Pavia and the Pimander: Agrippa as interpreter of Hermes Trismegistus

Agrippa's Italian years, between 1511 and 1518, were the most fruitful for his philosophical formation. The high point came at Pavia in 1515, when he gave public lectures on the Pimander, the text attributed to Hermes Trismegistus that Marsilio Ficino had translated into Latin and published in 1471. For an audience of students and scholars, hearing a German comment on that book meant entering the heart of Florentine Neoplatonic culture.

The Pimander and the prisca theologia

The Pimander gathered the first fourteen treatises of what we now call the Corpus Hermeticum. Ficino considered them the work of a very ancient Egyptian sage, contemporary with or slightly later than Moses, and placed them in a chain of masters of the prisca theologia, the ancient theology believed to have anticipated Christianity. Only in 1614 did Isaac Casaubon show on philological grounds that those texts dated from the Roman imperial age.

Agrippa fully shared Ficino's conviction. In his Pavia inaugural lecture he presented Hermes as a master of divine wisdom and insisted on the idea that man, the image of God, could rise through knowledge to the principle of all things. The text of this introductory oration has come down to us and shows a confident speaker, full of Platonic and Kabbalistic references.

Patrons and family in Italy

In Italy Agrippa found the support of William IX Palaeologus, Marquis of Montferrat, to whom in 1516 he dedicated the Liber de triplici ratione cognoscendi Deum, a treatise on the three ways of knowing God: nature, the Mosaic law and the Gospel. He also had dealings with the court of Charles III of Savoy and frequented physicians and philosophers of northern Italy, such as the converted Jew Paolo Ricci, a scholar of Kabbalah.

During these years he married for the first time, a young woman from Pavia whose name the sources do not record with certainty. A son was born of the marriage. His wife followed him in his later moves, as far as Metz, where she would die in 1521. Agrippa's letters remember her with affection and hint at a serene bond, rare in a life marked by so many tensions.

The flight after Marignano

The Pavia season came to an abrupt end. In September 1515 the new king of France, Francis I, defeated the Swiss at Marignano and seized the Duchy of Milan, to which Pavia belonged. For a man tied to the emperor the city became dangerous: Agrippa lost property and books and had to leave. Years of moving followed, between Casale Monferrato, Turin and other cities, in search of a new stable post. During this period, amid financial difficulties and uncertainty, he wrote some dialogues and orations that long remained in manuscript.

The Italian experience left a lasting legacy. Many pages of the De occulta philosophia printed in 1533 reflect reading done in Italy: Ficino, Pico, Christian Kabbalah, the ancient Neoplatonic authors. When in 1518 he accepted the post offered to him by the city of Metz, Agrippa was by then a mature humanist, convinced that philosophy, religion and magic were branches of a single ancient wisdom waiting to be rediscovered.