## 1. Biography



Nicholas of Cusa (Nikolaus Cryfftz or Krebs in German, then Nicolaus
Cusanus in Latin) was born in 1401 in Kues (now Bernkastel-Kues) on
the Moselle River between Koblenz and Trier. He was one of four
children in a bourgeois family. His father, Johan Cryfftz, was a
prosperous merchant who became one of the landed gentry in Trier. The
first record we have of Nicholas' early education comes from his
study of the liberal arts at University of Heidelburg in
1416-17. He then moved to the University of Padua where he
studied canon law, receiving his Doctor of Canon Law in 1423. In Padua
he met the physician and mathematician Paolo Toscanelli, the canonist
Giuliano Caesarini, and the humanists Guarino da Verona and Vittorino
da Feltre.



In 1425 he entered the service of the archbishop of Trier and, as his
secretary, received income from several benefices. By 1426 he was in
Cologne where he may have lectured on canon law, studied philosophy
and theology, and began researches into original source material and
into the annals of German law. There he was able to prove that the
Donation of Constantine was an eighth-century forgery, and he found
manuscripts of Pliny's *Natural History* and of
Plautus' comedies. In Cologne he met Heimerich of Campo, who
introduced him to the writings of Ramon Llull, Albert the Great and
his commentary on Dionysius, and Proclus' commentary on
Plato's *Parmenides*. In 1428 and 1435 Nicholas was
offered positions teaching canon law at the University of Louvain, but
he turned them down to remain in church administration.



Ordained a priest sometime during the 1430s, Nicholas first gained
wider notice for his work as a conciliarist at the Council of Basel.
There he wrote *De concordantia catholica* (1433), arguing for
the authority of the council over that of the pope and stressing the
notions of consent and representation. After the turmoil at Basel
split the council, Nicholas ultimately sided with the papal party and
left the conciliarists. In 1437 he was part of an embassy sent to
Constantinople to seek reconciliation of the Greek Church with Rome.
He reported that, during the voyage home, the insights of *De docta
ignorantia* (1440) came to him as a kind of divine revelation. He
continued as a papal legate to Germany from 1438-48. Named
cardinal in 1446 by Eugenius IV, Cusanus was elevated to that position
in 1448 by Nicholas V and was sent to Germany in 1451 as papal legate
to reform the church.



Nicholas' most important philosophical works were written in the
twenty-four years between the appearance of *De docta
ignorantia* and his death. *De coniecturis*
(1442-43), *De dato patris luminum* (1445), *Apologia
doctae ignorantiae* (1449), *Idiota de sapientia, Idiota de
mente, Idiota de staticis experimentis* (all 1450) were among
important works of the decade from 1440-1450, as were many
sermons and works on mathematics. The final fourteen years of his life
saw the appearance of *De visione Dei* (1453), *De
beryllo* (1458), *De possest* (1460), *De li non
aliud* (1461), *De ludo globi* (1462-63), *De
venatione sapientiae* (1462), *Compendium* (1464) and
*De apice theoriae* (1464), more works on mathematics and many
more sermons. Of particular note are two works he wrote during these
years that reached out to other religions, especially Islam, *De
Pace Fidei* (1453) and *Cribatio Alchorani* (1461).



In 1450 he was named bishop of Brixen in the Tirol. In 1452 he began
active administration in Brixen, but his attempts at reform led to
threats and clashes with Sigismund, the count of Tirol. Many of his
over two hundred sermons date from this time in Brixen, though his
reform efforts there and earlier in Germany mostly failed. Nicholas
finally retreated from the conflict in Brixen to Rome, where he
remained in the papal curia advising Pius II. He died in 1464 in Todi
on his way from Rome to Ancona. His remains were buried in his titular
Church, St Peter in Chains, at Rome; his heart was sent to Kues and
buried in the chapel of the hospice for elderly men there that he
endowed in his will. The hospice survives and his remarkable library
is housed there today.


## 2. Nicholas' Thought



Nicholas of Cusa may arguably be best understood as employing a
Christian Neoplatonic framework to construct his own synthesis of
inherited ideas. His thought witnesses to his own reading in a variety
of predecessors, while side-stepping the methods of the medieval
scholastic *summae* and their typical controversies and
arguments. Trained as a canon lawyer, Nicholas is mostly self-taught
in theology and philosophy; both his ideas and his language may
present some difficulties to contemporary readers. His thought has to
be viewed as a whole, for it works more by correspondences and
parallels between the domains he is interested in expounding than in a
linear fashion or by direct argument. What is noteworthy are the
flexible metaphors he uses as he moves across what we designate today
as ontology, philosophy of mind and epistemology, and philosophical
theology. His metaphors provide some methodological clue to
understanding how Nicholas proposes that we should think God and
creatures together. It is not just that God exceeds our conceptual
reach and grasp as well as our literal language. The asymmetry between
God and creatures also provides a measure or norm for the
appropriateness of any metaphor exploring or attempting to explain
their relationship.


### 2.1 Metaphysics and ontology



Nicholas of Cusa's most complete set of proposals about what is
real occurs in his best-known work of 1440, *De docta
ignorantia*: *On Learned Ignorance*. Here Cusanus addresses
the four categorical realities traditionally found in Christian
thought: God, the natural universe, Christ and human beings. *On
Learned Ignorance* devotes its first book to God, the second to
the universe and a third to the God-man, Jesus Christ. While its order
mirrors the outflow from God and return to him, this book does not
distinguish philosophy and theology as contemporary thinkers might,
but unites them in a single overview of Neoplatonic Christian
reality.



Nicholas begins with a single trope or symbol to lay out the parallels
between his teachings in the three books, that of the
"maximum." God is the absolute Maximum; the universe is a
created image of God, the "contracted" or restricted
maximum. Christ unites the first two as the Maximum at once
absolute-and-contracted. "Contraction" is a metaphor for
the finite status of creatures, all of whom are limited images of God.
"Absolute" is used in its etymological sense of
"free from" (*ab-solutus*) to characterize
God's infinity. As absolute maximum God is both unlimited and
transcendent, unreachable by human conceptions that measure the
limited or contracted realm of more and less. Once Cusanus
conceptualizes human knowing as measuring, he proposes that our
knowledge also cannot measure exactly the essence of any limited
thing. A fortiori, when it comes to the unlimited God, Nicholas
asserts that "there is no proportion between finite and
infinite." The infinite God remains beyond our ken. Human
efforts to understand the depth and implications of this assertion are
what will render our ignorance "learn-ed."



As so often in Christian thinking, this sort of apophatic preamble
does not prevent Cusanus from spending a whole book proposing how we
might comprehend the incomprehensible God
"incomprehensibly." His first proposal is that God is the
"coincidence of opposites." This turns out to be a way
both of recalling the negative theology to be found in Dionysius the
Areopagite and his other predecessors and at the same time of going
beyond it. Put in the language of the "maximum," in God
both maximum and minimum coincide in the divine infinite Oneness, for
both take the mind beyond the measurable created domain of more and
less and end up meaning just the "superlative" or
transcendent. The implication, in other words, is that God's
reality lies beyond any familiar domain where the principle of
contradiction holds sway.



At the same time this "coincidence" underlines the divine
Oneness that comprehends all else in undifferentiated and unlimited
unity. It is not that creatures coincide with God or God with
creatures, but that in God all else coincides as nothing else than
God. As so often in negative and apophatic "theology," we
are not only told what God is not but led to reflect explicitly on
what God must be, even if we have no conceptual clarity about what we
assert. The result is a kind of second-order language about the ways
in which we are forced to think and talk about divinity.



Nicholas then proposes some geometrical "exercises" to
provide his readers some object lessons designed to teach how we might
reach for the unlimited even while we are aware that we cannot grasp
what the infinite God may be. For instance, we are to imagine a circle
and a straight line or tangent that meets the circle. From a certain
perspective, as the diameter or circumference of the circle increases,
its circumference approaches the straight line and appears less and
less curved. If we then imagine and extrapolate the circumference to
the infinite, we can almost "see" that both straight
tangent and curved circumference should coincide--a kind of
"coincidence of opposites" that is a figure of how we may
think beyond limited things toward the transcendent One. All this is
mathematically impossible, of course, but it demonstrates some
metaphorical steps for moving beyond the finite toward the infinite
that might be transferred from geometrical figures to created beings
and their Creator.



In Book II of *On Learned Ignorance* Cusanus deals with the
created universe. The natural universe counts as the limited or
contracted maximum that is the image of the absolute Maximum. Here
Nicholas introduces another central metaphor to capture the
relationship between God and creatures, the metaphor of enfolding and
unfolding (*complicatio/explicatio*). He expands the
"folding" metaphor he inherited from the twelfth-century
school of Chartres. While all beings are "enfolded" in the
undifferentiated oneness of their Divine Source, they are at the same
time an "unfolding" of God in time and space.
"Insofar as He is the unfolding," Nicholas writes,
"in all things He is that which they are, just as in an image
the reality itself [*veritas*] is present" (II.3, Hopkins
translation). In Neoplatonic terms, one must think the unfolded
universe we experience and all that is real in it as at once enfolded
in the Creator on whom it depends. God encompasses every thing created
in a dialectical outflow and return to God without any creatures ever
being identified with the God on whom they depend, that One who
remains both present to them yet ever absent and beyond. What the
"unfolding/enfolding" couple captures is the dynamic
relationship between divine Original and created image.



The natural universe, then, is the whole or contracted maximum
collectively constituted by the many beings in space and time.
Nicholas proposes the quasi-Anaxagorean slogan that "each thing
is in each thing: *quodlibet in quolibet*" to emphasize
that the individual beings or parts are no less
"contracted" images of the whole created universe. Just as
God is present to each creature that stands as a contracted image of
the divine, so the universe as a macrocosm is present to each creature
or constitutive part as microcosm. In that way, each natural thing is
an image of the collective whole. But since this collectivity is made
up of interrelated parts, each thing is also the totality of its
connections with everything else. "Each thing is in each
thing" because each is an image reflecting the oneness of the
whole and thus of all other individuals that are the interrelated
parts of that whole.



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



For Nicholas, the exact center and circumference of the created
universe are to be found only in God. What *we* take to be
center and outer limits depends on our viewpoint. If we change
perspectives, say to that from another planet (which might indeed be
inhabited) and take it to be center, then earth might be zenith. In
this way we come to realize that what is taken as fixed or central can
be altered to be moving and at the zenith, depending on the location
of the standpoint we pick in the unbounded universe. The reason,
Cusanus writes, is that there is no exactness outside of God, and only
"God, who is everywhere and nowhere, is its [the
universe's] circumference and center" (II.12, Hopkins
translation).



In this way learned ignorance recognizes that the natural universe
itself, as a contracted image of God, has a physical center that can
be anywhere and a circumference that is nowhere. That is why Nicholas
characterized the natural universe as a contracted maximum or
"privative" infinite while God remains the
"negative" infinite or absolute maximum. This means that
the universe merely lacks set physical bounds or limits, while God has
no ontological limits in being all that can possibly be. This enables
the "infinite" universe, as the whole constituted by all
creatures, to be an image of the divine oneness, but only in a
contracted or attenuated fashion.



Nowhere is the Christian bearing of *On Learned Ignorance* more
obvious than in Book III, where Nicholas treats of the God-man, Jesus
Christ, as a third "maximum," the Maximum at once
absolute-and-contracted. Once again, however, Cusanus uses the
orthodox teaching of early Christian councils such as Chalcedon more
as a background guide than as providing a straightforward Christology
or text for exposition. He returns to the contrast between absolute
God and contracted creatures that he used throughout Books I and II to
interpret and contrast the relation between infinite God and finite
creatures, even though there is no real proportion between them.



God was construed as the absolute maximum and divine infinite Oneness,
while Nicholas viewed the natural universe as a contracted maximum
whose unity-in-multiplicity and lack of physical limits
"reflected" God's positively unlimited oneness.
Nicholas now entertains a third possibility, an anomalous joining of
absolute and contracted in the God-man. He reviews, borrowing from
Aristotle, the ordered universe of things belonging to natural types
(genera and species), then modifies it by extending to individuals his
idea of contraction or limitation. Individual specimens are all that
exist, but not only are they contracted images of God's oneness,
but also contracted images of their types insofar as each more or less
fulfills the possibilities of its nature.



Cusanus thereupon asks a hypothetical question. What would happen were
a perfect specimen, an individual fulfillment of its type, to actually
exist? In his language of maximality, it would be another maximum
contracted to a unique individual of a given kind. But what would make
such a maximum individual possible in a universe of more or less? Only
its unique union with God, the absolute divine Maximum that is the
source of every contracted reality, a union signaled in the
traditional "hypostatic union." The whole of this maximal
yet finite human nature is created and united with the absolute God so
that God remains transcendent, yet inseparable from this one human
creature. In terms of enfolding and unfolding, this unique unfolding
in a human being is at the same time to reveal the God enfolding Jesus
Christ. Jesus is an image of God so utterly transparent as to remain
opaque except to the eyes of faith.



Cusanus relies on the traditional microcosm/macrocosm trope to explain
why human nature would be the contracted nature best suited for union
with the divine Absolute. Human nature is the created nature
"more common to the totality of beings" (III.3, Hopkins
translation) because the intermediate status of human beings between
angels and all other bodily creatures provides common ties to the
whole range of created things. These ties are based on its capacities
as "what is highest of the lower and what is lowest of the
higher" natures (*ibid.*), so that it stands as
representative microcosm of the created macrocosm. The upshot is that
the historical Jesus Christ is human in such a way as to be divine
*and* divine in such a way as to be human, the Maximum at once
contracted *and* absolute, the human image who is
simultaneously the divine Original. Because the divine Word is one
with Jesus' human nature, that nature is perfect of its kind, at
the same time contracted and maximal. Learned ignorance may thus press
the Cusan metaphors and ideas to the limit in dealing with Jesus
Christ, because the hypostatic oneness of the incarnate God will
always elude full human understanding.



This third book realigns the order of Christian metaphysics so that
the God-man stands between God and the rest of creation, for it is
through the mediation of the Incarnate Word that creatures are made
and creatures return to their source. In Book I, Nicholas proposed
that there is no proportion or measure between the infinite and the
finite that will enable us to grasp the Infinite God or even
God's contracted image in the natural universe. This is what
learned ignorance establishes for and contributes to human wisdom. Yet
the historic reality of Jesus Christ has a theoretical role to play in
interpreting Nicholas' metaphysical vision. The Cusan Christ
stands as a more adequate norm and measure for theory and practice.
Jesus Christ is the historical human image of the Absolute One beyond
our ken and thus the paradigm that reveals our creaturely connection
with the infinite God. Christ is the disclosure in time of what God
is. In this way learned ignorance points to Jesus Christ as the
*medium*, the measure and mediator between finite and infinite,
and, as well, the concrete norm for what human beings may become.



The three books of *On Learned Ignorance* thus represent a
series of powerful proposals for reinterpreting Christian reality.
Throughout Nicholas uses metaphors such as the coincidence of
opposites, absolute/contracted and enfolding/unfolding to relate God
and creation. His proposals are established by seeking out parallels
between the infinite divine Original and limited created images and by
drawing out the implications of these parallels. This book is neither
medieval Aristotelian scholastic disputation nor later Cartesian
rationalism, but its own kind of Christian Neoplatonic speculation
that teases the philosophical imagination as much as it may frustrate
any contemporary philosophical search for arguments or proofs. It is
the coherence of the parallels or correspondences within the overall
view of reality that gives Cusan metaphysics and Cusan metaphors their
persuasive power.


### 2.2 The Mind and Human Knowing



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



> 
> You know how the divine Simplicity enfolds all things. Mind is the
> image of this enfolding Simplicity. If, then, you called this divine
> Simplicity infinite Mind, it will be the exemplar of our mind. If you
> called the divine mind the totality of the truth of things, you will
> call our mind the totality of the assimilation of things, so that it
> may be a totality of ideas. In the divine Mind conception is the
> production of things; in our mind conception is the knowledge of
> things. If the divine Mind is absolute Being, then its conception is
> the creation of beings; and conception in the human mind is the
> assimilation of beings. (c.3)
> 



This extension of the metaphor used in metaphysics to capture how
things simultaneously proceed from and return to God spells out where
human knowledge stands. God's utterly simple divine mind enfolds
the true natures of all the actual things "unfolded" from
it in the created universe. The human mind is a parallel though
limited oneness that can enfold or encompass the concepts of all it
knows while unfolding them in a conceptual universe. While divine
knowing amounts to the creating of beings, human knowing amounts to
the creating of concepts that are "the assimilation of
beings." The *idiota*/layman continues:



> 
> What suits the divine Mind as infinite Truth suits our mind as its
> close image. If all things are in the divine Mind as in their exact
> and proper Truth, all things are in our mind as in the image or
> likeness of their proper Truth, that is, as known; for knowledge takes
> place by likeness. All things are in God, but there as exemplars of
> things. All things are in our mind, but there as likenesses of things.
> (c.3)
> 



Two points here are essential. First, the conceptual content of our
knowledge is tied to the things God created as to their epistemic
likenesses. Nicholas thus stands in the tradition of Christian
realism. Second, the correspondences between divine mind and human
mind are severely modified by the fact that God's purported
"concepts," the "exemplars" of things, are
really nothing else in God but God's undifferentiated oneness.
Oneness is primary in God's knowledge, "manyness"
and "otherness" characterize our conceptual domain. At
best we humans are unitary sources of our own knowledge and can give
our ideas an overall oneness as a more or less organized whole--a
quite imperfect and faint mirroring of God's mind.


#### 2.2.1 Human Knowing is Conjecturing



Nicholas' second major treatise (1442-43) that again
explains his vision of all there is in Neoplatonic Christian terms is
entitled *De coniecturis: On Conjectures*. Here he employs the
contrasting terms of *unitas/alteritas:* oneness/otherness, as
well as enfolding/unfolding to propose how we might understand from a
somewhat different viewpoint God, the universe and human beings.
Oneness is characteristic of God, while otherness stands for the
contingent plurality and variety of limited created things. In this
work Nicholas also introduces an explicit contrast between the human
capacities of *ratio* and *intellectus*. *Ratio*
or discursive reason is our capacity for thinking, using concepts and
judgments. *Intellectus*, by contrast, is a direct intellectual
vision. Nicholas parallels the way our plural capacities for reason,
imagination and sensation are founded in "intellectus" as
their single source to the simultaneous outflow and return of the
plurality of creatures to their single divine Source. (*Ratio*
and *intellectus* may recall in some ways *dianoia* and
*noesis* in Plato's famous image of the divided
line.)



The title, *On Conjectures*, is also intriguing because here
Cusanus makes explicit the limits of human knowing only hinted at in
*On Learned Ignorance* and in his later *The Layman: On
Mind*. As his Prologue puts it, "You have seen that the
exactness of truth cannot be attained. The consequence is that every
positive human assertion of the truth is a conjecture.... And so
the unattainable Oneness of truth is known in conjectural otherness
and the conjecture of otherness is itself known in the most simple
Oneness of truth." Here the Neoplatonic dialectical principle
that insists we never think anything apart from the First is applied
even to human knowing. And such knowing is conjecturing.



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



Nicholas composed *On Conjectures* as a letter treatise
addressed to Cardinal Cesarini. In chapter 11 of Book One he proposes
a scenario where the cardinal views the pope. This scenario leads into
his sole explicit description of *coniectura*. This example of
visual perception lets us recognize that we readily make perceptual
assertions about what we see or hear. And when we reflect on these
perceptual judgments we realize that we go beyond what sensation alone
delivers, for we use reason to interpret and make sense of what we
see. Reason and sense operate inseparably in our perceptual
experience. Reason discriminates, recognizes and may explicitly
formulate in language or thought what the experience comes to, for
instance, "There's the pope."



Further reflection enables us to realize that what visual perception
delivers is limited, that is, partial and perspectival, because our
perceptual judgments reflect at least the constraints of the
perceiver's bodiliness. These constraints include what physical
eyes can see, as well as one's physical location and viewpoint.
Nicholas terms this a twofold "otherness" that conditions
and limits all sensory perception, limitations that we are implicitly
aware of in making perceptual judgments. So Nicholas'
description of *coniectura* reflects the
"otherness" of our finite human estate. As he writes,
"A conjecture, then, is a positive assertion that participates
in truth as it is, but in otherness." (Bk. I, c. 11)
"Truth as it is" refers, of course, to what is enfolded in
the divine Mind. What is unfolded in our concepts and assertions
shares that truth but only approximately, "in
otherness."



Two other sources of "otherness" besides bodiliness
underlie the limitations on perceptual knowledge. One is the fact that
the objects of perception are themselves limited. The cardinal's
sight of the pope has to be conjectural because anything extended can
show, as it were, but one side of itself to another embodied viewer. A
second "otherness" in perception is due to the
"otherness" of the mental and linguistic signs, images,
and symbols we use to think and talk about what we perceive. These
differ from both our mental capacities and what we are looking at or
listening to. This means the terms in which perceptual judgments are
expressed reflect the broader historical background and interests of
the perceiver as well as his or her linguistic community.



Given all these constraints we may wonder why Nicholas believes that
conjectural knowledge "participates in the truth as it
is." Fundamentally, he is convinced that our status as images of
God's mind and its oneness secures the cognitive validity of
what we know. Our knowledge is "conjectural" in contrast
to God's knowledge, for divine knowledge is complete and exact,
both aperspectival and omniperspectival, where knower and known
coincide in infinite Oneness. Our recognition of the limits in our own
knowing and its contents can keep us in touch, at least implicitly,
with what is beyond our ken in that ideal oneness of knower and known.
The separation of the human mind from the universe of knowable things
is at the same time a connection that results in conjectural
knowledge. Just so, conjectural knowledge is also an outcome of the
separation and connection of the human mind and the divine Mind, of
image and Original.


#### 2.2.2 Knowing as Assimilative Measuring



Recall once more the Cusan "definition" of mind already
alluded to in *The Layman: About Mind*: Mind is "that
from which comes the limit and measure of all things." (c.1) If
we set this beside the comment quoted above that "conception in
the human mind is the assimilation of beings," it is clear that
"assimilating" and "measuring" are the
dominant metaphors Nicholas uses to understand what we do as knowers.
As knowers we *measure* the things we know and we also are
*assimilated* or *likened* in some way to the objects of
knowledge. Along with the "horizontal" notion of our
concepts being images of things as well as of the mind's own
oneness, *assimilatio* also has a "vertical"
dimension because in knowing we liken ourselves to our divine
Original.



What is at issue is the connection and tension between the two
metaphors. Supposedly complementary, *assimilatio* and
*mensura* give no obvious answer to what provides the measure
for the content and validity of our knowledge--is it the things
known or our knowing minds? Nicholas never questioned that the varied
things we discover in the natural universe and fashion ourselves in
the social and cultural milieu exist independently of our minds (if
not of God's). But the question here is whether our knowledge is
derived from what is independent of mind or is in whole or part the
result of the linguistic and conceptual measures we learn, construct
and employ in dealing with reality. If knowing is creative or
productive, solely a matter of our "measuring," it is easy
to see how it is an image of God's creating, but not how it is a
likening to extra-mental things. If things outside measure and cause
what we know, we can see why human knowledge is a likening to things,
but not how it is an image of God's creative mind. The two
metaphors may well run counter to each other.



Because Nicholas himself does not frame the question in this way, he
provides ample evidence for both answers. Some interpreters, such as
J. Hopkins (1996), see his use of medieval scholastic language for the
powers and activities of the mind as placing him mainly in the
medieval Aristotelian-Thomist tradition of critical realism, while
emphasizing anew the active character of knowing at all levels and
thus stressing that the mind is an active power. Those interpreters
whose proclivities are more Kantian, for instance, K. Flasch (1998)
and K. Kremer (1978, 2000), find in his texts gestures towards what
would in Kant become "the transcendental unity of
apperception" and "a priori" concepts of the
understanding, not to mention the stress on active judgment. The view
of the present author is that both of these interpretations may miss
the Neoplatonic context in which Nicholas discusses human knowledge
and may underestimate how important philosophical theology is to the
Cusan exposition of knowing.



What are the clues we need to connect the metaphors of likening and
measuring in a complementary way? We must return to Nicholas'
underlying conviction that our minds are images of God's mind
and that this connection between them is constant and thoroughgoing
and thus should never be overlooked. Then we may begin to understand
that just as God's creative measuring sets the ontological
limits of everything God creates, so our corresponding measuring can
at best be assimilative of the mind-independent things we wish to know
but do not create or place in reality, and yet be creative in
measuring and adjudicating the conceptual domain that results from our
knowing them.



Both of these strands can seen to be operative in chapter 7 of *The
Layman: About Mind*. There Cusanus gives a somewhat more detailed
account of how he sees the mind's cognitive functions operating
at the levels of sensation, imagination, reasoning and intellectual
vision or intuition. Here, as in his later work entitled
*Compendium*, we find that Nicholas inherited a technical
vocabulary and conceptual framework for human knowing that embodies
the medieval Aristotelian view that natural things are the causes and
measures of perceptual and conceptual human knowledge. On that view,
what we understand is to correspond to the intelligible aspects of
things that are mind-independent so that an identity in
intelligibility between mind and thing results--the mind is
measured by things. While Nicholas insists that the active,
self-moving mind directs and integrates the joint operation of our
knowing capacities, he also agrees that the mind has no innate ideas
and that mental life has to be awakened or stimulated by direct
contact with the perceptible world. He never questions that the
perceptible world ("the plurality of things") exists and
is independent of our minds and our knowledge.



It is the mind's power to discriminate and make sense of what we
perceive, imagine or remember that Cusanus emphasizes. He writes,
speaking of imagination, "When sensible things are not present,
it [imagination] conforms itself to things in a confused way and
without discriminating one condition from another. But [when]
functioning with thinking imagination conforms itself to things while
discriminating one condition from another." (*Idiota de
mente,* c.7)



To help us understand the mind's engagement in perceptual
"assimilation," Nicholas turns to the work of sculptors
and craftsmen who use wax or clay to make an impression of some shape
so they can work from that likeness. When it is a matter of planning
something to do or make, it is easy to see our minds as active. What
about perceptual experiences where what we encounter is not up to us?
Nicholas returns to the wax, asking us to imagine wax informed by mind
in the way mind informs our capacities for sensing and proposing that
mind so imagined could "form the wax to every shape presented to
it." (c.7) Nicholas is saying, in effect, that
"assimilation" in perception is indeed a matter of
reason's active selecting and managing the deliverances of sense
and imagination that result from our encounters with perceptible
things. We are not mere passive recipients of colors, sounds, textures
and so on, but our minds differentiate and connect perceptions and
images in order to form concepts based on the discriminations of
reason.



Nicholas avers that our knowledge of the natural and cultural world
embodied in and made systematic in the technical and mechanical and
liberal arts will remain "conjectural." The reason is that
we are not dealing with the true reality of mind-independent things
whose true forms are one with God. We only encounter the physically
located temporal realities that are images of the really real. As he
remarks, "the notions that are attained through the
assimilations of reason are uncertain, because they are in accord with
the images of forms rather than with their true [forms]."
(*ibid.*, c.7) Only the concepts of mathematics are not
conjectural because we fashion or construct these ideas ourselves.
Consequently our conceptions of them can be precise and certain, for
as conceptual entities they escape the sorts of change and bodily
limits characteristic of the physical world.


#### 2.2.3 The Measure of Knowledge



But this sketch of our knowing powers as assimilative does not settle
what is normative for human knowing or what it means to take the mind
as a measure. Nicholas takes up this explicitly a bit later in chapter
9 of *The Layman: About Mind*. When he is questioned how the
mind can be a measure adequate to such a variety of things, the layman
responds somewhat cryptically:



> 
> In the way an "absolute" face would make itself the
> measure of all faces. For when you attend to the fact that mind is a
> certain absolute measure that cannot be greater or smaller since it is
> not restricted to quantity, and when you attend to the fact that this
> measure is alive so that it measures by itself (as if a living compass
> were to measure by itself), then you grasp how it makes itself into a
> concept, measure, or exemplar so that it attains itself in everything.
> (c.9)
> 



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



All these requirements can be found in the passage above. What we want
to know counts as the cognitively measurable ("such a variety of
things"). These knowables span items in the natural world and
the cultural sphere and their features, as well as concepts in the
realm of thought itself. The "concept, measure, or
exemplar" is the qualitative norm the mind employs and of which
it is the source. The mind does the actual measuring ("measures
by itself") and "makes itself a measure" or norm in
judging and taking the measure of each item across the range of things
it knows. What results is the knowledge we obtain when the mind
becomes "equal to such a variety of things" and
"attains itself in everything." Our knowledge includes
what we gain from everyday experience in society, from the natural and
human sciences, and from literature and the other arts.



What does the reference to "absolute face" in the passage
quoted come to? "Absolute" is a term Cusanus usually
reserved for God as the infinite One free from every limitation and
restriction. Here it is transferred to our minds as images of God. Our
minds are not limited to quantitative measures and thus can determine
the conceptual measures or "units" that best fit or are
adequate to the different sorts of things we want to know. We can
answer questions of "what sort," not just of "how
much." Our concepts and judgments are assimilative or actively
likened to what we know because we construct the conceptual measures
appropriate, if never wholly adequate, to what we are investigating or
thinking about. As thus relatively unrestricted or
"absolute," our minds can be conformed to whatever is
knowable in whatever way we can grasp it. Just as the absolute divine
"face" or mind is the infinite measure of all the
creaturely minds that are its images, so the human mind measures the
determinate conceptual realities that reflect its own finite unity or
oneness.



Human concepts are measures insofar they involve choice and
construction, application and interpretation, whether quantitative or
qualitative. The use of a given group of concepts or a particular
scheme of ideas or interpretative framework is a matter of human
creating. If we recognize some mind-independent phenomena we want to
explore and come to know, whether in nature or in culture, we should
also recognize that it is up to us to construct and employ the
appropriate cognitive measures in order to "take the
measure" of the state of affairs in question. Being introduced
to some cognitive domain or area of practice we are unfamiliar with
involves learning "a new vocabulary" and set of ideas
already utilized and standard in that area. Unless and until we can
understand the concepts and language in question, we cannot make sense
out of what we perceive and continue to understand in our previous
terms.



That Nicholas is using "measuring" in this sense is
brought home to us by the metaphor he employs in the passage quoted
above from chapter 9 where he says the mind is "a living compass
that measures by itself." In contrast with a fixed or
non-adjustable straight ruler, a compass or caliper can be adjusted to
fit a range of sizes and shapes. Cusanus' fanciful
"living" compass reminds us that as knowers we can
actively accommodate our ideas to what we want to know. As a compass
can be adjusted to find the quantitative measure of a variety of sizes
and shapes, so our minds are able to fashion, adopt, modify and
utilize both the literal and the symbolic ideas and concepts available
to us for exploring and understanding the natural, social and
conceptual worlds we inherit and extend.



This may help us understand why Nicholas' sketch of
*mens* involves both the mind-independent things and the mind
itself as normative measures of the assimilation that is human
cognition. We become like the knowable features of the things we know
and we fashion the conceptual and judgmental measures whereby we take
them into ourselves as known. The full determinate intelligibility of
mind-independent things and states of affairs provides a kind of ideal
limit that we acknowledge in recognizing the inadequacy and
shortcomings of what we do know about them. That is why Nicholas deems
our knowledge "conjectural."



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



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



Nicholas of Cusa thus combines the metaphors of *assimilatio*
and *mensuratio* in his account of what provides the cognitive
norms or criteria for human knowing. We cannot resolve the tension
between the two that we find in what he says, but must hold onto it.
The reason is that, as God's images, we do not create but must
recognize what God has created as independent of human knowledge. We
may fashion the interpretative measures whereby we know created
things, but we do this while acknowledging that the full
intelligibility of each determinate reality is ultimately identical
with God's unknowable Oneness. We may aspire to full
intelligibility but can reach it only in mathematics. That is why our
best knowledge, even of the mind itself, remains conjectural, sharing
God's truth but limited to human ways of knowing.


### 2.3 Symbols and Philosophical Theology



The relationship between *On Learned Ignorance* and *On
Conjectures* sets a pattern for the many shorter theoretical works
Nicholas was to write in the two decades that followed. The basic
insights and the framework laid out in *On Learned Ignorance*
is never discarded and never substantively modified. Instead
Nicholas' dialogues and briefer treatises can be read as
proposing many different metaphors or symbols for understanding his
teaching about the relationship between God and creatures. Three
examples of these metaphors may give some idea of the power and
freshness of his speculative imagining. The first is his use of the
icon and the wall in *The Vision of God* (1453); the second his
attempt to capture the God-creature connection by describing God as
"Not Other" in the dialogue by that name (*On the Not
Other*, 1461); the third his fascination with mathematics and its
symbolic potential. While Cusanus never surrenders his initial insight
that there is no proportion between infinite and finite, thinking
through these later symbols and neologisms lets us see how these
indirect means enable some movement of mind and heart towards the
divine Mystery with whom we are ever connected.


#### 2.3.1 The Icon and the Wall



Cusanus wrote *The Vision of God* in the form of a prayer,
responding to the request of the Benedictines of Tegernsee for a
treatise on mystical theology. With it he sent them an
"all-seeing" icon and proposed an exercise for its use to
give them some understanding of God's seeing their attempts to
see God. The icon was probably a "Veronica" or image of
the face of the suffering Jesus in which the eyes were portrayed as
looking out of the picture plane. As a result, from whatever
standpoint one looked at the painting, it seemed the eyes of Jesus
looked directly into the viewer's own eyes. Thus it could
symbolize at once both God's vision of us and our vision of God
(the combined objective and subjective senses of *visio
Dei*).



Nicholas begins by warning that "Whatever is apparent with
regard to the icon of God's sight is truer with regard to
God's true sight."(c. 1) And what does appear when we
place ourselves with the monks viewing the painting and reflect? Since
it is a painting we see, what we seem to experience as we look into
the eyes of Jesus is not really taking place. The face portrayed
neither looks at nor sees anyone; in fact, the viewer's gaze is
the norm for this experience of a face-to-face encounter. Yet because
of the spatial and temporal simultaneity the apparent gaze of the icon
invites the viewer to enter into the world of the painting and tends
to privilege what is portrayed, namely Jesus gazing at me. I move back
and forth from my customary reactions when eyes are looking into my
eyes to the realization that this eye contact is illusory.



But the illusory image in this case is of Christ suffering and looking
at me. If this painting is to mediate between my reality and what it
portrays, it obviously invites me to look beyond, since this is an
image of the One who *is* the image of the Father. Twice
removed from the actual divine seeing and being seen it is supposed to
symbolize, Nicholas' use of this icon lets us understand how far
we stand from God's own seeing. Yet Nicholas' initial
warning also reminds us that what is symbolized here by the painting
is all the more so in reality. We are in truth preceded and embraced
by Christ's seeing us.



In seeing we are seen--this mutual relatedness is at least what
the icon symbolizes. But Nicholas goes further, proposing that
God's seeing and God's being seen are identical:



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



In this way God seen is identically God seeing. The reason is that for
God to be seen by any creature is nothing else than for God to
"see" that creature gazing. But the icon also reminds us
of our distance from seeing God. I can see the depicted eyes of Jesus
even though no real eyes are present. But I cannot see the divine face
or its vision even though God's reality is present and
"sees" me. The dialectic of divine presence and absence,
of human seeing and not seeing that I experience with the icon is thus
turned inside out. When I look at the icon of Christ, what seems
present, its seeing, is really absent, yet God's seeing is
really present though it seems absent.



What the icon thus symbolizes is the experienced simultaneous
connection of different levels of reality. Indeed, I have separate
reality as a contracted image of God only through my relation to my
divine Source. What is telling about Nicholas' version of seeing
God is neither what vision discerns nor what practices one must follow
in order to gain the correct standpoint for such seeing. Rather he
revises the meaning of "seeing God" so that God is both
subject and object of our purported vision of God.



Yet this vision of God is merely purported. Cusanus leads us through a
series of reflections on seeing and on the face of God only to let us
realize that, whatever *ratio* or discursive reason comes to
realize, God is located beyond both imaginative exercise and
conceptual understanding. Nicholas symbolizes our approach to this
beyond by encouraging us to enter "into a certain secret and
hidden silence wherein there is no knowledge or concept of a
face," characterizing it as an "obscuring mist, haze,
darkness or ignorance." (c.6) He invokes the coincidence of
opposites from *On Learned Ignorance* and, in chapter 9 of
*The Vision of God*, proposes his second central metaphor: the
wall of paradise. God dwells inside this wall, and the wall also
symbolizes the coincidence of opposites and thus the defeat of
discursive reason and the principle of contradiction.



Just how are we to think through the coincidence of opposites and
attempt to move beyond the wall to some sort of "seeing"
God? Nicholas proposes that three locations in relation to the wall
map three stages in the mystical quest, using the metaphorical couple
of "enfolding/unfolding" from *On Learned
Ignorance*. Reason can understand things enfolded in or identical
with God as different from the same things unfolded in the created
universe. At this first stage we are outside the wall. The second
stage is at the wall itself, where Nicholas places us with Christ at
the door or threshold of an entrance in the wall. Here enfolding and
unfolding coincide and we encounter the barrier of the coincidence of
opposites. At best we acknowledge that creating and being created are
one and the same in God. A third stage is beyond the entrance and
inside the wall where enfolding/unfolding fall away and Cusanus points
to God's silent presence and utter transcendence, "free
from whatever can be spoken of or thought of" (c.11) The third
stage involves recognition that God's infinity remains
unknowable to us in conceptual terms.



Cusanus proposes some possible indirect routes that will give us no
positive insight or conceptual grasp of the divine Essence. For
instance, if we look to the very oppositions and contradictions that
plague our normal thinking about God, we may do more justice to the
unique relation between God and creatures. In his words, "the
oppositeness of opposites is oppositeness without oppositeness."
(c.13) He identifies the infinite God with this "oppositeness of
opposites." Now the "opposites" in question are the
ordinary things of our experience that are separate and distinct and
that may have opposed or mutually exclusive properties.



Designating God as the Oppositeness of such opposites can take us from
the distinctions and oppositions with which we are familiar to the One
who is responsible for there being such oppositions. God is distinct
from these oppositions and differences but only in a way that
establishes their reality. Yet God's oppositeness is
"without oppositeness" since God's distinctiveness
is unlimited and beyond familiar oppositions. In fact, God's
oppositeness encompasses or enfolds all opposites in God as
identically God and encompasses or unfolds all opposites in creation
by constituting them as what they are in all their determinate, finite
differences. We are to think together *both* the way finite
things are opposed *and* God's transcendent oppositeness
that is "opposed" to those opposites, not as they are to
one another, but so as to be ontologically responsible for the
oppositions with which we are familiar.


#### 2.3.2 God is the Not Other



In *De li Non Aliud/On the Not Other* (1462) Nicholas returns
to the ancient Platonic categories of the One and the Other in order
to re-construe in novel language what Christians believe about the
dependence of creatures on their Creator. Several of Cusanus'
later works use verbal coinages or Latin neologisms as
"names" or characterizations of God that are original with
him, though they have earlier echoes in Christian Neoplatonism. In
this dialogue he uses the expression "the not other" as a
substantive for God as the divine Not-Other, even though we are more
familiar with the phrase in comparative expressions that are negative
ways of stating self-identity. For instance, "the tree is not
other than (= the same as, identical with) the tree."



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



Nicholas is attempting to capitalize on the way we differentiate
created things to signal and symbolize their divine Creator. While
each created thing is not other than itself, so to speak, it certainly
is other or different from other things. And created things are
different from God as well. But Nicholas is proposing a way of
"naming" God that will underline how God's
difference from God's creatures is not even close to one
creature's difference from another creature. God's
difference is categorially different, so to speak, from one
creature's otherness from a second creature. Cusanus can thus
paradoxically assert that God is "not other" than anything
God has created and is sustaining in being. Indeed, we do well to
think of God as "the Not-Other."



Here is what Nicholas writes:



> 
> Not Other is not an other, nor is it other than any other, nor is it
> an other in an other--for no other reason than that it is Not
> Other, which can in no way be other, as if it something were lacking
> to it, as to an other. For an other which is other than something
> lacks that than which it is other. But Not Other, because it is not
> other than anything, does not lack anything nor can anything be
> outside it. (c.6)
> 



We may paraphrase this rather cryptic passage as follows. The divine
Not-Other is simply not one of the things we are familiar with in the
world we inhabit, where all is multiplicity and difference, where each
thing or state of affairs is other than or different from every other
existent thing or situation that obtains. Nicholas terms the multiple
things we deal with "others" because each one of them,
each "other," is distinct from every other thing. Nicholas
also proposes that such finite things possess and lack what things
different from them possess--to be other or distinct is precisely
not to be one or any of the finite others. Our language and thought
busy themselves in finding and making further distinctions and
divisions between things and parts of things, between one condition
and another, between one state of affairs and another. So we come to
know that one thing is other than or separate from another thing or
that we find it in another that is related to, yet different from,
something else.



Nicholas' central point is that the divine Not-Other is nothing
like all the finite, limited others of our experience. Nicholas
writes, "Not Other does not lack anything." Even in common
sense terms, any given thing is "plenty lacking," to speak
colloquially. No matter what it has, it arguably is lacking some of
what it should have as a specimen of its type, and it certainly lacks
what other things not of its kind possess. One way to think of the
finite things with which we are familiar is to consider that their
being limited means that they are just so much and not more. But this
is exactly how we should not think of God, who "does not lack
anything" and outside of whom nothing can exist. As Nicholas
says, "But God is Not-Other because God is not other than other,
even though 'not other' and 'other' seem
opposed. But other is not opposed to God from whom it has that it is
other." (c.6)



The opposition in this case is entirely different because, though
creatures are dependent functions of God and may be interdependent
functions of one another, God is not a dependent function of
creatures. God is precisely not any of the others and so is not other
or different in the way creatures are. We thus have two sorts of
differentiation or otherness, the opposition between distinct
creatures and the opposition between creatures and God. The
"Not" in "Not-Other" differentiates God from
creatures but does not exclude the divine Not-Other since the
Not-Other ontologically determines creatures. Thinking God as
Not-Other requires a characteristic Cusan dialectical thinking, not
simply affirming or denying difference. We are to recognize and
acknowledge that the divine Not-Other is *both* not one of the
others *and* at once not other than any or all of them.



To put this more formally, the difference or opposition between
created things is both symmetrical and transitive. The basis for their
distinction is their identity: their symmetrical otherness is the
result of their substantial not-otherness, so to speak. But created
things' difference from God is asymmetrical and intransitive.
True, the divine Not-Other is not one of the creatures, but in a
different way than they are different from one another. Cusanus gives
expression to this important difference between finite and Infinite
when he asserts that the divine Not-Other is *not other* than
any created other. Negatively, the Not-Other is not finite as the
others are; positively, the reflexivity characteristic of a limited
thing's self-identity also characterizes the Not-Other's
relation with it.



Just as any creature is not other than itself so it is not other than
the divine Not-Other. The divine Not-Other both is and is not every
finite other. The reason is that distinct created things possess their
very status as beings, and thus their otherness, from and through God.
God, the divine Not-Other, is causally responsible for things'
existing as separate and self-identical others. For Nicholas, nothing
can have being outside of God.


#### 2.3.3 Mathematics and God



Recent publications, and in particular, D.Albertson's
*Mathematical Theologies*(2014), have highlighted another key
theme and its attendant metaphors in Nicholas' works:
mathematics and number. Cusanus believes that no knowledge we have is
more certain than mathematics, given that it is the construction of
our own minds. Mathematical ideas are the paradigm of how the human
mind unfolds a conceptual universe that parallels and forms an image
of God's unfolding of the created world. Number here refers
primarily to arithmetic and geometry, to the whole numbers and to
plane and solid figures. The latter are often imagined as in movement
or constructing other figures. Nicholas joins enfolding/unfolding and
the certainty of mathematics to the Christian tradition that
everything is created in the divine word or Logos.



Geometrical figures are used early in Book 1 of *On Learned
Ignorance* to illustrate how our knowledge of created things is
only approximative. A bit later we are led to extrapolate straight and
curved lines as an aid to understanding the coincidence of opposites
and to moving human thought towards the God who is unknowable by
reason. Book 2 uses number to illustrate enfolding and
unfolding--as the number series unfolds what is enfolded in the
unit, so God unfolds all created things. Nicholas later introduces the
geometrical image of the sphere whose center is everywhere and whose
circumference is nowhere to explain how the physical universe's
lack of boundaries is an image of God's infinity. Book 2 also
opens and closes with reflection on the quadrivium: arithmetic,
geometry, music and astronomy. Book 3 returns to the image of the
infinite sphere for the combination of absolute and contracted reality
in the God-man.



*On Conjectures* moves directly into arithmetic and geometry
with its conjectural reflections on the decade's embracing all
number and with its ordering of reality's oneness and otherness
using the spatial diagrams P and U that employ cones and spheres. Just
as the number series unfolds the unit, so the created universe unfolds
God's creating, and human concepts (such as numbers and
geometric figures) unfold the oneness of the human mind. In this way a
human being is truly a "second God."



Nicholas' later works of the 1450s extend the notion of number
and of enfolding/unfolding that he inherited from Boethius and the
twelfth-century school of Chartres. Number and size (*multitudo et
magnitudo*) are central to *The Layman: On Mind* where
measuring is proposed as the layman's definition of the human
mind. Measuring is then used directly in *The Layman: Experiments
with Weights*. Nicholas proposes that the Divine Word in whom all
things are created or unfolded in time is to be thought together with
human measuring as the closest sign or image of the Divine Oneness. In
the background stands the saying from the *Book of Wisdom*11.21
that in creating God ordered "all things in measure, number and
weight." This way number and mathematical ideas take on more
than their usual employment for human ends and become a way to the
Creator always present to creaturely unfoldings in human thought.



*The Vision of God* (1453) proposes an exercise for the monks
based on the center and circumference of circle wherein seeing from
the circumference and being seen from the center collapse into a
figure of mystical oneness: being seen seeing. In the same year
Nicholas composes *Complementary Theological Considerations (De
theologicis complementis)*. There he features God as a
mathematician who creates in the Equality of the Divine
Word--unfolding as well human beings whose quadrivial mathematics
is an image of the divine creativity. God is now named "infinite
angle" that unites maximal and minimal angles and the
non-quantitative number of everything. Nicholas thus brings together
his theological and mathematical concepts from the 1440s and unites
number, enfolding/unfolding and the Divine Word.


## 3. A Neoplatonism of His Own



How does Nicholas' Neoplatonism aid his thinking about God? One
advantage is that Nicholas can take the basic asymmetry between
paradigmatic Platonic Forms and the perceptible realm of particular
things that are images of the Forms and apply that asymmetry to the
way the First Principle, God, is related to all other created
realities. In working out this relationship, Plato proposed that what
results for individual Forms is that all particulars
"participate" in the relevant Form just the way an image
reflects and depends on its original. That is to say, the Form does
not require the particulars but is prior ontologically. The relation
between Form and particulars is not one of reciprocal dependence.
Applied to the first ontological principle, or to the Christian God,
the result is to let all the multiple, complex creatures participate
in their ultimate Source while the divine Creator remains simple,
unparticipated and unchanged. As Christian medieval thinkers (even the
Aristotelians agreed on this point) were accustomed to express it,
creatures depend on God while God is not at all dependent on
creatures. All the dependence is one-way.



And that dependence is interpreted in Platonic and Biblical terms, as
the dependence of creaturely images on a divine Original. While the
total reality of an image requires the influence of the original,
there is nothing about the latter that is ontologically in need of the
image. In Platonism this effectively means there is
"separation" of the intelligible and perceptible realms,
for in fact the perceptible cannot exist without the very intelligible
that abides unaffected by the realm of multiplicity and change. While
not being themselves Forms, perceptible things are not really separate
from the intelligible Forms on which they depend. No less than Form
and perceptible thing in Platonism and Neoplatonism, in Christian
Neoplatonism Creator and creature are bound together in a parallel
asymmetry.



If this asymmetry is rethought in terms of the presence required for
the creatures to be all that they are by nature, it will turn out that
God (or the One in non-Christian Neoplatonisms), the greater and prior
reality, must always be there if creaturely reality is to be
forthcoming and to continue. Now creatures as created images can stand
for manifestation and reflection of (and for Christian thinkers,
likeness to) as well as for dependence on God, for the divine presence
penetrates and encompasses each and all creatures without ever being
limited or captured by any of them. While Plato's Forms play a
definitive role in the perceptible realm as responsible for the
determinate characteristics of things, they count as a kind of present
absence. No less determinative is the ongoing presence of the
Christian God and that, too, has become a kind of absence. How should
we attempt to understand this?



Our conceptions of the absence or presence of one thing to another are
taken originally from and remain most at home in the realm of limited
physical beings. Here presence to or absence from another involves the
same sort of mutuality or reciprocity that the same corporeal realm of
limited things must always manifest. If body A is present to or absent
from body B, B is present to or absent from A and vice versa. The
other sorts of important presence or absence we are familiar
with--presence in thought, in memory and imagination and
affection, for instance--are metaphorical to some degree and are
extensions from and find their source in our experience of some prior
physical presence, whether merely perceived and understood, or hoped
for, or feared. So too with the kinds of metaphorical absence we
recognize when some present person is, as we say, "just not
there." And absence, whether indifferent, bad or good,
presupposes presence. Such metaphorical presences and absences of
limited things to one another might thus be understood as absent
presences or present absences.



And so we are able to speculate about the case of a non-finite
presence-in-absence by starting with but moving beyond the limits of
the presence and absence we are familiar with in the realm of limited
things. Now we turn to the presence of the unfamiliar infinite One as
what is finally required, even if not obviously experienced, to keep
the creaturely image present and real. In this case, we may think that
absence becomes what is metaphorical and the presence of the First is
in truth ineluctably and literally necessary to explain the reality of
anything and everything. But God's presence is hardly like that
of one physical thing to another.



This means that the presence of God and God's identity with
things is not to be thought as the kind of reciprocity, say, that two
created physical things have that are present to one another, let
alone similar or identical to each other. What is distinctive about
Christian Neoplatonism is its ability to hold together dialectically
in thought the insight it provides about this asymmetrical,
non-reciprocal ontological connection between God and creatures. God
penetrates and surpasses or exceeds each thing God creates and
encompasses. Creatures are thus themselves real with the limited sort
of independence they manifest, yet they are at once in God and indeed
one with God without being themselves divine.



But what has all this to do with Nicholas of Cusa's having a
Neoplatonism of his own? What is characteristic of his thought, I want
to propose, is that in key passages of major works he proposes this
same kind of dialectical thinking to enable our grasping the general
relationship between God and creatures. But the thinking is supposed
to reflect an ontological dialectic, that is to say, a relationship
that is real whether we acknowledge it or not. The dialectical
relation between God and creatures is something towards which we
mostly gesture in our efforts to do it justice in thought and speech.
But is this not merely Proclus or Dionysius or Eriugena or Eckhart
revisited in the fifteenth century? The answer is both yes and no.



Yes, the dialectical reality envisioned by Nicholas should be little
different than that pointed to by earlier Christian Neoplatonists.
Neither Plato's Forms nor the Christian God did or could change
over the centuries nor did the need of particulars and creatures for
their intelligible and divine originals. But also, no, for Cusanus
gives the dialectical relation his own expression in a series of novel
metaphors for the connection between God and creatures. Some of his
original metaphors, such as the coincidence of opposites,
enfolding/unfolding, God as the Not Other, and as the Oppositeness of
opposites, are controlled by and witness to that same asymmetrical
relationship, yet lead our speculative imaginations in some new
directions that would otherwise remain unexplored.



If only God can bespeak Godself in literal terms, then we humans are
graced with metaphors. What Cusanus provides in his metaphorical
forays is not simply imaginative originality, but a series of
metaphors designed to remind us that there is no proportion between
creatures and creator; that indeed there is an asymmetry between them.
Moreover, our best ways of conceiving and asserting this necessary
lack of reciprocal dependence should be built into the metaphors we
choose. This is why one may not need a theory of metaphor to do
justice to the Cusan project of philosophical theology. Rather, the
Cusan project is Neoplatonic and has its own traditional strictures on
any metaphors he chooses: the ontology determines the metaphors, the
metaphors do not determine the ontology. What makes Nicholas'
thought a Neoplatonism of his own is precisely the grasp his metaphors
demonstrate of those ontological strictures, as well as the
speculative imagination he evinces in the range, originality and
variety of metaphors for what we can and cannot understand about
God's connection with creatures.


## 4. Contribution to Political Ideas



Nicholas of Cusa has attracted frequent notice in the history of
political ideas because of his early work, *The Catholic
Concordance/De Concordantia Catholica (1433-34).* This
lengthy work in three books is aimed first of all at an ecclesiatical
audience at the Council of Basel and only secondarily, in Book 3, at
the Holy Roman Empire and its electors of the emperor. Nicholas'
ideas stand squarely in the conciliarist tradition following proposals
from the Council of Constance (1414-18), and thus privilege the
council's authority above the pope's. In Book 1 he
expounds a hierarchical view of creation and of the church, following
Dionysius the Areopagite. Then he uses both canon law and historical
documents from and about the early church councils to undergird his
view of council and papacy. Yet he never denies the importance of the
positions of pope and emperor. Throughout Nicholas works to harmonize
(=*concordantia*) the many different strands in church law and
political theory.



Over the last century scholars of political history have singled out
chapters, particularly in Book 2, where Nicholas discusses consent as
a prerequisite for legitimate law and government. Going beyond
tradition and canon law, he argues on the basis of people's
natural freedom ("men are by nature equal in power and equally
free") that all governance comes from the consent of the
subjects. This argument to explicitly institutionalize consent is
Nicholas' original contribution. He follows it with proposals on
representation that move from representation as virtual impersonation
to representation as delegation based on those represented selecting
their representatives. This is one of the first explicit statements in
the West of the institutional limits to be placed on rulers and of the
idea that people must consent to their representative
institutions.



Even after he changed allegiance to the side of papal supremacy,
Nicholas used his ideas to argue in later brief writings that Basel
was not truly representative and that consent was embodied in the
college of cardinals. In the following centuries, secular parliaments
returned to ideas of consent and representation (though not directly
to Nicholas' book) in attempting to restrict the power of
monarchs. In the church itself, tradition continued to outweigh
innovation, and the idea of conciliar superiority to the pope seemed
dead for centuries. Some twentieth-century thinking in the Roman
Catholic Church has returned to and enlivened ideas about council and
papacy propounded by Nicholas of Cusa.