Hours with the Mystics: A Contribution to the History of Religious Opinion

by Robert Alfred Vaughan

Merry Wives of Windsor.

Willoughby’s Essay—Second Evening.

§ 2. Cornelius Agrippa.

Cornelius Agrippa, of Nettesheim, is a favourable specimen of that daring and versatile order of mind which, in the sixteenth century, sought adventure and renown in every province of philosophy. His restless life is picturesque with the contrast of every imaginable vicissitude. A courtier and a scholar, a soldier and a mystic, he made the round of the courts of Europe. Patronized and persecuted alternately, courted as a prodigy and hunted down as a heretic, we see him to-day a Plato, feasted by the Sicilian tyrant, to-morrow a Diogenes, crawling with a growl into his tub. He lectures with universal applause on the Verbum Mirificum of Reuchlin. He forms a secret association for the promotion of occult science. He is besieged by swarming boors in some Garde Douloureuse, and escapes almost by miracle. He enters the service of Margaret, Regent of the Netherlands, then that of the Emperor, and is knighted on the field for heroic gallantry in the campaign against the Venetians. He is next to be heard of as a teacher of theology at Pavia. Plunged into poverty by the reverses of war, he writes for comfort a mystical treatise On the Threefold Way of Knowing God. The hand of the Marquis of Montferrat plucks him from his slough of despond, but ere long he is again homeless, hungering, often after bread, ever after praise and power. At the court of France, the Queen Mother shows him favour, but withholds the honour to which such gifts might well aspire. Then appears the famous book On the Vanity of Arts and Sciences.

It was wormwood to the proud spirit of Agrippa to be treated as a mere astrologer. To think that he must toil in obscurity like a gnome, calculating aspects, sextile and quartile, reckoning the cusps and hours of the houses of heaven, to subserve the ambition of an implacable intriguante, when his valour might adorn the tourney and his wisdom sway the council! He would fain have been in France what that great astrologer of the previous century, Martius Galeotti, had been in Hungary, to whom the Czar of Russia and the Khan of Tartary were said to have sent respectful presents of more than royal magnificence; who was ambassador alike of monarchs and the stars; who bore a share in the statecraft of the court at Buda, and charging abreast with the crowned helm of Matthias, rode down the ranks of the turbaned infidel. So the gallant knight and the ‘courtier of most elegant thread,’ the archimage, the philosopher, the divine, became for awhile a sceptic and a Timon. The De Vanitate Scientiarum ravages, with a wild Berserker fury, the whole domain of knowledge. The monk Ilsan of mediæval fable did not more savagely trample the roses in the enchanted garden of Worms,—Pantagruel did not more cruelly roast with fire his six hundred and nine and fifty vanquished horsemen, than did Agrippa consume with satire every profession and every calling among men. With reason might he say in his preface, ‘The grammarians will rail at me—the etymologists will derive my name from the gout—the obstreperous rhetoricians will plague me with their big words and inimical gestures—the intricate geometrician will imprison me in his triangles and tetragonals—the cosmographer will banish me among the bears to Greenland.’ Scholastic fanaticism could never pardon the man whose sarcasm had left nothing standing, save the Holy Scriptures. The monks and doctors of Lyons hurled back his tongue-bolts with the dreaded cry of heresy. His disgrace and exile they could compass, but they could not arrest those winged words or bow that dauntless spirit.

The treatise On the Threefold Way of Knowing God, shows how, by Divine illumination, the Christian may discern the hidden meanings of the New Testament, as the Cabbalist evolves those of the Old. It teaches the way in which the devout mind may be united to God, and, seeing all things in Him, and participating in His power, may even now, according to the measure of faith, foretell the future and controul the elements.

The De Occulta Philosophia[^[213]] (a youthful work re-written in his later years) treats of the three kinds of magic—the Natural (the science of sympathies and antipathies, whereby the adept accelerates or modifies the process of nature so as to work apparent miracles); the Celestial, or Mathematical (astrology); and the Religious, or ceremonial (theurgy).

Once on a time, the savans were sorely puzzled by certain irregular holes on the front of an ancient temple. One, more sagacious than the rest, suggested that these indentations might be the marks of nails used to fasten to the stone metallic plates representing Greek characters. And, in fact, lines drawn from one point to the next were found to form letters, and the name of the deity stood disclosed. In like manner, the student of natural magic sought to decipher the secret language of the universe, by tracing out those lines of sympathy which linked in a mysterious kindred objects the most remote. It was believed that the fields of space were threaded in every direction by the hidden highways of magnetic influence; traversed from all points by an intricate network of communication uniting the distant and the near—the celestial and terrestrial worlds. Science was charged with the office of discovering and applying those laws of harmony and union which connect the substances of earth with each other and with the operation of the stars. Through all the stages of creation men thought they saw the inferior ever seeking and tending towards the higher nature, and the order above shedding influence on that below. The paternal sun laid a hand of blessing on the bowed head of the corn. The longing dews passed heavenward, up the Jacob’s ladder of the sunbeams, and entering among the bright ministeries of the clouds, came down in kindly showers. Each planet, according to its mind or mood, shed virtues healing or harmful into minerals and herbs. All sweet sounds, moving by the mystic laws of number, were an aspiration towards the music of the spheres—a reminiscence of the universal harmonies. The air was full of phantasms or images of material objects. These, said Agrippa, entering the mind, as the air the body, produce presentiments and dreams. All nature is oracular. A cloudy chill or sultry lull are the Delphi and Dodona of birds and kine and creeping things. But the sense of sinful man is dull. The master of the hidden wisdom may facilitate the descent of benign influences, and aid the travailing creation, sighing for renewal. It is for him to marry (in the figurative language of the time) the ‘lower and the higher potencies, the terrestrial and the astral, as doth the husbandman the vine unto the elm.’ The sage can make himself felt in the upper realm, as on the earth, by touching some chord whose vibration extends into the skies. From the law of sympathy comes the power of amulets and philtres, images and ointments, to produce love or hate, health or sickness, to arrest the turning arms of the distant mill, or stay the wings of the pinnace on the Indian seas. Such was Agrippa’s world.

According to Baptista Porta, a certain breath of life, or soul of the world, pervades the whole organism of the universe, determines its sympathies, and imparts, when received into the soul of the inquirer, the capacity for magical research. Similarly, in the theory of Agrippa, the fifth element, or æther, is the breath of this World-Soul. Within the spirit thus animating the body of the world lie those creative powers, or qualities, which are the producers of all things visible. The instruments of this universal plastic Power are the stars and the spirits of the elements.

With all the theosophists man is a microcosm—the harmonized epitome of the universe: a something representative of all that is contained in every sphere of being, is lodged in his nature. Thus he finds sympathies everywhere, and potentially knows and operates everywhere. Since, therefore, the inmost ground of his being is in God, and the rest of his nature is a miniature of the universe,—a true self-knowledge is, proportionately, at once a knowledge of God and of creation. The sources of Religion and of Science are alike within him.