Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

does not mean ‘a sorcerer, or one who is superstitious, or devilish; but a

wise man, a priest, a prophet.’ In fact, according to him, magicians were

among the first who ‘knew Christ the author of the world to be born,

and came first of all to worship him.’Agrippa divides reality into three

ascending levels, ‘elementary, celestial, and intellectual,’ and claims that

‘every inferior is governed by its superior.’The three books of occult

philosophy correspond to these three levels: () the world and its elements,

() the celestial sphere, and () the upper level of intelligences, including

angels. The study of magic, then, is the study of the powers that are man-

ifested in these different levels of reality, and this study provides a route

to ‘the Maker of all things, and First Cause, whence all things are, and

proceed.’With frequent references to Plato, Agrippa conceives of the

whole world as being informed by a ‘soul of the world’ through which the

powers of natural phenomena are communicated from God. ‘All virtues

therefore are infused by God, through the Soul of the World, yet by a

particular power of resemblances, and intelligences overruling them...in

a certain peculiar harmonious consent.’

The crowning achievement of magic, in this sense, is to teach people ‘to

know and understand the rules of religion.’As Agrippa argues, in Book:

‘to superadd the powers of religion to physical and mathematical virtues

is so far from a fault, that not to join them is an heinous sin.’Agrippa

endorses the tradition, evident even in the early centuries of Christianity, of

the ‘discipline of the secret’, according to which the most central mysteries

of a religion should not be divulged to nonmembers.Having defended an

orthodox Trinitarian account of God, the author discusses the nature and

powers of evil spirits, and the status of the human mind after death. On this

question, as usual, he reports the opinions of the ancient philosophers, of

‘the Cabalists of the Hebrews,’ and of the New Testament.Agrippa has

no doubt that the common belief in the human soul surviving the death of

the body is correct, and that it is consistent with the belief that souls may

be imprisoned after death in the bodies ‘of creeping things, and brutes,

entering into them, what kind soever they be of, possessing them like

demons.’While acknowledging the continued existence of human souls

after death, however, Agrippa also grants that such matters are obscure

and that ‘it is better to doubt concerning occult things, than to contend

about uncertain things.’This question, about the status of the human

soul after death, emerges as one of the central questions of Descartes’

metaphysics in theMeditations().