Nicholas of Cusa's Idea of Wisdom

NICHOLAS OF CUSA'S IDEA OF WISDOM
Author(s): EUGENE F. RICE Jr.

Source: Traditio, Vol. 13 (1957), pp. 345-368
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NICHOLAS OF CUSA'S IDEA OF WISDOM
By EUGENE F. RICE, Jr.
Like the Preacher, son of David, Nicholas of Cusa1 knew that wisdom
excels folly as light excels darkness and he gave his heart to search it out.
In phrases reminiscent of the classical definition of philosophy, the wisdom
literature of the Old Testament, and medieval venery, he pictured his in
tellectual life as a venatio sapientiae and himself as a keen and pious hunter.
Virtually all his important philosophical and theological works, from the
De docta ignorantia of 1440 to the De venatione sapientiae of 1463, document
the chase. Wisdom is the principal subject of the dialogues Idiota de sapientia.
And when the Pseudo-Petrarch incorporated most of the first of these two
dialogues in his De ver a sapientia (put together around 1470 and printed
in all the collected editions of Petrarch's works),2 his definition of wisdom
was given added publicity and authority.
To search for wisdom had been the defining effort of philosophy
since Plato and the idea of wisdom one of the great traditional ideas
of classical and Christian thought. In Cusanus' own lifetime sapientia was
an important and popular idea in flux. It was often discussed by his con
temporaries, and its meaning was perceptibly changing from the normal
medieval view that wisdom is the revealed knowledge of divine things to
the more common Renaissance conception of wisdom as a naturally acquired
moral virtue. A study of Cusanus' particular handling of it can perhaps shed
some useful light not only on his own thought but also on the more general
problem of his rather anomalous position in the intellectual history of the
fifteenth century.
1 Edmond Vansteenberghe, Le Cardinal Nicolas de Cues (1401-1464) (Lille 1920) remains

the standard biography (Bibliography). Several good general treatments of Cusanus*
thought have appeared since Vansteenberghe: P. Rotta, II cardinale Nicol? di Cusa. La
vita ed il pensiero (Milan 1928); Peter Mennicken, Nikolaus von Kues (2nd. ed. Trier 1950);
Henry Bett, Nicholas of Cusa (London 1932); and Maurice de Gandillac, La philosophie de
Nicolas de Cues (Paris 1941) (Bibliography). The most significant recent monograph is
Rudolf Haubst, Das Bild des Einen und Dreieinen Gottes in der Welt nach Nico laus von
Kues (Trier 1952) (Bibliography). To be noted also are the important and influential sections
on Gusanus in Ernst Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance
(Leipzig and Berlin 1927); Rudolph Stadelmann, Vom Geist des ausgehenden Mittelalters:
Studien zur Geschichte der Weltanschauung von Nicolaus Cusanus bis Sebastian Frank (Halle
1929), and D. Mahnke, Unendliche Sph?re und Allmittelpunkt (Halle 1929).
8 R. Klibansky, ' De dialogis Petrarcae addictis De vera sapientia, ' Nicolai de Cusa Opera
Omnia iussu et auctoritate Academiae Litterarum Heidelbergensis ad codicum fidem ?dita,
ed. E. Hoff mann, R. Klibansky, L. Baur, etc. (Leipzig 1932 sq.) V. xxi-xxiv and the literature
there cited. Klibansky suggests Filelfo as the possible forger. This edition is henceforth
referred to as H(eidelberg).
346 TRADITIO
I
If the search for wisdom was a chase, it was a chase more paradoxical than
that of the stag. Nicholas of Cusa found the scent in ambiguously juxtaposed
Biblical texts: 'sapientia foris clamat in plateis, et est clamor eius, quoniam
ipsa habitat in altissimis.'3 Characteristically, his point of departure is an
apparent contradiction: the total transcendence of wisdom, on the one hand,
and the ease with which it can be found by those who love and seek it, on
the other. For although wisdom cries out in the streets, it dwells in
the highest.
That is highest which cannot be higher. Only infinity is so high. Of
wisdom, therefore, which all men by nature desire to know and seek with
such mental application, one can know only that it is higher than all
knowledge and thus unknowable, unutterable in any words, unintelligible
to any intellect, unmeasurable by any measure, unlimitable by any limit,
unterminable by any term, unproportionable by any proportion, incom
parable by any comparison, unfigurable by any figuration, unformable
by any formation, unmovable by any motion, unimaginable by any ima
gination, unsensible by any sense, unattractable by any attraction, un
tasteable by any taste, inaudible to any ear, invisible to any eye, unappre
hendable by any apprehension, unaffirmable in any affirmation, unde
niable by any negation, indubitable by any doubt, and no opinion can be
held about it. And since it is inexpressible in words, one can imagine
an infinite number of such expressions, for no conception can conceive
the wisdom through which, in which and of which all things are.4
And yet wisdom cries out its transcendence from any public place.
* Wisdom is clear and never dark. It is easily seen by those who love it and
easily found by those who seek it.'5 Cusanus amplifies this text from the
Book of Wisdom in commentaries on the phrase sapientia foris clamat
in plateis. 'Truly,' he writes in the De apice theoriae, '[wisdom] proves itself
easily found by everyone';6 and in the De sapientia he emphasizes that its
point of departure is the simplest object of sense experience and its message
more accessible to the simple than to the learned. The interlocutors of the
De sapientia are an orator and a pauper quidam idiota. The scene is the
8 De sapientia 1 (H V 5.1-2). Cf. Prov. 1.20: 'Sapientia foris praedicat; In plateis dat
vocem suam'; and Eccles. 24.7: 'Ego in altissimis habitavi, Et thronus meus in columna
nubis. '
* Ibid. (9.18-10, 15).
5 Sap. 6.13.
6 De apice theoriae. Haec accvrata recognitio trivm uolvminum opervm ctariss. p. Nicolai
Cvsae card. ed. Jacques Lef?vre d'?taples (Paris, Badius Ascensius, 1514) I fol. 219v. This
edition is henceforth referred to as P(aris). AH references, unless otherwise indicated, are
to vol. I.
NICHOLAS OF CUSA's IDEA OF WISDOM 347
Roman forum in the summer of 1450 amid the noisy crowd of Jubilee pil
grims. The rich orator ? he represents both the scholastic philosopher and
the humanist ? is immensely proud of his learning. He attacks the ignorant
idiota for minimizing the importance of erudition ? Studium litterarum ?
'which alone permits us to make any progress.'7 In his reply the idiota
quotes two Pauline texts, classic for the Christian idea of wisdom, which
give added dimensions to the hints from Proverbs, Wisdom, and Ecclesias
ticus: 'Sapientia huius mundi stultitia est apud Deum' and 'Scientia inflat.'8
From this point of view the orator, without the humility indispensable for
his search, chained to the authority of writers, classic or scholastic, feeding
his intellect on unnatural food, seeks wisdom with much vain labor. 'This
is perhaps the difference between you and me,' the idiota adds, echoing
the mystics and the Socratic scepticism so common in early Italian humanism,
'you think you have knowledge when you have none, hence your pride. But
I know that I am an idiota, hence my humility. As a result I am much more
learned than you.'9 The orator uncharacteristically accepts this verdict and
the charitable idiota offers to help him escape his 'captious and unoriginal
subtleties' and reach the real 'treasury of gladness.' With vibrant echoes
from Paul and Augustine, they undertake the 'difficult facilities' of the
pursuit of wisdom.
Their problem is to resolve the paradoxes which the very notion of such
a search implies: the transcendence, the ultimate inaccessibility of wisdom,
on the one hand; and, on the other, man's natural desire for it, the departure
from observed experience, and its easy acquisition. Such a resolution is
possible by rising above the contradiction, by scaling the wall of the
coincidence of contraries into the garden of the divine, in short, by iden
tifying wisdom with God, who is beyond all logical and rational contradic
tions. For only when it is seen as an attribute of God does the fruitfully con
tradictory idea of wisdom reveal its full meaning and escape its necessary
contradictions. Wisdom dwells in the highest ? Cusanus never uses the super
lative except for God ? because it is equated with the second Person of the
Trinity. It cries aloud in the streets because the creation is eloquent tes
timony of a Creator whose wise finger spelled out the easily readable book
of nature ? as in Raymond de Sebonde ? and because always for Cusanus
the simple layman open to grace is wiser than any initiated expert. Man's
search for wisdom is only a special case of his relation to and search for God,
7 De sapientia, 1 (H V 4.2-3).
8 Ibid. (3.4-9); 1 Cor. 3.19 and 1 Cor. 8.1.
9 Ibid. (5.4-6). Cf. Plato, Apol. 21D. See Gandillac's La philosophie de Nicholas de Cues
57-73 for a full analysis of the meaning and sources of the Cusan idiota and Stadelmann
on the myth of Socrates in the fifteenth century, Vom Geist des ausgehenden Mittelalters 65-74.
348 TRADITIO
and he is wise to the extent that he knows and participates in the divine,
specifically the Trinity, the principium by which, in which and of which all
things are.
II
This traditional incorporation of a capitalized Sapientia in the mystery
of the Trinity is fundamental to Cusanus' idea of wisdom; and in the De pace
fidei he has traced what he felt to be its natural and inevitable stages. The
dialogue ? which counts among its predecessors works like Abelard's Dialogus
inter Philosophum, Iudaeum et Christianum, Roger Bacon's Opus tertium,
and Lull's Liber de gentili et tribus sapientibus ? was written in 1453 just
after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, and develops Cusanus' faith
that a few wise men and scholars selected from among the leaders of
the various world religions could easily come to full agreement and achieve
a true and universal religious peace. The basis of this optimistic view is his
conviction of a necessary passage from the existence of individuals whom
all men agree to be wise to the existence of a Wisdom indistinguishable from
Christ or the Word of God. The first of several interlocutors ? they include,
beside Europeans, an Arab, Jew, Hindu, Scythian, Persian and Chaldean
? are a young Greek and the Word of God himself. They begin with
the traditional definition of philosophers as lovers of wisdom.
The existence of men who love wisdom presupposes the existence of that
wisdom. The existence of a plurality of wise men presupposes, since before
all plurality one finds unity (a Neo-Platonic axiom), the existence of a unitary,
simple and indivisible wisdom in which they all participate.10 The ineffable
power of this wisdom, whose unity and simplicity is absolute, is reflected
in the objects of the visible world. Whenever, for example, one considers
visible objects, one notices at once that they proceed from the power
of wisdom. This justifies the affirmation that an invisible wisdom transcends
all things.
Cusanus'- pagan Greek, as soaked in Christian assumptions as the Cardinal
himself, offers no objection to this passage from the acceptance of an unitary
wisdom to the assertion of its ineffable creative power and transcendence;
and since both assume the identification they claim to be demonstrating,
the introduction of the idea of logos is simple. The Word asks the company
whether this wisdom does not embrace all that can be said. * Yes, ' the Italian
10 De pace fidei 4 (P 115r). Cf. ?tienne Gilson, Les M?tamorphoses de la Cit? de Dieu
(Louvain and Paris 1953) 154-181 and Bruno Decker, 'Nikolaus von Cues und der Friede
unter den Religionen,' in Humanismus, Mystik und Kunst in der Welt des Mittelalters,
ed. Jos?f Koch (Leiden and Cologne 1953) 94-121.
replies, 'there is no word outside of wisdom. The word of a man perfectly

wise belongs to wisdom itself, and wisdom is in the word and nothing is out
side it. For infinite wisdom embraces all things. ' The Word of the creator,
therefore, in whom all things were created, can be nothing other than his
wisdom. Wisdom is not a creature, but must be identified with God. 4 Since
the creating God creates all things in wisdom, He is necessarily the Wisdom
of created wisdom. For before every creature there is Wisdom, through which
every created thing is what it is. ' Such wisdom is eternal, preceding all birth
and creation, simple, indivisible and powerful. It is the principium of all
things. It is therefore 'God, one, simple, eternal, universal principle/ More
precisely it is the Word of God, who now, playing Socrates to Cusa's Plato,
concludes triumphantly: 'Behold how you philosophers of various sects unite
in the religion of a single God, whom you presuppose by the very fact that
you consider yourselves lovers of wisdom.'11
The Word of God is also the second Person of the Trinity; and Cusa con
cedes, through the mouth of the Hindu interlocutor that it will be difficult
to achieve a perfect harmony of views on the doctrine of the Trinity. Once
accepted, however (and Cusa thinks it can be demonstrated to the Gentiles),
the role of wisdom in the dialectic of the three Persons is easily established.
Wisdom, already assimilated to the Word of God, is identified with Christ.
Since Paul named Christ the 'power of God and the Wisdom of God' in
his First Epistle to the Corinthians and Augustine elaborated the suggestion
into coherent doctrine in the De Trinitate, the identification had been a
Christian commonplace. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries embroidered
on the idea with metaphysical subtlety and pictorial explicitness. A woodcut
illustrating the 1482 edition of Suso's Orologium sapientiae, for example,
shows Christ as die ewig Weyshait; while the English morality play Wisdom,
Who is Christ (ca. 1460) stages the same majestic figure, a ball of gold with
a cross in his left hand, a scepter in his right, with a golden wig on his head
and clothed in 'purpull clothe of golde.'12 Cusanus' Wisdom is more abstract
but equally regal. For God the Father to understand Himself is to engender
11 Ibid. 5 (P 115v). Cf. De sapientia 1 (H V 19.3-14): ' orator. Habunde haec explanasti.
Sed nunc te oro: nonne Deus est omnium principium? idiota. Quis haesitat? orator.
Estne aliud sapientia aeterna quam Deus? idiota. Absit quod aliud, sed est Deus. orator.
Nonne Deus Verbo cuncta formavit? idiota. Formavit. orator. Est Vernum Deus?
idiota. Est. orator. Sic est et sapientia? idiota. Non est aliud dicere Deum omnia in sa
pientia fecisse quam Deum omnia Verbo cr?asse.' De venatione sapientiae 15 (P 206v).
12 The Macro Plays, ed. F. J. Furnivall and A. W. Pollard (EETS Extr. Ser. 91;
London 1904) 35. The Morality of Wisdom has been often studied. See J. J. Molloy,
O.P., A Theological Interpretation of the Moral Play, Wisdom, Who Is Christ (Catholic
Univ. of America Press 1952) and the works there cited. For the illustration see Des Mys
tikers Heinrich Seuse O. Pr. Deutsche Schriften, ed. Nikolaus Heller (Regensburg 1926) 142.
350 TRADITIO
His Son, His concept, His Word, His Wisdom. Their mutual love is the Holy
Spirit. Adopting an Augustinian terminology to name the three Persons,
one fully developed in the twelfth century by theologians of the School of
Chartres ? unitas, aequalitas, connexio ? Cusanus emerges with a wisdom
which is Christ or absolute aequalitas.13
An examination of the notion of ontological equality measures the full
scope of this identification.
Just as the multiplicity of participating wisdom entails the existence of
a single wisdom, so also the inequalities apparent in the created world pre
suppose the prior existence of an eternal equality.14 From this equality flow,
in a return movement, the less perfect, participated equalities of the visible
world. Cusanus defines equality as the 'absence in a given thing of more
or less: nothing added, nothing subtracted. For if a thing is more, it
is monstrous; if less, it ceases to be.'15 Equality is the power of a being to
subsist in itself, to be no more and no less than it is, to be itself. Only form
confers this power, and equality is therefore the formal principle of being,
a close approximation of the Thomist ipsum esse subsistens. In man, for
example, it is to be no more and no less than a man, thus avoiding
the monstrosity ? or deification ? of being more and the human annihilation
of being less. His equality of being defines him as what he is. The equality
of man is the form of man. In God Equality is the second Person
of the Trinity and the Form of forms. As God the Father or unitas is
associated with being, so is the Son or aequalitas associated with form.
The Triune God is omnipotent, he has an infinite potentiality equivalent
to the Aristotelian pure act. In the power of His unity, He draws things from
non-being into being, giving existence to things which were totally
non-existent before; in the power of His equality, He endows these beings
with form. The divine Equality equalizes or forms everything which exists.16
It is precisely this infinite Equality and its formal fecundity which
is equated with sapientia. Wisdom is the equality itself of being, the word
13 De sapientia 1 (H V 19.20-21): ' ...et hic Deus est verbum, sapientia seu Filius Patris, et
potest dici unitatis seu entitatis aequalitas.' Cribrationis Alchoran 2.3 (P 134v): 'Diuinam
igitur mentem in qua omnia quae creari possunt aeternaliter consistunt christiani patrem
et creatorem appellant. Artem vero eius omnipotentiae, seu sapientiam, siue scientiam,
eius filium vocant, per quem omnia facit; and De ludo globi 2 (P 161v). See Vansteenberghe,
Nicolas de Cues 294ff. and Haubst, Das Bild des Einen und Dreieinen Gottes for analyses of
Cusanus' doctrine of the Trinity and its sources.
14 De pace fidei 7 (P 116*).
16 De docta ignorantia 1.8 (H I 17.9-12): 'Aequalitas vero essendi est, quod in re neque
plus neque minus est; nihil ultra, nihil infra. Si enim in re magis est, monstruosum est;
si minus est, nec est.' Cf. De venatione sapientiae 23 (P 210v).
18 De pace fidei 8 (P 117r).
or reason of things. It is an infinite intellectual form, for the form gives formal
being to the thing that is formed. Therefore, an infinite form is the actuality
of all formable forms and the most precise equality of them all.17 Such a form
is infinitely perfect, and contains within itself the perfections of all formable
forms. It is the treasury of being out of which flow all existing things and
a treasury of wisdom filled eternally with the Ideas of these things.18
All other forms are images of this infinite intellectual form. As Christ or the
Word of God, Wisdom is the formal principle of creation, and so, to say that
God made all things in His Wisdom is the same as saying that He created
all things in His Word. It is in this sense too that we recognize sapientia as
our 'principium, ... per quod, in quo et ex quo sumus et movemur,' as our
middle, beginning and end, and as the ' exemplar tantorum varietatum rerum
universarum.'19 Wisdom is thus Christ in His most subtle metaphysical
ramifications: as logos, infinite Form, the Form of forms, the Quiddity of
quiddities, as the beginning, middle and end of man's being, in particular
the being of his intellect. It dwells in the highest, and is at once radically
transcendent and the term, unattainable, of the intellectual ascent to God.
Ill
In itself this Wisdom is absolute, and as such is found neither in angels,
prophets nor men. Men ? and here one leaves the heights of transcendent
Wisdom to consider the immediate sources and content of human wisdom
? are commonly said to be wise; but strictly speaking all wisdom has its
source in the divine and all the wisdom found in every wise man comes from
the Wisdom which is God. Man is wise only by participation, and human
wisdom is a participation in divine Wisdom.20 In itself sapientia is a sub
stance; in man it is an accident.21 For the absolute brooks no comparison,
whereas there is no man, according to his human nature, who is so wise that
he cannot become wiser still, just as there is no man so just that he cannot
become juster, so true he cannot become truer or so good he cannot become
17 De sapientia 1 (H V 20.9-12).
18 De posset (P 182v): ' Oportet ergo quod forma quae penitus nullo alio indiget, quoniam
infinitae perfectionis, in se omnium formarum formabilium complicet perfectiones, quoniam
est actu ipse essendi thesaurus, a qua ?manant omnia quae sunt, quemadmodum ipsa ab
aeterno thesauro sapientiae concepta vel reposita sunt.'
? De sapientia 1 (H V 13.9-10; 17.4); Ibid. 2 (32.25).
20 Vier Predigten im Geiste Eckharts, ed. Josef Koch (Cusanus-Texte 1.2-5; Sb. Akad. Heidel
berg 1936/1937, Abh.2)80: ' Et nota, quod quamdiu aliquis sapiens potuit esse sapientior, non
fuit Sapientia recepta, sed participatio eius. Sapientia autem absoluta, quae est ars omni
potentiae, non fuit neque in angelis neque hominibus neque prophetis, uti est, recepta.'
352 TRADITIO
better. Such attributes, free from more or less, are not of this world.22 All
human wisdom, like all human being, must therefore be a participation in
the divine absolute; and, although wisdom in man is sufficiently similar to
the Wisdom of God to justify using the same word, just as being is infinitely
far from Being, so too ' between this reduced wisdom which is human wisdom
and Wisdom in itself which is the divine Wisdom, maximum and infinite,
the distance is always infinite.'23 Human righteousness, goodness, justice
and wisdom are images, more or less accurate, of the corresponding divine
virtues which are their exemplary causes.24 Man is at once capable of
participating in God's Wisdom and ontologically infinitely far from Him.
For a fruitful human participation in Wisdom, there are two conditions:
one subjective, the absence of sin; the other objective, the structural
relationship flowing from God's creation of man in His own image between
divine Wisdom and the human soul. For Cusa, as for Abelard, no man spotted
by sin can hope to reach any truth or wisdom. He quotes the traditional
text: '... spiritus sapientiae non habitat in corpore subdito peccatis, neque
in malivola anima ...'25 And he draws the traditional consequences. Wisdom
will be got only by those whose desire for it is free of all vain curiosity, who
humbly confess their ignorance and who lead a virtuous life, mortifying the
flesh and contemning the world.26 Cusanus asserts, in short, the dependence
of proper intellection on a possession of specifically Christian virtues.
The possibility of success is also guaranteed by objective similarities
between man and God. God made man in His own image, and the soul of
man is a viva imago Dei. Like Augustine, Cusanus develops this resemblance
into an elaborate parallel between the Trinity and the soul. Man's soul, like
all other creatural things, is stamped with the image of the power which
created it; and bears, in the manner proper to it, a similarity to the
universally creative Trinity. Thus the fecundity of the Trinity is reflected
in the soul by a 'certain fecundity which one calls thought [mens], wisdom
and love (that is to say the will). Thought gives birth to understanding or
wisdom, and from these first two terms emerges the will or love. Thus the
fecundity proper to the unity of the spiritual essence, the soul, is an image
of the infinitely fecund and uncreated Trinity.'27
22 De sapientia 2 (H V 32.14-15).
24 De sapientia 2 (H V 32.19-21).
25 Ibid. (18.13-14); Sap. 1.4.
26 Ibid. (5.17-18); De quaerendo Deum, ed. Alfred Petzelt, Nicolaus von Cues: Texte seiner
philosophischen Schriften nach der Ausgabe von Paris 1514, sowie nach der Drucklegung von
Basel 1565 (Stuttgart 1949) I 218. This edition is henceforth referred to as Petzelt. All
references are to vol. I.
27 De pace fidei 8 (P 117'-*).
There is a similar, but more specific, relationship between God and the
intellectual part of the soul. It too is a viva Dei similitudo and reflects the
Trinity in its profoundest modes of operation.28 More precisely, there is an
exemplary relationship between the intellect and the second Person of the
Trinity, the vera sapientia aeterna et infinita, from which the intellect receives
its life. 'Our intellectual spirit has from the eternal Wisdom such a prin
ciple of being intellectually that its being is more conformable to wisdom
than that of any other non-intellectual being. t Wisdom is the beginning,
middle and end, the exemplar of the intellect, which peculiarly fits it
to search for and receive wisdom.29 Its creation in a specific assimilatio or
resemblance to divine Wisdom guarantees objectively its capacity for
wisdom.30
In addition to such capacity for wisdom, the human intellect has a natural
desire and appetite for it. All men seek wisdom naturally.31 This is the natural
desire of every being for what necessarily conditions its existence. The in
tellectual life is hungry for wisdom because it is the very principle and
exemplar of its life and because it can conserve its life by no other
nourishment 'than the truth and the intellectual Word which is Wisdom.'32
The resemblance which God created between His Word and the human in
tellect has planted in the soul a foretaste (quaedam connatura praegustatio) of
divine Wisdom; and, as perfume attracts by its odor, as milk attracts a child,
as the magnet attracts iron, so does Wisdom, once tasted, attract man up
wards to itself. Cusanus develops further his image of iron and magnet to
illustrate this.
A magnetized stone attracts iron upward to itself; and, in thus adhering
to the magnet in the air, the iron ceases to subsist in its own heavy nature
(for otherwise it would not stand in the air, but fall towards the center
of the earth according to its nature). But the iron remains in the air stuck
28 De filiatione Dei (Petzelt 236): 'Unde, uti Deus est ipsa rerum omnium essentia, ita
et intellectus Dei similitudo rerum omnium similitudo. Gognitio autem per similitudinem
est. Intellectus autem cum sit intellectualis viva Dei similitudo, omnia in se uno cognoscit... '.
The Cribrationis Alchoran 2.6 (P. 135r-v) works out an image of the Trinity in the intellectus.
" De sapientia 1 (H V 16.8-10; 17.1-7). Cf. De mente 5 (H V 65.17-18): 'Unde mens est
viva descriptio aeternae et infinitae sapientiae.'
80 Koch, Vier Predigten im Geiste Eckharts 80: ' Unde adhuc Sapientia creavit aliqua
capacia Sapientiae, quae habent similitudinem eius magis propriam, et sunt intellectuales
naturae... Et quamvis illa, quae sie sunt capacia Sapientiae, sint ipsius Sapientiae propria
et ad illa tamquam in sui capacia proprius descenderit, tarnen illa sua propria ipsam non
reeeperunt. '
81 De pace fidei 6 (P 115v): ' Puto verissime omnes homines natura appetere sapientiam... ';
De sapientia 1 (H V 9.19-10.1): 'Unde sapientia, quam omnes homines, cum natura scire
desiderent...'.
M Ibid. Cf. De venatione sapientiae 1 (P 201v); Sermon, Qui manducat hune panem (Exci
tations 6; P II 106v).
354 TRADITIO
to the magnet because of the attracting power of the magnet and not
because of any power in its own nature, which, on the contrary, specifically
excludes this position. The cause, however, of the iron's inclination to
the nature of the magnet is that iron carries in itself a resemblance (in
which the inclination originates) to the magnetic nature. It is thus that
the intellectual nature of man, by adhering as closely as possible to the
intellectual nature of God, from whom it has received its being, can adhere
to it indissolubly as to the source itself of its life.33
Acting on the internal force which is the soul's innate appetite for wisdom,
by illuminating, reforming, and taking possession of it, uncreated Wisdo
draws the soul upward to itself, the end and principle of the soul's desire
Like iron, man has a natural capacity for this ascension, and from the divine
image within him he has a foretaste of the sweetness of his end and a natural
desire to grasp it.
Cusanus conceives the desire magnetized by this sapiential foretaste a
a form of motion, a natural motus desideriosus3* An intellect aroused b
it is restless, incomplete, unquiet, always in motion, searching for rest
since motion is always a violent state ? and its end in sapientia aeterno
For since Wisdom is also the end and exemplar of the intellect, only in i
is the intellect's desire for wisdom satisfied. Thirst for the rest in wisdo
can never be fully assuaged in this world. Full rest is possible only
a complete possession in eternity of the desired object.35 Attracted int
intellectual motion by the sweet foretaste of wisdom, the soul forgets a
mortal encumbrants, forsakes all sensible things, and, ravished by an amazed
admiration (the origin of philosophy), ' grows so mad that it makes no account
of ought else besides that wisdom, and to such a one it is sweet to leave this
world and this life in order the more readily to be carried into the wisdo
of immortality.'36
IV
It is through that highest cognitive faculty of the soul, the intellectus
that man participates in Wisdom. Above the senses, above the discursive
reason, it alone possesses the sapiential foretaste and can achieve the motu
desideriosus which makes it capable of wisdom because only in intellectua
33 Ibid. 12 (119'-v).
34 De sapientia 1 (H V 16.10-11).
35 Die Auslegung.des Vaterunsers in vier Predigten, ed. J.Koch and H. Teske (Cusarcus-Text
1.6; Sb.Akad. Heidelberg 1938-39, Abh. 4 [1940]) 16: 'Et sicut intellectus non est satiabili
nisi per Verbum et Sapientiam aeternam Patris, ita nec voluntas non est quietabilis nisi
Spiritu Sancto, in quo adipiscitur regnum pacis, cuius non est finis. ' Cf. De docta ignorant
3.10 (H I 149.27-150.4).
36 De sapientia 1 (H V 16.12-18).
NICHOLAS OF CUSa's IDEA OF WISDOM 355
natures is the image of wisdom * the lively intellectual life, the power of which
is of itself to show or put forth a vital motion, which motion is by under
standing to go forward to its proper object, absolute truth, that is eternal
Wisdom/37 The problem, therefore, of the nature of human wisdom and
the modes of its acquisition must center on the nature and powers of the
intellectus and its relation to the other faculties of the soul, on the one hand,
and to God, on the other. The senses, vulgar but essential, give images of
sensible particulars; while the memory, imagination and fantasy fix, conserve
and reproduce these images in the absence of the sensible objects. Nothing
is found in the fantasy which did not previously exist in the senses;
and because the reason and intellect are united to the body by the percipient
power, they cannot reach perfection without the senses. It is the function
of the ratio to operate on the sensible images stored in th? memory, to judge,
correct and raise them to a higher level of abstraction. This forms the first
stage in the constant effort of the mind to rise from accident to substance,
from particular to universal, from matter to form, from motion to rest, from
altereity to unity.
But reason, and logic and mathematics which are its most characteristic
expressions, is essentially discursive.
Now discourse is necessarily limited by its point of departure and its
point of arrival, and since these are in mutual opposition we speak of
contradiction. For the discursive reason these terms are opposed and
distinct. In the realm of the reason, therefore, there is a necessary dis
junction between extremes, as, for example, in the rational definition
of the circle where the lines from the center to the circumference are equal
and where the center cannot coincide with the circumference.38
Reason is the realm of number, measure, plurality and the principle of non
contradiction. A is either B or it is not B. Or, like a man walking along a road,
it proceeds from finite point to finite point. It will not let the man be in two
places at once, calling this a contradiction in terms, just as it is contradictory
to speak of the coincidence of the center and circumference of a circle. A
figure is either a circle or it is not.39
The intellect, on the other hand, sees things without measure, number
or weight. It is the realm of unity, intuition and the coincidence of contraries.
It is far above reason. As the ratio judges, corrects, and refines sense images
and is the form and unity of sensory cognition, so does the intellectus judge,
refine and correct rational images and act as the form and unity of reason.
It is supra-rational, the faculty in man closest to the direct intellection of
87 ?bid. (22.20-23.3).
88 Apologia Doctae ignorantiae (H II 15.4-10).
89 Ernst Hoffman, Nikolaus von Cues ; Zwei Vortr?ge (Heidelberg 1947) 20.
356 TRADITIO
angels. It sees simultaneously what the discursive reason sees only suc
cessively. If reason is a traveller walking along a road in a plain, the intellect
is a man who surveys this scene from the top of a mountain tower, thus
embracing in one glance objects which the traveller sees only disparately
and successively. More important, it rises above all the inept contradictions
of logic and mathematics to intuitions in which 'unity envelops number,
the point the line, the center the circle; and where the mental vision achieves
the coincidence of unity and plurality, of the point and the line, of the center
and the circle, without discourse ,..'40 It is the realm of the irrational
coincidence of opposites where ignorance is the final perfection of knowledge
and where reason is fused with faith.
The fusion of faith and reason in intellectual cognition is one result and
one aim of Cusanus' characteristic distinction between ratio and intellectus.
Reason is the highest faculty of the soul operating within the area of th
natural. Each act of intellectual cognition, on the other hand, is an amalgam
of reason and Revelation. For just as the ratio forms and unifies the images
of sense experience, just as the intellectus forms and unifies rational images,
so does divine illumination form and unify the intellect.41 The Word of God
illumines the intellect as the sun's light illumines the world.42 The intellect
feeds on the Word and finds its perfection by submitting itself through faith
like a disciple, to the Word of God.43 Beyond mere illumination even, the
divine light takes possession of the intellect and installs itself there in
40 Apologia Doctae ignorantiae (H II 15.10-13). Cf. De coniecturis 1.7-10 (Petzelt 129-138).

41 De coniecturis 1.8 (Petzelt 133): ' Unde cum quaestiones omnes a ratione investigativ
progredientes ab intelligentia omne id sint, quod sunt, non potest quaestio de intelligenti
formari, in qua ipsa praesuppositive non resplendeat. Ratio enim de intelligentia invest
gans, quam nullo sensibili signo compraehendit, quomodo hanc inchoaret inquisitionem sine
lncitativo lumine intelligentiae ipsam irradiantis ? Habet se igitur intelligentia ad rationem
quasi Deus ipse ad intelligentiam. ' De quaerendo Deum (Petzelt 215-216): ' Sicut igitur rati
discretiva est, quae in oculo discernit visibilia, ita intellectualis Spiritus est, qui in ration
intelligit et divinus spiritus est, qui illumin?t intellectum. (...) Pari quidem modo de intellect
idipsum concipe, qui lumen est rationis discretivae, et ab illo te ?leva in Deum, qui lumen
est intellectus.' Cf. Vansteenberghe, Nicolas de Cues 381-382.
42 De visione Dei 22 (P 11 lv): ' Illumin?t enim verbum dei intellectum sicut lumen solis
hunc mundum. (...) Nam & fontem luminis in lumine illo intellectuali video, verbum scilicet
dei, quod est veritas illuminans omnem intellectum.' De coniecturis 1.9 (Petzelt 134):
'Deus lumen est intelligentiae, quia eius est unitas; ita quidem intelligentia animae lumen
quia eius unitas. (...) Deus igitur forma intelligentiae est, intelligentia animae, anima
corporis. '
43 Ibid. 24 (P. 113r): 'Pascitur autem intellectus per verbum vitae, sub cuius influentia
constituitur, sicut motores orbium. (...) Perficitur autem intellectus per verbum dei & cres
cit; & fit continue capacior et aptior atque verbo similior. (...) Oportet autem omnem in
tellectum per fidem verbo dei se subiicere & attentissime internam illam summi magistri
doctrinam audire, & audiendo quid in eo loquatur dominus perficietur. '
NICHOLAS OF CUSa's IDEA OF WISDOM 357
a literally infinite way.44 For Nicholas of Cusa, as for Augustine and

St. Anselm, the solution of the problem of the relation of faith and reason
is thus credo ui intelligam.
Every faculty, indeed, presupposes certain first principles which can
be grasped only by an act of faith and which alone permit intellectual
activity. Therefore, whoever wishes to know must make these principles
his point of departure. Without them he cannot ascen^ to the truth.
Isaiah says : 'Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. ' Faith, therefore, envelops
in itself all intelligibility, and understanding is a development from faith.
Faith directs the intellect and extends its realm. Where a healthy faith
is absent there is no true intellection. (. . .) Nor is there a more perfect
faith than the essential truth which is Jesus.45
It follows that wisdom is in the area of grace rather than in that of nature.
Cusanus compares sensible, rational and intellectual to three springs. The
mass of men, exercising only their animal natures, drink from the first spring.
From the second, which is higher and lies at the horizon of the natural, drink
those men, called philosophers, who are vigorously rational; while from the
third and highest drink men called gods or theologians. This is the spring
of the intellect, of Christ and of wisdom. It is a fons sapientiae which yields
happiness and immortality.46 The intimate interrelation of Christ Wisdom,
on the one hand, and the intellectus, of which Christ Wisdom is the exemplar,
beginning and end and which is the only faculty of the soul capable of par
ticipating in Wisdom, on the other, is thus firmly established.
Man naturally desires wisdom and is naturally capable of it. Man is
potentially wise. But the seed of wisdom innate in him passes from potency
to act only under the influence of divine illumination, which perfects the
intellect and forges an amorous nexus between the spirit of wisdom and the
spirit of the intellect in which the intellect finds its happiness.47 The intellect,
in short, cannot naturally acquire wisdom. Wisdom descends from God:
'Omnis sapientia a Domino Deo est'; or, as St. James said, wisdom is a gift
of the Holy Spirit desursum descendais, and an illumination through faith
44 De coniecturis 1.13 (Petzelt 145-46).

45 De docta ignorantia 3.11 (H 1151.26-152.9). The text is a mistranslation of Isaiah 7.9.
It goes back to the Septuagint and is frequently quoted by Augustine in this form. Cf. De
filiatione Dei (Petzelt 224): 'Nihil enim sine fide attingitur, quae primo in itinere viatorem
collocat. '
46 Koch, Vier Predigten im Geiste Eckharts 124.
47 De dato Patris luminum 5 (Petzelt 251-252); De venatione sapientiae 25 (P. 211r): 'Nexus
igitur naturalis intellectualis naturae ad sapientiam inclinatae ipsam naturam intellectualem
non solum vt sit conseruat, sed etiam ad id quod naturaliter amat, vt illi connectatur adapt?t.
Spiritus igitur sapientiae in spiritum intellectus, vt desideratum in desiderans, secundum
feruorem desiderii descendit, et conuertit spiritum intelligentiae ad se... & in hoc amoris
nexu foelicitatur intellectus & viuit foeliciter. '
358 TRADITIO
to a knowledge and love of God.48 Cusanus' statements are as unequivoca

as his texts. Wisdom is desursum, it must be requested as a gift from
the Father of Lights, it can never be acquired except dono gratiae or attrac
tione Patris*9 Thus theologians, not philosophers, drink from the fon
sapientiae. The source of wisdom is God, and, like a magnet, it is He wh
draws man, who illumines and reforms him, to participation in it. Wisdom,
the second Person of the Trinity and the Word of God, gives man wisdom.
The meaning of the fact that a wisdom which dwells in the highest cri
aloud in the streets is now clearer. God is mysterious and hidden from t
wise men of this world. But by revealing His Wisdom in the sensible world,5
by the Incarnation of His Word,51 and by divine illumination He opens him
self to men living virtuously and humbly in a simplicity enforced by pover
and manual labor.52 Cusanus is optimistically convinced that men arouse
by an innate foretaste of wisdom and who ardently desire it, seek it and ask
God for it with unshakeabie faith and hope, will be given it. For God wants
to give wisdom to those who seek it, wants to be sought, wants to be known
wants to show himself to those who love Him.53 To this end Christ illumine
them and enables them to participate in His Wisdom through faith. 4 S
how many mysteries are in the words of Christ, voices in which lies hidden
eternal Wisdom itself. But if they are to be heard, they must be approached
with faith and reverence; and to this end we are illuminated and assum
His plenitude.'54 The spirit of Christ, which is the spirit of love and truth,
pours down and re-forms man in its image. Impregnated with a spirit which
transforms the wisdom of this world into folly and enables him to see t
God of gods in His stronghold, man assumes the spiritual form of Christ.55
48 Ecclus. 1.1; James 1.5; 3.5. Cf. Prov. 2.6; Eccles. 2.26; Sap. 7.7; 8.21.
49 De dato Patris luminum 1 (Petzelt 239-42); De quaerendo Deum (Petzelt 218
'Sed illi, qui dixerunt non posse attingere sapientiam et vitam intellectualem perennem
nisi daretur dono gratiae, ac quod tanta esset bonitas Dei cunctipotentis, quod exaudire
invocantes nomen suum, salvi facti sunt. ' De pace fidei 12 (P 119r): ' Omnis autem sapient
in omnibus sapientibus ab ilia est quae est per se sapientia, quoniam ilia deus. '
50 De quaerendo Deum (Petzelt 220).
61 Sermon Puer crescebat (Exercitationes 8; P II 157r-v).
62 De posset(P 17'8r): 'Est enim deus occultus & absconditus ab oculis omnium sapientium,
sed reuelat se paruulis seu humilibus, quibus dat gratiam. Est vnus ostensor magister scilic
Ihesus Christus.' De docta ignorantia 3.11 (H I 152.19-23): 'Maxima enim et profundissim
Dei mysteria in mundo ambulantibus, quamquam sapientibus abscondita, parvulis et h
milibus in fide Iesu revelantur, quoniam Iesus est, in quo omnes thesauri sapientiae et scien
tiarum absconditi sunt, sine quo nemo quidquam facere potest. '
53 De quaerendo Deum (Petzelt 217); De beryl to 38 (P 192v).
64 'Dies Sanctificatus' vom Jahre 1439, ed. Ernst Hoffmann and Raymond Klibansky
(Cusanus-Texte 1.1; Sb. Akad. Heidelberg 1928/29, Abh. 3) 28.
55 De posset (P 178r).
Three elements are thus essential in Nicholas of Cusa's formulation of

the problem of wisdom: the identification of Wisdom and the Word of God
and the definition of human wisdom as a participation in that Wisdom; a
separation of ratio and intellectus which diminishes the realm of natural
reason and makes the intellect an area of vision and intuition which is brought
to perfection by divine illumination; and, finally, an Augustinian solution
of the problem of the relation of reason and Revelation in which each act
of intellectual, sapiential cognition is an intimate amalgam of faith and
reason. The uenatio sapientiae is a quest for God, and man is wise to
the extent that he participates in the Word of God by illuminated acts of
intelligence and love.
Two things only hast Thou taught, O saviour Christ: faith and love.
By faith, the intellect has access to the Word; by love it is united to it.
The nearer it approaches, the more it increases in power; the more it loves,
the more it establishes itself in its light. And the Word of God is within it.
It has no need to seek outside itself, since it will find Him within, and
will have access unto Him by faith. And by prayer it will obtain a nearer
approach to Him, for the Word will increase faith by the communication
of His light.56
The paradox of a virtue which is at once unattainably

(because it is the second Person of the Trinity) and attainable to
human wisdom is a gift of God to an intellect naturally capab
it) tempts Cusanus to define wisdom as the unattainable atta
unattainable and the joyful comprehension of the incomprehens
problematical formulas suggest that wisdom is knowledge of Ch
limited by the abyss which separates man, who is finite, fr
God. Cusanus makes the idea more precise by restating it m
Returning to his conception of divine wisdom as an infinite for
of quiddities and forma formarum9 he defines wisdom as a
tellectual image of the infinite form which is the Word of G
is wise to the extent that he can know and love an infinite for
There is only one reality under two aspects: God, the ulti
visible reality, the form of forms, and the world, visible and d
The world is an image of God; God is the invisible form behind
Man remains in Plato's cave, in his mind a series of imag
reflecting this twin reality. All things are in God, but as th
Ideas of these things. All things are in the mind of man, but h
66 De visione Dei (P 113r).

" De sapientia 1 (H V 8.23-9.2; 13.5).
360 TRADITIO
or similitudes of things.58 Visible objects, moreover, have their roots in G

Cusanus' intimate penetration of the natural by the divine makes the f
essence of each thing the unknowable form of forms: Deus ipse est actual
rerum omnium essentia ...'59 More accurately, God is the quiddity of the
dity of each thing.60 The problem of knowledge, therefore, taking its po
of departure from a traditional definition of truth which defines it as th
adaequatio rei et intellectus*1 is the relation between a mental im
abstracted from sense experience and the forms of visible objects sunk
mediately in the infinite form which is the Word of God. The finite m
is placed squarely before the infinite.
The difficulty is that a finite mind must necessarily remain ignoran
an infinite form. The search for truth proceeds by comparison. A stone d
not exist in the human understanding as in its proper cause or nature,
as in its specific idea or likeness. We know an object, not in itself, but as
image which can be compared per similitudinem to the object. The differ
between image and object implied by the very action of comparison
be diminished but, aeternaliter, never wholly eliminated because no m
intellect is 4 so joined to the exemplar of all things, as the image to the Tru
that it could not be more nearly joined and more actually united to it;
therefore it does not understand so much that it could not understand
more, had it access to the exemplar of all things from which ev
thing actually existent derives its actuality.'62 The form of forms, in wh
every specific form participates, is infinite; and the infinite, which can o
be measured by itself, can never be reached by the categories of likeness
measurement.63 Finite understanding, therefore, can never reach the esse
or quiddity of a thing.64 We can know, for example, the form of m
68 De mente 3 (H V 57.18-22); De docta ignorantia 1.11.5 (H I 22.4-6).

59 De filiatione Dei (Petzelt 236).
60 Johannes Wenck (E. Vansteenberghe, ' Le "De ignota litteratura" de Jean Wenck
Herrenberg, ' Beitr?ge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters 8 [1909-10] 2
accused Nicholas of Cusa of pantheism because he said that God is absoluta omnium
ditas, falling thus into the errors of the Beghards, who taught that God was all things
maliter, and of Eckhart, who rashly equated God and being (esse). Gusanus answer
'Nam Deus est quidditas omniumquidditatum et absoluta omnium quidditas sicut abso
entitas entium et absoluta vita viventium. (...) Nec hoc dicere est confundere aut destru
quidditates rerum, sed construere, ut intelligunt sapientes' (Apologia Doctae ignorant
H II 33.20-25).
61 Compendium 10 (P 172M73*).
62 De visione Dei 20 (P 110r); De docta ignorantia 1.11 (H I 22.11-16); Apologia Do
ignorantiae (H II 11.14-15).
63 De docta ignorantia 1.1 (H I 5.23-6.2); De mente 2 (H V 54.19-21).
64 Ibid. 1.3 (H I 9.24-26): 'Quidditas ergo rerum, quae est entium veritas, in sua puri
inattingibilis est et per omnes philosophosinvestigata, sed per neminem, uti est, reperta
as individuated in each man; we can, to a degree, know the form of man as

species; but 'that unindividuated humanity which is the exemplar and idea
of the individuated, and, as it were, its form and truth' cannot be known
because it is the Infinite Form itself, because it is an absolute identified with
God.65 Truth is one, an indivisible entity. Truth is God. Therefore, an object,
which is itself a mirror and image of God, can only be known in the Word
of God.66 The result is scepticism: 'nihil perfecte homo noscere poterit ...
finis enim scientiae Deo tantum reconditus est. ,.'67 Our finite mind stands
to truth in the same relation as possibility to necessity or, in the Cardinal's
favorite image, as the polygon to the circle: it ceaselessly approaches it but
never reaches it.
Human knowledge, then, can only be a series of conjectural images or
similitudes of a God whose wisdom dwells in altissimis, behind that high
wall which separates it from all that can possibly be said or thought about
it. It is these images ? the result of the intellect's effort to grasp an
incomprehensible and unattainable object ? which define the content of
human wisdom. They are in the area of vision rather than of reason, of mys
tical theology rather than philosophy. They answer Cusanus' prayer in
the De visione Dei : 4 Teach me, Lord, how I can conceive that to be possible
which I perceive to be necessary.'68 Theologically necessary; rationally im
possible. Since we cannot pose a question about God without presupposing
the thing questioned,69 we must at once admit the ultimate impossibility
of a rational answer; and since Wisdom is the Word of God and the Form
of forms, the essence of the essence of all things, it too is unattainable. One
can only say that the sign of a progress in comprehension is precisely a fuller
comprehension of the incomprehensibility of the object ? this is learned
ignorance;70 or, more positively, that although the goal is unattainable, one
can yet attain it unattainably.
De Genesi (Petzelt 267): 'Manifestum est igitur neque in parte neque in toto posse aliquid
quidditatis per hominem attingi.'
65 De visione Dei 9 (P 103r). Gf. Apologia Doctae ignorantiae (H. II 11.28-12.3).
66 De mente 3 (H V 56.22-23): ' Et cum Verbum Dei sit praecisio omnis nominis nominabilis,
solum in Verbo omnia et quodlibet sciri posse constat.'
67 Apologia Doctae ignorantiae (H II 3.15-17). Cf. De docta ignorantia 1.17 (H I 35.5-8)
and Stadelmann, Vom Geist des ausgehenden Mittelalters 44-65.
68 De visione Dei 17 (P fol. 108r); Apologia Doctae ignorantiae (H II 13.4ff).
69 De sapientia 2 (H V 26.11-14): 'Omnis quaestio de Deo praesupponit quaesitum, et
id est respondendum, quod in omni quaestione de Deo quaestio praesupponit; nam Deus in
omni terminorum significatione significatur, licet sit insignificabilis. '
70 Sermon Tu quis es (Basel 354): ' Et intellectualis natura, quae ipsum esse seit & incom
prehensibilem: tanto se reperit perfectiorem, quanto seit ipsum magis incomprehensibilem.
Incomprehensibilis enim, hac s?ientia ignorantiae acceditur, '
362 TRADITIO
Unattainable attainment is best achieved (on the principles of revelation

and with the aid of grace) by a method Cusanus calls Pythagorica inquisitio,
a number mysticism which theologizes mathematics by the use of the concept
of infinity. By manipulating the rational and mundane figures of geometry
in this way, Cusanus thinks that the intellect can, in fact, achieve a partial
image, a partial comprehension of an infinite form which itself remains in
comprehensible in its plenitude. The true and certain concept of the circle,
for example, is a rational image. Using this as its point of departure, the
intellect, by the application of the principle of the coincidence of contraries,
attempts to achieve a less inadequate image of the infinite. The paradox
of the coincidentia oppositorum, applied to the rational image of the circle,
reveals that the angle of curvature of a circle diminishes as its diameter in
creases. At infinity, that is at a rationally inconceivable limit, the infinite
circumference will become an infinite line and thus coincide with the dia
meter. Similarly the point will coincide with the line or the center of
the circle with its circumference.71 The same result follows by beginning
with a triangle. At infinity its three sides are infinite straight lines; but these,
in fact, coalesce into one infinite line because a plurality of infinite lines is
impossible. Similarly for a rectangle, pentagon or any other figure. Every
geometrical figure at infinity coincides with an infinite line.72
We have achieved here symbolically, beyond the simple oppositions of
natural reason, an intellectual image, relative and conjectural, of the divine
and infinite Form which is God. This image is the infinite straight line, the
actus infinitus and the form of all possible figures. For God too is an absolute
Rectitude; and as the universal Exemplar He has the same relation to all
created things as the infinite line ? if such a line were possible ? has to
all figures. Just as the infinite line necessarily envelops all figurable figures
because it engenders them and because at infinity they all resolve themselves
into the simplicity of an infinite line, so does the absolute Rectitude, since
the infinite Form is the immediate root of all forms, envelop all things that
can be formed and their species. God and an infinite line have this in common:
both are the Exemplar, Model, Precision, Truth, Measure, the Justice,
Goodness and Perfection of all that exists or can exist.73
71 De sapienta 2 (H V 35.8ff.); De docta ignorantia 1.21 (H I 43.10-17).

73 Ibid. (36.18-37.12); De docta ignorantia 1.14 (H I 28.3-8).
78 Ibid. (36.5-12; 38.1-19); De docta ignorantia I 17 (H I 33.14-15). This is the same ascent
from the wisdom revealed in the sensible world to Wisdom itself whose stages Cusanus
described in the De venatione sapientiae 11 (P 205r): ' ...tr?s sunt regiones sapientiae. Prima:
in qua ipsa reperitur vti est aeternaliter. Secunda: in qua reperitur in perp?tua similitudine.
Tertia: in qua in temporali fluxu similitudinis lucet a remotis/
An infinite line is therefore a relative and conjectural intellectual image

of the infinite Form which is the Word of God. It is more. Since every form
able form can be reduced to it, it is the only adequate intellectual image of
the infinite Form possible in this life. The Word of God is divine Wisdom.
This image of it forms the content of human wisdom. The Word of God is
incomprehensible. This image of it is man's comprehension of the incom
prehensible. Human wisdom is the partial comprehension by an illuminated
intellect of the infinite Form which is an incomprehensible God.74
But the sweetest flower of partial comprehension is still to illuminate even
more clearly than before the final incomprehensibility of the divine object.
Cusanus points his conclusion in a beautiful passage:
This knowledge of its incomprehensibility is the most joyful and desirable
comprehension, not as it relates to the comprehender, but to the loveliest
treasure of his life. For if any man should love anything because it were
lovable, he would be glad that in the lovable there should be found in
finite and inexpressible causes of love. And this is the lover's most joyful
comprehension, when he comprehends the incomprehensible loveliness
of the thing beloved; for he would not rejoice to love any second loved
object, that were comprehensible, as much as when it appears that the
loveliness of the thing beloved is utterly unmeasurable, undetermined
and wholly incomprehensible. This is the most joyful comprehension
of the incomprehensible and lovable learned ignorance: to know partially
and yet to have no perfect knowledge.75
VI
Nicholas of Cusa makes three fundamental assertions about the meaning
of wisdom: wisdom is a knowledge of divine things; * divine things' mus
be understood in a Christian sense; wisdom is not naturally acquired; it is
gift of grace.
These assertions, except the first, distinguish Cusa's idea of wisdom from
those of the ancients. To define wisdom as the knowledge of divine things
was a commonplace of classical philosophy. For Plato, wisdom was the con
templation of the intelligible, immutable, eternal and divine.76 Aristotle said
that wisdom is any science which deals with 4 divine objects' or with
74 Ibid. (38.20-39.3): ' Sic nunc habes id, quod in aeterna sapientia contemplari coneeditur,
ut intuearis omnia in simplicissima rectitudine verissime, praecisissime, inconfuse et per
fectissime, licet medio aenigmatico, sine quo in hoc mundo Dei visio esse nequit, quousque
concesserit Deus, ut absque aenigmate nobis visibilis reddatur. Et haec est facilitas diffi
cilium sapientiae, quam pro tua ferventia et devotione Deus in dies tibi et mihi clariorem
quaeso faciat, quousque nos in gloriosam fruitionem veritatis transf?r?t aeternaliter reman
suros. Amen.'
w Ibid. (I 12.15-13.7).
Repub, 5,22; 478 E - 480 A; 7,3: 517 B-C; Protagoras 352 D,
364 TRADITIO
'remarkable, admirable and divine things.'77 When Cusanus says the same
thing, therefore, he is echoing antiquity. But at the same time, he is doing
two other things. Negatively, he rejects those classical definitions which
make wisdom a moral virtue, an ars vivendi, as Cicero put it,78 and those
which include human things in the content of wisdom (that of the Stoics,
for example: wisdom is the knowledge of all things divine and human and
their causes). 79 Positively, he Christianizes the meaning of wisdom by making
it one of the divine names, that attribute of divine substance by which all
things were created, and by identifying it with the second Person of
the Trinity. Divine wisdom is Christ. Human wisdom is knowledge of Him,
a Christian insight indistinguishable from religion. For the ancients, finally,
wisdom was a naturally acquired human perfection. Cusanus teaches that
one becomes wise not by any natural light but by an illuminated partici
pation in the divine light.
Nicholas of Cusa, of course, was in no way responsible for these trans
formations. They were largely the work of the Fathers, especially Augustine,80
and formed part of Cusanus' general intellectual inheritance. It will not
do, however, to say simply that his idea of wisdom is medieval and tra
ditional. It is; but it was also a reaction against another medieval conception
of wisdom fairly typical of European thought in the thirteenth century:
the Thomist.
In its major lines Augustine's conception of wisdom dominated the Middle
Ages until the Aristotelian revival of the late twelfth century. From the
Sapientia of the German nun Hrotsvitha to St. Anselm, Abelard and the
prologues of Otto of Freising's Two Cities its principal assertions were faith
fully reproduced: the identification of wisdom and Christ; the dualistic op
position of divine and human wisdom, 'our' wisdom and that of the phil
osophers; the definition of wisdom as a fundamentally Christian insight, a
knowledge of the Christian God and love of Him; the insistence that wisdom
is a gift of grace unattainable by the natural man. Only in the thirteenth
century was this conception modified in important ways. Under the in
fluence of Aristotle's Metaphysics one school of scholastic theology, that
associated with the names of Albertus Magnus and Aquinas, replaced Au
77 Metaph. 1.2: 983a.6-7; Eth. Nie. 6.7: 1141b. 6.

78 De finibus 1.13.42.
79 Sextus, Aduersus physicos 1.13; Cicero, De off. 2.2.5.
80 On Augustine's idea of wisdom: E. Gilson, Introduction ? l'?tude de saint Augustin
(3rd. ed. Paris 1949) 140-163; H.-I. Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique
(Paris 1937) 368-76 and 561-69; M. Schmaus, Die psychologische Trinit?tslehre des hl. Au
gustinus (M?nsterische Beitr?ge zur Theologie 11; 1927) 285-91; F. Edward Cranz, 'Saint
Augustine and Nicholas of Cusa in the Tradition of Western Thought/ Speculum 28 (1953)
306-310.
NICHOLAS OF CUSA'S IDEA OF WISDOM 365
gustine's dualisms by a temporary harmony, rehabilitating a variety of

naturally acquired wisdom and crowning it with a wisdom revealed by God.
The result was to make metaphysics and natural theology a second respect
able variety of wisdom and to emphasize significantly man's natural ability
to acquire wisdom without the aid of grace.
Aquinas recognized two legitimate varieties of wisdom: metaphysics, a
knowledge of divine things acquired lamine naturalis rationis, and theology,
a revealed knowledge of divine things. Theology is, of course, the nobler
science. 'Unde sacra doctrina maxime dicitur sapientia. ' But metaphysics
is also properly called wisdom. The two sciences are independent but not
opposed. On the contrary, just as nature is perfected and not destroyed
by grace, so also is there no hostility between human and divine wisdom.
Augustine had refused to recognize a non-Christian wisdom. He established
a Christian sapientia, while opposed to it, to be used perhaps but not enjoyed,
was classical scientia. Aquinas recognizes both a Christian sapientia and
beside it, inferior but autonomous, a human wisdom more or less identified
with Aristotle's metaphysics.81
Aquinas' definition, however, was only one of several even in the thir
teenth century. It became more atypical as time went on. Most late medieval
thinkers tended to upset his delicate balance of divine and human wisdom
by suppressing the human term of his equation and limiting wisdom to
a grace-given knowledge of God. From one point of view this tendency is
intelligible as a disintegration of the more balanced, more humane high
scholastic doctrine; but from another it is a return to Augustine and a positive
reassertion of positions long fundamental to earlier medieval doctrines of
wisdom and most characteristic of them. The essential medieval idea of
wisdom ? that wisdom is a Revelational knowledge of the Christian God ?
was never more strongly or eloquently stated than at the moment it had
begun to be replaced by more novel conceptions.
The best such statement was made by Nicholas of Cusa. Its aim, like that
of his philosophy as a whole, was to defend faith, intuition and the mystic's
vision by narrowing the operating realm of natural reason. Docta ignorantia
vanquished the * proud spirit of reason. '82 The coincidence of contraries was
81 Sum. theol. l.q.l art. 1 and 6; 2.1 q.57 art. 2; In Isaiam prophetam expositio 3.1; In
Boet. de Trin. q. 2 art. 2, resp. ad 1. Gf. Sister M. Rose Emmanuella Brennan, The Intellectual
Virtues according to the Philosophy of St. Thomas (Catholic Univ. of America Press 1941)
44-52 (and the literature there cited) and M.-D. Chenu, La Th?ologie comme science au
XIII9 si?cle (2nd ed. Paris 1943) 107.
88 De visione Dei 9 (P 103v). Cf. J. Uebinger, ' Der Begriff docta ignorantia in seiner ge
schichtlichen Entwicklung,' Archiv f?r Geschichte der Philosophie 8 (1894) 10-25; E. Van
steenberghe, Autour de la docte ignorance: Une controverse sur la th?ologie mystique au
XVe si?cle (M?nster 1914); and L. Baur, Nicolaus Cusanus and Ps. Dionysius im Lichte
366 TRADITIO
a conscious frontal attack on scholastic rationalism and the 'sect of Aris

totelians.'83 The venatio sapientiae is a mystical theology. Cusanus' fun
damental contribution to the history of the idea of wisdom was to keep wisdom
free of any trace of secularization, secularization by scholastic rationalism,
on the one hand, and an increasingly influential humanism, on the other.
For it is their secular assumptions which make the interest of novel con
ceptions of wisdom arising in Italian humanist circles in the later fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries and in the north of Europe in the sixteenth. The
process was the reverse of the Church Fathers' Christianization of wisdom.
The idea was gradually secularized, drained, that is, of its religious meanings
and disassociated from Christian revelation by a conscious return to the
antique. Where Cusanus, and medieval thought generally, had confined
wisdom to a knowledge of divine things, an increasing number of Renaissance
humanists returned to Ciceronian definitions and called wisdom a knowledge
of all things divine and human and their causes84 or transformed wisdom from
a speculative to a moral virtue.85 And even when the traditional Platonic
and Aristotelian definitions were repeated, they were given meanings far
closer to the original than medieval restatements of them had been.86
der Zitate und Randbemerkungen des Cusanus (Gusanus-Texte 3.1; Sb. Akad. Heidelberg
1941, Abh. 4) 84.
83 Apologia Doctae ignorantiae (H II 6.7-12). Gf. Ernst Hoffman, 'Die Vorgeschichte
der cusanischen coincidentia oppositorum,' prefacing Karl Fleischmann's translation ?ber
den Beryll (Leipzig 1938), and Paul Wilpert, 'Das Problem der coincidentia oppositorum
in der Philosophie des Nikolaus von Cues,' in Humanismus, Mystik und Kunst ed. J. Koch
39-55.
84 See among others: Francesco Novati, Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati (Rome 1891-1905)
III 458.7-11: 'nonne legisti apud Ciceronem nostrum sapientiam esse rerum divinarum et
humanarum scientiam cognitionemque, que cuiusque rei causa sit?'; Reuchlin, Breuiloquus
vocabularius (Basel,. J. Amerbach 1478): '...sapientia est rerum divinarum et humanarum
cognitio'; Guillaume Bud?, De philologia libri II (Paris, Badius Ascensius 1532) 5.5: ' Ita
haec quam graui nomine ac specioso vocamus philosophiam quasi Studium sapientiae, quod
rerum vtique humanarum intelligentiam diuinarumque consectatur, & praefert, sapientiae
quidem titulum sibi tueri potest...'; Sir Thomas Elyot, Bibliotheca Eliothae. Eliotis Librairie
ed. Thomas Cooper (London 1548): ' the knowlage of thynges diuine and humaine, wysedome,
sapience'; Louis Le Caron, Les Dialogues (Paris 1556) 54v: '...sagesse, laquelle elle dit estre
la congnoissance des choses diuines & humaines & de leurs causes...'.
85 For example, Erasmus, ready as usual with the memorable phrase, defined wisdom as
virtus cum eruditione liberali coniuncta (Liber apologeticus... in quo refelluntur rationes inepte
barbarorum contra poesim et literaturam secularem pugnantium, in Albert Hyma, The Youth
of Erasmus [Univ. of Michigan Press 1930] Appendix B, 315); Cardanus said it was bene ac
diu vivere (De sapientia 1, in Opera omnia, ed. Carolus Sponsius [Lyons 1663] I 497 col. 1);
and Charron completed the identification of wisdom and prudence: 'Ainsi nous disons que
sagesse est preude prudence, c'est-?-dire preud'hommie avec habilit?, probit? bien advis?e'
(De la Sagesse [Paris 1836] 702).
86 I have in mind the Aristotelian definitions of Bruni (Hans Baron, Leonardo Bruni
Finally, whatever their definitions, most innovating varieties of Renaissance

wisdom were autonomous. Wisdom is acquired, that is, by man's own un
aided efforts and describes a natural human perfection.87 This is at once a
return to the central characteristic of all classical definitions of wisdom and
a tacit rejection of the Christian assumptions which had transformed the
significance of medieval re-statements of those definitions.
The relation of Cusanus' idea of wisdom to the speculation on wisdom
of Italian Quattrocento humanism is thus a reasonably clear case of tradition
versus innovation. Its relation to the medieval past, on the other hand, is
more problematical. From one point of view his basic assertion that wisdom
is a revealed knowledge of divine things both repeats the most common
medieval definition of wisdom and represents a typical late medieval re
action against the kind of theological rationalism symbolized by the work
of St. Thomas. But from another point of view Cusanus' idea of wisdom is
less typical. In the narrow context of the history of the idea of wisdom the
formulas Cusanus uses to work out his traditional definition are unusual.
Many of these formulas, to be sure, were drawn from the Pseudo-Dionysius,
the theologians of the School of Chartres, Eckhart, Lull, and the mystics
of the Brethren of the Common Life. But what Cusanus has done is to
take conceptions which these thinkers had applied more generally to God
and use them to expand and systematize a traditional definition of wisdom.
Ruysbroeck, for example, had said that our knowledge of God is a
comprehension of the incomprehensible, Lull had made ingenious use of
mathematical symbolism in theology, and the theologians of the School of
Chartres had analyzed God as absolute equality and the Form of Forms.
But Nicholas of Cusa remains original in restating his traditional definition
of wisdom in terms of these formulas, in defining wisdom as the unattainable
attainment of the unattainable and the joyful comprehension of the in
comprehensible, in the metaphysical bravura he brings to bear on wisdom
as absolute aequalitas or as a knowledge of the Form of forms, in his
application of mathematical symbolism to wisdom and in singling out an
infinite straight line as the best image of wisdom attainable in this life. The
result is a curious kind of innovation in which originality consists in using
some of the odder formulas of medieval mysticism to push a traditional
Aretino humanistisch-philosophische Schriften [Berlin and Leipzig 1928] 29.25-26; 39.8-16)

and Pontano (Opera omnia [Florence 1520] II 61r ff.) and the Platonic one of Cardinal Sa
doleto in his De laudibus philosophiae.
87 The point is made in Bovillus' De sapiente, Elyot's Of The knowledg which maketh a
wise man: A disputacion Platonike, by Sadoleto, Vives, Erasmus, Cardanus and others.
Charron put it perfectly when he called wisdom the 'excellence and perfection of man as
man...' in the preface to the 1604 edition of De la Sagesse.
368 TRADITIO
definition of wisdom to its furthest and most extreme consequences. The

substance is old; the formulas in which it is expressed are novel in
this context.
These formulas are not only novel; they were without influence on the
subsequent history of the idea of wisdom. They do not appear in the works
of the Florentine Neo-Platonists, nor in Renaissance Aristotelians like Bruni,
Pontano and Pomponazzi. German humanism was not influenced by him.
Conrad Celtis printed a bit of the De non aliud along with his Carmen seculare,
but there is no trace of Cusa's ideas in his own brief remarks on
wisdom. 'Pre-reformers' like John Colet, the brilliant circle around Lef?vre
d'Etaples in France, Wesel Gansfort and the young Luther all say ,that
wisdom is a revealed knowledge of divine things; but they say it in the words
of Paul and Augustine, not in Nicholas of Cusa's. Even Lef?vre, Cusanus'
editor, does not echo his ideas on wisdom, but moves fr?m a Thomist to a
Pauline definition. Charles de Bouelles, finally, who knew Cusanus' works
well and was particularly influenced by the De coniecturis, created in the
De sapiente an ideal of the wise man very different from Cusa's both in its
formulas and its spirit. As for the most important works on wisdom later
in the sixteenth century, Vives' De sapientia, Sir Thomas Elyot's Of The
knowledg which maketh a wise man, Cardinal Sadoleto's De laudibus Phi
losophiae, Cardanus' De sapientia and Charron's De la Sagesse, there is no
evidence that their authors had ever heard of Cusanus' definition.
This is an odd situation. Can one go further and draw from the isolated
position of Cusanus' idea of wisdom in the history of that idea, a general
ization about the position of his philosophy as a whole in the tradition of
European intellectual history? Perhaps its fundamental assertions will then
be seen to represent that combination of scepticism (nihil perfecte homo
noscere poterit, as Cusanus himself put it) and mysticism so typical of late
medieval thought; while in their peculiarly Cusanian formulations they are
isolated in their century and without significant influence on the future.
Nicholas of Cusa's originality has thus no strictly historical significance.
His accomplishment was to state traditional ideas with provocative
extremism. Hence, perhaps, the surprising smallness of his influence on
the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. His success was to make his life
a pilgrimage in the eye of God; and the inscription on his tomb, across the
nave of San Pietro in Vincoli from Michelangelo's Moses accurately measures
it: 'Dilexit Deum, timuit ac veneratus est, ac illi soli servi vit.'
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NICHOLAS OF CUSA'S IDEA OF WISDOM

Author(s): EUGENE F. RICE Jr.

is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Traditio

By EUGENE F. RICE, Jr.

1 Edmond Vansteenberghe, Le Cardinal Nicolas de Cues (1401-1464) (Lille 1920) remains

replies, 'there is no word outside of wisdom. The word of a man perfectly

40 Apologia Doctae ignorantiae (H II 15.10-13). Cf. De coniecturis 1.7-10 (Petzelt 129-138).

a literally infinite way.44 For Nicholas of Cusa, as for Augustine and

44 De coniecturis 1.13 (Petzelt 145-46).

to a knowledge and love of God.48 Cusanus' statements are as unequivoca

Three elements are thus essential in Nicholas of Cusa's formulation of

The paradox of a virtue which is at once unattainably

66 De visione Dei (P 113r).

or similitudes of things.58 Visible objects, moreover, have their roots in G

68 De mente 3 (H V 57.18-22); De docta ignorantia 1.11.5 (H I 22.4-6).

as individuated in each man; we can, to a degree, know the form of man as

Unattainable attainment is best achieved (on the principles of revelation

71 De sapienta 2 (H V 35.8ff.); De docta ignorantia 1.21 (H I 43.10-17).

An infinite line is therefore a relative and conjectural intellectual image

77 Metaph. 1.2: 983a.6-7; Eth. Nie. 6.7: 1141b. 6.

gustine's dualisms by a temporary harmony, rehabilitating a variety of

a conscious frontal attack on scholastic rationalism and the 'sect of Aris

Finally, whatever their definitions, most innovating varieties of Renaissance

Aretino humanistisch-philosophische Schriften [Berlin and Leipzig 1928] 29.25-26; 39.8-16)

definition of wisdom to its furthest and most extreme consequences. The

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