About Nicholas of Cusa

About
Nicholas of Cusa

Nicholas of Cusa lived from 1401 to 1464 CE. He is the author of approximately 25 philosophical and spiritual works, but he also led a very active life. He served the Roman Catholic Church as a papal advocate before the imperial diets, cardinal-legate to Germany and the Netherlands, bishop at Brixen (in what's now known as Germany) and a papal adviser, vicar-general, and cameraius in Rome.

A pivotal point in his life occurred in 1437 when Pope Eugene IV sent Cusa and two other bishops to Constantinople to help secure Greek approval for a joint East-West council in Italy. His interaction with Eastern Orthodox Christians provided him with a fresh vision of unity and difference coexisting not only within the church but also in the soul's experience of God and the world. During this trip Cusa also reports having a profound, revelatory experience which he believed to be a divine gift. It was a visionary experience of the "incomprehensible" that opened up new ways for Cusa to speak about the ineffable.

Hugh Lawrence Bond, the author of Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings, has included translations of five different works by Cusa:

On Learned Ignorance
Dialogue on the Hidden God
On Seeking God
On the Vision of God
On the Summit of Contemplation

The message of these works may be summarized as follows:

God as he exists in Himself is unknowable and incomprehensible.
Yet God as He exists in His creation is simplicity Itself, and this invisible God can be seen within creation when viewed by an individual whose intellect has become similarly simple.
Christ as Logos is the simple essence which sustains the universe and the medium through which the believer is united to God.
Union with Christ does not annihilate individuality, but rather perfects it in Christ since Christ makes up for all the individual's deficiencies.

The above points are approached again and again from many different angles, using many different paradigms. It's worth noting that in the first book of the anthology, On Learned Ignorance, Cusa uses a geometrical paradigm in his presentation. If you are wondering if this paradigm would be meaningful for you personally, consider the following: a circle of infinite size has a circumference which consists of an infinite, straight line. If you don't like reflecting on this, you probably won't like reading On Learned Ignorance. However if this has a certain appeal to you, you'll find that Cusa uses such examples to illustrate that diversity manifests itself due to creation's finiteness. Rather than considering a thing as it is in itself (finite), consider it as it is in God (infinite). When you do so everything converges back into one, just as circles and straight lines do in the above geometrical example.