ABSTRACT
One of the minor puzzles of intellectual history is the relationship between
Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia and his De incertitudine et vanitate scientarum. In the latter work Agrippa seemed to renounce all human learning, including the
magical sciences: ‘Al[l] Sciences are nothing els[e], but the ordinaunces and
opinions of men, so noysome as profitable, so pestilent as [w]hol[e]some, so ill as
good, in no part perfecte, but doubtfull and full of errour and contention.’1 This
book was composed in 1526, some sixteen years after Agrippa wrote his De occulta philosophia. We might suppose that by this time Agrippa had come to see the futility of magical studies. Why, then, did he choose to publish De occulta philosophia only in 1531, the year after he put De incertitudine to the press? Why, also, did later occultists not understand the De incertitudine as a repudiation of the occult philosophy? Thomas Vaughan, for example, cites the work approvingly in
his Anthroposophia theomagica.2 Frances Yates suggests that De incertitudine was intended to forestall the charge of heresy that Agrippa’s magical textbook might
provoke.3 It is also possible to understand De incertitudine as satirical, but another reading of both works together suggests that they may not be incompatible at all:
both denigrate reason in favour of revelation.4 Agrippa’s scepticism and his
occultism might even be regarded as complementary, if we locate them in the
epistemological tradition that distinguishes between reason (Vernunft) and understanding (Verstand).
