition. Such divinely inspired knowledge would also enable man to perform wondrous works, beyond the ordinary powers of nature. The belief in an orderly and interconnected universe thus had not disappeared, if only man could learn the order and connection between things and so make use of them. In criticizing alchemy, Agrippa blamed the alchemists for seeking by art to overcome nature, when art could only follow nature from afar. Its effort to make gold was not only fraudulent but also wicked, for it sought to upset a divine law in nature instituted after the fall of Adam: that man should eat his bread in the sweat of his brow. Still in lesser matters, where it has not done violence to nature but only followed it, alchemy has produced many useful things, such as dyestuffs, metallic alloys, cannon, and glass. There are also something of orderliness and a suggestion of primitivism in Agrippa's treatment of the various branches of agriculture in De vanitate, for although he has criticisms to make, the simpler, more natural agrarian society does not suffer the scathing criticism to which he subjects courtly and urban life. Likewise his strong preference for simples and his distaste for foreign remedies in medicine, attitudes soon to be emphasized in far greater detail by Paracelsus, are based on a confidence that if any drug were really suited to the treatment of persons living in a given climate, nature would have provided a source for it in some native plant. Belief in an orderly universe also appears in Agrippa's definition of natural magic as the highest part of natural philosophy, inspecting the sympathetic bonds between things and so understanding and using occult powers to perform apparently miraculous works. Its major failing, he thought, is that it is so easily and so often contaminated by superstition. Agrippa's world even after 1526 was peopled by good and evil spirits, which the magus could summon; but even more than in his earlier period, he warned of the danger of such practices, since evil spirits often appear in the guise of good ones. The only statement which might seriously shake belief in the existence of an orderly world is Agrippa's ridiculing of the notion of the music of the spheres. This is only a peripheral matter, however. Agrippa had far too much faith in divine wisdom to teach that the universe created by God was disordered and imperfect.

Religion was no guard, however, against a contrary view in the realm of human affairs, for the doctrine of original sin could always serve as a theoretical justification for belief that society was disordered, selfish, and cruel. There are strong traces of just such a view in Agrippa's thought. The key to this belief in the anarchy of society is the chapter on moral philosophy in De vanitate. Here, while assuming of course that there is an absolute moral law in the realm of grace, the Nettesheimer seriously questions the existence of a moral order in the purely human sphere. Moral philosophy, he charges, "depends not so much on the reasons of philosophers as on varying usage, custom, observation, and frequent use of daily living, and is changeable according to the opinion of times, places, and men…." He defends this statement first of all with reference to the varying moral standards of different peoples. Like Montaigne half a century later, he says "that what once was a vice is even regarded as virtue, and what is here a virtue is elsewhere vice." For example, the ancient Hebrews and modern Turks permitted polygamy and concubinage, a practice regarded as execrable among the Christians. The Greeks found nothing wrong, he says, with homosexuality and appearance on the stage, both held shameful by the Romans. The Romans let their wives appear in public, while the Greeks did not. The Lacedemonians and Egyptians regarded theft as honorable, while we punish it. Agrippa also explains the existence of moral relativism on the grounds of different national characteristics, which in this case he attributes to the stars. This attribution, not wholly consonant with his doubts about astral influences earlier in the same work, was more happily explained as the result of climatic conditions by Jean Bodin later in the same century. Agrippa's denunciation of the wickedness of moral philosophers, especially the depraved and miscreant Aristotle, does not add much to buttress his belief in moral relativism. More effective is his argument that even ethicians are still disagreed about the nature of the summum bonum, some placing it in pleasure, some in virtue, and some elsewhere. He insists on the fundamental disharmony between the teachings of moral philosophy and the teachings of Christ. Beatitude, he says, is attained "not by Stoic virtue, Academic purgation, or Peripatetic speculation but by faith and grace in the Word of God." Agrippa makes a radical contrast between the wisdom of the world and the foolishness of Christ: "Christ teaches to do good to all, to love even one's enemies, to lend freely, to take revenge on no one, to give to every one who asks; on the contrary the philosophers [teach one to aid] only those who repay benefit with benefit; besides, that it is permissible to be wrathful, to hate, to contend, to wage war, to take interest." In conclusion, Agrippa charges that those who trust in the dictates of right reason are tending toward the heresy of Pelagianism. All moral philosophy is false and vain.

Accompanying this belief in moral relativism is a picture of human nature which shows strong traces of what students of sixteenth-century thought, referring to writers like Machiavelli and Guicciardini, call an animalistic view of human nature. Anyone who reads the bitter social criticisms contained in De ranitate must be well aware that they are not the work of a man who believed in the goodness of human nature. Every rank of society, according to Agrippa, depends on cruelty and deceit for its being. The nobility have risen to power by warfare, another name for murder, by prostituting their wives and daughters to the lusts of the monarch, or by the basest flattery and most abject servitude to the great and powerful; and they live by oppressing the lower classes, by cheating the crown, and by selling their influence at court. Their life is a mass of vices of every sort. Most members of religious orders regard their vocation as nothing but a means to win a subsidized and idle life and a shield against prosecution for their crime and immorality. Medical doctors are ignorant charlatans who do more harm than good. Lawyers are shysters who distort good laws and worm their way into the inner councils of princes, displacing the rightful and hereditary councillors. Merchants are cheats and usurers. This sharp social criticism, of which these are but a few instances, by no means implies any truly democratic element in Agrippa's thought. If the upper classes are vicious and oppressive, he regards the lower classes as stupid, superstitious, and crude. The gnostic scorn for the rabble which underlay Agrippa's insistence on the need to conceal occult philosophy never left him. The unforgivable sin of the monks is the way in which they expose the debates of the learned to the vulgar by their vituperative sermons. Their greatest folly was, by denouncing Luther in their sermons, to force him to write in the vernacular and so to infect the common herd with his heresy. The most desperate threat which Agrippa could make was that he might write in the vulgar tongue and so carry his anticlerical attack among the masses.

There is more to Agrippa's naturalistic view of man than mere denunciation of the injustice and vice of every rank of society. His attack on human nature also passes to the theoretical sphere, though not in any single coherent expression. What is the law of nature of which political theorists prattle so greatly? It is, he says, "not to go hungry, not to go thirsty, not to be cold, not to torment oneself with vigils or labors: it places Epicurean pleasure in the place of the highest felicity, pushing aside all the penitence of religion and works of penitence." Taking up a characteristic theme of the extreme ethical pessimists of the sixteenth century, Agrippa says that "even man himself (as it is in the proverb) is a wolf to man," a judgment amply borne out by his detailed picture of the abuses of society. Elsewhere he returns to the same theme by noting that when noblemen choose animals for their coats of arms, they never choose useful beasts but always fierce and predatory ones. His view of human nature is hardly optimistic.

Moral relativism and the animalistic view of natural man almost necessarily implied the shaking of all those social institutions which made for orderliness in human affairs. Politics, a branch of applied moral philosophy, fell into ruin under Agrippa's criticism. He discussed the usual three forms of government, monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, and showed some tendency to favor a mixed constitution combining two or more of the pure forms. But no type of constitution, he concluded, has any real value. All depends on the moral character of ruler and ruled. All forms of government are equally good in good hands, equally bad in bad hands. Thus there is no true order in the state itself; there is really no science of politics.

If Agrippa's view of political science depends chiefly on his ethical relativism, his view of law derives also from his pessimistic view of human nature. Agrippa knew quite well the many definitions of justice and expressed them fully in his Oratio pro quodam doctorando. But what came to his mind when he wrote on law in De ranitate was the harsh realities of law and government. Noting papal and imperial claims to plenitude of power, he traced the origin of all law to arbitrary acts of will on the part of lawmakers, who then cleverly gave their statutes divine sanction among the vulgar masses by pretending to have received their codes from a god. At this particular point he used only examples from gentile history, but in another place in the same chapter he discussed Moses' foundation of Jewish law in terms identical to those he used to describe the origin of gentile legal systems. Thus he seems to hint at the doctrine of the political origin of religious laws which was to become a major theme of seventeenth-century libertinism. Agrippa did not explicitly state it, however, and may not have consciously intended to include the Mosaic code among those laws whose divine sanction is the result of mere imposture. His denunciation of laws as a source of strife and contention was less weighty; but then he proceeded to analyze the binding power of laws, a power which according to him derives solely from the consent of the people, or from the consent of a prince on whom this popular power has been conferred. If an error is made, the error may itself become good law. "Hence we now know that all the prudence of the civil law depends on the mere opinion and will of men, no other reason being active except honesty of manners, or convenience of living, or the authority of the prince, or force of arms." If made for a good purpose by a good prince, a law is good; otherwise not. What is more, pettifogging lawyers and glossators often succeed in distorting even a good law, while lustful princes pervert all the laws to pander to their own unclean desires. There is no law so carefully written that lawyers cannot overturn it. And legal remedies are weak and ineffective unless the plaintiff is strong enough to assert his rights. Agrippa did not spare the canon law either, for he regarded it as arbitrary and oppressive and subject to the greatest abuse by sharp practitioners and unworthy clerics. Much of the social criticism contained in the middle chapters of De vanitate concerns perversion of the law by the mighty, and he made effective use of the venality of the university law faculties which pronounced in favor of the divorce of Henry VIII.

Agrippa did not accept these conditions with the coolness of a Machiavelli or a Guicciardini, although his attitude is otherwise reminiscent of the amoral view of the state which appears in the writings of the two great Florentine political theorists. The difference is partly in the passion with which Agrippa denounced the conditions which grow out of this political relativism and this bestiality of the great and powerful. But it lies mainly in the persistence in his thought of the other realm of being, the other standard of morals, that of the world of grace. All this disorder just described exists in the natural and unsanctified world, which original sin has cut off from contact with the world of the ideal. The Nettesheimer was unable and unwilling to push into the background the insistent moral imperative of Christianity. The power of the state still ideally derives from God. The holders of political power are under obligation to punish those who offend against the divine law. for instance, to repress houses of prostitution instead of favoring them and profiting by them. Similarly the claims of princes to be mortal gods are not in contradiction to man's obligation to obey the divine law. Their power derives from God, and part of man's religious duty is to obey them. The ability of kings to cure disease by touch illustrates their divine institution. Agrippa's argument that kings and nobles first arose from violence and bloodshed, that the Lord was angry with the Israelites for desiring a king, and that royal power corrupted even virtuous men, does not really contradict this ultimate derivation of authority from God. There is some inconsistency in his praising tyrannicide, but this still is not contradictory to the divine origin of authority. The unclear question is rather whether one may licitly kill the ruler who abuses the divinely instituted power. Thus one cannot say that there is no moral order in the intellectual world of Agrippa; but the order is in the realm of grace, not that of nature. The natural world is disordered and animalistic. The major positive message of De vanitate is that to end all these abuses in the intellectual realm and in the secular and ecclesiastical worlds, man must stop depending on his own depraved nature and instead must humbly rely on the Word of God as expressed in the illuminated soul and in the Bible. The ideal Christian is symbolized by the humble and patient ass, by the idiota, an ideal quite reminiscent of the docta ignorantia of Nicholas of Cusa, to whose work De docta ignorantia Agrippa expressly appealed in his defense of De vanitate.

De vanitate was a disturbing book. The Sorbonne and the Louvain theological faculty both condemned it, though their condemnations missed much of the point of the entire argument. The radical denial of the power of the human mind to grasp reality was one of the chief disturbing elements. Villey [in his Les sources et l'evolution des Essais de Montaigne, 1933], although he regards the book as a mere jeu d'esprit, admits that it was an important source of the skepticism of Michel de Montaigne. All that survived the wreckage of human science, aside from supernatural mysticism, was sense perception of singulars, which Agrippa thought unsuited to the foundation of a science, and the authority of the past masters of Antiquity. Even the great authorities of the past came in for attack, not only Aristotle and the medieval scholastics, but also Plato, Hermes, the Alexandrian school, the cabalists, and even, with far greater limitations, the Church Fathers. These two elements of De vanitate, the attack on reason and the repudiation of past authorities, undermined faith in the ability of the mind to know reality. A third major theme of the book was the shaking of belief in the orderly nature of the universe. This attack struck not at the physical world but at the moral world, where original sin provided a theoretical justification for it. A pessimistic view of human nature combined with moral relativism to undermine the rational foundations of human institutions. The prolonged and embittered social criticism which fills much of the book was really an extended demonstration of this principle of moral anarchy in the natural world. A final disturbing element was the rabid anticlericalism which the book reflects. Despite the obvious exaggeration of many of the statements, the book is a valid expression of the author's intellectual and emotional rejection of all human arts and sciences.

It is not hard to picture the consternation which Agrippa himself must have felt at the results of his formulation of doubt. The position which he had reached could hardly have satisfied him, for his tone was not the cool mockery of a Montaigne, nor the matter-of-fact attitude of a Machiavelli, but rather the impassioned invective of a Jean-Jacques Rousseau. One can see him shrinking back from the chaos he had wrought.

His declamatory little book itself contains elements of an effort to save something out of the ruin of all learning. Most important in Agrippa's own mind was the mystical escape from intellectual anarchy. As the present study has repeatedly shown, the mystical solution ran through his thought consistently from his earliest to his latest years. If only the mind of man, having been freed from the bonds of the flesh by careful preparation, can attain mystical illumination, then all knowledge and so all power will be its own. Since Agrippa himself did not claim personal experience of this sort, he had to provide a way out for those like himself who were not mystics. This way was to follow the lead of those who had gained such union, that is, simply and humbly to follow the Bible, which is the work of such illuminates. Even for a profound understanding of Scripture, illumination is necessary; but the humbler believer can gain beatitude by merely following the letter of Holy Writ carefully, believing the essentials of the teaching of the universal church (whatever those essentials were, a point on which he was not clear, though he certainly included the two great commandments and the Apostles' Creed), and reverently praying to God. God, he was sure, will not fail such a believer. Mysticism and skepticism, far from being opposed, here exist together.

Agrippa also groped, although far less surely, toward a solution of the problem of skepticism on an intellectual plane. Sense knowledge of singulars did not perish in his attack, although he seriously questioned its accuracy in any given case. This was the empirical side of his thought. His suspicion that somehow the great authorities of Antiquity could not have been so wrong as they seemed was an effort to salvage the principle of authority by accepting allegorical interpretations. Both his attempt to return to Antiquity and his empiricism really amounted to authoritarianism, the authority of bald statement and the authority of brute fact. At the same time, the belief that all higher generalizations were equally arbitrary made it possible for him to accept any scheme of explanation provisionally as long as it seemed useful, that is, as long as it stood the test of facts. Here was an adumbration of the function of scientific hypothesis, but without any program for controlled observation or planned experiments, and of course without any idea of quantitative, mathematical expression. Here was also an invitation to question and rethink all scientific generalizations, a process which was far more important in the scientific revolution that was about to begin than was any accumulation of new data. The least that such a book could do was to encourage people to explore any new idea, however absurd it might seem. All of this later development, of course, was outside the scope of Agrippa's thought, but he stood at the threshold of it. Ernst Cassirer has long since noted [in his Das Erkennthis problem in der Philosophie and Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit, 1906-20] that skepticism was the first great step toward modern philosophical reconstruction. Consciously or unconsciously, this is how Agrippa was able to continue his alchemical operations and his search for recondite literature after 1526, and how he was able to publish De occulta philosophia as a book containing many errors of the past but also much useful information.

His own and succeeding generations were unable to see this, and for them De ranitate remained either a pungent and sometimes witty paradox or a very unsettling book. His complete separation of the ideal and real worlds, for instance, was intended for the disparagement of the latter, not of the former. But all now depended on an act of faith, for he had ruled out on principle any rational demonstration of religious or other significant truth. Suppose one did not choose to take the leap of faith. What remained was an unknowable world, and, as far as the moral realm was concerned, a brutal, disorderly, and amoral one. This was the danger latent in the fideists' sharp separation of the realm of grace from the realm of nature. Even John Calvin felt some alarm at the tendency of certain naturalists to exalt animal instinct and appetite in man, a tendency which recent Roman Catholic apologists have called a natural outcome of the radical split which the Protestants made between the world of grace and the world of nature.

[I have] already shown the possible germ of the libertine belief that all religious laws, even that of Moses, were the products of clever impostors who gained respect for their codes among the masses by pretending to have written at the dictate of a god. This teaching was one of the major ingredients of that seventeenth-century Italian libertinism which attracted the esprits forts of every part of Europe. It is by no means clear that Agrippa meant the idea to apply to anyone but the founders of gentile religious laws, and there is not the slightest hint anywhere in his writings that he regarded Jesus Christ as such an impostor. This was, of course, a common enough theme in medieval literature, expressed in the tale of the three impostors, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed.

De ranitate also shows other traits of the later libertine teachings. One is the notion that all religions are subject to the stars in their origin, rise, and fall, though Agrippa mentioned it only to denounce it as an example of the impiety to which astrology has led. He was also well aware of the heterodox interpretation of Aristotle by the Averroists and the school of Alexander of Aphrodisias; and apparently he believed that these doctrines of the unity of the intellect, the mortality of the individual soul, and the eternity of the world represented the real teaching of Aristotle. It was precisely for this reason that he so bitterly detested and denounced the Stagirite. Still this heterodox interpretation of Aristotle was available for readers of De ranitate, as it was in the works of many writers of that period, most notably Pietro Pomponazzi. Agrippa also approximated Machiavelli's amoral view of the world, another ingredient of the libertine teachings. His suggestion that contradiction and error exist even in Scripture might encourage the greatest disorders among persons who did not, like him, submit the interpretation and the canon of Scripture ultimately to the judgment of the institutional church. He also knew and partly adopted the notion of natural causation of such supposedly miraculous phenomena as the stigmata of St. Francis, although he specifically refuted the idea that Christ's miracles were of this sort. The gnostical scorn for the canaille, which Spini regards as one of the chief proofs of the un-Christian mood of the Italian Seicento, was certainly not lacking from Agrippa's thought, although it was tempered by some compassion for their suffering at the hands of their upper-class oppressors, a compassion which even grew into a positive program of indoor poor relief as a means of suppressing sturdy beggars while aiding the impotent poor, a scheme which drew an approving marginal comment from his Elizabethan translator.

A recently discovered Agrippan imprint, known in only one copy, has raised the further question whether Agrippa was not himself the central figure of a group of libertines, who combined a truly dangerous degree of free thought with the occultist enthusiasms that characterized Agrippa's circle of friends wherever he lived. This document, discovered in the Biblioteca Colombina at Seville, is a small piece of four leaves printed in blackletter type, without indication of place or date, and entitled Prognosticon vetus in Agrippinarum archivis inventum. It consists of a prefatory letter entitled "Henricus Cornelius Agrippa Lectori S.D.," the Prognosticon itself, with an appended verse referring to Revelations 22, a French translation of the main text of the Prognosticon and the verse, and three Italian-language quatrains appended to the French verses. Its discoverer suggests a French origin for it, and the period 1515-1530 for date of publication. She also defends its authenticity as a work of Agrippa. For one thing, the Ad Lectorem or prefatory letter is textually almost identical to a letter which Agrippa wrote, probably in 1526, to an unnamed friend. In this letter, he attacked the validity of astrology. Furthermore, the same text, with only minor verbal changes, forms part of his chapter "De astrologia iudiciaria" in De ranitate. In his letter, the Nettesheimer himself wryly referred to a prognostication with twofold commentary which he sent so that those who demand predictions from him "may know that I, whom they think to be such an astrologer, am also such a prophet, and know how to profit by their folly." The same prophecy is surely mentioned in another letter which he sent to a friend named Conrad living at Chambéry in Savoy on 18 April 1526. Here he enclosed his De matrimonio, the Latin text for his friend and a French text for the friend's wife, together with "a certain prognostication, and that my own, from which you can judge what a noteworthy astrologer I have become." This letter, and especially the ironic tone in which it is written, strongly confirms Agrippa's authorship of the Prognosticon and makes it possible that either he or his Savoyard friend also prepared the French translation.

The Prognosticon itself consists of a short prophetic statement concerning four kings who are to come from the four corners of the world, and the horrors and prodigies which are to ensue. It is obviously meant to be typical of the obscure prophecies of doom which circulated frequently in Agrippa's time, and about which he himself often received requests for interpretations. Then he has added a twofold marginal interpretation, one of them speaking in a serious tone and one in a tone of folly. The serious interpretation refers the prophetic words to a great war, a terrible conqueror, religious reforms, and other favorite topics of contemporary prophecy. The jocular interpretation refers the same words to a description of a carouse by a pack of gamblers (the four kings, for instance, are in a deck of cards). Obviously, this newly discovered work is a fine example of prophetic parody, a genre which was quite popular in the early Reformation period and which had reached a climax after the dire but unfulfilled predictions of floods which were expected to result from the great planetary conjunction in the sign of Pisces in 1524. Such parody became a favorite propaganda device of humanists, and Agrippa's Prognosticon, probably a work of his year of crisis and disillusionment, 1526, is akin to the jocular prophecies of Rabelais just a few years later, or the anticlerical Judicio over pronostico di mastro Pasquino quinto evangelista per I'anno 1527 by Pietro Aretino, with its delightful spoof of astrological pomposity: "Secondo la opinione di moderni interpreti dei pianeti … lo introito del Sole sarà ne la prima taverna ch'egli troverà…."

The significance of this new Agrippan document needs to be carefully weighed. Its discoverer concludes that the publication of this document and the preservation and eventual publication of Agrippa's correspondence much later in the century were both the work of a secret brotherhood of disciples, perhaps the "Agrippans" denounced by André Thevet later in the century. Yet there is danger in pushing this argument too far. For instance, Agrippa himself preserved his own letters, as is shown not only by the publication of a few of them as appendices to his books published during his lifetime, but also by his threat to retaliate against Louise of Savoy by publishing his correspondence with various courtiers, in order to demonstrate to the world how shabbily she had treated him. Second, although there can be no doubt that the Nettesheimer was linked to an extensive network of fellow students of the occult, there is no real proof that this group was an institutionalized brotherhood, a conventicle. Perhaps his friends really did preserve his letters and were responsible for their eventual publication. On the other hand, Agrippa left several children; and one of them, at least, was a man of some learning and reputation who might well have preserved his father's papers. The phrase from the new-found Prognosticon, "ex archivis Agrippinarum," need not be taken too literally. Finally, the real influence of Agrippa on later libertinism did not derive chiefly from circulation of his collected letters, only a few of which betray the mocking tone and corrosive doubt of the libertines. The principal influence of Agrippa on later free thought was not a secret one exercised through secret channels, but a public one exercised through his widely circulated, muchtranslated, and highly popular book, De vanitate, a work which as late as the eighteenth century could still unsettle the youthful optimism of a Goethe. What the new Agrippan document really does, is to confirm still further a point already evident from the Nettesheimer's known works: that even at the height of his doubts about occultism and all sciences, he still preserved a belief, or at least a tentative half-belief, in such basic occultist concepts as the emanation of mysterious influences from the stars. Like De vanitate, like a few letters from the same period, the Prognosticon reflects a serious spiritual crisis on the part of the author himself, and also, in a more general sense, on the part of the Renaissance culture in which he was so deeply learned.

Although many hints of familiarity with the doctrines of later libertine groups abound in his works, Agrippa flatly rejected most of these teachings. He was no libertine, though he was interested in all viewpoints, even the most dangerous. One is not justified in calling his rejection of libertinism insincere, for it by no means ran counter to the main stream of his thought. Nor ought one to exaggerate the role of his works, chiefly De vanitate, in the development of unbelief at the end of the century. The book was certainly much edited and much translated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and doubtless made its contribution to the growth of such ideas not only in Italy but north of the Alps as well; but Spini has shown [in his Ricerca dei libertini: La teoria dell'impostura delle religioni nel Seicento italiano, 1950] that these ideas were widely spread even before the sixteenth century. In any case, the writings of Agrippa von Nettesheim furnish an example of acquaintance with some of these libertine ideas in germ north of the Alps, and so suggest a third major way in which De vanitate, even though unintentionally in this instance, helped shatter the rational and orderly world view of the great medieval intellectual syntheses. The other two ways were the epistemological pessimism and the moral anarchism discussed in the preceding sections of this [essay].

….

Agrippa von Nettesheim is now a forgotten figure in the intellectual history of the West. Yet both as a real man and as a legend he made his contribution to the development of the modern mind; and there is besides the intrinsic interest of the picture of the European mentality in the early sixteenth century which one can form from his numerous treatises and his hundreds of surviving letters. This analysis of his intellectual world will be complete when it has suggested his influence in his own day and after, discussed the legends that grew up around his figure and their contribution to that great symbol of western man, Faust, and then related the main elements of Agrippa's thought to the general intellectual movement of his age.

Only a handful of his contemporaries had a reputation for erudition and for boldness of thought and expression that could be compared to Agrippa's during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and even well into the eighteenth century. His biography shows that he was able to attract, though not to hold, the attention of the greatest princes of his age. Even the reserved and cautious Erasmus, though thinking him rash and ill-advised, still admitted his erudition and wit. Juan Luis Vives called him "the wonder of letters and of literary men," while the elder Scaliger esteemed him for his learning. Rabelais knew of him and did him the honor of satirizing him as the ridiculous astrologer and cuckold Herr Trippa of his Tiers Livre, a book wherein he also lampooned such figures as Lefèvre d'Étaples, Lemaire de Belges, and Tiraqueau. Agrippa's doctrine of the three types of melancholy strongly influenced his great contemporary Albrecht Durer in his famous engraving "Melencolia I." Agrippa's pupil Johann Wier, one of the few outspoken opponents of the witchcraft delusion later in the sixteenth century, wrote respectfully of his master and refuted some of the wild legends which already were gathering around this strange figure. Paracelsus, or one of his followers writing under his name, when boasting of his knowledge of magic, claimed to surpass Agrippa, as if he were an acknowledged master. Cardan attacked De vanitate as a mere literary trifle but admitted that many of his contemporaries admired it.

The generation which flourished near the end of the sixteenth century had not forgotten Agrippa. The continued re-editing of his books would suggest this fact even if there were no other evidence. In 1572, the landgrave of Hesse quoted an opinion of Agrippa's on astronomy in a letter to Caspar Peucer; and although both the latter and Tycho Brahe discounted this authority, they did so perhaps as much because of his reputation for impiety as because of the error of his opinions in astronomy. Giordano Bruno's general view of the universe was much like the Nettesheimer's magical world, and was partly derived from it. Of course the great Nolan philosopher drew on other sources also; but he took much of the detail of his De monade straight from De occulta philosophic, which was perhaps the chief source for his knowledge of Cabala. He also knew De vanitate, which in a negative sense was the source of his satirical treatment of asininity as the chief human virtue…. [I] have shown repeatedly that De vanitate was an important source for the skeptical thought of Michel de Montaigne, who based extensive passages of his "Apology for Raymond Sebond" on the earlier work. Montaigne also borrowed some illustrative details from De occulta philosophia. One French writer of the late sixteenth century, André Thevet, wrote that there was a whole school of atheists who claimed to follow Agrippa, while John Calvin earlier had classed him as a mocker at religion. One need not take these complaints as accurate reflections of Agrippa's own intentions; but the preceding chapter has shown that De vanitate contained ideas with an affinity for the thought of later groups of libertines and freethinkers. Furthermore, if De vanitate became a favorite of those who mocked at all learning and even at religion, De occulta philosophia in both printed and manuscript forms became a standard text for students of magic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although perhaps the spurious Fourth Book, with its numerous formulae and detailed instructions for conjuring spirits, was more influential than the three genuine books. It was chiefly as an infamous sorcerer that Jean Bodin denounced the Nettesheimer, though the occasion of the attack was rather the tendency of Agrippa and the open effort of his pupil Wier to throw discredit on the prosecution of witches.

Another important author who felt Agrippa's influence, far more strongly and positively than Bodin, was Sir Philip Sidney, whose well-known Apologie for Poetrie (written about 1579-1580 and posthumously published in 1595) not only referred directly to De vanitate but also, more important, modeled its fundamental arguments in defense of poetic fiction along lines obviously suggested by the recently translated declamation. Many other Elizabethan and Jacobean authors in England read and referred to Agrippa, including Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Nashe.

The seventeenth century saw frequent mention of Agrippa, but in the most various ways: as an enlightened opponent of the witchcraft delusion during his residence at Metz; as a Protestant hero who had been slandered by the Papists; as a wicked sorcerer or an equally wicked mocker at religion. Few of the numerous collections of lives of scholars failed to present him in one of these guises. The mystical writer and magician Thomas Vaughan in mid-century gave to Agrippa perhaps the most extravagant praise he ever received: "He indeed is my Author, and next to God I owe all that I have unto Him " [[Thomas Vaughan:] Eugenius Philalethes, Anthroposophia theomagica; or, A Discourse of the Nature of Man and his state after death, 1650]. His twin brother, the poet Henry Vaughan, drew from De vanitate at least the symbol of the ass as the humble Christian believer, and in part perhaps his stress on humility as a Christian ideal.

Such instances could be multiplied; but these, together with the continued re-editing of Agrippa's books, should at least show that there was something in his writings and in the figure of the man himself to attract the attention of his own and succeeding ages. Even well into the eighteenth century, although Agrippa had begun to be regarded as rather quaint, his De vanitate could still shake the youthful optimism of Goethe and cause him to pass through an intellectual crisis.

The Nettesheimer survived in the European mind, however, as a legend as well as a real man. The legends began accumulating within a very few years after his death. The earliest to find written expression was that wherever he went, a devil in the form of a black dog accompanied him, and that on his deathbed, he removed from the neck of this dog a collar bearing magical emblems and said, "Depart, damned beast, who hast wholly ruined me," whereupon the dog ran and leaped into the river Saône and was never seen again. This devil supposedly kept him informed of news, so that even though he spent long periods without ever leaving his study, he knew all that had happened even in distant places. This tale of Paolo Giovio reappears in Thevet and many later authors. Thevet also records (but denies) early tales that Agrippa's magical practices were responsible for the military victories of Charles V; and he attributes Agrippa's many travels to repeated expulsions caused by his practice of magic. Writing no later than 1599, the Jesuit Del Rio repeated the latter claim and added two new tales. According to him, Agrippa and Faust were both notorious for paying innkeepers with coins which after their departure turned into leaves or filth. The second tale is that a curious boarder once stole into the Nettesheimer's study and, by chance repeating a phrase found in a magical book that lay open on the desk, conjured up a devil. This devil fell upon the unskillful conjurer and killed him. Shortly afterward, Agrippa returned home and, fearing prosecution for murder, made the devil enter the victim's body and transport it to the public square, where, after strolling for a time as if alive, it collapsed, apparently the victim of a natural death. To these tales an eighteenth-century polyhistor added two more, that Agrippa was able to read in the moon distant events such as the outcome of the military operations of Francis I in Italy, and that he was able to lecture from nine to ten o'clock at Fribourg (or Freiburg-im-Breisgau) and at ten to begin his lecture at Pont-à-Mousson in Lorraine. In The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Sir Walter Scott preserves a legend—either invented or first written down by Thomas Nashe—that the alchemist Cornelius Agrippa allowed Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, to see his deceased sweetheart in a magic mirror.

To the European mind of the sixteenth century and after, then, Agrippa represented several things. Above all, as these legends show, and as the widespread use of De occulta philosophia confirms, he was the great magician who had sought out the wisdom of the remote past and had expressed some (but not all) of what he knew in De occulta philosophia, leaving much, however, to the conjecture of the reader or to private instruction which was handed down only by word of mouth. As later generations saw him, he was expert in the secret wisdom of the ancients, as expressed in the Orphic hymns and in the Hermetic writings. Not only Hellenistic but also Jewish culture excited the imagination of later decades, however; hence his contemporaries saw in him not just an expert in the writings of the magicians but also a rediscoverer of the still more sacred lore of the cabalists. His reputation for great learning, moreover, was not confined to these occult traditions. His works, which are rich in quotations, showed his readers that he also had a command of the ancient classics, especially the Latin ones, and of more recent authors. References to Italian authors of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are not uncommon in his books; and of these Italians, at least one, Pico della Mirandola, had influenced the structure of his thought considerably. The authority of Agrippa as a magician was doubtless enhanced by this familiarity with classical writings and with Italian humanistic literature.

The Agrippa who lived on in the awareness of following centuries, however, was not merely the magician and cabalist, the author of De occulta philosophia. He was also the radical doubter who passionately questioned the worth of all human learning, the author of De vanitate. … [These] two books are not so incompatible as they seem; but the appearance of these two elements in the thought of the Nettesheimer was nevertheless profoundly disturbing to an age which felt that all the old certainties (the unity of Christendom, the organic balance of the three traditional classes of society, the validity of human reason, the authority of accepted intellectual heroes such as Aristotle) were falling in ruin. In Agrippa the succeeding generations saw one of the greatest scholars of his age pursue and master not only the usual classical masterpieces but also the rarest works known, works enshrining the profound wisdom of ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, ancient Israel. Here they saw a man deeply versed in all the four faculties (liberal arts, medicine, law, and theology) and claiming academic degrees in all but the latter. And then they saw this same man turn against all arts and sciences, whether rational or occult, against all classes in society, even, it was whispered despite his final appeal to the unadulterated Gospel, against Christianity itself. Here these succeeding ages saw not just a man but also a symbol of disgust with all culture, with all values, with the whole condition of man in the universe. Agrippa von Nettesheim personified all the many doubts and uncertainties of his epoch.

It is small wonder that his century made of him and of other figures like him a legend, though it was Agrippa's misfortune that men named this legend, this symbol of their own intellectual despair and struggle, after a more shadowy figure, Faust. The Jesuit Del Rio classed Agrippa and Faust together as wicked sorcerers and swindlers who paid innkeepers in false gold. Christopher Marlowe expressed this same association between the two men, for his Dr. Faustus, after denouncing all human learning, explicitly takes Agrippa for his ideal:

Philosophy is odious and obscure,
Both Law and Physic are for petty wits;
Divinity is basest of the three,
Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible, and vild:
'Tis Magic, Magic that hath ravished me.
Then, gentle friends, aid me in this attempt;
And I that have with concise syllogisms
Gravelled the pastors of the German Church,
And made the flowering pride of Wertenberg
Swarm to my problems, as the infernal spirits
On sweet Musaeus when he came to hell,
Will be as cunning as Agrippa was,
Whose shadows made all Europe honour him.

[Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, Scene II, 11. 104-116]

The poet knew, as scholars long did not, that rejection of all learning was the prelude to an appeal to magic, not the product of dissatisfaction with it.

The influence of Agrippa on the other great recension of the Faust legend, that of Goethe, is even more obvious and more thoroughly established by literary scholarship. Here there is more than the general parallel between the intellectual bankruptcy of Faust and Agrippa's views in De vanitate. It is true that the name of Agrippa does not occur in Goethe's Faust; but Goethe knew De vanitate as a youth, when it caused him an intellectual crisis; and surely during his prolonged study of magic, the poet must have come across Agrippa's name time and time again. Certain details of the Faust character are clearly Agrippan in origin, such as the schwarze Pudel who attaches himself to Faust not long before the latter's first encounter with Mephistopheles. This element is the product of Giovio's legend about Agrippa's black devil-dog and of Wier's factual account of his master's fondness for a black dog called Monsieur. Like Agrippa, Goethe's Faust mastered and came to loathe all four faculties of university learning. Both of them were supposedly makers of gold; both of them supposedly offered to enrich the Emperor Charles V. Like Agrippa in the first chapter of De vanitate, Goethe's Mephistopheles gives an ironic twist to the phrase "Eritis sicut Deus, scientes bonum et malum" which he writes in the young scholar's book. One authority even suggests that Goethe changed Faust's first name from the Johann of earlier versions to Heinrich because Agrippa bore the latter name. This writer concludes that although Goethe drew on numerous figures, among them the real Faust and Paracelsus, no other individual united so many of the traits of his Faust as Agrippa did [Anton Reichl, "Goethes Faust und Agrippa von Nettesheim," Euphorion: Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte, IV (1897)]. Faust's opening speech sounds almost like a summary of De vanitate.

The matters so far discussed represent things which the contemporaries and successors of Agrippa could see. He was the magician, the cabalist, the Faustian doubter, the living embodiment of many of the enthusiasms and most of the gnawing doubts and uncertainties and fears of his age. There were other sides to his thought which his contemporaries could not see.

Agrippa's contemporaries could not, for instance, see his interest in magic and Cabala against its proper historical background. Such an appeal to occult traditions of Antiquity should not cause the modern student to speak grandly of interest in magic or Cabala as a passing fad of no great significance, as some have done. What could be more natural, in a civilization which for centuries had looked back with respect and awe to the cultural achievements of Antiquity and which was experiencing a great revival of interest in classical literature, than to look backwards for the solution of its intellectual problems? That it looked backwards not only for literary models and moral philosophies but also for magical lore should not be surprising, for even the main stream of ancient literature contained strong elements of magical belief. Furthermore, the Neoplatonic philosophy, which was the first great philosophical rediscovery of the humanists, was highly receptive to magic; and from it Agrippa's magical world view ultimately derives.

Not only Hellenistic but also Jewish culture had its contribution to make to the age; the revival of Hebrew studies led to a search for recondite Jewish literature. This interest in Cabala, too, was a natural outgrowth of the intellectual atmosphere of the century. It was natural for a humanistic age to look back to Greek and Roman literature for a shortcut to solution of its intellectual problems. It was just as natural for a Christian age to look back to the Hebrew texts that were its sources for a solution of religious and also general intellectual problems. This meant first of all study of the Hebrew Old Testament, but interest in Jewish Biblical commentary was a natural outgrowth of this study. Development of interest in Cabala and in the Talmud was aided by the fact that these writings often took the form of Biblical commentaries, and also by the pseudepigraphical character of much of the corpus of Cabala: it appeared to go back to very early times and to enshrine traditions handed down from the foundations of Judaism, even from Abraham and Moses themselves. It claimed, therefore, to be presenting not a Neoplatonizing philosophy of Alexandrian origin but the true and deeper meaning of divine revelation, as preserved from the most remote times. Christians would of course be interested in writings which presented themselves in this guise, especially since the gnostic and Neoplatonic influence on the actual authors of the cabalistic texts had led them to include materials which seemed to support such Christian doctrines as the Trinity.

Another matter which Agrippa's own age could not really understand was his relation to the Reformation, for men in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could not see that he stood quite apart from the movement initiated by Luther, neither wholly approving nor wholly condemning. The nearest approach to a correct understanding was that of Bayle, who felt that Agrippa like Erasmus first welcomed Luther but then felt disappointment with the Lutheran movement [Dictionnaire historique et critiqu]. Most Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries regarded him as a man of Protestant convictions who lacked the courage to avow them openly. Few in either religious camp could realize that his bitter attacks on the institutional church were accompanied by a refusal to disavow the institution, which he wanted to see purified of abuses and reduced in temporal power, but not shattered and broken.

Contemporaries also could not see that much of the destructive portion of his thought was an outgrowth of the fideism of late scholasticism and of the skeptical tendencies found in the thought of Nicholas of Cusa and perhaps in ancient philosophical writings. These contemporaries certainly felt the insufficiency of scholastic philosophy to meet their own intellectual needs; but they could not trace the growth of these antischolastic elements as, in part, scholars like Rudolf Stadelmann, Gerhard Ritter, Ernst Cassirer, and Richard H. Popkin have done in our own century. So they could not relate Agrippa to this more general movement which was producing a sense of debility, cultural decline, and decadence, a feeling that western society was passing through a terrible crisis, perhaps through its death agony, and that the Last Day was at hand.

Finally, even Agrippa himself had no glimpse of how the European mind was preparing to rise like the legendary Phoenix from the ashes of its despair to a new sense of mission, of self-confidence, of purposeful striving for progress. So he could not see his own doubt and despair as a preparation for a synthesis on a new and higher plane. He could not realize that his emphasis on sense knowledge of singulars could ever help create a new science, or even that it was in harmony with the crude empiricism of the rising generation. He could not see that the effect of books like De vanitate would be to encourage a bold questioning of accepted authorities and accepted beliefs in every field of endeavor and so would prepare men's minds to accept or at least to explore new patterns of explanation for old facts. Yet this inquisitive attitude, far more than the accumulation of new data, was the key to the rise of modern science later in the sixteenth and in the seventeenth centuries. Above all, Agrippa could have had only the dimmest awareness, if any at all, of the elements of future scientific reconstruction which existed in his later thought…. [His] half-hearted acceptance of sense perception of singulars and his doctrine that all higher patterns of explanation are arbitrary constructs of human reason, joined to his appeal to a principle of utility to justify his continued study of magic, put him on the threshold, logically speaking, of the modern notion of scientific hypothesis and its subjection to the test of facts. He did not cross this threshold; that was the work of later generations. But his history illustrates how European thinkers were beginning to grope in the direction of the seventeenth-century resolution of the problem of human knowledge. Agrippa himself stood amid the ruin of medieval thought, a ruin which he himself did much to advance; but he also pointed tentatively and unknowingly in directions which, for some centuries to come, European mankind was to find fruitful and satisfying.