Sending a book out into the world is an occasion for retracing its history. This book was born from the revision of my doctoral dissertation, presented on October 2, 2018 at the Scuola Normale Superiore. The research that I carried out between November 2013 and July 2018 sought to illustrate the theoretical foundations of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s humanism, examining on the historical-philosophical level the project of the renewal of culture by means of the refoundation of magic, which the German thinker conceived in the most significant moments of his formation. The methodological nucleus that guided my dissertation was the identifying of the crucial value that the philosophy of humanism has in Agrippa’s thinking. In order to illustrate concretely the constitutive elements of his conception, locating this in the historical-literary context from which it derives its origin and its form, I decided to examine a minor work, the Dialogus de homine (Dialogue on Humankind), probably written at Casale in Monferrato between autumn 1515 and the first months of 1516. My intention was to present a critical edition of the Latin text, which is conserved in a sixteenth-century manuscript codex in Lyons. The choice of studying a small work like the De homine was guided by the idea of rereading the less well known writings of Agrippa, seeing them as the coherent expression of a theoretical development that is intimately linked to the dynamics of the contemporary cultural world. These writings have a value that cannot be restricted to the biographical episodes that generated them. They should rather be seen as stages on a path of maturity that certainly was not linear or free of re-examinations, a path that finds its best articulated illustration in the De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum (On the Uncertainty and Vanity of the Sciences) and the De occulta philosophia (On Occult Philosophy), which are interpreted now, not as philosophical outcomes of discordant attitudes, but rather as complementary aspects of one and the same intellectual experience of a Renaissance humanist. On the basis of a historical-philosophical approach, the following chapters present an analytic study of the Dialogus de homine, a youthful work in which Agrippa unfolds in original forms a reflection on the human condition. In the course of my research, I have described the genesis, illustrated the purposes, and interpreted the content of the work in the more general context of Agrippa’s intellectual adventure. This research thus aims to clarify in detail the presuppositions that are necessary in order understand the original Latin text, of which I offer a philological reconstruction.
Chapter 1 describes the context and the biographical events that precede the redaction of the work. In particular, I have attempted to identify the most significant events of Agrippa’s stay in Italy in the period between 1511 and 1518, locating the writings of that time in the intellectual milieu to which they refer. On the cultural level, the years spent in Italy are the richest pages of Agrippa’s formation. The diplomatic tasks on behalf of Maximilian I of Habsburg and the teaching at the university during his brief stay in Pavia allow the philosopher to make important friendships with prestigious intellectuals in the peninsula. The profitable exchanges and contacts thus allow him to enlarge his philosophical library and bring it up to date: to mention some examples, it is during the Italian period that Agrippa discovers such fundamental texts as the Heptaplus of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, gets hold of the Kabbalistic translations by Paolo Ricci, studies in greater depth the Crater Hermetis of Ludovico Lazzarelli, and examines afresh in greater detail the dialogues of Plato and the treatises of the Neo-Platonists that had been translated and disseminated by Marsilio Ficino. Thanks to the formative context of his Italian experience, a radical idea took shape in Agrippa’s thinking: the promotion of a renewal of humanistic knowledge in a hermetic perspective, recovering and actualizing the theological and anthropological doctrines contained in the Corpus Hermeticum. This work of cultural reorganization is inspired by the philosophy of Hermes Trismegistus and is conceived in a larger sense as a work of general reformation of Christianity. It is based in a special way on the recovery of magic, considered an indispensable sapiential equipment for a Christian thinker.
In chapter 2, I examine the authors and the writings that allow Agrippa to translate into a defined philosophical project the “restoration of magic” (restauratio magiae) that had already been formulated in the first version of the De occulta philosophia (1510). I have specifically analyzed the way in which Agrippa contributes to the Renaissance debate about the significance of magic, about the value of magical praxis, and about the reasons for a recovery of the magical literature that had been handed down from antiquity. The encounter with the works of Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Ludovico Lazzarelli, Johannes Reuchlin, and Johannes Trithemius allows Agrippa on the ideological level to get beyond the classification of magical knowledge within the limits of “natural philosophy” – according to the programmatic restriction maintained by the Florentine humanists and then confirmed by the German thinkers too – in order to articulate the strongly religious value of magical activity instead. If we rework the problem in Agrippa’s terms, we may say that this action consists in claiming for the formation of the magician a priestly role, that is to say, a task with a sacred nature, oriented to realizing a spiritual renewal of Christianity.
In chapter 3, I have set out the reasons why the bibliographical aggiornamento brought about by his stay in Italy has a massive impact on Agrippa’s philosophical vocation, giving fresh nourishment to the theoretical proposal of which he intends to be the spokesman. In the course of his intellectual maturing, magic, theology, Neo-Platonism, and the Kabbalah, the youthful interests of the philosopher of Nettesheim, are both enriched and redefined. The influence of the hermetic doctrines also determined a reconfiguring of these sapiential fields within a philosophical interrogation that takes human nature as its object. In this regard, I have drawn on the early version of the De occulta philosophia in order to analyze Agrippa’s anthropological thinking, following its developments in the epistolary production that anticipates the Dialogus de homine. The light shed on his sources has allowed me to situate the composition of the dialogue within a theoretical choice on Agrippa’s part: namely, to reconsider and reformulate, going beyond the Ficinian context of its provenance, the description of the human nature that is sketched in broad terms in the youthful treatise. This theoretical revision underlines Agrippa’s will to isolate and to study more deeply, on the basis of the new texts he had encountered in Italy, the philosophical implications linked to a concept of humanity that was now elaborated in a hermetic sense, a concept both Kabbalistic and Christian.
Chapters 4 and 5 follow in detail the development of the text of the De homine. The examination of the dialogical structure, organized in a thematic subdivision that follows the development in the text itself, is accompanied by the articulation of the arguments that are presented in the work. This examination, supported by the identification of the literary sources, makes it possible to identify the ideological objectives of Agrippa’s reasoning, beyond the intentions that the author himself explicitly declares. In parallel, chapter 5 seeks to find an answer to the complex editorial question about the work. Specifically, after having examined the codex unicus that transmits it and analyzed the references to the De homine that are attested in Agrippa’s œuvre, I have been able to reconstruct the events linked to the conservation of the work and thus to identify the reasons for the transmission of the text in a mutilated version, its circulation exclusively in manuscript form, and the transposition of textual passages in later works by the author.
On the thematic level, chapters 4 and 5 show why the Dialogus de homine is presented to the reader as an intellectual exercise intended to look in depth at the question of the dignitas hominis. In the course of the dialogue, Agrippa’s intention is not only to celebrate the greatness of the human being, whom the vocabulary of the humanists with its ideological overtones called the image of God, a semi-divinity superior to the angels, the bond of every creature, and the fulfillment of the whole universe. As the hermetic Asclepius teaches, the duality that characterizes the human being makes his nature exceptional, both because it is equipped with a soul in which the highest faculties reside, capable of establishing a direct contact with the divinity, and also because it is endowed with a body that, given certain conditions, is capable of attracting and unleashing a miraculous power. As the author explains, mentioning some passages drawn from Joseph Gikatilla, a mediaeval Kabbalist of the Abulafian school, some miraculous powers lie hidden in the human body. These were introduced into it by God at the moment of creation, and they are capable of attracting, and of preserving in the members of the human body, a supernatural energy that has its immediate origin in the very power of God.
However, Agrippa states that the enjoyment of this power– to awaken and govern the miraculous skills that dwell in the body – is reserved exclusively to a human being who is worthy of having the miraculous gifts of God take up their abode in him; in other words, someone who unites in his own experience the integrity of morals and goodness in his dealings, someone who has been reborn by means of an incontestable knowledge and of an uncontaminated faith in Christ. For Agrippa, this man is identical with the hermetic-Christian magus. The Dialogus de homine thus brings together in a unified message hermetic anthropology, Neo-Platonic metaphysics, and Christian eschatology, and it contributes to a legitimation of the recourse to the magical patrimony of antiquity. For Agrippa, magic is the knowledge that, when restored in its original purity, reveals to the human being his otherworldly origin and his divine destination.
Chapter 6 presents the trascription of the Latin text. A detailed textual note that introduces the philological section presents, first of all, a description of the codex, the manuscript PA 048 in Lyons, from which the present version of the De homine has been transcribed and emended. Secondly, the note illustrates the editorial criteria that have guided the preparation of the critical text and the construction of the apparatus. Thirdly, the chapter explores and organizes the references to this work in the whole of Agrippa’s œuvre. Fourthly, it discusses the hypotheses connected to the identification of the sixteenth-century copyist who wrote down the manuscript.
Originally, alongside the study of the Dialogus de homine, I had decided to present in two specific appendixes to the dissertation a reaseach on two other brief texts of Agrippa, the De originali peccato (On Original Sin, 1518) and the Dehortatio gentilis theologiae (Dissuasion against pagan theology, 1526). With these texts, born in a climate of lively theological discussion that precedes and accompanies the events of Luther’s Reformation, the humanist intended to present himself to the attention of his contemporaries in the garb most in harmony with his philosophical situation, that of a theologian. In the oration De originali peccato, Agrippa engaged in the exegesis of the scriptures, positing an allegorical reading of the fall of Adam and Eve (metaphors of faith and of reason as faculties of the soul) and identifying the cause of the original fault in the sexual act of the two protagonists. In the case of the Dehortatio, Agrippa enquired into the value of the Ethnicorum philosophia for the formation of a Christian. This disuasory, at first sight a harangue against the ancient philosophers, and in particular against the doctrines of Hermes Trismegistus, which are accused of diverting the lovers of classical literature from learning the truths of the Gospel, turns out – thanks to a paradoxical reversal – to be an exhortation, in the footsteps of Erasmus, to the study of pagan wisdom that is a depositary of teachings that are in conformity with the message of Christ.
There is indeed a connection between the philosophical matrix from which these two works spring and the Dialogus de homine. But in order to evaluate correctly their place in Agrippa’s intellectual biography, reconstructing the significant passages that follow the Italian period, it proved necessary to confront the theoretical problems that they raise with regard to Agrippa’s evolution in the context of the intensification of the religious debate in Europe. This required a deeper study of an amplitude that would have inevitably exceeded the boundaries of the size of the dissertation that I had planned from the outset. For these reasons, I planed to publish elsewhere the results of my further investigations into these two works, which I regard as precious for understanding the coherence of Agrippa’s humanistic message.