[In the following essay, Gómez reviews Cusanus's efforts to find or create an accurate name for God, tracing his progress from De Docta Ignorantia through the last years of his life.]

If they should say to me: What is his name? what shall I say to them? God said to Moses: I am Who Am.

Ex. 3: 13-14.

THE THEORY OF THE NAMES OF GOD

The Middle Ages had no problem about God. This has been affirmed and denied time and again, and, as usual, there is much to be said on both sides. If the problem is posed in modern terms that is, starting from doubt or question as to belief in God, it must be judged alien to the great Western medieval writers, whether Christian, Moslem, or Jewish. If, however, it is a question of analysis of the proofs of God's existence drawn from natural reason (lumen naturale), of His attributes, His creativity, providence, and attainability by the intellect and heart of man, then not only does such a problem exist, but it is the one great problem of medieval knowledge, since all the speculation of this period, expressed in theological Summas, focuses on God as its object and goal.

It is either disconcerting or comforting for modern man, ridden and beset as he is by the problem of God in its most soul-searing aspect, that of the certitude of His existence, to learn that the most daring attempt to prove God's existence by rigorous reasoning during the Middle Ages, Anselm's “ontological” proof, is made within the context of a devout colloquy with God. One thinks of and speaks about God with faith, piety, and love. If for the benefit of the “gentiles” one sets up a system of rational proofs, of “ways” (viae), this is precisely the purpose: an itinerary which facilitates the non-believer's access to God by discussing the problem from a human rather than a strictly religious viewpoint. In so doing, however, medieval man never presented the problem of God as his own personal problem nor, as does the modern Christian, did he experience such anguish out of concern for his fellowman. As a result he did not make a problem out of the validity of some proofs from reason which actually do not turn out to be “ways” for many of whose mental capability and good faith there is no reason to doubt.

If strictly speaking there is no problem of God felt as a personal situation or out of concern for others, there was indeed a problem for medieval man, that of naming God. This seemingly unimportant question has produced repercussions on a wide systematic scale. It seems a challenge made to God, an impossible undertaking for man. From the time of Moses the answer was sought to the question: “What is your name?” The name was hidden by a jealous God in the evasive answer, “I am Who am,” that is, “What my name is you shall not know. Whenever you wish to name me before the people rest content with saying: ‘He who refuses to give his name,’ simply ‘He who is,’ Yahweh.” Rather than being a real name, “Yahweh” conceals God's real name. It remains the name or the non-name of the God of Israel.

We need not recur to strict “henotheism” to explain this effort by Moses to wrest His name from God, as if the word ‘God’ used in the passage: “the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham. …” expressed merely a generic notion and had need of limitation in view of the gods whose names were well-defined and known to the “other” peoples. Yahweh is always God in his special providence over the Jewish people.

It is to be noted, too, that the oriental mind, and, it might be said, other cultures, even all cultures to a certain degree, give great importance to names. A name is, as it were, a means to mastery of things. When pronounced, it exercises a definite influence over them. It is not a mere conventional sign but a quintessence of the meaning of what is named. So it is that the names imposed on children in the Bible on solemn occasions are always definitive, involve a destiny, a prophecy, a special design of God. When the name refers to the deity it has the virtue of evoking or invoking His power in behalf of the one who pronounces it. Moses, of course, did not inquire into God's name out of simple curiosity, but that he might have a guarantee of the outcome of his mission and a motive for winning the confidence of those who received his message.

Returning to the Middle Ages, let us first establish that there really was a preoccupation with the name of God. It might be said that they were concerned to lay hold of this God through the instrumentality of the mind. They were not trying to prove His existence but were consumed with the desire to possess Him. They endeavored not to define Him theoretically but to contemplate and delight in Him. This contemplative aspect was not complementary to rational speculation; rather it was the latter's source and motivation. First came the desire to savor God (sapere Deum), then intellectual apprehension of His being, as a way (via) the better to savor Him. This we find in the Fathers, especially Augustine, and, following him, writers of the Middle Ages who used Anselm as their example. Subsequent scholastic speculation never dried up this spring; rather from time to time contemplation became the primary concern.

Medieval man, like Moses, ran into the aporia of a jealous God who hides himself. It is then that efforts are made to name God. The starting point is the treatise of Pseudo-Dionysius On the Divine Names, an initial though basic attempt. It will be the “way” along which all medieval thought will travel. Its fundamental assertion is that no name is adequate for God. He has not willed to reveal His own name, i.e., His essence. So the common word ‘God,’ even apart from any generic or henotheistic sense, is only a human word which of itself is practically inexpressive. By it we signify or indicate God from without. We in no way penetrate His being. The initial or rudimentary aspect lies in the examination and analysis of human names in order to find out whether they are applicable to God.

Names are applied to things or qualities. The latter, the adjectival, are more important than the substantive for defining the divine perfections. However, even abstracting from every concrete situation of this substance, of this being, this good, wise, powerful being, in order to attain to the inconcreteness of pure designations such as substance, being, life, goodness, beauty, we find that these formulas are nonetheless stamped with finiteness, due to the implicit reference to created things of which they are originally attributes. Names in the Pseudo-Dionysius are names that have validity immediately to define beings of this world. To apply them to God, therefore, there was need of a formal affirmative, negative, and superlative artifice. When we affirm of God A, (A = the name of some finite thing or quality) our predication falls so short that it becomes false. When we deny of God A, our denial is true, but our predication says nothing positive about God. When we predicate A of God to a superlative degree, our assertion is true but vague. The above may be expressed:

God is A (false)
God is non-A (true but empty)
God is Super-A (true but vague)

Medieval scholasticism, when confronted with this immediate use of human names all freighted with finitude, all charged with inadequacy because of divine transcendency, began to seek out a name or definition of God which would express inadequacy and transcendence, not by means of a merely verbal artifice, namely, that of correcting an already extant meaning, but by means of a complex meaningful content that would correspond to God's unicity. They sought a name that would be unique and proper, though still inadequate; one that would, while sufficiently expressive of that inadequacy, be indicative of the corrective and superlativizing movement which the mind must make to transcend the created order. Along with the purely “negative” theology, the theology of the “cloud” or of “darkness” of the mystics, which still remained as the background for all medieval thought, there appeared doctrinal, rigorously scientific formulas.

Thus appeared unadorned, rational formulas which were Aristotelian rather than Augustinian, i.e., which appealed to reason more than to faith, such as ens per se, per se ipsum (Anselm), principium omnium, (Albertus Magnus), per se, necesse esse, actus purus (Thomas Aquinas), ens absolutum, actualissimum (Bonaventure), actus purus, agens absolute (Duns Scotus), etc. Even though the mystical and the rational approaches are not incompatible, it is hard to believe that such dry terms enhanced devotion among the doctors of Paris. Formulas such as these are intended to give to God's name greater logical precision and richer meaning. Though they may be said to be more adequate in comparison with mystical formulas, what they gain in precision they lose in that vividness of expression so dear to the human heart. They risk becoming self-sufficient, propositiones in se, lacking in the adaptability of names. Though they are the clue to the mystery, the clue has become as impenetrable as the mystery itself. Actually they are not names—unless their inspiration has been contemplation rather than mere theological speculation. This, we believe, is true in the case of Nicholas of Cusa, whose fifth centenary (1464-1964) has reawakened wide interest in his highly personal thought.

THE NAMES OF GOD IN THE WORK OF CUSA

Nicholas of Cusa, ever original, is especially so here, even in the most external aspect of divine nomenclature. He ingenuously congratulates himself in his last work, De Apice Theoriae, on having found at long last the best name for God, one that can “longe aptius nominare illud … quam aliud quodcumque vocabulum,” and solemnly declares that it contains “omnem praecisionem speculativam.”¹

From this it might be thought that his speculative progress is geared to ever ascending goals in seeking out a more appropriate way of naming God. Cusanus, however, warns us that the name of God will never be a goal. It resembles rather the way that leads the pilgrims to the city. The road will never be the name of the city to which one goes.²

Before we trace the most characteristic steps on this pilgrimage to the city that is God, it would be well to be aware of the fact that Cusanus does not seem very much interested in utilizing the scholastic theory of names or common terms, following the classical division into univocal, equivocal, and analogous, with which, of course, he was acquainted. Though the above division furnished a suitable basis for using those names of God which have a transcendental import, the mystics either did not advert to it or refused to accept it. In regard to these common words the attitude of “negative” theology prevailed: a fear lest, when these terms were applied to God, He would be revered not as an infinite God but rather as a creature, and such an attitude would be idolatrous.³ It may have been thought that all attempts to particularize the meaning of a word as applied to God would not eliminate the danger of confusing the two orders, the transcendent and the finite, brought into relation by means of a common term such as being, life, substance, the true, etc. Hence it was that they attacked the problem with a resolve to make a radical distinction which would safeguard the “properness” or exclusiveness of the name of God.

All the basic aspects of this “nomenclature” proper to God that were successively formulated by Nicholas of Cusa are contained in the first of his works, De Docta Ignorantia, which is also the source of his subsequent writings. These aspects are substantially two: on the one hand, transcendence, by which all and every implication of finiteness is removed from God; on the other, immenence, or rather, presence, by which the divine power directed toward the whole created order is affirmed. God is above all, in both senses: beyond all and the source of all. This concerns the meaning of the name, objectively speaking. Subjectively speaking, i.e., with respect to the attitude of the one naming, there is likewise a double and paradoxical dimension. First, there is ignorance, the recognition of God's inaccessibility to every created intellect; secondly, there is the conviction that the admission of such ignorance is precisely the way, the only way, to reach unreachably the unreachable, to comprehend incomprehensibly the incomprehensible, as our author puts it. This is precisely the secret of “learned ignorance”: a name that is not named, and a knowledge that is not knowledge. This goal, which seems like a product of mystical dreaming, is what Nicholas of Cusa is going to achieve in a deliberately scientific spirit avid for accuracy.

1. MAXIMUM-MINIMUM. UNITY

The De Docta Ignorantia begins with the theory of maximum and minimum. At first sight it appears to be a quantitative concept, but this is only the façade. It is the methodological device that is most efficacious for placing God beyond all finite denomination.

The “maximum” as used here does not mean “the greatest of a series,” at the end of which, at the summit, is that which is greater than what precedes. Nicholas indicates by this term his intention to go beyond every degree, to get outside of every series. He emphasizes this by adding “absolute.” Properly speaking, what we have here is not an order of magnitude; rather the very concept of magnitude, that is, greatness, is excluded when it is correlative to smallness. Excluded in general, too, is all that implies “excess” or “being exceeded” that is, something great that is “greater than” or something small that is “less than.”⁴ The maximum is not “the greatest” but “the maximally great.” Its characteristic is not magnitude but maximality, which places it outside the order of degree, either comparative or correlative, and thus it is that God is “the absolute”: “ipsa absoluta maximitas, quae est Deus benedictus.”⁵

“Maximum,” then, is equivalent to immutability or to stability, as opposed to mobility of the other order. It is called “maximum,” because it cannot be greater, and yet by this very fact neither can it be less, for to be less is to be in the mobile and correlative order just as to be greater. It follows, then, that if God is the “absolute maximum” he is equally the “absolute minimum.” In Him maximum and minimum coincide. This does not mean that there are no beings lesser than God, but that He is outside every comparative order, and that everything that is said to be “less than” is said to be so relatively to a greater term within the comparative series. God is not God by being a degree above the highest real or possible creature. For Nicholas, such a being, a finite absolute maximum, is an absurdity, an impossibility. One may possibly speak of a quantitas maxima actu which may be “the greatest” of a given series; but it will not be the absolute maxima. God alone is the “incomparable” absolutely.

This maximality of God can now be joined to any positive predicate expressed in common terms without risk of contamination by the finite. God is the maxime esse, or the maxima veritas. The stress does not fall on the second term as with common predications but on the exclusive note maximality, which is equivalent to transcendence. The name maximum expresses better than any other nameable being the maximality and the unnameableness of God.⁶ As a divine name it fulfills the requirement of being both proper and exclusive: it places God apart from everything finite and does so by virtue of the meaning of the word itself with no need of a superlative additive. Nor does it confine itself to delimiting the reality of God from without. It penetrates into His essence and expresses an attribute logically consonant with His other divine attributes. “The simply maximum is necessarily and so is absolute necessity. Further, it has been demonstrated that but one absolute maximum exists. … The maximum in act is necessarily the principle and end of all that is finite.”⁷

All these attributes can be summed up in that of the divine Unity. If maximality is a concept suggested to Cusanus because of the mathematical, scientific, Renaissance bent of his thought, unity, on the other hand, is the nerve center of all Neoplatonic thinking, and this was the atmosphere in which Nicholas moved. “Unity,” as employed by him, in its proper metaphysical sense never means mere numerical abstraction uniformly repeated in individuals. Unity is the totality of being, a synonym for plenitude in every order. Thus defined, unity is necessarily unique. For unity that is repeated or multiple, in this plenitude of metaphysical meaning, would have as little sense for Nicholas as a plurality of total sums of a definite aggregate of addenda.

Neoplatonism was used to a synthetic view of the world, according to which things are parts of an aggregate rather than separate beings. The true and only being would be the totality, the cosmic system. Christianity corrected this concept by applying the full meaning of totality and consequently of unicity of being to God in his transcendent singularity. All else, being under God, is not unity but its opposite, number. Neoplatonic number as a metaphysical concept is not a sum of unities but a broken up unity, as it were a disintegrated totality, a building in ruins. Though it retains unity, it is of a degraded nature. Each broken unity is a multitude, number. Since every unity is thus a version of primitive unity, there is room in the world of being for an indefinite multiplication of imperfect unities, all unequal. That they are all unequal follows from the fact that two finite aggregates entirely equal would be an absurdity, just as would two equal total ruins of one and the same house. Since actually each degradation is total, the whole is unity but in diverse form, broken and defective. The multiplication of beings is never conceived of as a production of pieces cut according to the same pattern (abstract universal), but as varied expressions of a unique reality. It is not so much a question of multiplying beings as of presenting diverse modes or partial aspects of the unique totality. Hence the distinction is never merely numerical but also qualitative. Everything is bound by the “greater” and the “lesser,” and convergence toward the maximum, always unattainable, links the whole aggregate in an organic solidarity that does not hinder but rather includes on a finite scale opposition and contrariety. Yet, since the modes are diverse among themselves, they enhance the aspects by which one penetrates more and more into unattainable unity.

This is the root of the great Cusan theory of the coincidence of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum), which is nothing but an expression of maximality, of absoluteness, and of the totalizing simplicity of divine unity. There follows from this, which is a theory of God, the theory, with respect to human knowledge, of reason (ratio) as an organ perceptive of diversity and opposition, and of understanding (intellectus) as an organ perceptive of unity. It is a kind of transfer of transcendence and of finitude to human knowledge. In accordance with Neoplatonic thinking, a level of being corresponds to a level of knowing. The Nous is simplicity of being and of knowing, over and above the variety in which, in its operations of informing and knowing, the World Soul moves. Reason is for us the faculty of perceiving, on a proper human level, being in all its variety and opposition. Just as the eye perceives the visible in the world precisely by distinguishing colors (without a variety of colors, the world would not be visible to us), so reason knows both things and the world by discerning, that is, by opposites. With this discerning reason we never depart from the order of contrariety and opposition. Nonetheless, the ultimate and true meaning of the world, of its being, is unity. The intellect—a kind of mystical organ for Nicholas—draws nearer to this unity by denying or surpassing the plane of reason. This is done in order to glimpse vaguely or to intuit under a rational obscurity that point of union toward which all things are oriented. It is a knowledge-limit that might better be called in mystical terminology un-knowledge, the unique prerogative of contemplative spirits who imitate in their way the transcendency of God over finitude, of unity over multiplicity.

Nicholas has recourse to his favorite geometrical symbols in order to illustrate this intuitively. Man of the Renaissance as he was, alert to the scientific functionalism of modern mathematics, he discovered in these symbols relationships of infinitesimal progression and limit remarkably helpful for making visible and concrete the order of transcendence on the double plane of being and of knowledge.

We shall never escape magnitude, plurality, and opposition by reason, just as a polygon inscribed within a circle never becomes the enveloping circumference, no matter how often its sides are multiplied and reduced in size. The circumference represents transcendence. It is not the last polygon, the one with the greatest number of sides possible, which is never attained. It is something that is beyond the possibility of every polygon. It is another order, not the maximum degree of the same line. With transcendence thus safeguarded, it is clear that the circumference is suggested as the goal or end of every polygon therein inscribed. Within it the opposition of sides is reconciled with the continuity of the curve. It represents a simple unity in which plurality and diversity are reconciled. Thus God appears to the intellect as the coincidentia oppositorum. Not only does coincidence appear as the terminus, it is also the principle and the origin. God is the synthesis—complicatio—the not yet unfolded unity, pregnant with all the finite variety which will be nothing but the unfolding, the explicatio, of God. It is with this concept of participation that the cycle of Nicholas' attempt at an adequate naming of God is concluded.

Nicholas employs another geometric illustration which is perhaps more concentrated and clearer. To illustrate the complex qualities of maximality, transcendence, and participation he uses the curve and the rectilinear tangent. The curve of the circle now represents the changeable element and the tangent from the circumference the absolute element. The curve will never become the tangent, although as we increase the diameter the curve of the circumference will become more like the tangent. This straight line is the unattainable goal of the curve in its twofold maximality: it is maximally a curve due to the magnitude of its diameter, and minimally a curve, by reason of the very fact that it is a straight line. Hence the straight line is considered as maximally and minimally curved: cum maxime et minime curvum non sit nisi rectum.⁸ In other words the tangent is but the curve of the circumference elevated, transcended to its maximum degree, in whatever direction (+ or -) it be. Curve and straight line represent two worlds which can never coincide but are related in such a way that the curve is now regarded as a defective straight line, which approaches closer to its exemplar the less its curvature: transcendence together with participation. As the curve is less a curve (or more a curve), as it approaches more on any side the maximum of the tangent, the more it participates in it.⁹

Another example expresses the same point even more simply. The finite straight line, the greater it is, seems so much the more to participate in the infinity of the infinitely maximal line.¹⁰ Transcendent maximality participated in by limited magnitude is symbolized in all these examples.

2. POSSEST

Nicholas made three additional attempts at naming God with a proper name in the last four years of his life, twenty years after De Docta Ignorantia. These attempts constitute the central subject of four late dialogues.

The first of these names is Possest, a strange combination of posse and esse. Nicholas likes to make up new words when he realizes that his concepts are new and that if expressed in ordinary terms their originality would be jeopardized. At first glance it looks as if he wants to express the same idea as the scholastics with the Aristotelian actus purus: an actuality that excludes all potency, an existential necessity and an essential fullness, an adequation between potentia or posse and actus or est: God conceived as the goal that resolves the dialectic tension found in all finite being between pretension to actuality without limit and contraction into this being and this existential sign. In God the tension between essence and facticity would be overcome by unlimited actuality in virtue of His essence.

This is true, but it is not all that Nicholas wants to express by Possest. First, actuality, as simple facticity, though it is not excluded, does not have much import here. Nor, of course, does it have the drama given it by modern existentialists. The est of the Cusan's Possest is free from such dramatics. We repeat that the existence of God is not a problem for medieval man and that, when he seeks out a name for God, His existence is assumed. The necessity and indefectibility of His existence, too, does not have to be stressed, for the hypothesis of a non-existing God, either in the past or future, hardly enters into the discussions of the time. Rather they discussed necessity in as much as it is a relative attribute, an extrinsic condition of the internal and external possibility of the created order.

For Cusanus, Possest is primarily and fundamentally a name descriptive of the essence, the unique essence, of God. When we speak thus we do not wish, of course, to ascribe to Nicholas an essentialist concept of being or of God in the modern sense of the term. Our essentialist concept of Possest does not detract in any way from the basic existential attitude prevalent throughout the Middle Ages, for whom there was no doubt, no problem, concerning the effective reality of being and of God as a fact. Essentialism and actualism are not opposed in that climate of thought as essence and existence, but rather as real, factitious, or possible essence and some qualification of that essence, e.g., its necessity, absoluteness, omnicomprehensibility, plenitude, etc. Possest means simply that God is that which He can be, without restriction, that is, that He is now and forever all that He can be. This “all that He can be,” if literally understood, is ambiguous, for it may mean “that which can be” in general, or “that which God can be,” without prejudice to the essential amplitude of His being.

A literal rendering of Possest as Actus purus (in an Aristotelian sense) results in an equivocation that is not easily removed or, at least, that demands a complicated reduction of formal Aristotelian or Platonic pluralism to the omnicomprehensive unity of potentiality actualized in God. This is not so, however, for the Neoplatonic Christian sense in which Nicholas uses it. For him it is more immediate and evident that potentiality in an unqualified sense means omni-potentiality.¹¹ For here one starts out from a full and total unity, an absolute One without fissures of number or plurality. Created unity does not negate unity, rather it debases it so that all created being affirms in a lower degree the total unity, not that each affirms its own unity but that all affirm the same unique unity. The infinite variety of unities of finite plurality consequently does not have any other meaning than to be the very being of God in its own way, that is, ever deficient and imperfect. The definition of all finite beings is the very definition of God, in all unequally fulfilled, in all perfectible. There is consequently in all a being with a minus of being, which is precisely all that is wanting in each (in an infinite degree or rather outside of all degree) in order to be God. In the last analysis, every finite being is what it is in such a way that it can be more than it is, or, it is never what it can be, it never fully fulfills its own definition, so that, to put it in the simplest and most basic terms, it is not (truly and fully) what it is. The creature is “that which is not what it can be; absolutely speaking, it is not. Only God is perfectly and completely.”¹²

The distinctiveness of God, expressed in the meaning of Possest, should now be clear. God, the unique, is all that He can be. In virtue of the totality and fullness characteristic of unity in the Neoplatonic sense, God, being all that He can be, is also everything that can be at all, absolutely speaking. He alone fills out the definition of “can be.”

Let it be granted that a certain expression signifies by simple signification all that is affirmed by the following proposition: posse est, that is, “Can be itself is.” And because that which is, is so in act, therefore “can be” is equivalent to “can be actually.” Let it therefore be called Possest.¹³

Nicholas congratulates himself on the result of this naming process: “Here we have a name close enough to God if we take into account the resources of our human concepts of Him.”¹⁴ It should be clear, moreover, from what has preceded, that this name implies a relative aspect, a connection with the world, to a greater extent than is the case with the Aristotelian formula, Actus purus. Possest looks both to the world and to God. It embraces all the names of created being, it is the name of each and every name: “nomen omnium et singulorum nominum.” It is the form of being, or the form of all formable form, “forma essendi, seu forma omnis formabilis formae.” It is in Aristotelian terms, “actus omnis potentiae.”¹⁵

It is a name apt to raise our minds to speculation beyond all meaning, all reason, all understanding, toward the mystic vision.¹⁶ All posse esse of the creature derives from it, a created posse esse which depends on God, not only in the existential or in the efficient causal order, but primarily in the essential order.¹⁷

3. NON ALIUD

Though there may seem to be a subtle play on words in the dialogue Directio Speculantis seu de Non Aliud and in the summary of it in the De Venatione Sapientiae (c.14), we find there a profound theory. The introductory theme is the definition, the “way” to knowledge. The power of definition is to separate, to set limits to the field of the defined in opposition to that which is not itself, in opposition therefore to the “other.” This may be formulated as follows: “A is no other thing than A” (A = non aliud quam A).

It can be said that the definition itself, expressed in terms of its properly defining elements, merely supplies a material context to that formal, distinguishing schema which is not expressed but assumed. When the latter is made explicit, it might well be an invariable prefix for every definition, including negative, formal, and unreal definitions. If we wish, for instance, to define nothing, we shall say that nothing “is no other thing than” nothing.¹⁸ Similarly, the other “is no other thing than” the other, etc. Curiously, non aliud, differently from other terms, defines itself by itself. It is impossible to avoid tautology when wishing to define it: “Non aliud est non aliud quam non aliud.” It is self-definition and it is the frame which every definition must fit whether explictly or implicitly. Such extraordinary characteristics could not but catch the attention of Cusanus. He glimpsed the possibility of using it to his purpose. Truly in it there is a certain exclusiveness, or transcendence, along with an omnicomprehensiveness, which seemed to provide the best conditions for constructing another “name” of God: He is Non Aliud with respect to the being of every thing.

Immediately one notes an aporia, an obstacle to the application of this device to God. If it be true that non aliud contains a tautology as to what is defined and to its definition, how can it be applied to God without lowering Him to the level of the rest of definable things by the non aliud? It will be necessary to remove a slight grammatical ambiguity which underlies Nicholas' formula and which he himself is at pains to eliminate. Non aliud means identity, and would be equivalent to pure tautology if the grammatical complement were quam (non aliud quam.) He excludes this meaning.¹⁹ There will be no such identity if the grammatical complement is a (non aliud a.) “If God is called Non aliud because he is non aliud in respect to any other thing, it does not follow from this that he is identical with it.”²⁰ “The fact that he is Non aliud with respect to the sky does not mean he is identical with the sky.”²¹

We might be tempted here to accuse Nicholas of juggling meanings. The introduction to the dialogue was seemingly based on the identity and tautology of Non aliud, which he now excludes. But actually for him the “non-otherness” was never simply a tautology. Rather it was an expression of the double meaning which definition involves for a Neoplatonic mentality. Definition not only defines the strictly identical, but also that which is essentially linked to the principal definiendum. There might be at work here an hypothesis of dynamic analogy, which is constantly functioning in his thinking. Actually God is definition, not only of Himself but of all things on account of their intrinsic dependence on Him.²² In this sense, in the Neoplatonic sense, and not in that of identity (for that is clearly excluded, due to God's transcendence, throughout negative theology) God is Non aliud in respect to anything beside Himself.

This is again the coincidentia oppositorum expressed in a different way. God is prior to all opposition, to all “otherness” that divides and confronts finite things. Under God every being is modelled in its essence as an aliud with respect to all the rest, not merely something distinct numerically, but a diverse being, opposed, “another.” The finite world is the kingdom of otherness and the opposition of differences. In God alone is being is not opposed to aliud, for He precedes it and defines it. From this flows another reason for not attributing to God names of creatures. To say of God that He is immortal is to exclude from Him the perfection of the mortal, and God is the being of both before they were opposed to each other. It is necessary, then, in order that names may have validity for God, to take them in that meaning they have before they are concretized in things that are distinct and opposed to each other. Only the name Non aliud has this quality. It is apt to name being in its original universality before all opposition.

But in overcoming all opposition it is appropriate to go to the point where being itself has not yet been opposed to non-being, to a point anterior to the distinction between being and nothing. Cusanus does not shrink from this amplitude of Non aliud; rather he welcomes it openly: “Otherness and nothing are not in opposition to God, since He precedes and defines nothing itself. For ‘nothing’ is ‘no-other-thing’ than ‘no-thing.’”²³ And in corroboration he cites the Pseudo-Dionysius: “Most subtly did the divine Dionysius say that God is all in all things and nothing in nothing.”

This inclusion of the concept of nothing within a predicamental and finite framework is not new, nor will it end with Cusanus. The question of nothingness will be discussed in modern times and in terms remarkably similar to those employed by the mystics and philosophers of the Middle Ages. Here we have another confirmation of the perennial character of Christian philosophical thought, or, to put it in a different way, its presence in a contemporary position of this problem seemingly quite alien to the sensus christianus (which is in final analysis the sensus Dei). Not only the Pseudo-Dionysius but also Cusanus assume that we move within the being that is God or something of God, and that this fundamental being is not attained by our names and concepts of differentiating reason. By means of them we affirm or deny, not being, but things; and when we place a negative sign on being itself, this is only an artifice by which we have the illusion of going beyond the finite order, without, however, succeeding in going so. All our denominating power is contracted to this order.

This is the other face of negative theology: if we are unable to name God, the absolute being, neither can we erase Him; our word simply does not reach Him. On the other hand, however, while we are not able to name Him, he is always involved in our language, not as a possible term of designation, but as its condition and source. We may say, interpreting if not repeating Cusanus, that the Absolute Being, or a derivative of it, in its generality is given to human language and to the human spirit not as an object before it but as a fluid medium in which it moves and off which it lives, so that to destroy being by human language is as illusory as to destroy air by breathing or water by the swishings of the tails of the fish that swim therein. In the etymologies of the various languages it is readily noticeable that in the word nihil, nada, rien, niente, “nothing,” there is a clear reference to the definite reality of things accessible to man. The origin of nihilum is typical: it equals nec hilum, hilum being the black part on the top of a bean, and is a expression of smallness, of something smaller than what is insignificant. The original force of negative words is, then, to diminish, to take away from man manageable things, not being itself.

Applying this linguistic digression to our present problem, we shall say that when we apparently deny all, and in fact deny things only as reduced to their finite outline, we come nearer to pure being, to the unattainable, the inconceivable; for the mystics, this means nearer to God. This is the profound and true sense in which God is nothing. When, by reflection and abstract intuition, we eliminate the objects from the landscape, there remains in all its purity that same landscape, space, light, and atmosphere. It is a great truth that things conceal being from us, that entities conceal esse.

4. POSSE IPSUM

It will seem surprising at first that this last formula should turn out for Nicholas to be the best, though seemingly less apt than the original Possest, that forceful synthesis of possibility and actuality. If Non aliud was born of subtle reflection on definition, Posse ipsum has a still more primitive origin, namely the question that is asked about any thing at all: “What?” (Quid?). Quid, already raised to a metaphysical category in scholastic philosophy in the form of quidditas, equivalent to essence, is now utilized by Cusanus in his attempt to name and define God.

In accordance with the Neoplatonic practice of ever searching for something more universal and more simple, upon which all that follows rests, he investigates the condition of this quid in every question, in its most universal and general sense. He thinks he has found it in that which is always presumed when something is questioned, the very ability to question, or, more properly, the ability to be made the question with some meaning, i.e., the very capacity that gives meaning to every interrogating quid.²⁴

We have already adverted to the fact that our point of departure is a pure formal category. The human asking of the question quid? opens up a possibility, the very ability to be, which furnishes an objective basis for all possibility or real quiddity. Posse ipsum, despite its apparent meaning, does not remain an open possibility, but is rather the subsistence, the underlying supposit (hypostasis) that gives consistency to things: “ipsam rerum hypostasim seu subsistentiam.” It is the most subsistent of all: “Posse ipsum … quo nihil subsistentius esse potest.” It is the subsistent quiddity, or rather, subsistent quiddity is nothing else but Posse ipsum.²⁵ It is the most perfect possible: “Quo nihil perfectius esse potest.”²⁶

Nicholas states explicitly that he is more satisfied with Posse ipsum than with Possest or any other word: “nihil melius ipsum nominabit, nec aliud clarius, verius, aut facilius nomen dabile credo.”²⁷ Its easiness to be understood is significantly exemplified in a child, an adolescent, or an uncultured man, who cannot be ignorant of their basic positive capacities when they say: “I can eat, I can run, I cannot lift a heavy rock.” Nor can they be ignorant of the fact that in order that a thing be done it must be able to be done. The primitive and the original here is stressed. We arrive at a tautology here again, as in the case of non aliud, for, in order that a thing can be done it must be able to be done. “No one of sound mind will doubt that nothing can do or be done without the very possibility itself.”²⁸ The term posse, grammatically presupposed for every reality done or to be done and, in general, “possible” (derived from posse) functions similarly to non aliud, which, it will be recalled, was a universal prefix to all definition. But over and above the grammatical or the formal, their meaning opens out into the order of being. All the qualifications that concern things concern even more the capacity itself which is presumed. “If something can be known, nothing is so known as the ability itself, if something can be easy, nothing is easier than the ability itself; if something can be certain, nothing is more certain than the ability itself, and so nothing is more prior, more powerful, more solid, more substantial, more glorious, and so on.”²⁹ Nicholas ends up with an idealization of posse, which reminds us of Plato's idealization of the forms. He does not conceal from us the fact that he has passed the Paschal time of 1463 most fruitfully in contemplating God in the light of this new and strange name.

It is hardly necessary to add that nothing is further from the significance of this name for God than the empty or merely potential attribution which the word posse at first suggests. Posse here stands for active potency, the dynamic wellspring whence all reality flows. As Non aliud, it extends this potency to every sign of possibility, even to that expressed in negative formulas.

The theory of posse, as applied to actual, finite realities, is developed in detail in De Venatione Sapientiae, which is prior to De Apice Theoriae. It contains something interesting and revealing for the understanding of this eleventh hour Posse ipsum. Cusanus describes posse in its three phases with a certain Trinitarian preoccupation which reveals Lullian influences: posse facere, posse fieri, and, combining both, posse factum. The order is symptomatic. The beginning is not posse fieri or pure possibility, abstract, airy or autonomous, but posse facere, the source itself. “Before the power to be done is nothing but the power to do.”³⁰ A posse fieri that might well be lost in an absolute possibility, a certain posse a se (replica of ens a se)—a temptation for all rationalism—has been avoided by Nicholas because of his Christian sense of God and because of the very Trinitarian structure of the Deity. The active potency, which is omnipotent, is the ultimate fount, not only of posse factum, but of posse fieri.

In terms of the scholastic discussion which occurred later concerning the ultimate basis for the intrinsic possibility of things, it must be said that according to Cusanus the foundation is divine omnipotence, not as an attribute formally distinct from wisdom or goodness or any other attribute, but an attribute that seemed to him ideal for expressing the very essence of God, as a posse, a potency, that dominates being and is being itself. For him, God as the source of being has nothing in common with an objective order of essences that would be, according to Plato, abstract types of reality, an unfolding of an impersonal Logos “a se.” This Platonic concept was automatically rejected by the advent of a religious concept of God, now Christian but formerly Jewish. Now a possibility, or a possible order, a posse fieri, prior to posse facere, is inconceivable. There is no reason nor any basis for this posse facere other than itself, its own posse subsistens, active and enterprising. God in order to conceive things does not presuppose them already constituted in their essential possible characteristics. To understand them is to “essentialize them,” to determine their metaphysical contour, their posse fieri, which is for Cusanus not before nor after but simultaneous with their posse esse.³¹

In our opinion, we have here touched upon the most noteworthy aspect of this last endeavor to name God. In his previous attempts Nicholas of Cusa tended to prefer, without disregarding other characteristics, to define the name and the reality of God in terms of essence, or reality, statically, as it were. The Maximum was the formula for God as the absolute, the transcendent; Possest was the formula for fullness, totality and actuality; Non aliud was the formula for complex unity, indistinctly turned towards the variety, otherness, and opposition of the created. Posse ipsum, on the other hand, pretends not so much to define an essence as to describe a dynamic order, of which the principle is God and the created is His expansion. If previously God was presented to us above all as He is in Himself and as He is in respect to His works, with the respective points of view carefully determined, now He is given to us as God originating being, not as a being who is and then originates other beings of a lower degree, but as an “origination” that is already beginning to be an origin, an active potency, in God himself, as Posse ipsum, whose essence is potency, a universal potency not contracted to this or that being, but as the already subsisting totality which realizes in itself all its possibility, and then manifests itself in a derivative and limited manner, in this or that particular field. Posse ipsum, which is God, and posse which supports the possibility and actuality of all inferior beings, would not be two posse's of independent orders, but linked together as a Posse which is plenitude and a posse which is the reflection and manifestation thereof.

The bond linking the world and God, its connection and dependence, acquire in this formula special contemplative import and brilliance. Nicholas regards it fondly as a wondrous stimulus for elevating the contemplative soul from the creature to the Creator, from the image to the model. For Cusanus, who differs in this from other medieval mystics, the world is not a springboard for leaping up to God; rather it is the best mirror reflecting His countenance. As a man of the Renaissance, Nicholas takes this world seriously and desires to know it with a mathematical precision (this is confirmed by his experiments on measure conducted with weights in his De Staticis Experimentis) that is a prelude or beginning of modern physics.

This practical and mystical side dominates the last portion of his literary message in De Apice Theoriae. He intentionally relates this short work to previous ones, De Dato Patris Luminum, De Visione Dei, and De Quaerendo Deum, although he protests that here lies the very quintessence of all his sermons and writings in general. In the works alluded to, the topic is precisely the art of seeing God through creatures, of transcending the variety and multiplicity of the world in order to behold, to discover, the unity of God which is reflected therein, and in which at the same time He conceals Himself—in a word, the art of contemplating all creation sub specie Dei.

From this height he deliberately descends, for the purpose of corroborating his theory, to the visual scheme developed principally in De Dato Patris Luminum and De Quarendo Deum. Light is considered to be, as it were, the source of all color (understood in the perspective of the physical concepts of the time). Light is in all color. Its nature is to diffuse itself purely (puriter), that is, without division or separation within itself. The entire being of color is produced by a descent of light.³²

Light is the universal form of all that is visible, that is, of all color, for color is the contracted reception of light, so that light does not mix with things but is received descendingly according to a certain degree on a descending scale.

From the varied giving and communicating of itself rises the variety of colors. Color is not light, but light thus received, contracted.³³

In De Quarendo Deum the parallel theory of human sight is developed. Human sight is regarded as the cause and the king in the domain of the visible. Light, as said above it, was the substance from the communication of which color arose. Sight is now the potency able to make color visible. Light, the physical factor, and sight, the subjective potency, exert on color a parallel and combined domination. If from the region of color one wished to put a name on sight, he would come up against an impossibility, for color possesses nothing of the name or the essence of sight.³⁴

In its entire concept it would meet with nothing similar to sight, because no concept could be presented to it without color; … if it should be asked of those visible things how they conceive their cause, they would reply that their master … which is sight, is something optimum and most beautiful. … And when they set out to form the concept of this …, they turn to color, without which they cannot fashion the concept.³⁵

Color, derivative of light, vassal of sight, is never either light or sight. Both are unattainable in themselves and unnameable from color. The latter cannot go out of itself in order to conceive its principles which transcend it. Nonetheless, sight moves as in its kingdom in the terrain of color, and light becomes visible only in color. Color is its manifestation.

Now we are in a position to understand clearly the entire reach, theoretical and contemplative, that Nicholas wishes to give Posse ipsum as a divine name. As light is manifested in colors, though not visible in itself, so God is omnipotent and omnipresent in all created beings, so that these beings are but “manifestations of that Posse ipsum.”³⁶ The modes are diverse, the quiddity is one (“quidditatem autem non posse variam esse”), because it is but Posse showing itself in a multiform way: “posse varie apparens.” Being, living, understanding, that is, the whole gamut of being, is but a variation of the unique Posse, which is the posse of all posse.³⁷

The contemplative power is nourished by this strange tension of the soul, turned on the one hand toward the kingdom of the finite, where God shows Himself, and necessitated on the other to surpass it constantly, since the more it longs to see Him the more it recognizes Him as invisible, “because he who sees the invisible clarity of light in things visible will truly grasp it.”³⁸ It is the final consecration of the docta ignorantia to know how to see by a non-seeing, to know by an unknowing, by a transcending. The created variety can be considered as much an unveiling as a veil of God. To remain on the surface of things is to break unity, or to remain in a broken unity, to be unaware of or to be blind to unity. If by an intuitive effort of the mind we go beyond variety, not denying it but following its lead toward convergence of maximality, then unity will absorb our attention. It will be, as it were, a reconstructed unity, recovered or regained, and then indeed it will be God all in all (in omnibus omnia):

Every creature is a manifestation which participates in the showing forth of the Son in a varied and contracted way. … some more obscure, others more clear—all reveal Him according to a diversity of theophanies, or appearances of God.³⁹

Effort and sacrifice are demanded in this pursuit after wisdom, after the traces of this Posse ipsum in the present life. But to renounce the goal because it is unattainable would be to renounce the most profound impulse of our living spirit. Here is the source of our interior desire (principium mentalis desiderii), which every mind seeks, and it is also its crown and end, for “nothing further can be desired beyond Posse itself.”⁴⁰

Notes

1. De Apice Theoriae (Paris, 1514), I, fol. 219^r and 220^v.

2. “Sicut via peregrinantem ad civitatem dirigens, non est nomen civitatis.” De Non Aliud (Leipzig: Meiner, 1944), c. 2.

3. “Sine illa [theologia negativa] Deus non coleretur ut Deus infinitus, sed potius ut creatura, et talis cultura idolatria est.” De Docta Ignorantia (Leipzig: Meiner, 1932), I, c. 26.

4. De Docta Ign., I, c. 3.

5. De Docta Ign., I, c. 5.

6. “Esse maxime et innominabiliter per nomen maximum super omne esse nominabile illi convenire necesse est.” De Docta Ign., I, c. 6.

7. “Maximum simpliciter necessario esse, ita quod sit absoluta necessitas. Est autem ostensum non posse nisi unum esse maximum simpliciter. … Necessario est maximum actu omnium finitorum principium et finis.” Ibid.

8. De Docta Ign., I, c. 18.

9. “Quando curvum est minus curvum, ut est circumferentia majoris circuli, plus participat de rectitudine.” Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. “Posse simpliciter dictum est omne posse.” Dialogus de Possest (Paris, 1514), I, fol. 176^r.

12. “Quae non est quod esse potest, non est simpliciter. Solus Deus perfecte et complete est.” Ibid.

13. “Esto enim quod aliqua dictio significet simplicissimo significato, quantum hoc complexum: posse est, scil. quod ipsum posse sit. Et quia quod est, actu est, ideo posse esse est tantum quantum posse esse actu. Puta vocetur Possest.” Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. “Oportet omnia creabilia actu in ejus potestate esse, ut ipse sit formarum omnium perfectissima forma; oportet ipsum omnia esse quae esse possunt, ut sit verissima formalis, seu exemplaris causa.” Ibid., fol. 183^v.

18. “Est enim nihil non aliud quam nihil.” De Venatione Sapientiae (ed. Paris, 1514), c. 14; cf. De Non Aliud, c. 1.

19. “Advertas quomodo Non aliud non significat tantum sicut idem.” De Ven. Sap., ibid.

20. “Si Deus nominetur Non aliud, quia ipse est non aliud ab alio quocumque, propterea non est idem cum aliquo.” Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. “Suiipsius et omnium aliorum definitio.” Ibid.

23. “Cui nec aliud nec nihil opponitur, cum etiam ipsum nihil praecedat et definiat; est enim nihil non aliud quam nihil.” Ibid.

24. “Ideo posse ipsum, sine quo nihil quidquam potest … est ipsum quid quaesitum seu quidditas ipsa, sine qua non potest esse quidquam.” De Apice Theoriae (Paris, 1514), I, fol. 219^r.

25. Ibid., fol. 219^v.

26. Ibid., fol. 219^r-^v.

27. Ibid., fol. 219^v.

28. Ibid.

29. “Nec prius, nec fortius, nec solidius, nec substantialius, nec gloriosius, et ita de cunctis.” Ibid.

30. “Ante posse fieri non est nisi posse facere.” De Ven. Sap., c. 29.

31. “Deus … proprie non intelligit, sed essentiat. … Intelligere non oritur ex rebus, sed res sunt ex ipso.” Ibid., c. 29.

32. “Omnis esse coloris datur per lucem descendentem.” De Dato Patris Luminum (Paris, 1514), c. 2.

33. Ibid.

34. “Nihil attingit de nomine et essentia visus.” De Quaerendo Deum (Paris, 1514), I, fol. 197^v.

35. Ibid., fol. 197^r.

36. “Non videbis omnia entia nisi apparitiones ipsius posse varios modos.” De Apice Theoriae, fol. 219^r.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid., fol. 219^v-220.

39. “Omnis creatura est ostensio participans ostensionem Filii varie et contracte. … Aliae obscurius, … aliae clarius ostendunt eum secundum varietatem theophaniarum, seu apparitionum Dei.” De Dato Patris Luminum, c. 4.

40. “Finem ejusdem desiderii mentalis, quum nihil ultra desiderari possit.” De Apice Theoriae, fol. 220^r.