Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM 71
author went so far as to refer to the assassin of Henry III as ‘the eternal glory of
France’, words which his Order required him to delete from later editions. Such
lapses of discretion were perhaps a hazard for a work which adopted the relaxed
and personal style of the humanists and which developed its arguments through
discussions of particular cases. At the same time Mariana wrote within the
intellectual framework for discussing political philosophy provided by Aristotle
and Aquinas. His book was thus very traditional and very topical and
provocative at the same time. When Henry IV was also assassinated part of the
blame fell on Mariana’s book, copies of which were publicly burned in Paris. He
himself spent some time in prison, but no charges were brought against him in
Spain.
It is not certain how much Mariana would have acknowledged a humanist
influence on his practical concerns and on his style of writing. But one figure
who represented himself as a Christian humanist and who sought the support of
Erasmus was the German “occult philosopher’ Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von
Nettesheim (1486–1535). Agrippa wrote a highly iconoclastic book to expose the
‘uncertainty’ and ‘vanity’ of the arts and sciences. He wrote the book, as he
explained in the preface he wrote for the reader, ‘because I see that so many
men, puffed up with human knowledge and learning, not only condemn and
despise the words of the Sacred Scriptures, but also prosecute and deride it with
the same contempt…’. To the extent that he sought to encourage scepticism
about human learning and institutions and a return to a simple biblical
Christianity, Agrippa was similar to Erasmus. But he was more radical though
perhaps even less consistently sceptical. He sought to demolish the edifice of
received wisdom in order to remove the barriers to the discovery of truth that
were placed in people’s way by deference to established authorities. Thus he
could exclaim: ‘how impious a piece of tyranny it is, to capture the minds of
students for prefixed authors, and to deprive them of the liberty of searching
after and following the truth….’ 21 This suggests that Agrippa was by no means
content to accept an Erasmian fideism. On the contrary, he seems to have
believed that there was a method of attaining truth that was not vulnerable to the
sceptic’s attack. 22 He remained a Catholic but he was by no means disposed to
accept the authority of the Church. Erasmus, by contrast, whilst acknowledging
the fallibility and imperfection of the Church and its institutions, taught that in
matters of faith they provided the best guide available.
PARACELSUS AND THE TRADITION OF OCCULT
PHILOSOPHY
It is perhaps artificial to distinguish religious Neoplatonism from its
manifestations in what has become known as ‘occult philosophy’. The former is
concerned with the relation of humankind to God and only in a metaphysical way
with the material world. The latter is more concerned with the relation of
humankind to the world and with possible ways of manipulating the world for