The Art of Conjecture: Nicholas of Cusa on Knowledge 9780813234175, 0813234174

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!e Art of Conjecture

Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy General Editor: John C. McCarthy

Volume "#

The Art of Conjecture Nicholas of Cusa on Knowledge

Clyde Lee Miller

!e Catholic University of America Press Washington, D.C.

Copyright © $%$& !e Catholic University of America Press All rights reserved !e paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standards for Information Science—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, '()* +,-.#.–&-.#. ∞ Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the Library of Congress *)0( -1.-%-.&,$-,#&"-.

Contents

Preface

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Why the Art of Conjecture?

!

"#$% &'(: )*'+(,%-$.'/ .' %0( 1*$23 !. Understanding Cusan Conjectures 5. Experiments with Weights

!4

46

4. 7e Cusanus Map and the Mapmaker 6. 7e Beryl Stone and Aristotle

88

95

"#$% :;*: )*'+(,%-$.'/ #'3 ): “Haec est causa cur occulta non debent communicari omnibus: quia eis absona videntur, quando panduntur. . . . Dico autem quod sicut iam ante de unitate, uncia, et petito dixi, ita de omnibus quoad omnium principium dicendum. Nam omnium principium est per quod, in quo, et ex quo omne principiabile principiatur, et tamen per nullum principiatum attingibile.” #. Idiota de sapientia I, sec. "%, > (V ">), (Hopkins, ??): “Sapientia est quae sapit, qua nihil dulcius intellectui.”

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by a philosopher characterized as proud of his learning but almost lost in books and in the opinions of authorities. &e layman takes him and the orator to his workshop where he carves spoons and o@ers his own conjectures about the human mind and its knowing capacities.A &is dialogue about mind and knowledge has attracted much attention in Cusanus studies,B while the (nal dialogue about the balance scales is oCen not more than mentioned. But through all three dialogues, and especially in the third, what the layman says is oCen couched as a conjecture, as an intelligent proposal, an idea that seems persuasive and, indeed, worth considering and using. While much in (Ceenth-century Italy marks a new emphasis on observation over revelation and authority, what is remarkable about Nicholas of Cusa’s writings is the way they combine both the perceptible and the conceivable in his conjectural thought experiments. By allowing the reader to recognize and acknowledge the unimaginable and humanly unthinkable, Nicholas can go on and point us beyond even the conceivable to a further spiritual understanding. And looking in Nicholas’s theoretical writings, with their varied examples taken from tools and instruments and other practical items of everyday life in Germany and Rome, we (nd him also fully aware of the customary activities, practices, and even changes in social life around him. Even though Nicholas’s central focus throughout is mostly theological and religious, we discover in the Cusan corpus an admirable and imaginative +exibility in his many writings. His early re+ections in De docta ignorantia II."" concerning the universe as a re+ection of the divine in(nity provide a dramatic example of Nicholas’s speculative imagination. &ere he moves beyond the accepted world picture he inherited (and even used himself in other writings) to assert that the physical universe has neither an exact center nor a physical boundary. As he concluded, “the world-machine therefore will have its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere, so to speak; for God who is everywhere and $. &e layman remarks that “mind is that from which derive the boundary and measure of everything” (Idiota de mente ", sec. $>, $–; [V ?%]: “mentem esse ex qua omnium rerum terminus et mensura”). ;. Ernst Cassirer, !e Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (Oxford: Blackwell, "?;)), esp. >–>!. For the compelling story of the neo-Kantian scholars of Nicholas, see Albertson, Mathematical !eologies, )–"!.

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Conjecturing in the World

nowhere, is its circumference and center.”D Because it is a re+ection in space and time of God’s own positive in(nity, the universe is boundless or “privatively” in(nite. While it seems ironic that Nicholas reaches this conclusion because of his theological speculations in De docta ignorantia, he clearly has no qualms about modifying and even discarding the usual Aristotelian and Ptolemaic world picture to do so. In this case, his admirable ability to take his reasoning wherever it might lead opened an approach to understanding the physical universe that enabled imagination to move beyond received wisdom and to think of the universe independently of traditional belief and teaching. No wonder some later thinkers (such as Giordano Bruno and Descartes) refer to him. He seemed to them a living proof that relatively unorthodox ideas about the universe could (t together with theological probity. Yet surely it is his speculative imagination that stands out most in this frequently cited example of his ideas.

EFG6H-1634. I-45 456 J2K23L6 ML2K6. It is hardly surprising, then, that the third dialogue in the Idiota trilogy of "#$%, De staticis experimentis, proposes that the use of balance scales to compare weights and then to record the results will secure more useful information for users than previously understood. As this is the last of the Idiota dialogues, it is important to notice how it (ts with and complements the (rst and second dialogues, which were concerned with wisdom and the human mind respectively. In the last dialogue, two of his characters, the orator and the layman, discuss the possibilities to be realized through use of the balance scales (and water clock) across a wide variety of imagined practical situations. &rough varied uses of weighing on a balance scale, the layman demonstrates for the orator (and us) his proposal in Idiota de mente that the best metaphor for conjectural human knowing and understanding is “measuring.” In much the same way that Nicholas’s constant return to geometrical (gures across so many of his theoretical works demonstrates that he >. De docta ignorantia II, "!, sec. ";!, ")–"$ (I ?#): “Unde erit machina mundi quasi habens undique centrum et nullibi circumferentiam, quoniam eius circumferentia et centrum est deus, qui est undique et nullibi.” De docta ignorantia II."! also expounds the reasoning behind Nicholas’s proposal of a boundless universe.

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expected an understanding of mathematics to yield results for our understanding in philosophy and theology, so here the layman reveals how careful measurement and recordkeeping could advance practical understanding. By writing this third dialogue, Nicholas locates the empirical and experiential information and ideas of the third dialogue in company with the theological and philosophical ideas of the (rst two Idiota dialogues, thereby implying that the three sorts of ideas are a natural (t for human beings. While speculative thinking can engender much appreciation of divine wisdom and human knowing, the layman here turns to practical thinking, the knowing that can guide everyday action. What Nicholas of Cusa (nds and understands in the Idiota trilogy is that such thinking (ts squarely within late medieval religious ideas and everyday practice. Nicholas knew about nominalist scholasticism, and he uses it at times, always for his own purposes. He knew of the ideas of Jean Buridan, Albert of Saxony, and Nicole Oresme on natural phenomena, and the ideas of their earlier masters, Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon. He was well acquainted with humanism and its revival of classical literature, especially in the circle of humanists around the papal court of Pius II. (Early in his career he had himself uncovered manuscripts of the Roman plays of Plautus.) &e many examples he notes from contemporary life in Italy and central Europe oCen become conjectural symbols in his works for understanding some of his distinctive theoretical ideas. His use of the beryl eyeglass, the spinning top, the mirror, the compass or calipers, the game ball with one concave side, and even certain paintings testify to his observation of life all around him and to his ability to capitalize on such items to explain conjecturally his own ideas.

N.-3O 456 J2K23L6 ML2K6. In this dialogue Nicholas’s layman elaborates on the everyday knowledge provided by the common practices of his time that used balance scales.P His practical experience leads him to an understanding of how *. Background on medieval “statics” or the science of weights can be found in Marshall Clagett’s !e Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, "?$?). Clagett mentions Nicholas’s dialogue on page ?> and gives a translation of a part of it in a

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Conjecturing in the World

to (nd new and possibly valuable information from such weighing. Here he proposes additional uses for the balance scales. Moreover, he stresses the importance of recording the resulting measurements. He emphasizes the advantages across these examples of securing and recording more accurate, if not always precise, results. Here Nicholas gives concrete examples of his proposal in Idiota de mente that the best conjecture for human knowing and understanding is “measuring.” We may understand it as a matter of careful observation as well as of “sizing up” conjecturally the implications of recorded weights in a particular area. Nicholas’s early use of geometrical (gures and geometrical thought experiments in De docta ignorantia had enabled him to propose novel conjectures in philosophical theology that extended even to the physical universe. In Idiota de staticis experimentis Nicholas has the layman turn to a discussion of more accurate practice in measuring and comparing weights and the conjectural possibilities and results of such practice. He points out that the use of the balance scale and the recording of results (almost as a collection of “standards”) would advance the varied practices of weighing and make possible comparative, if conjectural, judgments within and across a variety of everyday pursuits in commerce, navigation, agriculture, and medicine.Q He even manages to suggest some experimental examination of the classic “four elements” using the balance scale. For Nicholas, our best conjectures clearly have traction in ordinary life as well as in theology and philosophy (and in what we might see today as early “natural science” based on observing, measuring—here weighing—and recording results). In this way “conjecture” and “conjecturing” enable the layman to unify empirical and theoretical concerns and experience. In a later sermon of "#$;, Nicholas wrote tellingly of our human estate and the various arts that make at least some people’s lives better, even apart from religion. footnote there. For the medieval Latin treatises themselves, see Ernest A. Moody and Marshall Clagett, eds., !e Medieval Science of Weights (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, "?$!). See also Joseph E. Brown, “&e Science of Weights,” in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg, ">?–!%$ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, "?>*). ?. Jasper Hopkins notes that some of Nicholas’s ideas can be found in Leon Battista Alberti’s De’ Ludi matematici and in Avicenna’s Liber Canonis Medicinae. See Nicholas of Cusa on Wisdom and Knowledge, trans. Jasper Hopkins, $%?–"%n;.

Experiments with Weights

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Now everyone has one entrance into this world, but not every man lives in an equal way. For even though men are born naked like the other animals, still they are clothed by men’s art of weaving so they may live in a better state. &ey use cooked foods and shelter and horses and many such things which art has added to nature for better living. We possess these arts as a great service and giC or favor from their inventors. And so when many live wretchedly and in sadness and in prisons and su@er much while others lead lives of abundance joyfully and nobly, we rightly infer that a human being can, with some favor or art, attain more of a peaceful and joyful life than nature grants. Many have discovered the various arts of living better by their own talent or with divine illumination, as those who discovered the mechanical arts, the arts of sowing and planting and doing business.'R

&is passage from Nicholas’s sermon summarizes his down-to-earth understanding of how those in his congregations lived and how the various practical arts could improve their lives. As he states a few sentences later in the sermon, “Nonetheless, all these arts . . . hand down conjectures about how a virtuous life worthy of praise can be led in this world with peace and calm.”'' Nicholas of Cusa was a scholar and preacher, hardly an experimental scientist as we now think of one, yet he was conversant with and intrigued by what can be done with the simple balance scale already long in use in daily life. In De staticis experimentis he has the layman point out the advantages of accurate and comparative weighing to yield better measurements. Even though neither the orator nor the layman is performing or recording actual experiments, they consider together the "%. Sermo !";, sec. "!, ""–!% (IV/" *>): “Unus est autem introitus omnium hominum in hunc mundum, sed non aequae omnes vivunt. Nam etsi ut alia animalia nudi nascantur homines, tament arte hominum textoria, ut melius vivant, vestiti sunt. Utuntur coctis cibis et domo atque equis et pluribus talibus, quae ad melius vivendum ars addidit naturae, quas artes pro magno munere et dono atque equis et pluribus talibus, quae ad melius vivendum ars addit naturae, quas artes pro magno munere et dono seu gratia ab inventoribus habemus. Unde cum multi aerumnose et in tristia atque in carceribus vivant multa patientes, alii vero laete et nobiliter in abundantia vitam ducant, recte elicimus hominem posse aliqua gratia seu arte ad quietam et laetam vitam plus, quam natura concedit pervenire. Et quamvis multi suo ingenio aut divina illuminatio varias artes invenerunt melius vivendi, ut qui artes mechanicas et seminandi et plantandi et negotiandi invenerunt.” "". Sermo !";, sec. "!, !;–!? (IV/" *>): “Tamen hae omnes artes non servient spiritui, sed tradunt coniecturas, quo modo in hoc mundo cum pace et quiete via virtuosa et laude digna duci possit.”

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many possibilities for discovery and application using an ordinary balance. &e layman begins: “Although in this world nothing can attain unto preciseness, nevertheless we know from experience that the verdict of weight-scales is quite accurate and that therefore, they are generally accepted. . . . It seems to me that by reference to di@erence of weight we can more truly attain unto the hidden aspects of things and can know many things by means of more plausible conjectures.”': Since in De mente his layman derives mens (“mind”) from mensura (“measure”), it is clear that “measuring” in these many contexts is what he takes to be the natural way in which we come to know, if always conjecturally, what there is to measure in our observable world.'< &e use of the balance scales to (nd the proportional measures between material things and processes that appear to be similar but are not is a telling extension and application of what Nicholas wrote early in De docta ignorantia about human knowledge as proportional: “However, all those who make an investigation judge the uncertain proportionally, by means of a comparison with what is taken to be certain. &erefore, every inquiry is comparative and uses the means of proportion.”'= In this book, though no actual weighing goes on, the layman proposes (nding the “proportion” between two physical objects by the ratio between two known weights on equal sides of the scales. &e layman also uses the ratio of two di@erent weights of water collected from the water clock (clepsydra) for the time interval it takes to measure two di@erent pulse rates and other natural processes that involve counting.'A &e layman also laments the lack of recordkeeping: "!. De staticis experimentis, sec. ";", ;–*; sec. ";!, )–# (V !!"–!!) (Hopkins, )!"): “Quamquam nihil in hoc mundo praecisionem attingere queat, tamen iudicium staterae verius experimur et hinc undique acceptum. . . . Per ponderum di@erentiam arbitror ad rerum secreta verius pertingi et multa sciri posse verisimiliori coniectura.” "). Karsten Harries commented on the wider implications of this dialogue for scienti(c knowing in his lecture at Harvard in !%%* (“&e Power of Measuring: Re+ections on the Significance of Nicholas of Cusa’s De staticis experimentis” [lecture, February !", !%%*]). "#. De docta ignorantia I, ", sec. !, "#–"; (I $) (Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa on Wisdom and Knowledge, modi(ed, $%): “Omnes autem investigantes in comparatione presuppositi certi proportionabiliter incertum iudicant comparative igitur est omnis inquisition, medio proportionis utens.” "$. See Paula Pico Estrada, “Weight and Proportion in Nicholas of Cusa’s Idiota de Staticis Experimentis,” Verbum (St. Petersburg Press) ? (!%%>): "#%–$!.

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#)

Although in this world nothing can attain unto preciseness, nevertheless we know from experience that the verdicts of weight-scales are quite accurate and that, therefore, they are generally accepted. But since with regard to objects that have di@erent origins it is not possible for equal weights to be present in identically sized objects, please tell me whether or not anyone has [ever] written down the di@erent experimental results pertaining to weights.'B

N.-3O 456 J2K23L6 23/ 456 ,246H SK0LT What follows are some experiments the layman proposes from various areas of practical measuring that employ the balance and the water clock. &roughout he underscores the usefulness of weighing accurately and of keeping careful records of the results.

Medicine (sections "#$–#%) &e layman explains how the weight of water from di@erent sources can vary even when users do not compare them or otherwise sense any obvious di@erence between them. Items of the same size or apparently equal volume may have di@erences in weight once they are placed on the balance scale. He points to some examples: how the weight of equal volumes of blood or of urine can vary with illness, age, and a patient’s place of origin. Knowing these di@erences in weight, he conjectures, might lead to di@ering diagnoses and prescriptions of medication or care. Just so, instead of just being tasted, herbs and roots used for the sick could be compared by weight against weights of blood and urine aCer the herbs and roots are ingested so that physicians might “arrive at the [correct] deliverable dosage.” &e result would be “a more precise conjecture” as to the appropriate treatment.'D Again, one could use the weighed outputs of a water clock to measure di@erences between the pulse rate of a sick person and a healthy person for a given span of time. By combining the water clock and the balance ";. De staticis experimentis, sec.";", ;–"% (V ";") (Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa on Wisdom and Knowledge, )!"): “Quamquam nihil in hoc mundo praecisionem attingere queat, tamen iudicium staterae verius experimur et hinc undique acceptum. Sed dicito quaeso, cum non est possibile in eadem magnitudine esse idem pondus in diversis diversam habentibus originem, an ne quisquam experimentales ponderum conscripserit di@erentias.” ">. De staticis experimentis, sec. ";#, *–"% (V !!)) (Hopkins, )!$).

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scale, one could also compare the number of breaths of ill versus healthy people in a given locale by using the di@erence in weights of the water clock’s output for an equal time. Linking these results with those from weighing the same people’s urine and blood should lead to more accurate diagnoses and medical judgments.

Size and Weight (sections "#%–&') &e idiota then moves to the displacement of water as a way of determining and comparing weights of what seem to be similarly sized animals in and out of water (via Archimedes’s principle). He suggests that the same method can be used to detect the relative weights of metals or coins of the same size, simply by placing them in water or oil. &is might enable one to identify the metals mixed in each piece without melting them, just as Archimedes did.'P Precious metals and alchemy stand in the background in a time when testing with (re was valued as well. In the same manner jewels could be compared by weighing each di@erent gemstone against equal sizes of known lead weights. One could then discover whether any jewel had been tampered with. And each gem could be weighed in air, water, and oil. &ese techniques were no doubt already long in use, but no widespread records of standard or comparative weights of precious metals and jewels seem to have been known to Nicholas. !e “Power” of Magnets (section "&() &ey turn to discussing how the power of a magnet could be ascertained conjecturally by equalizing the weights of a piece of iron and a piece of stone on a balance, then holding the magnet above the iron. Stronger magnets would make the balance move more or less when held closer or farther from the iron. If a series of weights were used to equalize the balance when the magnet was at a series of distances, the proportional power of the magnet could be shown. So, too, could one demonstrate the “blocking power” of diamonds or wood and other objects of various sorts and sizes placed between the magnet and the iron to prevent the magnet’s moving the iron. Di@eren"*. Even though Nicholas does not mention Archimedes by name, the story from antiquity of his discovery and of his assessment of the king’s crown was well known in the late Middle Ages.

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tial weights on the balance scale would also indicate the di@erences in weight between pure and mixed metals of the same size—just as weighing the metals in air, water, and oil and comparing their weights would indicate those di@erences.'Q We should notice that Nicholas is proposing an investigation in mathematical terms of what he assumes is the “power” or intrinsic quality of the magnet. Measuring and recording each weight reveals not so much anything intrinsic to a given magnet but rather how the magnet compares with opposite weights on the balance scales before and aCer it liCs the piece of iron. As Fritz Nagel has pointed out, a qualitative object is given a quantitative description in relation to other objects.:R Cusanus clearly did not realize how prescient and groundbreaking this would seem to those looking back at his ideas centuries later in times when repeated observations were oCen recorded in mathematical and statistical terms.

!e “Four Elements” (sections "&#–%)) All such procedures are compatible with and have as their background the medieval notion that goes back to the ancient Greeks (especially Aristotle) that there are four basic elements mixed in various ways in everything material that has some size. (From heaviest to lightest the four classic elements were: earth, water, air, and (re.):' &e layman points out that burning wood or other objects and then weighing the ashes lets us see how much water, air, and (re was in the wood. Since we never get any one of the four elements alone and unmixed, we can discover how much water is in something by (rst weighing the item, then burning everything combustible in it. Weighing the remaining ashes would amount to mostly earth since air and (re are much lighter in weight. One can also weigh a sample of sand or dirt in water, air, and oil to see what other elements might be in the sample. Comparing weights of di@erent samples of earth can let us know what is not obvious to direct observation. "?. On this particular experiment, its presuppositions and results, see Fritz Nagel, Nicolaus Cusanus und die Entstehung der exakten Wissenscha*en (Münster: Aschendor@, "?*#), *)–*$. !%. Nagel, Entstehung, *#. !". See the essay by Anneliese Maier, “&e &eory of the Elements and the Problem of &eir Participation in Compounds,” in On the !reshold of Exact Science: Selected Writing of Anneliese Maier on Late Medieval Natural Philosophy, ed. and trans. Steven D. Sargent, "!#–#! (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, "?*!).

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One could also use the balance scales to weigh samples of wool of the same size and to note the di@erences in the samples between humid and dry conditions. &is di@erence could supposedly give some sense of the weight of the air (actually, the weight of the water in the air), in addition to a sense of the weight of the wool itself. One could even measure the comparative strength of the sun in various regions by weighing the same number of grains of wheat or barley from very fertile (elds in each place, or from hilltops and valleys in the same locale along the same straight line from east to west. Another way to measure the weight of air would be to drop heavy objects of the same weight but of varied shapes from the same height and, using a water clock, measure the di@erences in the times they each took to fall. &e di@erent weights of the water collected from the water clock would be proportional to the weight of the air. A similar technique done in water could give you the weight of the water. (Nicholas’s layman did not realize that this sort of procedure fails to account for the di@ering resistance of air or water to di@erently shaped objects of the same weight.) &e layman does not discuss the accuracy of these comparative weights of the four elements. While we note some obvious +aws in what is being done (primarily, perhaps, the presupposition of and conventional belief in the four elements), using this kind of procedure could possibly eventuate in a table of comparative weights of di@erent kinds of things. It could not tell much about the four elements, in fact, but it could be of practical use when cost, price, and pro(t depended, for instance, on the weight of something like wool when comparing dry or damp wool, or on the amount of seed needed to plant on a hill or in a valley or in (elds of varying fertility. Some of the layman’s proposals break with the traditional idea (oCen attributed to Aristotle) that claimed plants and herbs were mostly earth. &e orator asks how the weight scale might help us experience an element since no pure element can be observed. Nicholas writes: Suppose that aCer one hundred pounds of earth have been placed in a cask someone were to cull the one hundred pounds successively of herbs or of seeds that were strewn amidst the earth and that were previously weighed [together with that earth]. And suppose that he were to weigh the earth again. He would (nd that the earth had diminished in weight only a little. From this fact he would know that the collected herbs have weight mainly from water. It follows that thickened waters in the earth have attracted “earthenness” and by the

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activity of the sun the waters have condensed into an herb. If these herbs were burned, wouldn’t you—through conjecture on the basis of the di@erence of all the weights—reach [a conclusion about] however much earth you would (nd over and above one hundred pounds? And isn’t it evident that water produced this [additional] earth?::

&is passage makes clear that although Nicholas did not know about photosynthesis, he at least saw the import of the sun and of water for the total weight of the “herbs.”:< Once more he stresses the need for written records—as he puts it, “the more written records there are, the more infallibly we can arrive, on the basis of experiments, at the art elicited from the experiments.”:= Neither the layman nor Nicholas seems to have performed or even attempted any of these experiments, but the imagination and experience shown in describing them demonstrate convincingly that Nicholas was well aware of what someone with practical purposes could do with the balance scale.

Determining the Depth of Water (section "%") &e next procedure they discuss involves determining the depth of a given location in water by comparing it to one of known depth. &e layman proposes using a crescent-shaped piece of lead with an apple balanced within or attached to the lighter end of the crescent. When the lead piece hits the bottom of the location of unknown depth, the apple is released and the time it takes to rise is recorded. &e same procedure is followed for a location with a known depth of water, and the unknown depth correlates to the di@erence in times that it takes the same apple to rise in !!. De staticis experimentis, sec. ">>, ")–!" (V !)%) (Hopkins, )#$): “Si quis positis centum libris terrae in testa colligeret ex herbis aut seminibus in terram proiectis prius ponderatis, successive centum libras et iterum terram ponderaret, in pauco ipsam in pondere reperiret diminutam. Ex quo haberet collectas herbas pondus ex aqua potius habere. Aquae igitur in terra ingrossatae terrestreitatem attraxerunt, et opera solis in herbam sunt condensatae. Si herbae illae incinerentur, nonne per coniecturam ex ponderum omnium diversitate attingeres quantum terrae plus centum libris reperires; et illam, aquam attulisse manifestum est?” !). See A. D. Krikorian and F. C. Steward, “Water and Solutes in Plant Nutrition: With Special Reference to van Helmont and Nicholas of Cusa.” Bioscience "*, no. # ("?;*): !*;–?!. &e authors conclude: “While Nicholas of Cusa, writing in the style of his day, did not insert any experimental data, it is nevertheless clear that conceptually he anticipated van Helmont and Robert Boyle” (!?"). !#. De staticis experimentis, sec. ">*, ";–"* (V !)") (Hopkins, )#>): “Quanto enim plures [scripturas] fuerint, tanto infallibilius de experimentis ad artem quae ex ipsis elicitur, posset deveniri.”

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each case, with the times determined using the weight of water collected from the water clock. One could imagine all sorts of practical problems with these untested suggestions, given unseen currents (especially with the release of the apple at the bottom), but perhaps what the layman is proposing could be feasible in calm water.

A Ship’s Speed (section "%$) &e orator proposes dropping an apple o@ the front of a ship and timing how long it takes to reach the rear. &e layman also mentions the use of a crossbow to measure a moving ship’s speed. He states that if one calculates the di@erent amounts of time the ship takes to reach the spot where the arrow hits the water when the ship is moving faster or slower, the weights of the water collected for each period should be proportional to the di@erent speeds of the ship. What these proposals leave out, however, is that the ship imagined is already moving, so the times calculated, whether longer or shorter, indicate slower or faster speeds that are always relative to the ship’s current speed.:A Other Proposals (sections "%+–%() &e relative strength of crossbows can be timed from the +ight of the same arrow shot straight up from each of the bows, presumably on a windless day. And the relative speed of men and animals and even of military forces can be timed and compared. In each case, one weighs and records the amount of water collected by a water clock. A man’s strength can be measured by how large a weight he can liC to equilibrium on the other side of a balance scale while subtracting his weight from the weight he liCs. (And any man weighs more and less upon inhaling and exhaling.) Ice and water vary in weight, as do green and dry wood—the balance scales can tell their increase or decrease in cold and hot weather. If records are kept from timing all the days of a year from sunrise to sunset, one can conjecture from the weights of water collected what the month and day is for any year. But because some days vary so little from others, one must treat the results “less assuredly.” (&at remark suggests the limits of measurements when testing something as variable as weather from year to year on the same day.) !$. &is criticism of Nicholas’s proposal was made early in the twentieth century by Pierre Duhem. See his Études sur Leonard de Vinci, Seconde serie (Paris: F. de Nobele, "?$$), !#%–#!.

Experiments with Weights

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Astronomy and Astrology (sections "%#–,") &e orator proposes timing movements to compare the sun’s movement in the zodiac to its movement in the meridian—all in the Ptolemaic system of the sun, the planets, and the stars. &e layman responds con(dently that even the size of the sun can be detected from timing an equinoctial day and comparing it to the revolution of a star, but it can also be detected by reference to solar eclipses and the movement of the moon through earth’s shadow. Since the moon is half the earth’s size (so Nicholas’s layman believes) we can then calculate “both the distance of the sun from the earth and the sun’s size.”:B Perhaps one can even predict, if only conjecturally, a yield of more or less from the soil’s fertility based on the planets and their moons. &is would parallel the conjectural predictions on how cold the winter will be from the “fatness of (sh and reptiles at the beginning of winter”— “ex pinguedine piscium et reptilium in principio hiemis.”:D &e layman (dryly perhaps) remarks that weighing the water in herbs and grains of wheat from di@erent years may be a better guide to future fertility or its lack than to do so by movement of the stars. As for questions asked of astrologers, the layman says that there is no suitable way to answer them using weights—unless one thinks a suitably “weighty” response should (t a “weighty” question (the layman is surely smiling). What we see in this response is the probable motive the questioner may not see. But no art or use of balance scales is possible apart from good judgment—and people blessed with wisdom need not be concerned with such matters of astrology, according to the layman. Music and Harmony (sections ",$–,+) &e balance scale is useful in relation to music as well. (Nicholas is thinking here of the Pythagorean scale, following Boethius’s De musica.) Weights of two bells of consonant tone display the proportion that is their harmonic measure. &e weights of music pipes and of water (lling the pipes can display the proportions of all the formable harmonies, !;. &e whole Latin passage reads: “Ex quibus mediam conicimus proportionem esse magnitudinis eius ad terram. Deinde ex motu lunae et eclipsatione solis venamur solis a terra distantiam et magnitudinem subtili ingenio, coniecturaliter tamen” (De staticis experimentis, sec. "*>, !!–!$ [V !);] [Hopkins, )$?]). !>. De staticis experimentis, sec. "*?, )–; (V !)>) (Hopkins, );").



%$Conjecturing in the World

for instance, the octave, the (Ch, and the fourth. So, too, the weights of mallets striking an anvil, the weights of drops of water dripping into a pond, and the weights of +utes and all musical instruments can be more precisely measured by weighing on the balance. &e weight itself is a harmonic proportion arising from various combinations of di@erent things. (&e layman then extrapolates to claim that friendships and animosities, health and illness, +ightiness and seriousness, prudence and naivete display [a di@erent sort of] harmony or disharmony.)

Geometry and Weights (section ",') &e orator then asks about geometry. Weights can reveal the close proportions between a circle and a square: weigh a constructed cylinder of known diameter and height and a cubical vessel of the same diameter and height, then (ll each with water, and from the di@erence of their weights one will know “the proportion of an inscribed square to the circle within which it is inscribed” (this amounts to pi).:P Again, the di@erence in their weights displays the di@erence in area between a circle and a square of equal perimeter. One can also use the balance scales to weigh each side of other scales being fabricated and note how distances from the center of the scale let a small weight liC a large one. For the layman, such experimenting with the balance is useful for anything “pertaining to geometry.”

UV.6HW24-03 23/ X6L0H/T66G-3O As the third dialogue in the Idiota trilogy, De staticis experimentis continues the conversation between the layman and orator-humanist of the (rst two dialogues. Nicholas demonstrates his own familiarity with the everyday practical world of his time, describing and re+ecting on the use of balance scales he read about and was directly acquainted with from his travels and time spent in both Germany and Italy. Nicholas’s layman (the unschooled idiota) discusses the everyday knowledge involved in several actual and possible practices that employ or could pro(t from the use of balance scales. His character, the layman, can catalogue for the humanist orator this !*. De staticis experimentis, sec. "?#, ;–* (V !#%): “nota tibi erit ex diversitate ponderum inscripti quadrati ad circulum, cui inscribitur proportio.”

Experiments with Weights

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everyday practical knowledge. Many of the measurements with weights they discuss utilize both the balance scales and the water clock that late medieval and early Renaissance people were familiar with and could easily imagine at work as they read the layman’s conversational account. All the layman’s recommendations about weighing emphasize the utility of obtaining more accurate knowledge than mere perceptual observation could deliver. Here we are reminded again of the layman’s initial invoking of measuring as what the human mind characteristically does. &e di@ering descriptions of procedures and applications let us see how the balance scale and water clock are an extension of the human mind and imagination (no less than every sort of contemporary technology and technique). De staticis experimentis demonstrates how many of the practical pursuits of ordinary (Ceenth-century life that involve weighing on the balance could be improved by use of more exact measuring and recording of results. Many of these examples had been noted by various other medieval writers, both Muslim and Christian. Nicholas’s layman gathers them together in a single conversation. Nicholas of Cusa is hardly anticipating or forecasting the science that would come in the following centuries. &e astronomy in this book is Ptolemaic, the “chemistry” involves the four elements inherited from the Greeks, and some of the purported ways of measuring (for instance, the speed of a falling object) are faulty. Yet Nicholas’s layman is illustrating how everyday knowledge of the world around us can be improved by observation, careful measurement, and recordkeeping. Both layman and orator repeatedly and explicitly wish that the measurements that result from using the balance scale were kept in a very large book so that they could easily refer to them. Once more we recognize that the layman (Nicholas) is aware of and involved with everyday life and commerce. He is intrigued by the possibilities of more exact weights and measures across the varied human endeavors he was acquainted with and mentions here: health, soil mixtures, purity of water, coinage and gems, depth of bodies of water, harvest comparisons, music, time.:Q All of these could be calculated more exactly by using a balance !?. Nicholas’s dialogue, as one commentator summarizes, “advocates the use of the balance and the comparison of weights for the solution of a wide range of problems, ranging from mechanics to medicine, and including those of chemistry. He advocates di@erences in weights as a guide to the evaluation of natural waters, the condition of blood and urine in sickness and

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Conjecturing in the World

scale and a water clock for collecting and measuring di@ering weights of water. And they could be made more useful by continuous recording and consistent organizing. &e upshot is that those using this “technology” could answer questions that observation alone, even careful observation, could not manage with as much accuracy. &e physical and social sciences today continue to rely on careful observation and measurement and on keeping records of the results of investigation and experimentation. Nicholas wrote (ve centuries before our contemporary science, yet he anticipated something central to all human endeavor, scienti(c or not. We observe the world and people around us, and we oCen need to measure what we see to guide and compare our interpretations, get beyond our assumptions and prejudices, and judge what we want to do and hope to accomplish. We turn to specialists and experts in various (elds to let us know how our common sense and cultural beliefs do or do not conform to the conclusions of the physical and social sciences, and how we can improve our practices and our lives by reforming those beliefs, changing our practices, or both. Cusanus’s dialogue enables us to reach back over half a millennium to see some early examples of what we now take for granted in measuring and recording, not to mention how our practical and scienti(c a@airs are in+uenced by how we measure and what we record. Even today we need to observe what is going on in the world and oCen to measure it (in every sense of “measure”) in order to make our choices, actions, and lives more telling and productive. &e creative thinkers, artists, and humanists of (Ceenth-century Italy looked to the texts of classical times to enrich their own lives and renew their own society. &eir century also marks the beginnings of what was still to come in the sixteenth century and aCer—in art, music, protoscience and medicine, mathematics, literature, and religion. Nicholas was acquainted with all these endeavors and was in frequent contact with a circle of learned friends in Italy (especially in Rome). De staticis experimentis, whatever its mistakes, is thus both an extension of what more exact knowing can amount to and a witness to the everyday activhealth, the evaluation of the eYcacy of drugs, and the identi(cation of metals and alloys. It would be diYcult to (nd a more speci(c prescription for what scientists were actually doing two centuries later” (Robert P. Multhauf, “&e Science of Matter,” in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, "?>*], )*;).

Experiments with Weights

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ities that were of interest to Nicholas because they involved measuring with the use of the balance scales. What is novel and striking about De staticis experimentis is the way it adds obvious concern with the realm of practice to the more theoretical and abstract concerns of the (rst two dialogues of the Idiota trilogy. It transforms the theoretical map of knowledge so that everyday practice becomes an important part of human conjectural knowing. While not really a plea for experimentation and observation as such, this dialogue exempli(es how ordinary hands-on knowledge and measurement already extended across various practices of the time, how observable practices already worked, and how they could be made more serviceable by more exact measurement and consistent recordkeeping. Since the Renaissance meant retrieval as well as renewal, practical knowledge already sought in many areas could be preserved and extended by re+ecting on just when and how one used balance scales and water clocks and by tallying results. What Nicholas’s layman proposes required no new inventions but an emphasis on careful observation and measurement. “Taking the measure” of various things is exactly what the human capacities of sense perception, imagination, and reason are designed to do. &e layman uses the weight scales and water clock so he can measure and compare sizes, distances, weights, durations, and speeds. For Nicholas, even if our theoretical knowledge never captures the essence of any given thing, our practical concerns and experience do enable us to put a variety of human inventions to work so that we can discover and learn how to deal more accurately with the world around us. Expanding and recasting the range of human knowing to include new ideas and to emphasize practical concerns beyond religious revelation and philosophical speculation bring attention to empirical observation and employment of instruments. Cusanus, though he probably did not realize it, took a step toward what the Renaissance was encouraging—human endeavor and individual experience. De staticis experimentis looks toward the physical sciences that would emerge in the next few centuries and would depend on observation and measurement, even as they do to this day., !%"*, >*–>?.

Map and Mapmaker

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"e Cusanus Map and the Mapmaker

As the products of a transitional thinker, Nicholas of Cusa’s writings illuminate how even the theological texts of the #$eenth century evolve as premodern thinking. He o$en selected some contemporary invention, artifact, or device and employed it as a symbol or analogy for his conjectural theological and philosophical re%ection.& In a late work, Compendium ('()(), Nicholas takes the act of mapmaking beyond the merely geographical or textual and into the realm of mind and imagination, thus demonstrating an intuitive grasp of the import and %exibility of both geophysical maps and their metaphorical, if conjectural, extensions. Chapter * of his late Compendium turns to a mapmaker or cosmographicus who constructs an imaginary city map as a way of organizing human sense perception and its deliverances.+ "is mapmaker image also calls attention to the then rising interest in more geographically accurate and complete geophysical maps. A late #$eenth-century map of central Europe is still attributed to Nicholas, though we have no independent textual evidence of or reference to his own mapmaking experience. Much earlier in his life, Nicholas had purchased three types of astronomical instruments that observers used to map the “#xed stars” in the heavens, #nd their locations on earth, and guide their journeys on the sea: a wooden celestial globe, a torquetum, and an astrolabe. Today these instruments are still in the Cusanus Library in Bernkastel-Kues, a '. Of particular note are the beryl eyeglass in De beryllo ('(,*), the measuring compass and wooden spoon in Idiota de mente ('(,-), contemporary portraiture and the clock in De visione Dei ('(,!), the spinning top in Trialogus de Possest ('()-), and the use of geometrical diagrams and mathematics in a good number of his works. Moreover, Nicholas never separated theology and philosophy in his writing. .. "e whole Compendium amounts to a booklet. It also discusses signs, speaking about the reality that is God, and adds, toward the end, some considerations about the human mind and human knowledge. "e mapmaker passage from chapter * is quoted in full below.

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Conjecturing in the World

concrete manifestation of Nicholas’s interest in and enthusiasm for celestial mapping and for locating oneself on land and sea. He writes: “In '((( . . . I bought a large solid sphere, an astrolabe and a torquetum along with a book about the Almagest [perhaps Ptolemy’s actual geographical treatise] and #$een other books.”/ Nicholas purchased these instruments while he attended the imperial Diet of Nuremberg. (He spent only thirty-eight Rhenish %orins, a real bargain.) His selection of these instruments (and their preservation) provides clear evidence of his early awareness and ongoing curiosity about mapping in general. Geophysical and astronomical maps provoke careful re%ection as multifaceted visual texts. If we understand the notion of maps and mapmaking as Cusan conjectural illustrations, they make accessible for our understanding the way imagination and thought put ideas together. Making a map of human mentality in the Compendium thereby provides for the reader an entryway and invitation to make sense of thinking itself and its conjectural products.

012 3456745 869 "e story of the so-called Cusanus map of late medieval Germany and central Europe is itself captivating. Although no copy of Nicholas’s supposed original is extant, it would likely have to be dated sometime after '(,-, when he was appointed bishop of Brixen. "e later woodcut map of Etzlaub at Nuremberg and the copper engraving map from Eichstätt are both said to derive from Nicholas’s map. It was presumed that the map originated with Nicholas of Cusa because both his birthplace (Kues—today Bernkastel-Kues) and his diocese (Brixen—today BolzanoBressanone) are designated on these maps and because neither place was otherwise particularly important. "ese two maps (Etzlaub and Eichstätt) are the basis of the several early sixteenth-century maps attributed to Cusanus.: !. Nicholas’s note in Codex Cusanus .'', fol. !, reads: “emi speram solidam magnam, astrolabium et turketum, lebrum super Almagesti cum aliis libris ', pro xxxviii %orenis Renensibus.” I owe this quote to Dr. Marco Broesch, the current head of the Cusanus Library. See also Alois Krchnak, “Die Herkun$ der astronomischen Handschri$en und Instrumente des Nikolaus von Kues,” MFCG ! (';)!): '-;–*-. (. “"e maps that derive from Cusanus’ map are essentially itinerary maps in their detailed construction, based on measurements along many routes. "ese measurements will have

Map and Mapmaker

,
of international legal proceedings, violent clashes, and wars. Maps not only o>er a guide for our movements but also provide evidence of our possessions and of authority wielded over land and the people who dwell there. Just placing items on a map in relation to one another singles them out and underlines their connections and signi#cance. With their seemingly neutral geographical representations, maps imply and signify a history of social in%uence and importance. In this way, every map has no less meaning and rhetorical potential than that invested in any verbal or visual text. J. B. Harley points out that such “power” is both external and internal to maps.? For Harley, such power is external in that it is exerted on the map itself in its making and is internal in that it is exercised with the map in use. What results is in%uence exerted in the map’s very representations. Many maps are made in the pursuit of national goals and as symbols of state prestige. As instruments of such in%uence, maps are employed by governments, nation states, and property owners (whether institutions or individuals) to stake claims, to highlight desirable natural and social resources, to rebu> encroachments from without, to rea@rm ancient borders and national or ethnic histories and identities, to deny the presence or claims of others, and even to warn others to stay away. To rephrase Robert Frost’s famous line about fences, borders “make good neighbors.” ). See “Deconstructing the Map,” '),–)), in J. B. Harley’s !e New Nature of Maps (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, .--'). "e de#nitive study of maps may well be Christian Jacob’s !e Sovereign Map, trans. Tom Conley, ed. Edward H. Dahl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, .--)). A remark in Jacob’s conclusion is apropos here: “Even when its di>usion becomes the object of restrictions or of a monopoly, the map is a social object, concerned with power, and a strategic instrument as well” (!).).

Map and Mapmaker

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Maps function as “objective” (though socially constructed) instruments or means for advancing any or all of these goals or purposes. But service to these economic and political ends—what one does with the map—all depends on the map’s putative claims. To make a map is to exercise control over what it contains and represents, as well as over its omissions and emphases. Maps are texts that separate and relate the places they single out; they are the result of an ordering mind that selects and omits for both explicit and implicit reasons. Maps can become de#nitive statements of what is not there, not just of where the borders are placed. "ey also state what or whom a designated territory includes or excludes. "is is the rhetorical power internal to the map that makes it into an “objective” statement of “where things stand” geographically, socially, and otherwise. Maps have had a long history of telling us what places are important because of their size, location, and connection to other places. Maps thus provide a perspective on past and current social history, not just a means of getting from one place to another. "ey emphasize the places that are important for the mapmakers and their audiences, even when there are standard procedures and protocols for how maps designate and symbolize whole countries and continents and the places important within them. "e Cusanus map, with its designation of Nicholas’s home town, is one such example. It also serves to underline the importance of central Europe, the Rhine river, and the Holy Roman Empire—even perhaps to Nicholas’s ecclesial and secular colleagues and acquaintances in Rome. Although there is no evidence available, we might well suppose that such a map could let those in Renaissance Rome and Italy encounter the “real” Germany. "is use of conjectural imagery is an example of the kind of rhetorical in%uence that can be exercised with the help of a map. "e Cusanus map thus anticipates what would very soon be deliberately done by nations constructing and employing their own maps of both homelands and colonies. Since we do not know Nicholas’s intentions for his map, we can only suppose that he did not re%ect on all the social and political implications of the place of Germany and the Holy Roman Empire in north central Europe.A But being the Renaissance “premodern” man he was, Nicholas erence. "e best symbols and conjectures use differences to underline likenesses we did not notice or may have missed. We are led to examine carefully what we are talking about and trying to understand, even if the terms of the symbol seem far-fetched or foreign. Symbol and metaphor enable us to step across the conventional boundaries of literal description and de#nition to see what we are dealing with from the outside and even sometimes from an inside we had not previously entertained. Nicholas’s conjectural city map of mentality and its contents is an example of how an extended aenigma or symbol can defamiliarize us so that we look at the human mind’s workings and results in a di>erent light. Nicholas’s imagined city gates demonstrate how this works. By transferring the characteristics of the gates to sense perception, we add to our understanding of sensing, even if we use our previous perceptual experience to understand what other characteristics of gates probably do not apply. "e senses, a$er all, are hardly city gates. We sort and make judgments about which of a gate’s qualities really #t the sensorium, and we test them against our previous experience. Yet we allow those gate-like parallels to be conjectures that extend the way we previously imagined both gates and sensation. We can open or close our senses to some degree, and “the messages” they gather about the perceptible world require our sorting and ordering. Nicholas has selected two somewhat unlikely items whose connection can further our understanding. Aristotle’s remark that employing metaphor requires an inventive eye for likenesses lets us see just how astute our conjectural judgments of #t and appropriateness can be. One can imagine, for instance, being blocked or confused in sorting and comparing what sensation amounts to and wishing one had a map or diagram so one could better locate and relate the di>erent deliverances of sense perception, whether in their bodily organs or in conceptual space. Working in this situation, one can use mapping or diagramming in order to judge better just what sensation involves. What a conjectural map of a city’s gates and the information that comes through them spells

erence. In his writings from the mid-'(,-s to the end of his life, he consistently returns to his initial conjectures about God’s nature and God’s unknowability for human beings—looking again at the coincidence of opposites. Nicholas continues to propose imaginative conjectures about God as ways of leading us to what we may not understand apart from religious faith, but what he thought it crucial for us to acknowledge and address in terms of our own knowing.

!e Beryl Stone and Aristotle

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!e Beryl Stone and Aristotle

Cusan conjecture #ts easily into the world of everyday practice and inventive analogies. But how can conjecturing move our minds past images and concepts to a level where we are #nally forced up against the limits of human thought, conjectural or not? Instead of leading us through several stages as he did in his story about a map of the mind, Nicholas confronts us in the De beryllo of $"%" with a gemstone that blinds as much as transports us toward what is beyond the human mind. Even here where Nicholas’s writings are obsessed with the God we cannot fathom, he does provide us with a concrete object to paradoxically let us see just what stands in our way. On the Beryl Glass (or On the Gemstone) is a literal translation of the puzzling but intriguing title De beryllo.& Nicholas describes the beryl stone named in his title as a clear lens or eyeglass fashioned from the semiprecious beryl gem. In his words, it is “white, bright, and clear.” (!e beryl stone was thought to have curative and even magical properties in the Middle Ages.) Not interested in its use as eyeglasses, he explains that his stone is a single lens—perhaps comparable to our loupe or magnifying glass. Nicholas imagines this single lens as combining both a concave side and a convex side. For him it serves as a distinct, physical object that displays his famous “coincidence of opposites.” Such a lens or eyeglass is also an e'ective metaphor or symbol to guide human comprehension, a novel conjectural means designed by Nicholas to draw us into his thought. Nicholas proposes that we transform the physical beryl into an “intellectual” beryl so we may better understand his ideas about the coincidence of opposites.( !e entire $. !e editors’ lengthy “adnotationes” at the end of the critical edition #ll out in greater detail earlier sources for, plus information and lore about, the beryl stone. See De beryllo, Note $ (XI )*–*+). ,. !is key idea in Nicholas of Cusa was proposed in his early masterwork in philosophical

-,

!e Beryl Stone and Aristotle

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De beryllo treatise stands, in fact, as a Cusan conjectural proposal—an informal teaching that also extends and points his conjectures beyond what we can normally conceptualize or fathom. When, as Nicholas says, we imagine and employ this “intellectual beryl that has both a maximum and a minimum form,” we are expected to understand or perhaps glimpse more clearly via intellectual sighting (intellectus) that divine One who is the “indivisible Beginning,” at once beyond and within all that God encompasses. If we examine carefully several passages in De beryllo, especially those about the transcendent divine Oneness or indivisibility and the coincidence of opposites, we may at least be able to grasp how this sketch of these central Cusan ideas now places them in a perhaps somewhat di'erent but clearer light. As we follow his explanations, we also #nd Nicholas’s reactions to his Greek and Latin philosophical predecessors, especially Aristotle and Plato, Dionysius and Albert the Great. Cusanus thus uses the beryl glass symbolism as a conjectural lens to reexamine his own ideas and as an opportunity to di'erentiate those ideas from other philosophical proposals. We are to search where opposites coincide using, as it were, our intellectual beryl glass. Nicholas says that this does not mean that we will properly or fully understand what we may discover, but that at least we will be mindfully disposed not to make God another creature, however exalted. !is God does not belong in the realm of more and less, of contraries and opposites. We therefore need to learn how to situate our thought conjecturally in relation to that triune Origin in which maximum and minimum are not di'erent at all. !en, perhaps, we may glimpse, with the help of grace, the divine mystery, the One who lies beyond. De beryllo begins with four conjectural theses that we might expect would be examined sequentially in what follows. But very soon those themes are pursued more globally by a series of extended diversions rather than by an ordered and systematic explication. Is there a way to see what is happening in this work? It stands as a series of bemused retheology, De docta ignorantia, and was linked to his teaching about learned ignorance. For comments about further relevant sources of these ideas, see the detailed comments in De beryllo XI, Note ,, pp. *+–$... Kurt Flasch comments in his chapter entitled “Die Brille” in Nikolaus von Kues: Geschichte einer Entwicklung, ""%–-*. His later Nicolaus Cusanus (München: Beck, ,..$) is dedicated entirely to De beryllo and a summary of Nicholas’s ideas.

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Conjecturing in the World

/ections and conjectures that proceed in the way a person’s informal re/ections or even one-sided conversations easily do. One set of ideas, or the name of a predecessor and his ideas, suggest or sometimes lead to the next predecessor or idea. Nicholas himself remarks at the very end that his book is “not well organized.”0 Nonetheless, it is worth enunciating his initial four conjectural theses (in the table below), then proceeding to examine and comment on exposition that mostly supports the #rst thesis. In the order of the four theses, we notice the familiar pattern in Nicholas of Cusa’s thinking: he proceeds from God to creatures, here particularly to human beings, and then has them return to the divine source. !is is the typical conjectural pattern of simultaneous out/ow and return (exitus/reditus) we #nd throughout Christian Neoplatonic thought. $. !e #rst origin or beginning is singular and called Intellect. (Cusanus tells us that this thesis enfolds everything else that is to be said.) ,. Second, what is neither true being (verum) nor truthlike being (verisimile) does not exist. +. !ird, man is the measure of all things. (From Protagoras, the Greek sophist.) ". Fourth, man is a second god. (From Hermes Trismegistus.)1 In Nicholas’s actual discussion, any one of the four theses may appear at any point in his exposition. !e third thesis about human knowers being measures is exempli#ed throughout by what Nicholas says and what we are expected to understand, but it is only explicitly discussed a few pages before the treatise ends. A reader new to Nicholas of Cusa may rightly wonder why anyone would care to entertain these ideas and may rightly ask what plausibility or validity they might have. But if we take De beryllo as a didactic exposition, we are not so concerned with why what it claims is true, but rather with how to understand and appreciate what it proposes.

+. De beryllo, sec. -,, $. (XI )%): “minus bene digestus.” ". De beryllo, sections "–- (XI 2–$.).

!e Beryl Stone and Aristotle

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Conjecturing and Beyond

G*4)H I,-J'/+K4'L *M,K+ N.5&+ Nicholas’s De coniecturis employs numbers and geometrical diagrams both to delineate and portray his ideas and to act as examples of “conjecturing.”O #e diagram Nicholas refers to as “P” or “paradigmatica” maps the dialectical relation of oneness and otherness for three imagined regions of the whole created universe.P Figura paradigmatica diagrams these regions by picturing two interlocking and interpenetrating pyramids or cones, one of light or oneness and the other of darkness or otherness, bound together so that the apex of the pyramid of darkness touches the base of the pyramid of light. So, too, the apex of the pyramid of light touches the base of the pyramid of darkness. #ere Nicholas writes: Notice that God, who is Oneness, is as if the base of light; the base of darkness is as if nothing. Every creature, we conjecture, lies between God and nothing. Hence, the uppermost region abounds with light as you see in the diagram; yet it is not free of darkness, although because of the upper world’s simplicity the darkness is thought to be absorbed in light. By contrast, in the lowest region darkness reigns, although it is not the case that in that darkness there is no light at all. Yet the diagram shows that the light is hidden in the darkness rather than shining forth.:Q

Nicholas’s diagram depicts neither God nor nothing, just three realms in which we may "nd all other "nite, created things. #is implies that the divine source of the light is beyond what is here diagrammed and transcends human sighting in any sense. Humans inhabit the mid=. De coniecturis I, ?, sec. ;6 (III ;8–;!). ?. For a thorough explanation of the diagram and variations on it, see Satoshi Oide, “Über die Grundlagen der cusanischen Konjekturenlehre,” esp. 6!>–!7. See also Marco Böhlandt, “Figurae paradigmaticae: Die Bildsprache der konjekturalen Logik an der Schnittstelle von Mathematick, Optik und Lichtmetaphysik,” in Spiegel und Porträt. Zur Bedeutung zweier zentraler Bilder im Denken des Nicolaus Cusanus, ed. Inigo Bocken and Harald Schwaetzer, >=7– C>> (Maastricht: Shaker Publishing, >998), esp. >?8–C96. 69. De coniecturis I, ?, sec. ;>, 6–7 (III ;!–;7): “Adverte quoniam deus, qui est unitas, est quasi basis lucis; basis vero tenebrae est ut nihil. Inter deum autem et nihil conjecturamur omnem cadere creaturam. Unde supremus mundus in luce abundant, uti oculariter conspicis; non est tamen expers tenebrae, quamvis illa ob sui simplicitatem in luce censeatur absorberi. In in"mo vero mundo tenebra regnat, quamvis non sit in ea nihil luminis; illud tamen in tenebra latitare potius quam eminere "gura declarat.” #e English modi"es Hopkins’s translation in Nicholas of Cusa: Metaphysical Speculations, >:676–7>.

Conjectures about Light

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dle, more shadowy region where both light and darkness are found. All three middle regions have proportions of oneness and otherness as participation in them varies among created things, though no "nal or "xed degree of oneness or otherness, light or darkness, is ever attained in the realm of creatures. What of the human minds that make conjectures about this construal of the world? In spite of the divine light’s invisibility, Nicholas understands our participation in this metaphorical light as constitutive of what human intelligence amounts to. He writes later in De coniecturis I.66 that “the intellect’s partaking of that incommunicable, most actual Light constitutes the quiddity of created minds.”:: He interprets all of this in De coniecturis II.67 as meaning that human minds share or participate in the triune divine mind or light in varying degrees, always attempting to approach its triune Oneness more closely. He even maps human knowing powers, ascending from sense perception to reasoning to intellectus, onto the pyramids of light and darkness, of oneness and otherness. We should read the diagram of the interacting pyramids of darkness and light in the early De coniecturis as a dynamic hierarchical display of creatures as well as of our cognitive capacities. It maps the results of our quest to know conjecturally all of creation and even the divine in terms of darkness and light. We are involved dialectically in a back-and-forth between our ignorance of God’s splendor and the purported “knowledge” that lies in and beyond our use of a symbol such as light. Sharing the divine light thus can count as both giD and power. If we need to use sensation and reason to make our way in the world, we also need to use our powers of rational judgment and abstract thought to understand conjecturally all we are capable of as human. For Nicholas, the self-knowledge that we gain should happen in concert with our discovery that we must go beyond reason’s conjectural ideas in seeking to touch God—in whom everything is one. As the Oneness that is identically “light,” God alone is the measure of our minds. Our search to know God is thus identically the search to know ourselves—both should occur together as we move beyond reason into the intellectual and spiritual light that marks our source and our destination. To see Nicholas’s originality, we may recall our own experience of or66. De coniecturis I, 66, sec. 8!, >–; (III 87) (Hopkins modi"ed, 67!): “participatio intellectualis incommunicabilis ipsius actualissimae lucis earum quiditas exsistit.”

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dinary visual perception. What is it that we take for granted as we look around and move about in the world? We seldom notice or question, for instance, that natural or arti"cial physical light is a crucial condition for visual perception. We understand as well that at any given moment we perceive the world around us from one perspective, so that we see only the single pro"le of things that is visible from where we stand. We "nd it commonplace to transfer ordinary visual perspective to the realm of thinking so that more theoretical statements or outlooks may result in an intellectual perspective or may build a conjectural Weltanschauung. As we look at and across any landscape or vista, our ordinary visual perception may no longer be able to discriminate in any detail as we look out some distance towards the horizon, even with the help of binoculars or other means. Instead, at best, we may see some sort of bluish haze in the far distance. #is eRect is due to the air’s interference with light in the distance; it does not mean that the things we cannot make out disappear or that daylight is gone, but that our eyes’ inability to discriminate because of the atmosphere makes it seem that the physical light needed for ocular vision and discriminating sense perception runs out. What diagram P in De coniecturis shows us conjecturally is where Nicholas believes that visual and intellectual discrimination cease and what may be possible at that juncture. Where the light for "nite perception or intellection runs out, we are somehow to move to the in"nite God.

N.5&+ *-0 N'*4-'0 S5-,4*-/' #e uses of light in Nicholas’s writings are not just something inherited and repeated as a convenient trope. #ey are his conjectural attempts to think through and turn the traditional motif, to reframe in dynamic terms the point and meaning of learned ignorance—that we have no literal conceptual or linguistic means, let alone perceptual means, for capturing the divine. Of course God escapes the pyramids of light and darkness in De coniecturis, even if we understand them not as interlocked and static but as dynamically interactive, as symbolic light and darkness together in diRering and changing proportions throughout creation.:< Yet 6>. Jean-Marie Nicolle emphasizes the import of the mind’s dynamic movements if we are to understand Nicholas’s use of geometrical "gures. See “How to Look at the Cusanus’ Geometrical Figures?” MFCG >? (>998): >7?–?C.

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if the base of the pyramid of light is as close as we can come to God’s inaccessible light, we have to ask why God is present at all as we approach the limit of what can be mapped in a diagram of light and darkness—a diagram that is always moving out from oneness and light and returning through otherness or darkness. Nicholas proposes that we place both God and nothing beyond these schematic created limits. (Recall always that his diagram is itself merely a conjecture.) Both interlocking pyramids are fashioned to help our understanding, but we end up having to admit that while they may map something of our knowledge of creatures, they capture nothing of the divine creator. What sort of light is at issue in diagram P? Obviously both the ordinary light of the physical world and the intellectual “light” of the mental realm. #e latter is what we need to make sense of P beyond recognizing the two interacting pyramids and what they stand for—the upper, middle, and lower domains of creation and of human knowing spread out dynamically from light into darkness, from oneness into otherness, and vice versa. Nicholas has us view his diagram only to experience its limits as we think it through. Here light moves from oneness, while at the same time darkness counters light with otherness. But this diagram symbolically removes God from our knowledge of created things alone, just as viewing a landscape and noting linear perspective in a painting can become symbolic of the point where intellectual light and human thinking run out. A further way to understand this initial geometrical diagram will be to note how later (in De coniecturis II.6!) Nicholas will apportion sensation, imagination, reason, and intellectus into the three regions or domains so that what we know by sense perception, by imagination, by reason, and by intuitive vision will move from the realms of otherness to those of oneness.:@ God’s light works with our knowing powers and is 6C. In De coniecturis II, 6!, sec. 687, 6–6; (III 68!–87), Nicholas writes: “Ipsa autem humana anima cum sit in"ma intellectualis natura, intellectualiter in potentia est. Intellectualis autem potentia lumen est rationis. Concipito itaque animam humanam ut P "guram ex intellectuali unitate et sensuali alteritate. Descendente igitur lumine intelligentiae in umbram sensualem atque ascendente sensu in intellectum per gradus ternos medio loco duo exoriuntur, quae rationis nomen habere suppono. Superior autem huius rationis portio, quae intellectui prior reperitur, apprehensiva, inferior vero phantastica seu imaginativa, si placet, his aut aliis vocentur nominibus. Haec sunt quasi animae humanae quattuor elementa. Intellectus autem iste in nostra anima eapropter in sensum descendit, ut sensibile ascendat ad ipsum. Ascendit ad intellectum sensibile, ut intelligentia ad ipsum descendat. Hoc est enim intellectum descendere ad sensibile, quod sensibile ascendere ad intellectum” (Hopkins, >;C: “Since the human soul is the

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more obvious as we move away from the otherness of the lowest domain and greater cognitive darkness to that of the higher regions where there is more cognitive light. What structures this diagram P, then, is a proportion: as light is to oneness and intellection, so darkness is to otherness and sense perception. And where such light, whether for eyes or for intellect, disappears for intellection, we are to acknowledge God’s transcendent, inaccessible light beyond Nicholas’s conjectural mapping in his diagram P. How are we to understand and construe this inaccessible light? In De quaerendo Deum (On Seeking God), one of several shorter works composed in the 6;;9s, Nicholas again turns to light, physical light, to speak of sight. He goes beyond physical light to propose that reason (ratio) stands as the discriminating spirit that enables perceptual sight, and thus is itself a kind of light, just as intellect (intellectus) stands to reason as the light enabling rational discriminations. Here is his next proposal: “And from the intellect elevate yourself unto God, who is the light of the intellect.”:A Here we have a “ladder of lights” within human cognition, each dependent on the next higher power for illumination. We are to take the "nal step and understand the whole proposal as moving us towards God’s light, a light both metaphorical and transcendent. As Nicholas summalowest intellectual nature, it exists intellectually as in potentiality. But intellectual potentiality is reason’s light. #erefore, conceive of the human soul according to Diagram P, [i.e., as constituted] from intellectual oneness and perceptual otherness. #erefore, when through three gradations the light of intelligence descends unto perceptual shadows and when through three gradations the senses ascend unto the intellect, then in the middle there arise two things which I take to have the name ‘reason.’ #is reason’s superior part, which is prior to the intellect, is the apprehension; but its inferior part is the imagination. (Let these parts be called by these names or by other names, as you please.) #ese [powers] are, as it were, the four ‘elements’ of the human soul. Now, this intellect in our soul descends unto the senses because what-is-perceptual ascends unto the intellect; and what-is-perceptual ascends unto the intellect because the intellect descends unto it. For the intellect’s descending unto the perceptual is the perceptual’s ascending unto the intellect”). 6;. De quaerendo Deum II, sec. C!, >–C (IV >8): “et ab illo te eleva in deum, qui lumen est intellectus.” For the Hopkins translation of De quaerendo Deum, see A Miscellany on Nicholas of Cusa, trans. Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis: Banning, 6??;), 6C=–8=; this quote is found on p. 689. Another short work of this period, De dato patris luminum, makes a crucial distinction in the metaphor of light between God and creatures by terming God “lux” and creatures “lumina.” See M. L. Führer’s essay, “#e Metaphysics of Light in the De dato patris luminum of Nicholas of Cusa,,” International Studies in Philosophy 6=, no. C (6?=!): 67–C>. #e Neoplatonic shape of this same work is taken by Hopkins to be an exposition of Nicholas’s metaphysics of contraction. See his translation and essay in Nicholas of Cusa’s Metaphysic of Contraction, ?7–666.

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rizes, “light is a medium between spiritual natures and material natures and through light this material world ascends, as if through its own simplicity, unto the spiritual world.”:B Yet he warns that the creator of light remains transcendent: “However God Himself cannot be partaken of but is In"nite Light that shines forth in all things.”:E Nicholas conjectures that physical light is as paradoxical as other creatures, for while each manifests the creator, none can provide insight into the essence or nature of God. Nicholas makes all of this dramatic in one conjectural passage from De dato patris luminum (another short work of the 6;;9s) where he contrasts sunlight and color as a parallel to God’s pure light and our differentiated lumina or re$ections. He writes: For example, light is a universal form of all visible being, i.e., of all color. For color is the contracted receiving of light, and light is not commingled with things but is received [by them] in a descending manner according to a given grade of descent. Color is the limitation of light in a transparent medium—in accordance with one mode [of limitation] red, in accordance with another, blue. And the entire being of color is given through descending light, so that in all colors light is all that which is. It is the nature of light to impart itself purely and out of its own goodness. But although it gives itself purely when it imparts itself, a diversity of colors arises from the diverse descending receptions of it. Color is not light; rather, it is light received contractedly in the foregoing manner. By means of such a likeness [we see that] as the form of light is related to the form of colors, so God (who is In"nite Light) is related as the Universal Form of being to the forms of created things.:F 68. De quaerendo Deum II, sec. C7 6–8 (IV >8–>!): “ut sit medium inter spiritualem naturam et corporalem, per quam corporalis hic mundus tamquam per suum simplex ascendat in spiritualem mundum.” 6!. De quaerendo Deum II, sec. C7, 6C–6; (IV >8–>!): “Deus autem est imparticipabilis et in"nita lux lucens in omnibus.” 67. De dato patris luminum II, sec. 699, >–6C (IV 7;–78): “Nam lumen est forma quaedam universalis omnis esse visibilis, scilicet omnis coloris. Color enim est contracta receptio lucis, et non permiscetur lux rebus, sed recipitur descensive secundum gradum aliquam descensionis. Terminatio lucis in perspicuo est color, secundum unum modum rubeus, secundum alium blavius, et omne esse coloris datur per lucem descendentem, ut lux sit omne id quod est in omnibus coloribus, cuius natura est se ipsam puriter diRundere ex bonitate sua. Et quamvis se ipsam puriter communicando donet, tamen ex varia receptione descensiva eius varietas colorum exsurgit. Nec est color lux, sed est lux sic recepta tali quadem similitudine ut se habet forma lucis ad formam colorum. Sic deus, lux in"nita, ut forma universalis essendi se habet ad formas creaturarum.” Hopkins’s English translation is in his Nicholas of Cusa’s Metaphysic of Contraction, 66?–>9.

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Conjecturing and Beyond

Such is Nicholas’s dramatic visual schema of God as Lux and creatures as resplendent and varicolored lumina.

N.5&+ .- #$% &'(')* )+ ,)Nicholas’s later De visione Dei of 6;8C highlights both light and darkness: #e obscuring mist reveals that your face is there, above everything that veils it. By comparison, when our eye seeks to see the sun’s light, which is the sun’s face, it "rst looks at it in a veiled manner in the stars and in colors and in all participants in the sun’s light. But when our eye strives to view the sun’s light in an unveiled manner, it passes beyond all visible light, because all such light is less than the light it seeks. But since it seeks to see a light which it cannot see, it knows that as long as it sees something, it is not the thing it is seeking. #erefore it must pass beyond all visible light. So if one has to pass beyond all light, the place into which he enters will have to be devoid of visible light; and so, for the eye, it will be darkness.:O

Here again the sun and its light show the way, but we thereupon "nd that we cannot see what we are looking for. Ordinary reason may well be darkened but human intellection for Nicholas involves more than ordinary reason. #e light has not gone out or vanished but has been transformed from the ordinary sunlight in which we see and from the intellectual “light” in which we can understand and make judgments. Nicholas’s conjectures that light has become both more and less than the psalmist realized when he wrote: “In thy Light we shall see the Light” (Ps C!.=). As Nicholas remarks later in the same work, “You, O God, worthy of admiration by every mind, you who are light sometimes seem as if You were a shadow.”:P We need to approach what we may term “the van6=. De visione Dei !, sec. >6, 7–67 (VI >C): “Ipsa autem caligo revelat ibi esse faciem supra omnia velamenta. Sicuti dum oculus noster lucem solis, quae est facies eius, quaerit videre, primo ipsam velate respicit in stellis et coloribus et omnibus lucem eius participantibus; quando autem revelate intueri ipsam contendit, omnem visibilem lucem transilit, quia omnis talis minor est illa, quam quaerit; sed quia quaerit videre lucem, quam videre non potest, hoc scit quod quamdiu aliquid videt, non esse id, quod quaerit. Oportet igitur omnem visibilem lucem transilire. Qui igitur transilire debet omnem lucem, necesse est quod id, quod subintrat, careat visibili luce; et ita est oculo tenebra.” #e English translation (here modi"ed) is found in Nicholas of Cusa’s Dialectical Mysticism: Text, Translation, and Interpretive Study of De visione Dei, >nd ed., trans. Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis, Banning: 6??!), 6C=–;9. 6?. De visione Dei 68, sec. !;, 6–> (VI 8C) (Hopkins, 6?7): “O deus omni menti admirandus, videris aliquando, quasi sis umbra, qui es lux.”

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ishing point” of reason and rationality, where human sight and insight are darkened, so that we may experience a whole diRerent sort of light and enlightenment. In the "nal chapters of De visione Dei, Cusanus turns to Christ to "nd some resolution for our darkness. Our situation in relation to the Godman is comparable conjecturally to the way a candle illumines a room with light that is brighter the closer one is to the candle. [It is] as if the light of the sun were joined to the aforementioned candle, for the Word of God enlightens the intellect, just as the light of sun illumines the earth. #erefore, I see that in You, my Jesus, the sensible life is illumined by the intellectual light, that the intellectual life is both an illumining and illumined light, and the divine life alone is an illumining light. For in Your intellectual light I see the Fount of light, viz, the Word of God, which is the Truth that enlightens every intellect.—proposes a summary digest of his varied metaphors. #ree of its chapters (68–67) are devoted to the fourth hunting ground, namely Light. #ese chapters follow directly on Nicholas’s exposition of Non-Aliud as the third hunting ground and his most recent way of expounding God’s relation with creatures. #at conjectural exposition of God as Non-Aliud extends itself into the chapters on Light.9. De visione Dei >>, sec. 699, 69–6! (VI 7=) (Hopkins modi"ed, >;8): “quasi lux solis iungatur candelae praelibatae; illuminat enim verbum dei intellectum sicut lumen solis hunc mundum. In te igitur Jhesu meo video vitam sensibilem illuminatam lumine intellectuali, vitam intellectualem illuminans atque illuminatam et vitam divinam illuminantem tantum. Nam et fontem luminis lumine illo intellectuali video, verbum scilicet dei, quod est veritas illuminans omnem intellectum.” >6. Werner Beierwaltes, “Venatio sapientiae: Das Nicht-Andere und das Licht,” MFCG C> (>969): =C–69;. Further analysis of De venatione sapientiae is in my Reading Cusanus, >9!–;9.

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“shinings forth” of the divine light beyond.;. De apice theoriae, sec. =, 6C–6; (XII 6>C): “sed in visibilibus se manifestat, in uno clarius, in alio obscurius.” For the English translation, see Nicholas of Cusa: Metaphysical Speculations, vol. 6, trans. Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis,: Banning,6??=), >;>–;C. >8. De apice theoriae, sec. =, 6C–6; (XII 6>C): “Nec lux se in visibilibus manifestat, ut se visibilem ostendat, immo ut potius se invisibilem manifestet.” H. Lawrence Bond spells out in tenfold detail what this means for ordinary light in “#e Changing Face of Posse,” in Nicholas of Cusa: A Medieval "inker for the Modern Age, ed. Kazuhiko Yamaki, C8–;! (Richmond, UK: Curzon, >99>), esp. ;6.

Conjectures about Light

6>?

that he may point out that Power Itself transcends the mind’s power to understand. “When, therefore, the mind sees by means of its own power how that Power Itself because of its excellence cannot be grasped, then by means of this seeing it sees beyond its own power, just as a boy sees that the size of a stone is larger than the capacity of his strength can carry. #erefore, the power of the mind to see exceeds its power to comprehend.”;C–;;): “Quando igitur mens in posse suo videt posse ipsum ob suam excellentiam capi non posse, tunc visu supra suam capacitatem videt, sicut puer videt quantitatem lapidis maiorem, quam fortitudo suae potentiae portare posset. Posse igitur videre mentis excellit posse comprehendere.”

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Conjecturing and Beyond

strength against the stone’s size, we end up acknowledging that our usual ideas about understanding and insight must be set aside so that we may attempt to reach the object or goal we personally desire. It would be, for Nicholas, the sort of seeing we are designed by God to "nally achieve. #e upshot would be to see or realize that the fact that we do not see or understand does not require that we attempt to go further. It may simply amount to the judgment that there is nothing further to be understood or seen. Nicholas insists, however, that the intellectual vision that awaits us is not just a matter of darkness. Suppose that we transfer this notion of light and discrimination “running out” to intellectual or mental vision. Once we do so, do we not also "nd that we reach another vanishing point beyond the perspectivism or viewpoint implicit in our minds’ conjectural concepts, language, and judgments? ADer all, to recognize a limit is ipso facto to “look beyond” or transcend it. Yet Nicholas of Cusa was convinced that this limit, where ordinary mental insight and rational understanding disappear, is itself open to a further sort of “seeing.” He termed this “seeing” intellectus, and his interpreters have usually described it as some sort of intellectual intuition. By means of intellectus and by going to the innermost part of oneself, Cusanus believed that a person could, no doubt with the help of God’s grace, glimpse or sight or touch “the divine within,” the real depth and reality of the indwelling God encompassing us. #ere one would "nd that God had been present and somehow “visible” all along and that God’s disappearance was a parallel to the apparent disappearance of physical light itself—an ordinary feature of "nite human perceptual and cognitive limits. Just as in ordinary looking we pay attention to what is illuminated, not to the light that illumines it, so God’s usual invisibility is conjectural evidence that we may be continuously captivated by our ordinary ways of seeing the world and by our everyday thinking and habitual concerns. #e apparent vanishing point of the human mind’s light and insight is in truth, and thus in human possibility, a conjectural opening to some sort of sighting of the divine. Nicholas therefore urges us in De visione Dei to pass beyond all light and all that is illuminated by light since God’s face cannot be approached as if it too were illumined and ready for our viewing. “So if one has to pass beyond all light,” Nicholas concludes, “the place into which he enters will have to be devoid of visible light; and so for the eye it will be

Conjectures about Light

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darkness.”).?. See De docta ignorantia I, C, sec. 69, 6–6C (I 6;) for the locus classicus where Cusanus explains this.

Conjectures about Light

6CC

cussion, our hesitation and doubts about our capacity to imagine any knowledge of God may remind us more of darkness, or at best of deep shadow. But this is to interpret our situation solely from our own viewpoint—Nicholas is always ready to remind us that even our cognitive estrangement is enfolded in God’s own divine light. Whether we employ literal or symbolic terms, Nicholas reminds us that we will not overcome the otherness or alteritas of what we want to know, let alone of our own bodiliness, our viewpoints, and our conceptual and linguistic tools.@Q #ese are all we have in a universe that is so oDen less than transparent, though always resplendent with re$ected divine light for Nicholas of Cusa. Nicholas never doubted that our minds, using symbolic ideas and examples, continue to share in the divine truth and light. His interpenetrating pyramids of light and darkness, for instance, are shaded to represent mostly re$ected light and shadow. But the same divine light always encompasses us, a kind of “all around” lighting, as it were, of our understandings of things and all our linguistic expressions about them. Cusan conjecture about God as light thus continues the historical quasi-mystical tradition of using light to stand for God’s self-disclosure to our minds, a disclosure or revelation that transcends normal sensory perception and rational thought and judgment. Within that tradition, the light metaphor has long been pervasive in attempts to understand human cognition on its own terms.@: As Nicholas reminds us in De coniecturis, “You now see that the posited assertions of the wise are conjectures.”@< We might consider that the symbol of light exempli"es and opens for us a more radical possibility, namely, that the domain of our theoretical knowing and especially of our technical and second-order language may not be literal or exact through and through, even when we are dealing with what is not God.@@ We cannot understand correctly what something C9. #e analysis in De coniecturis I, 66, sec. 87, 6–67 (III 8=) lays out these points in Cusan terms. C6. #e classic essay on light is that of Hans Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth,” in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin, C9–!>. (Oakland: University of California Press, 6??C). C>. De coniecturis I, 66, sec. 87, 6 (III 8=): “Vides nunc assertiones positivas sapientum esse coniecturas.” CC. As Nicholas states this point in the prologue to De coniecturis: “consequens est omnem humanam veri positivam assertionem esse coniecturam” (De coniecturis I, prologue, sec. >, C–;

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is or explain perspicuously why it is so or how our knowing itself works unless we employ symbols and make conjectures. Using and recognizing this complexity are themselves keys to human thinking and understanding, essential to the ongoing knowing we do accomplish and that we later analyze and explain. To say “God is Light” brings such truths home again. [III ;] [Hopkins modi"ed, 6;?]: “it follows that every human aYrmation posited about what is true is a conjecture”).

!e Vision of God

!

S

Seeing and Being Seen in !e Vision of God

Nicholas of Cusa’s exploration of light demonstrates that every human instance of seeing must involve interpretation. His multiple and varied conjectures on seeing and being seen in !e Vision of God remind us that perception and the resulting beliefs are grounded in and communicated through the linguistic and visual symbols of social experience. Cusanus applies this complicated, layered understanding of the power of seeing and believing and directs it to an explanation of concepts and realities that fall beyond the physically visible and socially accepted. He develops and extends the general notion of “seeing” so that he might guide his readers to “see” in a yet further sense a path toward and a recognition of what lies beyond ordinary human experience. His exploration of images and commonplace examples reminds us in a striking and memorable way not simply, as we say, that seeing is believing but also that believing itself is seeing." When we look at something, we make at least two sorts of contributions as perceivers to what we see. First of all, there is the physical sighting of at least some of what is visible in the visual #eld before us. Accompanying that interaction of eye and lighted scene there is also—usually simultaneously and without our adverting to it—recognition, identi#cation, even judgment about the identity and relevance of what we see. And all of this is socially mediated. $is is the way our minds (including memory, imagination, and thought) habitually cooperate with our senses in ordinary adult life. Adult vision requires both visible and invisible components of sense perception and perceptual judgment. Nicholas does not distinguish these two aspects of typical seeing in this treatise. Instead, he assumes that the whole complex is involved in normal human %. For further commentary on this work of %&'( as a whole, see chapter & of my Reading Cusanus, %&!–!).

%('

%(*

Conjecturing and Beyond

vision and opens up what we take to be familiar seeing and perceiving to something astonishing for further “sight” and insight: we are to see (and understand) beyond what we see or think we see. $e seeing that occurs in this treatise thus involves what we see with our eyes and enables our moving beyond such ordinary sensation and perception to a kind of mental vision and, Nicholas hopes, to some further “seeing” and understanding of what is truly at stake in such “vision.” He accomplishes this by introducing an exercise he proposes the monks at Tegernsee follow. It involves an all-seeing icon or “omnivoyant portrait” that he sent them. (Perhaps it was a “Veronica” or other depiction of Jesus’ face, but Nicholas does not identify the painting’s subject. He simply calls it the icon of God.) $e face is portrayed so that the subject’s eyes look out of the picture plane directly at the viewer, a device that Renaissance painters of the time (for instance, Roger van der Weyden, whom Nicholas mentions, or Jan van Eyck, whom he does not) were employing, perhaps to confront and involve more directly those who viewed their portraits and other paintings. We may note as a further background feature how Nicholas turns the methods painters were using to depict such faces to his own ends. A+er all, the painter no doubt rendered the face as he saw it—in perspective with the eyes looking out of the picture plane. $is sort of painting provides for the viewer what the artist chose to depict and represent of the face portrayed—a kind of selection hardly calculated to go beyond what the viewers could see as the painted face peering at them. And Nicholas uses early Renaissance art’s rendering of human seeing so that the monks he addresses will look on it from a traditional medieval spiritual perspective. He wants the painting to be a sign or icon of God with a meaning beyond its human artistry and aesthetic power. Nicholas #rst directs the brothers to arrange themselves around the portrait. $ey are to notice that each of them sees that the eyes in the painting are looking directly into his own eyes, as if it were gazing at each monk alone. Yet all of them experience the gaze from the portrait at the same time. $e painted eyes seem to capture the living eyes of each viewer simultaneously. Instead of looking at a painted portrait, they experience themselves being seen in their looking, perhaps even challenged and scrutinized (or at least observed). $e single painted gaze that is illusory overcomes the actual looking of its many viewers.

!e Vision of God

%(!

Nicholas then proposes that the monks move and change places. Once again, each monk notices that the icon’s eyes are always upon him, no matter where he moves. When he moves in a direction opposite to that another monk takes, the same single set of eyes in the portrait are upon both of them as they walk in opposite directions. Each is seen at the same moment no matter how the two move. So long as a monk looks, he is held by the portrait’s gaze. It is the same for all of his fellow monks., Moreover, to enter entirely into the object lesson Cusanus proposes to the monks of Tegernsee, we must notice that walking with others, even in di-erent directions, keeps the exercise from becoming simply an idiosyncratic or private experience somehow abstracted from the actual bodies we are. $at we seem to be seen seeing from any angle we view the icon, and that the icon’s apparent seeing is of all viewers even when they look from di-erent angles, opens what one seems to see to include the variety of viewers’ positions. $is grounding in a shared experience renders this seeing and this sight even more telling: “It happened to me, too.” Not surprisingly, hearing is thus joined with seeing. And one’s seeing the gaze of the icon #xed on oneself is not simply something curious or startling in visual terms. It is, a+er all, simply a painterly ploy to confront and bring the viewer into the depicted scene or portrait. And with an icon of God, the monks may well have experienced themselves as looked upon from the painting with eyes of divine compassion; perhaps they even spoke about that.. Analyzing this experience should involve and provoke several realizations. First is the down-to-earth realization that, whatever the appearance, the picture’s eyes are not living eyes and the one portrayed does not really look into the viewers’ eyes, even if at #rst the gaze of the icon #xes the looks of all the viewers. Yet, in fact, the viewers are doing all the physical looking and actual seeing. $e icon is an unseeing artifact and only seems to see. Yet its eyes are depicted in a way that evokes a response and /. For Nicholas’s relationship with the Benedictines of Tegernsee, see Margo Schmidt, “Nikolaus von Kues im Gespräch mit den Tegernseer Mönchen über Wesen und Sinn der Mystik,” MFCG %0 (%)0)): /'–&); and Edmond Vansteenberghe, “Autour de la docte ignorance: Une controverse sur la théologie mystique au XVe siècle.” Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und !eologie des Mittelalters %&, nos. /–& (%)%'). (. For the social aspects of this exercise, see Michel de Certeau, “$e Gaze—Nicholas of Cusa,” Diacritics %!, no. ( (%)0!): /–(0.

%(0

Conjecturing and Beyond

makes a demand of the viewers, if only to symbolize that they be receptive of God’s mercy. Second, Nicholas intends the monks to “see” twice. First, they engage in the mental “seeing” or insight that each is supposed to achieve in the moment when he recognizes that no depicted eyes are actually able to look. With a kind of second sight or insight, each comes to “see” that this icon’s gaze symbolizes the way that God’s vision or gaze at once encompasses both one’s seeing and one’s understanding, no less than those of other viewers (and if it is a portrait of Jesus, this symbolism is even stronger). With the #rst, seeing the depicted gaze and “seeing” how the painted eyes do not really look at all is designed to take a person towards some further “seeing” of the invisible One who the monk, with the second sort of seeing, believes actually gazes upon him and his community with love and concern, mercy and forgiveness. $is way into the twofold seeing and being seen—the ordinary and extraordinary seeing—lets us more readily understand that, just as our experience is duplicated by others and requires us to act and speak as well as to look, so what it represents is calculated to help us transcend the depicted image altogether. With this further sort of “second sight,” we are released into a renewed understanding of the divine reality that sustains both this exercise in seeing and our attempt to move beyond what we see. We are supposed to employ the all-seeing icon both to transcend what we normally see and to see well beyond what we habitually understand about painted portraits. Nicholas is straightforward about God’s actual “seeing” once his directions for the object-lesson with the icon are completed. He says explicitly that we must presuppose “that anything that can be apparent about the seeing of the icon of God is truer for God’s real seeing.”1 Everything the icon could seemingly do in engaging our looking is actually so with God’s sight. Unrestricted divine seeing exceeds, with a more perfect sight than we can conceive, any power of actual animals with physical eyesight. “$erefore, no one should doubt that what appears in the image &. De visione Dei %, sec. ', (–& (VI %2): “Primo loco praesupponendum esse censeo nihil posse apparere circa visum eiconae dei, quin verius sit in vero visu dei.” Translations throughout are my own. For two excellent alternate translations of De visione Dei, see “$e Vision of God,” in Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings, trans. H. Lawrence Bond, /((–0) (N.Y.: Paulist Press, %)!!); Nicholas of Cusa, Nicholas of Cusa’s Dialectical Mysticism, trans. Jasper Hopkins, %2!–/*) (Minneapolis: Banning, %))*).

!e Vision of God

%()

exists in absolute sight.”3 Further, all the restricted or contracted types of #nite seeing we are familiar with (or can portray or imagine) ultimately depend for what they are on God’s unrestricted or absolute vision. Finally, Cusanus reminds us that all the powers and qualities we ascribe to God are identically one in Godself where “all otherness is unity and all diversity identity.”4 So even ascribing the power of seeing to God can be misleading. God does not see in any way we can identify or understand, yet for Nicholas the divine Oneness “enfolds” in itself everything created. Ironically, God’s “sight” encompasses all there is, yet God does not see with physical eyes any more than does the painted icon. Re5ection lets us understand that what we might #rst imagine to be physical seeing in the portrait (even though it is not) is to stand for a divine “seeing” that is also not bodily perception. Ironically, the depicted seeing that is in fact blind gives us an insight into God’s purported “vision” beyond the corporeal realm. Nonetheless, the fact that the gaze of the icon follows its viewer anywhere the viewer can see it reminds us again that depicted eyes looking into ours do make visual demands of us. $e look of the painting is to remind the monks (and those who share their belief) of God’s constant providential and loving presence. $at recollection should evoke from them feelings of gratitude and love in return. Nicholas sent a painting of a face whose gaze would hold and even demand their attention so that they could recall together what God’s seeing of every person involves and could respond appropriately. At this point in chapter &, Cusanus’s textual voice alters. No longer the instructor for the exercise or the theologian setting out its presuppositions, Nicholas models a lengthy prayerful consideration of the vision of God, both of God’s sight of us and of our attempt to see God. In this way, most of the book demonstrates for any soul seeking God a thoughtful and prayerful response to the divine gaze and its implications. Nicholas is well aware that our human seeing is guided as much by our desires as by what is visually available. All our seeing is directed, as such expressions as “looking out,” “looking around,” and “looking for” '. De visione Dei %, sec. *, %&–%' (VI %%): “Id igitur, quod in imagine illa apparet, excellenter in visu esse absoluto non est haesitandum.” *. De visione Dei (, sec. 0, %*–%! (VI %(): “absolute ratio, in qua omnis alteritas est unitas et omnis diversitas identitas.”

%&2

Conjecturing and Beyond

remind us. So Nicholas proposes that God’s vision of each person is likewise an expression of God’s desire to care for and aid human pilgrims on their way to eternal life—he cites God’s providence and grace as evidence that God’s look is one of love. God searches for us no less than the soul searches for the God who created it, sustains it, and saves it for Godself. Cusanus’s assumption is that God’s seeing of each of us is a looking out for each of us, that our incessant searching for God is matched and trumped by the divine gaze that precedes ours in creating us, in gracing us, and by God’s providential desire and love for us. Our ordinary experience with looking at objects in our everyday world reminds us that we are very much the result of what we look at and see, and especially of the eyes we look into. What looks back at me lets me see myself seeing and being seen, whether it accepts or rejects my gaze. $e interpersonal response and demand other human eyes make on me will move me to adjust my sense of who I am and what version of myself I am sending with my own look. While Nicholas does not explicitly discuss these features of human looking, what he says about God’s seeing of our seeing may stand as the a fortiori version of the same matters. In a telling transitional passage in chapter ', Nicholas writes: What else, Lord, is your seeing when you look on me with an eye of goodness than your being seen by me? In seeing me you give yourself, who are the hidden God, to be seen by me. No one can see you except insofar as you grant that you are seen. Nor is seeing you anything else than that you see the one seeing you. In this image of you I see how eager you are, Lord, to show your face to everyone seeking you.6

Well aware that we can reject God’s loving gaze (or perhaps #nd it too demanding or intrusive?), Nicholas does note that we are free to look away from the divine gaze and see other things that may keep us from God. But his background understanding is that God’s identi#cation with us comes #rst, for God sees us looking for God, even in objects that distract us. We do not look at God by ourselves, but even in preserving our freedom, God’s seeing is one with our choices. And should we indeed see !. De visione Dei ', sec. %(, %2–%&; sec. %&, %–/ (VI %!) (my emphasis): “Quid aliud, domine, est videre tuum, quando me pietatis oculo respicis, quam a me videri? Videndo me das te a me videri, qui es deus absconditus. Nemo te videre potest, nisi in quantum tu das, ut videaris. Nec est aliud te videre, quam quod tu videas videntem te. Video in hac imagine tua, quam pronus es, domine, ut faciem tuam ostendas omnibus quaerentibus te.”

!e Vision of God

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God, not only is this an extraordinary gi+, but it should remind us that, though we are not God, God is identically one with us and our seeing. In chapter *, Nicholas turns from God’s gaze and sight of us to our seeing God’s face. “$e vision of God” is double in meaning since it includes both God’s vision of us and our vision of God. He makes explicit the two di-erent kinds of seeing (and being seen) on which the exercise with the icon rests. He contrasts the perceptible image in the portrait that is seen with bodily eyes against the invisible truth of God’s face that is seen with mental and intellectual eyes. Nicholas writes, “I see the invisible truth of your face, represented in this contracted shadow here, not with the eyes of 5esh, which examine this icon of you, but with the eyes of the mind and the intellect.”7 $e “contracted shadow” (umbra contracta) of the icon is hardly God’s actual “face” that is totally unlimited, beyond corporeality as well as beyond space and time. At best, all bodily faces are distant images of the divine exemplar. Once again Nicholas turns our looking back to ourselves. He writes: “So every face that can look upon your face sees nothing other or di-erent from itself, because it sees its own truth. However, the truth of the exemplar cannot be other or di-erent [than itself], but those conditions befall the image because it is not the exemplar.”8 What this comes to is that to look upon the face of God is to see the truest re5ection of oneself. If in ordinary life the faces and eyes of others looking back at us may provide mirrors that accept or resist our gaze with their demands, if we adjust our sense of who we are because of others’ responses, if we need to be seen by those we care about to #nd ourselves, then a fortiori, seeing the face of God should involve facing the utter truth about ourselves. For Nicholas, the divine exemplar is identically its human image, even as the image remains limited and #nite. $e relation between God’s face and creatures’ faces is never symmetrical, and so the painted icon’s face is at best an even more limited or contracted shadow. Nicholas’s prayerful reaction is exuberant: 0. De visione Dei *, sec. %!, !–%2 (VI /2) (my translation): “Sed video non oculis carneis, quo hanc eiconam tuam inspiciunt, sed mentalibus et intellectualibus oculis veritatem faciei tuae invisibilem, quae in umbra hic contracta signi#catur.” ). De visione Dei *, sec. %0, %%–%& (VI /%): “Omnis igitur facies quae in tuam potest intueri faciem, nihil videt aliud aut diversum a se, quia videt veritatem suam. Veritas autem exemplaris non potest esse alia et diversa, sed illa accidunt imagini ex eo quia non est ipsum exemplar.”

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Conjecturing and Beyond

Who could conceive of this sole, truest and most adequate exemplar of all faces, in such a way that it is the exemplar of all and of each individually and is so most perfectly exemplar of each as if it were the exemplar of no other? One must leap beyond the forms of all formable faces and beyond all #gures. And how would one conceive a face when one would transcend all faces, and all likenesses and #gures of all faces, and all concepts that can be formed of a face, and all color, decoration and beauty of all faces?"9

Yet Nicholas is ever realistic, even in this prayer, for he prays: “Whoever, therefore, undertakes to see your face is far removed from your face, so long as one conceives anything at all. For every concept of a face is less than your face, O Lord.”"" What Cusanus is doing is moving beyond the way we usually see, imagine, or conceptualize what we are talking about or looking at. We are to “leap beyond” and to “transcend all faces.” Should we imagine ourselves to have seen or grasped in thought or conception either God’s face or God’s seeing, we are to realize that we are still far away. $ere is no proportion between our thinking and God’s reality, “facial” or otherwise. It is not surprising that his prayer next acknowledges that God’s face is in fact veiled, that to the eye of the believer the brightness of that face amounts to darkness, all clouded over in “unapproachable light.” We are to approach in faith what amounts to darkness and dense cloud cover for the eyes of the mind and the body. “I see, O Lord, that it is only in this way that the inaccessible light, the beauty, and the splendor of your face can be approached without veil.”", What this set of exercises and prayerful re5ections has done is to show just how paradoxical and tenuous our seeing and believing both turn out to be. It is not so much that “seeing is believing,” for we cannot #nally believe our eyes when we look at what Nicholas calls the icon of God, and yet we do believe that God sees our seeking God. What we %2. De visione Dei *, sec. /2, %–0 (VI //): “Quis hoc unicum exemplar verissimum et adaequatissimum omnium facierum, ita omnium quod et singulorum, et ita perfectissime cuiuslibet quasi nullius alterius, concipere posset? Oporteret illum omnium formabilium facierum formas transilire et omnes #guras. Et quomodo conciperet faciem, quando transcenderet omnes facies et omnes omnium facierum similitudines et #guras et omnes conceptus, qui de facie #eri possunt, et omnem omnium facierum colorum et ornatum et pulchritudinem?” %%. De visione Dei *, sec. /2, 0–%2 (VI //): “Qui igitur ad videndum faciem tuam pergit: quamdiu aliquid concipit, longe a facie tua abest.” %/. De visione Dei *, sec. /%, /%–/( (VI /&): “Video, domine, sic et non aliter inaccessibilem lucem et pulchritudinem et splendorem faciei tuae revelate accedi posse.”

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want to see of God, we discover, is identically what God wants us to see of God; indeed, God’s desires in this respect are one with our own. And yet seeing God in either of the two senses here speci#ed, either with bodily eyes or with the mind’s eyes and conceptions, is utterly blocked for limited human vision and understanding. As believers, we end up knowing only that what we seek and what we believe are not available to human desire on human terms. Yet we should be convinced that believing is one with seeking God and we should be consoled that our seeking is one with our being seen by God. Looking for the face of God, we #nd that it mirrors each human face as its source and paradigm. Understanding that God’s seeing can do everything the painted eyes seem to do and more besides only certi#es that God’s actual “face” will remain unseen. $e chasm between #nite and in#nite cannot be bridged from the human side. What remains is to believe what God will accomplish in and through Christ—our way into and through the cloud and the darkness to some taste of the divine. Believing this will #nally accomplish a kind of seeing, for anyone who “sees me sees the Father” (Jn %&.)). When we proceed further in De visione Dei, we #nd Nicholas engaging his readers with several striking images. In chapter !, for instance, Nicholas looks in detail at a “great and lo+y” nut tree. He details its perceptible features—its size, color, branches, leaves, and nuts. $en he moves to what we understand about the tree’s seed in whose virtual power this complete nut tree resided at its beginning. $e whole of this and every kind of tree species is thus “contracted” or enfolded virtually in the seeds and then unfolds in a temporal process. Nicholas thereupon moves beyond the “seminal power” of every tree’s nuts or seeds to what is enfolded in the unseen, all-powerful cause and source of everything, the exemplar of every kind of tree and of each tree. He concludes, “I see the tree as a particular unfolding of the power of the seed and the seed as a particular unfolding of omnipotent power.”". While all power is ultimately enfolded (complicatio) in God’s transcendent Oneness, the power of creatures is the temporal unfolding (explicatio) of that transcendent power. It is no di-erent with the “face of God” we want to “see” in looking at the icon. %(. De visione Dei !, sec. /&, %–/ (VI /'): “Et video arborem illam quandam explicationem virtutis seminalis et semen quandam explicationem omnipotentis virtutis.”

%&&

Conjecturing and Beyond Nicholas writes:

If, therefore, I wish to see the absolute power of all such seminal powers which is the power and the principle giving power to all seeds, I must leap beyond every seminal power that can be known and conceived and enter into that ignorance in which nothing at all remains of seminal power or energy. And then in the cloud I #nd a most astonishing power, approachable by no power that can be thought. $is is the principle that gives being to every power both seminal and not seminal. . . . this principle and cause, in an enfolded and absolute way, holds within itself as cause, whatever it gives to its e-ect. And thus I perceive that this power is the face or exemplar of every arboreal face and of each tree."1

Nicholas’s conjectural tree thus becomes the symbolic “face” of every tree of its kind; it unfolds the power enfolded in its seeds and thus gives us a concrete picture of enfolded and unfolded power. Nicholas then recalls divine power, an enfolding principle that is the cause of all living and nonliving things, their exemplar that we can neither see nor conceive except in learned ignorance. Why does Nicholas call the tree a “face?” $is conclusion about the tree is drawn from the “seeing” of the “absolute” face beyond all normal human seeing. In such a purported seeing, Nicholas calls what is glimpsed “the natural face of all nature.” We are thus o-ered, as in the icon, a face that we can see and a face beyond us, truly an “enigmatic” contrast that depends on God’s leading and our following. In Cusan terms we begin with the enfoldings and unfoldings we know from daily life and experience, then with God’s grace we are invited to peer beyond to the One who is the absolute source of all that we experience in creaturely enfolding and unfolding. Chapter 0 continues the contrast between the contracted creation and absolute God by imagining or conjecturing God as a reader and contrasting divine and human reading. God’s “reading” is not something that happens in succession, as does ours, yet God reads with each of us. %&. De visione Dei !, sec. /(, %–0, %%–%& (VI /'): “Si igitur omnium virtutum seminum talium virtutem volo videre absolutam, quae sit virtus quae et principium dans virtutem omnibus seminibus, necesse est me transilire omnem seminalem virtutem, quae sciri et concipi potest, et subintrare ignorantiam illam, in qua nihil penitus maneat virtutis aut vigoris seminalis. Et tunc in caligine reperio stupidissimam virtutem nulla virtute, quae cogitari potest, accessibilem, quae est principium dans esse omni virtuti seminali et non seminali. . . . tunc principium illud et causa in se habet complicite et absolute ut causa, quidquid dat e-ectui. Et sic video virtutem illam esse faciem seu exemplar omnis speciei arboreae et cuiuslibet arboris.”

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Here Nicholas is working to have us think dialectically about the divine reader. God not only enfolds in his power all that can be read or written, but he is also present to and reading with each human reader in the #nite unfolding of that same power. $is is a concrete picture of how we might realize that God is both present and absent at one and the same temporal moment, how God is both beyond and within creation. Nicholas writes: You seem to read within time since you read with those reading. And beyond time you see and read all things at once. For your seeing is your reading. . . . Nor do you read one thing in eternity and another in time with those who are reading, but the same thing in the same way because you are not changeable but are #xed eternity. However, because eternity does not abandon time, it seems to be moved with time, although motion in eternity is rest."3

Both examples (the tree and reading) are also meant as conjectural paradigms. $at is, they are exemplary cases of familiar items and practices here used symbolically to help us come to understand both the difference and the connection between contracted #nite things in time and the absolute, in#nite, and eternal God. Both this di-erence and this connection are dialectical constants of Nicholas’s Neoplatonic thinking, even in the concrete images and familiar examples he proposes for readers’ consideration. Nicholas ends chapter 0 with a third example. He proposes something we notice about the human eye. $e physical organ can be seen as a mirror that re5ects all that is around it, yet the person’s organ of vision is focused on a particular item to which one attends. No one sees all that is mirrored in the physical human eye. What we see, even with binocular vision, is limited in scope to an angle of a certain magnitude, and we focus on something within that scope. But Nicholas is focusing on the contrast between the human eye and the putative “divine eye”—in the divine case all things are seen in the living mirror that is God’s sight. For God is cause of everything supposedly mirrored in the divine eye. Nor need God turn to see everything or anything since the angle of God’s vision is without limit. %'. De visione Dei 0, sec. /), %(–%', %0–/% (VI /)–(2): “videris in tempore legere, quia legis cum legentibus, et supra tempus omnia vides et legis simul; videre enim tuum est legere tuum. . . . Nec aliud legis in aeternitate et aliud legis in tempore cum legentibus, sed idem eodem te modo habens, quia non es mutabilis, cum sis #xa aeternitas. Aeternitas autem, quia non deserit tempus, cum tempore moveri videtur, licet motus in aeternitate sit quies.”

%&*

Conjecturing and Beyond

Once again Nicholas contrasts God’s vision with what goes into our seeing, recalling no doubt his claim in De docta ignorantia II.%% that God is both center and circumference of the visible physical universe and, indeed, of every creature that depends on God. God’s in#nite vision is then said to be best understood as an in#nite sphere in its perfection. God’s sight “is an eye of sphericity and of in#nite perfection. For he sees all things around and above and below at one and the same time.”"4 While we do not see our own physical eyes as mirrors (except perhaps by glancing at a separate physical mirror), we do rely on our experience of others’ eyes or on their reports about our own. Here we rely on others as much as on our own looking, and in so doing we can extrapolate from our experience of someone else’s eyes to conjecture what would occur in what we might imagine to be God’s seeing, even though that divine “seeing” is without organs. Human sight and God’s sight must be thought together for Nicholas—as truly separate but always conjoined. $is short exercise always conforms to the condition Nicholas laid down early in chapters / and ( of De visione Dei: God’s sight embraces any and every mode of “seeing” we experience or propose and does so incomparably and perfectly in in#nite Oneness. He even admonished us there to “notice that all that is said of God cannot di-er in reality because of God’s highest simplicity.”"6 In the end, all our conjectures already always point to God’s Trinitarian Oneness. We may take these three images as practical directions, for they prepare us to confront Nicholas’s well-known and frequently analyzed conjecture in chapter %2. $ere he proposes the symbolic wall that blocks those seeking to see the divine One beyond. Ordinary perceptual and even conceptual “seeing” are stymied because the wall represents the limit of what human seeing and human intelligence can grasp. $e imagined wall stands as the symbol of Nicholas’s “coincidence of opposites.” We are le+ with a wall of coincidence where contradictories meet and shatter, where reason itself stands stupe#ed and blocked from ordinary understanding and insight. Only beyond this wall, with the help of Je%*. De visione Dei 0, sec. (2, %*–%0 (VI (2–(%): “sphaera in#nita, quia visus est oculus sphaericitatis and perfectionis in#nitae. Omnia igitur in circuitu et sursum et deorsum simul videt.” %!. De visione Dei (, sec. 0, (–& (VI %/): “Consequenter attendas omnia, quae de deo dicuntur, realiter ob summam dei simplicitatem non posse di-erre.”

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%&!

sus at its threshold, may we catch sight of the absent God whose face we have been seeking but whose in#nite reality is beyond our comprehension. Nicholas has located his coincidence of opposites at the wall of contradiction and has remarked that there we #nd Christ as mediator (with whom we may go in and simultaneously go out in a dynamic enfolding and unfolding). $e “wall” divides ordinary perception and understanding (ratio) from the intuitive intellectual “vision” (intellectus) of God on the other side. Nicholas is hardly #nished with such conjectural down-to-earth images. In chapter %% he uses a clock as another conjectural symbol. $e mechanism or structure of the clock is taken to be an unchanging “concept” (that is, Word or Jesus). Nicholas conjectures that it “enfolds” all the times that are unfolded by the clock when it runs. $at change in successive hours and minutes signals, for instance, the sixth and then the seventh hour. Whether Nicholas has in mind a water clock or one of the large mechanical clocks that were starting to appear during his lifetime on main squares in some German cities is hardly clear. (Church bells, of course, had been sounding the hours for prayer for centuries.) $is imagined clock seems at least to combine both striking the hours and showing the current hour. (Many early clocks did not show minutes or parts of an hour.) Nonetheless, Nicholas compares both the stable physical mechanism and the changing times to the divine Word or “Concept,” for Christ eternally enfolds all succession of times without change, and yet unfolds succession itself in the temporal world. Nicholas proposes this thought experiment: “So let the concept of the clock be, as it were, eternity itself; then the movement in the clock is (temporal) succession. $en eternity enfolds and unfolds succession. For the concept of the clock, which is eternity, equally enfolds and unfolds everything.”"7 $is coincidence of opposites in the clock is another striking conjecture pointing to how, in God, enfolding in eternity and unfolding in time are identical. De visione Dei is moving from the imagined wall that closes o- ordi%0. De visione Dei %%, sec. &&, )–%/ (VI ()–&2): “Sit igitur conceptus horologii quasi ipsa aeternitas; tunc motus in horologio est successio. Complicat igitur aeternitas successionem et explicat. Nam conceptus horologii, qui est aeternitas, complicat pariter et explicat omnia.” See Donald F. Duclow, “Cusanus’ Clock: Time and Eternity in De visione Dei,” MFCG (& (/2%*): %('–&*.

%&0

Conjecturing and Beyond

nary human vision and rational thought and encloses the divine Trinity beyond. $e heady description of Trinitarian immanence and transcendence twists our usual ways of thinking to show what and how we might reach for God $ree-in-One, but always without full understanding. If God’s relation to the created world of opposites and oppositions that we do experience and understand is to be given its full weight, we end up with the divine Trinity as that “opposite” who holds all oppositions and contrariety in existence. Without the One who seems so absent, the opposites present in our experience and in our world would not exist. If we #nd thinking about created opposites in their contrariety di:cult enough, to see in their presence the absent God is supposed to enable us to keep God present yet not present in all we deal with and #nd familiar. Nicholas uses light and shadow, faces, and mirrors in chapter %' to make it clear that we creatures can see (and #nd) ourselves most truly if we imagine looking into the divine mirror that is God. Yet what we see there is hardly God, only our own faces. But we see not just images of our present faces or selves, as in normal mirrors, but rather also the truth of our ideal faces that are images one with God. $is means that our present looking “sees” two images—our present faces and our ideal faces as images of that divine exemplar. Seeing as believers thereby #nds our twofold faces as pointing beyond to our divine exemplar. As if that paradox were not startling enough, Nicholas proposes that the divine reality o+en seems shadowy to us even though we believe that God is (unapproachable) light. Even though we are the shadows and God the light, from our viewpoint God’s shadow and the icon seem to change as we do. Yet God is immutable. As so o+en is the case, the paradox is supposed to remind us that our relation to God and the icon can hardly be like our relation to other human faces and those faces’ images, even though we would ordinarily tend to construe them as parallel. In fact, God’s face can be understood as both changeable and unchangeable because God is always both unfolding and enfolding all creation in the divine eternal Oneness. Nicholas writes: $en you show me, O Lord, how according to the changing of my face your face is equally changed and unchanged. It is changed because it does not forsake the truth of my face; it is unchanged because it does not follow the changing of the image. For this reason just as your face does not abandon the truth of my face, so also it does not follow the changing of an image that can be changed, for ab-

!e Vision of God

%&)

solute truth is unchangeability. $e truth of my face is changeable, for it is truth in such a way as to be image. But yours is unchangeable, for it is image in such a way as to be truth. Absolute truth cannot abandon the truth of my face, for if it should, my face, which is a changeable truth, could not exist."8

A+er a careful paradoxical parsing of God’s in#nity,,9 Nicholas turns to speak of God’s triune reality. What he says goes back to what Augustine wrote about the Trinity. Modeling that classic prayerful approach to this mystery in God, Nicholas reminds us that creation and salvation, unfolding and enfolding, out5ow and return are but faint echoes of the dynamics of the loving reality within the Trinity. If love and charity are supposed to be marks of the Christian believer, the ultimate paradigm for such loving is to be found in the relationships between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Cusanus thus proposes we recall that God is “in#nitely lovable” and concludes as follows: Never, therefore, can you be loved by anyone as you are lovable except by one who is in#nitely loving. For unless there were one who is in#nitely loving, you would not be in#nitely lovable; for your lovableness, which is the power to be loved in#nitely, exists because there is a power to love in#nitely. From the power to love in#nitely and the power to be loved in#nitely arises an in#nite bond of love between the in#nite lover and the in#nite lovable. But the in#nite cannot be multiple. You, therefore, my God, who are love, are the loving love, the lovable love, and the love which is the bond of loving love and lovable love.," %). De visione Dei %', sec. *&, %(–%*; sec. *', %–! (VI '(–'&): “Et tunc ostendis mihi, domine, quomodo ad mutationem faciei meae facies tua est mutata et immutata; mutata, quia non deserit veritatem faciei meae, immutata, quia non sequitur mutationem imaginis. Unde sicut facies tua non deserit faciei meae veritatem, sic etiam non sequitur mutationem alterabilis imaginis. Absoluta enim veritas est inalterabilitas. Veritas faciei meae est mutabilis, quia sic veritas quod imago, tua autem immutabilis, quia sic imago quod veritas. Veritatem faciei meae absoluta veritas deserere non potest. Si enim desereret eam absoluta veritas, non posset subsistere ipas facies mea, quae est veritas mutabilis.” /2. See my Reading Cusanus, %**–!/. /%. De visione Dei %!, sec. !%, /–%/ (VI '0): “Numquam igitur poteris a quoquam amari, sicut amabilis es, nisi ab in#nito amante. Nisi enim esset in#nite amans, non esses in#nite amabilis. Amabilitas enim tua, quae est posse in in#nitum amari, est, quia est posse in in#nitum amare. A posse in in#nitum amare et posse in in#nitum amari oritur amoris nexus in#nitus ipsius in#niti amantis et in#nite amabilis. Non est autem in#nitum multiplicabile. Tu igitur, deus meus, qui es amor, es amor amans et amor amabilis et amoris amantis et amabilis nexus.” See also Bernard McGinn, “Unitrinum seu Triunum: Nicholas of Cusa’s Trinitarian Mysticism,” in Mystics: Presence and Aporia, ed. Michael Kessler and Christian Sheppard, )2–%%! (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, /22().

%'2

Conjecturing and Beyond

$is kind of thinking may seem verbal word play, but considering Nicholas’s words slowly and thoughtfully can reveal the underlying signi#cance and trinitarian implications of the somewhat “tired” notion that “God is love.” And Trinitarian divine love has entered human history. Nicholas turns prayerfully to Jesus, the God-man, in the #nal chapters of !e Vision of God. He recalls the icon’s face and what it represents to remind us that our best view of the living God who is $ree-in-One has been revealed in the Christ. Moreover, for Christian believers Jesus is both man and God. Jesus Christ therefore stands as “mediator” (medium) in several senses. Jesus is the intermediary who stands between God and human beings. As God’s Word, he is the enfolding center of all creation, in and through whom the universe has come into being. $rough his human life, death, and resurrection, Jesus is the means of salvation for everyone, our savior and redeemer. He is mediator for all mankind, the one who has told us that “who sees me sees the Father.” In John’s gospel, Christ is called both Word and Light for all who believe in Him. In explaining how Jesus is the perfect human being united to God’s nature, Nicholas focuses in chapter // on the relation within human nature of human discursive reason (ratio) and intellectual intuition and vision (intellectus). When human intellectus (intuitive vision) is joined to ratio or discursive reason, we can imagine their relation as what happens when a candle lights up a room—an illumination that is greater the closer one is to the candle. But where Jesus is concerned intellectus is “the place where the Word is received,” the point of union between the divine and the human in Jesus. Now the illumination of the human candle is replaced by that of the divine sun: “For the Word of God illumines the intellect just as the light of the sun illumines this world.”,, Yet this illumination does not compel anyone to believe. We remain free even when we submit in faith to God’s Word, Jesus, and come to love and be united to the God-man. In the #nal chapter of De visione Dei, Nicholas compares God to a “painter who mixes di-erent colors in order #nally to be able to paint himself and to have an image of himself wherein he may be delighted //. De visione Dei //, sec. %22, %2–%% (VI !0): “illuminat enim verbum dei intellectum sicut lumen solis hunc mundum.”

!e Vision of God

%'%

and his art #nd rest.”,. In fact there is only one painter, but there can be many and di-ering “images and likenesses”—human beings. In this #nal turn to the community of believers who gathered before the icon he sent them, Nicholas remarks how human spirits reveal their secrets of knowledge of and love for Jesus to one another. His #nal words are those of an individual in a joyful community asking the Lord he loves to draw him ever closer. It is possible, of course, to cite the various examples and concrete items that Nicholas uses in this prayerful treatise as particular conjectures. In fact, the whole exercise with the icon and all that Nicholas says about God’s seeing and its implications is an extended conjecture. With the guidance of his faith and its long history of thought about the implications of that religious belief, Nicholas proposes another way to understand God’s presence and absence. Perhaps the best philosophical theology amounts to conjecture, for #rm in its convictions about God and Jesus Christ, it proposes di-erent ways of understanding and appreciating what it sees as revelation of divine love in the God-man’s living, dying, and rising. Intended to be taken seriously and acted upon, Nicholas’s booklet of conjectural proposals about the vision of God (in both senses) amounts to a stunning case of posited assertions “that share in the truth as it is, but in otherness.” $e transition from the Trinity beyond the wall of contradiction in De visione Dei to the more “visible” #gure of Jesus marks a natural transition to the theme of christiformitas emphasized in many of Nicholas’s sermons. $e sermons expand on the Neoplatonic dialectical structure of God’s giving and humans’ receiving and responding to God’s love, all centered in the mystery of the historical God-man. “Who sees me, sees the Father” (Jn %&.)). Nicholas is convinced that human lives can be reformed and are thereby transformed by Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection so that men and women may love one another in loving Jesus Christ. /(. De visione Dei /', sec. %%*, %%–%( (VI 00): “quasi pictor, qui diversos temperat colores, ut demum se ipsum depingere possit ad #nem, ut habeat sui ipsius imaginem, in qua delicietur et quiescat ars sua.”

Transformation in Christ

!

S

Transformation in Christ

Nicholas of Cusa composed "#$ sermons over the course of his career. %is body of sermons illustrates both the spiritual depth of Nicholas’s thought and the rich dialogic relationship between his more theoretical ideas and his preaching. %e sermons complement his treatises and dialogues as they &ll out a more complete picture of his thinking about Christian life and practice. Conformity to Christ (christiformitas), a striking conjecture and a pervasive theme in some of his later sermons, is mentioned by Nicholas from his earliest writings and preaching. He remarked near the end of his best-known work, De docta ignorantia, that the power of faith is such that it produces (brings about [ef!cit]) this conformity to Christ by transforming a human being so that she or he is “Christiform.”' Two other traditional themes in his preaching and writing go hand-in-hand with christiformitas: that of our dei&cation (theosis, dei!catio, !liatio) and that of !des formata caritate (literally “faith formed by love”).( His understanding of christiformitas witnesses to the spiritual depth of Nicholas’s sermons. Nicholas’s certainties may be those of Christian faith, but his readings of the ideal Christian life and its deep and pervasive connection to God represent his ongoing conjectural proposals in a more practical context for his listeners. How does Nicholas develop the theme of christiformitas? We discover as we read both his sermons and his theological treatises that christiformitas marks a point of con)uence in his thinking about Christ and Christians. What he hopes for his readers and hearers is that they understand that a transformation or conversion is to take place in the lives and loves of believers who accept Jesus Christ in faith. Nicholas proposes that *. De docta ignorantia III, **, sec. "+", *–" (I). ". His brief early treatise of *,,+, De !liatione Dei, discusses just how we come to share in the divine life of the Trinity through the second Person, the Word of God. See also Hudson, Becoming God.

*+"

Transformation in Christ

*+$

Jesus is the key to who and what they are and the key to who and what they are to become.In one late sermon, Nicholas moves from christiformitas to deiformitas to demonstrate how our lives in Christ are to be directed toward the triune God no less than was Christ’s life. %ere he says: “You may ask, ‘Since holiness is deiformitas, how is it obtained?’ I say, ‘In christiformitas. For, since God is unknown to us, in order to draw us to deiformitas, God sent his son into our nature—one who can be approached by us since he is a human being—so that . . . as he became the son of man, we may become sons of God.’ ”. Christiformitas provides one way into understanding just what Nicholas believes that God is doing in human lives, as well as some direction for the kind of response that is appropriate for Christians. Behind Cusanus’s understanding of conformity to Christ, not to mention the “reforming” and “transforming” that conversion implies, we can discern his central understanding of form and formation as their meanings vary across several contexts. Two of Cusanus’s early sermons that allude to christiformitas are worth noting at the start. First, an Easter sermon of *,$" proposes “how a person is made spiritually christiform through contemplation of Christ’s divinity with a pure and sincerely formed faith.”/ Second, a sermon for the Epiphany the following year imagines us contemplating in faith the Christ child in the manger during the week a0er Christmas and our souls becoming christiform thereby. During those eight days we are to have grown spiritually with Christ by “circumcising our souls”—and Nicholas details what we are to achieve each day. By day eight, each of us has become “jesuana”—literally “belonging to Jesus.” Nicholas explains $. Richard Serina has contextualized the theme of christiformitas in Nicholas’s Brixen and Roman sermons squarely within his e1orts at reform of the late medieval Church. See Serina’s Nicholas of Cusa’s Brixen Sermons and Late Medieval Church Reform, ##–**". See also %omas Izbicki, “Christiformitas in Nicholas of Cusa’s Roman Sermons (*,+#),” Asian Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities *, no. * ("2**): *–*3. ,. Sermo "#2, sec. *$, *–*2 (XIX 33$): “Diceres: Cum sanctitas sit deiformitas, quomodo acquiritur? Dico: In christiformitate. Nam, cum Deus sit nobis ignotus, ut nos ad deiformitatem attraheret, misit Filium in nostrum naturam, qui, cum sit homo, accedi per nos potest, ut, . . . sicut ipse factus est ‘&lius hominis’ nos &amus &lii Dei.” All translations from the sermons are my own. +. Sermo *", sec. $,, *–, (XVI ",#): “Qualiter autem spiritualiter homo christiformis e4ciatur, per contemplationem suae divinitatis pura et sincera formata &de.”

*+,

Conjecturing and Beyond

this as “abiding saved deep within.” By Epiphany, we come to recognize and grasp our status as “jesuana” through what Nicholas terms “the heartfelt charity of the twel0h day.”5 So what does Cusanus see God doing in the lives of Christian believers? We may discern two di1erent directions in his preaching and thinking that, not surprisingly, parallel the Christian Neoplatonist scheme of creation’s exitus-reditus in relation to its divine source. One direction proceeds “from above,” as it were, and anchors God’s dealing with human beings in the life of the Trinity and its expression in the Incarnation, always making Jesus Christ central.6 A second, matching movement in Nicholas’s thought proceeds “from below” and attempts to understand what sorts of response in faith characterize the believers who appreciate what God has done for them in Jesus Christ. Not surprisingly, both directions converge or coincide to help us understand jesuanitas and christiformitas—belonging to Jesus and being conformed to Christ. Nicholas o0en weaves the two perspectives together or moves back and forth from one to the other. An instance of this weaving occurs in a Lenten sermon from *,+3 where Nicholas remarks that “the soul habituated with charity” will turn to God. He says: If this [charity] is rightly understood, it says the soul is jesuana. For Jesus is said to be savior. So in the soul whose spouse is Jesus, the soul betrothed will speak to the Lord: “You, my Lord, are my support, you are my refuge, you are my God and I will trust in my God himself.” For divine Love saves us from all attacks of vicious thoughts. And in Christ alone love in its fullness is found, and from the fullness of his love all who love him receive the form of love. %erefore the christiform soul is said to be jesuana, because in it also is the saving grace of the beloved.7 3. Sermo *!, sec. *+, *2 (XVI "!#): “per caritatem fervidam duodecimae diei.” 8. A good example of this sort of exposition can be found in Hans Gerhard Senger, “Gerechtigkeit und Gleichheit und ihre Bedeutung für die Tugendlehre des Nikolaus von Kues,” MFCG "3 ("222): $#–3$. For the centrality of Christ to Nicholas’s Brixen sermons, see Walter Andreas Euler, “Die Christusverkündigung in den Brixener Predigten des Nikolaus von Kues,” MFCG "8 ("22*): 3+–!2. !. Sermo """, sec. $, ,–*+ (IV *""): “Hoc si recte intelligitur, dicit anima jesuana. Jesus enim salvator dicitur. In anima igitur, in qua est Jesus sponsus, ‘dicet’ anima sponsa ‘domino’: ‘Tu, domine mi, es susceptor meus, tu es refugium meum, tu es Deus meus, et in ipsum Deum meum sperabo. Amor enim divinus salvat ab omni impugnatione vitiosae cogitationis, et—in solo

Transformation in Christ

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We see here the outpouring of God’s love and grace (the perspective from above) exactly matched in turn by the soul’s response of trust and love (the perspective from below).9

:;< :=>?>@A=>A? BCD=E@O A longer segment of one sermon from Nicholas’s preaching as bishop at Brixen may exemplify in a paradigmatic fashion just how Nicholas thinks both from above and from below about christiformitas. In his Palm Sunday sermon for *,+8, “Hoc sentite in vobis,” Nicholas preached on the well-known Christological hymn in the second chapter of Paul’s letter to the Philippians. %e &rst verses of this hymn read as follows (in the Douay translation of the Vulgate Latin): “For let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who being in the form of God thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as a man” (Phil ".+–8). Now the fact that the word “form” is found twice in these verses no doubt easily led Nicholas to recall that being Christian is being christiformis—taking on the form of or becoming “con-formed” to Christ. Nicholas opens this Palm Sunday sermon with a summary of the points that he will explain from this segment of Philippians. He writes: %e Apostle teaches that humility and obedience a0er the example of Christ are necessary for a christiform soul. From this we may notice that, if we have such virtues in us a0er the example of Christ, then Christ is the exemplar of the virtues of our soul. And so Christ to whom we are con&gured is in us, just as Christ, who is the “&gure of the substance” of his Father, said that the Father is in him. %en Christ speaks and acts in us, and God does so in Christ. For we will be disciples of Christ, whose teaching, as he said himself, is of God his Father.'P Christo in plenitudine inventus—de cuius amoris plenitudine omnes amantes formam amandi recipient. Unde anima christiformis jesuana dicitur, quia in ipsa et gratia amati salvans.” #. See the wide-ranging overview of Wilhelm Dupré, “Liebe als Grundbestandteil allen Seins und ‘Form oder Leben aller Tugenden,’ ” MFCG "3 ("222): 3+–##. *2. Sermo "88, sec. *, 3–*3 (XIX ++3): “Docet Apostolus humilitatem et oboedentiam exemplo Christi animae christiformi necessariam. Ex quo notemus, si tales virtutes in nobis habuerimus exemplo Christi, tunc Christus est exemplar virtutum animae nostrae. Ideo in nobis Christum, cui sumus con&gurati, sicut Christus qui est ‘&gura substantiae’ Patris sui, dixit Patrem in

*+3

Conjecturing and Beyond

We see at once how Nicholas plays on exemplum and exemplar, on con!gurati and !gura substantiae (from Hebrews *.$), on the Father’s being, speaking, and acting in Christ as parallel to Christ’s being, speaking, and acting in us—all based on Jesus being the “exemplar of the virtues of our soul.”'' Cusanus here combines in Christ Jesus God’s action and human response. As always in Cusan thought, both perspectives— from above and below, as it were—are in fact always together in the dialectical unity Nicholas terms “coincidence.” We may distinguish Christ and ourselves, but with “Christ in us,” we in fact live and act in Christ as a single reality. By reminding us that Christ is the &gure of the Father’s substance, Nicholas’s summary thus invites us to retrieve his ideas about the inner life of the Trinity. For him, Father, Son, and Spirit are said to be oneness, equalness, and connectedness—unitas, aequalitas, et nexus—a formula he takes from %ierry of Chartres that we also &nd in St. Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana. Even though we may conjecture that all three persons are equal as divine, Nicholas assigns equality in a unique way to the Son, the second Person, the Word and Image of the Father. To get some inkling of what he is driving at, we must remember that Oneness or unitas is the most proper name of the Father. Now the generation of the Son brings forth the equalness or aequalitas of that Oneness, the “second” divine Person. Nicholas writes in De docta ignorantia, “Oneness repeated once brings forth only the equalness of oneness because nothing else can be understood than that oneness brings forth oneness. And this generation is eternal.”'( Here oneness is taken to be prior to equalness. But in his later De aequalitate, Nicholas easily reverses this nontemporal priority, writing as follows: “And although oneness is seen to be the father of equalness—since equalness is oneness taken once, as you eo esse. Tunc in nobis loquitur et operator Christus et in Christo Deus. Erimus enim discipuli Christi, cuius doctrina, ut ipse ait, est Dei Patris sui.” **. For more on this theme, see Albert Dahm, “Christus—‘Tugend der Tugenden,’ ” MFCG "3 ("222): *!8–"28, and the same author’s earlier monograph, Die Soteriologie des Nikolaus von Kues: Ihre Entwicklung von seinen frühen Predigten bis zum Jahr "##$ (Münster: Aschendor1, *##8), esp. *!3–#* on christiformitas. *". De docta ignorantia I, !, sec. "$, #–*" (I $$): “Unitas vero semel repetita solum gignit unitatis aequalitatem, quod nihil aliud intelligi potest quam quod unitas gignat unitatem. Et haec quidem generatio aeterna est.”

Transformation in Christ

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know from elsewhere—nevertheless absolute equalness enfolds oneness. For that which is equal exists in a single way. For in oneness only equality is seen.”'- %is rationale appears to be another symbolic use of the arithmetic fact that one times one times one (oneness taken twice) equals one, now extrapolated to the case of divinity. In any event, Nicholas &nds the divine Word’s equality with the Father a fundamental fact and truth of Trinitarian life. %e form of divine being that is the Father is equally expressed in the divinity of the Son, the form and &gure of the Father’s substance.'.

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