[First published in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig (10 vols.

; London and New

York: Routledge, 1998), vol. 1, pp. 130-33.]

[Index: Henricus Cornelius Agrippa]

[Date: 1998]

Henricus Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim

Michael H. Keefer

Henricus Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535)

Famous in the sixteenth century for writings in which he steps forward variously
as magician, occultist, evangelical humanist and philosopher, Agrippa shared with other
humanist writers a thoroughgoing contempt for the philosophy of the scholastics. In his
more evangelical moods Agrippa could be taken for a radical exponent of the philosophia
Christi of his older contemporary Erasmus, or mistaken for a follower of Luther, whose
early writings he actively disseminated in humanist circles. However, his deepest
affinities are with magically inflected philosophies: the Neoplatonism and Hermetism of
Marsilio Ficino, and the syncretic Christian Cabala of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,
Johannes Reuchlin and Johannes Trithemius.
As well as expounding an influential magical view of language, Agrippa
contributed to the sixteenth-century revival of scepticism, denounced the tyranny of
those who obstructed a free search for truth, criticized the subjection of women and (with
a courage unusual in his time) resisted and mocked the instigators of the witch-craze.
Finding in Hermetic-Cabalistic doctrines the inner truth both of religion and of
philosophy, Agrippa was also aware of parallels between these magical doctrines and the
Gnostic heresies. His heterodoxy made him a target for pious slanders: within several
decades of his death he became the protagonist of demonological fictions which were
soon absorbed into the legend of Doctor Faustus.

Life

Verbal magic

Agrippa as sceptic and free-thinker

Agrippa as feminist

Agrippa's philosophical influence

Life
Born to a family of the lesser nobility in Cologne (from whose Latin name,

Colonia Agrippina, he drew his humanist cognomen), Agrippa took his first degree at
Cologne in 1502; after further studies in Paris and elsewhere, he claimed to have
doctorates in canon law, civil law and medicineand also to have been knighted in
recognition of military service.
In 1508 he took part in an unsuccessful military adventure which a secret occultist
society of which he was a member undertook in Spain, possibly at the behest of the
emperor Maximilian I. Members of this society subsequently became prominent in
French humanist and court circles, providing Agrippa with a network of supporters upon
whom, as his reputation for encyclopedic learning grew, he was able to draw in his
searches for patronage. When in 1509 he lectured on Reuchlin's Cabalist philosophy at
the University of Dle in Franche-Comt and wrote De nobilitate, Agrippa had hopes of
preferment in the court of Margaret of Austria, regent of Franche-Comt and the Low
Countries. These were dashed when he was denounced at court by a prominent
Franciscan as a judaizing heretic. Returning to Germany, he completed the first version
of De occulta philosophia in 1510, and in the same year travelled to England, apparently
in the service of Maximilian I.
For the first several years of his Italian sojourn, which lasted from 1511 to 1518,
Agrippa continued to serve the emperor both as diplomat and soldier. But by 1515 he was
lecturing on the Hermetica at the University of Paviaa position which he promptly lost,
along with his library and other possessions, after the French victory at Marignano. In
1518 Agrippa moved north again, taking up a position as city orator and advocate in
Metz. Intervening there in the case of a woman accused of witchcraft, he secured her

freedom, recovered her property, and accused the inquisitor responsible for torturing her
of heresy. But this and other instances of resistance to tyranny and obscurantism made
him unpopular with the orthodox. He returned to Cologne in 1520, lived from 1521 to
1523 in Geneva (where he was at the centre of a group of reforming tendencies), and then
moved to Fribourg, where he practised medicine.
In 1524 Agrippa secured a place at the French royal court at Lyons as personal
physician to the queen mother, Louise de Savoy. But by 1526 he was in trouble, having
rashly revealed his sympathy for the rebellious Duc de Bourbon and the emperor Charles
V, who was at war with king Franois I. During the same year Agrippa wrote De vanitate,
which includes a vehement critique of the corruption and venality of court life. Perhaps
as a result, his salary was withheld, while at the same time he was refused permission to
leave the court.
Dismissed at last in 1528, Agrippa obtained a place in the court of Margaret of
Austria at Antwerp as historiographer to the emperor Charles V. But when Margaret died
in late 1530 he was again unable to secure payment for his services. And he was now in
more serious trouble. The printing of De vanitate in 1530 had earned him condemnations
from the theological faculties of Paris and Louvain, which led to difficulties with the
imperial privy council. In 1531 the printing of a much expanded version of De occulta
philosophia was blocked after the first of its three books had been printed; two years
later, thanks to the patronage of the reform-minded Archbishop of Cologne, Agrippa was
able to see this book and several others, including De nobilitate and a commentary on the
art of Ramon Lull, through the press.
Returning in 1535 to Lyons, Agrippa was imprisoned by Franois I for having
written against Louise de Savoy. Released through the intervention of friends, he died
shortly afterwards in Grenoble.

Verbal magic
Agrippa derived from the Neoplatonists (and ultimately of course from the

Cratylus) the view that the power inherent in natural things lives on and is latent in the
form of the signification (DOP, I. lxx). Because the hidden powers of things proceed in
the first place from celestial causes, and because the celestial powers which move the

elemental world, acting from circumference to centre, originate with the word of God,
which word the wise Chaldeans of Babylon call the cause of causes, it follows that the
philosopher or magician whose words can draw upon the power of this originary creative
Word should be able to intervene powerfully in the natural order (DOP, II. lx). Agrippa's
insistence on the purely natural quality of verbal magic cannot disguise the heterodox
implication of this view of language, which is that the magician can get in at the top of
the hierarchical structure of the cosmos because his mysterious words and ingenious
speech draw upon the power contained within God's Worda term which refers to the
canonical scriptures as well as to Christ, the creative Logos.

Agrippa as sceptic and free-thinker

The main purpose of De vanitate is to being the reader to a position of Christian

fideism (though one in which Christian faith is thoroughly infused with Hermetic and
Cabalistic motifs). To this end Agrippa's chapter on logic makes a brief but effective
deployment of sceptical arguments. Aristotle's principles of demonstration, he argues,
require an understanding of causes and principles to which we give our assent on the
basis either of authority or of sense-based experience (for knowledge is agreed to arise
from the senses, and Averroes makes agreement with sensible things a criterion of truth).
But the senses are often deceived, and furthermore cannot to the intellectual level at
which we encounter the causes of lower things. It is therefore manifest that the way of
the truth is shut up from the senses, and that sciences rooted in them are uncertain,
erroneous and deceitful (De vanitate, cap. 7). Appeals to authority are no more
acceptable, since the final recourse of the scholastics against those who deny the first
principles of their science is to violence, so that of philosophers they are made torturers
and hangmen, since they compel us by force to confess that which they should teach by
reason (cap. 1).

Agrippa as feminist
In De nobilitate Agrippa argues that between man and woman by the substance

of the soul one has no higher pre-eminence of nobility above the other, but both have by
nature equal liberty of dignity and worthiness. Yet in all other respects, apart from the
divine substance of the soul, the excellence and nobility of womankind surpasses beyond
limit the rude gross nature of men. Some of the examples with which he develops this
claim are deliberately frivolous, and yet he does insistently challenge the misogynist legal
culture by which women, being subdued as it were by force of arms, are constrained to
give place to men, and to obey their subduers, not by any natural or divine necessity or
reason, but by custom, education, fortune, and a certain tyrannical occasion. Franois
Rabelais's portrait of Agrippa as Herr Trippa, an occultist who is ready to predict
Panurge's cuckoldry by all the magical arts at his disposal, while remaining unaware that
the court lackeys are lining up to frolic with his own wife (Le tiers libre des faicts et dicts
hroiques du bon Pantagruel [1546], ch. 25), can be understood as a sardonic response to
Agrippa's feminism. A more positive response is evident in Johannes Wier's De
praestigiis daemonum (1563), a book which in some parts of western Europe had a
moderating effect upon the witch-hunts of the time: Wier, who had been Agrippa's
student, adopted his opinion that the elderly women who were the prime targets of the
witch-hunters were suffering from melancholia rather than demonic possession, and that
Christians should give them spiritual and material comfort rather than persecuting and
torturing them.

Agrippa's philosophical influence

The apparent contradiction between the sceptical fideism of De vanitate and the

encyclopedic syncretism of De occulta philosophia is to some extent dissipated by

Agrippa's reliance in both books upon a Hermetic-Cabalistic doctrine of spiritual rebirth
and deification. However, Agrippa is neither a coherent nor in most respects an original
thinker. His most strongly voiced opinions are often taken verbatim from the works of
Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico and Johannes Reuchlin, and since he typically appears
more interested in assembling diverse opinions on a subject than in assessing their
relative truth, his own impulses may seem more antiquarian than philosophical. (Given
the hostility he encountered from theologians of the mendicant orders from 1509
onwards, one may suspect that he was content to allow the material he had assembled to

work within the reader's mind, without himself taking the risk of underlining its
heterodox implications.)
Agrippa was widely read for well over a century after his death. He was, on the
one hand, denounced by Jean Calvin in De scandalis (1550) as a mocker of sacred truths
in the vein of Lucian of Samosata, by Jean Bodin in De la dmonomanie des sorciers
(1581) as the leading sorcerer of his age, and by Andr Thevet in Les vrais pourtraits et
view des hommes illustres (1584) as having spawned hordes both of scoffers and
magicians. On the other hand, his works were also cited and echoed by literary figures
ranging from Jean de la Taille to Sir Philip Sidney, Fulke Greville, Christopher Marlowe
and Thomas Nashe, as well as by occult philosophers from John Dee and Giordano
Bruno to Thomas Vaughan. Moreover, Michel de Montaigne's scepticism, which
represents man as naked and empty, acknowledging his natural weakness, apt to receive
from above some strange power, disfurnished of human knowledge, and so much the
more fit to harbour divine understanding, nullifying his judgment so as to give more
place to faith (Essais II. xii, vol. 1, p. 562), is clearly indebted to Agrippa's De vanitate.
Perhaps more significantly, it has recently been argued that Ren Descartes's writings,
from the early Olympica and Cogitationes privatae (1619-21) to the Meditations (1641),
make sustained use of motifs derived from the philosophical Hermetica, and that
Descartes' understanding of the Hermetic writings was conditioned by his early reading
of Agrippa (see Keefer 1996).

List of Works
Agrippa, Henricus Cornelius (1509, printed 1532) De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei
sexus, Cologne; Of the Nobilitie and Excellencie of Womankynde, trans. Thomas
Clapham (1542), London.
------ (1526, printed 1530) De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium atque
excellentia verbi dei declamatio, Cologne; Of the Vanitie and Uncertaintie of Artes
and Sciences, trans. James Sanford (1569), ed. Catherine M. Dunn (1974),
Northridge: California State University Press.
------ (1533) De occulta philosophia libri tres, Cologne; Three Books of Occult

Philosophy, trans. James Freake (1651), ed. Donald Tyson (1993), St. Paul,
Minnesota: Llewellyn Publications.
------ (c. 1600) Opera, 2 vols., Lyons; ed. R. H. Popkin (1970), facsimile rpt., Hildesheim
and New York: Georg Olms Verlag.

References and further reading

Hermes Trismegistus [pseud.] (1992) Hermetica, ed. Brian P. Copenhaver, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. (The best English translation of writings in which
Agrippa was obsessively interested.)
Jordan, Constance (1990) Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models,
Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. (Includes an analysis of Agrippa's
place on the feminist side of Renaissance debates on the status of women.)
Keefer, Michael (1988) Agrippa's Dilemma: Hermetic 'Rebirth' and the Ambivalences of
De vanitate and De occulta philosophia, Renaissance Quarterly 41: 614-53.
(Explores the commonalities and divergences of Agrippa's two major works in
terms of their deployment of motifs derived from the Hermetica and their author's
awareness of parallels between Hermetic texts and Gnostic heresies.)
------ (1996) The Dreamer's Path: Descartes and the Sixteenth Century, Renaissance
Quarterly 49: 30-76. (Referred to in 5, this essay argues that Agrippa's writings
led Descartes to Hermetic texts which were decisive in shaping his philosophical
project.)
Montaigne, Michel de (1962) Essais de Montaigne, 2 vols., ed. M. Rat, Paris: ditions
Garnier Frres.
Nauert, Charles G., Jr. (1965) Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought, Urbana:
University of Illinois Press. (The standard biography and the most detailed study of
Agrippa's thought.)
Tomlinsin, Gary (1993) Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of
Others, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, pp. 44-66. (The best
summary account available of Agrippa's magic.)
Yates, Frances A. (1964) Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul. (This compulsively readable account of Renaissance

magical traditions includes a rather dismissive account of De occulta philosophia.)

------ (1979) The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul. (Gives greater emphasis than Yates' previous books to the influence of
Kabbalah on Renaissance occult philosophy.)
Zambelli, Paola (1969) Cornelio Agrippa, Erasmo e la teologia umanistica,
Rinascimento 21 (2nd series, 10): 29-88.
------ (1976) Magic and Radical Reformation in Agrippa of Nettesheim, Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 39: 69-103.
------ (1985) Scholastiker und Humanisten: Agrippa und Trithemius zur Hexerei,
Archiv fr Kulturgeschichte 67: 41-79. (These and other articles by the leading
Agrippa scholar have been crucial in situating his writings in relation to Erasmian
humanism, the radical Reformation, and overlapping views of magic and
witchcraft.)