The Works of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Part 2

...who lacks these, [will be] not at all; and philosophers would be happier than priests. For true happiness does not consist in the knowledge of goods, but in a good life; not to understand, but to live in the intellect; for it is not good intelligence, but a good will that joins men to God, and disciplines applied from without produce nothing else except that they provide us with a certain purgative condition, contributing something to happiness, yet not the reason itself by which our happiness is completed, unless there is added to them a life translated into the very nature of the goods: for it has been very often discovered, as Cicero says in his speech for Archias, that nature without learning has often been more effective for praise and virtue than learning without nature. Therefore, there will not be a need to imbue the soul with such a long, such difficult, and—as the Averroists contend—scarcely ever investigable discipline of all the sciences, which Aristotle himself also says is a very common happiness, and which all can easily obtain through a certain discipline and diligence, which he says is an easy and, as it were, a common faculty of contemplating the most noble object of all, namely, God: which indeed, this act of contemplation, so easy and common to all, is not perfected by syllogizing and demonstrating, but by believing and worshipping. What, then, is the happiness of the sciences now? What is the praise and happiness of the wise and the philosophers, with which all schools are deafeningly full, and resound with the encomia of those whose souls they hear are being torn apart by dire tortures, and whom they see in the underworld? Augustine saw these things and feared, exclaiming that saying of Paul: The unlearned arise and take heaven by force, and we with our science are plunged into hell. But if one must dare to confess the truth, the tradition of all the sciences is so dangerous and inconstant that it is far safer to be ignorant than to know. Adam would never have been driven from the paradise of happiness if he had not learned to know good and evil from the serpent as his teacher. And Paul judges that those who wish to know more than they ought should be cast out of the Church. Socrates, when he had investigated almost all disciplines, was then for the first time judged the wisest of all by the oracle, when he openly confessed that he knew nothing. The knowledge of all the sciences is so difficult, not to say impossible, that a man's whole life would fail before the smallest principle of even one discipline could be perfectly investigated. This is what Ecclesiastes seems to affirm to me here, when he says: I have understood that a man can find no reason for all the works of God that are done under the sun, and the more he labors to search, the less he finds, even if the wise man says he knows, he will not be able to find it. Nothing for man...