NEW SOLIDARITY

July 11, 1980

Page 6

The Neglected Importance of NICHOLAUS OF CUSA

by William Jones Part II "It is an urgent necessity to revive the life and work of the great 15th century Cardinal Nicholaus of Cusa," wrote William Jones in Part I of this series. The cancerous growth of irrational "charismatic" cults masquerading as Christianity today, like the "flagellants" and other bestial practices of the early 15th century, relies on a seeming opposition between science and religion. But in the figure of Cardinal Cusa (14011464) the Neoplatonic thinker who played a central role in leading Europe out of the morass of the 14th-century Black Death and into the Golden Renaissance, "natural science" and "spiritual science" were unified. As a young man, the German-born Nicholaus of Cusa intervened in the conciliar movement that was attempting to re-establish the shattered political and religious institutions of Europe at the Council of Basel. His Concordantia Catholica of the early 1430s was a program for a community of emerging nation-states based on the principle of utilizing the capacities of the entire citizenry in enriching society through scientific progress. Later, as an emissary for the papacy to Greece, Cusa wrote his Docta Ignorantia (Learned Ignorance), a major epistemological work. Under this paradoxical title Cusa showed how the knowledge of one's non-knowledge (the falseness of particular knowledge) provides the direction which thought must take in order to arrive at new knowledge. Learned ignorance was thus
Cardinal Nicholaus of Cusa (1401-1464) in a contemporary portrait in an altarpiece by a Flemish artist.

a new pedagogy for demonstrating what Plato termed "the hypothesis of the higher hypothesis." Church Reform The years immediately following the publication of Docta Ignorantia were spent by Cusa in diplomatic work for the pope in Germany. The ultrademocratic conciliar faction at Basel, undeterred by the consolidation of the papacy, continued to agitate for years, trying to gain support from the German princes. They were trying to accomplish what Martin Luther was to do 100 years laterunite with key sections of the feudal oligarchy and destroy the papacy as a potential instrument of the city-building, Platonic faction. Cusa spent many years in Germany countering this agitation and intervened at numerous meetings of the German Diet to present the views of the papacy. His mission was ultimately successful; the princes signed a concordat with the pope in 1447. One year later, Cusa became a Cardinal of the Church. Shortly thereafter the humanists won a second victory within the Roman Catholic Church. Thomas Parentucelli, formerly librarian to Cosimo de' Medici in Florence, was elevated to the papacy, taking the name Nicholas V. The new pope's immediate task was to consolidate the cultural and scientific renaissance in Italy and use the Church apparat to spread this Neoplatonic ferment beyond Italian borders. Cusa was named papal legate to Germany, where he was given plenipotentiary powers to launch the first major Reformation. Before debarking for Germany, Cusa published a dialogue called Idiota (The Layman), in which he attempted to make his thought more accessible to the educated layers of his time and pinpointed his early concept of learned ignorance" as the basis of all scientific activity. The dialogue takes place between the layman, presented as a skilled craftsman, and several "learned" philistines, including an orator, a philosopher, and a theologian. The layman, who continually comments tongue-in-cheek about his simple origins and his limited knowledge, proves himself the wiser when the debate turns to questions of metaphysics, and the three interlocutors are astonished at his learning. When they try to discover the source of the layman's great knowledge, he points out that his activity as a craftsman (who makes spoons, solves geometry problems, etc) actually transforms nature ("a book written

by God") and thus allows him to discover the laws of nature (to read the secrets implanted in nature by God). The layman's knowledge of the "conception of the conception" as Cusa terms ita phrase most evocative of Plato's "hypothesis of the higher hypothesis"is simply the self-conscious reflection on his own creative activity. None of Cusa's educated contemporaries would have missed the republican political implications of the Cardinal's attribution of this unique world-outlook, characteristic of the Neoplatonic scientist, to the mere "layman." In 1451 Cusa left for the north on a two-year journey through Germany and the Low Countries to conduct his religious reforms on the basis of the epistemology he had developed in his books. The total breakdown of political authority in the wake of economic devastation had produced a widespread erosion of morality. Concubinage and simony (the buying and selling of ecclesiastical offices) were rampant among the clergy. Under the direction of the 15th century's ancestors of the "Aquarians"an alliance of the Dominican Order with the feudal nobility and allied taxfarming stratathe population was inured to starvation and plague by alternate orgies of Carnival, where people were briefly permitted to indulge all of their sensual lusts, and Lent, the lengthy period of self-denial and selfpunishment that followed. The corrupted Church not only tolerated this situation, but profited from it. Cusa's reforms were twofold. First he reasserted Church prohibitions against simony and concubinage, and where he had the power to do so, removed abbots and bishops who refused to reform their practices. Secondly and more fundamentally, he tried to eliminate superstitious and pagan practices by introducing scientific concepts to the Christian laity. In one parish where Cusa applied this method, the sick were being brought to a church for "faith healing" by a priest who sprinkled them with holy water, Cusa intervened with a lesson on basic hygiene and physiology to show how the body really works and can be healed. In another case, local clergy were exploiting the "miracle" of a "bleeding Host" to produce hysteria among the population and, not coincidentally, doing a brisk business in religious curios. Cusa explained to the congregation that the reddish spots being produced in the communion wafers were chemical changes due to dampness in the church. The great Cardinal also insisted that prayers be

translated into the vernacular language so that people could understand what they were saying and thus educate themselves in virtue through prayer, rather than babbling in Latin which was meaningless to them. He condemned any cult of the saints, including Mary, that detracted from the worship of the one God, the transfinite principle of all Being.

The battle for a reform of the Church based on scientific reason, as seen by two 15th century artists Nicholaus of Cusa influenced: Left, a wicked monk relieves the stupefied victim of his purse in this detail of the Flemish painter Bosch's "The Shell Game," often identified as an allegory of heresy. Right, St. Augustine, the greatest Neoplatonic of the early Church Fathers, is shown as a master of physics and geometry in this painting by Botticelli (detail: the book behind Augustine is open to a proof of the Pythagorean theorem). Botticelli's image of the churchman was painted for the family of explorer Amerigo Vespucci during their close association with the Florentine cartographer Paolo Toscanelli, who was in turn one of Cusa's most intimate friends.

The thrust of Cusa's reforms was to make the process of perfection in virtue and knowledge the guideline of Christian morality, rather than adherence to fixed religious practices that were often irrationalist. In this, he was carrying forward the educational work of his own first teachers, the Brethren of the Common Life, while raising it to a higher epistemological level. He appointed fellow former Common Life pupil, John Busch, to carry out a

thoroughgoing reform of the monasteries in Germany. Later, Cusa set up a scholarship fund for poor students to enable them to attend the schools of the Brethren. During his legation to Germany, Cusa also started to build a hospital at his home town of Kues (near Trier) where he later placed his personal library. To this day, the foundation functions as a center for the dissemination of Cusa's ideas. Had the Cardinal from Kues received adequate backing from the Church in Germany to complete his reforms, a generation later Martin Luther would have been treated as an isolated kook. Germany could have been spared the ravages of the Lutheran revolt that sowed the seeds of the Thirty Years War and postponed Germany's emergence as a nation-state for three centuries. An Ecumenical Alliance with Islam In 1453 the internal moral decay of Western Christendom that Cusa had fought throughout his life was matched by an even greater, external threat: the barbarous Ottoman Turks conquered the last bastion of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople in that year, with the aid of treacherous allies from within Latin Christendom. Now they were poised for an invasion of central Europe. It was to avoid precisely this strategic danger that Cusa, 15 years earlier, had led the papacy's diplomatic efforts to reunite the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches, catalyzing the Platonic Renaissance of Florence in the process, through his collaboration with the greatest living Greek philosopher, Gemisthos Plethon. Left with sole responsibility for defending Christendom and the Neoplatonic tradition in Christianity, the papacyincluding such Cusa allies as Nicholas V and later his close friend Pius IIhad little choice but to attempt to pull together a Western military force against the Turk. But Cusa saw that this would not be adequate for precisely the same reasons that Latin Christendom had not been able to aid the Greeks before the fall of Constantinople. The oligarchs and their clerical allies in the West had a secret alliance with the top leadership of the Ottoman Turks, who were dominated by followers of the antiscience thug, Al-Ghazali. The situation was strikingly analogous to the collaboration today between the "Islamic fundamentalists" of Khomeini and "born-again Christian" Jimmy Carter.

Cusa's approach was to apply the same method of eliciting reason from his readers that had been so effective in combatting the pseudo-Christian cults of Western Europe. In 1453 he penned the dialogue De Pace Fidei (On the Peace of the Faiths), drawing upon his extensive knowledge of the great Neoplatonic thinkers of the Muslim religion, Ibn-Sina (Avicenna) and alFarabi. This work elaborates the basis for ecumenical cooperation among the three great monotheistic religions, Christianity, Islam and Judaism, including several national variants. It is well worth study today, and not only as the basis for an understanding among humanists in each of those faiths of their common, Neoplatonic roots. De Pace Fidei may be considered one of the first, and best, of history's programs for "East-West detente." The arguments are presented in a masterful dialogue imagined as occurring in heaven. The World of Godthe Logosinterrogates philosophers from the various religions and nations to discover the basic tenets of their beliefs. As the celestial discussion proceeds, it becomes evident that the Neoplatonic currents of the religions all adhere to the principle that there is one, and only one principle of lawfulness governing the universe (one God) and that it is man's task to strive to attain an ever greater knowledge of that lawfulness (to search for wisdom). The dialogue reaches a high point around the theme of consubstantiality, which Cusa had dealt with in his earlier interventions into Western Christendom. In Cusa's rendering of this concept, the unity of the human and divine must be expressible as an actual infinite, that is, as a real historical person through whom individual human beings partake of the fullness of the divine (Christ). Cusa was confident that the Neoplatonic thinkers of Islam could accept the doctrine of Christ because in principle they agreed with the notion known in Christian doctrine as "consubstantiality." In contrast to such rabid Aristotelians (and nominal "Christians") as Ignatius Loyola and Martin Luther, the Muslim Neoplatonists also believed that man shares in the creative activity of God, rather than being a blind follower in a preordained scheme of things. Cusa hoped to persuade Muslims and Turks that a political alliance based on shared belief in man's ability to master the laws of God's universe, and hence on a shared commitment to scientific progress, would be an effective guarantee of enduring peace, to the advantage of both Christendom and the Ottoman realm.

Cusa found an excellent opportunity to organize for that alliance in 1458, when his close friend Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini was elevated to the papacy and took the name Pius II. Pius quickly named Cusa Vicar-General of the Church, second in command to the pope himself, and brought him back to Rome from the diocese of Brixen. This was not only an opportunity but a relief: Cusa had been sent to Brixen, one of Europe's backwaters, to carry out reforms and had ended up the prisoner of an angry oligarch, Sigismond of the Tyrol. As Vicar-General, Cusa immediately opened up new channels to the Turks. He introduced the study of the Koran into the Roman Curia in order to work out a more detailed program for unity. He summarized these studies for the Pope, who used the summary to frame a famous letter to the Turkish Emperor in which Pius II proposed peaceful coexistence on ecumenical principles unfortunately, without success. Cusa was also appointed head of the committee to reform the papacy. His first and in many ways his most difficult target was the Curia itself, the bureaucratic apparatus attached to the papal court in Rome. For time immemorial, and despite the conciliar reforms and penetration by leading Platonic humanists, the Curia was a nesting place for the "Black Guelph" feudalist arm of the Italian and German oligarchy and its monetarist banking allies who fed off Peter's pence, the tithes of the Church, to build their speculative financial empire. Cusa authored one of his shorter works, the Reformatio Generalis, laying out as "General Reformation" a step by step program for creating in the entire Catholic hierarchy, including the Curia, a clear understanding of their role as shepherds for the body of the faithful. His model was the notion of the "guardian" laid out in Plato's Republic. Pius II, in his autobiographical Commentaries, relates the frustration Cusa encountered in attempting to educate members of the Curia to this necessity. Last Years: The 'Non-Other' The greatest accomplishment of Cusa's last years was undoubtedly his final attempt to grapple with the epistemological problems first elaborated years before in the Docta Ignorantia. Between the late 1430s, when he composed his treatise on "learned ignorance" in the heat of the battle for a Greek-Latin ecumenical Church

council, and his death in 1464, Cusa had developed the tool of the Platonic dialogue to express the notion of the self-developing universe in a variety of ways suited to ever-changing tactical circumstances. At the same time he published numerous pedagogical treatises on problems of geometry and physics, including some of the earliest descriptions of experimental science. Yet, his De Non Aliud (On the Non-Other) represents a peak in the edifice of his life's work. The concept of the Non-Other was undoubtedly stimulated by Cusa's reading of Plato's Parmenides, one of his favorites among the Platonic dialogues. Plato designates the distinction between the Same and the Other (or clearly distinguished concepts of identity and difference) as the basis for all discursive or formalized thought (for example, Aristotelian logic). As Plato himself made evident, such sharp distinctions fit well for a world of fixed relations, but fail when it is a question of describing the self-generating principle that underlies the seemingly "fixed" world of any particular moment. To designate such a principle, a term is needed that transcends the distinction between "same" and "other." If such a concept were found, Cusa reasoned, and it proved to be a principle defining itself as well as everything else (the universe) and yet not be encompassed or defined by anything in the universe except itself, then the existence of the "transfinite" would be proven, for thought as well as for being. To put it in philosophical terminology, it would be proven ontologically as well as epistemologically. Cusa found such a concept in what he termed the "Non-Other." It was another paradox like Cusa's "learned ignorance," but more farreaching in its implications. In the first place, the "Non-Other" defines itself, as is evident from Cusa's own expression: "The Non-Other is not other than the Non-Other." Here, the term "not other" is used as the means of defining the subject. In precisely this way, everything in the universe can be defined, for example: "x is not other than x," "y is not other than y," etc., where "x, y, z . . ." designate everything that exists in the universe. The Non-Other, however, cannot be defined by any single predicate or quality of the universe (x, y, z . . .) since each of these is distinguished from that which is other than it (x is distinguished from all that is not-x, or in other words, x is an "other" to not-x). This is obviously not the case for the

Non-Other as it cannot be juxtaposed to an "Other." It is thus definable only by itself and nothing else. This result was so important to Nicholaus of Cusa that he summarized it in epigrammatic form, a thing he never did with any of his other writings. In his last writing, The Search for Wisdom, where he summarized his life's work, he called the Non-Other "Posse Facere," which means, "the ability to create." That transformation in the term eliminated any possible ambiguity as to the nature of this transfinite principle Cusa had singled out: it was continuous creation. The Turkish Problem The growing danger of a Turkish military invasion overshadowed the work of these final years in Rome. The failure of the ecumenical peace overtures made military defense of Europe vital as the Ottoman armies under Mohammad the Conqueror, himself a fanatical follower of "Islamic fundamentalist" ideologue al-Ghazali, were making steady advances into eastern and central Europe. But the forces of Latin Christendom were fragmented and wavering. As mentioned earlier, a faction of the Black Guelph nobility was playing the 15th century version of the "China Card" and had secret military agreements to aid the barbarous Turks, as a flank in their battle to destroy the citybuilding faction in the West. Other European rulers were passively watching the Turkish advance, unwilling to move until their own territories were directly threatened. Above all, the internecine squabbles among oligarchs, endemic to Europe in this period when nation-states had only begun to emerge, marred the potential for a unified defense. Cusa and Pius II worked feverishly to bring together the forces needed to launch a Crusade against the Ottoman Empire, but with little result. The old institutions of Christendom, the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy, were highly questionable as a basis for political unity, irreparably discredited as they were by the Black Death and the Hapsburg family's takeover of control of the Empire. Cusa's thoughts between 1458 and 1464 were turning toward a new constellation. In a letter to the Spanish Cardinal Carvajal, Cusa suggested that a proposal be made to the French King Louis XI, the Common Life-trained monarch who was forging France as a nation-state. If Louis would organize the

Crusade against the Turks, he would be made the secular leader of Christendom. But the pope, an intransigent Italian nationalist, rejected the idea, fearing a dominant French presence in divided Italy. Thus a potential 15th century model for the recent alliance between President Giscard's French republic and the Vatican on Middle East peace initiatives never came into being. Both Pius II and his Vicar-General died shortly after, in the midst of preparations for the Crusade. The seminal work of Cusa in geometry and physics and his advances in epistemology set the stage for the highly fruitful succeeding generation of the Golden Renaissance affecting Leonardo da Vinci, Erasmus, and many others. In the late 1500s, it became the basis for modern mathematical physics, the groundwork of which was laid by Johannes Kepler, Giordano Bruno and a little later by Leibniz. Kepler was deeply moved by the writings of the man he called "the divine Cusanus." Giordano Bruno used the work of Cusa to demonstrate to his Jesuit persecutors, the spiritual descendants of the Dominican-oligarch alliance that had plagued Cusa that one of the greatest and most revered of all Churchmen had espoused the very same notions of a self-developing universe for which Bruno was accused of heresy. These giants of the late 16th century were followed in the 17th century by Leibniz, whose work is almost unthinkable without Cusa as a forerunner both in his scientific work per se and in the political framework of an ecumenical alliance of sovereign nation-republics that he saw as developing on the basis of scientific reason. Through Leibniz's impact on the American founding fathers, Cusa had a very important and generally unrecognized share in the founding of our republic. He may also have played a key role in the actual discovery of America, through his intimate friendship with the Florentine mathematician and cartographer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, who taught Amerigo Vespucci and provided the map of the globe Christopher Columbus used to chart his 1492 voyage. One direct result of Cusa's scientific researches is the reform of the calendar based on new astronomical data, which provided the basis for the Gregorian calendar we still use today. His greatest contribution was his lifelong campaign to combat the destruction of the mental powers of the population through cults, by

inculcating an understanding of the process by which scientific discoveries are developed in the guise of religious discourses. At the historical moment when modern nations first come into being, Cusa gave fresh content to the Neoplatonic principle that there is no discrepancy between "spiritual science" and "natural science," between the search for wisdom and an active commitment to human development. Man the scientist, the creator of new technologies, makes himself like a "second God" by the replication of God's distinguishing capability, as a Creator. America owes a neglected debt to the great Cardinal Nicholaus of Cusa. There is no better way to discharge it than by using his work today to tear the mask of "Christianity" off the antiprogress cults, and boldly create the community of sovereign republics based on scientific reason envisioned in his magnificent works.