Arguably the most important German thinker of fifteenth century,Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) was also an ecclesiasticalreformer, administrator and cardinal. His life-long effort was toreform and unite the universal and Roman Church, whether as canon lawexpert at the Council of Basel and after, as legate to Constantinopleand later to German dioceses and houses of religion, as bishop in hisown diocese of Brixen, and as advisor in the papal curia. His activelife as a Church administrator and bishop found written expression inseveral hundred Latin sermons and more theoretical background in hiswritings on ecclesiology, ecumenism, mathematics, philosophy andtheology. Cusanus had an open and curious mind. He was learned andsteeped in the Neoplatonic tradition, well aware of both humanist andscholastic learning, yet mostly self-taught in philosophy andtheology. Nicholas anticipated many later ideas in mathematics,cosmology, astronomy and experimental science while constructing hisown original version of systematic Neoplatonism. A whole range ofearlier medieval writers, such as Thierry of Chartre, Ramon Llull andAlbert the Great, influenced Nicholas, but his important intellectualroots are in Proclus and Dionysius the Areopagite. In spite of hissignificance few later thinkers, apart from Giordano Bruno, understoodor were influenced by him until the late nineteenth century.

• 1. Biography
• 2. Nicholas’ Thought
  • 2.1 Metaphysics and ontology
  • 2.2 The Mind and Human Knowing
  • 2.3 Symbols and Philosophical Theology
• 3. A Neoplatonism of His Own
• 4. Contribution to Political Ideas
• Bibliography
  • Primary Texts
  • Secondary Literature
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Biography

Nicholas of Cusa (Nikolaus Cryfftz or Krebs in German, then NicolausCusanus in Latin) was born in 1401 in Kues (now Bernkastel-Kues) onthe Moselle River between Koblenz and Trier. He was one of fourchildren in a bourgeois family. His father, Johan Cryfftz, was aprosperous merchant who became one of the landed gentry in Trier. Thefirst record we have of Nicholas’ early education comes from hisstudy of the liberal arts at University of Heidelburg in1416–17. He then moved to the University of Padua where hestudied canon law, receiving his Doctor of Canon Law in 1423. In Paduahe met the physician and mathematician Paolo Toscanelli, the canonistGiuliano Caesarini, and the humanists Guarino da Verona and Vittorinoda Feltre.

In 1425 he entered the service of the archbishop of Trier and, as hissecretary, received income from several benefices. By 1426 he was inCologne where he may have lectured on canon law, studied philosophyand theology, and began researches into original source material andinto the annals of German law. There he was able to prove that theDonation of Constantine was an eighth-century forgery, and he foundmanuscripts of Pliny’sNatural History and ofPlautus’ comedies. In Cologne he met Heimerich of Campo, whointroduced him to the writings of Ramon Llull, Albert the Great andhis commentary on Dionysius, and Proclus’ commentary onPlato’sParmenides. In 1428 and 1435 Nicholas wasoffered positions teaching canon law at the University of Louvain, buthe turned them down to remain in church administration.

Ordained a priest sometime during the 1430s, Nicholas first gainedwider notice for his work as a conciliarist at the Council of Basel.There he wroteDe concordantia catholica (1433), arguing forthe authority of the council over that of the pope and stressing thenotions of consent and representation. After the turmoil at Baselsplit the council, Nicholas ultimately sided with the papal party andleft the conciliarists. In 1437 he was part of an embassy sent toConstantinople to seek reconciliation of the Greek Church with Rome.He reported that, during the voyage home, the insights ofDe doctaignorantia (1440) came to him as a kind of divine revelation. Hecontinued as a papal legate to Germany from 1438–48. Namedcardinal in 1446 by Eugenius IV, Cusanus was elevated to that positionin 1448 by Nicholas V and was sent to Germany in 1451 as papal legateto reform the church.

Nicholas’ most important philosophical works were written in thetwenty-four years between the appearance ofDe doctaignorantia and his death.De coniecturis(1442–43),De dato patris luminum (1445),Apologiadoctae ignorantiae (1449),Idiota de sapientia, Idiota demente, Idiota de staticis experimentis (all 1450) were amongimportant works of the decade from 1440–1450, as were manysermons and works on mathematics. The final fourteen years of his lifesaw the appearance ofDe visione Dei (1453),Deberyllo (1458),De possest (1460),De li nonaliud (1461),De ludo globi (1462–63),Devenatione sapientiae (1462),Compendium (1464) andDe apice theoriae (1464), more works on mathematics and manymore sermons. Of particular note are two works he wrote during theseyears that reached out to other religions, especially Islam,DePace Fidei (1453) andCribatio Alchorani (1461).

In 1450 he was named bishop of Brixen in the Tirol. In 1452 he beganactive administration in Brixen, but his attempts at reform led tothreats and clashes with Sigismund, the count of Tirol. Many of hisover two hundred sermons date from this time in Brixen, though hisreform efforts there and earlier in Germany mostly failed. Nicholasfinally retreated from the conflict in Brixen to Rome, where heremained in the papal curia advising Pius II. He died in 1464 in Todion his way from Rome to Ancona. His remains were buried in his titularChurch, St Peter in Chains, at Rome; his heart was sent to Kues andburied in the chapel of the hospice for elderly men there that heendowed in his will. The hospice survives and his remarkable libraryis housed there today.

2. Nicholas’ Thought

Nicholas of Cusa may arguably be best understood as employing aChristian Neoplatonic framework to construct his own synthesis ofinherited ideas. His thought witnesses to his own reading in a varietyof predecessors, while side-stepping the methods of the medievalscholasticsummae and their typical controversies andarguments. Trained as a canon lawyer, Nicholas is mostly self-taughtin theology and philosophy; both his ideas and his language maypresent some difficulties to contemporary readers. His thought has tobe viewed as a whole, for it works more by correspondences andparallels between the domains he is interested in expounding than in alinear fashion or by direct argument. What is noteworthy are theflexible metaphors he uses as he moves across what we designate todayas ontology, philosophy of mind and epistemology, and philosophicaltheology. His metaphors provide some methodological clue tounderstanding how Nicholas proposes that we should think of God andcreatures together. It is not just that God exceeds our conceptualreach and grasp as well as our literal language. The asymmetry betweenGod and creatures also provides a measure or norm for theappropriateness of any metaphor exploring or attempting to explaintheir relationship.

2.1 Metaphysics and ontology

Nicholas of Cusa’s most complete set of proposals about what isreal occurs in his best-known work of 1440,De doctaignorantia:On Learned Ignorance. Here Cusanus addressesthe four categorical realities traditionally found in Christianthought: God, the natural universe, Christ and human beings.OnLearned Ignorance devotes its first book to God, the second tothe universe and a third to the God-man, Jesus Christ. While its ordermirrors the outflow from God and return to him, this book does notdistinguish philosophy and theology as contemporary thinkers might,but unites them in a single overview of Neoplatonic Christianreality.

Nicholas begins with a single trope or symbol to lay out the parallelsbetween his teachings in the three books, that of the“maximum.” God is the absolute Maximum; the universe is acreated image of God, the “contracted” or restrictedmaximum. Christ unites the first two as the Maximum at onceabsolute-and-contracted. “Contraction” is a metaphor forthe finite status of creatures, all of whom are limited images of God.“Absolute” is used in its etymological sense of“free from” (ab-solutus) to characterizeGod’s infinity. As absolute maximum God is both unlimited andtranscendent, unreachable by human conceptions that measure thelimited or contracted realm of more and less. Once Cusanusconceptualizes human knowing as measuring, he proposes that ourknowledge also cannot measure exactly the essence of any limitedthing. A fortiori, when it comes to the unlimited God, Nicholasasserts that “there is no proportion between finite andinfinite.” The infinite God remains beyond our ken. Humanefforts to understand the depth and implications of this assertion arewhat will render our ignorance “learn-ed.”

As so often in Christian thinking, this sort of apophatic preambledoes not prevent Cusanus from spending a whole book proposing how wemight comprehend the incomprehensible God“incomprehensibly.” His first proposal is that God is the“coincidence of opposites.” This turns out to be a wayboth of recalling the negative theology to be found in Dionysius theAreopagite and his other predecessors and at the same time of goingbeyond it. Put in the language of the “maximum,” in Godboth maximum and minimum coincide in the divine infinite Oneness, forboth take the mind beyond the measurable created domain of more andless and end up meaning just the “superlative” ortranscendent. The implication, in other words, is that God’sreality lies beyond any familiar domain where the principle ofcontradiction holds sway.

At the same time this “coincidence” underlines the divineOneness that comprehends all else in undifferentiated and unlimitedunity. It is not that creatures coincide with God or God withcreatures, but that in God all else coincides as nothing else thanGod. As so often in negative and apophatic “theology,” weare not only told what God is not but led to reflect explicitly onwhat God must be, even if we have no conceptual clarity about what weassert. The result is a kind of second-order language about the waysin which we are forced to think and talk about divinity.

Nicholas then proposes some geometrical “exercises” toprovide his readers some object lessons designed to teach how we mightreach for the unlimited even while we are aware that we cannot graspwhat the infinite God may be. For instance, we are to imagine a circleand a straight line or tangent that meets the circle. From a certainperspective, as the diameter or circumference of the circle increases,its circumference approaches the straight line and appears less andless curved. If we then imagine and extrapolate the circumference tothe infinite, we can almost “see” that both straighttangent and curved circumference should coincide—a kind of“coincidence of opposites” that is a figure of how we maythink beyond limited things toward the transcendent One. All this ismathematically impossible, of course, but it demonstrates somemetaphorical steps for moving beyond the finite toward the infinitethat might be transferred from geometrical figures to created beingsand their Creator.

In Book II ofOn Learned Ignorance Cusanus deals with thecreated universe. The natural universe counts as the limited orcontracted maximum that is the image of the absolute Maximum. HereNicholas introduces another central metaphor to capture therelationship between God and creatures, the metaphor of enfolding andunfolding (complicatio/explicatio). He expands the“folding” metaphor he inherited from the twelfth-centuryschool of Chartres. While all beings are “enfolded” in theundifferentiated oneness of their Divine Source, they are at the sametime an “unfolding” of God in time and space.“Insofar as He is the unfolding,” Nicholas writes,“in all things He is that which they are, just as in an imagethe reality itself [veritas] is present” (II.3, Hopkinstranslation). In Neoplatonic terms, one must think the unfoldeduniverse we experience and all that is real in it as at once enfoldedin the Creator on whom it depends. God encompasses every thing createdin a dialectical outflow and return to God without any creatures everbeing identified with the God on whom they depend, that One whoremains both present to them yet ever absent and beyond. What the“unfolding/enfolding” couple captures is the dynamicrelationship between divine Original and created image.

The natural universe, then, is the whole or contracted maximumcollectively constituted by the many beings in space and time.Nicholas proposes the quasi-Anaxagorean slogan that “each thingis in each thing:quodlibet in quolibet” to emphasizethat the individual beings or parts are no less“contracted” images of the whole created universe. Just asGod is present to each creature that stands as a contracted image ofthe divine, so the universe as a macrocosm is present to each creatureor constitutive part as microcosm. In that way, each natural thing isan image of the collective whole. But since this collectivity is madeup of interrelated parts, each thing is also the totality of itsconnections with everything else. “Each thing is in eachthing” because each is an image reflecting the oneness of thewhole and thus of all other individuals that are the interrelatedparts of that whole.

Nicholas also recognizes in Book Two that the natural universe ischaracterized by change or motion; it is not static in time and space.But finite change and motion, ontologically speaking, are also mattersof more and less and have no fixed maximum or minimum. This“ontological relativity” leads Cusanus to some remarkableconclusions about the earth and the physical universe, based not onempirical observation but on metaphysical grounds. The earth is notfixed in place at some given point because nothing is utterly at rest;nor can it be the exact physical center of the natural universe, evenif it seems nearer the center than “the fixed stars.”Because the universe is in motion without fixed center or boundaries,none of the spheres of the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic world pictureare exactly spherical. None of them has an exact center, and the“outermost sphere” is not a boundary. The universe istherefore “infinite,” in the sense of physicallyunbounded. Cusanus thus shifts the typical medieval picture of thecreated universe toward later views, but on ontological grounds.

For Nicholas, the exact center and circumference of the createduniverse are to be found only in God. Whatwe take to becenter and outer limits depends on our viewpoint. If we changeperspectives, say to that from another planet (which might indeed beinhabited) and take it to be center, then earth might be zenith. Inthis way we come to realize that what is taken as fixed or central canbe altered to be moving and at the zenith, depending on the locationof the standpoint we pick in the unbounded universe. The reason,Cusanus writes, is that there is no exactness outside of God, and only“God, who is everywhere and nowhere, is its [theuniverse’s] circumference and center” (II.12, Hopkinstranslation).

In this way learned ignorance recognizes that the natural universeitself, as a contracted image of God, has a physical center that canbe anywhere and a circumference that is nowhere. That is why Nicholascharacterized the natural universe as a contracted maximum or“privative” infinite while God remains the“negative” infinite or absolute maximum. This means thatthe universe merely lacks set physical bounds or limits, while God hasno ontological limits in being all that can possibly be. This enablesthe “infinite” universe, as the whole constituted by allcreatures, to be an image of the divine oneness, but only in acontracted or attenuated fashion.

Nowhere is the Christian bearing ofOn Learned Ignorance moreobvious than in Book III, where Nicholas treats of the God-man, JesusChrist, as a third “maximum,” the Maximum at onceabsolute-and-contracted. Once again, however, Cusanus uses theorthodox teaching of early Christian councils such as Chalcedon moreas a background guide than as providing a straightforward Christologyor text for exposition. He returns to the contrast between absoluteGod and contracted creatures that he used throughout Books I and II tointerpret and contrast the relation between infinite God and finitecreatures, even though there is no real proportion between them.

God was construed as the absolute maximum and divine infinite Oneness,while Nicholas viewed the natural universe as a contracted maximumwhose unity-in-multiplicity and lack of physical limits“reflected” God’s positively unlimited oneness.Nicholas now entertains a third possibility, an anomalous joining ofabsolute and contracted in the God-man. He reviews, borrowing fromAristotle, the ordered universe of things belonging to natural types(genera and species), then modifies it by extending to individuals hisidea of contraction or limitation. Individual specimens are all thatexist, but not only are they contracted images of God’s oneness,but also contracted images of their types insofar as each more or lessfulfills the possibilities of its nature.

Cusanus thereupon asks a hypothetical question. What would happen werea perfect specimen, an individual fulfillment of its type, to actuallyexist? In his language of maximality, it would be another maximumcontracted to a unique individual of a given kind. But what would makesuch a maximum individual possible in a universe of more or less? Onlyits unique union with God, the absolute divine Maximum that is thesource of every contracted reality, a union signaled in thetraditional “hypostatic union.” The whole of this maximalyet finite human nature is created and united with the absolute God sothat God remains transcendent, yet inseparable from this one humancreature. In terms of enfolding and unfolding, this unique unfoldingin a human being is at the same time to reveal the God enfolding JesusChrist. Jesus is an image of God so utterly transparent as to remainopaque except to the eyes of faith.

Cusanus relies on the traditional microcosm/macrocosm trope to explainwhy human nature would be the contracted nature best suited for unionwith the divine Absolute. Human nature is the created nature“more common to the totality of beings” (III.3, Hopkinstranslation) because the intermediate status of human beings betweenangels and all other bodily creatures provides common ties to thewhole range of created things. These ties are based on its capacitiesas “what is highest of the lower and what is lowest of thehigher” natures (ibid.), so that it stands asrepresentative microcosm of the created macrocosm. The upshot is thatthe historical Jesus Christ is human in such a way as to be divineand divine in such a way as to be human, the Maximum at oncecontractedand absolute, the human image who issimultaneously the divine Original. Because the divine Word is onewith Jesus’ human nature, that nature is perfect of its kind, atthe same time contracted and maximal. Learned ignorance may thus pressthe Cusan metaphors and ideas to the limit in dealing with JesusChrist, because the hypostatic oneness of the incarnate God willalways elude full human understanding.

This third book realigns the order of Christian metaphysics so thatthe God-man stands between God and the rest of creation, for it isthrough the mediation of the Incarnate Word that creatures are madeand creatures return to their source. In Book I, Nicholas proposedthat there is no proportion or measure between the infinite and thefinite that will enable us to grasp the Infinite God or evenGod’s contracted image in the natural universe. This is whatlearned ignorance establishes for and contributes to human wisdom. Yetthe historic reality of Jesus Christ has a theoretical role to play ininterpreting Nicholas’ metaphysical vision. The Cusan Christstands as a more adequate norm and measure for theory and practice.Jesus Christ is the historical human image of the Absolute One beyondour ken and thus the paradigm that reveals our creaturely connectionwith the infinite God. Christ is the disclosure in time of what Godis. In this way learned ignorance points to Jesus Christ as themedium, the measure and mediator between finite and infinite,and, as well, the concrete norm for what human beings may become.

The three books ofOn Learned Ignorance thus represent aseries of powerful proposals for reinterpreting Christian reality.Throughout Nicholas uses metaphors such as the coincidence ofopposites, absolute/contracted and enfolding/unfolding to relate Godand creation. His proposals are established by seeking out parallelsbetween the infinite divine Original and limited created images and bydrawing out the implications of these parallels. This book is neithermedieval Aristotelian scholastic disputation nor later Cartesianrationalism, but its own kind of Christian Neoplatonic speculationthat teases the philosophical imagination as much as it may frustrateany contemporary philosophical search for arguments or proofs. It isthe coherence of the parallels or correspondences within the overallview of reality that gives Cusan metaphysics and Cusan metaphors theirpersuasive power.

2.2 The Mind and Human Knowing

Nicholas of Cusa does not neatly divide ontology from epistemology anymore than he separates faith and reason, so it seems fitting that hisideas on human knowing emphasize the metaphor of mind as measure(mens/mensura) already mentioned inOn LearnedIgnorance. This becomes the significant way that human minds areimages of the divine mind. In his 1450 dialogue,Idiota de mente:The Layman: About Mind, the first “definition”proposed for mind may fit the divine mind better than the human:“Mind is the limit and measure of all things” (c.1).Cusanus proceeds to employ the quasi-technical metaphor fromOnLearned Ignorance,“enfolding/unfolding—complicatio/explicatio,”to spell out just how our minds are images of God’s mind. Thesemoves already separate his ideas about human knowing from those ofboth his scholastic predecessors and his post-Renaissance successors.He writes:

You know how the divine Simplicity enfolds all things. Mind is theimage of this enfolding Simplicity. If, then, you called this divineSimplicity infinite Mind, it will be the exemplar of our mind. If youcalled the divine mind the totality of the truth of things, you willcall our mind the totality of the assimilation of things, so that itmay be a totality of ideas. In the divine Mind conception is theproduction of things; in our mind conception is the knowledge ofthings. If the divine Mind is absolute Being, then its conception isthe creation of beings; and conception in the human mind is theassimilation of beings. (c.3)

This extension of the metaphor used in metaphysics to capture howthings simultaneously proceed from and return to God spells out wherehuman knowledge stands. God’s utterly simple divine mind enfoldsthe true natures of all the actual things “unfolded” fromit in the created universe. The human mind is a parallel thoughlimited oneness that can enfold or encompass the concepts of all itknows while unfolding them in a conceptual universe. While divineknowing amounts to the creating of beings, human knowing amounts tothe creating of concepts that are “the assimilation ofbeings.” Theidiota/layman continues:

What suits the divine Mind as infinite Truth suits our mind as itsclose image. If all things are in the divine Mind as in their exactand proper Truth, all things are in our mind as in the image orlikeness of their proper Truth, that is, as known; for knowledge takesplace by likeness. All things are in God, but there as exemplars ofthings. All things are in our mind, but there as likenesses of things.(c.3)

Two points here are essential. First, the conceptual content of ourknowledge is tied to the things God created as to their epistemiclikenesses. Nicholas thus stands in the tradition of Christianrealism. Second, the correspondences between divine mind and humanmind are severely modified by the fact that God’s purported“concepts,” the “exemplars” of things, arereally nothing else in God but God’s undifferentiated oneness.Oneness is primary in God’s knowledge, “manyness”and “otherness” characterize our conceptual domain. Atbest we humans are unitary sources of our own knowledge and can giveour ideas an overall oneness as a more or less organized whole—aquite imperfect and faint mirroring of God’s mind.

2.2.1 Human Knowing is Conjecturing

Nicholas’ second major treatise (1442–43) that againexplains his vision of all there is in Neoplatonic Christian terms isentitledDe coniecturis: On Conjectures. Here he employs thecontrasting terms ofunitas/alteritas: oneness/otherness, aswell as enfolding/unfolding to propose how we might understand from asomewhat different viewpoint God, the universe and human beings.Oneness is characteristic of God, while otherness stands for thecontingent plurality and variety of limited created things. In thiswork Nicholas also introduces an explicit contrast between the humancapacities ofratio andintellectus.Ratioor discursive reason is our capacity for thinking, using concepts andjudgments.Intellectus, by contrast, is a direct intellectualvision. Nicholas parallels the way our plural capacities for reason,imagination and sensation are founded in “intellectus” astheir single source to the simultaneous outflow and return of theplurality of creatures to their single divine Source. (Ratioandintellectus may recall in some waysdianoia andnoesis in Plato’s famous image of the dividedline.)

The title,On Conjectures, is also intriguing because hereCusanus makes explicit the limits of human knowing only hinted at inOn Learned Ignorance and in his laterThe Layman: OnMind. As his Prologue puts it, “You have seen that theexactness of truth cannot be attained. The consequence is that everypositive human assertion of the truth is a conjecture…. And sothe unattainable Oneness of truth is known in conjectural othernessand the conjecture of otherness is itself known in the most simpleOneness of truth.” Here the Neoplatonic dialectical principlethat insists we never think anything apart from the First is appliedeven to human knowing. And such knowing is conjecturing.

Cusan “conjecture” is not to be taken as what we normallymean by the word in contemporary English where it covers the rangefrom a guess or hunch to a typical surmise to a provisional proposalto be investigated or checked against usually empirical evidence.Nicholas only considers “true” conjectures and believesthat our conceptual and judgmental knowledge is conjectural orprovisional because human reason never grasps the essence of anythingprecisely as it is. This does not mean we cannot improve ourunderstanding or that we are simply making things up; rather, itfollows from the fact that our knowledge is a likeness of actualthings and real characteristics whose complete and “true”natures are only known to their Creator. To quote the Prologue again,“while our actual knowledge is incommensurable with the greatestknowledge, something humanly unattainable, the unsure falling away ofour weak apprehension from the purity of truth makes our assertions ofwhat is true conjecture.”

Nicholas composedOn Conjectures as a letter treatiseaddressed to Cardinal Cesarini. In chapter 11 of Book One he proposesa scenario where the cardinal views the pope. This scenario leads intohis sole explicit description ofconiectura. This example ofvisual perception lets us recognize that we readily make perceptualassertions about what we see or hear. And when we reflect on theseperceptual judgments we realize that we go beyond what sensation alonedelivers, for we use reason to interpret and make sense of what wesee. Reason and sense operate inseparably in our perceptualexperience. Reason discriminates, recognizes and may explicitlyformulate in language or thought what the experience comes to, forinstance, “There’s the pope.”

Further reflection enables us to realize that what visual perceptiondelivers is limited, that is, partial and perspectival, because ourperceptual judgments reflect at least the constraints of theperceiver’s bodiliness. These constraints include what physicaleyes can see, as well as one’s physical location and viewpoint.Nicholas terms this a twofold “otherness” that conditionsand limits all sensory perception, limitations that we are implicitlyaware of in making perceptual judgments. So Nicholas’description ofconiectura reflects the“otherness” of our finite human estate. As he writes,“A conjecture, then, is a positive assertion that participatesin truth as it is, but in otherness.” (Bk. I, c. 11)“Truth as it is” refers, of course, to what is enfolded inthe divine Mind. What is unfolded in our concepts and assertionsshares that truth but only approximately, “inotherness.”

Two other sources of “otherness” besides bodilinessunderlie the limitations on perceptual knowledge. One is the fact thatthe objects of perception are themselves limited. The cardinal’ssight of the pope has to be conjectural because anything extended canshow, as it were, but one side of itself to another embodied viewer. Asecond “otherness” in perception is due to the“otherness” of the mental and linguistic signs, images,and symbols we use to think and talk about what we perceive. Thesediffer from both our mental capacities and what we are looking at orlistening to. This means the terms in which perceptual judgments areexpressed reflect the broader historical background and interests ofthe perceiver as well as his or her linguistic community.

Given all these constraints we may wonder why Nicholas believes thatconjectural knowledge “participates in the truth as itis.” Fundamentally, he is convinced that our status as images ofGod’s mind and its oneness secures the cognitive validity ofwhat we know. Our knowledge is “conjectural” in contrastto God’s knowledge, for divine knowledge is complete and exact,both aperspectival and omniperspectival, where knower and knowncoincide in infinite Oneness. Our recognition of the limits in our ownknowing and its contents can keep us in touch, at least implicitly,with what is beyond our ken in that ideal oneness of knower and known.The separation of the human mind from the universe of knowable thingsis at the same time a connection that results in conjecturalknowledge. Just so, conjectural knowledge is also an outcome of theseparation and connection of the human mind and the divine Mind, ofimage and Original.

2.2.2 Knowing as Assimilative Measuring

Recall once more the Cusan “definition” of mind alreadyalluded to inThe Layman: About Mind: Mind is “thatfrom which comes the limit and measure of all things.” (c.1) Ifwe set this beside the comment quoted above that “conception inthe human mind is the assimilation of beings,” it is clear that“assimilating” and “measuring” are thedominant metaphors Nicholas uses to understand what we do as knowers.As knowers wemeasure the things we know and we also areassimilated orlikened in some way to the objects ofknowledge. Along with the “horizontal” notion of ourconcepts being images of things as well as of the mind’s ownoneness,assimilatio also has a “vertical”dimension because in knowing we liken ourselves to our divineOriginal.

What is at issue is the connection and tension between the twometaphors. Supposedly complementary,assimilatio andmensura give no obvious answer to what provides the measurefor the content and validity of our knowledge—is it the thingsknown or our knowing minds? Nicholas never questioned that the variedthings we discover in the natural universe and fashion ourselves inthe social and cultural milieu exist independently of our minds (ifnot of God’s). But the question here is whether our knowledge isderived from what is independent of mind or is in whole or part theresult of the linguistic and conceptual measures we learn, constructand employ in dealing with reality. If knowing is creative orproductive, solely a matter of our “measuring,” it is easyto see how it is an image of God’s creating, but not how it is alikening to extra-mental things. If things outside measure and causewhat we know, we can see why human knowledge is a likening to things,but not how it is an image of God’s creative mind. The twometaphors may well run counter to each other.

Because Nicholas himself does not frame the question in this way, heprovides ample evidence for both answers. Some interpreters, such asJ. Hopkins (1996), see his use of medieval scholastic language for thepowers and activities of the mind as placing him mainly in themedieval Aristotelian-Thomist tradition of critical realism, whileemphasizing anew the active character of knowing at all levels andthus stressing that the mind is an active power. Those interpreterswhose proclivities are more Kantian, for instance, K. Flasch (1998)and K. Kremer (1978, 2000), find in his texts gestures towards whatwould in Kant become “the transcendental unity ofapperception” and “a priori” concepts of theunderstanding, not to mention the stress on active judgment. The viewof the present author is that both of these interpretations may missthe Neoplatonic context in which Nicholas discusses human knowledgeand may underestimate how important philosophical theology is to theCusan exposition of knowing.

What are the clues we need to connect the metaphors of likening andmeasuring in a complementary way? We must return to Nicholas’underlying conviction that our minds are images of God’s mindand that this connection between them is constant and thoroughgoingand thus should never be overlooked. Then we may begin to understandthat just as God’s creative measuring sets the ontologicallimits of everything God creates, so our corresponding measuring canat best be assimilative of the mind-independent things we wish to knowbut do not create or place in reality, and yet be creative inmeasuring and adjudicating the conceptual domain that results from ourknowing them.

Both of these strands can seen to be operative in chapter 7 ofTheLayman: About Mind. There Cusanus gives a somewhat more detailedaccount of how he sees the mind’s cognitive functions operatingat the levels of sensation, imagination, reasoning and intellectualvision or intuition. Here, as in his later work entitledCompendium, we find that Nicholas inherited a technicalvocabulary and conceptual framework for human knowing that embodiesthe medieval Aristotelian view that natural things are the causes andmeasures of perceptual and conceptual human knowledge. On that view,what we understand is to correspond to the intelligible aspects ofthings that are mind-independent so that an identity inintelligibility between mind and thing results—the mind ismeasured by things. While Nicholas insists that the active,self-moving mind directs and integrates the joint operation of ourknowing capacities, he also agrees that the mind has no innate ideasand that mental life has to be awakened or stimulated by directcontact with the perceptible world. He never questions that theperceptible world (“the plurality of things”) exists andis independent of our minds and our knowledge.

It is the mind’s power to discriminate and make sense of what weperceive, imagine or remember that Cusanus emphasizes. He writes,speaking of imagination, “When sensible things are not present,it [imagination] conforms itself to things in a confused way andwithout discriminating one condition from another. But [when]functioning with thinking imagination conforms itself to things whilediscriminating one condition from another.” (Idiota demente, c.7)

To help us understand the mind’s engagement in perceptual“assimilation,” Nicholas turns to the work of sculptorsand craftsmen who use wax or clay to make an impression of some shapeso they can work from that likeness. When it is a matter of planningsomething to do or make, it is easy to see our minds as active. Whatabout perceptual experiences where what we encounter is not up to us?Nicholas returns to the wax, asking us to imagine wax informed by mindin the way mind informs our capacities for sensing and proposing thatmind so imagined could “form the wax to every shape presented toit.” (c.7) Nicholas is saying, in effect, that“assimilation” in perception is indeed a matter ofreason’s active selecting and managing the deliverances of senseand imagination that result from our encounters with perceptiblethings. We are not mere passive recipients of colors, sounds, texturesand so on, but our minds differentiate and connect perceptions andimages in order to form concepts based on the discriminations ofreason.

Nicholas avers that our knowledge of the natural and cultural worldembodied in and made systematic in the technical and mechanical andliberal arts will remain “conjectural.” The reason is thatwe are not dealing with the true reality of mind-independent thingswhose true forms are one with God. We only encounter the physicallylocated temporal realities that are images of the really real. As heremarks, “the notions that are attained through theassimilations of reason are uncertain, because they are in accord withthe images of forms rather than with their true [forms].”(ibid., c.7) Only the concepts of mathematics are notconjectural because we fashion or construct these ideas ourselves.Consequently our conceptions of them can be precise and certain, foras conceptual entities they escape the sorts of change and bodilylimits characteristic of the physical world.

2.2.3 The Measure of Knowledge

But this sketch of our knowing powers as assimilative does not settlewhat is normative for human knowing or what it means to take the mindas a measure. Nicholas takes up this explicitly a bit later in chapter9 ofThe Layman: About Mind. When he is questioned how themind can be a measure adequate to such a variety of things, the laymanresponds somewhat cryptically:

In the way an “absolute” face would make itself themeasure of all faces. For when you attend to the fact that mind is acertain absolute measure that cannot be greater or smaller since it isnot restricted to quantity, and when you attend to the fact that thismeasure is alive so that it measures by itself (as if a living compasswere to measure by itself), then you grasp how it makes itself into aconcept, measure, or exemplar so that it attains itself in everything.(c.9)

Earlier the layman had described the human mind as a measure that setslimits, conceptual and linguistic boundaries, to all that it knows.What this presupposes are the requirements of any measuring,quantitative or qualitative: (1) something measurable to beascertained, (2) a measure, that is a criterion or norm embodyingstandard units, (3) the actual measuring that employs the norm, (4)the results of the process, the measure taken.

All these requirements can be found in the passage above. What we wantto know counts as the cognitively measurable (“such a variety ofthings”). These knowables span items in the natural world andthe cultural sphere and their features, as well as concepts in therealm of thought itself. The “concept, measure, orexemplar” is the qualitative norm the mind employs and of whichit is the source. The mind does the actual measuring (“measuresby itself”) and “makes itself a measure” or norm injudging and taking the measure of each item across the range of thingsit knows. What results is the knowledge we obtain when the mindbecomes “equal to such a variety of things” and“attains itself in everything.” Our knowledge includeswhat we gain from everyday experience in society, from the natural andhuman sciences, and from literature and the other arts.

What does the reference to “absolute face” in the passagequoted come to? “Absolute” is a term Cusanus usuallyreserved for God as the infinite One free from every limitation andrestriction. Here it is transferred to our minds as images of God. Ourminds are not limited to quantitative measures and thus can determinethe conceptual measures or “units” that best fit or areadequate to the different sorts of things we want to know. We cananswer questions of “what sort,” not just of “howmuch.” Our concepts and judgments are assimilative or activelylikened to what we know because we construct the conceptual measuresappropriate, if never wholly adequate, to what we are investigating orthinking about. As thus relatively unrestricted or“absolute,” our minds can be conformed to whatever isknowable in whatever way we can grasp it. Just as the absolute divine“face” or mind is the infinite measure of all thecreaturely minds that are its images, so the human mind measures thedeterminate conceptual realities that reflect its own finite unity oroneness.

Human concepts are measures insofar they involve choice andconstruction, application and interpretation, whether quantitative orqualitative. The use of a given group of concepts or a particularscheme of ideas or interpretative framework is a matter of humancreating. If we recognize some mind-independent phenomena we want toexplore and come to know, whether in nature or in culture, we shouldalso recognize that it is up to us to construct and employ theappropriate cognitive measures in order to “take themeasure” of the state of affairs in question. Being introducedto some cognitive domain or area of practice we are unfamiliar withinvolves learning “a new vocabulary” and set of ideasalready utilized and standard in that area. Unless and until we canunderstand the concepts and language in question, we cannot make senseout of what we perceive and continue to understand in our previousterms.

That Nicholas is using “measuring” in this sense isbrought home to us by the metaphor he employs in the passage quotedabove from chapter 9 where he says the mind is “a living compassthat measures by itself.” In contrast with a fixed ornon-adjustable straight ruler, a compass or caliper can be adjusted tofit a range of sizes and shapes. Cusanus’ fanciful“living” compass reminds us that as knowers we canactively accommodate our ideas to what we want to know. As a compasscan be adjusted to find the quantitative measure of a variety of sizesand shapes, so our minds are able to fashion, adopt, modify andutilize both the literal and the symbolic ideas and concepts availableto us for exploring and understanding the natural, social andconceptual worlds we inherit and extend.

This may help us understand why Nicholas’ sketch ofmens involves both the mind-independent things and the minditself as normative measures of the assimilation that is humancognition. We become like the knowable features of the things we knowand we fashion the conceptual and judgmental measures whereby we takethem into ourselves as known. The full determinate intelligibility ofmind-independent things and states of affairs provides a kind of ideallimit that we acknowledge in recognizing the inadequacy andshortcomings of what we do know about them. That is why Nicholas deemsour knowledge “conjectural.”

Along with providing this ideal limit to what we know, things outsidethe mind also stand as referents that themselves measure our cognitiveassimilating. Recognizing that they exist, we also acknowledge thatthey are what our knowledge is about. And we constantly return to whatwe seek to understand to assess the adequacy of our conceptions and tocorrect any mistakes or misinterpretations in our interpretations.Deprived of these independent measures, our knowledge has no referenceoutside the mind and no standard for revising or improving ourconceptual measures as more or less adequate to what we are trying tounderstand.

The Cusan answer, then, to the question of whether mind or themind-independent realities are the “measures” of what weknow may thus be seen as an attempt to have it both ways. We are bothmeasured by the things we know and we construct the concepts andconceptual frameworks whereby we measure them, however“conjecturally.” There are situations and realities wewant to understand that challenge us to adjust to what we perceive,examine, and experience. So, too, there are situations and realitiesthat require us to modify our ideas and concepts and symbols so thatthey will be consistent one with another and with the rest of ourbeliefs.

Nicholas of Cusa thus combines the metaphors ofassimilatioandmensuratio in his account of what provides the cognitivenorms or criteria for human knowing. We cannot resolve the tensionbetween the two that we find in what he says, but must hold onto it.The reason is that, as God’s images, we do not create but mustrecognize what God has created as independent of human knowledge. Wemay fashion the interpretative measures whereby we know createdthings, but we do this while acknowledging that the fullintelligibility of each determinate reality is ultimately identicalwith God’s unknowable Oneness. We may aspire to fullintelligibility but can reach it only in mathematics. That is why ourbest knowledge, even of the mind itself, remains conjectural, sharingGod’s truth but limited to human ways of knowing.

2.3 Symbols and Philosophical Theology

The relationship betweenOn Learned Ignorance andOnConjectures sets a pattern for the many shorter theoretical worksNicholas was to write in the two decades that followed. The basicinsights and the framework laid out inOn Learned Ignoranceis never discarded and never substantively modified. InsteadNicholas’ dialogues and briefer treatises can be read asproposing many different metaphors or symbols for understanding histeaching about the relationship between God and creatures. Threeexamples of these metaphors may give some idea of the power andfreshness of his speculative imagining. The first is his use of theicon and the wall inThe Vision of God (1453); the second hisattempt to capture the God-creature connection by describing God as“Not Other” in the dialogue by that name (On the NotOther, 1461); the third his fascination with mathematics and itssymbolic potential. While Cusanus never surrenders his initial insightthat there is no proportion between infinite and finite, thinkingthrough these later symbols and neologisms lets us see how theseindirect means enable some movement of mind and heart towards thedivine Mystery with whom we are ever connected.

2.3.1 The Icon and the Wall

Cusanus wroteThe Vision of God in the form of a prayer,responding to the request of the Benedictines of Tegernsee for atreatise on mystical theology. With it he sent them an“all-seeing” icon and proposed an exercise for its use togive them some understanding of God’s seeing their attempts tosee God. The icon was probably a “Veronica” or image ofthe face of the suffering Jesus in which the eyes were portrayed aslooking out of the picture plane. As a result, from whateverstandpoint one looked at the painting, it seemed the eyes of Jesuslooked directly into the viewer’s own eyes. Thus it couldsymbolize at once both God’s vision of us and our vision of God(the combined objective and subjective senses ofvisioDei).

Nicholas begins by warning that “Whatever is apparent withregard to the icon of God’s sight is truer with regard toGod’s true sight” (c. 1). And what does appear when weplace ourselves with the monks viewing the painting and reflect? Sinceit is a painting we see, what we seem to experience as we look intothe eyes of Jesus is not really taking place. The face portrayedneither looks at nor sees anyone; in fact, the viewer’s gaze isthe norm for this experience of a face-to-face encounter. Yet becauseof the spatial and temporal simultaneity the apparent gaze of the iconinvites the viewer to enter into the world of the painting and tendsto privilege what is portrayed, namely Jesus gazing at me. I move backand forth from my customary reactions when eyes are looking into myeyes to the realization that this eye contact is illusory.

But the illusory image in this case is of Christ suffering and lookingat me. If this painting is to mediate between my reality and what itportrays, it obviously invites me to look beyond, since this is animage of the One whois the image of the Father. Twiceremoved from the actual divine seeing and being seen it is supposed tosymbolize, Nicholas’ use of this icon lets us understand how farwe stand from God’s own seeing. Yet Nicholas’ initialwarning also reminds us that what is symbolized here by the paintingis all the more so in reality. We are in truth preceded and embracedby Christ’s seeing us.

In seeing we are seen—this mutual relatedness is at least whatthe icon symbolizes. But Nicholas goes further, proposing thatGod’s seeing and God’s being seen are identical:

O Lord, when you look upon me with an eye of graciousness, what isyour seeing, other than your being seen by me? In seeing me, you whoaredeus absconditus [hidden God] give yourself to be seen byme. No one can see You except insofar as you grant that you be seen.To see you is not other than that you see the one who sees you. (c.5,Hopkins translation)

In this way God seen is identically God seeing. The reason is that forGod to be seen by any creature is nothing else than for God to“see” that creature gazing. But the icon also reminds usof our distance from seeing God. I can see the depicted eyes of Jesuseven though no real eyes are present. But I cannot see the divine faceor its vision even though God’s reality is present and“sees” me. The dialectic of divine presence and absence,of human seeing and not seeing that I experience with the icon is thusturned inside out. When I look at the icon of Christ, what seemspresent, its seeing, is really absent, yet God’s seeing isreally present though it seems absent.

What the icon thus symbolizes is the experienced simultaneousconnection of different levels of reality. Indeed, I have separatereality as a contracted image of God only through my relation to mydivine Source. What is telling about Nicholas’ version of seeingGod is neither what vision discerns nor what practices one must followin order to gain the correct standpoint for such seeing. Rather herevises the meaning of “seeing God” so that God is bothsubject and object of our purported vision of God.

Yet this vision of God is merely purported. Cusanus leads us through aseries of reflections on seeing and on the face of God only to let usrealize that, whateverratio or discursive reason comes torealize, God is located beyond both imaginative exercise andconceptual understanding. Nicholas symbolizes our approach to thisbeyond by encouraging us to enter “into a certain secret andhidden silence wherein there is no knowledge or concept of aface,” characterizing it as an “obscuring mist, haze,darkness or ignorance.” (c.6) He invokes the coincidence ofopposites fromOn Learned Ignorance and, in chapter 9 ofThe Vision of God, proposes his second central metaphor: thewall of paradise. God dwells inside this wall, and the wall alsosymbolizes the coincidence of opposites and thus the defeat ofdiscursive reason and the principle of contradiction.

Just how are we to think through the coincidence of opposites andattempt to move beyond the wall to some sort of “seeing”God? Nicholas proposes that three locations in relation to the wallmap three stages in the mystical quest, using the metaphorical coupleof “enfolding/unfolding” fromOn LearnedIgnorance. Reason can understand things enfolded in or identicalwith God as different from the same things unfolded in the createduniverse. At this first stage we are outside the wall. The secondstage is at the wall itself, where Nicholas places us with Christ atthe door or threshold of an entrance in the wall. Here enfolding andunfolding coincide and we encounter the barrier of the coincidence ofopposites. At best we acknowledge that creating and being created areone and the same in God. A third stage is beyond the entrance andinside the wall where enfolding/unfolding fall away and Cusanus pointsto God’s silent presence and utter transcendence, “freefrom whatever can be spoken of or thought of” (c.11) The thirdstage involves recognition that God’s infinity remainsunknowable to us in conceptual terms.

Cusanus proposes some possible indirect routes that will give us nopositive insight or conceptual grasp of the divine Essence. Forinstance, if we look to the very oppositions and contradictions thatplague our normal thinking about God, we may do more justice to theunique relation between God and creatures. In his words, “theoppositeness of opposites is oppositeness without oppositeness.”(c.13) He identifies the infinite God with this “oppositeness ofopposites.” Now the “opposites” in question are theordinary things of our experience that are separate and distinct andthat may have opposed or mutually exclusive properties.

Designating God as the Oppositeness of such opposites can take us fromthe distinctions and oppositions with which we are familiar to the Onewho is responsible for there being such oppositions. God is distinctfrom these oppositions and differences but only in a way thatestablishes their reality. Yet God’s oppositeness is“without oppositeness” since God’s distinctivenessis unlimited and beyond familiar oppositions. In fact, God’soppositeness encompasses or enfolds all opposites in God asidentically God and encompasses or unfolds all opposites in creationby constituting them as what they are in all their determinate, finitedifferences. We are to think togetherboth the way finitethings are opposedand God’s transcendent oppositenessthat is “opposed” to those opposites, not as they are toone another, but so as to be ontologically responsible for theoppositions with which we are familiar.

2.3.2 God is the Not Other

InDe li Non Aliud/On the Not Other (1462) Nicholas returnsto the ancient Platonic categories of the One and the Other in orderto re-construe in novel language what Christians believe about thedependence of creatures on their Creator. Several of Cusanus’later works use verbal coinages or Latin neologisms as“names” or characterizations of God that are original withhim, though they have earlier echoes in Christian Neoplatonism. Inthis dialogue he uses the expression “the not other” as asubstantive for God as the divine Not-Other, even though we are morefamiliar with the phrase in comparative expressions that are negativeways of stating self-identity. For instance, “the tree is notother than (= the same as, identical with) the tree.”

When we use reason to recognize differences and to make distinctions,we are attempting to do justice to the plurality and variety of thenatural and cultural realms with which we are most familiar. Eventhings of the same kind are different numerically, and speaking andthinking clearly about things and their features requires ourdifferentiating what is determinate about them. We expect them to staythe same as they are and to remain different from other things and wereflect this in our language of identity and difference when wedescribe and define what we perceive and understand.

Nicholas is attempting to capitalize on the way we differentiatecreated things to signal and symbolize their divine Creator. Whileeach created thing is not other than itself, so to speak, it certainlyis other or different from other things. And created things aredifferent from God as well. But Nicholas is proposing a way of“naming” God that will underline how God’sdifference from God’s creatures is not even close to onecreature’s difference from another creature. God’sdifference is categorially different, so to speak, from onecreature’s otherness from a second creature. Cusanus can thusparadoxically assert that God is “not other” than anythingGod has created and is sustaining in being. Indeed, we do well tothink of God as “the Not-Other.”

Here is what Nicholas writes:

Not Other is not an other, nor is it other than any other, nor is itan other in an other—for no other reason than that it is NotOther, which can in no way be other, as if it something were lackingto it, as to an other. For an other which is other than somethinglacks that than which it is other. But Not Other, because it is notother than anything, does not lack anything nor can anything beoutside it. (c.6)

We may paraphrase this rather cryptic passage as follows. The divineNot-Other is simply not one of the things we are familiar with in theworld we inhabit, where all is multiplicity and difference, where eachthing or state of affairs is other than or different from every otherexistent thing or situation that obtains. Nicholas terms the multiplethings we deal with “others” because each one of them,each “other,” is distinct from every other thing. Nicholasalso proposes that such finite things possess and lack what thingsdifferent from them possess—to be other or distinct is preciselynot to be one or any of the finite others. Our language and thoughtbusy themselves in finding and making further distinctions anddivisions between things and parts of things, between one conditionand another, between one state of affairs and another. So we come toknow that one thing is other than or separate from another thing orthat we find it in another that is related to, yet different from,something else.

Nicholas’ central point is that the divine Not-Other is nothinglike all the finite, limited others of our experience. Nicholaswrites, “Not Other does not lack anything.” Even in commonsense terms, any given thing is “plenty lacking,” to speakcolloquially. No matter what it has, it arguably is lacking some ofwhat it should have as a specimen of its type, and it certainly lackswhat other things not of its kind possess. One way to think of thefinite things with which we are familiar is to consider that theirbeing limited means that they are just so much and not more. But thisis exactly how we should not think of God, who “does not lackanything” and outside of whom nothing can exist. As Nicholassays, “But God is Not-Other because God is not other than other,even though ‘not other’ and ‘other’ seemopposed. But other is not opposed to God from whom it has that it isother.” (c.6)

The opposition in this case is entirely different because, thoughcreatures are dependent functions of God and may be interdependentfunctions of one another, God is not a dependent function ofcreatures. God is precisely not any of the others and so is not otheror different in the way creatures are. We thus have two sorts ofdifferentiation or otherness, the opposition between distinctcreatures and the opposition between creatures and God. The“Not” in “Not-Other” differentiates God fromcreatures but does not exclude the divine Not-Other since theNot-Other ontologically determines creatures. Thinking God asNot-Other requires a characteristic Cusan dialectical thinking, notsimply affirming or denying difference. We are to recognize andacknowledge that the divine Not-Other isboth not one of theothersand at once not other than any or all of them.

To put this more formally, the difference or opposition betweencreated things is both symmetrical and transitive. The basis for theirdistinction is their identity: their symmetrical otherness is theresult of their substantial not-otherness, so to speak. But createdthings’ difference from God is asymmetrical and intransitive.True, the divine Not-Other is not one of the creatures, but in adifferent way than they are different from one another. Cusanus givesexpression to this important difference between finite and Infinitewhen he asserts that the divine Not-Other isnot other thanany created other. Negatively, the Not-Other is not finite as theothers are; positively, the reflexivity characteristic of a limitedthing’s self-identity also characterizes the Not-Other’srelation with it.

Just as any creature is not other than itself so it is not other thanthe divine Not-Other. The divine Not-Other both is and is not everyfinite other. The reason is that distinct created things possess theirvery status as beings, and thus their otherness, from and through God.God, the divine Not-Other, is causally responsible for things’existing as separate and self-identical others. For Nicholas, nothingcan have being outside of God.

2.3.3 Mathematics and God

Recent publications, and in particular, D.Albertson’sMathematical Theologies(2014), have highlighted another keytheme and its attendant metaphors in Nicholas’ works:mathematics and number. Cusanus believes that no knowledge we have ismore certain than mathematics, given that it is the construction ofour own minds. Mathematical ideas are the paradigm of how the humanmind unfolds a conceptual universe that parallels and forms an imageof God’s unfolding of the created world. Number here refersprimarily to arithmetic and geometry, to the whole numbers and toplane and solid figures. The latter are often imagined as in movementor constructing other figures. Nicholas joins enfolding/unfolding andthe certainty of mathematics to the Christian tradition thateverything is created in the divine word or Logos.

Geometrical figures are used early in Book 1 ofOn LearnedIgnorance to illustrate how our knowledge of created things isonly approximative. A bit later we are led to extrapolate straight andcurved lines as an aid to understanding the coincidence of oppositesand to moving human thought towards the God who is unknowable byreason. Book 2 uses number to illustrate enfolding andunfolding—as the number series unfolds what is enfolded in theunit, so God unfolds all created things. Nicholas later introduces thegeometrical image of the sphere whose center is everywhere and whosecircumference is nowhere to explain how the physical universe’slack of boundaries is an image of God’s infinity. Book 2 alsoopens and closes with reflection on the quadrivium: arithmetic,geometry, music and astronomy. Book 3 returns to the image of theinfinite sphere for the combination of absolute and contracted realityin the God-man.

On Conjectures moves directly into arithmetic and geometrywith its conjectural reflections on the decade’s embracing allnumber and with its ordering of reality’s oneness and othernessusing the spatial diagrams P and U that employ cones and spheres. Justas the number series unfolds the unit, so the created universe unfoldsGod’s creating, and human concepts (such as numbers andgeometric figures) unfold the oneness of the human mind. In this way ahuman being is truly a “second God.”

Nicholas’ later works of the 1450s extend the notion of numberand of enfolding/unfolding that he inherited from Boethius and thetwelfth-century school of Chartres. Number and size (multitudo etmagnitudo) are central toThe Layman: On Mind wheremeasuring is proposed as the layman’s definition of the humanmind. Measuring is then used directly inThe Layman: Experimentswith Weights. Nicholas proposes that the Divine Word in whom allthings are created or unfolded in time is to be thought together withhuman measuring as the closest sign or image of the Divine Oneness. Inthe background stands the saying from theBook of Wisdom11.21that in creating God ordered “all things in measure, number andweight.” This way number and mathematical ideas take on morethan their usual employment for human ends and become a way to theCreator always present to creaturely unfoldings in human thought.

The Vision of God (1453) proposes an exercise for the monksbased on the center and circumference of circle wherein seeing fromthe circumference and being seen from the center collapse into afigure of mystical oneness: being seen seeing. In the same yearNicholas composesComplementary Theological Considerations (Detheologicis complementis). There he features God as amathematician who creates in the Equality of the DivineWord—unfolding as well human beings whose quadrivial mathematicsis an image of the divine creativity. God is now named “infiniteangle” that unites maximal and minimal angles and thenon-quantitative number of everything. Nicholas thus brings togetherhis theological and mathematical concepts from the 1440s and unitesnumber, enfolding/unfolding and the Divine Word.

3. A Neoplatonism of His Own

How does Nicholas’ Neoplatonism aid his thinking about God? Oneadvantage is that Nicholas can take the basic asymmetry betweenparadigmatic Platonic Forms and the perceptible realm of particularthings that are images of the Forms and apply that asymmetry to theway the First Principle, God, is related to all other createdrealities. In working out this relationship, Plato proposed that whatresults for individual Forms is that all particulars“participate” in the relevant Form just the way an imagereflects and depends on its original. That is to say, the Form doesnot require the particulars but is prior ontologically. The relationbetween Form and particulars is not one of reciprocal dependence.Applied to the first ontological principle, or to the Christian God,the result is to let all the multiple, complex creatures participatein their ultimate Source while the divine Creator remains simple,unparticipated and unchanged. As Christian medieval thinkers (even theAristotelians agreed on this point) were accustomed to express it,creatures depend on God while God is not at all dependent oncreatures. All the dependence is one-way.

And that dependence is interpreted in Platonic and Biblical terms, asthe dependence of creaturely images on a divine Original. While thetotal reality of an image requires the influence of the original,there is nothing about the latter that is ontologically in need of theimage. In Platonism this effectively means there is“separation” of the intelligible and perceptible realms,for in fact the perceptible cannot exist without the very intelligiblethat abides unaffected by the realm of multiplicity and change. Whilenot being themselves Forms, perceptible things are not really separatefrom the intelligible Forms on which they depend. No less than Formand perceptible thing in Platonism and Neoplatonism, in ChristianNeoplatonism Creator and creature are bound together in a parallelasymmetry.

If this asymmetry is rethought in terms of the presence required forthe creatures to be all that they are by nature, it will turn out thatGod (or the One in non-Christian Neoplatonisms), the greater and priorreality, must always be there if creaturely reality is to beforthcoming and to continue. Now creatures as created images can standfor manifestation and reflection of (and for Christian thinkers,likeness to) as well as for dependence on God, for the divine presencepenetrates and encompasses each and all creatures without ever beinglimited or captured by any of them. While Plato’s Forms play adefinitive role in the perceptible realm as responsible for thedeterminate characteristics of things, they count as a kind of presentabsence. No less determinative is the ongoing presence of theChristian God and that, too, has become a kind of absence. How shouldwe attempt to understand this?

Our conceptions of the absence or presence of one thing to another aretaken originally from and remain most at home in the realm of limitedphysical beings. Here presence to or absence from another involves thesame sort of mutuality or reciprocity that the same corporeal realm oflimited things must always manifest. If body A is present to or absentfrom body B, B is present to or absent from A and vice versa. Theother sorts of important presence or absence we are familiarwith—presence in thought, in memory and imagination andaffection, for instance—are metaphorical to some degree and areextensions from and find their source in our experience of some priorphysical presence, whether merely perceived and understood, or hopedfor, or feared. So too with the kinds of metaphorical absence werecognize when some present person is, as we say, “just notthere.” And absence, whether indifferent, bad or good,presupposes presence. Such metaphorical presences and absences oflimited things to one another might thus be understood as absentpresences or present absences.

And so we are able to speculate about the case of a non-finitepresence-in-absence by starting with but moving beyond the limits ofthe presence and absence we are familiar with in the realm of limitedthings. Now we turn to the presence of the unfamiliar infinite One aswhat is finally required, even if not obviously experienced, to keepthe creaturely image present and real. In this case, we may think thatabsence becomes what is metaphorical and the presence of the First isin truth ineluctably and literally necessary to explain the reality ofanything and everything. But God’s presence is hardly like thatof one physical thing to another.

This means that the presence of God and God’s identity withthings is not to be thought as the kind of reciprocity, say, that twocreated physical things have that are present to one another, letalone similar or identical to each other. What is distinctive aboutChristian Neoplatonism is its ability to hold together dialecticallyin thought the insight it provides about this asymmetrical,non-reciprocal ontological connection between God and creatures. Godpenetrates and surpasses or exceeds each thing God creates andencompasses. Creatures are thus themselves real with the limited sortof independence they manifest, yet they are at once in God and indeedone with God without being themselves divine.

But what has all this to do with Nicholas of Cusa’s having aNeoplatonism of his own? What is characteristic of his thought, I wantto propose, is that in key passages of major works he proposes thissame kind of dialectical thinking to enable our grasping the generalrelationship between God and creatures. But the thinking is supposedto reflect an ontological dialectic, that is to say, a relationshipthat is real whether we acknowledge it or not. The dialecticalrelation between God and creatures is something towards which wemostly gesture in our efforts to do it justice in thought and speech.But is this not merely Proclus or Dionysius or Eriugena or Eckhartrevisited in the fifteenth century? The answer is both yes and no.

Yes, the dialectical reality envisioned by Nicholas should be littledifferent than that pointed to by earlier Christian Neoplatonists.Neither Plato’s Forms nor the Christian God did or could changeover the centuries nor did the need of particulars and creatures fortheir intelligible and divine originals. But also, no, for Cusanusgives the dialectical relation his own expression in a series of novelmetaphors for the connection between God and creatures. Some of hisoriginal metaphors, such as the coincidence of opposites,enfolding/unfolding, God as the Not Other, and as the Oppositeness ofopposites, are controlled by and witness to that same asymmetricalrelationship, yet lead our speculative imaginations in some newdirections that would otherwise remain unexplored.

If only God can bespeak Godself in literal terms, then we humans aregraced with metaphors. What Cusanus provides in his metaphoricalforays is not simply imaginative originality, but a series ofmetaphors designed to remind us that there is no proportion betweencreatures and creator; that indeed there is an asymmetry between them.Moreover, our best ways of conceiving and asserting this necessarylack of reciprocal dependence should be built into the metaphors wechoose. This is why one may not need a theory of metaphor to dojustice to the Cusan project of philosophical theology. Rather, theCusan project is Neoplatonic and has its own traditional strictures onany metaphors he chooses: the ontology determines the metaphors, themetaphors do not determine the ontology. What makes Nicholas’thought a Neoplatonism of his own is precisely the grasp his metaphorsdemonstrate of those ontological strictures, as well as thespeculative imagination he evinces in the range, originality andvariety of metaphors for what we can and cannot understand aboutGod’s connection with creatures.

4. Contribution to Political Ideas

Nicholas of Cusa has attracted frequent notice in the history ofpolitical ideas because of his early work,The CatholicConcordance/De Concordantia Catholica (1433–34). Thislengthy work in three books is aimed first of all at an ecclesiaticalaudience at the Council of Basel and only secondarily, in Book 3, atthe Holy Roman Empire and its electors of the emperor. Nicholas’ideas stand squarely in the conciliarist tradition following proposalsfrom the Council of Constance (1414–18), and thus privilege thecouncil’s authority above the pope’s. In Book 1 heexpounds a hierarchical view of creation and of the church, followingDionysius the Areopagite. Then he uses both canon law and historicaldocuments from and about the early church councils to undergird hisview of council and papacy. Yet he never denies the importance of thepositions of pope and emperor. Throughout Nicholas works to harmonize(=concordantia) the many different strands in church law andpolitical theory.

Over the last century scholars of political history have singled outchapters, particularly in Book 2, where Nicholas discusses consent asa prerequisite for legitimate law and government. Going beyondtradition and canon law, he argues on the basis of people’snatural freedom (“men are by nature equal in power and equallyfree”) that all governance comes from the consent of thesubjects. This argument to explicitly institutionalize consent isNicholas’ original contribution. He follows it with proposals onrepresentation that move from representation as virtual impersonationto representation as delegation based on those represented selectingtheir representatives. This is one of the first explicit statements inthe West of the institutional limits to be placed on rulers and of theidea that people must consent to their representativeinstitutions.

Even after he changed allegiance to the side of papal supremacy,Nicholas used his ideas to argue in later brief writings that Baselwas not truly representative and that consent was embodied in thecollege of cardinals. In the following centuries, secular parliamentsreturned to ideas of consent and representation (though not directlyto Nicholas’ book) in attempting to restrict the power ofmonarchs. In the church itself, tradition continued to outweighinnovation, and the idea of conciliar superiority to the pope seemeddead for centuries. Some twentieth-century thinking in the RomanCatholic Church has returned to and enlivened ideas about council andpapacy propounded by Nicholas of Cusa.

Bibliography

Primary Texts

Nicolai de Cusa Opera Omnia jussu et auctoritate AcademicaeLitterarum Heidelbergensis, 1932–2007, Leipzig-Hamburg:Meiner.

German Translations

• Philosophisch-Theologische Schriften, 1967, 3 volumes, L.Gabriel (ed.), D. & W. Dupré (trans.), Vienna: Herder.(Facing Latin and German text.)
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• De docta ignorantia I, 1994, Philosophische Bibliothek(Volume 264a), P. Wilpert and H. G. Senger (ed. and trans.). (FacingLatin and German text.)
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• De docta ignorantia III, 1999, Philosophische Bibliothek(Vol. 264c), R. Klibansky (ed.), H.G. Senger (trans.). (Facing Latinand German text.)

English Translations

• Bond, H.L. (tr.), 1997,Nicholas of Cusa: Selected SpiritualWritings, New York: Paulist.
• Hopkins, J. (tr.), 2001,Complete Philosophical andTheological Treatises of Nicholas of Cusa, Minneapolis:Banning.

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