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Jacques Lefèvre D'étaples Humanism and Hermeticism

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Jacques Lefèvre D'étaples Humanism and Hermeticism JACQUES LEFÈVRE D’ÉTAPLES HUMANISM AND HERMETICISM IN THE DE MAGIA NATURALI Jan R. Veenstra The last decades of the fifteenth century and the first decades of the sixteenth are a period of great intellectual vacillation. The debates of that era were domi- nated by the time-honoured differences and frictions between Platonism and Aristotelianism, but both philosophical currents underwent radical rejuvena- tions. Humanist scholarship and the printing press aided a renewed upsurge of the Averroist controversy1 in peripatetic quarters, and the followers of Plato were well served by the recently discovered doctrines of Hermes Trismegistus. An Aristotle scholar such as Agostino Nifo saw to the publication of important Averroist works, and Pietro Pomponazzi radicalised the Averroist controversy with the publication of his immortality treatise. Such radicalism rarely met with general approval, and it is telling that someone like Nicoletto Vernia (a teacher of both Nifo and Pomponazzi) was scared off by ecclesiastical censure. In 1489 he published an Averroist treatise which greatly upset the bishop of Padua (Pietro Barozzi), so that Vernia retracted his positions a few years later (in 1492) in an anti-Averroist treatise for which the bishop obligingly provided a preface in 1499.2 Platonism likewise had its radical avant garde, first and fore- most in the persons of Ficino and Pico. Its radicalism, however, did not mani- fest itself in the logical deduction of undesirable consequences from philoso- phical premises, but rather in the abstruse claims of a totalising world view. One of the lures of Hermetic omniscience was the promise of the harmony of all sciences, the foremost being the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. When drawing up his famous theses, the young Giovanni Pico della Mirandola claimed to have studied all schools of philosophy, and the reconciliation of Plato and Aristotle was one of his intended projects. Pico had a strong Platonic 1 Averroes was the most important of the Arabic Aristotle commentators and was chiefly responsible for heated debates on questions concerning the mortality of the soul and the eternity of the world. See the overview of philosophical positions in D. A. Iorio, The Aristotelians of Renaissance Italy: A Philosophical Exposition (Lewiston, 1991). 2 Essential on Vernia is E. P. Mahoney, Two Aristotelians of the Italian Renais- sance: Nicoletto Vernia and Agostino Nifo (Aldershot, 2000). In opposing Averroism, Vernia was influenced by the Platonising tendencies of his age; see J. R. Veenstra, ‘Thomas Aquinas and Nicoletto Vernia on the Unity and Plurality of the Intellect’, in Philosophy, Theology, Culture: Problems and Perspectives, Jubilee volume dedicated to the 75th anniversary of Guram Tevzadze , ed. T. Iremadze, T. Iskhadadze and G. Kheosh- vili (Tbilisi, 2007), pp. 128-141. 354 JAN R. VEENSTRA inclination to begin with, so that Hermetic thought and ideals came to him quite naturally. But even sceptical minds could fall for Hermeticism. Agostino Steuco da Gubbio (one of Pomponazzi’s students), after writing books against Platonic theology and kabbalah, became quite an adept of the prisca theologia. Awareness, however, that not all angels in Plato’s or Hermes’s heaven are Christian, did on occasion cause the more heated enthusiasm for Hermetic and Platonic doctrines to chill. Pico is again a case in point, for instead of rejoicing in the easy and happy harmony of the celestial and terrestrial worlds, elaborat- ing on the correspondences and medicinal cures for procuring health and hap- piness, he wrote, at the end of his life, the incisive Disputations against divina- tory astrology, quite rightly called the ‘most extensive attack on astrology that the world had yet seen’.3 A comparable change of heart can be witnessed in the scholar who is the focus of this contribution, namely the French humanist and Bible translator Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (c. 1460-1536). Lefèvre visited Italy in 1491-92, where he met Giovanni Pico della Miran- dola and Ermolao Barbaro, and where he underwent the influence of Marsilio Ficino, whom (so he would confess later) he venerated as a father. In the years that followed, his scholarly production moved across the philosophical spec- trum of Aristotelianism and Platonism where Pico had aspired to forge a har- mony that more critical minds would deem impossible. Lefèvre wrote a number of textbooks on Aristotle such as an Introduction to metaphysics, Paraphrases of Aristotle’s natural philosophy, an Introduction to Aristotle’s Ethics and a commentary on Sacrobosco’s De Sphaera. He also wrote a commentary on Fi- cino’s Pimander and a lengthy treatise on natural magic, the De magia natu- rali.4 It is this latter work, breathing the spirit of Ficino’s De vita, from which Lefèvre distanced himself in later years. As with Vernia, an official censure, in this case the condemnation of all occult arts by the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris on 19 February 1494, compelled Lefèvre to refrain from ever publishing his book on magic. Arguably, it may also have triggered a 3 See S. Vanden Broecke, The Limits of Influence: Pico, Louvain, and the Crisis of Renaissance Astrology (Leiden, 2003), p. 2. 4 Essential publications for this topic are L. Thorndike, A History of Magic and Ex- perimental Science, vol. 4 (New York, 1934), pp. 512-517; A. Renaudet, ‘Un problème historique: la pensée religieuse de J. Lefèvre d’Étaples’, in: idem, Humanisme et Renais- sance (Genève, 1958), pp. 201-216; E. F. Rice, ‘The De magia naturali of Jacques Le- fèvre d’Étaples’, in Philosophy and Humanism: Renaissance Essays in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. E. P. Mahoney (Leiden, 1976), pp. 19-29; E. F. Rice, ‘Jacques Le- fèvre d’Étaples and the medieval Christian mystics’, in Florilegium Historiale: Essays presented to Wallace K. Ferguson, ed. J. G. Rowe and W. H. Stockdale (Toronto, 1971), pp. 89-124; L. Pierozzi and J.-M. Mandosio, ‘L’interprétation alchimique de deux travaux d’Hercule dans le De magia naturali de Lefèvre d’Étaples’, in Chrysopœia, tome 5 (1992-1996), pp. 190-264 (this article contains three chapters: L. Pierozzi, ‘Le De magia naturali de Lefèvre d’Étaples’; De magia naturali III,6 et IV,18, Textes édités et traduits par L. Pierozzi et J.-M. Mandosio; J.-M. Mandosio, ‘Commentaire’). An illus- trated overview of Lefèvre’s editorial work can be found in T. Harmsen, ‘Drink from this fountain’: Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, inspired humanist and dedicated editor, exhi- bition catalogue of the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica (Amsterdam, 2004). .
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