Cornelius Agrippa: From Occult Philosophy to Divine Knowledge
in Spain under the military service of King Ferdinand and having earned the title of knight, he travels to various cities such as Lyon, Dole and obviously to Würzburg where at that moment Abbot Trithemius was located. Here, says Agrippa, the formative conversations with the abbot take place on chemistry, magic, kabbalah and are such as to induce him to write the first two books of his De Philosophia Occulta, which are dedicated to him. "Reverend Father, when I was recently with you at your convent in Würzburg, where our conversations took place on chemistry, magic, kabbalah and other mysterious subjects in the field of occult sciences and arts, we wondered why magic, so esteemed by the ancients and venerated in antiquity by the Wise and priests, became in the early times of our religion, so suspect and hateful to the Church Fathers [...]" Agrippa turns out to be an energetic and dynamic character, always traveling throughout Europe, never disdaining a verbal dispute, even when he risks losing in the first person, as in the case of the alleged witch of Woippy. This poor woman whose only fault was being the daughter of a woman burned for witchcraft, had been brutalized by the Inquisition without any reason and Agrippa, finding himself near the village for other reasons and noticing the absurd injustice of the Inquisitor, decided to constitute himself as the woman's lawyer adopting as a defensive strategy that of accusing the Inquisitor of heresy: "What proof does he give that this woman is really a witch? He says that her mother was burned as a witch; and I tell him to his face that the deeds of others have no value against an accused [...] he claims that witches have the habit of consecrating the fruit of their womb to the devil and that, on the other hand, since they ordinarily give themselves to the devil, he is certainly the father of their children to whom he transmits his malice. [...] With your perverse doctrine, you disregard the virtue of baptism and the sacramental formula; because if the son remains with the devil even when the priest has said: 'Come out unclean spirit and make room for the Holy Spirit'; what value does the sacrament have? And who proves to you that the devil can generate? [...] you, inquisitor of the faith, with all your arguments, you are nothing but a heretic." Like in the case of Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and all that current that dedicates itself to philosophical or magical astrology, Agrippa does not look favorably upon divinatory astrology, in particular he does not look favorably upon the fatalism with which it is taken by princes and princesses, so much so that to Louise of Savoy he refuses to perform the natal chart of her son, the future king of France, and for this he is driven from the court where he had found asylum. 20.1 The Occult Philosophy and the De Vanitate In this period, in 1526 Agrippa writes one of those texts destined to create considerable perplexity among historians of this historical period: the De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum. The book, written in 1526 and published in 1531, declares the uncertainty and vanity of human sciences including those more properly occult such as magic, astrology and alchemy. For example, the famous warning he declares in this writing to alchemists is famous: "In the end, after having lost the time and money you have employed there, you find yourselves old, burdened with years, covered in rags, hungry, with a perpetual smell of sulfur and dirty and stained with zinc and carbon, paralyzed from having manipulated quicksilver too much... and so unhappy that you would gladly sell your life and even your soul." With this book Agrippa seems to make himself known as the most irreducible of skeptics and those disillusioned by science. Yet after not even a year's distance he publishes the first edition of a book totally devoted to magic and astrology that he had begun under the tutelage of Abbot Trithemius, which he had kept private for more than twenty years and which in those very years he had decided to organize and complete with the addition of a third book: De Philosophia Occulta which comes out in its first edition in 1533. Agrippa's apparently schizophrenic attitude has aroused the curiosity of historians for a long time, who have attributed this double publication to an attempt by Agrippa to protect himself against the attacks that would come from the publication of the subsequent book, namely the Occult Philosophy. This can certainly be true, but it is not a conclusive fact. In reality, as Yates has illustrated, the two works are not in antithesis, indeed once examined in depth they are the only logical consequence of each other. The failure to understand this continuity and therefore also Agrippa's personality has been dictated by a failure to understand and evaluate the De Vanitate Scientiarum. In the De Vanitate, Agrippa affirms the vanity and uncertainty of all human sciences, both occult and classical ones. The list of vain sciences includes: grammar, art, poetry, the art of memory, dialectic, arithmetic, music, geometry, cosmography, architecture, astronomy, magic, Kabbalah, physics, metaphysics, ethics, medicine, alchemy and jurisprudence. Having arrived at the ninety-ninth chapter, Agrippa thus appears to us as the prince of skeptics, for whom everything is vain. But having arrived at the hundredth chapter, here we discover the meaning of the entire work. Everything is vain, except one thing: the Word of God. Human science is vain, uncertain and illusory, only Divine Science, the Word of God is real. Here is the meaning of Agrippa's writing, so that in his subsequent writing the De Philosophia Occulta, without any solution of continuity he illustrates how to access, through a "more effective philosophy" to such divine science and real wisdom. Thus Agrippa conceives his system, which is essentially magical and whose end is to reach Divine Science. He, following the Kabbalistic division of Francesco Giorgi divides the cosmos into