corporate avenger freedom is a state of mind raritan

In 1508 he took part in an unsuccessful military adventure which a secret occultist society of which he was a member undertook in Spain, possibly at the behest of the emperor Maximilian I. His heterodoxy made him a target for pious slanders: within several decades of his death he became the protagonist of demonological fictions which were soon absorbed into the legend of Doctor Faustus.īorn to a family of the lesser nobility in Cologne (from whose Latin name, Colonia Agrippina, he drew his humanist cognomen), Agrippa took his first degree at Cologne in 1502 after further studies in Paris and elsewhere, he claimed to have doctorates in canon law, civil law and medicine-and also to have been knighted in recognition of military service. Finding in Hermetic-Cabalistic doctrines the inner truth both of religion and of philosophy, Agrippa was also aware of parallels between these magical doctrines and the Gnostic heresies.

However, his deepest affinities are with magically inflected philosophies: the Neoplatonism and Hermetism of Marsilio Ficino, and the syncretic Christian Cabala of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Reuchlin and Johannes Trithemius.Īs well as expounding an influential magical view of language, Agrippa contributed to the sixteenth-century revival of scepticism, denounced the “tyranny” of those who obstructed a free search for truth, criticized the subjection of women and (with a courage unusual in his time) resisted and mocked the instigators of the witch-craze. In his more evangelical moods Agrippa could be taken for a radical exponent of the philosophia Christi of his older contemporary Erasmus, or mistaken for a follower of Luther, whose early writings he actively disseminated in humanist circles. Famous in the sixteenth century for writings in which he steps forward variously as magician, occultist, evangelical humanist and philosopher, Agrippa shared with other humanist writers a thoroughgoing contempt for the philosophy of the scholastics.

Corporate avenger freedom is a state of mind raritan