SOURCE: Duclow, Donald F. “Mystical Theology and Intellect in Nicholas of Cusa.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 64, no. 1 (Winter 1990): 111-29.

[In the following essay, Duclow discusses how Cusanus uses the notion of learned ignorance to link mystical thought and intellectual thought. Focusing on De Docta Ignorantia, Apologia Doctae Ignorantiae, De Visione Dei, and De Filiatione Dei, Duclow shows how Cusanus moves beyond the mystical theology of Dionysius and Eckhart.]

Mystical theology and intellect may seem ill matched, if we limit mysticism to emotional rapture and visionary experience. Yet they form a consistent—indeed, inseparable—pair for many medieval thinkers. Nicholas of Cusa places intellect at the center of his mystical theology, as he links learned ignorance with mystical vision and filiatio or sonship. This essay will trace these themes in De docta ignorantia, in Nicholas's response to Johannes Wenck's criticism, in De visione Dei's discussion of mystical theology, and in De filiatione Dei's account of Christology and sonship.

I. DE DOCTA IGNORANTIA AND DIONYSIUS'S MYSTICAL THEOLOGY

Because of its vast influence in the medieval West, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite's Mystical Theology provides a useful background for our discussion. Nicholas, ever the book collector and reader, takes pride in his familiarity with Dionysius. He refers to a Greek text of the Dionysian corpus that he had possessed in Florence,¹ and tells us that Pope Nicholas V gave him Ambrose Traversari's “very recent translation” of Dionysius.² The latter volume, along with others on the Areopagite, survives in Nicholas's library at Bernkastel-Kues.³ That Cusanus read and used these books is clear from his numerous marginalia to Albert the Great's commentaries, and from frequent citations throughout Nicholas's works.⁴ For example, in the dialogue De non-aliud he presents himself as Dionysius's spokesman, and in the Apologia doctae ignorantiae he defends his own teachings by citing the Mystical Theology and its commentators.⁵

Two related themes are basic to Dionysius's and Nicholas's thought: unknowing and dialectic. Because God utterly transcends all knowledge and being, mystical union occurs in agnosia or unknowing, which in turn requires a logic of negation. For Dionysius, Moses's ascent of Mount Sinai represents the spiritual progress that culminates in mystical theology. He first purifies and sets himself apart, then ascends to illumination in “the place where he [God] dwells,” and finally “plunges into the truly mysterious darkness of unknowing.” In this final stage Moses achieves union with God “by a completely unknowing inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing.”⁶ Some, like Cusanus's critic Vincent of Aggsbach, argue that affection and love carry us beyond knowledge into unknowing; intellect is abandoned, as will and love achieve mystical union.⁷ While this affective reading shapes much later medieval spirituality, it is hard to find within Dionysius's text. Here, as Vanneste has noted, the language of love is conspicuous by its absence.⁸ Rather, Dionysius presents mystical theology as an austere, intellectual ascent that progressively negates or “strips away” all positive names and attributes of God. In sketching his program, Dionysius links affirmative and negative theology with the Neoplatonic schema of procession and return. Affirmation follows the causal procession from God's unity into multiplicity and materiality, and expands its repertoire accordingly; negation “rises from what is below up to the transcendent,” and contracts toward silent unknowing.⁹ The way of negation is thus the dialectic appropriate to mystical theology. The treatise's two concluding chapters trace this negative dialectic, first denying sensible names of God, and then intelligible ones including “one,” “divinity,” and the Trinitarian names.¹⁰ In the end Dionysius denies the adequacy of negative theology itself, because God transcends affirmation, negation and the contrast between them. Yet this last move remains a dialectical one—a negation that denies negative theology's own limits. With this denial the treatise ends, as Dionysius points toward silent union with the unknowable God. We approach this union through an ascending dialectic of negation, which leads into the cloud or darkness of unknowing. Here we become aware that “this quite positively complete unknowing is knowledge of him who is above everything that is known.”¹¹ For Dionysius, this pattern of negation and unknowing defines mystical theology.

This Dionysian pattern is also basic for Cusanus, who develops a learned ignorance and a specifically mystical dialectic, the coincidence of opposites. These emerge powerfully in De docta ignorantia, Nicholas's first speculative work. With clear Socratic precedent, he describes “learned ignorance” as a reflective awareness, a knowing that we do not know. Within this knowing ignorance, he reflects on God, the universe and Christ. Here let us note briefly learned ignorance's Dionysian and mystical features. Cusanus presents his discovery of docta ignorantia as a revelation. He tells us that while returning by ship from Constantinople, “I was led by, as I believe, a heavenly gift from the Father of lights, from whom comes every excellent gift, to embrace incomprehensible things incomprehensibly in learned ignorance and through a transcending of the incorruptible truths which are humanly knowable.”¹² Elsewhere Nicholas says that this revelation occurred before he had read Dionysius.¹³ He thus emphasizes the intensity of his new insight, but adds that it led him to careful study of the theologians. By the time he composed De docta ignorantia (1440), Cusanus had found his discovery confirmed in Dionysius. He cites The Divine Names, Mystical Theology and letters concerning negative theology, divine transcendence, and knowing God “above every mind and all intelligence.” As Nicholas comments, Dionysius “endeavored to show in many ways that God can be found only through learned ignorance.”¹⁴ Cusanus's phrases, “learned ignorance” and “embracing incomprehensible things incomprehensibly,” directly echo the Areopagite's discussions of agnosia. For both thinkers, the unknowable God is approached through unknowing. Further, agnosia and learned ignorance involve purgation or “the removal from the mind of all positive images.”¹⁵ Here dialectic emerges, since this removal includes the logic of negation. Referring to the Mystical Theology, Nicholas says, “We speak of God more truly through removal and negation—as teaches the greatest Dionysius, who did not believe that God is either Truth or Understanding or Light or anything which can be spoken of.”¹⁶ Cusanus thus follows Dionysius's negative dialectic.

But where the Areopagite uses a higher negation to overcome the contrast between affirmation and negation, Nicholas turns to the coincidence of opposites. Discussing God as the Absolute Maximum, he says that “There is no proportion of the infinite to the finite.” What distinguishes the infinite or Maximum is that opposites coincide within its unlimited power:

Since the absolutely Maximum is all that which can be, it is altogether actual. And just as there cannot be a greater, so for this reason there cannot be a lesser, since it is all that which can be. But the Minimum is that than which there cannot be a lesser. And since the Maximum is also such, it is evident that the Minimum coincides with the Maximum.¹⁷

This argument requires a mental purification, stripping the superlatives “maximum” and “minimum” of their association with the comparatively large and small. Only then do the maximum and minimum coincide in an infinite unity that enfolds and transcends all finite contrasts. For Cusanus the absolute Maximum is thus qualitatively different and—like the God of Dionysius's mystical theology—“beyond both all affirmation and negation.” If Dionysius does not discuss coincidence in this formal way, Nicholas claims that his language nevertheless suggests it. He cites the Divine Names where Dionysius sees “all things, even the things that are opposites, in a simple unity within the universal Cause,”¹⁸ and affirms that the opposites of beginning and end, rest and motion coincide in the divine cause. In the coincidence of opposites Cusanus thus finds a logic appropriate to his learned ignorance. In De docta ignorantia this logic sustains his teaching on the universe as the contracted maximum, and on Christ as the coincidence of the divine and human.

II. WENCK, CUSANUS, AND MYSTICAL THEOLOGY

During Nicholas's lifetime, De docta ignorantia received mixed reviews. The Heidelberg theologian Johannes Wenck denounced it as destructive and heretical, while the monks at Tegernsee praised its mystical theology. Cusanus responded to Wenck in his Apologia doctae ignorantiae, and to the Tegernsee community in letters and treatises. Let us see how these two exchanges clarify Nicholas's mystical theology.

In De ignota litteratura Wenck challenges Nicholas's conception of both learned ignorance and the coincidence of opposites. Vain curiosity leads Cusanus to learned ignorance and the attempt to “apprehend incomprehensibly the incomprehensible” during this life, whereas we can only understand “comprehensibly and in terms of an image.”¹⁹ Hence, when Nicholas leaves proportion and sensible things behind to ascend to the infinite, he enters “intense darkness” and “vanishes amid thoughts.”²⁰ In addition, the coincidence of opposites undercuts knowledge because it “destroys all scientific procedure and all inference—destroying, as well, all opposition and the law of contradiction.” This destruction reflects Cusanus's ignorance of logic and disregard for Aristotle.²¹ By blurring all contrasts, coincidence also yields a host of doctrinal errors: it abolishes distinctions between God and creatures and between the persons of the Trinity, and “destroys the individuality of Christ's humanity.”²² These serious charges support Wenck's association of Nicholas with late medieval “heretics,” especially Eckhart, who abolish distinctions between God and creatures.²³ Like Eckhart, Cusanus too deserves condemnation. De ignota litteratura thus becomes a would-be inquisitor's brief.

The Apologia doctae ignorantiae (1449) is Nicholas's answer to Wenck. This work, a dialogue between Cusanus and a student, combines ad hominem attacks on Wenck and replies to his objections. Politically motivated and with meager intelligence, the Heidelberg theologian seriously distorts Cusanus's teaching.²⁴ For example, he fails to distinguish between the coincidence of opposites enfolded within divine simplicity and God's transcendence of opposites unfolded in creation.²⁵ Cusanus also confirms his familiarity with Eckhart, and defends the Dominican who never “thought the creation to be the creator.”²⁶

But especially interesting for our purposes is how Cusanus uses mystical theology and Dionysius in responding to Wenck. This emphasis colors even Nicholas's ad hominem arguments. Wenck's inept criticisms prove how right Dionysius was to warn against disclosing mystical teachings to the ignorant.²⁷ If Wenck wishes to pass from blindness to light, he should “read with discernment” Dionysius's Mystical Theology and the commentaries on it.²⁸ There he would discover the Areopagite's discussion of Moses's ascent, and his teaching that only when all things have been left behind can we be “carried away with Moses to the place where the invisible God dwells.”²⁹ Hence, where Wenck sees only vanishing amid vain thoughts, Nicholas sees the Dionysian mystical ascent. This ascent occurs in learned ignorance, and Cusanus cites Dionysius's praise for knowledge of one's ignorance, especially concerning the divine.³⁰ As the student remarks, “the root of learned ignorance” consists in recognizing “that God cannot be known as He is.”³¹ Once again the unknowable God must be sought in unknowing—that is, in learned ignorance.

This search requires the coincidence of opposites. For although Wenck and the “Aristotelian sect” consider coincidence heretical, its acceptance marks “the beginning of the ascent to mystical theology.”³² In saying this, Cusanus does not reject the principle of contradiction, but restricts its range because reason itself is inadequate to mystical theology. In its movement to and from—its “discursus”—reason distinguishes among opposites, and achieves knowledge by means of proportion and the logic of non-contradiction. On this point Wenck and Cusanus agree. But whereas Wenck considers reason and non-contradiction as ultimate, Nicholas sees them as limited and exhausting neither human capacities nor their approach to God. For Cusanus the principle of contradiction remains “first with respect to discursive reason but not at all with respect to the seeing intellect.”³³ Intellect is a higher power of the mind. Free of reason's process and contrasts, it sees opposites united in their principle or source. Nicholas clarifies this point with mathematical examples. While reason defines a circle by distinguishing the center from the circumference, intellect sees the circle enfolded in its center, number in unity, etc. Reason and intellect accordingly develop different logics, as non-contradiction governs reason's inquiry and the coincidence of opposites articulates intellect's unified vision. By directing our gaze beyond otherness and opposition, coincidence marks the intellectual transition from reason's contrasts to God's infinite unity. In this respect, coincidence is not Nicholas's last word, but rather begins the mystical ascent toward God who transcends both opposites and their coincidence. For “God is beyond the coincidence of contradictories, since he is the Opposition of opposites, according to Dionysius.”³⁴ Coincidence itself is thus finally inadequate to divine transcendence. Yet the logic of coincidence remains essential to learned ignorance and mystical theology because it marks out the boundaries of rational knowledge and leads into an “unknowing” vision of God.

In replying to Wenck, Cusanus thus emphasizes the mystical features of learned ignorance and the coincidence of opposites. Wenck invites this response when he accuses Nicholas of ignoring the Psalm's advice, “Be still and know that I am God.”³⁵ Cusanus replies that mystical theology—not disputatious reasoning and chattering logic—seeks this silent vision,³⁶ and that learned ignorance and coincidence are integral to this theological quest.

III. TEGERNSEE AND DE VISIONE DEI

In contrast to Wenck's hostility, the Benedictine community at Tegernsee welcomed Cusanus's teachings warmly. The prior, Bernard de Waging, composed an enthusiastic Laudatorium doctae ignorantiae, where he identifies learned ignorance and mystical theology as “one in essence,” differing only in their respective acts of intellect and love.³⁷ Bernard may overstate and even distort Cusanus's views, but he focuses sharply on their spiritual implications. These implications also emerge in Nicholas's correspondence with Bernard and with Tegernsee's abbot, Gaspard Aindorffer. Their letters concern practical matters of monastic reform, friendly exchanges of books and fish, and issues of the contemplative life. At one point Nicholas, feeling the world's weight more heavily than usual, asks that a cell be prepared for him, saying “If only it were granted me to enjoy holy rest among the brothers, who have leisure and see how sweet the Lord is.”³⁸ Although Cusanus never retired to Tegernsee, the community did provoke his most detailed reflections on mystical theology. Responding to the monks' requests, Nicholas composed two works: De visione Dei (1453) and De beryllo (1458).

As Cusanus's richest spiritual treatise, De visione Dei deserves careful attention. Its title suggests both God's vision of us, and our vision of God. The play between these ways of seeing is Nicholas's main theme, which he illustrates with an experiment. He sent the treatise to Tegernsee with a portrait whose face “seems to behold everything around it.”³⁹ Nicholas asks the brothers to meditate on this “icon of God.” Regardless of where he stands, each brother feels that the face looks at him alone. And as they walk before it, they find that “the face does not desert anyone who is moving—not even those who are moving in contrary directions.” Cusanus notes the paradoxes in this experiment. The icon's gaze is at once inclusive and exclusive, seeing everyone present and concentrating on each “as if it were concerned for no one else.”⁴⁰ Itself unmoved, the icon appears to move with the brothers. Central to these paradoxes is the contrast between the all-seeing icon and the brothers' limited, perspectival vision. This contrast reflects a far more dramatic one between God's vision and ours. Human seeing is limited or “contracted” because it always perceives from a given point of view. But God's sight is radically without perspective; it is “absolute,” a term which Nicholas uses in the “etymological sense of the Latin absolvere, ‘to loosen or free from.’ God's vision is ‘freed from’ restriction or limitation in even the most perfect vision or knowledge that we might imagine or conceive.”⁴¹ In this respect, Nicholas again stresses the stark lack of proportion between finite and infinite, the human and the divine.

Yet the icon also illustrates the fundamental relation between them, because absolute sight is the condition for all restricted vision. Cusanus says, “Sight that is free from (absolutus) all contractedness—as being the most adequate Measure, and the most true Exemplar, of all acts of seeing—encompasses at one and the same time each and every mode of seeing.”⁴² God's vision thus contains all modes of seeing without limitation—that is, all finite perspectives coincide within God's infinite sight. Further, perspective involves a contraction of this unrestricted vision. As the “contractio contractionum,” God's vision is the principle of limitation that becomes present in all seeing, since “contracted sight exists through Absolute Sight, and cannot at all exist without it.”⁴³ Without God's sustaining gaze, there would be no human vision. Indeed, there would be nothing whatever, since God's seeing confers being on creatures.⁴⁴ While absolute vision thus includes a creative, ontological dimension, Nicholas's main concern here is the relation between divine and human vision. He asks, “O Lord, when You look upon me …, what is Your seeing, other than Your being seen by me? In seeing me, You who are deus absconditus give Yourself to be seen by me. 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.”⁴⁵ In this mutual seeing God's primacy and initiative are clear, since God reveals himself to the seeing subject.

Nicholas then outlines a progress from the fracture of seeing's mutuality in sin, to contracted mental sight, and finally to learned ignorance. Free will enables us to turn toward or away from God. Echoing Augustine and the parable of the prodigal son, Cusanus describes turning toward something other than God and thereby failing to return God's gaze. Reciprocity then gives way, and “the reason You do not look upon me is that I do not look upon You but reject and despise You.”⁴⁶ Sin too becomes a problem of perspective, of not seeing properly because one is turned around. God nevertheless keeps us in focus, mercifully inviting us to acknowledge his presence.

Even when we return God's glance, limitations remain. In chapter 6 Nicholas discusses “visio facialis,”⁴⁷ a phrase derived from Paul: “For now we see through a glass darkly (per speculum in aenigmate); but then we shall see face to face (facie ad faciem): now I know in part; but then I shall know even as I am known” (1 Cor 13.12). Cusanus's icon provides an “aenigmatic” mirror that directs him toward “face to face” contemplation of God. He turns from the painted icon, “this image of Your Face,” to its divine exemplar and says, “The invisible Truth of Your Face I see not with the bodily eyes which look at this icon of You but with mental and intellectual eyes. This Truth is signified by this contracted shadow-like image.”⁴⁸ Here again Cusanus shifts perspectives, moving from bodily to mental seeing and from contraction to the absolute. As in mutual vision, the divine face is the truth and exemplar of human faces. Nicholas reaffirms reciprocity, but with a novel twist. Each face is an image of God, and when it looks toward God, it “sees nothing other than itself or different from itself, because it sees its own Truth.”⁴⁹ As the icon seems to gaze exclusively at each brother, God appears to share the restrictions of those who look toward him. “Whoever looks unto You with a loving face will find only Your Face looking lovingly upon him. … Whoever looks angrily unto You will find Your Face likewise to display anger. Whoever looks unto You joyfully will find Your Face likewise to be joyous, just as is the face of him who is looking unto You.”⁵⁰ An apparent reversal occurs here, suggesting that we create God in our own image. Nicholas, however, is not Feuerbach or Freud. For our subjectivity does not simply project its likeness outwards, but is rather a living image that recognizes its divine exemplar in a restricted way; the beholder becomes a figure reflected in the mirror of eternity.⁵¹ The issue remains one of perspective. When the bodily eye looks through red glass, everything appears red; similarly, “each mental eye, cloaked in contraction and affection, judges You, who are the object of the mind, according to the nature of the contraction and the affection.”⁵²

Nicholas does not rest in this perspectival vision of God. Another way of seeing remains open—namely, learned ignorance that strips away the veils of contracted images and concepts. Invoking the Dionysian agnosia, Cusanus writes, “This obscuring-mist, haze, darkness or ignorance into which the one seeking Your Face enters when he passes beyond all knowledge and conception is that beneath which Your Face can be found only in a veiled manner. Yet, the obscuring mist reveals that Your Face is there, above everything veiling.”⁵³ If not yet fully seeing “face to face,” we have at least moved beyond restricted mental vision. By breaking through all finite perspectives, learned ignorance approaches God's perspectiveless vision. To explain this, Nicholas develops the classical Platonic analogy of the eye overwhelmed by the sun's brilliance. In darkness and unknowing, the mind's eye finds itself in the presence of God's “light inaccessible.”

Yet for Cusanus the relation between restricted and absolute vision is not a simple ascent culminating in darkness and silence. Dionysius's Mystical Theology may end this way, but Nicholas is more concerned with how we “see” in this darkness. He accordingly uses the coincidence of opposites to develop an on-going dialectic of vision. This dialectic is clearest when he discusses the wall of paradise, an image from the Genesis account of man's fall and exile. Cusanus describes the place “wherein You [God] dwell unveiledly—an abode surrounded by the coincidence of contradictories. And [this coincidence] is the wall of Paradise wherein You dwell. … On the other side of the coincidence of contradictories You can be seen—but not at all on this side.”⁵⁴ This image includes three elements: the enclosed garden where God dwells, the wall of coincidence, and the exterior realm of exile. Nicholas comments on each of these elements. Outside the wall is the region of finite distinction, where perspectives vary and opposites are distinguished. Here unity is dictinct from multiplicity, beginings from ends, etc. Reason (ratio) rules this realm, and with the flaming sword of non-contradiction bars entry to the garden. For the wall's gate “is guarded by a most lofty rational spirit; and unless this spirit is vanquished the entrance will not be accessible.”⁵⁵ As in the Apologia, Nicholas then shifts to intellect. For the wall itself is the coincidence of opposites where reason gives way to intellect. The distinctions of reason are seen unified in the wall, “where later coincides with earlier, where end coincides with beginning, where alpha and omega are the same.”⁵⁶ Here rational knowledge passes into learned ignorance, whose dialectic then leads to the image's final element: the central enclosed garden where God dwells.

When I see You to be Absolute Infinity, … then I begin to behold You unveiledly and to enter unto the source of delights. For You are not at all something such that it can be spoken of or conceived but are absolutely and infinitely exalted above all such things.⁵⁷

Here Cusanus looks beyond coincidence, since divine infinity transcends both the distinction and the coincidence of opposites.

Nicholas further argues that the image's three elements form a single, unified pattern. He writes,

Because we admit that there is an end of the finite, necessarily we admit the Infinite—i.e., the Final End, or End without an end. But we cannot fail to admit that there are finite beings. So we cannot fail to admit that there is the Infinite. Hence, we admit the coincidence-of-contradictories, above which the Infinite exists.⁵⁸

The full implications of the image now become clear. By its very nature the “external,” finite region has an end or limit, which the wall represents, and beyond which is divine infinity. The finite, limit and infinity thus form a dialectical pattern. Seeing and thinking move back and forth within this pattern, as in this discussion of creation:

From creatures I go in unto You, who are Creator—go in from the effects unto the Cause. I go out from You, who are Creator—go out from the Cause unto the effects. I both go in and go out when I see that going out is going in and that, likewise, going in is going out.⁵⁹

By realizing this dynamic unity, we find ourselves in the “wall of coincidence, beyond which You [God] dwell, free from whatever can be either spoken of or thought of.”⁶⁰ The wall of paradise thus expresses the dynamics of vision. We recognize the relativity of reason and finite perspectives, the resolution of their oppositions in the intellectual vision of coincidence, and finally the turn toward divine infinity in learned ignorance. As Nicholas prays, “I see You in the garden of Paradise, and I do not know what I see, because I see no visible thing. I know only the following: viz., that I know that I do not know—and never can know—what I see.”⁶¹ Even here, though, Cusanus does not simply leap over the wall, but continues to oscillate between perspectival and absolute vision in learned ignorance.

IV. DE FILIATIONE DEI: CHRISTOLOGY AND SONSHIP

Later in De visione Dei Nicholas gives this dialectic a clearer, more concrete focus when he looks toward Christ who reveals the infinite God. For Christ, the tree of life, stands at the garden's center. Cusanus prays,

I see You, O good Jesus, on the inner side of the wall of Paradise, since Your intellect is both truth and image. And You are God and, likewise, creature—infinite and, likewise, finite. You cannot possibly be seen on this side of the wall. For You are the uniting (copulatio) of the creating divine nature and the created human nature.⁶²

Two points are worth noting here. First, this union is not a coincidence “which causes one thing to be another thing.”⁶³ In Christ the finite and the infinite meet directly and intimately, but preserve their basic improportion. For the bond between Christ's divine and human natures is not to be confused with the “infinite union” within the Trinity. Hence, while in Christ “human nature is most perfect and is most closely conjoined to its Exemplar,” it remains the finite image of its divine exemplar.⁶⁴

The second point is more striking, as Cusanus describes Christ's union of natures in intellectual terms. Humanity's perfection consists in understanding, and in Christ the divine Word is united to the intellect, which is “the place where the Word is received”—just as we receive a teacher's word in the intellect.⁶⁵ Through intellectual union, Christ perfects his full humanity; he communicates divine light and life to reason, the senses and the body. In this way Christ completes a hierarchy of vision, where restricted ways of seeing participate in more comprehensive ones. Our power of bodily vision, “exists not in itself but in the rational soul” which orders and judges perception; and in turn, Christ's “intellectual power of seeing exists not in itself but in the absolute seeing power.” By illuminating Christ's intellect, the divine Word perfects his human sight and unites it with “absolute and infinite vision.”⁶⁶ In De visione Dei Christ thus becomes the ultimate icon of God, embracing all modes of seeing and himself the focus for mystical devotion.

This Christological focus suggests a final theme in Nicholas's mystical theology: filiatio or sonship. Nicholas describes Christ as Son of God and Son of Man. The former is the absolute sonship of the only-begotten Son within the Trinity; and the latter is “the highest human sonship” and closest image of the divine Son.⁶⁷ By uniting these sonships, Christ mediates human vision of the Father. Through Christ we can become “sons of God” and attain union with the Father. While this view is hardly new in medieval spirituality, Eckhart's preaching on the Word's birth in the soul had shown how profound—and dangerous—it could become. Although tame by comparison, Nicholas's analysis is nevertheless noteworthy.

Cusanus's De filiatione Dei (1445) begins with the Gospel text, “To whoever received him, he gave the power to become sons of God, who believe in his name” (Jn 1.12). Commenting on this verse, Nicholas invokes the powerful Greek language of salvation when he identifies sonship with deification and theosis. His intellectual focus surfaces immediately in the definition of theosis as “knowledge of God and the Word or intuitive vision.”⁶⁸ Deification consists in intellectual assimilation to the divine Word or “eternal reason” who has given us the power to become sons like himself. Nicholas compares the intellect to “a divine seed whose power, by believing, can ascend so high that it reaches theosis itself, the intellect's ultimate perfection—that is, the very apprehension of truth not as it is cloaked in figure, aenigma and varying otherness in this sensible world, but as [it is] in itself intellectually visible.”⁶⁹ The seed develops through faith, as divine light leads intellect to perfection. To trace this development, Cusanus revives a metaphor from Augustine and Clement of Alexandria: Christ the Logos as teacher. Deification is an education. As a teacher uses words and books to bring students to share his insight, Christ uses the aenigmas of the sensible world to lead us to intellectual union with him. In both cases education aims at an understanding beyond signs. This is especially true of theosis, which involves “the removal of all otherness and difference” and a turn to divine unity.⁷⁰ Yet Cusanus sets clear limits to sonship, which respects both divine transcendence and human distinctness. Theosis does not attain God as he is, but sees him “without any aenigmatic, imaginary figure in the purity of the intellectual spirit; and for the intellect this is clear and face to face vision (facialis visio).”⁷¹ Sonship or theosis thus remains a properly intellectual vision of God. It is “absolute” with respect to aenigmas, sense and reason, yet sees God only as truth—intellect's proper object—and not “as he is” in sheer transcendence. Moreover, this sonship confirms human identity. Becoming sons of God does not mean that we become something other than we are now, but that “we shall then be in another way what we are now in this way.”⁷² Sonship is less a transformation than a fulfillment. In becoming adopted sons of God, we attain our intellect's goal and happiness in divine truth.⁷³

V. CONCLUSION

We have come a long way from Dionysius's Mystical Theology. Cusanus's detailed analysis of vision and his focus on Christology and sonship reflect the rich complexity of medieval mystical theology. Eriugena, the Victorines, Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Eckhart and others had left their marks on Christian spirituality. What distinguishes Cusanus's approach is his consistent intellectualism in an age when many were finding intellect too constraining. Eckhart often speaks of intellect as the locus for union with God, but unlike Nicholas he also proclaims a breakthrough to Godhead beyond the “veil” of truth.⁷⁴ More typical, however, are the affective currents that came to dominate much mystical thought and experience. Jean Gerson, for example, distinguishes between speculative theology which seeks truth intellectually, and mystical theology which moves affectively toward the good.⁷⁵ Others, such as Hugh of Balma and Vincent of Aggsbach, deny knowledge of any sort a preparatory or accompanying role in mystical theology; for them intellect retains its role in contemplation, but mystical theology becomes exclusively affective.⁷⁶ Love and will thus displace intellect at mystical theology's center. Nicholas's approach is quite different. When the Tegernsee monks ask him about desire and knowledge in mystical theology, he replies that they coincide. Knowledge of the good directs desire; and in mystical theology where we cannot know what we desire, learned ignorance and faith guide love toward the infinite God.⁷⁷ Far from being eclipsed, intellect subtly governs and assimilates itself to desire.

The form and style of De visione Dei reflect this assimilation. For as prayer and invocation, the work attains an urgency and intensity that effect a coincidence between intellect and desire. Intellect's leading role in this coincidence becomes evident in Cusanus's description of faith and love (dilectio): “Through faith the intellect approaches unto the Word; through love it is united therewith.”⁷⁸ Nicholas also cites Augustine's analyses of the Trinity in terms of love and intellect, and uses the language of desire, spousal love and rapture. Desire, he says, leads into infinity—that is, into God who is “the Form of everything desirable … [and] the Truth which is desired in every desire.”⁷⁹ As the terms “form” and “truth” suggest, the focus is “intellectual desire” that seeks vision and sonship. As we have seen, the way into divine infinity lies in and through the intellect and its perception of the coincidence of opposites.

This intellectualism marks Cusanus as an extraordinarily speculative mystical theologian. Of course, he traces his teaching back to Dionysius, whose phrase “ignote consurgere” can apply only to the intellectual power because “knowledge and ignorance belong to intellect,” not to feeling or will.⁸⁰ We may also note several intermediaries between Dionysius and Cusanus. John Scotus Eriugena translated the Dionysian writings into Latin, and his Periphyseon develops a mystical eschatology that counsels an intellectually alert expectation of the reditus or return of all things to God.⁸¹ Similarly, Albert the Great and Eckhart accord intellect a central place in their spirituality. Nicholas's annotated manuscripts of Periphyseon, Albert's Dionysian commentaries and Eckhart's Latin works thus provide important evidence of his sources on these issues.⁸² Other figures in the Albertist school also influenced Cusanus. As a young man he studied at the University of Cologne which was heir to Albert's Dominican studium, and there he became a close friend of Heimeric de Campo. Through Heimeric Nicholas came to know the earlier Dominican thinkers Dietrich of Freiburg, Ulrich of Strassburg and Berthold of Moosburg—all of whom developed Albert's teachings on intellect.⁸³ Nicholas's contemporary and friend, Dionysius the Carthusian also studied at Cologne and viewed intellect as central to mystical theology.⁸⁴ Cusanus thus stands within a tradition of speculative spirituality, whose themes he elaborates with an intensity and thoroughness very much his own.

Cusanus's mystical theology is speculative in another, more literal sense as well. For it involves an on-going play of mirrors and images, perspectives and reflections. We have seen how his dialectic of vision expresses both the improportion and the reciprocity between God's seeing and ours. Now we may note briefly how this dialectic shapes Nicholas's handling of images. Mystical theology may seek sonship and vision beyond aenigmatic symbols, but the mind must first create or notice the images through which it makes this attempt. We can only overcome images that are there to begin with. Here, too, Dionysius is instructive. For his mystical theology presupposes the symbolic and liturgical patterns of the hierarchies and divine names; it simultaneously negates and brings to completion the theoria or insight that we seek through the sacraments and names of God. Cusanus's symbolic practice is similar, but with a difference. Like Dionysius, he sees the world shining with the light of divine causality; the sensible world is given to aid our progress in knowledge of God.⁸⁵ But Nicholas emphasizes human creativity by frequently using humanly constructed images⁸⁶—for instance, De visione Dei's painted icon. Similarly, he prefers mathematical symbols for their greater certainty, and because they unfold the mind's own power. Cusanus's use of symbols reflects his dialectic of vision. For just as he sees an oscillation between perspectival and absolute vision, he moves between creating symbols and stripping them away. Ever new images and divine names appear in his writings, only to be replaced. By recognizing symbols' inadequacy, learned ignorance leads not only beyond them, but also to renewed attempts to find more adequate ones. Since no humanly created image or concept can exhaust the divine, we need many approaches to its fullness.

Two images, however, remain fundamental for Nicholas: humanity as imago Dei, and Christ. The former is the image that we are, and our likeness to God consists in intellect and creativity. We are, moreover, not static but living images. Cusanus compares the mind to an image that “has the power to conform itself, without limit, ever more closely to its inaccessible exemplar.”⁸⁷ For this reason, Nicholas presents mystical theology as dynamically “on the way.” Yet the journey has a goal in Christ. As Son of God, he is the image that perfectly expresses the Father within the Trinity; and as incarnate, he is the fully actual human image of God and the exemplar that simultaneously reveals God and draws human intellects to itself. We thus see ourselves as images in the ultimate speculum of Christ who mirrors the Father and illumines our minds. In this mirroring of the divine and human, Cusanus discerns a vision of God—and a richly speculative mystical theology.

Notes

1. “Correspondance de Nicolas de Cues,” in Autour de la docte ignorance, ed. Edmond Vansteenberghe, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mitterlalters 14 (1915), 116-17. This volume also includes a valuable introductory essay and editions of related treatises, and will hereafter be cited as “Autour.”

2. AP, 49 (538). Three frequently quoted works of Cusanus will be cited by abbreviated titles, as follows:

   AP: Apologia doctae ignorantiae, trans. J. Hopkins in Nicholas of Cusa's Debate with John Wenck (Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press, 1981); followed by page number for the Latin text in volume 1 of Cusanus's Philosophisch-Theologische Schriften, ed. L. Gabriel (Vienna: Herder, 1964)—hereafter cited as “Schriften.” DI: De docta ignorantia, trans. J. Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa on Learned Ignorance (Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press, 1980); followed by page for the Latin text in Schriften, volume 1, and by book and chapter numbers.

   VD: De visione Dei, ed. & trans. J. Hopkins in Nicholas of Cusa's Dialectical Mysticism (Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press, 1985); followed by chapter number.

3. J. Marx, Verzeichnis der Handschriften—Sammlung des Hospitals zu Cues (Trier, 1905), manuscripts no. 43-46, & 96.

4. See Ludwig Baur, Nicolaus Cusanus und Ps.Dionysius im Lichte der Zitate und Randbemerkungen des Cusanus, in the Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1941; and Pauline M. Watts, “Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Three Renaissance Neoplatonists—Cusanus, Ficino & Pico—on Mind and Cosmos,” in Supplementum Festivum: Studies in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller (Binghamton: State University of New York, 1987), 279-98.

5. De non-aliud, Schriften 2, p. 444; and Ap, 55-56 (558-560).

6. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Mystical Theology, trans. C. Luibheid, in Dionysius's The Complete Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 137 (1,3; PG 3, 1000C-1001A).

7. See Autour, 58-65.

8. Jan Vanneste, “Is the Mysticism of Pseudo-Dionysius Genuine?” International Philosophical Quarterly 3 (1963): 302. See also Vanneste, Le mystère de Dieu: Essai sur la structure rationelle de la doctrine mystique du Pseudo-Denys l'Aréopagite (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1959).

9. Dionysius, Mystical Theology, 137 (3; 1033C).

10. Ibid., 140-41 (4-5; 1040D-1048B).

11. Dionysius, “Letter One,” in Complete Works, 263 (PG 3: 1065A).

12. DI, 158 (516; concluding letter to Cardinal Julian Caesarini); translation modified. Nicholas accompanied Eastern church representatives to the council of reunion at Florence; they departed Constantinople November 27, 1437 and arrived in Italy February 8, 1438. The voyage marked a major turning point in Cusanus's life; see James E. Biechler, The Religious Language of Nicholas of Cusa (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1975), 27-32.

13. AP, 50 (544).

14. DI, 67 (242-244; 1, 16).

15. M. L. Führer, “Purgation, Illumination and Perfection in Nicholas of Cusa,” Downside Review 98 (1980): 179.

16. DI, 84 (292; 1, 25).

17. DI, 53 (204; 1,4).

18. Dionysius, The Divine Names, in Complete Works, 100 (PG 3: 821B; 5,7); cited by Cusanus in De beryllo, Schriften 3, pp. 12-14 (10). See also the play of opposites in Divine Names, 115-19 (909B-917A; 9).

19. Johannes Wenck, De ignota litteratura (IL), trans. J. Hopkins, in Nicholas of Cusa's Debate with John Wenck, 22-23. Hopkins also includes a new edition of IL.

20. IL, 25.

21. IL, 30; see p. 23.

22. IL, 38.

23. IL, 26-27. See also pp. 22 & 26; and Bernard McGinn, “Eckhart's Condemnation Reconsidered,” The Thomist 44 (1980): 390-414.

24. Wenck supported the Council of Basel after Cusanus's turn to the papal cause, and therefore speaks “from emotion” (AP, 45 [526-528]). Concerning his limited intelligence and distortions of Nicholas's works, see AP 47 (534), 53 (552), 55 (558), & 62 (580).

25. AP, 52 (552), & 63 (582).

26. AP, 58-59 (568). Nicholas's knowledge of Eckhart is well documented. Here he describes works of Eckhart that he has seen; and his own annotated manuscript of Eckhart's Latin works survives at St. Nikolaus Hospital in Kues (Marx, Verzeichnis, Cod. Cus. 21). For a systematic comparison, see Herbert Wackerzapp, Der Einfluss Meister Eckharts auf die ersten philosophischen Schriften des Nikolaus von Kues (1440-1450), ed. J. Koch (Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters 39, 3; Münster: Aschendorff, 1962).

27. AP, 46 (528).

28. AP, 56 (560). Pauline M. Watts perceptively translates the phrase “legat cum intellectu” as “read with his intellect,” in Nicolaus Cusanus: A Fifteenth-Century Vision of Man (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1982).

29. AP, 55-56 (560), translation modified.

30. AP, 50 (544), & 54 (556).

31. AP, 56 (562).

32. AP, 46 (530), translation modified. See De beryllo, Schriften 3, pp. 48-50 (ch. 25) concerning Artistotle's fear of acknowledging the coincidence of contradictories. In his marginalia to Albert the Great's commentary on the Divine Names, Nicholas says, “Videtur quod Albertus et pene omnes in hoc deficiunt quod timeant semper intrare caliginem, quae consistet in admissione contradictorium” (Baur, Nicolaus Cusanus und Ps. Dionysius, p. 102, #269; see also p. 112, #589).

33. AP, 61 (576) emphasis added and translation modified. Hopkins renders “intellectum videntem” as “intuitive understanding”; “the seeing intellect,” however, suggests more clearly Nicholas's contrasts between reason and intellect, and between knowledge and seeing.

34. AP, 52 (550), referring to Dionysius, Divine Names (5,10: PG 3: 825B), in Ambrosius Traversarius's translation. On this theme, see Werner Beierwaltes, “Deus Oppositio Oppositorum,” Salzburger Jahrbuch für Philosophie 8 (1964): 175-85.

35. IL, 21; citing Psalm 45:11 (46:10).

36. AP, 47 (534), & 56 (560-562).

37. In Vansteenberghe, Autour, 164-65.

38. Letter, February 12, 1454; in Vansteenberghe, Autour, 122.

39. VD, 113 (intro. letter). Nicholas mentions several similar works, including one by Roger van der Weyden. Cusanus's use of the portrait reflects a Renaissance concern for visual perspective, while its description as “icona Dei” indicates his interest in the Eastern church.

40. VD, 115-17 (intro. letter).

41. C. L. Miller, “Nicholas of Cusa's The Vision of God,” in An Introduction to the Medieval Mystics of Europe, ed. P. Szarmach (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984), 296.

42. VD, 121 (2).

43. VD, 121 (2).

44. VD, 127 (4), & 165 (10): “Esse creaturae est videre tuum pariter et videri.” See Werner Beierwaltes, “Visio absoluta oder absolute Reflexion,” in his Identität und Differenz (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1980), 144-75.

45. VD, 131 (5).

46. VD, 131 (5).

47. See Werner Beierwaltes, Visio facialis—Sehen ins Angesicht (Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1988).

48. VD, 135 (6). In describing the icon as “haec imago faciei tuae,” Nicholas suggests that it may represent Christ, like the “Veronica” in his chapel at Koblenz mentioned at p. 113 (intro. letter). If so, VD's concluding chapters on Christology continue and intensify the opening meditations on the icon.

49. VD, 135 (6); see VD, 195 (15).

50. VD, 137 (6). The theme of mutual seeing occurs elsewhere in medieval traditions. For example, the Cistercian William of St. Thierry expresses it powerfully in his Meditivae orationes VIII (PL 180, 229-32); see Thomas M. Tomasic, “The Three Theological Virtues as Modes of Subjectivity in the Thought of William Saint-Thierry,” Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 38 (1971): 89-120.

51. VD, 195 (15).

52. VD, 137 (6).

53. VD, 139 (6).

54. VD, 161 (9). On this image, see D. F. Duclow, “Anselm's Proslogion and Nicholas of Cusa's Wall of Paradise,” Downside Review 100 (1982): 22-30; and Rudolf Haubst, “Die erkenntnistheoretische und mystische Bedeutung der ‘Mauer der Koinzidenz’,” Mitteilungen und Forschungsbeiträge der Cusanus-Gesellschaft, vol. 18 (1989): 167-95.

55. VD, 161 (6).

56. VD, 167 (10).

57. VD, 177 (12).

58. VD, 181 (13).

59. VD, 171 (9). God transcends the distinction between the complicatio or enfolding of all things in God, and creation as their explicatio or unfolding from divine power. See Thomas P. McTighe, “The Meaning of the Couple Complicatio-Explicatio in the Philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 32 (1958): 206-14.

60. VD, 173 (11).

61. VD, 177 (13).

62. VD, 231 (20).

63. VD, 247 (23). Ewert Cousins distinguishes five types of coincidence, and compares Cusanus and Bonaventure in Bonaventure and the Coincidence of Opposites (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1978), 199-227.

64. VD, 227 & 231 (20), & 247-49 (23). On the centrality of image in Christian mystical theology, see Louis Dupré, “Mysticism,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. M. Eliade et al. (New York: Macmillan, 1987), vol. 10, pp. 251-54.

65. VD, 245 (22).

66. VD, 241 (22); see also VD, 243-54 (22).

67. VD, 229 (20); translation modified. Hopkins renders “altissima” as “closest.”

68. De filiatione Dei (FD), my translation, Schriften 2, p. 610 (ch. 1): “Theosim vero tu ipse nosti ultimitatem perfectionis exsistere, quae et notitia Dei et verbi seu visio intuitiva vocitatur.” See Rudolf Haubst, “Nikolaus von Kues ueber die Gotteskindschaft,” in Nicolò da Cusa (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1962), 29-43.

69. FD, 610-12 (1).

70. FD, 626 (3): “Filiatio igitur est ablatio omnis alteritatis et diversitatis et resolutio omnium in unum.”

71. FD, 620 (3).

72. FD, 614 (2): “Sed modo alio id tunc erimus, quod nunc suo modo sumus.”

73. FD, 620 (3).

74. See Bernard McGinn, “The God beyond God: Theology and Mysticism in the Thought of Meister Eckhart,” Journal of Religion 61 (1981): 1-19.

75. Jean Gerson, De mystica theologia, ed. André Combes (Lucca, 1958), 73-74(1.6.29).

76. See Vansteenberghe, Autour, especially pp. 58-69, & 189-218. Autour documents a fifteenth-century dispute about intellect and love in mystical theology, and Cusanus's role in this discussion.

77. Autour, 111-12 & 115. See Hans Gerhard Senger, “Mystik als Theorie bei Nikolaus von Kues,” in Gnosis und Mystik in der Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. P. Koslowski (Zurich: Artemis, 1988), 111-34.

78. VD, 261 (24).

79. VD, 201 (16).

80. Autour, 115: “Ignote enim consurgere non potest dici nisi de virtute intellectuali … Sciencia et ignorancia respiciunt intellectum, non voluntatem.”

81. See Paul A. Dietrich & Donald F. Duclow, “Virgins in Paradise: Deification and Exegesis in ‘Periphyseon V’,” in Jean Scot écrivain, ed. Guy-H. Allard (Montreal: Bellarmin, 1986), 29-49.

82. For Eriugena, see “Kritisches Verzeichnis der Londoner Handschriften aus dem Besitz des Nikolaus von Kues,” Mitteilungen und Forschungsbeiträge der Cusanus-Gesellschaft 3 (1963): 84-100; and for Albert's commentaries, see Baur, Nicolaus Cusanus und Ps.Dionysius, 93-113. Nicholas's marginalia to his Eckhart manuscript (Cod. Cus. 21) are printed in the critical apparatus for Meister Eckhart, Die lateinischen Werke (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer); they are especially frequent in the Sermones (vol. 4 [1956]).

83. For a concise survey of the Albertist school, see Ruedi Imbach, “Le (Néo-) platonisme médiéval, Proclus latin et l'école Dominicaine allemande,” Revue de théologie et de philosophie 110 (1978): 427-48. See also Rudolf Haubst, Zum Fortleben Alberts des Grossen bei Heymerich von Kamp und Nikolaus von Kues, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, Suppl. 4 (1952); and Mark L. Führer “Ulrich of Strassbourg and Nicholas of Cusa's Theory of Mind,” Classica et Mediaevalia 36 (1985): 225-39.

84. See Kent Emery, Jr., “Twofold Wisdom and Contemplation in Denys of Ryckel (Dionysius Cartusiensis, 1402-1471),” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 18 (1988): 99-134.

85. VD, 267 (25).

86. See, for example, the Idiota de mente where the Layman carves a wooden spoon and asserts that “omnes humanas artes imagines quasdam esse infinitae et divinae artis” (Schriften 3, p. 490; ch. 2).

87. Idiota de mente, 592 (ch. 13): “quae potentiam habet se semper plus et plus sine limitatione inaccessibili exemplari conformandi.” See also VD, 231 (20); and DI, 52 (202; 1,3).