Justified True Belief

(●) A boatman’s son who became a cardinal, and who taught that the surest thing a mind can know about God is that it will never finish knowing him. + Most people who have heard of Nicholas of Cusa have heard of one phrase: learned ignorance. It sounds like a joke at the expense of scholars, and in part it was. He meant something exact by it. A finite mind set beside an infinite God is not a small measure beside a large one; it is no measure at all, the way a ruler is no measure of a colour. The mind that grasps this has not given up on truth. It has finally understood what it is reaching for, and it can start reaching honestly. He was a churchman before he was a philosopher, and he never stopped being one. He argued canon law, the church’s own law, at the Council of Basel, sailed to Constantinople to fetch the Greek bishops home to a union that did not last, wore a cardinal’s red, governed an Alpine diocese badly enough to end up a prisoner in his own territory, and died on the road to a crusade that never sailed. The books were written in the gaps: on shipboard, in a castle he had fled to, in the weeks after news came that Constantinople had fallen. Here is the fact worth keeping. In a book finished in 1440, a century before Copernicus published, this German churchman wrote that the earth is not the centre of the universe, that it moves, and that the universe has no outer edge. He got there with no telescope and no new measurement, purely by asking what follows if God is genuinely infinite.

(●) 1401 AD: Born at Kues on the Moselle, into a family that made its living hauling wine on the river. + The village of Kues sits on the left bank of the Moselle in the wine country of the Rhineland, opposite the town of Bernkastel. Nicholas was born there in 1401, or possibly late in 1400; the year is the conventional one and the records do not settle it. His father, Johann Krebs, was a boat owner and ferryman, prosperous enough that the old story of a poor fisherman’s son is simply wrong. The boy grew up watching cargo move on water, which may be why, decades later, the illustrations in his books so often involve measuring, weighing, and the exact moment when a scale tips. A tradition, repeated for centuries but not documented, sends him first to the school at Deventer in the Netherlands run by the Brethren of the Common Life, the lay religious movement whose schools also shaped Thomas à Kempis and, later, Erasmus. It may be true. Nothing survives to prove it, and a careful reader should treat it as a story rather than a fact.

(●) 1416 to 1429 AD: He took a doctorate in canon law at Padua, and made his name hunting down manuscripts nobody had read in centuries. + He enrolled at Heidelberg in 1416, stayed about a year, and then went south to Padua, the best law faculty in Europe. He came away in 1423 as a doctor of canon law, the church’s own body of law, the rules that decided who held which office, whose marriage stood, and how a bishop could be judged. In the fifteenth century that degree was less an academic honour than a licence to run things: dioceses, courts, councils. At Padua he also fell in with the humanists, the scholars who had set themselves to recover the actual writings of the ancient world rather than the summaries of them that the Middle Ages had been living on. In 1425 he went on to Cologne to study theology. The hunting is what made him famous first. Working in monastic libraries where nobody had looked properly for a very long time, he turned up, around 1429, an eleventh-century manuscript of the Roman comic playwright Plautus containing twelve plays that no living person had read. Twelve. A whole shelf of an ancient author, recovered at a stroke by a young German lawyer with a good eye. Scholars across Italy knew his name from that find before they knew anything else about him.

(●) 1433 AD: At the Council of Basel he argued that a council outranks a pope, and proved the Donation of Constantine a forgery. + He came to Basel in 1432 as a lawyer for a client, arguing a disputed claim to the archbishopric of Trier, and stayed to become one of the council’s working minds. Out of that came De concordantia catholica, The Catholic Concordance, presented in 1433. Its subject is consent. Authority in church and empire, he argued, rests on the agreement of those governed by it, so that a general council, representing the whole church, stands above the pope. This position has a name, conciliarism, and in the 1430s it was the reforming party’s programme. Buried in the third book is a piece of detective work that outlived the politics. The Donation of Constantine was a document in which the emperor Constantine supposedly handed the western empire over to the pope, and for six centuries it had been quoted as the legal foundation of papal temporal power. Nicholas took it apart. No church history from Constantine’s own time mentions any such grant, and the popes themselves went on acknowledging imperial authority in the West for another four hundred years. A forgery, then. Lorenzo Valla would demolish the same document seven years later with a philologist’s tools, the close study of how Latin was actually written in a given century, which can date a document by its own vocabulary the way an accent places a stranger. Valla got most of the credit, but Nicholas was there first, and he did it inside a book arguing for church unity rather than against the papacy as such.

(●) 1437 to 1440 AD: He sailed to Constantinople for the Greeks, and came home with the idea he called learned ignorance, which he said was handed to him at sea. + By 1437 the Council of Basel had split, and Nicholas changed sides. The man who had written the textbook of conciliarism now judged that the council had become a faction and that unity lay with Pope Eugene IV, and he joined the papal embassy sent to Constantinople to bring the Greek church to a union council in Italy. It worked, at least on paper: the emperor, the patriarch and twenty-eight archbishops came west. Old friends never forgave the switch, and the charge of opportunism followed him for the rest of his life. It was on the voyage home, somewhere between Constantinople and Venice, that the thing happened which he spent the next twenty-four years unpacking. In the letter he attached to De docta ignorantia, addressed to his old Padua teacher Cardinal Julian Cesarini, he says the insight came to him at sea as a gift from above: how to embrace what cannot be comprehended, precisely by not pretending to comprehend it. He finished the book at Kues on 12 February 1440. Its second book contains the sentences that still startle people. The universe has no circumference and no fixed centre; the earth is not the centre of anything but is a star like the others, and it moves; and a man standing anywhere in the cosmos would think himself at the middle of it (De docta ignorantia II, 11 and 12). No observation drove this. It follows, he thought, from what an infinite God implies about the world such a God would make.

(●) 1448 to 1452 AD: He was made a cardinal, handed a diocese in the Alps, and sent three thousand miles across Germany on horseback to preach reform. + The book brought trouble before it brought honours. John Wenck, a theologian at Heidelberg, published De ignota litteratura, On Unknown Learning, calling learned ignorance a road to pantheism: if opposites coincide in God, Wenck reasoned, then God and the world collapse into each other and theology is finished. Nicholas answered in 1449 with the Apologia doctae ignorantiae, and no condemnation followed. Rome, as it turned out, went the other way entirely. Eugene IV had named him a cardinal in 1446 without announcing it, Nicholas V published the appointment on 20 December 1448, and in January 1449 he was given the title of St Peter in Chains, the church in Rome where he lies today. In 1450 he was given the diocese of Brixen in the Tyrol, and then sent north as papal legate, which is to say as the pope’s own representative, carrying the pope’s authority in his person wherever he went. The list of tasks was long enough for three men: preach the jubilee, the year of pardon Rome had proclaimed, raise support against the Turks, reform the monasteries, settle a quarrel between the duke of Cleves and the archbishop of Cologne. He rode nearly three thousand miles, holding synods, the working assemblies of a region’s clergy, at Salzburg, Bamberg, Magdeburg and Cologne. He moved against a lucrative pilgrimage to Wilsnack, where a cult had grown up around consecrated hosts, the communion wafers, which were said to bleed, on the ground that the faithful were being sold a wonder; Rome later let the pilgrimage stand. Some of the reform stuck. Much of it lasted only as long as he was in the room, which is the ordinary fate of a reformer who has to be somewhere else by Thursday.

(●) 1453 to 1460 AD: Constantinople fell and he wrote a book about peace among the faiths, while his own diocese went to war with him. + On 29 May 1453 Constantinople fell to the armies of Mehmed II. Nicholas had walked those streets sixteen years earlier. The reports of the sack reached him that summer, and his response was not a call to arms but a dialogue, De pace fidei, On the Peace of Faith, in which the nations of the earth are summoned to a council in heaven and talked toward a single faith by the Word of God himself. In the same year he sent the monks of Tegernsee a painting and a book to go with it, De visione Dei, The Vision of God, which is the warmest thing he ever wrote. Meanwhile his own bishopric was coming apart. Brixen sat inside the lands of Duke Sigismund of Austria, who had no intention of letting a reforming cardinal take back church property or discipline the aristocratic Benedictine nuns of Sonnenburg. The quarrel ran for a decade and turned violent. In 1457 Nicholas withdrew to the mountain fortress of Andraz in fear of his life, and wrote De beryllo there. In 1460 Sigismund besieged him at Bruneck and took him prisoner, releasing him only after he signed away his claims. He repudiated the agreement the moment he was free, Pope Pius II excommunicated the duke, and Nicholas never governed Brixen again.

(●) 1464 AD: He died at Todi on the road to a crusade, and left his books to a home for thirty-three old men. + The last years were spent in Rome as a cardinal of the curia, the papal household and its offices, where the central business of the church was actually done. He was still writing, still turning the same handful of ideas over: De possest, De li non aliud, De venatione sapientiae, and in 1461 the Cribratio Alkorani, a sifting of the Qur’an which he read in a Latin translation in order to argue with it rather than merely denounce it. In 1464 Pius II called for a crusade and set out for the port of Ancona to sail with it himself. Nicholas followed and got as far as Todi in Umbria, where he died on 11 August. The fleet never sailed; the pope died at Ancona a few days later. His body was buried in Rome, in his titular church of St Peter in Chains, the Roman church every cardinal is given as his own so that a man who governs the whole church still has one congregation to belong to. His heart went home to the Moselle, to the chapel of the hospital he had built at Kues between 1451 and 1458 and endowed by charter on 3 December 1458, a home for thirty-three poor old men, one for each year of Christ’s life: six nobles, six clergy and twenty-one commoners, a mix no one rank could claim as its own. He left it his library. Both are still there. It is among the oldest homes for the elderly in Germany and still does the work its founder set it, and upstairs, up a stair from the courtyard, sit the manuscripts he collected across a lifetime, in the village where the boats used to load.

What He Taught

(T1) No amount of learning closes the distance between a finite mind and an infinite God, and knowing that is where wisdom begins. + Draw a circle on a page, then draw a triangle inside it with all three corners touching the line. It is a poor circle. Now make it a square, then a pentagon, then a shape with fifty sides, then five hundred. The more sides you add the rounder it looks, and if you kept going all afternoon you would have something a printer could pass off as a circle. But you would never have a circle. A shape made of straight edges and a shape with no edges at all are different in kind, not in degree, and adding sides forever does not cross that difference. That drawing is Nicholas’s own, and it is the whole of what he means by learned ignorance: the trained, hard-won knowledge that our minds stand to the truth as the many-sided figure stands to the circle (De docta ignorantia I, 3). Understanding grows real and grows forever, and never arrives. Between the finite and the infinite, as he liked to put it, there is no proportion, no ratio, nothing you could set out as so-much-to-so-much. You might think this is just despair with a Latin name. It is the opposite. The man who thinks he has God measured has stopped looking, and what he is now looking at is a thing his own mind made. The man who knows the gap is real keeps going, and keeps going honestly. Nicholas was not inventing this; he was standing in a line that runs back through Augustine to Paul, who said that now we see in a mirror dimly (1 Corinthians 13:12), and back beyond Paul to the book of Job, where Zophar asks whether anyone can find out the deep things of God (Job 11:7). What Nicholas added was the geometry, and the nerve to say that ignorance of this kind is a kind of learning and can be taught.

(Q) "The more he knows that he is unknowing, the more learned he will be." + Source: Nicholas of Cusa, De docta ignorantia I, 1 (Hopkins translation). The sentence that names the book, in its opening chapter. He has just listed his witnesses: Socrates, who knew only that he did not know; Solomon, who found all things unexplainable in words; and Aristotle, who compared our difficulty with the most obvious things to a night owl trying to look at the sun.

(T2) In God the opposites that divide everything else come together. + Take a bicycle wheel and set a ruler against the rim. The rim curves away from the ruler sharply. Do the same on a tractor tyre and the gap is smaller. Do it on a grain silo and you can hardly see daylight between them. Curvature falls as the circle grows. So what happens to the arc of a circle that is infinitely large? It is straight. Curved and straight, which are opposites everywhere else, turn out to be the same thing at the limit (De docta ignorantia I, 13). Nicholas calls this the coincidence of opposites, and by coincidence he means what the Latin word means, falling together: two things that must be kept apart in the world of measurable sizes turn out, in the infinite, to be one. Greatest and least. Centre and circumference. Everywhere and nowhere. Reason works by keeping opposites apart, because that is what reason is for, and so reason arrives at God’s door and can go no further. The mind has to be carried past its own rules to see what is on the other side. Two things should be said at once, because he says them. First, this is not a licence for nonsense. He does not say that contradictions are true down here where we live; he says that the categories we use down here stop applying at the top, which is precisely the claim that there is a God and not merely a very large item in the universe. Second, it is not new. Scripture has been saying for a long time that God dwells in unapproachable light and that no one has ever seen him or can see him (1 Timothy 6:16), and that Moses had to draw near to the thick darkness to find him (Exodus 20:21). What Nicholas gives is a way of thinking that does not treat those verses as poetry to be got past.

(Q) "Whence I begin, Lord, to behold Thee in the door of the coincidence of opposites, which the angel guardeth that is set over the entrance into Paradise." + Source: Nicholas of Cusa, De visione Dei X (Salter translation, 1928). The guarded gate of Eden, where God set the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way (Genesis 3:24), has become in his hands a picture of the limit of reason: the place beyond which a mind cannot walk on its own legs. He has just been comparing God’s sight of the world to a preacher speaking one sermon that every hearer receives whole.

(T3) God’s gaze rests on each creature as though it had nothing else to look at. + In 1453 Nicholas sent the monks of the abbey of Tegernsee a parcel: a book, and a painted face to go with it. The painting was one of those portraits whose eyes seem to follow you around a room, and he gave the monks an exercise to do with it. Hang it on the north wall. Stand in a ring around it. Each of you will be certain the eyes are on him and on no one else. Now walk from one end of the wall to the other, and watch the gaze come with you although the picture has not moved. Then send a brother walking the other way, and ask him, when you meet, whether the eyes followed him too. He will say yes. You will not believe it until he tells you. That is the whole apparatus, and out of it Nicholas draws his doctrine of providence, the teaching that God does not wind the world up and walk away but attends to each particular creature in it, this one and that one and not the species in general. What a painter fakes with a trick of the brush, God does in fact: he attends to each creature wholly, without dividing his attention, because he is not a large thing looking at many small things but the source in which all of them stand. The monks were not being given an illusion to admire. They were being given a way to feel, in their own shoulders and eyes, something Scripture states flatly, that the Lord has searched me and known me and is acquainted with all my ways (Psalm 139:1-3). And then he presses further, into the sentence the book is really for. If the eyes never leave you, and if in God seeing and willing and loving are not three activities but one simple act, then to be looked at by God is to be loved by God, continuously, for as long as you exist. The mysticism here is not vague. It is a cardinal handing some monks a picture and telling them to go and stand where the eyes can find them.

(Q) "And, since where the eye is, there is love, I prove by experience that Thou lovest me because Thine eyes are so attentively upon me, Thy poor little servant. Lord, Thy glance is love." + Source: Nicholas of Cusa, De visione Dei IV (Salter translation, 1928). The chapter is headed "That the gaze of God is called providence, grace, and life eternal." The reader has just been told to walk around the picture from east to south to west, and the prayer breaks out of the exercise: the eyes that will not leave him are not a painter’s trick but the nearest thing he has to proof that he is loved.

(T4) Only in Christ do the infinite and the finite actually meet. + All of this could have ended as a very elegant agnosticism: God is beyond us, so be quiet and be humble. The third book of De docta ignorantia is where Nicholas refuses that ending, and it is worth noticing that he had planned the refusal from the first page. The polygon can never become the circle by adding sides. But the circle can take a polygon into itself. His terms for it are worth learning, because they are only two. The absolute maximum is God, who is not the biggest of things but is greatness itself, unrestricted, not one item in any list. The contracted maximum is any created thing brought to the fullest it could possibly be, the way a particular oak is a contraction, a narrowing-down, of everything an oak could be. Ordinarily these two cannot be the same, and the whole first book was spent showing why. Then Nicholas says: in Jesus Christ they are. Here is one who is the absolute and the contracted maximum together, God without limit and a man of a particular height in a particular village, and in him human nature stands where it could never have climbed. So the book ends where a fifteenth-century cardinal’s book would end, on the creed: conceived by the Holy Spirit, crucified, risen, coming to judge. What learned ignorance had shown to be impossible from below has been done from above. The move is the one Augustine had made a thousand years earlier when he said that the Platonists showed him the homeland but not the road, and Nicholas makes it in the same spirit: the climb does not fail because the climber is lazy, but because the wall has no top, and so the summit comes down.

(Q) "There is no perfect religion leading men to the last and most desirable end of peace, which does not embrace Christ as the mediator and saviour, God and man, the way, the life and the truth." + Source: Nicholas of Cusa, De docta ignorantia III, 8 (Heron translation, in Dolan, Unity and Reform, 1962). The sentence runs, in full, "If I mistake not, you now perceive that there is no perfect religion"; the quotation picks it up partway in, at the word "there". He has been arguing that human nature has put on immortality in the resurrection of Christ, and turns from the argument to its consequence. The echo is John 14:6. Thirteen years before he wrote his most generous book about other faiths, he had already written this, and it is the reason the generous book means what it means (T5).

(T5) The nations are already reaching for the same God, and killing each other over rites is a mistake about what they are reaching for. + News of the sack of Constantinople reached the West in the summer of 1453, and what most churchmen wrote that year were appeals for an army. Nicholas wrote a dialogue instead. In De pace fidei a man sickened by the slaughter is carried up in a vision to a council in heaven, where the Word of God receives a Greek, an Italian, an Arab, an Indian, a Jew, a Persian, a Turk, an Englishman and others, and reasons with each of them in turn. The phrase everyone quotes from it is one religion in a variety of rites, and it is easy to quote badly. What Nicholas means is not that every faith is a path up the same mountain. Watch what actually happens in the dialogue: the Word takes hold of something each speaker already grants, and shows him that his own commitment carries him further than he knew. The Arab, who insists God is one, is walked step by step to why a God who is genuinely productive must be one in three. The Jew is shown a Trinity that adds no plurality to the divine unity. The conclusion of the council is the Christian creed, not a truce beneath it. What the council then hands back to the nations is their ceremonies, their fasts, their liturgies, their languages, on the judgment that uniformity in such things is neither possible nor worth a war. Two things make this remarkable and one makes it limited, and both should be said. It is remarkable that a cardinal in 1453 chose argument over crusade, and that he assumed a Muslim could be reasoned with rather than only fought, which is why he sat down eight years later with a Latin Qur’an to argue with the book itself. It is remarkable, too, that he grounded the hope in a real doctrine and not in good manners: God is the one thing every seeking creature is actually seeking, whatever name it uses, which is the claim Paul made to the philosophers on Mars Hill in Athens, that men should seek God and perhaps feel their way toward him (Acts 17:27). What limits it is that his Arab and his Jew are his own creations, and they concede at the speed a philosopher’s dialogue requires. No one in the book has to give anything up that costs.

(Q) "Then the sword of envy and hatred would cease along with all other evils, and all would recognize that there is, in spite of many varieties of rites, but one religion." + Source: Nicholas of Cusa, De pace fidei I (Dolan translation, Unity and Reform, 1962). The petition begins, in full, "If you would only deign to do this then the sword of envy and hatred would cease"; the quotation picks it up partway in, at the word "then". An archangel is speaking, on behalf of all the nations, to the King of heaven. The request is that God show his face, since the killing is being done by people who believe on both sides that they are pleasing their Creator.

(Q) "You consider yourself wise when actually you are not, and are proud of the fact. I, however, realize that I am a simple citizen and am consequently more humble and as a result more learned." + Source: Nicholas of Cusa, Idiota de sapientia I (Dolan translation, Unity and Reform, 1962). An unlettered layman has stopped a famous orator in the Roman Forum to tell him that his library has made him proud. Asked where wisdom is to be found if not in books, the layman answers that it cries out in the streets, and points at the money changers and the oil sellers in the market as men doing, without knowing it, the thing the philosophers write about: counting, weighing, measuring. The cardinal who wrote this had one of the finest private libraries in Europe (T1).

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The first serious response to his masterpiece was a charge of heresy, and it did not stand. + Within two or three years of publication, De docta ignorantia was under attack from Heidelberg. John Wenck, a respected theologian of the old school, wrote De ignota litteratura and made a charge that has to be taken seriously: if maximum and minimum coincide, if God is in all things and all things in God, then the line between Creator and creature has been rubbed out, and what is left is pantheism, the belief that God and the world are the same thing. Wenck also saw, correctly, that a method which puts God past the reach of reason threatens the whole enterprise of scholastic theology, the careful chains of argument the universities had been building since Aquinas. Nicholas answered in the Apologia doctae ignorantiae of 1449, and his answer is the one that matters. Saying that reason cannot capture God is not saying that God is confused; it is the ordinary teaching of negative theology, which describes God by denial, saying what he is not, on the ground that every positive term is drawn from creatures and fits him only loosely. That tradition was not marginal. It runs through Pseudo-Dionysius, whom the Middle Ages read as a convert of the apostle Paul, and through Augustine, and through Aquinas himself, who held that we cannot know what God is but only what he is not. The church agreed. No condemnation was issued, then or later. Nicholas V made him a cardinal in the middle of the controversy, and Pius II, a friend of many years, kept him close in Rome to the end.

(†) He gave the church a way to speak about a God who outruns speech, and a way to think about a world without edges. + His works went on being copied and read, and in 1514 the French humanist Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples brought out an edition of them in Paris, which put a whole German cardinal into the hands of a generation that was about to argue about everything. From there he entered two very different conversations. One was theological. Christians who wanted to talk about God without domesticating him found in learned ignorance a discipline rather than a mood: a set of reasons why the reverence is owed, tied to the difference between the infinite and the finite rather than to a preference for mystery. Anyone who has said that our language about God is analogical, true but never adequate, is standing where he stood, and the line carries forward through the mystical writers to the modern theologians who returned to him when the nineteenth century’s confidence about what reason could deliver ran out. The other was scientific, and it began with a compliment. Johannes Kepler, opening his first book in 1596, named Nicholas first among the thinkers who seemed to him divine, and gave his reason: they had made so much of the relation between the straight and the curved, the very drawing of the polygon and the circle (Mysterium Cosmographicum II). Whether Copernicus owed him anything directly is still debated and probably unprovable. What is not in doubt is that a cardinal had written, in 1440, that the earth moves and that the universe has no centre and no wall, and had reached it by theology; when the astronomers arrived at the same country by measurement, the church had already been given a way to think about it.

(†) As papal legate he ordered the Jews of Germany to wear a badge, and barred them from lending at interest. + The ledger has another column, and it is not made of things other people did with his books. It is made of things he did himself, while holding the pen that wrote about peace among the faiths. - The badge. As papal legate in Germany he used his authority to legislate against Jews. At the synod of Bamberg on 30 April 1451 he issued an ordinance requiring every Jewish man and woman there to wear a distinguishing badge and forbidding them to lend at interest. The church’s censures could not reach Jews, who were not under its discipline, so the penalties fell on Christians: a parish that did not enforce the badge faced interdict, the shutting of its worship and its sacraments, and no Christian who let a Jewish moneylender live beside him or below him could be absolved. On 21 September of the same year he ordered the Jews of Arnhem to register with the burgomaster and wear a yellow badge, and similar instructions went out across Germany that year. Since money-lending was among the few trades open to them, the two measures together were a vice. He was applying canon law that older councils had written, and he was not alone in enforcing it, and none of that makes it less than what it was: a man who had argued that consent is the root of all just authority, imposing a mark of shame on neighbours who had not consented to anything. - The contempt. His pages on Islam swing between two voices. One of them sits down with a Latin Qur’an and looks for what can be granted; the other calls Muslims blind and senseless persecutors of the cross and dismisses their law as a promise of sensual indulgence (De docta ignorantia III, 8). The second voice was ordinary in his century. It is still the voice of a man who had written that God is sought under many names, failing to extend to living opponents the courtesy he extended to their representatives in a dialogue he controlled. Both belong in his ledger, and neither cancels the rest. Scripture is unembarrassed about this sort of double ledger; it tells us about Peter at Antioch as readily as about Peter at Pentecost. The right response to a man like Nicholas of Cusa is not to choose between the badge and the vision of God, but to notice how easily the same person carried both, and to ask the question of oneself.