Tutius Ignorare Quam Scire: Cornelius Agrippa and Scepticism

On 16 September 1526 Agrippa announced to his friend Jean Chapelain that he had completed a “rather dense volume” entitled De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum atque excellentia verbi Dei. It is not possible to establish whether the celebrated declamatio invectiva was really finished at this time; in any case, its publication, by Johannes Grapheus of Anversa, did not take place until 1530. The work was reprinted many times and was soon translated into German, Italian, English, French and later Dutch. It granted Agrippa a long-lasting, but not altogether deserved, reputation as one of the sixteenth century's foremost proponents of scepticism.

Gabriel Naudé placed Agrippa in his ideal library alongside Sextus Empiri-cus and Sanchez, among those “who made it their business to overturn all the sciences.” Modern bibliography, however, prefers to place him in the categories of anti-intellectualism, mysticism or biblical fundamentalism. This interpretation has the merit of calling into question the so-called ‘scepticism’ of De vanitate, but it remains a negative and partial reading. Since the invective, striking out indiscriminately at all the sciences and arts, does not contain “a serious epis-temological analysis,” what are Agrippa's intentions? And how can his final categorization in anti-intellectualism, mysticism or biblical fundamentalism be reconciled with his long-standing interest in precisely those products of reason which the appeal to verbum Dei should by then have swept away? The paradox is well-known. At the same time as preparing to print De vanitate, Agrippa was reworking and expanding the youthful draft of his De occulta philosophia (1510), which was eventually published in 1533, three years after De vanitate. De occulta philosophia is not an encyclopaedia assembled purely as a work of erudition, nor is it an esoteric text which tries to make up for the defeat of reason by taking refuge in the irrational. It is a work of philosophy, in which Agrippa justified the epistemological status of magic on the basis of Neoplatonic metaphysics. It is possibly true that “it may be wrong to expect a simple consistent interpretation of the thought of such figures as Agrippa,” but before making a catalogue of his supposed tensions and inconsistencies it is worth attempting an explanation.