Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim - Biography

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa was born September 14, 1486 presumably in Cologne, or nearby Nettesheim, Germany. He died in Grenoble, France on February 18, 1535. His parents were citizens of Cologne, though not of any known status or nobility; it has been substantiated that approximately in the year 1526 Agrippa exaggerated the status of his family, which led biographers to refer to Agrippa as “Agrippa von Nettesheim” implying a high level of nobility. Regardless of his penchant for aggrandizing, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa was most known for his studies and writings in occult philosophy, alchemy and medicine.

His formal education began in 1499 in the Faculty of Arts at the university in Cologne where he pursued both undergraduate and graduate studies, completing his master’s degree in 1502. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa studied with the few humanists within the university who inspired him to engage with the work of figures such as Pliny the Elder and Ramon Lull, a Catalan mystic and metaphysician. As well, Albertus Magnus, in particular his text Speculum, was stated by Agrippa himself to have been a profound influence and Magnus’s scholastic tradition was a well known tradition at the university in Cologne.

His humanist leanings are assumed to have developed and flourished later during his time spent in Italy from 1511-1518. Prior to his appearance in Italy, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa seems to have moved around quite a bit. Presumably he first ended up in Paris in which he engaged with further studies in the occult, though it is not clear whether or not he enrolled in any formal education in Paris. According to his letters though, he met various Parisians whom shared his interests in both the occult and humanism (Charles de Bouelles, Germain de Brie, Symphorien Champier, Germain de Ganay, all humanists, and the artist Jean Perréal).

There are accounts of military service purportedly performed in Catalonia before his arrival in Dôle in the year 1509. In Dôle, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa began to lecture at the university as well as experiment with the alchemical production of gold. His lectures exalted Cabalistic ideology based on the text, De verbo mirifico (On the Wonder-working Word), (1494), by Johann Reuchlin. In such tradition it is held that names and words (specifically Hebrew) can hold miraculous ability and are capable of providing a union between man and god through them. Most especially it is revealed that the name of the Son of God, Jesus, embodies the most divine power—it is in the name of the Lord that such miracles are possible. Such ideology was soon condemned by the region’s Franciscan minister, Jean Catilinet, who declared Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa a “judaizing heretic.” And although he protested the unfair condemnation in writing an Expostulatio, clearly, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa was no longer welcome in Dôle.

Before ending up in England, it is understood that Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa returned to Germany with short stays in Cologne and Würzburg where he began work on one of his major texts on the occult and magic, De occulta philosophia, alongside the abbot Trithemius of Sponheim, who was considered an expert in the field. In 1510, he arrived in England presumably in the service of Emperor Maximilian I. There, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa spent time in London attending the lectures on St. Paul’s Epistles by John Colet. Soon thereafter he arrived in Italy, and again it is presumed that his arrival was initially in the service of the military. It should be noted though that his claims of military service and subsequent honors are dubious at best.

While in Italy, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa broadened and expanded his scholarship in occult philosophies heavily influenced by the humanist tradition in the region that found inspiration in Cabalistic texts, as well as Neo-platonic and Hermetic studies. He hoped to receive a university position in Pavia or Turin, but was unsuccessful though he did lecture in Pavia on hermetics and on theology at the University of Turin. With his wife, whom he met in Pavia, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa briefly lived under the patronage of the Marquis (also a Cabalist) in Casale Monferrato, where he penned two treatises dedicated to the Marquis, Dialogus de homine and De triplici ratione cognoscendi Deum. The scholar’s last year in Italy was spent in Savoy, where after an unsuccessful attempt to secure a position or patronage through the Duke of Savoy, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa successfully influenced a wealthy banking family, the Laurencins, who secured him a position as a lawyer and advocate for the city of Metz.

In Metz, he was very successful professionally though again received criticism and was denounced a heretic for his ‘reformative’ stances in protecting an elderly women from an unfair witch hunt and writing in defense of Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples, De beatissimae Annae monogamia. He soon relocated to Geneva in 1521, and lost his wife during the journey. He met his second wife in Geneva, where he practiced medicine for two years and continued for another year in Fribourg. While he was quite successful in this practice it is debated whether or not he actually had the license or proper qualifications to practice. After only six months in Fribourg Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa left for a much more lucrative position in Lyon; the physician to the queen mother, Louise of Savoy, at the Court of King Francis I. It is also rumored that he held the ‘title’ of “court astrologer”; the queen mother was an ardent believer in astrology. Trying to gain greater favor in the court, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa wrote a treatise on marriage and dedicated it to the king’s sister, Marguerite of Navarre.

After a promising start in Lyon things became dire as the Italian War escalated and the king was imprisoned leaving France vulnerable with little coffers. Louise of Savoy, acting as regent, left for Paris and became very much unavailable to Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa who was in need of payment and in want of the pension he was promised. He began writing his second major work, De vanitate, during the summer months in 1526, while he bided his time hoping and demanding to receive payment. It was a dismal period and Agrippa was faced with destitution as his threats to the court, and his supposed refusal to make an astrological prediction for the queen mother, caused him to lose his pension entirely. It is surmised that he resorted to producing alchemical gold again for sustenance. More likely, a small patronage from a Genoese with contacts in the Netherlands enabled safe passage for Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and his wife to relocate to Antwerp in 1528.

Failing to gain the position of physician to the Queen Margaret of Austria in the rival Hapsburg Court, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa settled in Antwerp as a civic physician where the plague gained him financial success but took his wife. In 1530, after being remised for practicing medicine without proper certification, Agrippa accepted lower positions in the court of Queen Margaret in Mecheln as a historiographer. Though, more importantly, his time in Flanders was prodigious for he finally began publishing his works beginning in 1529 with a collection of treatises including what has become his infamous “feminist” text, De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus declamatio (On the Nobility and Superiority of the Female Sex), written twenty years prior in Dôle and finally ‘officially’ dedicated to Queen Margaret. The radical piece suggests that women have been excluded due to social conditioning, among other things, by their male oppressors and not due to any real sense of inferiority as propagated since the Greeks.

The following year saw the publication of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s De vanitate, which was followed by the first book of De occulta philosophia in 1531. While such dissemination was the greatest gift for Agrippa, it also proved to be retribution. De vanitate was charged with heresy as it challenged the ability to ascertain knowledge in general and medieval scholarship specifically. He was influenced by the Praise of Folly by Erasmus, and by Nicholas of Cusa’s De docta ignorantia, and, essentially, like the Greco and Roman Skeptics before him, questioned epistemology. Such questioning, even in its rhetorical form of a declamation, is somewhat ironic when taken alongside the philosopher’s De occulta philosophia, which, written before and after De vanitate, propagates the philosophy of the occult and magic in which Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa sought to recuperate the positive aspects of occult practices as they were understood in ancient times from the demonized arena medieval scholarship had positioned such philosophy.

The work is divided into three parts that follow his tripartite division of the universe: elemental, celestial, and intellectual. These three aspects of magic are harmoniously inter-related and work in concert. As well, language and symbols hold special power when appropriately used by the intellect. The intellectual aspect of Agrippa’s philosophy relied heavily on demonic and ceremonial practices, an aspect which drew much criticism. Culminated together, what is important to understand is that man embodies a special power as well that if empowered and employed appropriately, if man can become aware of and enlightened by such potential, than he can obtain magical abilities within nature and the universe. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa follows a Platonist sensibility here in which man is the microcosm of the macrocosm and hence inherently inter-related and symbiotic. Yet, of course, such potential, whether in language or in man her/himself, is only possible through a deep understanding and practice of occult philosophy.

What is also important to understand in both of his primary texts, as well as his treatise on the female sex and other treatises, is his style of rhetorical writing, a manner that was popular of the period. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa essentially sets up his texts as suggestions rather than as suppositions—ideas to be taken as provocations and not as an imposing indoctrination. Furthermore, this notion may be relevant in the discrepancies in Agrippa’s own philosophies as De vanitate repudiates philosophies of the occult, including his own, and any such hierarchical systematic practice of learning, which is very much apart of De occulta philosophia. Considering that in a later revised edition of the latter, the former was included in the appendix, perhaps for Agrippa one was to be a provocation of the other—a symbiotic tension to be applied and defied. Regardless of the ironic or intended seeming incongruencies in his logic, any reception of the more problematic text, De vanitate, as ‘simply’ rhetorical were not received. Perhaps it was because the text was too provocative to a dominating discourse that had the power to censor and indict.

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa was ordered to suppress his book and dismissed from his post at the Hapsburg ruling court in Mechelen. He wrote two texts in his defense, the Querela and Apologia, yet neither helped his situation with the court. He then ended up in debtor’s prison for a short period until he gained the admiration and patronage of the archbishop of Cologne, Hermann von Wied, who sympathized with his philosophy of the occult and enabled Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa to come to Bonn in 1532. He stayed as a member of the archbishop’s court until 1534.

Unfortunately, while he still was in defense of De Vanitate with the courts of the Netherlands, he also found himself in defense of De occulta philosophia in Cologne, where a revised and complete edition of the work was in the process of being printed. Spurred by the Dominican ministry, the city council of Cologne demanded the printing to be halted and any portions that were already printed confiscated. Like he did with his previous text, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa defended his text and the right for its dissemination, and even in light of the philosopher’s harsh tone, was granted the right to publish in 1533.

By 1535 Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa was back in Lyon, though it is unclear as to why he left Bonn and why he went specifically to Lyon. Soon after his arrival there he was arrested under the orders of King Francis I due to his earlier criticisms and threats against the queen mother. Fortunately, due to a somewhat influential following in France, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa was freed and ended up in Grenoble where he died in the same year.

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa was a contentious figure, philosopher and scholar, who, for better or worse, was often more known for his eccentricity than anything else. He was legendary, but also influential and his radical and original thinking proved inspirational to a loyal following.