Nicholas Cusanus: Christian Panentheist and Pantheist

Nicholas Cusanus (or Nicholas of Cusa, or Nicholas Cryfts) was born in Kues in 1401, in what is now Germany, the son of a wealthy merchant. During his education in both the liberal arts and in canon law, he met and mingled with mathematicians, physicians, and humanists--a group that, at the time, was dedicated to bringing back the Greek ideals of the good life.

He never took a formal education in either philosophy or theology, but that did not stop him from educating himself. Among other Greek philosophers, Cusanus studied Parmenides (via Proclus and Plato). He also studied Dionysius (also called Pseudo-Dionysius), whose theology was both mystic and strongly Neoplatonic.

One of his first contributions to us was proving that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery. (Not surprising, perhaps, for a man who later became a controversial bishop.) The Donation of Constantine was--supposedly--the document by which Constantine gave the western part of the Roman Empire over to the authority of the pope. Cusanus was one of the first churchmen to realize that it was fake.

Cusanus' real notoriety began after a diplomatic trip from Rome to Constantinople. He played a part in one of the many embassies seeking reconciliation between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. This desire for reconciliation, or (re)union of opposites, played a large part in his later philosophy and theology.

On the way home from Constantinople, Cusanus reported being struck with something like a vision. From this experience, he produced "On Learned Ignorance," his first philosophical treatise. This was not a "leave your brain at the church door" support of deliberate ignorance: This was going beyond the "pure reason" that Kant critiqued.

Science and reason, Cusanus explained, could only take us so far: it can only tell us about the base, physical side of things, but nothing of the spirit. Once we hit the borders of what's possible with reason, we must take the leap into "learned ignorance." Ignorance, because to go beyond the human, we must go beyond human reason. Learned, because we seek (and learn about) God by going beyond the limits of (but not abandoning) human reason.

Cusanus didn't write in philosophical language; instead, he used familiar philosohical ideas (such as Neoplatonism) and some unfamiliar (for his times) religious metaphors to produce something that both combined and transcended philosophy and theology.

Take the phrase, "learned ignorance." It's a union of opposite concepts. This was something that captured Cusanus--the thought that opposites could, in some way, be part of a larger, unified whole that was simply too immense for humans to understand. Here we see the first hints of the pantheism he was later accused of proposing.

It's probably not surprising that Cusanus' philosophy followed in the Neoplatonics' footsteps. The three books of "On Learned Ignorance" were devoted to God, the world, and Christ: a Neoplatonic series symbolizing the One, the emanated creation, and the return of the created to the creator.

Also not surprising for a Greek-influenced thinker, Cusanus starts with Man as the measurer. Unfortunately, he says, God cannot be measured: there is no possibility of measurement between the finite and the infinite. There's no need to measure, though. Because this is Neoplatonic quasi-philosophy, the infinity of God and the finitude of creation are contained and reflected in each other--another example of Cusanus' love of the unity of opposites.

Here we come to the heart of Cusanus' theology: The creator and the creation are, on some level, unified. This is one of the ideas that led his writings to be called pantheistic. He uses the twin metaphors of "enfolding" and "unfolding": Creation is a finite point enfolded within the infinite Being of God; at the same time, the unfolding of the created universe is, in some way the Being of God.

Of course, these ideas are not only pantheistic; they are also panentheistic (the universe is part of God, but God goes beyond the universe). The whole of creation is present in each creature. And in the same way, so is God. Each creature is both the image of creation, and the image of the creator: Each individual, to Cusanus, embodies the unification of opposites that he seems to love. Each individual becomes Christ-like, through his own existence as the unification of creation and creator.

This unification goes beyond the God-human relationship. It's also embodied in the human-human relationship. If I contain the whole creation, then I also contain the reality of other people; so that anyone I meet is already within me--and I'm already within everyone I meet. I cannot, in any existential way, be truly separate from anyone else, because the union of opposites which takes place in and through God means that no one is truly separate from anyone else.

For Cusanus, the union of opposites was the very definition of Christ. For God to become Man, for Man to become God, for Creator to become creation and vice versa, was the centerpoint of his faith. The union of God and Man in Christ was not an original or singular event, but a hidden truth about the nature of reality.

Cusanus' ideas went beyond philosophy and theology: not surprisingly, he tried to unify the two. This was both a product of his understanding, and of the times, as there was a debate going on about whether philosophy was a branch of theology, or vice versa (though both sides mostly agreed that philosophy should be used to the same ends as theology, supporting the cultural power of the Church). He also went beyond both pantheism and panentheism, merging them into something that had never been seen before.

His philosophy goes way beyond what I've sketched out here, of course. But the unification of opposites is the heart of everything he presents. One of his later works, "On the Peace of Faith," brings this home in a startlingly modern way. This is a story of several people from a variety of faiths--Greeks, Jews, Christians, Muslims, etc.--meeting in Heaven and discovering that, though their religious languages and ceremonies seem different, they all have the same core of unified truth. Christ the unifier is secretly present even in non-Christian faiths, he says; and therefore all faiths are, at heart, the same.

Nicholas Cusanus died in 1464, a cardinal and part of Pius II's papal curia. Most of him was buried in the church of St. Peter in Chains, in Rome. His heart, though, was buried in his hometown of Kues, in the chapel he set up to serve as a hospice for the elderly. The chapel, and hospice, still exist today, along with the library of his works.