Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 386 - Perhaps Not Wrong - Cornelius Agrippa.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the University of London. We saw last time how Marie Dantier and Arguella von Grumbach were inspired by the spirit of the Reformation to speak out on religious matters. Ironically enough, in doing so they would not have had the support of the leading Reformers. As I mentioned in the earlier episode on him, Luther himself taught that women are best off staying home and keeping their mouths shut. But at this same time, some men were arguing in favor of women's emancipation. One of them was Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Netzesheim. Early in the 16th century, he made his contribution to the long-running dispute over the virtues of women, often called by its French title the Querelle de France. We'll be returning to the general topic in a future installment, but since it is an early work by Agrippa and does him so much credit, I thought we might begin our survey of his multifaceted and rather puzzling career by examining his declamation on the nobility and preeminence of the female sex. Agrippa delivered it as a speech in 1509 at the University of Dul. It was dedicated to the titular president of the university, Margaret of Austria. Though the work did not secure him patronage from Margaret or the faculty position he coveted at Dul, it was a huge success by other measures. Just in the 16th century, the Latin original would be translated into French no fewer than five times, alongside two versions in each of three other languages, German, Italian, and English. Its eager reception was not thanks to its originality. Like other contributors to this genre, Agrippa is indebted to the Italian poet Boccaccio, who wrote in praise of women back in the 14th century. He also makes extensive use of the Triumph of Women, a treatise composed in about 1440 by Juan Rodriguez del Padron. And one of the most striking passages in Agrippa's declamation is closely parallel to remarks made several years earlier in Maria Equicolas' On Women. Agrippa repeats her complaint that women are subjected to the tyranny of their husbands, legally disenfranchised, and kept out of public life, with nothing to occupy them but needle and thread. Indeed, one of the more interesting points made by Agrippa concerns the legal status of women. He points out that Roman law was more generous in its dealings with women than the law of his own time. In antiquity, they could pass on their names to their children, had control over their dowry, and owned property, including slaves. This shows Agrippa's awareness of the way that customs and attitudes change over time. He thinks they should change again, now in favor of women. He argues for this philosophically, as when he says that the virtue of the soul is unaffected by sexual difference, and invokes Galen and Avicenna for the important role of female seed in reproduction, and Plato's Republic and its support for including women in the military. But more central to his case is scriptural evidence, to the point that the work has been called an exercise in applied theology. Agrippa, of course, realizes that biblical texts can be used to justify oppression of women, as with St. Paul's notorious instruction that women are to be subject to their husbands and silent in the church. These would have guided the attitudes expressed by Luther. But Agrippa discounts them on the grounds that God has a preference for no one. Actually, if God has a preference for anyone, it must be women. He saved Eve for his final creation, after all, and as the philosophers say, the first thing intended is the last done. Furthermore, it was really Adam who was at fault for the first sin and who propagated sin to all his descendants. Elsewhere, Agrippa argues that the first sin was the original act of sexual congress between Adam and Eve, which seems to apportion blame more equally. On the other hand, he also writes a treatise on the sacrament of marriage, which recommends that everyone should marry, and for love, not financial or political convenience. With Agrippa, as we'll be discovering, there is always an on the other hand. In the present case, it comes in the form of interpretations which take this whole declamation to be satirical. It must be said that some of his arguments are so ridiculous that it's hard to believe they are meant seriously, as when he says that when women fall down they always fall on their backs so as to look up at the exalted heavens. And speaking personally, I certainly hope he's kidding when he says that baldness makes men grotesque and beards make them look so ugly that they look like beasts. Sometimes Agrippa's feminist arguments even look like thinly veiled attacks on women. He demonstrates women's cleverness and resourcefulness by listing all the men they managed to deceive, like Adam, Samson, and Solomon. In this case, though, he anticipates the obvious objection and defends treacherous women for realizing that they have to come out on top when competing with men. He here cites the example of Pope Innocent III, who once told someone, If only one of us loses, I'd rather it was you. The question of Agrippa's sincerity hangs over his most important writings, if not his whole corpus. The central dilemma has been phrased by one scholar as follows, How could the same man have written an enthusiastic and uncritical summa of Renaissance magic, and also an aggressively skeptical, Fideist attack on all human knowledge, which presents the Bible as the only source of truth? The enthusiastic summa or compendium of magic is called on-occult philosophy, while the skeptical attack on knowledge bears the frank title, On the vanity and uncertainty of the sciences. His authorship of these dramatically different treatises allows us to compare him to contemporaries who explored Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, and demonology, like Marsilio Ficino and Pico de la Mirandola, or alternatively, to critics of human rationality and upholders of faith in God and scripture, like Luther. During and after his lifetime, observers complained about both versions of Agrippa. He was blamed for everything from supporting the cause of Protestantism to being a sinister mage, wielding dark powers. The English playwright Philip Marlow explicitly compared his dramatic creation of Dr. Faustus to Agrippa, whose shadows made all Europe honor him, and a famous legend about Agrippa traveling with the devil in the form of a black dog is a source for Goethe's much later play about Faust. Agrippa's on-occult philosophy is in a sense two different books, because its original 1510 version was extensively revised and expanded to about double length in a second 1533 printed edition. The first version was sent to Agrippa's colleague Johannes Tritemius, who shared both his fascination with magic and his conviction that the practice of this art could be made consistent with Christian piety. Thus, Tritemius said, But nature is already capable of achieving quite a lot, according to Tritemius. This is why pagans have been capable of performing astounding feats, despite their lack of faith in the true God. The notion of natural magic was a common one in the Renaissance, also explored down in Italy by Ficino and Picco. Agrippa quotes Picco to the effect that, for example, by making flowers bloom already in March, a feat that we nowadays manage unnaturally by causing climate change. Alchemy would also be an art for isolating elemental natures and recombining them to make new substances, notably precious metals. But for Agrippa, such manipulation of the elemental natural world is only the first of three kinds of magic. There's also astrology, which is the science that deals with the higher world of the heavens, and then religion, which deals with the still higher world of divinity. Thus, Agrippa integrates theology into the occult sciences, portraying it as a science that deals with God and angels, as we might expect, but also demons, rituals, and powerful words and signs. All forms of magic function by exploiting the similarities and dissimilarities between things in the three worlds, elemental, celestial, and intellectual, or divine. As Agrippa puts it, magic teaches us how things differ from one another and how they agree. Thus, Agrippa explains the use of the magic square, a grid-shaped array of letters which will produce magical effects when one traces the pattern made by the letters in the name of a celestial body. He also evokes old ideas from the Pythagorean and Platonist tradition by saying that the magician can take advantage of the harmony and proportion between things because all things that are and are made subsist by and receive their power from number. That sounds like pure Pythagoreanism. And certainly classical sources are important for Agrippa, to the point that on-occult philosophy has been called a prime example of the revival of ancient paganism. But he also draws, especially in the revised 1533 edition, on the Hebrew mystical tradition called Qabalah. This is the reason he did not get that teaching position at the University of Dul. He was accused of heresy over his interest in Qabalah, this just one year before the Reuchlin Affair, which we have discussed earlier. As you'll remember, it involved attacks on a humanist who specialized in Hebrew studies. Apparently heedless of such opposition, Agrippa continued his study of this tradition and remained convinced of its magical efficacy and its compatibility with Christian religion. Or did he? In his treatise on the uncertainty of the sciences, he devotes a whole chapter to Qabalah, explaining correctly that the term means the tradition of knowledge passed down through the generations. Supposedly, Moses himself used this secret knowledge to work miracles like the parting of the Red Sea. But now Agrippa says that it is mere superstition used to perform tricks that should certainly not be compared to real miracles. This fits with the overall tone of the work, which the Agrippa scholar Paolo Zambelli has called an anti-encyclopedia. It begins by stating that, so far from allowing humans to transcend their natural limits, the arts and sciences are in fact highly damaging to us. By the end of the lengthy work, Agrippa has not changed his mind. He says that all the branches of learning are actually just human customs which are lacking in true demonstration and simply prevent people from devoting themselves to Christianity. Indeed, he says that nothing is so much opposed to Christian faith and religion as science. No two things are more incompatible with each other. This sentence was one of those quoted by the theologians of the University of Louvain when they condemned Agrippa, here following the example of their colleagues at the Sorbonne. And you can see why. Sandwiched between these general denunciations of the sciences at the beginning and end of Agrippa's book, we have a series of scandalous criticisms of every kind of human learning, from grammar to medicine to theology, with discussions of such topics as prostitution and dice-playing thrown in for good measure. The resulting treatise is, in the opinion of Agrippa's biographer Charles Nauert, thanks to its pungent invective, the one work of Agrippa which can still be read with enjoyment. But we're forced to ask the same question that we posed about his defense of women. Is he being serious? There are reasons to doubt it. Elsewhere, Agrippa expresses the typical early 16th century disdain for the scholastics by suggesting that they are effectively skeptics, remarking that they are even worse than prostitutes. He doesn't tell us how they compare to dice-players. He also wrote a favorable commentary on one of the most ambitious theories of scientific method produced in the medieval era, that of Ramon Lull, though he does say that Lull's combinatorial art would at best secure us knowledge of divine attributes and not God's true nature, but that's hardly a radical skeptical position, of course. Given that Agrippa was so devoted to the occult sciences of magic, alchemy, and astrology, we can also ask more specifically whether he became skeptical about these arts by the time of writing on the uncertainty of the sciences. As you might almost expect by now, there are conflicting pieces of evidence. The occult sciences are targeted along with the other disciplines in On Uncertainty. Furthermore, in his revised 1533 edition of the treatise On Occult Philosophy, he advises readers that they should neither read nor understand nor remember the earlier version of the treatise, for it is harmful, it is poisonous. He then adds, I desire by this retraction to be recanted, for formerly I spent a great deal of time and expense in these vanities. But why spend more than two decades researching occult sciences and then massively expand your treatise on the topic if you reject the whole business? Also worth mentioning here is a fascinating bit of biography. Agrippa really got around. He was born in Cologne, but traveled widely, to London, various places in France and Germany, and also Italy. At one point he was staying in Metz, and involved himself in the trial of a woman who had been accused of witchcraft. He assailed the Inquisitor in the case, a Dominican named Nicolas Savin, arguing that the accusations made no sense in rational or theological terms. His intervention was successful, as the woman was freed. This sounds like the action of a skeptic, and a pretty heroic one at that, to which we can add that his student, Jan Vier, was a prominent critic of witch trials. But now comes the inevitable phrase, on the other hand, on the other hand, a close look at the documents from Metz shows that Agrippa did not question the sheer possibility of witchcraft or the conjuration of demons. He just thought the accused woman was innocent. In his on-occult philosophy, he has plenty to say about such summonings, though he is careful not to spell out the procedure in such detail that we could all try it at home. He even comments that evil women are apt to consort with demons. He levels the ultimate 16th century insult at such women by comparing them to heretical churchmen. How then to resolve the tension between Agrippa the mage and Agrippa the skeptic? The aforementioned Troz-Nauwot offers an explanation that combines chronology with caveats. As his career progressed, Agrippa became less confident about the efficacy of magic and the resources of human reason more generally, but he still thought that occult sciences worked a lot of the time, even if they did not provide certainty. As Nauwot puts it, despite Agrippa's denunciation of astrology, he still felt that there might be something to it and that if one were to practice it, one must follow its rules faithfully. Then he wrote On Uncertainty, which despite its brash rhetoric, leaves open the possibility that magic does sometimes work. It rails against practitioners of natural magic but does not claim that they are always charlatans. Agrippa also refers to the possibility of an alchemist making a philosopher's stone, which has a balance of the elemental properties. But he keeps his descriptions so vague that only adepts of the alchemical art will know what he is talking about. This is not so far from what we find in On Occult Philosophy, where he says in a similar vein that he has seen precious metals produced alchemically but not in enough quantities to make the technique profitable. A very different reading has been offered by Marc van der Pol, who focuses on the genre chosen by Agrippa for both his defense of women and his attack on the sciences. This is the declamation, a genre which, in Agrippa's own words, says some things for sport and other things for serious. It voices some true things, some false things, and some doubtful things. While declaiming, one might even intentionally bring forth unpersuasive arguments so as to provoke others into defending the truth. In a context like this, it would be perfectly acceptable for Agrippa to be merely provocative or satirical, the suspicion that has been raised regarding his defense of women, or simply to try out ideas to which he is less than fully committed. As he said in a daring work on Original Sin, The most philosophically intriguing interpretation, though, would have Agrippa being skeptical about the rational sciences, including magic, in order to be anything but skeptical when it comes to religious faith. When he says in On Uncertainty that the learned are less likely to come to God, it is because they have mistakenly elevated reason above revelation. Only faith can unite us to God and to ultimate truth. Many of Agrippa's remarks about magic fit with this idea. Remember his claim that pagan and Jewish magicians can do what amount to parlor tricks, whereas the truly miraculous or supernatural deed is worked only with the assistance of God. Agrippa consistently presents good magic as a thoroughly Christian enterprise, and opposes it to merely natural sorcery. Thus, he writes in On Occult Philosophy that And in a letter, he states that If this is the right way to understand Agrippa, then it turns out, rather against expectation, that he fits remarkably well into the story we've been telling, that is, the story of the Reformation. He can sometimes sound just like Erasmus or even Luther, complaining about monks, relics, the cult of saints, and the pavacy, and telling the scholastics that they should be relying on faith and not taking prideful recourse to their sophistries. Toward the end of On Uncertainty, he even says that we have certainty only through faith, and that only God is truthful, whereas all humans are liars. No wonder that a contemporary observed of Agrippa these things which Luther sees now he had seen a long time ago. But you most definitely wouldn't find Luther saying that we can use magical techniques to render ourselves divine, as Agrippa does in his more confident moods. And when he comments explicitly on the Reformation, it's pretty clear he does not see himself as a character in that story after all. In On Uncertainty, he grumbles that, thanks to Luther, nearly every city has its own particular heresy. He was trying to write a story of his own, in which the failings of European culture, being challenged openly by Luther and the other reformers, would be solved through more secret means. We're not done with the occult sciences in this period. For one thing, we still need to talk about Paracelsus, a contemporary of Agrippa's, who was a key figure in the history of alchemy and early modern science more generally. We'll be looking at him and the whole topic of alchemical science in a couple of episodes. But first I want to step back and consider in greater breadth the question I just raised about Agrippa. What impact was Protestantism having on philosophy in this period and beyond? To help answer that question, I'll be turning to an expert on the topic, Helen Hatab. She'll join us next time for a transformative interview that I've been led to believe will be as good as gold, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps. Thank you.