Problems of the Infinite: Cusanus and Descartes

by Karsten Harries
I
Many contemporary philosophers are uneasy about what philosophy
has become and where it has led uso Their uneasiness mirrors widespread
concern about the shape of modern culture. As more and more begin to
suspect that the road on which they have been travelling may be a dead
end, attempts are made to retrace steps already taken. A search begins
for the missed turn and for those who may have misled uso
Among these Descartes would appear to deserve a special place. Has
his understanding of proper method not helped found modern philosophy,
science, and indeed modernity? The present essay is part of an attempt to
excavate what lies beneath this supposed foundation. It here takes the
form of a step back from the mathesis universalis ofDescartes to the docta
ignorantia of Nicolaus Cusanus. That step invites a rethinking of tl'le
Cartesian project.
Not that Descartes' writings call for such an excavation. Despite
Maurice de Gandillac's suggestive remarks on the many ways in which
Cusanus's speculations look forward to Descartes,l the latter cannot have
found the cardinal's anything but clear and distinct prose much to his
liking. Descartes mentions Cusanus only once, in a letter to Chanut,
where he points out "that the Cardinal of Cusa and many other Doctors
have supposed the world to be infinite without ever being censured by the
Church," and insists that his own opinion
is not as difficult to accept as theirs, because I do not say that the
world is infinite, but only that it is indefinitely great. There is
IMaurice de Gandillac, Nikolaus von Cues. Studien zu seiner Philosophie und
philosophischen Weltanschauung (Dsseldorf: Schwann, 1953), substantially re-
vised translation of La philosophie de Nicolas de Cues (Paris: Aubier, 1942) by
Karl Fleischmann.
89
90 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
quite a notable difference between the t ~ o for we cannot say
that something is infinite without an argument to prove this
such as we can give only in the case of God himself; but we can
say that a thing is indefinitely large, provided that we have no
argument to prove that it has bounds.
2
Descartes returns to this distinction in the Principles of Philosophy
where he admonishes us
that we must never discuss the infinite, but must simply
consider those things in which we notice nlO limits as indefinite:
as, for instance, the extension of the world, the divisibility of
parts of matter, the number of stars, etc.
He explains that
Thus we shall never be wearied by any debates concerning the
infinite. For of course, inasmuch as we are finite, it would be
absurd for us to attempt to determine anything concerning the
infinite, and thus attempt as it were to prescribe limits to it and
comprehend it. Therefore we shall not bother to respond to those
who ask whether the half of a given infin.i.te line would also be
infinite; or whether infinite number is even or odd, and such:
because surely only those who judge their own mind to be
infinite ought to think about such things.
3
Descartes would have agreed with Cusanus t:hat it is "self-evident that
there is no comparative relation of the infinite to the finite."4 But while
Cusanus concluded from this that a finite iIltellect cannot "precisely
attain the truth about things;'5 Descartes denied that infinity is so
2Letter to Chanut, June 6, 1947, Descartes, Philosophical Letters, tr. and ed.
Anthony Kenny (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 221. Des-
cartes had insisted on this distinction already in his Reply to Caterus. See Reply
to Objections I, Philosophical Works ofDescartes, tr. E.S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross
(New York: Dover, 1955), vol. 11, p. 17. Descartes goes on there to distinguish
between the formal notion of the infinite and the thing which is infinite; the
former we understand only in a certain negative fashion, from the fact namely
that we perceive no limitation in the thing, but the thing which is infinite is itself
positively understod. Descartes wants to claim both: that we have a positive
understanding of God, yet cannot comprehend his infinity. Ibid., 18.
3Rene Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, I, 26; tr. \lalentine Rodger Miller and
Reese P. Miller (Dordrecht, Boston, Lancaster: Reidel, 1983), 13.
4Nicolaus Cusanus, De docta ignorantia, I, 3, tr. Jasper Hopkins, Nicholas ofCusa
on Learned Ignorance. A Translation and an Appraisal of De Docta Ignorantia
(Minneapolis: Banning, 1981), 52.
5De docta ignorantia, I, 3; tr. p. 52.
WINTER 91
constitutive of things that whenever we attempt to really understand
them we become entangled in what he would dismiss as wearying debates
concerning the infinite. This dismissal covers up an abyss that lies
beneath the supposedly secure realm of truth.
11
Separated by two hundred years, Cusanus and Descartes have this in
common: their thought is informed by a profound understanding of the
significance ofperspective, which threatens to imprison the finite human
knower in mere appearance. But while the young Descartes promises to
hand us with his Rules for the Direction ofthe Mind the Ariadne's thread
that will lead us out of what Baroque writers liked to call "the labyrinth
of the world"6 and the mature Descartes attempts to demonstrate that
this promise of an escape from what is but a Christian version ofPlato's
cave was not idle, Cusanus would teach us to recognize and accept our
profound ignorance. All our attempts to seize the truth must founder on
the reef of infinity.
Arguing for the perspectival character of all knowledge, Cusanus
resists the temptation to absolutize a particular mode ofknowledge and to
make it the measure of reality. Our knowledge of reality is inescapably
conjectural. It is thus not surprising that later thinkers, such as Bodin
and Schookius consider Cusanus a leading Pyrrhonist.
7
Such a conclusion
is difficult to avoid once we agree with Descartes that we must "reject all
such merely probable knowledge and make it a rule to trust only what is
completely known and incapable of being doubted."8
To be aware of perspectival appearance as such is to be aware not only
ofwhat is seen, but also ofthe conditions imposed on the seen by our point
of view. Such awareness cannot be divorced from another: awareness of
what constitutes my point ofview carries with it some awareness of other
possible points of view. To recognize the limits imposed by any particular
perspective we have to be in some sense already beyond these limits,
while failing to recognize them, we are likely to mistake appearance for
reality. This mistake constitutes that ignorance about which Cusanus
would have us become learned.
6See RuZes for the Direction ofthe Mind, PhiZosophicaZ Works ofDescartes, tr. E.S.
Haldane and G.R.T. Ross, vol. I (New York: Dover, 1955), RuZe V, p. 14.
7See Gnter Gawlich, "Zur Nachwirkung Cusanischer Ideen im Siebzehnten und
Achtzehnten Jahrhundert, in "NicoZo Cusano agZi inizi deZ mondo moderno. Atti
deZ Congresso internazionaZe in occasione deZ V centenario della morte di NicoZo
Cusano (Firenze: Sanzoni, 1970): 227, n. 4 and Richard H. Popkin, The History of
Scepticism (New York; Harper, 1968), 84 and 202.
8RuZe 11, tr. p. 3.
92 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
An example helps Cusanus to illustrate the key point: Cusanus asks us
to imagine someone on a moving ship in the middle of a large body of
water.
9
Such aperson, unable to see the shores and to find a point of
reference there, might think his ship the unnl0ving center of the world.
But with what right? And where is the point ofreference that would allow
us to claim that the earth is at rest in the middle of the cosmos?
Because of the fact that it would always seem to each person
(whether he were on the earth, the sun, or another star) that he
was the 'immovable' center, so to speak, arld that all other things
were moved: it would assuredly be the case that ifhe were on the
sun, he would fix a set of poles in relation to himself; if on the
earth, another set; on the moon another; on Mars, another, and
so on.
IO
Human beings have a natural tendency to whatever place they just
happen to occupy for a center. But as we recognize that all supposedly
naturally given centers are precariously established by human knowers
and bound to their finite condition, rest and rn.otion, too, become relative
concepts, "for we apprehend motion only through a certain comparison
with something fixed."ll By questioning the very idea of a naturally given
center the perspectivism of Cusanus's thought experiment thus turns not
only against the geocentric cosmology of Aristotle and Ptolemy, but also
against the not yet born heliocentric cosmology of Copernicus, Kepler,
and Galileo.
12
While reflection on the phenomenon of perspective may suffice to call
into question particular centrist illusions, it is insufficient to show that
the very idea of a natural center should be rejected. Cusanus does so,
because he finds the conception of a center of the cosmos unintelligible:
9De docta ignorantia, 11, 12; tr. p. 117: "For exan1ple, if someone did not know that
a body of water was flowing and did not see the shore while he was on a ship in
the middle ofthe water, how would he recognize that the ship was being moved?"
Invoking the authority of Virgil's Aeneid, Copernicus uses essentially the same
image to introduce his De Revolutionibus Coelestium and Descartes
adopts the Copernican example: "Just as a man in ealm weather and looking at
several other fairly distant vessels, which seem to hirn to be changing position, is
frequently unable to say whether the change is caused by the movement of the
vessel on which he is or by that of the other vessels; when from our situation, we
observe the course of the planets and their positions, even careful observation
does not always bring sufficient understanding to enable us to determine to which
bodies we ought properly to attribute these changes" Principles 111, 15; tr. p. 89.
lODe docta ignorantia, 11, 12; tr. p. 117.
llIbid., 11, 12; tr. p. 117.
l2Given his perspectivism, it is no surprise that the eardinal should have gone on
to write De Pace Fidei, which pleads for religious tolerance in a way that looks
forward to Lessing's Nathan der Weise. In the sphere ofreligion, too, what we take
to be central depends on our point of view.
WINTER
For if it had a [fixed] center, it would also have a [fixed]
circumference; and hence it would have its own beginnlg and
end within itself, and it would be bounded in relation to
something else, and beyond the world there would be both
something else and space (loeus). But all these [consequences]
are false. Therefore, since it is not possible for the world to be
enclosed between a physical center and a [physical] circumfer-
ence, the world-ofwhich God is the center and circumference-
is not understood.
13
93
The apparent dome of the firmament is itself but a perspectival illusion.
Challenging Aristotle, Cusanus insists that the cosmos can only be
thought as infinite, where, very much like Descartes, who in the cited
letter to Chanut does not prove hirnself a careful reader of De doeta
ignorantia, Cusanus, too, is careful to distinguish its infinity from that of
God: the cosmos is infinite in that it lacks limits in which it can be
enclosed, while true infinity precludes all indeterminacy.14
Our inability to think a boundary or limit of the universe is just a
corollary of our more general inability to think an absolute maximum.
Take the case of counting. To ask for the greatest number is to ask for an
impossibility. Were we to frame what Descartes is right to insist is the
unreasonable thought of the numerical maximum and ask the equally
unreasonable question whether we move closer to that maximum when
we multiply, say, 100 by 10, we should have to answer that despite such
multiplication we have gotten no closer, but remain equally, i.e., infinitely
distant from it. When referred to the unreasonable limit of the greatest
number, the number line becomes a circle and that limit its center, itself
no longer a number. But with this transformation greater and smaller
lose their meaning. With it the plurality ofnumber vanishes. Left is the
essence ofnumber, itselfno longer a number. The same holds when we to
attempt to refer numbers to the numerical minimum, which Cusanus
understands as "oneness;' which is the essence of every number. Were we
to ask whether this minimum is contained more times in 1000 than in
100, we should have to say once again that "oneness" is equally contained
in both, just insofar as they are nUITlbers, Le., that both are equally
distant from it.
15
Once again the number line turns into a circle with the
13De docta ignorantia, 11, 11; tr. p. 114.
14Ibid., 11, 1; tr. p. 90: "Therefore, only the absolutely Maximum is negatively
infinite. Hence, it alone is whatever can at all possibly be. But since the universe
encompasses all the things which are not God, it cannot be negatively infinite,
although it is unbounded and thus privatively infinite. And in this respect it is
neither finite nor infinite." Cf. Descartes, Principles ofPhilosophy, I, 27; tr. p. 14.
15De docta ignorantia I, 5; tr. pp. 54-55.
94 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
limit provided by the minimum at its center. Nor can we finally distin-
guish these two centers, which fall equally outside the number sequence.
The minimum merges with the maximum. "For the [unqualifiedly]
minimum must coincide with the [unqualifiedly] maximum, therefore the
center of the world coincides with the circumference."16
The source of Cusanus's famous description of the universe as an
infinite sphere which has its center everywflere and its circumference
nowhere,17 is Meister Eckhart,18 who in turn found the formulation in the
Book ofthe 24 Philosophers. Cusanus, however, transfers what is first of
all a metaphor for God to the cosmos. Not that it thereby loses its
theological aura: The endless universe is understood by Cusanus as an
epiphany of the one and infinite God.
Although Cusanus's understanding of the cosmos in the image of the
infinite sphere is linked to his conception ofthe infinite power ofGod, the
persuasive force of his cosmology does not depend on its theological
origins. Speculation will be led to such metapllors, whenever it attempts
to bound the boundless. We may, to be want to heed Descartes'
admonition that such speculation surpasses the infinite human intellect.
But the very ease with which we are drawn into it suggests that the
human intellect is more involved with the infinite than its supposed
finitude would seem to allow.
But why this need to bound the boundless? Is it perhaps because we
cannot understand ourselves except as parts of the universe? To really
understand ourselves as such parts, we need to grasp the universe as a
uni verse, i.e., as a whole, even ifthis attempt ,viII inevitably outstrip the
understanding and involve us in mythopoeic construction.
To think the universe as a whole, we have to think its boundaries. But
just this we appear unable to do, for we are unable to think the boundary
ofspace, i.e., the spatial maximum. This means also that we cannot make
sense of an absolute center of space. With tllis loss of the center the
supposed truth of key propositions in astronom.y also becomes difficult to
maintain. How can we assert the absolute truth of, say, the Copernican
hypothesis, if we are unable to make sense of a center of space and thus
to understand the cosmos as a whole? Once the infinity of space has been
recognized, the attempt to think such a center no longer makes sense.
16Ibid., 11; tr. p. 114.
17Ibid., I, 23 and 11, 11, 12. See Dietrich Mahnke, Unendliche Sphre und
Allmittelpunkt (Halle: Niemeyer, 1937). and Karsten Harries, "The Infinite
Sphere: Comments on the History of a 1'he Journal ofthe History of
Philosophy, 13, (1975): 5-15.
18See Mahnke, pp. 76-106, 144-158, 169-176 and Herbert Wackerzapp, Der
Einfluss Meister Eckharts auf die ersten philosophischen Schriften des Nikolaus
von Kues, 1440-1450 (Mnster: Aschendorff, 1962).
WINTER 95
When we nevertheless attempt to seize that center, we end with the
impossible thought ofthe coincidence of opposites, which denies absolute
truth to the human understanding and teaches us about our ignorance.
19
111
Given Cusanus's understanding ofthe infinity ofthe cosmos, it is to be
expected that he should have rejected the traditional distinction, so
familiar to Aristotelians, between the sublunar and the superlunar
world. Ockham's critique ofthe heterogeneity ofthe cosmos had prepared
for this. But when the heterogeneity of the cosmos is challenged, so
inevitably is Aristotle's physics. It, too, is shown to rest on anthropocen-
tric prejudice. That hierarchical conception of the cosmos we think so
characteristic of the Middle Ages had been undermined speculatively
long before it was overthrown by the new science, by Tycho de Brahe's
observation of a new star in the superlunar realm, by Galileo's and
Scheiner's discovery of changing spots on the supposedly immaculate face
ofthe sun, and by the theories ofCopernicus and Kepler.
20
Like Cusanus, Descartes, too, argues from the infinity of space for the
homogeneity ofthe cosmos.
21
From the perceived identity ofthe ideas of
extension and corporeal substance he deduces "that the matter of the
heaven does not differ from that of the earth; and that even if there were
countless worlds in all it would be impossible for them not to all be of one
19Cusanus' "impossible" speculation on the coincidence of opposites and the
infinite sphere throws an interesting light on Nietzsche's elusive doctrine of the
eternal recurrence. Since we can map the number line onto the time line, the
reference to the infinite which closes the number sequence to a ring would appear
to hold also for time. Time, too, will not be bounded. Any attempt to think an
absolute beginning oftime leads to thoughts ofthat time before time began. But
if the infinity of time is assumed, the impossible thoughts of a beginning and an
end of time have to coincide and referred to this Alpha and Omega of time, time
closes into a ring. Georges Poulet, in the introduction to his The Metamorphoses
of the Circle (BaItimore: Johns Hopkins, 1966), cites a number of passages by
medieval writers, including Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Dante, that show that
the temporal implications of the metaphor of the infinite sphere were weB
recognized. Hans Blumenberg speaks of a Sprengmetapher, a metaphor that
explodes a world view, and, pursuing a hint provided by a diary fragment by
Georg Simmel, relates it to Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal recurrence. See
Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer. Paradigma einer Daseinsmetapher (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1979), 84.
2For an iBuminating account of the incon1patibility of God's omnipotence and
omnipresence with Aristotelian physics see Hans Blumenberg, Die Genesis der
kopernikanischen Welt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975). Blumenberg places special
emphasis on Bishop Tempier's Condemnation of 1277, which helps bring into
focus the specifically Christian character of the prehistory of modern science.
21Principles, 11, 21; tr. p. 49.
96 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
and the same [kind of] matter."22 Where Descartes differs from Cusanus
is in the confidence with which he asserts that our inability to imagine a
limit of space allows us to say that "in reality" space has no limit.
Cusanus would have questioned the presupposed commensurability of
our imagination and reality and insisted tllat the boundless cosmos
opened up by reflection is itself but a human eonjecture. We shall never
know as God knows. Absolute truth belongs only to God. When we
attempt to seize it we inevitably end up in arltinomies and paradox. To
sail past these pillars of Hercules is to lose all bearings. All we know
bears the imprint of our human measure. We escape the prison of one
perspective only to find ourselves bound by allother.
IV
Descartes, too, recognizes how our supposedly clear and distinct per-
ception of extension entangles us in the infi.llite. But on this reef our
resolution to accept only that as true which is completely known and
incapable of being doubted has to founder. D1escartes is thus forced to
conclude his Principles ofPhilosophy with the admission that in natural
science absolute certainty is not to be had, that we have to settle for what
is "morally certain," that is certain "to a degree which suffices for the
needs of everyday life; although if compared to the absolute power of God,
they are uncertain."23 We must take Descartes by his word when he
insists "that the works of God cannot be thought too great" and "that we
must beware, lest, in thinking too highly of ourselves, we suppose that we
understand for what ends God created the worJld."24 This must mean also
that we have no reason to assume that God created the world so that we
might gain an adequate understanding of it. i\ll the physicist can do is
construct mechanical models ofwhat he observes and use these to predict
what is going to happen. Such ability to prediet need not mean that the
real causes have been understood; indeed, givell the infinite divisibility of
matter it is very unlikely that our finite models will ever allow us to
duplicate nature's processes.
For just as the same artisan can make two clocks which indicate
the hours equally weIl and are exactly similar extemally, but
are internally composed of an entirely dissimilar combination of
small wheels; so there is no doubt that the greatest artificer of
things could have made all those things ~ h i h we see in many
diverse ways. And indeed I most willingly concede this to be
22Principles, 11, 22; tr. pp. 49-50.
23principles, IV, 205, tr. p. 287.
24principles, 111, 1 and 2; tr. p. 84.
WINTER 97
true, and will think that I have achieved enough ifthose things
which I have written are only such that they correspond accu-
rately to all phenomena of nature.
25
Descartes compares the scientist to someone who attempts to read a letter
in code:
Thus, for example, if someone wishes to read a message written
in Latin letters, to which however their true meaning has not
been given and if, upon conjecturing that wherever there is an A
in the message, a B must be read, and a C wherever there is a B,
and that for each letter, the following must be substituted; he
finds that by this means certain Latin words are formed by these
letters: he will not doubt that the true meaning of that message
is contained in these words, even if he knows this solely by
conjecture, and even though it may perhaps be the case that the
person who wrote the message did not put the immediately
following letters but some others in place of the true ones, and
thus concealed some different meaning in the message.
26
Ifwe accept that God's power is infinite or just the infinite divisibility of
matter, there is no way for science to take the measure of nature.
Measured by his own conception of absolute truth, all Descartes can claim
for science are well-founded conjectures. Descartes, to be sure, modifies
this admission when he claims that there are "even among natural
things, some which we judge to be absolutely and more than morally
certain." He mentions mathematical demonstrations, knowledge that
material things exist, and indeed "all evident demonstrations which are
made concerning material things." He goes on to suggest that despite his
disclaimers "These reasonings of ours will perhaps be included among the
number ofthese absolutely certain things by those who consider how they
have been deduced in a continuous series from the first and simplest
principles of human knowledge."27 But where in the Principles do "evi-
dence" and "deduction" leave off and conjectures begin?
Ifthe endless divisibility ofspace suggests the artificiality ofDescartes'
reconstruction of nature by means of mechanical models, its limitless
extension makes it impossible to assert either absolute motion or rest.
Descartes thus follows Cusanus with his relativistic conception ofmotion:
"Movement, properly understood, concerns only the bodies contiguous to
25Principles, IV, 204; tr. p. 286.
26Principles, IV, 204; tr. p. 287. Cf. Hans Blumenberg, Die Genesis der koperni-
kanischen Welt, 368-70.
27principles, IV, 206; tr. p. 287.
98 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
the body which is moving."28 In this sense sorneone who rests on a deck
chair on a moving ocean liner can properly say that he is not moving. And
in the same sense Descartes can agree with Copernicus and yet say that
properly speaking the earth does not move si]tlce, on his conception of a
fluid heaven, it is carried along by its vortex.
Descartes knew that his insistence that the earth does not properly
move, but is carried around the sun was not likely to satisfy those critics
of the Copernican system who not long aga had attempted to silence
Galileo. As he himself points out, besides its own proper movement, a
body "can also participate in innumerable other movements, in as much
as it is apart of other bodies which have other movements."29 He asks us
to imagine a sailor wearing a watch. Although each ofthe watch's wheels
will have its own proper movement relative to the watch case, it also
participates in the movements ofthe sailor, the ship, the ocean, the earth,
and, we can continue, the solar system, and the galaxy. Is there a final, all
encompassing whole that would allow us to speak ofthe absolute motion
of each wheel? Given Descartes' clear and distinct conception of exten-
sion, that question is as meaningless as the question whether the infinite
number is odd or even. This means also that someone who wants to hold
on to his conviction that the earth is at rest cannot be refuted by
astronomy.
Since the nature of our intellect is such that it perceives no
limits to the universe and since, consequently, anyone who takes
careful notice of the greatness of God and the weakness of otIT
perception willjudge that it is much more appropriate to believe
that perhaps, beyond all the fixed Stars w]tlich we see, there are
other bodies in relation to which we would have to say that the
Earth is at rest and all the Stars move together, than to suppose
that none such could exist.
30
No doubt, the Church's condemnation of Copernicus's De Revolutioni-
bus and its subsequent ruling against those who continued to teach the
condemned doctrine played an important part in Descartes' refusal to
simply proclaimthe truth ofthe Copernican system. But he also could not
have reconciled such a proclamation with the infinity of the cosmos he
thought implied by the clear and distinct perception of extended sub-
stance.
V
Cusanus, as we have seen, derives the infinity of the cosmos from the
more general principle that we cannot think an absolute maximum. Ifthe
28principles, 11, 28; tr. p. 52.
29Principles, 11, 31; tr. p. 54.
30Principles, 111, 29; tr. p. 96.
WINTER 99
boundlessness of the cosmos is thus not grasped, it nevertheless shows
itselfin the knowledge that in thought at least we are free to pass beyond
any boundary. Such, knowledge, however, presupposes that we possess a
faculty that reaches up to what will always exceed our grasp. While our
ability to comprehend is finite, the freedom of thought is infinite.
Descartes, too, recognizes that by its very essence human being, no less
than extension, is entangled in the infinite.
For to take an example, if I consider the faculty of comprehen-
sion which I possess, I find that it is of very small extent and
extremely limited, and at the same time I find the idea of
another faculty much more ample and even infinite, and seeing
that I can form the idea ofit I recognize from this very fact that
it pertains to the nature of GOd.
31
Indeed, if we could not measure the reach of our faculty of comprehen-
sion by a "much more ample and even infinite" faculty, we could not
recognize its finitude. In this case, too, the principle applies that to
understand a perspective as such is already to be beyond it, at least in
thought: to think the reach of our faculty of comprehension as essentially
finite we have to in some sense transcend ourselves as finite knowers.
Regardless of whether God exists, our ability to form some idea of God's
infinite nature presupposes that the power of human self-transcendence
reaches up to the infinite. Descartes points in this connection to the will:
It is free-will alone or liberty of choice which I find to be so great
in me that I can conceive no other idea to be more great. It is
indeed the case that it is for the most part this will that causes
me to know that in some manner I bear the image and simili-
tude of God. For although the power of will is incomparably
greater in God than in me, both by reason ofthe knowledge and
the power, which conjoined with it, render it stronger and more
efficacious, and by reason of its object, inasmuch as in God it
extends to a great many things; it nevertheless does not seem to
me greater if I consider it formally and precisely in itself.
32
As will, thought transcends the finite understanding towards infinity.
Andjust as the fact that I have a clear and distinct understanding ofGod
does not mean that I comprehend hirn, or the fact that I have a clear and
distinct idea of extension does not mean that I comprehend it, so the fact
that I have a clear and distinct idea ofmyself as thinking substance does
not mean that I comprehend myself. The self transcends its own under-
standing. Every free action manifests human self-transcendence. All
human behavior remains finally incomprehensible.
31Descartes, Meditation IV; tr. p. 174.
32Meditation IV; tr. 175.
100 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
Descartes touches on this difficulty in The j ~ s s o n s of the Soul, where
he suggests that "the machine of the body is so formed that from the
simple fact that this [the pineal] gland is diversely moved by the soul, or
by such other cause, whatever it is, it thrusts the spirits which surround
it towards the pores of the brain, which condulct them by the nerves into
the muscles by which means it causes them to move the limbs."33 This
raises the question that already troubled Gassendi, "how that union and
apparent intermingling, or confusion, can be found in you, if you are
incorporeal and indivisible."34 How, given Descartes' distinction between
res cogitans and res extensa, can the soul be said to be the efficient cause
of bodily actions? What could "cause" mean here?
But perhaps we are given a hint of how to approach this problem by
Descartes' answer to Arnauld's question what the former might possibly
mean when he calls God his own efficient eause.
35
Descartes' answer
depends on the mathematical symbolism Cusanus had advanced in De
docta ignorantia:
But in order to reply expressly to this, let Ine say that I think we
must show that intermediate between ef{icient cause in the
proper sense, and no cause, there is sOInething else, viZe the
positive essence ofa thing, to which the cOIlcept of efficient cause
can be extended in the way in which in geometry we are wont to
extend the concept of a circular line that is as long as possible to
that of a straight line; or the concept of a rectilinear polygon
with an infinite number of sides to that of a circle.3
6
When Descartes calls God his own efficient cause, "efficient cause" is
not to be understood literally, but in an extended sense that presupposes
a willingness to follow Cusanus in his infinite ascent to the coincidentia
oppositorum.
I would like to suggest that if we are to understand Descartes' claim
that the soul is the cause of bodily actions, "cause" must be given a
similarly extended meaning, which involves a movement to the infinite.
Note the scale change when in his reconstruction ofthe "machine ofthe
body" Descartes turns to the "animal spirits," w'hich name "a certain very
subtle air or wind" that courses through the nerves and the brain, of
which only the "most subtle" enter the cavities of the brain.
37
These
33Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, I, 34; tr. Phil080phical Works, vol. I, p. 347.
340bjections V; tr. Philosophical Works, vol. 11, p. 201. Cf. Anthony Kenny,
Descartes. A Study of his Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1968), 224-26.
350bjections IV; tr. p. 89.
36Reply to Obj. IV; tr. p. 110.
37The Passions ofthe Soul, 1,7 and 10; tr. pp. 334 and 335.
WINTER 101
animal spirits are "nothing but material bodies and their one peculiarity
is that they are bodies of extreme minuteness."38 The soul is said to
exercise its functions immediately only in "a certain very small gland"
which is so situated
that the slightest movements which take place in it may alter
very greatly the course ofthese spirits; and reciprocally that the
smallest changes which occur in the course ofthe spirits may do
much to change the movements ofthis gland.
39
Descartes' mechanics of the body proves incapable of giving an adequate
account of human action. To do so it would have to model what is
indefinitely small and thus must remain indeterminate. This indetermi-
nacy opens up the space that. allows what Gassendi considered the
confusion of body and soul. Perhaps it would be better to speak of their
coincidence.
VI
According to Descartes, "the perception of the understanding is ex-
tended to those few things which are presented to it, and is always very
finite."40 Cusanus would have agreed that our understanding, if not our
intellect, is limited by its inescapably finite perspective. Convinced ofthe
perspectival nature of all human knowledge Cusanus was led to defend
Protagoras and his thesis that man is the measure of all things against
the criticism of Aristotle.
41
I suspect that his interest in Protagoras was
sparked by the slightly younger Leon Battista Alberti, who made passing
references to Protagoras in book two of the Libri della famiglia and in his
De pictura.
42
As Cusanus was to do a few years later, first in De docta
ignorantia, Alberti insists that all things are known by comparison.
43
Alberti, too, is convinced that neither objective space nor its subjective
appearance, which alone is the proper concern ofthe painter, allows us to
38Ibid., I, 10; tr. p. 336.
39Ibid., I, 31; tr. pp. 345-346.
4Principles, I, 35; tr. p. 17.
41See De beryllo, chs. 5 and 36; tr. Karl Fleischmann, ber den Beryll (Leipzig;
Meiner, 1938), 69 and 125. Cusanus could find a discussion ofProtagoras's dictum
in Aristotle, Metaphysics 1002b8-23, 1009a6-13, 1009bl-6, 1047a4-7, 1053a35-
36, 1062bI2-13. Ficino translated Plato's Protagoras and Theaetetus only in the
1460's. See Charles Trinkaus, "Protagoras in the Renaissance: An Exploration;'
in Philosophy and Humanism: Essays in the Honor ofPaul Oscar Kristeller (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 190-213, especially 194.
42Trinkaus, "Protagoras," 195-196.
43Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, tr. and int. John R. Spencer (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1966). 55. See also Nicholas of Cusa, On Learned Igno-
rance, I, 1; tr. p. 50.
102 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
speak of the true size of things. This would presuppose that somewhere
there is a true measure. Where is such a measure to be found? Measures
may indeed suggest themselves quite naturally, as the body provides the
human being, and especially the painter, wit:h a natural measuring rod,
but this measure depends on an accident 01' natllre. His own artistic
practice must have suggested to Alberti that Protagoras, notwithstand-
ing all his critics, got hold of something very important: "By saying that
man is the mode and measure of all things [he] meant that all the
accidents ofthings are known through the accidents ofman."44 And what
could it mean to grasp things as they really are? Presumably Alberti's
"sensate wisdom" would have dismissed this question as useless to the
practical task he had set himself, just as he dismissed as quite useless for
his purpose the dispute whether the "visual rays" issue from the eye or
from whatever is seen.
45
Alberti's practice-oriented relativism invites his
readers to renounce the claim to absolute trutll. We can leave such truth
to God. But such an invitation does not imply anything like resignation.
Quite the opposite: Alberti's refusal to engage in what he considers idle
speculation concerning the way things really are is but the other. side of
a proud confidence that relying only on himself the artist is able to so
master appearance, that, "anotller god;'46 he is able to create another
world. In this respect his treatise on painting is a forerunner ofDescartes'
"practical philosophy."
Given the overlapping biographies and interests of Alberti and Cusa-
nus, I find it inconceivable that these two seminal figures of the Renais-
sance should not have met.
47
And given Cusanus's interest in painting
44Alberti, On Painting, 55.
45Ibid., p. 46.
46Ibid., p. 64.
47See Joan Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti. Universal Man of the Renaissance
(Chicago and London: The University ofChicago Press, 1969), 196, n. 66: "There
is no direct evidence that Alberti ever knew Cusa personally, although both were
close friends of Toscanelli. Cusa studied at the university of Padua from 1417-
1423, when he received his doctorate in law, and Toseanelli was as the University
as a student during these years. There the two became friends and remained so
throughout their lives. Alberti left Padua in 1421. He may have known Cusa and
Toscanelli there, but there is no evidence that he actually did. There were several
occasions at which Alberti and Cusa could have met after that. During the
Council of Florence-Ferrara, Alberti was at Ferrara with Eugenius IV, as was
Cusa who received his appointment there as apostolie visitor to Germany. In 1540,
Alberti was residing in Rome when Cusa was made a cardinal by Nicholas V,
another mutual friend. In the late 1450's, Cusa's ho:me in Rome was a gathering
place for men of science like Peurbach, Regiomontanus, and Toscanelli; Alberti
must have been a member of that group." CitingG. Mancini's Vita di Leon
Battista Alberti, Paul O. Kristeller points out that Cusanus "owned Alberti's
Elementae picturae," "A Latin Tanslation of Gemlistos Plethon's De Fato by
WINTER 103
and the problem of perspective, he must have read Alberti's De pictura
with interest. What Alberti had to say there about Protagoras and the
godlike creativity of the artist must have seemed especially suggestive.
Cusanus, at any rate, followed Alberti in finding in the saying of
Protagoras hints of a deeper understanding of the nature of knowledge
than his critic Aristotle possessed. On first consideration it is difficult not
to agree with Aristotle; for if, as Plato teIls us in the Theaetetus,
Protagoras held that all things are becoming and we cannot rightly call
anything by any name, such as large and small, heavy or light, for given
a different point of view, a different perspective, the great will be judged
small and the heavy light,48 what is discourse, what are agreement and
disagreement finally about? Once more recalling Alberti, Cusanus, too,
ties the thesis that man is the measure of all things to another, the thesis
that man is a second god, although the cardinal invokes the authority of
the mythical Hermes Trismegistus.
49
The language Cusanus used to develop his understanding ofthe human
being's godlike creativity, which can of course invoke the Biblical under-
standing of man as created in God's image, remains quite traditional.
Following Thomas Aquinas and supported by a false etymology, Cusanus
relates mens (mind) to mensura (measure).5 The mind's proper activity is
mensurare (to measure).5
1
And again, like Thomas and Aristotle, Cusa-
nus takes counting to be the paradigm of all measuring. But in keeping
with Alberti's understanding ofthe Protagorean dictum, Cusanus gives a
very different meaning to such seemingly traditional formulations.
According to Thomas the human being is really the measure only ofthose
things it itself creates. The things of nature measure us more than we
measure them. Cusanus, on the other hand, understands the human
knower rather like an Albertian artist who creates conceptual, and
especially mathematical forms with which he structures what presents
itself to hirn in his own image. Cusanus knows that things present
themselves to us as they do because we have always already taken their
measure. Constitutive of appearance is our way of understanding it.
Following Plato and the Platonic tradition, Cusanus, too, understands
the activity of the mens as a search for unity. This search expresses itself
in unending attempts to subject the world to unity, to reduce what is
Johannes Sophianos Dedieated to Nieholas of Cusa," in Nicolo Cusano agli inizi
deI mondo moderno, 184-185. See also Pauline Moffitt Watts, Nicholas Cusanus.
A Fifteenth Century Vision of Man (Leiden: BrilI, 1982), 150.
48Plato, Theaetetus, 152d.
49Nieolaus Cusanus, De beryIo, ehs. 5 and 36; tr. pp. 69, 125, 129.
50ST, I. 11. 2; ST 1-11. 91. 3ad2. See also Aristotle, Metaphysics, X, 1, 1053 a
35-b4.
51Nieholas Cusanus, Idiota de mente, eh. 2.
104 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
many to one. But although unity is our most filndamental measure, it is
much too empty and formal to be directly applicable to what is given.
Measures with content are necessary to meditate between what is given
to our senses and this abstract one. This is to say, if there is to be any
knowledge at all, the human knower must hirnself first provide the
measures by which he is to know. He does not simply see them with the
eye of the mind, as Descartes insists. Knowledge rests on creativity and
human invention. It is fundamentally artistic or poetic.
To call knowledge poetic is not to argue that the knower creates the
known ex nihilo. Not even the Albertian artist creates his fictions ex
nihilo but draws his material from what he observes. He only creates the
measures he applies to what he sees. Thus measuring, the human knower
knows hirnself surpassed by the reality he is trying to measure. Consider
a rose. To see what I see before me as a rose, I must already be in
possession of the concept "rose." This measure applies not only to the
flower now before me, but to countless sinlilar actual and possible roses.
All our linguistic measures are in principle inadequate to whatever
concrete reality we encounter. To be sure, it is a rose I see, but how much
does this say? It does distinguish it from an arlimal or a tree, but "rose"
still says much too little, although given what JDescartes calls "the needs
of everyday life," such a description may be adequate enough. Still, it fails
to capture this particular, concrete reality. To be sure, I can refine my
measures, point out the rose's color or give it a fancy name. And I can go
on and find ever richer descriptions, descriptions definite enough to single
out this rose. And yet, no matter how rich my description, I can always
imagine a still indefinitely large number ofpossible roses besides the one
which I am now seeing that this description would fit. Just as space and
human freedom are boundless, so is every individual thing. Whatever we
grasp of reality is shadowed by what has eseaped the activity of our
understanding, shadowed by transcendence. This transcendence an-
nounces itself in th'3 failure of our attempts to describe adequately or
grasp conceptually what we are given. What remains unmastered re-
minds us that what we have arrived at is only a conjecture concerning
reality and that it is in principle always possible to improve on that
conjecture.
Openness to transcendence is part of our encounter with reality. There
is always a beyond, a horizon that forces us to ac]{nowledge that limits are
set to our understanding. Our descriptions will rLever be full enough. This
lack of closure prevents our understanding from ever arriving at a
definition that will not in some way fall short of what it defines, that
would coincide with the defined. Once again we are faced with the
incommensurability of the finite and the infinite, here in the form of the
incommensurability of our concepts or words arid reality.
WINTER 105
This incommensurability has its foundation in the very nature of
thought and language, which determine what something is by assigning
it a place in a humanly established conceptual or linguistic space, thus
measuring it with a measure that is not its own. Language-and this is
not a fault but its very point-is finally incommensurable with reality.
We can know adequately only what we can create. Thus we can have
certain knowledge in mathematics, which according to Cusanus, who
here disagrees with Plato, is simply the unfolding of the mind and of the
unity which is its measure. The world of mathematics is so transparent
because we constitute that world without having to engage reality. This
explains why science should turn to mathematics to find its form of
description. Compare our understanding of a rose with our understanding
of a circle of a given radius: to know the definition of a circle is to know
how to construct one.
This makes it difficult to dismiss Descartes' suggestion that we under-
stand nature precisely to the extent that we can reconstruct her works
with our mathematical models. Descartes' promise of a "practical philos-
ophy" that will render us "the masters and possessors of nature" can be
realized ifhe is right with the suggestion that this new philosophy would
teach us to know the forces of nature "as distinctly as we know the
different crafts of our artisans."52 If we are to reconstruct the works of
nature, we have to understand its mode of production in the image of
human production. Such a practical philosophy will not want to hear any
more of my elusive concrete rose than Alberti wanted to hear of the true
being ofthe "visual ray." And given their practical sufficiency, what sense
does it make to speak of the essential inadequacy of all our descriptions
ofwhatever is real or ofthe essential absence ofreality from whatever we
have grasped clearly and distinctly, i.e., able to reconstruct out of
Descartes' simple natures?
There is an obvious difficulty with this artistic view: how are we to
distinguish knowledge from arbitrary construction? How are we to save
the truth? Even if, as Cusanus holds, the finite and the infinite are
separated by a gulf reason cannot bridge, this separation cannot be so
complete as to destroy all connection. Something is obviously right about
the traditional view that reality provides our thoughts with a measure.
When I recognize the essential inadequacy of all description, this cannot
mean that all descriptions are therefore equally good. Some must be
judged better than others. What then allows us to grade descriptions in
this manner? Observation provides an obvious answer. But perception
does not allow us to step outside language. Perceiving, too, can finally not
52Descartes, Discourse on the Method, VI; tr. p. 119.
106 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
be divorced from naming. Whatever we see has always already been
subjected to a human measure.
And yet, ifwe are to make sense ofmore or less adequate descriptions,
these must have their measure in some ideal description. Such a descrip-
tion, Cusanus points out, cannot be other thall the thing described.
53
In
the fully adequate description, description and thing described are one
and the same thing. Here to describe means to create. This, of course, is
the traditional understanding of God's creative Word. Like knowing,
seeing has its measure in the creative knowledge ofGod. Sight is haunted
by absence, and yet that absence is present as 'iVhat provides sight with a
measure. Cusanus goes on to suggest that it is this Divine Word Plato had
in mind when he spoke of the forms. By forIn, Cusanus argues, Plato
meant that principle which accounts for everything being just what it is
and nothing else. To "see" something as nothing other thanjust what it is,
is to "see" beyond appearance the form, the Divine Word. For Plato's eidos
Cusanus substitutes the non aliud, the not other. The eidos of the rose is
thus not other than the rose itself. To this eidos only an infinitely
complicated description could do justice, a description which would be not
other than the rose itself. While inaccessible to discursive reason, this
description furnishes all our descriptions with a measure.
"Why is the earth the earth?" Cusanus asks, and answers: "Because it
is not other than the earth."54 What is the point of such seemingly
tautological statements? The question asks: WblY is the earthjust what it
is and not something different? Indeed why is there such a thing as the
earth at all? To ask: why is the earth the earth? is thus to see it as
something that only happens to be what is, that could be other than it is
or not at all. Such questions presuppose what vre can perhaps call a view
of the world sub specie possibilitatis, a view that is inseparable from the
way our understanding presupposes a conceptllal space that by its very
nature has room not only for this world, but for an indefinite number of
other possible worlds.
This awareness that our world is only an infi:nitesimally small island in
an ocean of endless possibilities parallels that other awareness that our
earth is only another star swimming in an endless ocean of stars. Both
thoughts have their foundation in a movement that leads reflection from
what is initially given to other possibilities. JBoth threaten to rob the
earth of its special place and significance. Tlle later Middle Ages are
marked by this frightening discovery of the eontingency of the world.
53Nieholas of Cusa, On God as Not-Other, a Translation and an Appraisal ofDe Li
non aliud by Jasper Hopkins, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: :Banning, 1987), eh. 1, tr. pp.
31-33.
54De Li non aliud, 21; tr. p. 141.
WINTER 107
Why did God create this world? The voluntarism of Ockham and his
followers insisted that speculation could throw no light on this question.
God's will is inscrutable. As far as philosophy is concerned, we might as
weIl speak of a cosmic accident. For essentially the same reason Descartes
insists that the philosopher should not look for final causes.
55
As long as we view the world sub species possibilitatis there can be no
final answer to the question: why are things the way they are? Suppose I
were to answer the question: why is the earth the earth? by pointing to an
efficient cause, say some cosmic event that caused the earth to come into
being, or to some supposed form of earthness. Again we could repeat our
question with respect to this process or form. Such questioning would
have to continue until we arrived at a principle which is causa sui, which
is what it is because it is not other than what it iso But given the ratio and
its mode of operation I cannot grasp the meaning of causa sui. Whatever
falls into the spaced defined by my language is thereby understood as
something which could also not be. As Descartes' critics recognized, in
that space there is no room for a causa sui, no place for God. And even
Descartes recognized that to think the causa in causa sui required an
extension of the meaning of "cause" ad infinitum.
If we are to use our language to name God, we must do so in a way that
calls into question the very conditions under which language operates.
Language must be used in a such a way that it turns back on and against
itself, putting itselfinto question, casting us beyond its limits, beyond the
ratio to the intellectus. Rightly understood, the phrase causa sui does this.
But so does Cusanus's formulation: the earth is earth because it is not
other than the earth. This is not so much an answer as it is rejection ofthe
question, pointing to another way of viewing the world, not sub specie
possibilitatis, but sub specie necessitatis.
As long as I understand the earth as falling into the space defined by
reason I see it as something accidental. To understand transcendence as
the non aliud is to admit that the question: why is the world the way it is?
ultimately receives no answer. As long as the world is seen in the mode of
the aliud or the other, it cannot but seem accidental to us and its
significance must escape uso God cannot show hirnself in the world
understood this way. If that world is understood as the world, then
Nietzche is right and God is dead. But in the experience of the world, or
any particular object, as not other than what it is, we escape from
possibility. Now the "why" no longer arises. Rephrasing Kierkegaard's
dictum, we can say: "purity of heart is to see one thing." It follows from
this conception of the non aliud, which Cusanus takes to be his best
55Principles, I, 28 and 111, 2, 3; tr. pp. 14 and 84-85.
108 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
conjecture concerning God, that anything can become an epiphany ofthe
Divine when seen in a certain way: a tree, a cloud, an old roof, Eckhart's
dung-heap, or that rose of Angelus Silesius, which blooms without a why.
VII
I have insisted that to think a perspective as a perspective is to be in
some sense already beyond it. Thus to think subjective perspectival space
is already to have some understanding of objective space: to think of
language as providing a perspective is already to have some understand-
ing of what transcends language, i.e., of the essential transcendence of
reality; and similarily, to think, as Cusanus would have us do, of logic as
a perspectival phenomenon, is to have already some understanding ofthe
trans-Iogical, i.e., of the coincidentia oppositorum.
To make this last point somewhat clearer let me return once more to
Protagoras and to his thesis that man is the measure of all things. This,
it would seem, makes the law of non-contrad:ilction constitutive, not of
reality per se, but only of reality as it presents itself in our finite
perspective. This is how Cusanus understands the implications of the
Protagorean dictum. Aristotle's logic, on his view, is only a logic of finite
appearance.5
6
The self-transcending move froIn the perspectival to the
transperspectival becomes, once logic is understood as constitutive of the
ratio's perspective, the move from the ratio to the intellectus, which is
necessarily also a move beyond the law of non-contradiction to the
coincidentia oppositorum.
That the law of non-contradiction is tied to the finite is clear from
Aristotle's formulation:
For a principle which every one must have who knows anything
about being, is not a hypothesis; and that ~ h i h everyone must
know who knows anything, he must already have when he
comes to a special study. Evidently then stIch a principle is the
most certain of all; which principle this is, we proceed to say. It
is, that the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and
not belong to the same subject and in the same respect;. .. For
it is impossible for anyone to believe the same thing to be and
not to be, as some think Heraclitus says;...57
To understand this formulation, we must know what we mean when we
say "same"-"same attribute," "same subject," "same respect." The law of
non-contradiction depends on our ability to identify and hold on to the
56Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, tr.
Mario Domandi (New York and Evanston: Harper, 1963), 12.
57Aristotle, Metaphysics IV, l005bl4-26;tr. W. D. Ross.
WINTER 109
same. Such identification requires a criterion or measure. Is this the same
rose I saw yesterday? Is there only one obviously correct answer to this
question?
The law of non-contradiction cannot be divorced from definition. To
subject reality to the law of non-contradiction is to claim that reality is
essentially definite. Both Plato and Aristotle recognize this and just
because of this they are critical of Heraclitus and Protagoras, who make
being too evanescent and indefinite to be grasped and held fast and thus
make it impossible to distinguish error from truth. To save this distinc-
tion they introduce definition into the very essence of being. Descartes
does the same when he insists on the commensurability of our under-
standing and reality. But radical doubt calls such commensurability into
question. Does it not subject reality to our ability to comprehend? The
finite ratio is made the foundation of being. Can this be reconciled with
the infinite being of God? The evil genius Descartes introduces to lead his
reader to doubt is but a mask of God, whose infinity demands that we seek
hirn beyond the law of non-contradiction.
We do not have to turn to God to give some plausibility to the idea of a
coincidentia oppositorum. Consider once more the coincidence of the
curved and the straight, of the circumference of a circle and its tangents,
as we increase the circle's radius to infinity. Or of the attempt to grasp
persons or things in all their concreteness: again the attempt to seize the
infinite lets us glimpse a coincidence of opposites: the coincidence of
thought or language and the thing itself.
When we speak of the infinity of space or the infinity of the individual
we speak of infinity in a restricted sense. In such cases the coincidence of
opposites is not a coincidence of all opposites. It is thus possible to oppose
infinite space to infinite time, one individual to another. As opposed to
these restricted infinites, God is thought by Cusanus as the infinite
beyond all restriction and opposition. Given our finite perspective, we can
say: God is the utterly transcendent, the beyond in which all that is finite
has both its ground and measure. This transcendence of God shows itself
in the inevitable failure of all our attempts to think the absolute. Yet as
long as we think God as transcendent, we still tl1ink God from our finite
perspective and remain caught in its oppositions. To think God we must
think hirn beyond the coincidence of immanence and transcendence.
VIII
I have tried to show how perspective and infinity are joined in the
thought of Cusanus and Descartes. Depending on the different meaning
given to perspective, we arrived at different interpretations of the
infinite: thus from the ordinary spatial meaning ofperspective we arrived
110 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
at the idea of an infinite homogeneous space; from an understanding of
the perspectival nature oflanguage we moved to an understanding ofthe
infinite richness of each individual; from an lInderstanding of the per-
spectival nature ofthe principle ofnon-contradiction to an understanding
ofthe coincidentia oppositorum. In each case th.e problem ofthinking the
infinite is analogous. In each case discursive reason suffers shipwreck and
this shipwreck frees an intuition ofthe infinite. This analogy allows us to
understand why the attempt to square the c:ircle should have come to
figure the attempt to understand God.
I would like to conclude with the suggestion that the attempt by artists
of the Renaissance to capture the infinity of space may be understood as
a similar symbolic activity. And what is true ofthe infinity of space is also
true ofthe infinity ofeach individual person or thing. The boundlessness
of space, the boundlessness of reality, and the boundlessness of the
individual are all experienced as epiphanies ofthe infinite God. Thus it is
hardly surprising that on the first page ofDe Visione Dei Cusanus should
call his almost exact contemporary Rogier van der Weyden the greatest of
all painters.
58
In their different ways, cardinal and painter revealed the
infinite depth of a reality which Cartesian science was going to conceal
with its insistence on the clear and distinct, even as Descartes himself
had to recognize that every attempt to render the human being the
master and possessor ofnature finally has to suffer shipwreck on the reef
of the infinite.
Yale Uniuersity,
New Hauen, Connecticut
58Cusanus calls Rogier van der Weyden (1400-1464) "maximus pictor." De Visione
Dei, 1; tr. Jasper Hopkins, Nicholas ofCusa's Dialectical Mysticism, Text, Trans-
lation, and Interpretive Study of De Visione Dei, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Banning,
1988), 113.