Studies at the University of Cologne and the Albertist tradition

In 1499, at the age of twelve, young Heinrich matriculated at the University of Cologne, and in 1502 he obtained his academic degree in arts there. Such early enrolment was not unusual: the arts faculty then offered a preliminary training, comparable to an advanced secondary school, based on grammar, logic, and natural and moral philosophy according to the texts of Aristotle. From this foundation the most gifted students went on to the higher faculties of theology, law or medicine.

The ways of scholasticism

German universities of the time were divided into rival schools, called ways. Alongside the modern way, linked to the nominalism of William of Ockham, the realist currents of the Thomists and the Albertists were strong in Cologne. The latter looked back to Albert the Great and favoured a reading of Aristotle open to Neoplatonic themes, such as the emanation of forms and the influence of the heavens on the lower world.

Historians have often stressed that Cologne Albertism gave Agrippa a first vocabulary for thinking of nature as a fabric of hidden forces. The works attributed to Albert, including the apocryphal ones on the secrets of stones and herbs, circulated widely. It is no accident that, years later, in the De occulta philosophia, Albert appears among the authorities cited on the occult virtues of natural things.

Ramon Lull and the combinatory art

Another passion born in his youth was for Ramon Lull, the thirteenth-century Majorcan thinker who had conceived a universal art based on combining principles and letters arranged in rotating figures. Agrippa wrote a commentary on Lull's Ars brevis, published later under the title In artem brevem Raymundi Lullii commentaria. For him the Lullian art promised a method for ordering all knowledge, an idea he would later criticise harshly.

Lullism was alive in many European circles at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, especially in Paris, where Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples edited Lullian texts and spread them among students. Later Lefèvre himself would cross Agrippa's path again, in the Metz dispute over the figure of Saint Anne. The fascination of combinatorics joined the typically Renaissance desire to recover a unified and original wisdom.

From school to the world

After 1502 the information becomes sparser. Agrippa does not seem to have completed a regular, documented course in the higher faculties at Cologne, and later he claimed doctorates in law and medicine whose origin has not been established. Scholars consider it likely that he spent time in Paris around 1506 or 1507, coming into contact with humanist circles. The move from German scholasticism to French humanism was decisive for his culture.

The Cologne years left a lasting mark. There Agrippa learned scholastic Latin, logic, Aristotelian natural philosophy and a taste for great systems. Later, in the De vanitate scientiarum, he would mock precisely the disputes of the schools and the arrogance of university masters. Yet without that training he could not have built the orderly architecture of the three books of occult philosophy, which inherit from scholasticism a passion for classification.