Dole 1509: the lectures on Reuchlin's De verbo mirifico

In 1509 Agrippa, just twenty-three years old, took up a lectureship at the University of Dole, in the Franche-Comté, then part of the Burgundian lands governed by Margaret of Austria. The subject he chose was bold: Johannes Reuchlin's De verbo mirifico, published in Basel in 1494, the first major attempt by a Christian to use Jewish Kabbalah in support of the truths of the faith. The lectures were a success and drew students, masters and notables of the town.

Reuchlin's book

Reuchlin, a jurist and humanist from Pforzheim, was one of the few German scholars with a good knowledge of Hebrew. In the De verbo mirifico, written as a dialogue, he argued that the name of Jesus, rendered in Hebrew letters, was the fulfilment of the divine Tetragrammaton with the addition of one letter. This interpretation, already suggested in Italy by Pico della Mirandola, made Kabbalah a tool for demonstrating Christianity.

To comment on that text meant entering the current of Christian Kabbalah, which combined philology, the mysticism of names and speculation on numbers. For Agrippa it was a chance to present himself as an expert in ancient wisdom and to attract the attention of the court. In the same period he was gathering the materials that would form the first draft of the De occulta philosophia.

The tribute to Margaret of Austria

To win the governor's favour, Agrippa composed during those months a declamation on the nobility and excellence of the female sex, dedicated to Margaret herself. The little work remained unpublished for twenty years and was printed only in Antwerp in 1529, but it shows the young scholar's strategy: to combine university teaching with the search for a powerful patron. The support of the Archbishop of Besançon, chancellor of the university, had already secured him a prestigious post.

The hope of a stable position at court, however, vanished quickly. The favour won through the lectures turned within a few months into suspicion, and the dedication to Margaret was not enough to protect him. At Dole, moreover, the local clergy looked warily on a young layman who spoke of divine names and Hebrew letters, subjects that seemed to trespass on ground reserved for theologians.

Catilinet's attack

During Lent 1510 the Franciscan Jean Catilinet, provincial of his order in Burgundy, preached at Ghent before Margaret against Agrippa, accusing him of being a Judaising heretic who was bringing Kabbalah, an art considered impious, into Christian schools. Charges of Judaism were a dangerous weapon at the time, and Agrippa chose to leave Dole. From London, where he was shortly afterwards, he wrote an Expostulatio, a reply in which he defended Reuchlin and his own orthodoxy.

The episode anticipated, on a small scale, the great controversy that from 1510 would involve Reuchlin himself, attacked by the Cologne Dominicans for defending Hebrew books. Agrippa always sided with the humanist from Pforzheim, and his name remained associated with that battle for the freedom of Hebrew studies, which divided the German universities for years.

The Dole lectures mark Agrippa's public entry into European culture. They already show his inclination towards wisdom held to be ancient and hidden, his desire to reconcile it with Christianity, and the difficulty of doing so without provoking the theologians. From then on his reputation as a scholar of the secret arts would precede him everywhere, opening doors but also exposing him to suspicion and enmity for the rest of his life.