What joins a herb and a stone in Agrippa’s philosophy

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535), a German Renaissance scholar, opens the thirteenth chapter of his De occulta philosophia with a question one might ask of a piece of amber. Rub and warm the piece and it will draw a straw towards it. A person can watch that happen. But what gives this particular material the power to set something else in motion? Agrippa wants an account that will also hold for plants and animals.

What works within a thing

There is therefore a wonderfull vertue, and operation in every Hearb, and Stone, but greater in a Star, beyond which, even from the governing Intelligencies every thing receiveth, and obtains many things for it self, especially from the Supream Cause, with whom all things do mutually, and exactly correspond, agreeing in an harmonious consent, as it were in Hymnes, alwaies praising the highest Maker of all things, as by the three children in the fiery furnace were all things called upon to praise God with singings.

– Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, De occulta philosophia, 1651, p. 31.^[1]

Agrippa has just set several possible answers alongside one another. Some scholars, he says, started from the qualities of the elements. Others looked to the stars or to the particular form of each thing. He arranges these explanations at different levels. What appears below as a property of a particular stone can, in his account, be understood higher up as the influence of the heavens and ultimately as the expression of a divine pattern. There is a place in this order for a herb growing at the doorstep as well as for the star one looks up to at night.

Why the paragraph ends in song

Towards the end Agrippa changes his imagery. A reader who has been following an argument about causes is now asked to listen to many voices singing together. Plants, birds and beasts are called upon to join in praising their maker. The comparison brings out what agreement means to Agrippa. For a harmony to be heard, its voices must remain distinguishable. The stone likewise retains its particular character, even as its action bears witness to an order reaching far beyond the specimen in one's hand.