International Journal of Systematic Theology

Volume 8

Number 2

April 2006

That He Might Fill All Things: Creation and Christology in Two Treatises by Nicholas of Cusa
DAVID ALBERTSON*

Abstract: Theology in modernity is especially assisted by elements of Christian tradition which work to reunify, after Louis Duprs formula, the lost synthesis of self, world and God. This article examines the tradition of Christs immanence in creation, as seen in two short treatises by Nicholas of Cusa from 144546. Read together, these treatises illumine Cusas pan-Christic ontology. The rst describes the prospect of liation, the intellects virtual participation in the Words sovereignty over created being; the second explains how all beings are lesser theophanies participating in the theophany of God which is the body of Jesus.

Most students of the Christian tradition now perceive the causes of theological decline in modernity to lie as much in a loss of nerve from within Christianity as in any hostility from without.1 In the last century, one response to the waning distinctiveness of Christian self-understanding has been the notion of the so-called cosmic Christ, or more accurately, the doctrine of christological immanence in creation. In his 1992 Bampton Lectures on the culture of modernity, Colin Gunton recollects this tradition in which the Son is not only the Word spoken to time from eternity, but the immanent dynamic of meaning which holds time and space together . . . It is not therefore something which holds things together, but someone: the one through whom, in the unity of the Father and the Spirit, all things have their being.2
* University of Chicago, 2333 W. Addison St, Apt A-3 Chicago IL 60618, USA. 1 [T]he history of modern theology can also be read as its steady alienation from its own subject-matter and procedures. If this is true, then the intellectual disarray of modern Christian theology owes as much to its loss of condence in its own habits of mind as it does to the enmity sometimes shown by its cultural context. John Webster, Theological Theology. An Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University of Oxford on 27 October 1997 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 89. 2 Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three, and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 179.
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Likewise, Louis Duprs diagnosis of the modern alienation of God, world and self concludes with the hope that a new synthesis might be achieved beginning with roads not taken in the early modern period. Chief among these for Dupr is the way shown by Nicholas of Cusa, the fteenth-century German cardinal, who in his judgement was probably the last thinker to reunite the theocentric and anthropocentric forces that had begun to pull the medieval synthesis apart.3 In Duprs account, it is not only Cusas doctrine of divine immanence in creation, but more importantly, the christological conguration of that immanence, that sets apart the Cusan option. As divine person, Dupr summarizes, Christ ontologically precedes that created nature which he, through his humanity, enables to participate in Gods nature.4 Duprs estimation of Cusa, as well as his schema of the dissolved triangulation of God, world and self, can be traced to moments within Hans Blumenbergs argument in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.5 Ever since Blumenbergs landmark essay, the signicance of Nicholas of Cusa for tracing the threshold of modernity has been widely recognized. Whatever the limitations of his interpretation, Blumenberg sees at least two things quite clearly. First, Cusas attempt to save the Middle Ages from a corrosive nominalism was grounded in the doctrine of the incarnation, specically in its most radical form, namely, its absolute predestination ante lapsum.6 If the Word would have become incarnate even if Adam had not sinned, then as thus eternally destined, the incarnate Word must be the principle of all creation he through whom all things were made and hence Christ must be immanently present in the structures of the created world. Second, Cusas embrace of incarnation is precisely what separates him from Giordano Bruno, and thus from the onset of modernity.7 Hence, so far as the example of Cusa stands, modernity begins with the denial of Christ immanent in creation. It is not an accident that today christological immanence counteracts the distancing of God, world and self in modernity. Nicholas offers a fascinating vision of creation saturated by Christ, as part of the venerable tradition of what Bernard McGinn calls pan-Christic ontology.8 But

3 4 5 6

7 8

Louis Dupr, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 186. Dupr, Passage to Modernity, p. 188. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983 [1966]); see respectively p. 484 and p. 391. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, pp. 1747. But note that Blumenberg appears to conate the absolute predestination of Christ according to Duns Scotus and according to Cusa. These should rather be distinguished, as one can see after consulting the two treatises of 14456. See below, note 75. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, p. 469. Bernard McGinn, Maximum Contractum et Absolutum: The Motive for the Incarnation in Nicholas of Cusa and his Predecessors, in Thomas M. Izbicki and Christopher M. Bellitto, eds., Nicholas of Cusa and His Age: Intellect and Spirituality (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002), pp. 15175. McGinn is citing a phrase used by Eric D. Perl, Metaphysics and

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it is important in discovering his Christology not to limit ourselves to Cusas best known work, De docta ignorantia (1440). While his Christology is certainly outlined in this, his rst theological work, two shorter and lesser-known treatises, De liatione Dei (1445) and De dato patris luminum (1446), complement and indeed complete the perspective adumbrated there. By reading these two treatises together as the fulllment of the original and daring christological trajectory ventured in De docta, we can begin to grasp the rich potential of the Cusan cast of mind that has excited students of theology in the present. In what follows, I set forth the reasons why De docta remains insufcient in its own terms, making the case for reading the later two treatises with each other and as supplement. Then to the heart of the matter, to present the vision Nicholas has of Christs presence in creation or rather, as we shall see, of creation in Christ.

From incarnation to liation

In De docta ignorantia, nished in 1440, Cusa contends that the union of God and human in Christ provides the substructure underpinning the whole universe, uniting the cosmos to God through a maximally perfected microcosmos, the humanity of Jesus. At the same time, Cusa is attempting to demonstrate a new method for theology he calls docta ignorantia, a method that takes seriously the via negativa but ultimately is able to transcend it as he puts it, to embrace incomprehensibles incomprehensibly. Cusas concept of maximum is one such instance of docta ignorantia. In his usage, a maximum denotes an innity so radical it exceeds the opposition of alterity, such that in the maximum opposites coincide. In Books I and II Cusa denes God as absolute maximum and the world as contracted maximum. Then in Book III he presents Christ as the singular maximum, at once contracted and absolute, who thus perfects creation, binds the world together, and returns all things to their origin in God. It is crucial that one read Cusas methodological innovations chiey through this third book on Christology.9 For Cusa it is the Chalcedonian concept of Jesus,10
Christology in Maximus the Confessor and Eriugena, in Bernard McGinn and Willemien Otten, eds., Eriugena East and West (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), pp. 25370. 9 See also Peter J. Casarella, His Name is Jesus: Negative Theology and Christology in Two Writings of Nicholas of Cusa from 1440, in Gerald Christianson and Thomas M. Izbicki, eds., Nicholas of Cusa on Christ and the Church (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996), p. 290. Without the real knowledge that the humanity of Christ is in fact united to the divine Word in one person, the argument of On Learned Ignorance falls apart . . . Book Three is the foundation of the entire system. 10 Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings, trans. H. Lawrence Bond (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), p. 169. This volume also contains translations of De visione
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fully God and fully human, whose existence has secured a series of impossible unions: created and uncreated, time and eternity, death and life, and thus just as impossibly, human language and divine Word. So great is Cusas reliance on the hypostatic union that the humanity of Christ is truly a conditio sine qua non of his schema. H. Lawrence Bond has explained this particularly well: Christ the incarnate Word resolves the problem of discourse about God. Cusa denes the theological enterprise as essentially iconography by virtue of the Incarnation providing the gross metaphor for all coincidences, including the coincidence of nite language with the ineffable God. And the icon of icons is the incarnate Christ; the hypostatic union of his person is the prime and model coincident . . . [T]he coincident nature of Christs person provides criteria and models for right theologizing.11 Without a fully human Jesus, the relation of Creator and creation would unhinge and Cusas theological edice would collapse. For it is in Christs continuity with the human that Cusa discovers the real potential of docta ignorantia: radically bound by its nitude, human knowledge could never (even in its ignorantia) be lifted up to theological understanding unless the humanity of Jesus as such was lifted up (or ascended) to God. In the crucial third book of De docta, Cusa tries to emphasize that precisely in Christs highest cosmic stature the fount of all creation, the center of all intellects the human element must be radically retained. Such a being who unied both maximums would have to be a human being, since through the intellect only the human virtually possesses all things in itself.12 Then paraphrasing Colossians 1:1517, Cusa notes that if such a human being existed, he would be the exclusive means by which all beings came into existence, when proceeding from the One they took particular form. The whole creation would nd its perfection in this one human being, since this person would be the maximal instance of the human microcosmos. Yet for all this, Cusa maintains, this one would not cease being a human being.13

11

12 13

dei and De quaerendo deum, from which I cite below. Hereafter I refer to De docta ignorantia as DI and, since some translations have been modied, cite by book and chapter rather than page number: DI III.181. The Latin text has been edited as De docta ignorantia, ed. E. Hoffmann and R. Klibansky, Nicolai de Cusa opera omnia iussu et auctoritate Academiae Litterarum Heidelbergensis, vol. I (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1932). H. Lawrence Bond, Nicholas of Cusa and the Reconstruction of Theology: the Centrality of Christology in the Coincidence of Opposites, in George H. Shriver, ed., Contemporary Reections on the Medieval Christian Tradition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1974), pp. 88, 82. DI III.3.198. DI III.3.200.

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Cusa is aware of the apparent incongruity here. The maximal human being who stands as the summit of all creatures is also one preceding creation as its source and end. How can a created human be the fount of all things? Cusa suggests this answer: But this order should not be regarded temporally as if God had preceded in time the rst-born of creation or as if the rst-born, God and human, had preceded the world by means of time [tempore]. Rather, the rst-born preceded it by nature and by the order of perfection above all time [natura et ordine perfectionis supra omne tempus], so that, existing with God above time and before all things, the rst-born appeared in the world in the fullness of time after many ages had come and gone.14 The cardinal distinguishes between two types of pre-eminence: one of priority and one of nature or perfection. Clearly for Cusa Jesus enjoys the latter type. Even though he appears historically after many ages the humanity of Jesus is nevertheless somehow eternal.15 In an essay on Cusas doctrine of the incarnation, Bernard McGinn directs attention to this central element of Cusan Christology.16 McGinn places Cusa in the

14 15

DI III.3.202; translation modied. In the Christmas of 1444, Cusa preached a sermon on the mystery of the incarnation of Christ before time: Christ is rstborn of all creation: not as much according to divinity, but as Christ, God and man; and not from the appearance in time, because the eternal Word in which the creature is supposited is before all time. And thus Christ is before every creature. The appearance in which he came in time with regard to us does not alter his primogeniture with regard to the Creator, of whom he is a creature . . . (Sermon 45, 5.115, cited from Sermones III, Fasciculus 2, ed. H. Pauli, Nicolai de Cusa opera omnia iussu et auctoritate Academiae Litterarum Heidelbergensis, vol. XVII [Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 2001], p. 189) Then follows a mysterious vision of salvation history not limited by chronology at least from the perspective of God. Christ is fully simultaneous with creation but also fully prior to it: Consider well and subtly how with God there is no time and how all the things which are past and future with us are present with him. And with him there is neither Adam before Christ nor Christ before Adam. If therefore you grasp all creatures simultaneously, as they always are before the face of God, that plurality of creatures, conceived plurally through our intellect, exists in a certain unity of order with God. And thus is Christ prior, the beginning and the head. (Sermon 45, 6.111)

16

Several later sermons conrm that this trajectory in the years before De liatione and De dato was one that continued steadily into his most mature theological reection. See Walter Andreas Euler, Proclamation of Christ in Selected Sermons from Cusanus Brixen Period, in Izbicki and Bellitto, Nicholas of Cusa and His Age, pp. 89103. At a diocesan synod during his bishopric at Brixen from 1453 to 1457, Cusa charged his
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tradition of Maximus Confessor, Hildegard of Bingen and Meister Eckhart. Each proposed that the God-Man and not simply the divine Word is the agent of creation as McGinn puts it, the verbum incarnatum and not the verbum increatum.17 Precisely as incarnate, the God-Man remains immanently present to creation, so that in these pan-Christic ontologies, according to McGinn, creation is inherently Christological both in its beginning and its end cosmogenesis is Christogenesis.18 The ultimate purpose of incarnation precedes and envelops Gods purpose in creation; the incarnation is absolutely predestined by God and is only secondarily a remedy for sin. One therefore has good reason to expect a high value placed upon the human element in the Christology of De docta. Yet that is not what one nds. After confessing Jesus to be the hinge of the universe, Cusa seems to evade the humanity of Jesus elsewhere in Book III. The life, ministry and death of Jesus human body hold little theological or salvic signicance in themselves. The corporeal sufferings of Christ are but a means toward the true destination, resurrected glory, and Cusa remains vague at best when he explains how others participate in Christ. In hindsight we can observe that many of these questions plaguing Book III of De docta are eventually addressed by Cusa under another christological rubric, that of liation.19 Obviously the term refers to the process of becoming lius, more

priests to preach Christ: If Christ is known, then all things are known in Him. If Christ is possessed, then one possesses all things in him . . . When one possesses this truth, then one possesses the nal goal of every desire (Euler, p. 91; Sermon 280). In other sermons, he explicitly afrms the absolute predestination of Christ ab aeterno (Sermon 203); he asserts that the eternal purpose of creation is found in Christs temporal incarnation: the goal of creation is a man, who is the Son of God (Sermon 204); and after the manner of De dato, he names Jesus the ostensor Patris (Sermon 258) and the apparitio or ostensio absconditi Dei (Sermon 260). Thus nearly a decade after the 1445 treatises, Cusa continues to stress the pre-eminence of Christs incarnation before time as that theophany which makes manifest all other created theophanies of God. 17 McGinn, Maximum Contractum, p. 172. 18 McGinn, Maximum Contractum, p. 162. 19 McGinn points to the importance of this second christological pillar: The primacy of the God-man took on an increasingly larger role in Cusas thought after 1440. Along with the theme of liation . . . it emerges as a lynch-pin of his mature view of our relation to God. However, the connection between these two poles of his thought, i.e. Incarnation and liation, remains a subject to be explored, especially because Cusas analysis of liatio in the 1445 treatise is largely abstract. (Maximum Contractum, p. 168) Rudolf Haubst also conrms the central place liation holds in Cusas thought. According to him, Cusa nds all the fundamental mysteries of Christian teaching rooted and recapitulated in the liatio Dei, and over time it grows into one of the liveliest themes of his soteriology. See his Streifzge in die cusanische Theologie (Mnster: Aschendorff, 1991), p. 406. For this reason Haubst studies the precursors to De liatione with special
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specically, one of the lii Dei (Jn 1:12).20 In Cusas use liation refers primarily to the adoptive sonship attained by the believer through participation in the trinitarian relationship of Son to Father: But the liation of the Only-Begotten, which is without mode in the identity of nature with the father, is the superabsolute liation, in which and through which all children of adoption obtain liation.21 At its summit the believer is joined to the Son to the extent of sharing in his divinity, and through unity with the Son one attains union with God.22 Although the concept appears in sermons as early as 1444, Cusas most developed discussion of liation occurs in the treatise De liatione Dei.23 The work falls in a particularly productive year during which Cusa completed four short and innovative works: De Deo abscondito (early 1445), De quaerendo Deum (JanuaryMarch 1445), De liatione Dei (July 1445) and De dato patris luminum (December 1445January 1446).24 Scholars have discussed how to read these treatises in relation to each other. Some have proposed the rst three form a trilogy,

care. Yet even so, he concedes that ultimately the work achieves only a provisional and still not altogether ripened sketch of the sublime theme. He points ahead to De visione Dei (1453) and later sermons which better clarify the import of liation (p. 415). Curiously however, Haubst does not mention the next opusculum produced by Cusa later that same year: De dato patris luminum. 20 In the Vulgate: quotquot autem receperunt eum dedit eis potestatem lios Dei eri his qui credunt in nomine eius. The other important passage to note is Rom. 8:14ff. discussing the Spiritus adoptionis liorum. 21 De liatione Dei (hereafter, FD) 54. My thanks to H. Lawrence Bond for the use of his unpublished English translation (1998). For the Latin text of De liatione Dei and De dato patris luminum, see Opuscula I, ed. P. Wilpert, Nicolai de Cusa opera omnia iussu et auctoritate Academiae Litterarum Heidelbergensis, vol. IV (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1959). 22 Hans Urs von Balthasar offers a vivid denition of Cusan liation: the sinking of the creature into the trinitarian process of begetting, the ascent of the yearning, conjectural knowledge into the mutual intuition of the Father and the eternal Son, through incorporation into Him, through actualization of his potential presence (as divinum) in the nite reason. See The Glory of the Lord, vol. V. The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age, trans. O. Davies et al. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), pp. 2412. 23 The term is notably absent from the christological sections of De docta, but conspicuously present by 1453 in De visione Dei (cf. 18.82, 19.86, 20.88). Rudolf Haubst isolates Sermon XLIII from Christmas 1444, which contains the rst developed usage of the term: If the reasonable spirit has passed through everything, in order to describe the globe and all created works, and nally to turn back upon itself and examine that the beauty (of its countenance) is a likeness of immortal life, thus it leaves behind all worldly delights and devotes itself to the brilliance of life, in order to become enlightened from this; and that is liation. (Haubst, Streifzge, p. 407) 24 Haubst, Streifzge, p. 580.
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excluding De dato.25 Others have focused on the latter in isolation from works of the same period.26 Beyond isolation or exclusion, I wish to point out the unity that exists between De liatione and De dato. The two treatises exhibit deep thematic correspondences. Together they relate God and world according to the two cosmic rhythms in Christian Neoplatonism: exitus and reditus. Whereas De liatione instructs the intellects ascent to God through the world (reditus), De dato explains the descent of that world from God to the intellect (exitus). By reading them together, one gains two versions of the same theological cosmology, as if Cusa animates the universe rst in forward motion toward God and then, for claritys sake, replays it again in reverse.

25

In Streifzge and his earlier work Die Christologie des Nikolaus von Kues (Freiburg: Herder, 1956), Rudolf Haubst discusses De liatione in several places but refers to De dato only occasionally. He gathers the rst three into a trilogy (Streifzge, pp. 89ff.), but pays relatively little attention to the fourth. For Haubst the rst three works, all written within the rst half of 1445, exhibit a certain inner coherence in which the knowledge of God advances through three stages corresponding to each work (Streifzge, p. 408). While this certainly rings true, it seems arbitrary to exclude De dato from the progression. De dato stands no further apart from De liatione chronologically than the latter does from the rst of Haubsts trilogy. But more importantly, Haubsts schema does not explain the signicant transition in perspective between De quaerendo and De liatione. Cusa expresses himself in De Deo abscondito and De quaerendo Deum without recourse to a specically theological doctrine of God; no mention is made of triune economy, much less of the incarnation and passion of Christ even when in De quaerendo Cusa extols Gods gracious and loving will to self-revelation. Compare this to De liatione, wherein the burden of the treatise is to dene the relation of the Son to the Father, to urge faith in the Sons incarnation, and to measure the consequences of such trinitarian and christological truths for believers eternal destiny. Such a shift in De liatione represents not so much an innovation as a reversion to the method of De docta ignorantia, in which trinitarian and christological doctrines gure prominently but also coexist alongside philosophical inquiry. 26 Mark Fhrer wonders what motivated [Cusa] to devote an entire book to an analysis of this passage (viz. Jas 1:1718) and how the work relates to his other writings. See Fhrer, The Metaphysics of Light in the De Dato Patris Luminum of Nicholas of Cusa, International Studies in Philosophy 18/3 (1986), p. 17. Fhrer concludes that a careful reading of the text reveals that the De dato patris luminum is in reality a treatise on lightmetaphysics (p. 17). Unfortunately Fhrer fails to consider its context among Cusas previous writings, citing only De docta as precedent. No doubt Cusa was, as Fhrer claims, well-versed in this unique Neoplatonic genre, and no doubt Cusas careful discrimination of lux from lumen is both deliberate and signicant (he notes that Cusa uses the distinction to denote the respectively uncreated and created natures of the incarnate Word). But Fhrer does not co-ordinate these observations with the crucial christocentric passages of the treatise regarding the Words sensible manifestation as the incarnate God-Man. As a result his conclusions regarding Nicholas motivations for writing De dato as a contribution to light-metaphysics are likely overstated, and one cannot accede to the judgement that the distinction between lux and lumen is perhaps the most important development in Cusanus thinking since he wrote the De docta ignorantia (p. 28).

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In De liatione, things in the world direct the intellect to grasp its own virtual likeness to the divine Word. In De dato, Cusa depicts precisely that world required for liation to function as he describes, namely, one created in the incarnate Word. This treatise explains the missing puzzle-piece: how Christ is present in all things, and therefore why liatio must be participation of the incarnate Christ and not the pre-incarnate eternal Word. De dato addresses that christological descent which provides, so to speak, the ontological infrastructure for liation as christological ascent. Expanding on important intuitions in De docta and De liatione, it is only in De dato that Cusa explains how the creation of the world through the lius determines the path to God as liatio. Thus only from the perspective of the pair can one best see the fullness of Cusas achievement in these two works (and perhaps in the entire quartet) in developing the Christology he outlined in De docta.

Filiation as christomorphic ascent

Because, for Cusa, Christ is the fundament of the cosmos, indwelling the created order, union with God in Christ takes place in the setting of a deep encounter with the world. Contemplation begins (following Cusas intellectualist anthropology) with inquiry and knowledge of creation. For Cusa, a man of great curiosity and truly catholic interests, the world is inherently intelligible precisely because it was so designed to be understood, and even further, to initiate communication with the human intellect. All creatures serve on behalf of the pre-eminent creation, the human intellect, at their Creators behest.27 Sensible things are enigmatic signs of the true,28 and the good student should not adhere to the temporal shadows of the sensible world, but rather use them, in a perfunctory way, for intellectual study, just as boys in school use material and sensible writings.29 Every being is an enigmatic sign to be read and understood, as if through them the Master of truth were speaking to us and they were books containing the expression of his mind.30 Cusa teaches that the triune Creator created matter to speak with a voice: All sensible things are the utterances of various expressions unfolded from God the Father through the Son the Word in the Spirit of all things to the end that by means of sensible signs the teaching of the highest mastery would transmit

27

Compare from De quaerendo Deum: Indeed, unless this world aided the seeker, humankind would have been sent into the world to seek God in vain [Acts 17:27]. Therefore, this world must assist whoever seeks God, and [nevertheless] the seeker must know that neither in the world nor in all that a human conceives is there anything similar to God (I.18). 28 FD 61. 29 FD 60. 30 FD 61.
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itself into human minds and effectively transform them into a similar mastery.31 Since the world is fundamentally disposed to reveal God, even though Cusa organizes his treatise as an exposition of liatio, it is helpful to consider his different explanations of the term as so many lessons in the schola huius mundi. In each lesson, the intellect learns more about how liation is achieved vis--vis created things in the world.

First lesson
In the rst lesson, things in the world teach the believer how to think radical unity. This is a crucial rst step, since for Cusa such is the unity of God, whose supremacy transcends every opposition of diversity, marking God as the non-other.32 The differences that pervade the world of things orient the intellect toward seeking unity, setting it on a quest for the one Creator behind a pluriform creation.33 Contemplating the many trains the intellect to behold the One. Cusa takes pains, however, to ensure Gods transcendence of the One and bars the way of a crude natural theology that would simply unify creations diversity, as if Gods unity could be read off of the world.34 Cusa insists on an intermediate tier of divine presence in modes.35 Without modes, God would be unknown and imparticipable. Modes are given unilaterally by God to lead us beyond our natural capacities of participation. Such modes include Gods power, truth, goodness, being, and even in an Eckhartian move Gods deity.36 As modes are unfolded from the one, they can appear contrary to each other because we cannot conceive their supra-modal, enfolded unity in God beyond the tensions of alterity.37 All this means that liation is not a direct route to God, but a subtle art of intellectual comportment with respect to Gods modes:

31 FD 76. 32 On God as the non-other, see Cusas later treatise, De li non aliud (1462), trans. Jasper Hopkins in Nicholas of Cusa on God as Not-Other (Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press, 1987). 33 Regarding Cusas understanding of alterity, particularly in De docta, see Thomas P. McTighe, Contingentia and Alteritas in Cusas Metaphysics, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 64 (1990), pp. 5571. 34 This major theological and metaphysical principle is stated best at De visione dei 23.101: There is no proportion of the nite to the innite. But Cusa states it as early as DI I.1.3 (Because the innite escapes all proportion, the innite as innite is unknown) and repeats it often (DI I.3.9, II.2.102). 35 Mode (modus, Weise) is an important term whose particular use and sense Cusa adopts from Eckhart. 36 FD 78. 37 FD 83.
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David Albertson In this way [i.e. on account of modes] what is ineffable is effable, what is imparticipable participable, and what is beyond all mode modiable. Therefore, God is the beginning above one and mode, who in the one and the mode of the one presents Godself as participable. For this reason I conjecture that the pursuit [studium] by which in this world we endeavor to ascend to the attainment of liation can perhaps be in something other [in alio fortassis] so that our speculation occupies itself with [versetur] the one and the mode of the one.38

The speculative venture of liation engages modes of the One. The intellects ascent leads in alio that is, into the differentiated creation in which God has given modes of Godself for our discovery. Cusa thus reframes a search for God beyond the world as the task of dialectically grasping Gods modes of presence within the world. By a prudent indirectness, this strategy respects Gods transcendence and frustrates the idolatry of a crude natural theology. Cusas idea of liation thus requires a specic kind of intellectual labor. He often speaks of the pursuit (studium) that seeks liation, but one could also translate the term as an eager or devoted study. The student must learn carefully to discriminate the presence of the ineffable God among all the effable things,39 the inexpressible that paradoxically is unable not to be expressed in every expression.40 Therefore Cusa can state as a rule: This is the pathway of pursuit [via studii ] of those who strive toward theosis: to perceive [advertere] the one in the diversity of any modes whatsoever.41 Hence, when Cusa proposes his formal denition of liation in a key passage of De liatione, he expresses it in terms of this task. Filiation, therefore, is the ablatio of every otherness and difference and the resolutio of all things into one, which is also the transfusio of one into all things; and this is theosis.42 These three terms denote different aspects of the same intellectual progress from modes of the one to the one. Ablatio43 is the general term encompassing the subordinate and complementary twins resolutio and transfusio. Beginning from the diversity of Gods modes of presence in the world, the intellect must ablate, or carry away, that diversity in a movement of thought that aims toward Gods unity. One executes ablatio in performing resolutio and transfusio. The former abstracts from created difference, but the latter perceives the One present amidst difference. Now one can see how liation, the unity of the two movements in ablatio, constitutes theosis: it achieves in the human intellect an accurate reection of Gods complex relation

38 FD 78. 39 FD 77. 40 FD 84; my emphasis. 41 FD 84. 42 FD 70. 43 Cusas use of the term is somewhat original. Cf. DI I.26.87; De quaerendo deum, 5.49.
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to the world. It translates the contemplative into the situation of the sovereign Word.44

Second lesson
Things in the world give themselves as incitamenta, stirring up the intellect and driving it to perfect its self-actualization through knowledge.45 Cusa imagines the intellects powers extended into creation in a hunt [venatione] in this world for knowledge. The intellectual nature is the universe in an intellectual mode, and, while the intellect is engaged in the school of this world, it seeks to bring its potency to actuality.46 The intellect assimilates itself to particular forms, converting the potential likeness of a thing resident in the intellect into actual intellectual possession of its essence.47 If the intellect were ever to actualize the entire contents of its potential knowledge, it would then universally embrace all things, and thus resemble in liation the Words sovereignty over creation. But until liation, here in the schola mundi created things are given as exercises for the intellect to practice piecemeal and in miniature its theoretically universal knowledge. Like the trainer whose voice drives the athlete to actualize her potential muscle power, created reality provokes the intellect to exercise its capacity for liation. Cusa states this idea most fully in De dato.48 Revisiting a bit of trinitarian doctrine from De docta,49 Cusa tells how the Spirit perfects the intellect:

44

Echoing the language of Eckhart, Cusa provides a kind of paraphrase of resolutio and transfusio in De visione Dei. In contemplating simultaneously God enfolding and unfolding the world, Cusa experiences the sweetest nourishment (pascua dulcissima): I enter when I nd you as power that enfolds all things. I go out when I nd you as power that unfolds . . . I go in proceeding from creatures to you, the Creator, from the effects to the cause; I go out from you, the Creator from the cause to the effects. I go in and go out simultaneously when I see how to go out is to go in and to go in is simultaneously to go out. (10.46)

45 FD 85. Elsewhere it is the divine Word who excites the believing intellect to actuality: . . . virtus nostra intellectualis, quae ponitur per excitationem divini verbi in actu apud credentes (FD 53). 46 FD 87. 47 FD 86. 48 But see also the beautiful passage from De quaerendo Deum: For our intellectual spirit has the power of re within it. It has been sent by God to earth for no other end than to glow and to spring up in ame. It increases when it is excited by wonder, as if wind blowing on re excites its potency to actuality. Therefore, through the knowledge of the works of God we marvel at eternal wisdom and are stirred by an external wind of works and of creatures of such various powers and operations that our desire may burst into love of the Creator and into a contemplation of that wisdom that has wonderfully ordered all things. (III.43) 49 Cf. DI II.10.

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David Albertson Therefore, in order that [our intellectual spirit] may be able to proceed from its state of potentiality to a state of actuality, the perfecting Spirit furnishes it with many lights. For all created things are lights for actualizing the intellectual power, in order that [the intellectual spirit], by means of the light thus given to it, may proceed to the Fount of lights.50

The sensible world is given from God to begin to bridge the eschatological distance from the future glory of the human spirit. Filiation arises in believers initially as a power (potestatem, Jn 1:12) to become Gods children, but it needs further activation. The material creation offers itself for our contemplation and use as a means toward realizing the end of the human species, the vision of God. Filiation is the extreme state of this realization, when the intellect maximizes its potential totally and, through the Word, knows all things in itself. Of course Cusas account strains belief. How could the nite intellect ever know itself in such a way? His theory of liation must be understood properly from the perspective of grace. The human intellect in its totality is known only to God, such that one could only experience identity with God through sharing in Gods own vision. Cusa writes: The intellect knows itself when it sees itself in God as it is. But this takes place when God in the intellect is the intellect. Therefore, to know all things is nothing other than for the intellect to see itself as a likeness of God, and this is liation.51 Cusas meditations along this line that the vision of God should be considered beginning with Gods own seeing and not our own reach fruition in De visione Dei, where he unfolds this germ of insight from De liatione: In seeing me you, who are the hidden God, give yourself to be seen by me. No one can see you except in the measure you grant to be seen. Nor is your being seen other than your seeing one who sees you.52 Thus we only attain liation when we see (or know) ourselves as being seen (known) by God, that is, as Gods children.

Third lesson
Cusas nal lesson in the schola mundi reveals the intellects remarkable similarity with the divine Word. In ashes of unexpected insight, the Word is encountered as ones own image. Such a realization inspires the intellect to press on in the pursuit of liation and demonstrates its latent potential that, if actualized, could spark its

50 51 52

De dato patris luminum, 115. Hereafter DP, citing from the English translation in Jasper Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusas Metaphysic of Contraction (Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press, 1983). FD 86. De visione Dei, 13.
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theosis. For Cusa all serious inquiry sets the intellect in relation to the Word via the diverse works of the Creator. The intellect is the image of the Word, and its capacity to embrace things in knowledge reects the Words actual embrace of all things in existence. Hence Cusa proposes that study of the world is always theologically signicant since in study one begins to appropriate, albeit in asymptotic proportion, the Words supremacy over created things. In the ultimate situation, one actually enters the Words own innite study of creation, so to speak, and is identied, by grace, with the Words all-encompassing knowledge. This scenario is well illustrated by Cusas gure of the divine Word as Mirror.53 Imagine the Word as an innitely perfect mirror of God, and imagine creatures in the world as a multitude of smaller mirrors shards of a lost whole, curved and distorting fragments. Although made in the Words likeness as mirrors, each reects only one minute aspect of their origin, and even that imperfectly. Among creatures the intellectual mirror is the clearest, though still imperfect; unique among creatures, however, it is free and alive, capable of straightening, bending and polishing itself. Because of its perfection, the true mirror (the Word) contains all the fragmented mirrors in its reection without distortion. The true mirror reects its vision of the whole to the living mirror (the intellect), which receives it as best it can. At this point Cusa notes three events occurring simultaneously in this exchange between Word and intellect: (1) the intellect sees all creation in the true mirror, though in a vision limited by its own imperfect reception; (2) the intellect also sees itself in the true mirror; (3) as clarity and straightness increase toward perfection, the living mirror sees itself seeing all things in itself, which is to say, it begins to perceive its approximate likeness to the true mirror, the divine Word, the Son. At its summit, this event represents the intellects liation. Cusa explains that liation, as union with the divine Word, entails a new sovereignty for the intellect over all creation. Exchanging its own identity for the true mirror it reects, the liated intellect is now boldly described with attributions usually reserved for the Word. Hence Cusa can say that in liation the intellect is all things in all things and all things are in it, and its kingdom is the possession of God and of all things in a life of glory.54 Once having attained union with the Word, the intellect perceives that nothing lives outside itself and that alone those things are living that in it are it itself . . . [that] it itself is the life of living things.55

Creation as christomorphic descent

Cusa believes the intellects liation takes place through its encounter with the world of creation. What remains unclear is why creation can function to lead the intellect

53 54 55

FD 658. FD 67. FD 68.

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to the divine Word. What is it about creations relationship to the Word more precisely, to the incarnation of that Word in creation that gives the world such transformative power? These are critical questions left unanswered (and largely unasked) by De liatione. It is no coincidence that Cusas next treatise concerns the origin of the created world.56 In De dato patris luminum Cusa explains that creation descends from the Creator in such a way that creatures manifest God through the supreme manifestation, who is the incarnate Son. He rst describes how creation descends from the Father christologically, and then he explains how the generation of the Son discloses the theophanic purpose of all creation. World and Christ, creation and incarnation, are bound together in mutual co-ordination. Cusa suggests that the world itself, in its descent from eternity into time, resembles the incarnate Word. The world reects what the incarnate Christ manifests singularly: the paradoxical double origin from both eternity and time. Creation itself is christomorphic, such that the mystery of the worlds origin in God incurs all the paradoxes that mark the classic christological formulations. Cusa begins with the Dionysian maxim that the divine goodness is selfdiffusive.57 He further follows Eckharts corollary that God does not give partialiter or of something less than the whole of himself.58 God only gives the best gift, the datum optimum of James 1:17. If God gives in the act of creation, then what is given

Cusa initially presents the work as a theological exegesis of Jas 1:1718; yet because of the status ceded these verses in Christian Neoplatonism, his choice invites further interrogation. Dionysius had begun the Celestial Hierarchy by appealing to the same verse and discusses it in very similar terms. John Scotus Eriugena, whom Cusa had certainly read, translated and commented on the Dionysian text, translating theosis as deicatio. See I.P. Sheldon-Williams, Eriugenas Greek Sources, in John J. OMeara and Ludwig Bieler, eds., The Mind of Eriugena (Dublin: Irish University Press, 1973), pp. 115. Since Cusa identies theosis with liatio in De liatione, Eriugenas inuence seems clear. Note that Cusa cites this same verse in the prefatory letter to Cardinal Cesarini to describe the mystical experience that led him to write De docta ignorantia. 57 Optimum est sui ipsius diffusivum . . . (97). Although it nowhere appears as a formula, see Dionysius, Divine Names IV.20 and Celestial Hierarchy IV.1. 58 Thus Meister Eckhart in the twenty-sixth article of his Defense at Cologne in 1326. From Apologia doctae ignorantiae we know that Cusa is a great admirer and defender of Eckhart, but also that he wishes the Meister would have restrained some of his more dramatic and potentially misleading pronouncements. See Rudolf Haubst, Nikolaus von Kues als Interpret und Verteidiger Meister Eckharts, in Udo Kern, ed., Freiheit und Gelassenheit. Meister Eckhart heute (Grnewald: Kaiser, 1980), pp. 7596. Donald Duclow notes that Cusa chose to defend Eckharts works even when Cusas own were attacked for resembling them. Donald F. Duclow, Nicholas of Cusa in the Margins of Meister Eckhart: Codex Cusanus 21, in Gerald Christianson and Thomas M. Izbicki, eds., Nicholas of Cusa in Search of God and Wisdom (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1991), pp. 589. In De dato itself Cusas note of caution (caute) seems to allude to the article from Eckharts Defense regarding Gods eternal giving. Thus we see Cusa adopting the trajectories of his theological forebears but with them also a sense of responsibility to retool their formulations as necessary.
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can be nothing other than Gods self. Cusa thus ventures his remarkable conclusion: It seems to be the case that God and the creation are the same thing according to the mode of the Giver God, according to the mode of the given the creation. Accordingly, there would [seem to] be only one thing, and it would receive different names in accordance with different modes. Hence, this [one] thing would be eternal in accordance with the mode of the Giver, but it would be temporal in accordance with the mode of the given; and it would be both Creator and created, and so on.59 One thing appears in two modes requiring two sets of names to describe it sufciently. Cusa struggles to explain how the world can be both eternal in its divine origin and temporal in its contracted existence. What can one say of a world which both has a beginning and does not have a beginning? Nor is the conundrum alleviated on the level of the individual creature: in the Giver every creature is eternal and is eternity itself . . . every gift was eternally with the Father, from whom it descends when it is received. For the Giver gave always and eternally.60 Cusa also rules out dividing the two natures into two worlds, one eternal and one temporal (the Nestorian error, as it were). To deny the temporal world its eternity would deny its created origin. One can only insist on holding the two natures of the world together in an inscrutable union (the Chalcedonian formula): There is not one world which with the Father is an eternal world and another world which through descent from the Father is a created world. Rather, the very same world [is] without beginning and, by means of a descent, [is] received in its own being with a beginning.61 But how do creatures receive the divine gift, the gift of Godself given as the world? 62 One immediately recognizes traces of Eriugenas vision of the whole world as theophany of the divine. Yet Cusa works more cautiously than his predecessor. After the initial statement of identity, he admits his formulation lacks precision and requires clarication. Cusa reintroduces De doctas notion of contraction to keep himself from tumbling into pantheism.63 For the Givers maximal goodness . . . cannot be received as it is given. Creation appears in a diversity of forms

DP 97. Although one should note that Cusas use of mode here differs from that described in De liatione above. 60 DP 104. 61 DP 106. 62 On God and the gift in this and other Cusan works, see Martin Thurner, Die Philosophie der Gabe bei Meister Eckhart und Nikolaus Cusanus, in M. Thurner, ed., Nicolaus Cusanus zwischen Deutchland und Italien. Beitrge eines deutsch-italienischen Symposiums in der Villa Vigoni (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002), pp. 15384. 63 Dermot Moran, Pantheism from John Scottus Eriugena to Nicholas of Cusa, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 64 (1990), p. 146.
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because the Universal Form can only be received in a descending manner [descensive] that contracts the eternal gift to the nite condition of those receiving it. Therefore, he concludes, the innite is received nitely; the universal, singularly; and the absolute, contractedly.64 Suddenly Cusas description of the world resembles his portrait of the incarnate Christ in De docta ignorantia: the innite Creator, the absolute maximum gift, appears at the same time in contraction in its descent into time. As if to stress the resemblance, Cusa points out the soteriological import of Gods self-giving as world. Out of the intrinsic momentum of his goodness, God becomes world in order to present that same goodness to humankind in the sensible things of the world. In the very terms of the gracious condescension usually attributed to Christ (e.g., Phil. 2:67), Cusa portrays the Creator incarnating himself, not only as one person, but as the world entire: And since he who worked all things for His own sake is the goal of his own work, He gave Himself as sensible world. Thus, the sensible world exists for His sake, so that the descending reception of Him, which disperses into the level of sense, attains His goodness sensibly so that Innite Light gives light to sensible things sensibly and, likewise, to vital things vitally, to rational things rationally, to intelligible things intellectually.65 Things in the world exist as sensible data on account of the Giver, so that his goodness could be found in the world, not beyond it. According to Cusa, we would not be wrong to call this world (in the Hermetic phrase) a Deus sensibilis.66 The Givers self-binding as world does not so much submit him to change and decay as it effects the worlds elevation. As he had already stated in De docta: The innite form is received only in a nite way; consequently, every creature is, as it were, a nite innity or a created god, so that it exists in the way in which this could best be.67 Since the world is the self-gift of God, all things which appear (apparere) to us are manifestations (apparitiones) of God, lights indicating the Father of lights.68 Indeed, Cusa asks, how could the innite God become manifest to human perception if not through a great variety of manifestations? In calling such creaturely manifestations theophanies, rst in De liatione but now more deliberately in De dato, Cusa has not yet diverged from the tradition of Dionysius and Eriugena. But now, taking up James 1:18,69 he suggests that the theophanic quality of creation is christologically derived, ontologically dependent upon the phenomenon of the

64 DP 99. 65 DP 103; translation modied. 66 DP 102. 67 DI II.2.104. 68 DP 108. 69 Freely he begot us by the Word of truth so that we might be a kind of beginning of his creatures (voluntarie genuit nos verbo veritatis ut simus initium aliquod creaturae eius).
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incarnation. To this objective aspect of theophany Cusa matches a subjective one. In good humanist fashion, he correlates believers faith with creations capacity to manifest divine presence. As a result, although the sheer givenness of incarnation remains more fundamental than the believer who receives it, as an early modern Cusa cannot ignore the deep link between the world as manifest and the human to whom it is manifest. Hence Cusa actually presents two different acts of generation. First, he asserts that the world, in the totality of its various theophanies, is generated in the Word: In this Light . . . the Father of lights has freely begotten all the descending manifestations, so that all the manifesting lights might be enfolded [complicarentur] in the highest power and uniting strength of the manifestations . . . Every creature is a disclosing [ostensio] of the Father and participates diversely and contractedly [varie et contracte] in the Sons disclosing [of Him]. Some creatures disclose Him more dimly, others more clearly in accordance with a diversity of theophanies, or manifestations of God.70 The Words appearance in the world provides the original manifestation of God through which all creaturely manifestations can appear. As theophanies, all creatures disclose the Father to some degree; yet only the incarnate Son fully reveals the Father. So as the founding instance of the divine self-disclosure, the Son exclusively governs every subsequent event of divine disclosure in the world. To put it differently, only the Christ can supply the creative power to unite in one divine origin the panoply of what is manifested in the unfolding of creation. Second is the generation denoted in James 1:18: the generation of believers (genuit nos) in the Word. This is another way of dening liation, but here Cusa adds another dimension to the concept. In John 1:12, Cusas initial text in De liatione, credere appears to be synonymous with recipere.71 The believers faith receives Christ when one believes in his name; faith means receiving the gift of incarnation. From this perspective Cusa can make sense of the second half of James 1:18 (ut simus initium aliquod creaturae eius). Through receiving the incarnation we are generated in the Word, and since that Word enfolds all creatures, our reception of the Word in descent provides the contracted beginning for creatures in their descent from the eternal self-giving. All this is contained in Cusas dense explanation: Therefore, the receiving, via a descent, of the disclosing of the Father in the Word brings about [ praestat] a beginning of creatures. For we are a beginning of His creatures by virtue of the fact that in our own way [nostro modo] we receive the Word of Truth, in whom [the Father] has begotten us.72

70 71 72

DP 110, 111. . . . quotquot autem receperunt eum dedit eis potestatem lios dei eri his qui credunt in nomine eius. DP 111.

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Our unique way (nostro modo) of receiving the Word contractedly receives what is eternal as temporal and what is without beginning as with a beginning. Clearly this beginning of creatures does not denote the efcient causal origin of creatures, as if faith itself produced the material world. But this receptive faith does originate all creatures in their formal cause as theophanies of God. Faith in the Words descent to esh shows forth the eternal aspect of every temporal creature, so that only receiving Christ incarnate makes manifest the theophanic character of the world. Because, as we showed above, the worlds descent into particularity and time is christomorphic, the Words incarnate manifestation provides the norm for other creatures manifestations of God. As Christ is fully God and fully human without beginning yet born of Mary all creatures nd their own double aspect in him. The nite beginning of the creature is rooted in the Words temporal appearance, and the creatures eternal subsistence in the Giver is rooted in the Words divine nature. Likewise, it is not enough for believers to rely only upon an eternal Logos. Unless the Words descent into esh is received in faith, then creatures cannot be sensibly perceived in their concrete being as the self-presencing of God. To serve as the archetypal apparitio of God, the divine Word must appear and dwell among all creatures visibly, in the esh. Clearly in what I have presented from De dato there is an intimate relationship between incarnation and creation. God gives himself sensibly in the incarnation, in the esh of Jesus, but for Cusa God gives himself sensibly in creation as well. Observing the congruence here raises a difcult and important question. How should these two divine manifestations one as the world, one as Christ be ordered with respect to each other in Cusas thought? In De dato Cusa shows how creation, as Gods self-giving contracted to time, resembles incarnation in several ways. Like the Words incarnation, the created world represents the indissoluble union of eternal and temporal, the absolute contracted to particular forms. Hence Christ appears in a world already christoform, one prepared for his advent in the very structure of its being. More fundamentally than the incarnate Word appears in the world, the world appears in him, conforming its appearance to his prior character in its descent from eternity to time. To express this in Cusas terms, creation unfolds incarnation, and incarnation enfolds creation.73 The world was created so that Christ might become incarnate. As Maximus Confessor puts it, the hypostatic union is the foreknown divine purpose of the beginning of beings . . . on account of which all things are, but itself on account of nothing. Looking toward this end, God produced the essences of beings . . . For on account of Christ, that is the

73

On the pair complicare explicare, and their roots in Thierry of Chartres commentaries on Boethius, see the helpful article by Thomas P. McTighe, A Neglected Feature of Neoplatonic Metaphysics, in Peter Casarella, ed., Christian Spirituality and the Culture of Modernity: The Thought of Louis Dupr (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 2749.
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mystery of Christ, all the ages, and the things in the ages, take in Christ their beginning and end of being.74 It is not even, as one might rst suppose, that creation enfolds incarnation, as if the incarnation were teleologically secured by virtue of imperatives elected by God in creation (goodness, love, self-actualization).75 This too would achieve an intimate connection between these two orders of grace. Rather, creation unfolds incarnation. Creation is never made to wait for the incarnation to happen; it has always already happened. The incarnation precedes and grounds the created world. It is, as in Cusas common illustration, the nut-seed in which the whole tree of creation with all its diverse ramications is contained.76 From this perspective, we can see why in De liatione Cusa explained liation in terms of the intellect studying the curriculum of creation in the schola mundi. In De dato each creature is a theophany sharing in the Sons achievement of disclosing the Father. Hence the intellect can be educated about the Son from things in this world. If creation unfolds the identity of the Son in his manifestation, the believer can be led toward union with the Sons generation through a theological understanding of the world as generated in the generated Son. Indeed, Cusa seems to allude precisely to liation at the end of De dato. In a concluding passage that resembles the beginning of De liatione77 as if to complete the circle inscribed by the two works Cusa stresses the extraordinary promise of liation: Indeed, our intellectual power has, in a potential way, ineffable riches of light. Until they are made known to us through the intellectual light that exists actually, and until the manner of bringing [them] to actuality is disclosed [to us], we do not know that we have them, since they are potential.78

74 75

76

Quaestiones ad Thalassium 60 (PG 90, 621AB), trans. and cited in Perl, Metaphysics and Christology, p. 256. This option, while it does represent an intrinsic teleology toward incarnation, is distinct from the tradition of christological ontology explained by McGinn. Note how creation enfolds incarnation resembles what McGinn categorizes as the Scotist option (Maximum Contractum, pp. 157ff.), in which the incarnation is eternally predestined in order to exemplify Gods power and love. Hence, in discussing the generation of believers in Christ: In the eternal begottenness of Truth they were eternally begotten, and thus [begotten] they are the eternal power of Truth. When they are manifested in a temporal succession, they receive from Truth the fact that they are a beginning of the Begetting Fathers creatures. By comparison, the branch of a tree which I see to have just begun in the tree was begotten antecedently in the seed [begotten] not as a branch but as the seed. (DP 111)

77 78

Cf. further De visione Dei, 7.224. FD 53. DP 120.

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Cusa then compares the intellects hidden potential for liation to a eld with hidden treasure (Matt. 13:44). The eld is worth a great deal more than it seems, if properly tilled; one must know how to cultivate the land to educe its surprising potential. So too the intellect needs careful tending.79 Thankfully, Cusa says, God has provided examples in descents of his Word to prophets, philosophers and apostles regarding how to yield the fruit of life from the intellect. And yet their traditions shine dimly in the Innite Light of the incarnation, when the Word that is without contraction revealed itself perceptibly in our Lord Jesus Christ . . . He has manifested Himself to us, in order that in the Light of Him who is the Word made esh we may apprehend the Paternal Light of our life.80 That is, the decisive event that brings the power of liation to the believer is not the Words impassible eternity, but the sensible revelation of the Word in the esh of Jesus.

Conclusion
Like Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar in the last century, Nicholas of Cusa is a radically christocentric thinker. He understands creation and redemption in terms of the self and world being conformed to the shape of the Christ. Filiation as christomorphic ascent complements creation as christomorphic descent. These gurings of Christ in the world speak to the modern problematic broached in the introduction. If the spiritual crisis of modernity, as Louis Dupr frames it, is the reciprocal alienation of self, world and God consequent upon a lost onto-theological synthesis, then christocentric theologies like Cusas have the potential to reconnect those attenuated links for Christian thought and practice. When Christ the God-Man is also interpreted as the fundament of the created order itself, he becomes the gure who unies God, world, and self in the most utterly concrete unity. Properly understood, christological immanence, while not a panacea, can ameliorate the tensions in modern Christianity between seeking God in the inner self or in the outer world. Christomorphic liation bridges the distance between the self and the world. Rather than the self nding God beyond the world or despite it, Christ immanent in the world becomes the path into God. Likewise, to grasp creation as christomorphic is to bridge the gap between God and world. Rather than the material universe being empty of the ascended Son, in Cusas view the Son dwells within, preserving Gods intimate presence to creation. As the author of Ephesians writes, What does he ascended mean except that he also descended to the lower, earthly regions? He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the

79 80

DP 121. DP 122.
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heavens, in order to ll the whole universe (4:910, NRSV).81 When Christ is seen as the lling of all things, then the more radical the encounter with the world is, the more radical is the encounter with the Christ. The human project of knowing self and knowing world intensifying to a new degree in Cusas fteenth century would then be, as he saw it was, inextricably christological.

81

For a contemporary (and polemical) engagement with the question of ascension and its cosmological consequences, see Douglas Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999).

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