A gloriously shining star in the sky of the thought-life of the Middle Ages is Nicholas Chrysippus of Cusa (at Trevis, 1401-1464). He stands upon the summit of the knowledge of his time. In mathematics he accomplished remarkable work. In natural science he may be described as the forerunner of Copernicus, for he took up the standpoint that the earth is a moving celestial body like others. He had already broken away from a view upon which even a hundred years later the great astronomer, Tycho Brahe, based himself, when he hurled against the teaching of Copernicus the sentence: “The earth is a gross, heavy mass inapt for movement; how, then, can Copernicus make a star of it and run it about in the air?” The same man who thus not only embraced all the knowledge of his time, but also extended it further, possessed in addition, in a high degree, the power of awakening this knowledge in the inner life, so that it not only illuminates the external world, but also mediates for man that spiritual life, which from the profounder depths of his soul he needs must long after.
If we compare Nicholas with such spirits as Eckhart or Tauler, we obtain a remarkable result. Nicholas is the scientific thinker, striving to lift himself from research about the things of the world on to the level of a higher perception; Eckhart and Tauler are the faithful believers, who seek the higher life from within the content of this faith. Eventually Nicholas arrives at the same inner life as Meister Eckhart; but the inner life of the former has a rich store of knowledge as its content.
The full significance of this difference becomes clear when we reflect that for the student of science the danger lies very near at hand of misunderstanding the scope of that species of knowing which enlightens us regarding the various special departments of knowledge. He can very readily be misled into believing that there really is only one single kind or mode of knowledge; and then he will either over- or under-rate this knowledge which leads us to the goal in the various special sciences. In the one case he will approach the subject-matter of the highest spiritual life as he would a problem in physics, and proceed to deal with it by means of concepts such as he would apply to gravitation or electricity. Thus, according as he believes himself to be more or less enlightened, the world will appear to him as a blindly working machine, or an organism, or as the teleological structure of a personal God: perhaps even as a form which is ruled and pervaded by a more or less clearly conceived “World-Soul.” In the other case he notes that the knowledge, of which alone he has any experience, is adapted only to the things of the sense-world; and then he will become a sceptic, saying to himself: We can know nothing about things which lie beyond the world of the senses. Our knowledge has a limit. For the needs of the higher life we have no choice but to throw ourselves blindly into the arms of faith untouched by knowledge. And for a learned theologian like Nicholas of Cusa, who was also a scientist, this second danger lay peculiarly near at hand. For he emerged, along the lines of his learned training, from Scholasticism,—the way of conceiving things which was dominant in scientific life within the Mediæval Church; a mode of thought that St. Thomas Aquinas (1227-1274), the “Prince of Scholastics,” had brought to its highest perfection. We must take this mode of conceiving things as the background, when we desire to portray the personality of Nicholas of Cusa.
Scholasticism is, in the highest degree, a product of human sagacity; and in it the logical capacity celebrated its highest triumphs. Any one who is striving to work out concepts in their sharpest, most clear-cut outlines, ought to go to the Scholastics for instruction. They afford us the High School for the technique of thinking. They possess an incomparable skill in moving in the field of pure thinking. It is easy to under-value what they were able to achieve in this field; for it is only with difficulty accessible to man as regards most departments of knowledge. The majority rise to its level only in the domains of numbers and calculation, and in reflecting upon the connection of geometrical figures.
We can count by adding in thought a unity to a number, without needing to call to our help sense-conceptions. We calculate also, without such conceptions, in the pure element of thought. In regard to geometrical figures, we know that they never perfectly coincide with any sensible perception. There is no such thing within sensible reality as an “ideal” circle. Yet our thinking concerns itself with the purely ideal circle. For things and processes which are more complicated than forms of number and space, it is more difficult to find the ideal counterparts. This has even led so far that it has been contended, from various sides, that in the separated departments of knowledge there is only so much of real science as there is of measuring and counting.
The truth about this is that most men are not capable of grasping the pure thought-element where it is no longer concerned with what can be counted or measured. But the man who cannot do that for the higher realms of life and knowledge, resembles in that respect a child, which has not yet learned to count otherwise than by adding one pea to another. The thinker who said there was just so much real science in any domain as there was mathematics in it, was not very much at home in the matter. One ought rather to demand that everything which cannot be measured or counted should be handled just as ideally as the forms of number and space. And the Scholastics in the fullest way did justice to this demand. They sought everywhere the thought-content of things, just as the mathematician seeks it in the field of what is measurable and countable.
In spite of this perfected logical art, the Scholastics attained only to a one-sided and subordinate conception of Knowledge. Their conception is this: that in the act of knowing, man creates in himself an image of what he is to know. It is obvious, without further discussion, that with such a conception of the knowing process all reality must be located outside of the knowing. For one can grasp, in knowing, not the thing itself, but only an image of that thing.
Also, in knowing himself man cannot grasp himself, but again, what he does know of himself is only an image of himself. It is entirely from out of the spirit of Scholasticism that an accurate student thereof[10] says: “Man has in time no perception of his ego, of the hidden ground of his spiritual being and life, ... he will never attain to beholding himself; for either, estranged for ever from God, he will find in himself only a fathomless, dark abyss, an endless emptiness, or else, made blessed in God, he will find on turning his gaze inwards just that very God, the sun of whose mercy is shining within him, whose image and likeness shapes itself in the spiritual traits of his nature.”
Whoever thinks like this about all knowing, has only such a conception of knowing as is applicable to external things. The sensible factor in anything always remains external for us; therefore we can only take up into our knowledge pictures of whatever is sensible in the world. When we perceive a colour or a stone, we are unable, in order to know the being of the colour or the stone, to become ourselves the colour or the stone. Just as little can the colour or the stone transform itself into a part of our own being. It may, however, be questioned whether the conception of such a knowing-process, wholly directed to what is external in things, is an exhaustive one.
For Scholasticism, all human knowing does certainly in the main coincide with this kind of knowing. Another admirable authority on Scholasticism[11] characterises the conception of knowledge with which we are concerned in this direction of thought in the following manner: “Our spirit, allied in earth-life with the body, is primarily focussed upon the surrounding bodily world, but ordered in the direction of the spiritual therein: the beings, natures, forms of things, the elements of existence, which are related to our spirit and offer to it the rungs for its ascent to the super-sensuous; the field of our knowledge is therefore the realm of experience, but we must learn to understand what it offers, to penetrate to its meaning and thought, and thereby unlock for ourselves the world of thought.”
The Scholastic could not attain to any other conception of knowledge, for the dogmatic content of his theology prevented his doing so. If he had directed the gaze of his spiritual eye upon that which he regards as an image only, he would then have seen that the spiritual content of things reveals itself in this supposed image; he would then have found that in his own inner being the God not alone images Himself, but that He lives therein, is present there in His own nature. He would have beheld in gazing into his own inner being, not a dark abyss, an endless emptiness, but also not merely an image of God; he would have felt that a life pulses within him, which is the very life of God itself; and that his own life is verily just God’s life.
This the Scholastic dared not admit. The God must not, in his opinion, enter into him and speak forth from him; God must only be in him as an image. In reality, the Godhead must be external to the self. Accordingly, also, it could not reveal itself from within through the spiritual life, but must reveal itself from outside, through supernatural communication. What is aimed at in this, is just exactly what is least of all attained thereby. It is sought to attain to the highest possible conception of the Godhead. In reality, the Godhead is dragged down and made a thing among other things; only that these other things reveal themselves to us naturally, through experience; while the Godhead is supposed to reveal Itself to us supernaturally. A difference, however, between the knowledge of the divine and of the created is attained in this way: that as regards the created, the external thing is given in experience, so that we have knowledge of it; while as regards the divine, the object is not given to us in experience; we can reach it only in faith.
The highest things, therefore, are for the Scholastic not objects of knowledge, but mainly of faith. It is true that the relation of knowledge to faith must not be so conceived, according to the Scholastic view, as if in a certain domain only knowledge, and in another only faith reigned. For “the knowledge of that which is, is possible to us, because it, itself, springs from a creative element; things are for the spirit, because they are from the spirit; they have something to tell us, because they have a meaning which a higher intelligence has placed in them.”[12] Because God has created the world according to thoughts, we too are able, when we grasp the thoughts of the world, to seize also upon the traces of the Divine in the world, through scientific reflection. But what God is, according to His own being, we can learn only from that revelation which He has given to us in supernatural ways, and in which we must believe. What we ought to think about the highest things, must be decided not by any human knowledge, but by faith; and “to faith belongs all that is contained in the writings of the New and of the Old Testament, and in the divine traditions.”[13]
It is not our task here to present and establish in detail the relation of the content of faith to the content of knowledge. In truth, all and every faith-content originates from some actual inner human experience that has once been undergone. Such an experience is then preserved, as far as its outer form goes, without the consciousness of how it was acquired. And people maintain in regard to it that it came into the world by supernatural revelation. The content of the Christian faith was simply accepted by the Scholastics. Science, inner experience, had no business to claim any rights over it. As little as science can create a tree, just so little dared Scholasticism to create a conception of God; it was bound to accept the revealed one ready-made and complete, just as natural science has to accept the tree ready-made. That the spiritual itself can shine forth and live in man’s inner nature, could never, never be admitted by the Scholastic. He therefore drew the frontier of the rightful power of knowledge at the point where the domain of outer experience ceases. Human knowledge must not dare to beget out of itself a conception of the higher beings; it is bound to accept a revealed one. The Scholastics naturally could not admit that in doing so they were accepting and proclaiming as “revealed” a conception which in truth had really been begotten at an earlier stage of man’s spiritual life.
Thus, in the course of its development, all those ideas had vanished from Scholasticism which indicated the ways and means by which man had begotten, in a natural manner, his conceptions of the divine. In the first centuries of the development of Christianity, at the time of the Church Fathers, we see the doctrinal content of theology growing bit by bit by the assimilation of inner experiences. In Johannes Scotus Erigena, who stood at the summit of Christian theological culture in the ninth century, we find this doctrinal content being handled entirely as an inner living experience. With the Scholastics of the following centuries, this characteristic of an inner, living experience disappears altogether: the old doctrinal content becomes transposed into the content of an external, supernatural revelation.
One might, therefore, understand the activity of the mystical theologians, Eckhart, Tauler, Suso and their associates, in the following sense: they were stimulated by the doctrines of the Church, which were contained in its theology, but had been misinterpreted, to bring to birth afresh from within themselves, as inner living experience, a similar content.
Nicholas of Cusa sets out to mount from the knowledge one acquires in the isolated sciences up to the inner living experiences. There can be no doubt that the excellent logical technique which the Scholastics have developed, and for which Nicholas himself was educated, forms a most effective means of attaining to these inner experiences, even though the Scholastics themselves were held back from this road by their positive faith. But one can only understand Nicholas fully when one reflects that his calling as a priest, which raised him to the dignity of Cardinal, prevented him from coming to a complete breach with the faith of the Church, which found an expression appropriate to the age in Scholasticism. We find him so far along the road, that a single step further would necessarily have carried him out of the Church. We shall therefore understand the Cardinal best if we complete the one step more which he did not take; and then, looking backwards, throw light upon what he aimed at.
The most significant thought in Nicholas’s mental life is that of “learned ignorance.” By this he means a form of knowing which occupies a higher level as compared with ordinary knowledge. In the lower sense, knowledge is the grasping of an object by the mind, or spirit. The most important characteristic of knowing is that it gives us light about something outside of the spirit, that therefore it directs its gaze upon something different from itself. The spirit, therefore, is concerned in the knowing-process with things thought of as outside itself. Now what the spirit develops in itself about things is the being of those things. The things are spirit. Man sees the spirit so far only through the sensible encasement. What lies outside the spirit is only this sensible encasement; the being of the things enters into the spirit. If, then, the spirit turns its attention to this being of the things, which is of like nature with itself, then it can no longer talk of knowing; for it is not looking at anything outside of itself, but is looking at something which is part of itself; is, indeed, looking at itself. It no longer knows; it only looks upon itself. It is no longer concerned with a “knowing,” but with a “not-knowing.” No longer does man “grasp” something through the mind; he “beholds without conceiving” his own life. This highest stage of knowing is, in comparison with the lower stages, a “not-knowing.”
But it is obvious that the essential being of things can only be reached through this stage of knowing. Thus Nicholas of Cusa in speaking of his “learned not-knowing” is really speaking of nothing else but “knowing” come to a new birth, as an inner experience. He tells us himself how he came to this inner experience. “I made many efforts to unite the ideas of God and the world, of Christ and the Church, into a single root-idea; but nothing satisfied me until at last, on my way back from Greece by sea, my mind’s vision, as if by an illumination from above, soared up to that perception in which God appeared to me as the supreme Unity of all contradictions.” To a greater or lesser extent this illumination was due to influences derived from the study of his predecessors. One recognises in his way of looking at things a peculiar revival of the views which we meet with in the writings of a certain Dionysius. The above-mentioned Scotus Erigena translated these writings into Latin, and speaks of their author as the “great and divine revealer.”
The works in question are first mentioned in the first half of the sixth century. They were ascribed to that Dionysius, the Areopagite, named in the Acts of the Apostles, who was converted to Christianity by St. Paul. When these writings were really composed may here be left an open question. Their contents worked powerfully upon Nicholas as they had already worked upon Scotus Erigena, and as they must also have been in many ways stimulating for the way of thinking of Eckhart and his colleagues. This “learned not-knowing” is in a certain way preformed in these writings. Here we can only indicate the essential trait in the way of conceiving things found in these works. Man primarily knows the things of the sense-world. He forms thoughts about its being and action. The Primal Cause of all things must lie higher than these things themselves. Man therefore must not seek to grasp this Primal Cause by means of the same concepts and ideas as things. If he therefore ascribes to the Root-Being (God) attributes which he has learned to know in lower things, such attributes can be at best auxiliary conceptions of his weak spirit, which drags down the Root-Being to itself, in order to conceive it.
In truth, therefore, no attribute whatsoever which lower things possess can be predicated of God. It must not even be said that God “is.” For “being” too is a concept which man has formed from lower things. But God is exalted above “being” and “not-being.” The God to whom we ascribe attributes, is therefore not the true God. We come to the true God, when we think of an “Over-God” above and beyond any God with such attributes. Of this “Over-God” we can know nothing in the ordinary sense. In order to attain to Him, “knowing” must merge into “not-knowing.”
One sees that at the root of such a view there lies the consciousness that man himself is able to develop a higher knowing, which is no longer mere knowing—in a purely natural manner—on the basis of what his various sciences have yielded him. The Scholastic view declared knowledge to be impotent to such a development; and, at the point where knowledge is supposed to cease, it called in to the help of knowledge a faith basing itself upon external revelation. Nicholas of Cusa was thus upon the road to develop out of knowledge itself that which the Scholastics had declared to be unattainable for knowledge.
We thus see that, from Nicholas of Cusa’s point of view, there can be no question of there being only one kind or mode of knowing. On the contrary, for him, knowing clearly divides itself into two, first into such knowing as mediates our acquaintance with external objects, and second into such as is itself the object of which one gains knowledge. The first mode of knowing is dominant in the sciences, which teach us about the things and occurrences of the outer world; the second is in us when we ourselves live in the knowledge we have acquired. This second kind of knowing grows out of the first. Now, however, it is still one and the same world with which both these modes of knowing are concerned; and it is one and the self-same man who is active in both. Hence the question must arise, whence comes it that one and the self-same man develops two different kinds of knowledge of one and the same world.
Already, in connection with Tauler, the direction could be indicated in which the answer to this question must be sought. Here in Nicholas of Cusa this answer can be still more definitely formulated. In the first place, man lives as a separated (individual) being amidst other separated beings. In addition to the effects which the other beings produce on each other, there arises in his case the (lower) knowledge. Through his senses he receives impressions from other beings, and works up these impressions with his inner spiritual powers. He then turns his spiritual gaze away from external things, and beholds himself as well as his own activity. In so doing self-knowledge arises in him. But so long as he remains on this level of self-knowledge, he does not, in the true sense of the word, behold himself. He can still believe that some hidden being is active within him, whose manifestations and effects are only that which appears to him to be his own activities. But now the moment may come in which, through an incontrovertible inner experience, it becomes clear to the man that he experiences, in what he perceives or feels within himself, not the manifestation or effect of any hidden power or being, but this very being itself in its most essential and intimate form. Then he can say to himself: In a certain way I find all other things ready given, and I myself, standing apart from and outside of them, add to them whatever the spirit has to tell about them. But what I thus creatively add to the things in myself, therein do I myself live; that is myself, my very own being. But what is that which speaks there in the depths of my spirit? It is the knowledge which I have acquired of the things of the world. But in this knowledge there speaks no longer an effect, a manifestation; that which speaks expresses itself wholly, holding back nothing of what it contains. In this knowledge, there speaks the world in all its immediacy. But I have acquired this knowledge of things and of myself, as one thing among other things. From out my own being I myself speak, and the things, too, speak.
Thus, in truth, I am giving utterance no longer only to my own being; I am also giving utterance to the being of things themselves. My “ego” is the form, the organ in which the things express themselves about themselves. I have gained the experience that in myself I experience my own essential being; and this experience expands itself in me to the further one that in myself and through myself the All-Being Itself expresses Itself, or in other words, knows Itself. I can now no longer feel myself as a thing among other things; I can now only feel myself as a form in which the All-Being lives out Its own life.
It is thus only natural that one and the same man should have two modes of knowing. Judging by the facts of the senses, he is a thing among other things, and, in so far as he is that, he gains for himself a knowledge of these things; but at any moment he can acquire the higher experience that he is really the form in which the All-Being beholds Itself. Then man transforms himself from a thing among other things into a form of the All-Being—and, along with himself, the knowledge of things transforms itself into the expression of the very being of things. But as a matter of fact this transformation can only be accomplished through man. That which is mediated in the higher knowledge does not exist as long as this higher knowledge itself is not present. Man becomes only a real being in the creation of this higher knowledge; and only through man’s higher knowledge can things also bring their being forth into real existence.
If, therefore, we demand that man shall add nothing to things through his inner knowledge, but merely give expression to whatever already exists in the things outside of himself, that would really amount to a complete abnegation of all higher knowledge. From the fact that man, in respect of his sensible life, is merely one thing among others, and that he only attains to the higher knowledge when he himself accomplishes with himself, as a being of the senses, the transformation into a higher being, it follows that he can never replace the one kind of knowledge by the other. His spiritual life consists, on the contrary, in a ceaseless oscillation between these two poles of knowledge—between knowing and seeing. If he shuts himself off from the seeing, he abandons the real nature of things: if he seeks to shut himself off from sense-perception, he would shut out from himself the things whose nature he seeks to know. It is these very same things which reveal themselves alike in the lower knowing and the higher seeing; only in the one case they reveal themselves according to their outer appearance; in the other according to their inner being. Thus it is not due to the things themselves that, at a certain stage, they appear only as external things; but their doing so is due to the fact that man must first of all raise and transform himself to the level upon which the things cease to be external and outside.
In the light of these considerations, some of the views which natural science has developed during the nineteenth century appear for the first time in the right light. The supporters of these views tell us that we hear, see, and touch the objects of the physical world through our senses. The eye, for instance, transmits to us a phenomenon of light, a colour. Thus we say that a body emits red light, when with the help of the eye we experience the sensation “red.” But the eye can give us this same sensation in other cases also. If the eyeball is struck or pressed upon, or if an electric spark is allowed to pass through the head, the eye has a sensation of light.
It is thus evident that even in the cases in which we have the sensation of a body emitting red light, something may really be happening in that body which has no sort of resemblance to the colour we sensate. Whatever may be actually happening “outside of us” in space, so long as what happens is capable of making an impression on the eye, there arises in us the sensation of light. Thus what we experience arises in us, because we possess organs constituted in a particular manner. What happens outside in space, remains outside of us; we know only the effects which the external happenings call up in us. Hermann Helmholtz (1821-1893) has given a clearly outlined expression to this thought:
“Our sensations are simply effects which are produced in our organs by external causes, and the manner in which such an effect will show itself depends, naturally enough, altogether upon the kind of apparatus upon which the action takes place. In so far as the quality of our sensation gives us information as to the peculiar nature of the external action which produces the sensation, so far can the sensation be regarded as a sign or symbol of this external action, but not as an image or reproduction of it. For we expect in a picture some kind of resemblance to the object it represents; thus in a statue, resemblance of form; in a drawing, resemblance in the perspective projection of the field of view; in a painting, resemblance of colour in addition. A symbol, however, is not required to have any sort of resemblance to that which it symbolises. The necessary connection between the object and the symbol is limited to this: that the same object coming into action under the same conditions shall call up the same symbol, and that therefore different symbols shall always correspond to different objects. When berries of a certain kind in ripening produce together red colouration and sugar, then red colour and a sweet taste will always find themselves together in our sensation of berries of this form.”[14]
Let us follow out step by step the line of thought which this view makes its own. It is assumed that something happens outside of me in space; this produces an effect upon my sense-organs; and my nervous system conducts the impression thus made to my brain. There another occurrence is brought about. I experience the sensation “red.” Now follows the assertion: therefore the sensation “red” is not outside, not external to me; it is in me. All our sensations are merely symbols or signs of external occurrences of whose real quality we know nothing. We live and move in our sensations and know nothing of their origin. In the spirit of this line of thought, it would thus be possible to assert that if we had no eyes, colour would not exist; for then there would be nothing to translate this, to us, wholly unknown external happening into the sensation “red.”
For many people this line of thought possesses a curious attraction; but nevertheless it originates in a complete misconception of the facts under consideration. (Were it not that many of the present day scientists and philosophers are blinded even to absurdity by this line of thought, one would need to say less about it. But, as a matter of fact, this blindness has ruined in many respects the thinking of the present day.) In truth, since man is but one object or thing among other things, it naturally follows that if he is to have any experience of them at all, they must make an impression upon him somehow or other. Something that happens outside the man must cause something to happen within him, if in his visual field the sensation “red” is to make its appearance.
The whole question turns upon this: What is without? what within? Outside of him something happens in space and time. But within there is undoubtedly a similar occurrence. For in the eye there occurs such a process, which manifests itself to the brain when I perceive the colour “red.” This process which goes on “inside” me, I cannot perceive directly, any more than I can directly perceive the wave motions “outside” which the physicist conceives of as answering to the colour “red.” But really it is only in this sense that I can speak of an “inside” and an “outside” at all. Only on the plane of sense-perception can the opposition between “outside” and “inside” hold good.
The recognition of this leads me to assume the existence “outside” of a process in space and time, although I do not directly perceive it at all. And the same recognition further leads me to postulate a similar process within myself, although I cannot directly perceive that either. But, as a matter of fact, I habitually postulate analogous occurrences in space and time in ordinary life which I do not directly perceive; as, for instance, when I hear piano-playing next door, and assume that a human being in space is seated at the piano and is playing upon it. And my conception, when I speak of processes happening outside of, and within me, is just the same. I assume that these processes have qualities analogous to those of the processes which do fall within the province of my senses, only that, because of certain reasons, they escape my direct perception.
If I were to attempt to deny to these processes all the qualities which my senses show me in the domains of space and time, I should in reality and in truth be trying to think of something not unlike the famous knife without a handle, whose blade was wanting. Therefore, I can only say that space and time processes take place “outside” me; these bring about space and time processes “within” me; and both are necessary if the sensation “red” is to appear in my field of vision. And, in so far as this “red” is not in space and time, I shall seek for it equally in vain, whether I seek “without” or “within” myself. Those scientists and philosophers who cannot find it “outside,” ought not to want to find it “inside” either. For it is not “inside,” in exactly the same sense in which it is not “outside.” To declare that the total content of that which the sense-world presents to us is but an inner world of sensation or feeling, and then to endeavour to tack on something “external” or “outside” to it, is a wholly impossible conception.
Hence, we must not speak of “red,” “sweet,” “hot,” etc., as being symbols, or signs, which as such are only aroused within us, and to which “outside” of us something totally different corresponds. For that which is really set going within us, as the effect of some external happening, is something altogether other than what appears in the field of our sensations. If we want to call that which is within us a symbol, then we can say: These symbols make their appearance within our organism, in order to mediate to us the perceptions which, as such, in their immediacy, are neither within nor outside of us, but belong, on the contrary, to that common world, of which my “external” world and my “internal” world are only parts. In order to be able to grasp this common world, I must, it is true, raise myself to that higher plane of knowledge, for which an “inner” and an “outer” no longer exist. (I know quite well that people who pride themselves on the gospel that our entire world of experience builds itself up out of sensations and feelings of unknown origin will look contemptuously upon these remarks; as, for instance, Dr. Erich Adikes in his book, Kant contra Haeckel, observes condescendingly: “At first people like Haeckel and thousands of his type philosophise gaily away without troubling themselves about theory of knowledge or critical self-reflection.” Such gentlemen have no inkling of how cheap their own theories of knowledge are. They suspect the lack of critical self-reflection only in others. Let us leave to them their “wisdom.”)
Nicholas of Cusa expresses some very telling thoughts bearing directly upon this very point. The clear and distinct way in which he holds apart the lower and the higher knowledge enables him, on the one side, to arrive at a full and complete recognition of the fact that man as a sense-being can only have in himself processes which, as effects, must necessarily be altogether unlike the corresponding external processes; while, on the other side, it guards him against confusing the inner processes with the facts which make their appearance in the field of our perceptions, and which, in their immediacy, are neither outside nor inside, but altogether transcend this opposition of “in” and “out.”
But Nicholas was hampered in the thorough carrying through of these ideas by his “priestly garments.” So we see how he makes a fine beginning with the progress from “knowing” to “not-knowing.” At the same time we must also note that in the domain of the higher knowledge, or “ignorance,” he unfolds practically nothing but the content of the theological teaching which the Scholastics also give us. Certainly he knows how to expound this theological content in a most able manner. He presents us with teachings about Providence, Christ, the creation of the world, man’s salvation, the moral life, which are kept thoroughly in harmony with dogmatic Christianity. It would have been in accordance with his mental starting point, to say: I have confidence in human nature that after having plunged deeply into the science of things in all directions, it is capable of transforming from within itself this “knowing” into a “not-knowing,” in such wise that the highest insight shall bring satisfaction. In that case, he would not simply have accepted the traditional ideas of the soul, immortality, salvation, God, creation, the Trinity, and so forth, as he actually did, but he would have represented his own.
But Nicholas personally was, however, so saturated with the conceptions of Christianity that he might well believe himself to have awakened in himself a “not-knowing” of his own, while yet he was merely bringing to light the traditional views in which he was brought up. But he stood upon the verge of a terrible precipice in the spiritual life of man. He was a scientific man. Now science, primarily, estranges us from the innocent harmony in which we live with the world so long as we abandon ourselves to a purely naïve attitude towards life. In such an attitude to life, we dimly feel our connection with the world-whole.
We are beings like others, forming links in the chain of Nature’s workings. But with knowledge we separate ourselves off from this whole; we create within us a mental world, wherewith we stand alone and isolated over against Nature. We have become enriched; but our riches are a burden which we bear with difficulty; for it weighs primarily upon ourselves alone. And we must now, by our own strength, find the way back again to Nature. We have to recognise that we ourselves must now fit our wealth into the stream of world activities, just as previously Nature herself had fitted in our poverty. All evil demons lie in wait for man at this point. His strength can easily fail him. Instead of himself accomplishing this fitting in, he will, if his strength thus fails, seek refuge in some revelation coming from without, which frees him again from his loneliness, which leads back once more to the knowledge that he feels a burden, into the very womb of being, into the Godhead. Like Nicholas of Cusa, he will believe that he is travelling his own road; and yet in reality he will be only following the path which his own spiritual evolution has pointed out for him.
Now there are—in the main—three roads which one can follow, when once one has reached the point at which Nicholas had arrived: the one is positive faith, forcing itself upon us from without; the second is despair; one stands alone with one’s burden, and feels the whole universe tottering with oneself; the third road is the development of the deepest, most inward powers of man. Confidence, trust in the world must be one of our guides upon this third path; courage, to follow that confidence whithersoever it may lead us, must be the other.