The Works of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Part 2

...as one who professes the Holy Scriptures, would be a reproach, as if I were a lover of adulation, were I to follow the falsities of rhetoric. For it befits a possessor of the Holy Scriptures to speak properly, not merely to declaim; to intend the truth of the thing, not the ornamentation of speech. For the seat of truth is not in the tongue, but in the heart. Nor does it matter what kind of speech we use in saying things that are true. For a lie stands in need of eloquence and tricked-out words so that it may be able to insinuate itself into the minds of men; but the speech of truth, as Euripides writes, is simple, seeking neither falsehood nor pigments. If, therefore, I pour out this task I have assumed before your most delicate ears without any flower of eloquence (which itself must now be not so much neglected by me as condemned), I pray that you bear it with that patience with which that Roman Emperor once stood with his army to hear a little woman; and King Archesilaus also sometimes wished to hear hoarse men with unpleasant voices, so that by listening he might later receive more delight from the eloquent. You will remember that opinion of Theophrastus, that even among the greatest and most elegant men, the unlearned can speak, provided they speak with faith and reason; and lest I let you hang upon my words as if you were drowsy, I shall bring into the light these footprints and signs by which, like a hound, I have hunted down and discovered this opinion of mine that I have narrated—provided I first remind you of this: that all sciences are as evil as they are good; and that they bring us no happiness of divinity above the goal of humanity, unless, perhaps, that which that ancient serpent promised to our first parents, saying:

You shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

In this serpent, therefore, let him glory who glories that he knows science—a thing we read was rightly practiced by the Ophite heretics, who worshipped a serpent in their rites, saying that it introduced the knowledge of virtue in Paradise. The Platonic history agrees with these, that a certain demon named Theutus, hostile to the human race, was the first to devise the sciences, no less offensive than useful, as that King of all Egypt, Thamus, most wisely argued concerning the inventors of the sciences and letters. Hence it is that most Grammarians explain "demons" as "those who know"; but let it be, let us leave these fables to their poets and philosophers, and let there be no inventors of the sciences other than men, and those we know to have been the sons of the worst generation—I say the sons of Cain, and of whom it was truly said:

The children of this world are wiser than the children of light in this generation.

If, therefore, men are now the inventors of the sciences, is not every...

man a liar, and there is none that doeth good, no, not one.

But