AGRIPPA OF NETTESHEIM, CORNELIUS HEINRICH. - Philosopher, b. at Cologne in 1486 into a noble family. After a wandering and adventurous life he died, it seems at Grenoble, in 1535.
His principal work, written in his youth, but on which he labored his whole life with revisions and additions, is the De occulta Philosophia, presented, as A. says in the proem, to the celebrated abbot Trithemius, and by him corrected and approved. Magic is there described as the highest form of knowledge, from which the three parts of philosophy (physics, mathematics and theology) receive their complement, to which the three books into which the work is divided respectively attend.
The object of occult philosophy is the intimate natures and the occult properties of things, so called because their causes are hidden from the abstract consideration of philosophers and are revealed only through the exercise of particular experiences (I, 10). They do not belong to natures as such, but are infused into them and participated from the divine ideas by means of the "soul (or spiritus) of the world," by the rays of the stars and by the intelligences that preside over them. Magic therefore, after natural reason and divine revelation, is the "third way" that introduces us into the knowledge of divine things, and it supplies that hidden sense of nature and of Revelation that God reserves for some of his elect. The mediator between the intelligences and the corporeal world is the "spiritus mundi," which is called the "fifth essence," after the four elements (I, 14), which must be taken not as a hypostasis but rather as the universal force that is in the world as the soul is in its body. We note in book III (ch. 9) a profession of faith on the Trinity and on the Incarnation, which is a pious and ardent abbreviation of the Athanasian symbol of frankly Catholic content. Less optimistic is the essay De vanitate scientiarum, written in his mature years, in which A. makes a merciless critique of all the sciences, showing how each one halts precisely at the point where the definitive solution of the problems ought to be posed.
The essay earned him a harsh critique from a doctor of Louvain, to which he responded with unchanged convictions. A. reveals himself as an exquisite humanist in the curious De praecellentia et nobilitate foeminei sexus, which is a dignified defense of feminism "ante litteram" and must be remembered for the affectionate praises it contains in reference to the Madonna.
A. calls her among all virgins "longe lateque principem immaculatum," so that merely to look upon her stirs the most chaste thoughts; he defends her divine motherhood, her virginity "ante" and "post partum"; finally he proclaims that "in foemineo sexu optima est Virgo Maria," so that "nec unquam dignior fuit nec futura est mulier, ipsa inquam beatissima Virgine Maria, quae siquidem praeter originale peccatum concepta sit, ne Christus quidem, quantum ad eius humanitatem attinet, maior est."
An Italian version of the pamphlet soon appeared (G. De Ferrari, Venice 1549).
There is still lacking an overall study that would allow an equitable judgment on the content and significance of A.'s work. In any case, to present him as a heretic and conniving with the reformers, as is usually done, seems to us to pass over his explicit intentions and to take little account of his fundamental doctrines, in order to overvalue the extravagance of certain doctrines that could have some explanation in the rigidification and decadence of Scholasticism.