SOURCE: Dupré, Louis. “Nature and Grace in Nicholas of Cusa's Mystical Philosophy.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 64, no. 1 (Winter 1990): 153-70.

[In the following essay, Dupré outlines Cusanus's efforts to bridge the gap between immanence and transcendence, a divide driven by the rise of nominalist thought in the late Medieval era. Observing Cusanus's debt to Meister Eckhart and Neoplatonism, Dupré finds that Cusanus's understanding of nominalist theology anticipated its modern consequences: the absolute separation of the natural and the supernatural.]

Hans Blumenberg in his influential The Legitimacy of the Modern Age insists that modern culture is not to be interpreted as merely transforming the theological concepts of an earlier age, as the so-called secularization thesis posits, but rather as introducing a radically new mode of self-assertion which reoccupies the available religious concepts while endowing them with a wholly different meaning. This thesis of radical novelty needs to be seriously qualified. During the period beginning with early Italian humanism and concluding around the middle of the seventeenth century, a religious vision continues to determine much of modern culture and thus to link it to the past. It is true, of course, that the cosmological syntheses of the previous epoch had disintegrated. But the new ones that soon took their place, often inspired by Platonic or Neoplatonic philosophies, reveal theoretical concerns no less religious than the early ones. The change in that early-modern period lies not, I believe, in the absence or presence of a religious perspective, but in the manner in which the two essential components of the religious dimension, immanence and transcendence, came to relate to each other. This change is clearly reflected in the theological transformation the concept of nature underwent during that period.

In the high Middle Ages nature, taken in the sense of creation as a whole or in the sense of human nature, cannot be thought independently of a transcendent dimension. A relation to God conveyed ultimate intelligibility to the entire cosmos as well as final meaning to human activity. Cosmology and theology interpenetrated each other. After the nominalist interpretation of an unlimited and inscrutable divine power had loosened that union and withdrawn the divine presence from all human comprehension theology, which had previously formed an integral part of the cosmological structure, ceased to be an intrinsic principle of intelligibility of nature. Of course, this detachment had started before. Already Alexander of Hales and Saint Bonaventure had denied that the cosmos is an image of God (as the person still is, for them): it merely reveals the vestigia, the traces, of a divine creation. More directly to the point, Ockham, clearly perceiving the conclusions of the new theology, had criticized the distinction between the nature of celestial bodies, presumed to be more intimately linked to the divine, and the more contingent sublunar sphere. For him, there was only one cosmos and it was wholly natural. In nominalist theology the divine became exclusively object of a positive revelation, while for our knowledge of the physical world—the celestial as well as the terrestrial—only methods of empirical observation would apply. By the same token, the order of nature became detached from the order of divine grace. With the separation of the real into two distinct orders—one natural and one supernatural—God's immanent presence in nature was well on its way toward being reduced to the extrinsic causality of an inscrutable divine will.

I. CREATION AS DIVINE SELF-EXPLICATION

Cusanus's mystical philosophy may be understood as an original effort to bridge the gap late medieval philosophy had opened between nature and its transcendent source. Though he accepted much of the via moderna, he succeeded to a remarkable extent. In Cusanus's vision God is at once infinitely removed from nature and infinitely close to it. No longer the pinacle of a cosmic hierarchy but its center, God “explicates” his Being in the cosmos. Far from excluding the negative theology so prominent in nominalist writers Cusanus's mystical speculation intensified the negation, yet in a manner that renders the Deus absconditus immanently present in each part of nature. Cusanus succeeded in temporarily harmonizing the theocentric and anthropocentric forces that had begun to pull apart the medieval synthesis and would do so increasingly all through the modern age. To be sure, the search for a new immanence had already begun in the devotional movements of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries especially in Geert Grote's Brothers of the Common Life. But there it had consisted in a retreat from culture at large into the inner realm of the soul, not in a general renewal of God's immanent presence in all of creation. Cusanus's mystical theology, on the contrary, includes the entire cosmos as well as human nature in its proper identity.

A first condition for restoring the divine immanence consisted in containing the idea of God's potentia absoluta within predictable borders. This required rethinking the idea of possibility itself. The nominalist concept of potentia absoluta, leaving God free to do anything at all both in the order of nature and of grace, had severed intelligibility from divine omnipotence. The total absence of restraint imposed upon the idea of the possible eliminated any certainty about the rational structure of nature. Not only were the laws of nature unpredictable and reversible, but, even while they prevailed, they offered no guarantee that the order of grace, issuing from a different divine decision, would in any way run parallel to them. God could save the unjustified person, if he chose to do so, for divine justice consisted in nothing more than what God regarded as such. The intrinsic rationality of the course of nature, ancient apriori of Western thought, thereby lost much of its traditional protection against randomness.

A superficial reading may convey the impression that Cusanus concedes the nominalist thesis when he declares possibility to be created no less than actuality itself. In De venatione sapientiae, Ch. 3, he distinguishes a first moment of possible creation (posse fieri) from the actual creation in time (posse factum). Yet Cusanus's position is inspired by a motive directly opposite to that of nominalism, namely, to reunite possibility with actual reality as two constitutive elements of one creative act. As Peter Casarella shows elsewhere in this issue, in his dialogue De possest Cusanus posits the divine principle as a unity of possibility and actuality which precedes their differentiation in the created order—ante differentiam actus et potentiae. Since the divine unity is the common ground of posse as well as of esse, one cannot be without the other in the created order. Possibility, then, does not precede actuality, as a well-defined vacuum (somewhat like Newton's sensorium of infinite space and time) within which God may choose to create whatever he pleases. Possibility emerges from the divine Being simultaneously with actuality. Hence Cusanus's universe actualizes all its possibilities. With this theory the Cardinal closed the gap which nominalist theology had opened between God's potentia absoluta and his potentia ordinata without having to deny either one of the two terms. As God's absolute Being still infinitely surpasses the totality of all created being, the distinction between the two must be maintained, but not the separation. Though possibility is coextensive with actuality in God's creation, no universe exhausts the divine creativity, as Bruno was to claim. Hence Cusanus's statement in De venatione sapientiae (1463) (Ch. XXVII) that God could have created any other world than the present one. But this discrepant statement implies no confession of failure in solving the problem, that would return Cusanus to the absolute possibility of nominalism,¹ but rather, I think, emphasizes the total dependence of the world upon a rational Creator who, though his reason surpasses human intelligence, never acts inconsistently. Once the world is there, we know that it expresses divine reason in the best possible way. No Leibnizian choice between possible worlds precedes the act of creation. Whatever is, is eo ipso the best possible.

Still, the elimination of an independent and unrestricted realm of possibility does not suffice to reunite the two realms of nature and grace. For God could have created nature by one set of principles and elevated it by another. This hypothesis Cusanus excludes by his theology of expression. Once God expresses himself in creation he eo ipso defines the entire structure of the finite. A discrepancy between two orders of nature and grace militates against Cusanus's concept of creation as explicatio of God's own being. The explicatio articulates the relation between God and the creature in a more intimate mode of union than traditional theologians had ever advanced. In a diversified mode (explicatio) the universe unfolds the very Being which God is in a unified way (complicatio). Including all that exists and could exist the universe, as maximum contractum, may be called infinite though in a different way than God. Cusanus daringly applies the definition of God as an infinite circle with an ubiquitous center to the cosmos itself. Yet the world does not resemble God: it constitutes the otherness of God's own Being, while God is the non-otherness of created being.

Following Eckhart in his profound theological treatise, De li non aliud, Cusanus describes God as the very principle through which things are identical with themselves. The absolute cannot stand in a relation of otherness to any relative being. Though God entirely surpasses his creation to the point of being unknown in himself, he cannot be defined through the derived category of “otherness.” The absolute must define both itself and all the rest. Eckhart had declared God to coincide with Being (Esse est Deus—Deus igitur et Esse idem). This implies that in its essential Being the creature is not other than God. Eckhart escapes the pantheistic consequences of his thesis by distinguishing that esse from the creature's existence which limits it and totally differentiates it from its divine esse. Nor does that essence consist in the limiting characteristics which separate the nature of one creature from that of another. For Eckhart, self-identity cannot be defined in a purely negative way, as Spinoza does when he defines determination as negation. It consists essentially in a positive mode of being which transcends distinctiveness and which by the same token constitutes the link of identity with the divine Being. In De li non aliud Cusanus follows Eckhart's line of argument in declaring self-identity to be characteristic of God's Being not only in its uniqueness but also in its unfolded presence in creation.

For Not-other is the most congruent form (ratio), Standard and Measure of the existence of all existing things, of the nonexistence of all nonexisting things, of the possibility of all possibilities, of the manner of existence of all things existing in any manner, of the motion of all moving things, of the rest of all nonmoving things, of the life of all living things, of the intelligibility of all intelligible things, and so on for all other things of this kind. I see this to be necessary, in that I see that Not-other defines itself and, hence, all nameable things.²

Dionysius, in Cusanus's day still identified with Denys whom St. Paul converted on the Areopagus, had argued in The Divine Names (Bks. VIII and IX) that God's transcendence places him beyond identity (tautotès) and otherness (heterotès), as well as beyond equality (homoiotès) and inequality (anomoiotès). Cusanus drew conclusions from this source which negative theologians had rarely drawn. They had generally accepted that God dwells beyond identity (and hence that no names properly applied to him), but the transcendence of difference had remained undeveloped (though assumed). On the basis of Eckhart's Latin writings and of Thierry of Chartres' commentaries on Boethius, Cusanus developed a daring dialectic of identity and otherness. Beyond difference lies the more fundamental unity. Unitas alteritatem praecedit. Hence any affirmation of divine transcendence must conclude with a profession of total immanence.

Cusanus perceived the mystical implications of Neoplatonism more acutely than most earlier Christian followers of Plotinus and Proclus had done. They had mostly emphasized the ekstasis, the ascent of the soul to God, rather than the more fundamental immanence of God in the soul. For Plotinus and Proclus themselves the One, present in all forms, coincides with none of them.³ For Cusanus this meant that God is not only the cause of the world, but also its ground, constituting the essence both of himself and of all things. In finite beings difference limits the identity of a thing with itself. A thing is what it is not only by its relation to itself, but also by its relation to others. (St. Thomas derives aliquid from aliud quid and Plato placed the aoristos dyas, the undefined two-ness, as underived next to the One—a position which Cusanus for obvious reasons rejected.) God alone fully coincides with his essence. Hence no distinction separates that God is fromwhat he is. But for Cusanus, it also implied that he contains all created things in an identity without difference. Indeed, he conveys to finite things the complete self-identity which they do not possess through themselves. Their otherness is not a constitutive quality of their essence. As Thomas P. McTighe shows in a probing essay included in this collection, otherness is neither a principle of being nor of differentiation, but is constituted by the condition of contingency, which pervades the entire being of the creature. Otherness is the very essence of finitude: a pure negation that could not subsist without the positive identity. “Omnia autem participatione unius id sunt quod sunt.”⁴ That which enables a thing to find its identity with itself is precisely what unites it with absolute Being; that which separates it from others results from its not possessing its ground in itself. As ungrounded ground God knows no otherness: he is literally more the thing than the thing is itself, or in Cusanus's words, God is the sun in the sun, even as the sun in God in no way differs from God.⁵

Cusanus innovatively combines the Christian doctrine of the image of God with a Neoplatonic negative theology. In the resulting synthesis the two theologies, far from restricting each other, reinforce each other. The original theology of the image of God as developed by Origen and Gregory of Nyssa had stressed the presence of God in the soul, rather than a mere resemblance of the soul to God. Likewise, and contrary to some later interpretations, the fundamental intuition of Neoplatonic philosophy had emphasized the immanence of the One in each emanating hypostasis more than its increasing distance from the lower spheres. Cusanus restored both theories to their original, mystical immanence. At the same time he remained faithful to apophatic theology in denying any external similarity between God and the creature, and in reserving the term image to the human mind alone. All other creatures are “mute”: they do not reveal their Creator but only refer to him as their ratio or metrum et mensura.⁶ Creatures are no more than signs or symbols—Cusanus uses the term aenigma from the Vulgate translation of 1 Cor. 13, 12: “per speculum, in aenigmate”—that allow the mind to ascend to what lies beyond any representation (De possest). Such an ascent without likeness occurs by means of a mental process, not by means of a representational intuition. Cusanus here follows the distinction established by Alexander of Hales and Bonaventure between vestigium (trace) and imago (image). Both deny that creatures are images of God. In his Summa Theologiae Alexander writes: “Vestigium est inexpressa similitudo,” possibly linked to Augustine's “imago est expressa similitudo.”⁷

The category of non-otherness develops a thesis implicit in Neoplatonic philosophy but insufficiently accounted for by the supremacy of the One. Undoubtedly the One precedes the multiplicity, but unless it remains immanently present in the many, its precedence turns into a mere opposition destructive of its own unity. To avoid the contradiction of a One simply opposed to the many, Cusanus ranks the non-aliud as the highest ontological category. In his early work he had attributed the supreme position to the One, but later he apparently felt that in so doing he had created a new opposition rather than resolved all oppositions.⁸ Its dispersion removes the created cosmos itself from the divine unity but the divine immanence continues to secure the presence of that unity without which the creature would cease to exist altogether. “Deus ergo est omnia complicans in hoc, quod omnia in eo. Est omnia explicans in hoc, quod ipse in omnibus.”⁹ In defining God as non-aliud Cusanus replaces the traditional relations from the created to the uncreated by an analogy that, instead of ascending from the creature to God, follows God's own Being as it descends to the creature. If unity truly precedes multiplicity, as Western philosophy has consistently maintained, then that which allows a reality to be identical with itself cannot be reduced to what differentiates it from others. Hence non-otherness enjoys an ontological precedence. Precisely in its ultimate self-identity—its non-otherness—created being coincides with God's uncreated Being. The same term, then, which most adequately describes God's Being, serves also as the most fundamental definition of all created reality.¹⁰

II. PERSPECTIVAL AND NON-PERSPECTIVAL KNOWLEDGE

How does the creation still differ from its Creator? Since this question receives an extensive treatment in Dermot Moran's essay, a few indications may suffice here for our purpose. In De li non aliud Cusanus interprets the traditional position that God is in all things even though he is none of them, by referring to God's absolute priority in the order of being. In God all things coincide with that divine Being before being themselves and since in their created being they remain totally dependent on him, he remains innermost in their own being.¹¹ In God's “complicated” Being, antecedent to creation, all things may be said to be in him in an undifferentiated way. In the “explicated” divine Being, however, God is in all things all that they are.

As causa sui and first principle God cannot be defined by anything else. He must define himself as simply being what he is, coinciding with himself in a manner that excludes any reference to otherness. But as cause of all that is God must define all created things as well. Now, as that which defines itself and everything that is, he cannot be “other” than what he defines.¹² Though Cusanus refers to the relation between God and the creature as one of causality,¹³ he obviously feels the need to specify the relation in the far more intimate relation of participation.¹⁴ If the creature participates in God in its very being, God can constitute no otherness with respect to it. Otherness implies a lack, but God lacks nothing that the creature is or has, since no created being ever moves outside the divine Being.¹⁵ Indeed, as God's “explicated” Being, creation is nothing but “the manifestation of the Creator defining Himself.”¹⁶

In De venatione sapientiae, written shortly before his death, Cusanus further elucidated the relation by distinguishing non-otherness from sameness. The latter attribute does not apply to the relation between God and the creature. Though God is named Not-other with respect to created being, he is not the same as creation.¹⁷ Sameness, though presupposing the more fundamental category of non-otherness, is a univocal category that allows no distinction between complicated and explicated Being.

Of more direct significance for our subject is the question how identity with, and difference from the complicated divine Being become manifest in the creature's relation to God. Here the notion of perspective plays a highly original and significant role. In introducing it Cusanus professes his allegiance to the modern tendency to define meaning in and through the human subject, but also shows how that subject, while acting this creative part, clearly displays the fragmented, non-divine quality of the creaturely mode of being. The idea of perspective was, precisely in Cusanus's time, being developed both in painting (Ambrogio Lorenzetti) and in artistic theory (Leon-Battista Alberti). Its aesthetic popularity may have inspired Cusanus to apply it to the mind's relation to its divine archetype. Created being, though infinite in its own right, is a broken infinity that in each of its parts reflects only one perspective of the uncreated infinite. Like a mirror, each fragment presents a different, perspectival view of God's face, though none shows him as he is in himself. Yet unlike the mirror, created being does not exist prior to its reflecting.

Who could understand the following? How all things are the image of that one, infinite Form and are different contingently—as if a created thing were a god manqué [deus occasionatus]. … For the infinite Form is received only finitely, so that every created thing is, as it were, a finite infinity or a created god, so that it exists in the way in which this can best occur.¹⁸

Each creature reflects the Infinite in as perfect a way as it could possibly do. To explain this, Cusanus introduces the typically modern idea of perspective. Here the simile of the mirror, despite its inadequacy, attains its full significance. Since the creature reflects only a perspective of the “light” or the “face” of its Creator, it does not resemble at all what it reflects. As totality of perspectives God cannot be captured in any single perspective.

With the notion of perspective the Dionysian tradition takes the modern turn to the subject. Cusanus assumes that the mind represents the real according to its subjective capacity. Yet, Cusanus's metaphor then points in a direction opposite to that taken by modern epistemology. Far from being the sole source of truth the human mind receives its representational truth only by reflecting a perspective of the perspectiveless divine mirror. Nor does the mind receive the divine light as in a pre-existing receptacle: its very being partakes in the divine intellect. The “otherness” in which it receives, then, consists of no more than the limited mode of its participation.¹⁹ God's vision also may be called a “mirror”—yet one that reflects all things as they exist in their aboriginal forms within himself.

Since your sight is an eye, i.e., a living mirror, it sees within itself all things. … The reason our eye turns toward an object is that our sight sees from an angle of a certain magnitude. But the angle of Your eye, O God, is not of a certain magnitude but is infinite.²⁰

Cusanus asserts neither that God knows (in the objective sense) without perspective nor that he knows from a totality of perspectives. To do the latter he would have to adopt simultaneously incommensurable perspectives. The notion of perspective is directly linked to the category of space, and indirectly to time. To know from one point in space or time excludes knowing from another point. The Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition had consistently taught that segments of space are juxtaposed to one another and hence mutually exclusive. The same applies, with due qualifications, to the successive moments of time. To know in perspective, then, is to have one's knowledge restricted by intrinsically finite conditions. While the inclusion of the finite within the infinite is not per se perverse, perspective would introduce into the divine essence precisely one of those aspects of the finite which distinguish it from the infinite. Moreover, to speak of knowledge from a “totality of perspectives” is to posit cognitive conditions which are incommensurable as well as intrinsically restrictive. On the other hand, objectively to know without perspective would, as Sartre has pointed out, result in a full coincidence of the knowing subject with the known object.

A pure knowledge in fact would be a knowledge without a point of view; therefore a knowledge of the world but on principle located outside the world. But this makes no sense; the knowing being would be only knowledge since he would be defined by his object and since his object would disappear in the total indistinction of reciprocal relation.²¹

Since a totality of perspectives is impossible, divine knowledge would then become knowledge from a “divine perspective”—a concept strongly at odds with the traditional idea of God's infinity and of divine knowledge. But it is only the assumption that knowledge must by its very nature take the form of a subject-object relation that entails the necessity of perspective. According to Cusanus, however, God knows all things within himself. Such a knowledge is indeed perspectiveless and ontological, but not in Sartre's sense of coinciding with the known. Precisely by its separateness—in which perspective originates—does the created universe decisively differ from the divine identity. All things coincide with God in their identity, but they are separated from God in their otherness. Still this insurmountable ontological difference does not entail that God knows things not as they are in themselves. In knowing them in himself, that is, in their identity, he knows them in their innermost core—interior intimo meo—though not by objective, perspectival knowledge.

Unlike finite knowledge, divine knowledge does not depend on what it knows. God's “seeing” does not depend upon what it reflects as the mirror of the human eye does. That mirror establishes the ontological truth of things, which the human mind reflects in a perspectival image.

When someone looks into this Mirror, he sees his own form in the Form of forms, which the Mirror is. And he judges the form seen in the Mirror to be the image of his own form, because such would be the case with regard to a polished material mirror. However, the contrary thereof is true, because in the Mirror of eternity that which he sees is not an image but is the Truth, of which the beholder is the image.²²

Herewith the mirror metaphor has shifted its focus from the subject that merely represents, to the God in whom forms exist in truth. Only the mirror of God's essence conveys truth to our representations, without in any way resembling those representations. It has none of their perspectival qualities, but it grounds them as its exemplar. Though being the basis of all knowledge, it lies itself beyond cognition. Thus the theology of the image is here converted into one of symbols. “Since [the mind's eye] seeks to see a light which it cannot see, it knows that as long as it sees something, this is not the thing it is seeking.”²³ For Cusanus, religious truth attained by means of symbols consists in the opposite of that acquired by image representation. The symbol, contrary to the image, has mainly a negative function: to lift the mind to a different mode of “seeing” once ordinary seeing and thinking have collapsed. “Seeing” the Face of faces means “to enter, above all faces, into a certain secret and hidden silence wherein there is no knowledge or concept of a face.”²⁴ Seeing here consists in renouncing all vision. Cusanus speaks of the obscuring mist through which we approach the invisible light.

Still somehow the presence of God must appear. Indeed, it does, according to the Cardinal, yet not in likeness or image, but in symbolic “ciphers” constructed by the human mind, the one reality created “into the image and likeness” of God. Cusanus's theory of the symbol may appear nominalist, insofar as it denies any sort of analogy between sign and signified. Yet the relation between the two is more than merely extrinsic, since symbols reveal the finite as the appearance of an invisible infinite. His semiotic also displays that characteristic mixture of Neoplatonism and nominalism so suitable to a mystical tradition which, since Gregory of Nyssa, had reflected the tension between a God hidden beyond the limits of representation, and a divine Logos in which all things remain permanently present to God. In his early work, De docta ignorantia, Cusanus considers only mathematical constructions.²⁵ Different geometrical figures, if extended into infinity, coincide. Sphere, circle, triangle, even straight line all lose their oppositions when protracted into infinity. Similarly, in the ontologically infinite, the Absolute Maximum, all oppositions vanish. Now a mathematical infinite obviously differs from an ontologically infinite. Yet, rightly or wrongly disregarding the difference in nature Cusanus concentrates exclusively on the abstract relation from finitude to infinity. Neither does his move from multiplicity to unity imply an equality of the numerical one with divine simplicity, but merely that one presupposes the other. Cusanus describes the symbolic process as follows:

Since all mathematicals are finite and otherwise could not even be imagined: if we want to use finite things as a way for ascending to the unqualifiedly Maximum, we must consider finite mathematical figures together with their characteristics and relations. Next we must apply these relations in a transformed way, to corresponding infinite mathematical figures. Thirdly, [we must] thereafter in a still more highly transformed way, apply the relations of these infinite figures to the simple Infinite, which is altogether independent even of all figure. At this point our ignorance will be taught incomprehensibly how we are to think more correctly and truly about the Most High as we grope by means of a symbolism.²⁶

Mathematical symbolism appears particularly appropriate to Cusanus because, while bearing no resemblance to the reality it investigates, it nevertheless in a non-intuitive way assists the mind in conceiving it.

Precisely its purely constructional nature renders mathematics suitable for grasping what lies beyond direct human cognition. The non-intuitive quality of this symbolism prevents its “ciphers” from seducing the mind into seeking illusory resemblances where none are possible. Nor is the analogy arbitrary. For Cusanus, number is “the first exemplar of spirit,” since God is one-in-three, and in the creation of the world God uses arithmetical, geometrical, musical, and astronomical models.²⁷ In choosing the path of numbers, weight, and measure the mind follows the plan of God's own creative activity as much as we are capable of knowing it. Even as God knows all creatures exhaustively in the act of creation, the mind fully knows only what it produces itself. In directly imitating this divine creativity the mind turns into an image of God. It does so particularly in mathematical knowledge. To be sure, Cusanus insists, numbers and geometrical figures are inherently finite and, as such, alien to God's essence. But for us they evoke the proportion that exists among different facets of the ideal model of the cosmos operative in God's creative act. Our own quantitative articulation of this proportion merely functions as a finite reconstruction of an infinite, inimitable knowledge. Ironically Cusanus here singles out mathematics as the science in which the mind is most actively productive, whereas Vico would later use the example of history, as truth “made” by man and therefore most certain, to discredit the mathematical type of certitude advocated by Descartes. For Cusanus a mathematical symbolization is an autonomous construction comparable to God's creation of the world.

For even as God is the Creator of real beings and material forms, so does man create rational entities and artificial forms that reflect his intellect in the manner in which creatures bear a similitude to the divine intellect. Hence the human person is endowed with an intelligence that resembles the divine intellect in the creative act.²⁸

Rather than imitating an inimitable divine “model” the mind in its own way progressively construes an intelligible cosmos. The divine mind creates by conceiving; our mind assimilates by conceiving in notions and conjectures.²⁹

In the projective construction of human knowledge the mind approaches the divine unity, moving from the explicatio of the creature's diversity towards the complicatio of the divine unity. “Mens est imago complicationis divinae prima.”³⁰ On the level of reason the mind, beyond “comprehending” ideas (the function of the understanding-ratio), constitutes their intelligible unity. For Cusanus the mind needs no agent intellect to reduce its passivity to activity, because its activity precedes and dominates all its operations. On this issue Cusanus's epistemology differs as much from Augustine's theory of illumination as from Aristotle's abstraction. In thus stressing the creative quality of the mind Cusanus begins to justify philosophically the new conceptions implicit in Italian humanism. The characteristic quality of the mind lies not in its receptive ability but in its creativity. The theory of participation which had dominated earlier medieval philosophy (even after the rediscovery of Aristotle it remains much in evidence) here takes an altogether new direction. The eternal Word is no longer only the exemplar of the mind, but the creative principle present in every mental act, the Word speaking in every human word. In his creative theory of cognition Cusanus anticipates some of the theses of modern thought: Kant's “productive” synthesis of the imagination, and the creative imagination of German idealism. Precisely in performing this creative intellectual operation the mind turns into an image of God, for in projecting symbols of itself the mind directly imitates God's creative act. It projects itself outside itself only in order to return to itself. That is precisely what God does in his creative act.

III. REINTEGRATION OF NATURE AND GRACE IN THE INCARNATION

But it is in the theology of the hypostatic union, presented in the third, often neglected part of the Learned Ignorance, that Cusanus fully transcends the nominalist dualism between a divine and a human order. The concrete order of salvation elevates human nature as such and in its model sets the final goal for the entire species. The hypostatic union intrinsically transforms human nature as a whole. Indeed, because of the central position of the human being on the scale of created being, it raises the entire creation to a divine level.

Human nature is that [nature] which, though created a little lower than the angels, is elevated above all the [other] works of God; it enfolds intellectual and sensible nature and encloses all things within itself, so that the ancients were right in calling it a microcosm, or a small world.³¹

This union, Cusanus insists, must not be conceived as a “composite” of God and human nature, since a composition of God and creature is impossible. It must be “Creator and creature without confusion and without composition.”³²

Nor must the hypostatic union be considered an “addition” in time, the result of an afterthought provoked by human failure through sin. “Divinity does not exist in different ways according to an earlier and a later time.”³³ The Incarnation is not posterior to God in time: the God-man, insofar as he is God himself, stands above time and is ontologically “prior to all things.”³⁴ He mediates all temporal events as their ultimate goal and reason. The participation of created nature in Christ's perfect humanity implies that God is in all things and all things are in God. Human nature is divinized to a point where it no longer exists in itself, but “in oneness with Infinite Power.”³⁵ In it God achieves his most perfect work—that which enables him personally to inhabit creation. Even the distinction between philosophy and theology vanishes. Natural knowledge leads to a docta ignorantia, an awareness beyond strict reasoning, which allows the receptive attitude of faith to unite with the active one of “conjectures.” Because Cusanus regards the mind as a copy of the divine original, philosophical and revealed faith coincide for him. There are not two sources of that unified divine knowledge, but only one—the one constituted in the Incarnation and revealed in Christ.³⁶

Cusanus's integration of natural and theological knowledge—a direct consequence of the unity of nature and grace—results in a continuous epistemic hierarchy from thought to mystical visio or intuitio. Karl Jaspers, in his study on Cusanus, may have failed to appreciate the full impact of Christian dogma upon Cusanus's thought (such as it appears in the third book of On Learned Ignorance), but he correctly stresses the continuity between that philosophy and at least the attitude of faith.

His philosophy does not presuppose particular articles of faith, but it does imply a fundamental attitude of faith, which he explicitly calls Christian. Because Cusanus regards his mind as a copy of the divine original, philosophical faith and revealed faith are for him identical. … What we call the duality of his thinking was to him no such thing. He does not recognize multiple sources of faith, but only one, the Christian.³⁷

Meanwhile we may question the extent to which Cusanus actually succeeded in integrating his philosophy with Christian theology. Not the intended result is at issue, but the assumptions made to reach it.

Is the concept of Incarnation presented in the third book of On Learned Ignorance philosophically sound, and does it furthermore conform to the Christian tradition? At least one crucial point in the argument raises doubts on both counts. The Incarnation, the Cardinal argues, unites the absolute maximum of God's Being with the relative, wordly maximum of Christ's humanity. Yet what is a maximum? Earlier Cusanus had rejected the notion as being intrinsically impossible, since in the realm of relative perfection a higher degree remains always thinkable.³⁸ Cusanus appears to have taken a religious representation (Christ—the perfect man) and transferred it uncritically into the realm of philosophy. Revelation, or at least a representation he assumes to be implied in it, must here legitimate what philosophy previously had ruled out. From the theological side, problems appear equally serious. The idea of a universe that culminates in the nature of the God-man is an apriori construction that can claim no decisive scriptural or dogmatic support. Being theologically no more than speculation engaged in for non-theological purposes, it does not go very far toward functioning as a basis for integrating theology with philosophy. Criticism of this sort, however, does not invalidate the thrust of Cusanus's enterprise, but merely one particular argument through which he sought to realize it. His treatment of Christ in De filiatione Dei, controversial in its own way, moves along different lines and shows at least that other approaches were available to him.

Cusanus's reintegration of nature and grace directly affected his attitude toward non-Christian religions. As they all express a natural aspiration to God, all in some way partake in Christ's sanctification of that nature. Cusanus has expressed his view on the integration of nature and revelation most clearly in the third book of De docta ignorantia. Well before he wrote that work, however, the need for religious unity had been his overriding concern. Thus in De concordantia catholica (1435) written in preparation for the Council of Basel convening to settle the controversy about the respective authority of Pope and Council, Cusanus appears less interested in the question of priority than in the need for ecclesiastical unity. It was precisely this ideal of harmony which induced him (with his later friend and protector, Sylvius Aeneas Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II) to make the controversial switch from the conciliar to the papal side. The reunion of the Latin and the Greek Churches would mark a further objective in his drive toward unity. It was during the return from his mission in Constantinople that he conceived the central idea of De docta ignorantia. In De pace fidei (1453) he extended his ideal of religious harmony to non-Christian religions. Such a harmony, he had learned from experience, would require tolerance for other rites and customs. Nevertheless the Christian revelation had to remain the unifying element—not some common core of “natural” religion, as it was to be for the Enlightenment (as in Lessing's Nathan the Wise). His insistence on the priority and necessity of the one ultimate religion does not exclude that a divine truth underlies every genuine form of divine worship. If the Incarnation completes and directs nature's innate move toward transcendence, the cult which expresses that move attains the highest level of natural truth.

In religion the mind surpasses the truth of the ratio and reaches that of the intellectus. In this “natural” transcendence the mind finds its own highest truth. Both the ascent and the following coincidentia oppositorum allow it to discover the immanence of the infinite in the finitude of nature. Left to its own powers, however, nature remains unable to unite the human to the divine and thus fully to achieve the desired harmony. Only in the Incarnation do divine transcendence and human nature fully interpenetrate each other. The one Logos revealed in Christ constitutes the complicatio of all partial religious truths. It succeeds in rendering consonant the often conflicting claims of different faiths. In its power to unite the divine with the human the Christian revelation remains unique, and other religions simply fall short in affirming this ultimate religious truth. Cusanus advocates neither a religious syncretism, nor a common core of revelation in various religions. Instead, he consistently applies the union of nature and grace to the relation between the one revealed religion and the many religions all of which express in some way the calling of human nature to be united with God. If nature is the explicatio of God himself, then also its aspiration toward transcendence must be endowed with a divine quality. But only in the Christian faith, according to Cusanus, do these aspirations encounter that response which reveals their full meaning. Such a coincidence of opposites in one point was possible only within a vision of God that on the one hand fully recognizes that God dwells beyond any finite expression while at the same time asserting that the Unknowable has intimately communicated Himself. In his mystical works, his sermons, and his treatise on the unity of faith Cusanus's thought manifests its definitive significance. The text on the Incarnation in the third book of De docta ignorantia holds the key to that deeper meaning.

CONCLUSION

At the closing of the Middle Ages the “order of grace” became separated from that of nature. Theology of the modern age failed to recapture the lost unity of nature and grace, though it survived in mystical and devotional movements. Yet mystical thought itself became marginalized with respect to the main course of theology. Even when the various warring branches of late scholastic theology rallied around the idea of pura natura as if it were a point of Catholic dogma, “mystical theology,” now a separate branch, was left alone—because, as de Lubac observes, no one cared about it. Cusanus assumed the entire cosmos into the light of his mystical vision and, from a typically Western and already modern position, regained the Greek Christian concept of grace as intrinsically deifying all of nature. The time may have come to reexamine the alternative he offers both to the theology and the philosophy of the modern age. The former, by assigning to grace and nature two separate orders of reality, rendered nature virtually autonomous and grace a “superstructure” (either superimposed or forensically applied from without), thereby at least negatively preparing an atheist naturalism. The latter, by positing the absolute priority of the human subject as sole source of meaning and value, made that cultural atheism inevitable. Cusanus shares one of the basic premises of modern culture—the central, creative role of the subject—yet he succeeds in avoiding the separation from transcendence which that principle came to entail. There lies his particular significance for the understanding of modern culture and, just possibly, one road of escaping its present predicament.

Notes

1. As Blumenberg maintains: The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 521.

2. De li non aliud, Ch. V, 16. Nicholas of Cusa on God as Not-other, trans. Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis: The Arthur Banning Press, (1979) 1983), Ch. V, 16, p. 45. Henceforth, abbreviated as NA and Hopkins.

3. Cf. Proclus: In Parmenidem 1075, 26. Paul Wilpert, in Nikolaus von Kues: Vom Nichtanderen (Hamburg: Meiner Verlag (2d ed.), 1976), Anmerkung 6, 4, p. 147.

4. De coniecturis II, 41.

5. De docta ignorantia II, 4, #115. Henceforth, abridged as DI, Roman numeral for part, Arabic number for chapter. Nicholas of Cusa on Learned Ignorance, trans. by Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis: The Arthur J. Banning Press (1981) 1985). Abridged as Hopkins. See also: Idiota de mente, ch. 4.

6. DI I, 17, #47-48; II, 7, #129.

7. Alexander: Summa Theologiae I-II ing.1, tr.1, s.2, q.1. Augustine: 83 Questiones 2a.74. PL 40, 86.

8. Paul Wilpert, in Vom Nichtanderen, Anmerkung, 4/11, p. 134.

9. DI, II, 3.

10. Wilpert, Vom Nichtandern, Anmerkung 2, 3, p. 115.

11. NA Ch. VI, 21-22, Hopkins, 51.

12. NA Ch. I, 3-4; Hopkins, 31.

13. NA Ch. VI, 20; Hopkins, 49, for one of many instances.

14. NA Ch. X, 36; Hopkins, 65.

15. NA Ch. VI, 20; Hopkins, 49.

16. NA “Propositiones” #12; Hopkins, 143.

17. De venatione sapientiae Ch. 14.

18. DI, II, 2, #104; Hopkins, 92-93. Personally, I prefer the reading “God descended” suggested by Thomas P. McTighe to “a god manqué.” But occasionatus—from ob-cadere (to fall forward or down) remains hard to translate.

19. De coniecturis, I, 13.

20. De visione Dei, Ch. VIII, #133; Jasper Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa's Dialectical Mysticism. Text, Translation and Interpretive Study of De visione Dei (Minneapolis: The Arthur J. Banning Press, 1985), 152-53.

21. Jean-Paul Sartre: Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), 377. Cf., Donald Crosby: The Specter of the Absurd (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), 142-45.

22. De visione Dei, Ch. XV, #67; Hopkins, 194-95.

23. De visione Dei, Ch. VI, #22; Hopkins, 138-41.

24. Ibid.; Hopkins, pp. 138-39.

25. In De coniecturis he envisions similar results from experiments in logic, and even in rhetoric or music. De coniecturis II, 2.

26. DI, I, 12, #33; Hopkins, 62-63.

27. De coniecturis I, 4; and D I, II, 13.

28. De beryllo, Ch. VI. Also: “While the human mind, God's noble similitude, partakes in the measure of its ability in the fertility of the creative nature, it produces from itself, as image of the omnipotent form, rational entities in the likeness of real beings.” De coniecturis I, 3.

29. Idiota de mente, Ch. VII.

30. Idiota de mente, Ch. IV.

31. DI, III, 3, # 198; Hopkins, 131.

32. DI, III, 2, #194; Hopkins, 130.

33. DI, III, 2, #193; Hopkins, 129.

34. DI, III, 3, #202; Hopkins, 133.

35. Ibid.; Hopkins, 132.

36. Karl Jaspers, Anselm and Nicholas of Cusa. The Great Philosophers, 2, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1974), 53-59.

37. Jaspers: Anselm and Nicholas of Cusa, 58.

38. On this critique, cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar: Herrlichkeit. Vol. III/1: In Raum der Metaphysik (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1965), 588-90.