CORNELIUS HEINRICH AGRIPPA OF NETTESHEIM
- Philosopher, born in Cologne in 1486 to a noble family.
After a wandering and adventurous life, he died, it seems, in Grenoble in 1535.
His principal work, written in his youth but to which he devoted his entire life with revisions and additions, is the *De occulta philosophia*, presented, as he himself says in the preface, to the famous Abbot Trithemius, who corrected and approved II. Magic is described here as the highest form of knowledge, from which the three parts of philosophy (physics, mathematics, and theology) are complemented, corresponding respectively to the three books into which the work is divided.
The subject of occult philosophy is the intimate natures and hidden properties of things, so called because their causes are hidden from the abstract consideration of philosophers and are revealed only through the practice of particular experiences (I, 10). These do not belong to natures as such but are infused within them and shared by divine ideas through the "soul (or spiritus) mundi," the rays of the stars, and the intelligences that preside over them. Magic, therefore, after natural reason and divine revelation, is the "third way" that leads us to the knowledge of divine things, and it provides that hidden sense of nature and Revelation which 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), and is to be understood not as a hypostasis but rather as the universal force that permeates the world as the soul does the body. In Book III (ch. 9), we find a profession of faith in the Trinity and the Incarnation, a pious and ardent condensation of the Athanasian Creed with content of distinctly Catholic character. Less optimistic is the essay *De vanitate scientiarum*, written in his mature years, in which A. offers a merciless critique of all sciences, showing how each stops precisely at the point where the definitive solution to problems should be found.
The essay earned him a harsh critique from a scholar at the University of Louvain, to which he replied with unshaken convictions. A refined humanist is revealed in the curious *De praecellentia et nobilitate foeminei sexus*, a dignified defense of feminism "avant la lettre" and noteworthy for the affectionate praise it contains of the Blessed Virgin.
A. calls her among all virgins "far and wide the most immaculate princess," so that merely looking upon her arouses the most chaste thoughts; he defends her divine motherhood, her virginity "before" and "after childbirth," and finally proclaims that "in the female sex the best is the Virgin Mary," so that "never was there nor will there be a worthier woman, I say the most blessed Virgin Mary, who, indeed, having been conceived without original sin, is not even greater than Christ, insofar as His humanity is concerned."
A quick Italian translation of the pamphlet appeared (G. De Ferrari, Venice 1549).
To date, there is no comprehensive study that allows for a balanced judgment on the content and significance of A.’s work. In any case, to present him as a heretic and complicit with the Reformers, as is usually done, seems to us to overlook his explicit intentions and to pay too little heed to fundamental doctrines in order to overemphasize the extravagance of some theories that might have had some explanation in the rigidity and decline of Scholasticism.