Abstract
The global ecological crisis has spawned intensive reflection about views of the natural world. Western Christian thought has received special scrutiny as modern alienation from nature has been traced to Christian theology. Undiscovered within the mystical theology of medieval Christian theologian Nicholas of Cusa lies an ecologically promising vision of nature. The concept of divine immanence presented by this medieval thinker provides a rich spirituality that is inclusive, rather than exclusive, of the natural world. It is also far more intimate than contemporary stewardship theology. Cusanus interprets theophany as divine self-expression. A series of striking metaphors, including God’s enfolding and unfolding, God as ‘Not-other’, and Christ as the contracted maximum, reveals a holistic spirituality. Nicholas of Cusa’s concept of divine immanence infuses the world with immeasurable value and gives rise to a Christian theology that can address the current ecological crisis.
Originally published as Nancy J. Hudson, “The Divine Immanence: Nicholas of Cusa’s Understanding of Theophany and the Retrieval of a ‘New’ Model of God.” The Journal of Theological Studies, 56 (2): October 2005. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.
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- 1.
Reuther (1994). Radford Reuther agrees (p. 247) in this text that “we need a more imaginative solution to these traditional oppositions [such as spirit and matter, God and world] than simply their reversal; something more like Nicholas of Cusa’s paradoxical ‘coincidence of opposites’ in which ‘the absolute maximum’ and the ‘absolute minimum’ are the same.”
- 2.
White (1974).
- 3.
McFague (1987).
- 4.
Santmire (1985).
- 5.
De docta Ignorantia (1985). Hereinafter abbreviated as DDI. Translated as “enfolding-unfolding,” complicatio-explicatio refers to the way in which God enfolds all things in himself such that, in God, they are God, and to the parallel unfolding of God’s self in the world. These constructs were originally used by Boethius and Thierry of Chartres. The schema is expressive of the way that Cusanus perceives the relationship between the one God and the multiplicity of the universe.
- 6.
Contraction is the delimitation of a species of universal to an individual thing. It is the concretization of a generality into a particular which has the effect of locating it in space and time and making it finite. The “Absolute Maximum” refers to God.
- 7.
Unitas or unity and alteritas or otherness are Neoplatonic terms that in Cusanus’ thought involve the notion of participation. Unity generally denotes God or being that communicates or participates itself, not in itself or it would replicate itself, but in otherness. Thomas McTighe has shown that a difference between Cusanus and Neoplatonist thought is that for the former alteritas is the multiplicity while for the latter it is a principle that accounts for multiplicity. See McTighe (1990).
- 8.
Possest is the combination of the two terms: posse, to be possible, and esse, the infinitive of the verb sum, to be or exist. It is also the union of the words of the phrase “Possibility exists” (posse est ). Translated as “Actualized-possibility,” possest is a name for God that refers to the fact that God is the actuality of every possibility and that not even possibility precedes or escapes him. Trialogus de possest (1980. Cf. De venatione sapientiae h 13, translated by Jasper Hopkins. “On the Pursuit of Wisdom,” Nicholas of Cusa: Metaphysical Speculations. (Minneapolis: The Arthur J. Banning Press, 1998).
- 9.
Nicholas of Cusa Directio speculantis seu de Non-aliud (1981).
- 10.
J. Koch argues that Cusanus actually moves from one metaphysical system to another, while Rudolph Haubst sees his later thought as a natural progression from his earlier works. Others like Thomas P. McTighe take the more middle road of finding new elements in his later texts, but no significant breaks from his previous thought. The difficulty of proceeding systematically through his metaphors or schemas is his own shifting employment of them. He moves freely from one rubric to another, often using a set of terms yet undeveloped in a particular text to buttress or elucidate terms he has been using all along.
- 11.
Nicholas of Cusa, Idiota de sapientia I, 10 (1996, 99).
- 12.
DDI 2.1 h 94. Hopkins, 59–60.
- 13.
Contraction is the delimitation of a species or universal to an individual thing. It is the concretization of a generality into a particular which has the effect of locating it in space and time and making it finite.
- 14.
DDI 2.2 h 104. Hopkins, 64–65. Cf. De dato Patris luminum 2 h 102–103. Translated by Jasper Hopkins as “The Gift of the Father of Lights,” in Nicholas of Cusa’s Metaphysics of Contraction (Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press, 1983), 121: “Yet, provided our construal be sound, we can accept Hermes Trismegistus’ statement that God is called by the names of all things and that all things are called by the name of God, so that a man can be called a humanified God and so that, as even Plato claimed, this world can be called a perceptible god.” The notion that the created world is the most perfect world possible and that its deficiencies arise from its limitations (for Plato, matter; for Cusanus, possibility of being) is Platonic. Cf. Plato’s Timaeus 29e ff.; Plotinus’s Enneads 2 9, 17; and DDI 2.8 h 139, Hopkins, 81.
- 15.
DDI 2.5 h 115. Hopkins, 69–70.
- 16.
Cusanus uses the term “quiddity” to refer to the essence of something, but it is not a formal or generic essence; it is that thing that makes an individual thing what it is.
- 17.
DDI 2.5 h 117. Hopkins, 71.
- 18.
DDI 2.5 h 121. Hopkins, 72–73.
- 19.
De Visione Dei, 7 h 26 (1985, 145).
- 20.
Note that the other is not equal to the Not-other. The two formulations are significant in their difference. Nicholas is not merely confusing terminology here, but is obeying the law of non-contradiction.
- 21.
DNA 17 h 81. Hopkins, 123.
- 22.
Nicholas himself notes Dionysius on this point. DNA 1 h 5.
- 23.
DNA 9 h 35. Hopkins, 73.
- 24.
DNA 16 h 79. Hopkins, 121.
- 25.
DNA 6 h 21. Hopkins, 57.
- 26.
Nicholas has given the philosophical concern for definition a supreme theological significance. He has, in fact, turned the entire project of definition on its head. It is God who defines, not the human mind. For Plato it is impossible to overestimate the importance of definition; he attacks problems of knowledge and even ethics by seeking definitions of terms. While Nicholas follows Plato (and later Neoplatonists) by saying that the divine is the most real or is truly real, he differs from him in an important way. Unlike Platonic essentialism, which sees definitions as characterizing the Forms, for Nicholas, the ultimate Form or God cannot be described, but instead itself does the defining. And though Cusanus, like Aristotle, attempts definition by exploring causality, it is not a causality that makes use of substantial forms.
- 27.
DNA 7 h 23. Hopkins, 59–60.
- 28.
DNA 6 h 22. Hopkins, 57.
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
One of Nicholas of Cusa’s three interlocutors in De Non-aliud, Ferdinand Matim of Portugal was Nicholas’ physician.
- 31.
DNA 9 h 35. Hopkins, 73.
- 32.
The human mind is like God, the Creator of the world, in the way that it constructs the conjectural world. But this analogy is an analogy of proportionality or relation, not a direct analogy of proportion. God is not directly compared to humanity; rather his relationship to Creation is compared to humanity’s relationship to the conceptual world. No knowledge, therefore, is gained about God’s attributes, but only about his relations. Moreover, this particular analogy is itself dependent on an original human ignorance since the human mind can only construct what is not already there for it to discover. Whereas direct analogy depends on what one already knows, the analogy between the creative mind and the Creator God admits that the mind does not know any given concepts and so must create them for itself.
- 33.
In De visione Dei 13 h 55–56, (Hopkins,183) Nicholas addresses God:
You, then, O God, are the Oppositeness of Opposites, because you are infinite. And because you are infinite, you are Infinity. In Infinity the oppositeness of opposites is present without oppositeness. Lord my God, Strength of the frail, I see that You are Infinity itself. And so, there is not anything that is other than You or different from You or opposed to You. For Absolute Infinity includes and encompasses all things…. Therefore, Infinity exists and enfolds all things; and no thing can exist outside it.
Thus, the most basic requirement for analogy, opposition or distinction between two things, is removed by God’s absoluteness, including both his absolute identity and his absolute difference from the created order.
- 34.
“Now what is posterior exists by means of participation in what is prior. Hence, what is the first (by participation in the first all things are what they are) is seen prior to intellect; for it is not at all the case that all things participate in intellect. Therefore, intellect does not attain to ‘what is earlier or older than intellect itself’—to use his [Proclus’] words. Wherefore, I think that Plato mentally viewed the substance, or the beginning (principium), of things by way of revelation--in the manner in which the Apostle tells the Romans that God has revealed Himself to them.” DNA 20 h 92. Hopkins, 135.
- 35.
He did, however, adhere to the nominalist position that universals exist only in the mind. Idiota de mente XI.
- 36.
Analogy of being.
- 37.
- 38.
In De Possest the question of formal causality arises immediately. The dialogue begins by attempting to unravel the meaning of Paul’s statement that the invisible things of God can be known in creation. Does Paul simply mean that one can move from the forms of things to their origin in God, the Beginning? Is enfolding just another version of analogy in which things are traced by their likeness back to their existence in the Creator? No, Nicholas clearly intends something very different. Completely avoiding the language of intellectual abstraction of forms, the cardinal answers by leading his questioners to an understanding of the meaning of the idea that God is actually every possible thing. It is not merely that all things exist in God, but that enfolded in God, all things are God. Since God is the life and essence of things, he can be called the Form of their forms. In fact, things can be said to exist more truly in the Form of forms than they do in themselves. But these are not the Aristotelian substantial forms of Aquinas. The fact that Nicholas is not talking about a removal of things from their contingent creaturehood or simply referring to a divine archetype can be seen by his metaphor of the line. In both cases, he emphasizes the inclusive infinity of God rather than his formal transcendence. Unlike human beings, God is possest, actualized-possibility; he is everything he can be . If a line had actualized possibility, it would extend everywhere; there would be no shape or figure that was not bounded by it since everything that it could trace, it would trace. At the same time, it would extend minimally, since it would actually fulfill the possibility that it extended nowhere. All figures, no matter how different, how great or how small, would thus be made through it and embraced by it and could be seen in it. Furthermore, according to Mahnke, Nicholas here evinces a clear difference from the Plotinian doctrine of unity in which infinite multiplicity is potentially found in infinite unity. For Cusanus, God, both potentiality and actuality, is the infinite unity that actually contains infinite multiplicity. Mahnke (1937, 86).
- 39.
De coniecturis I h 13 (2001).
- 40.
Haubst. Streifzuege, 237.
- 41.
Haubst. Streifzuege, 240.
- 42.
See De Possest h 6. Hopkins, 916–917: [Absolute possibility] is not able to exist prior to actuality—unlike the case where we say that some particular possibility precedes its actualization. For how would |absolute possibility| have become actual except through actuality? For if the possibility-of-being-made made itself actually exist, it would actually exist before it actually existed. Therefore, absolute possibility, about which we are speaking and through which those things that actually exist are able actually to exist, does not precede actuality. Nor does it succeed actuality; for how would actuality be able to exist if possibility did not exist? Therefore, absolute possibility, actuality, and the union of the two are coeternal. They are not more than one eternal thing; rather, they are eternal in such way that they are Eternity itself.
- 43.
DP 29. Hopkins, 929.
- 44.
De filiatione Dei (1994).
- 45.
DDI III 1 h 183. Hopkins, 112. DDI III 1 h 187, Hopkins, 114.
- 46.
Maximum and minimum are taken from the language of fourteenth century physics.
- 47.
Note that this is in contrast to the universe as a whole, which he describes as a “contracted maximum.”
- 48.
DDI III, 2 h 192. Hopkins, 116–117.
- 49.
DDI III, 2 h 190. Hopkins, 116.
- 50.
DDI III, 2 h 191. Hopkins, 116.
- 51.
DDI III, 3 h 198. Hopkins, 119.
- 52.
DDI III, 3 h 200. Hopkins, 120.
- 53.
DDI III, 3 h 202. Hopkins, 120–121.
References
Primary Sources
De coniecturis, translated as “On Conjectures” by Jasper Hopkins. 2001. Complete philosophical and theological treatises, vol. 1. Minneapolis: The Arthur J. Banning Press.
De docta Ignorantia, translated as “On Learned Ignorance” by Jasper Hopkins. 1985. Nicholas of Cusa on learned ignorance: A translation and an appraisal of De Docta Ignorantia, 2nd ed. Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press, in Complete philosophical and theological treatises of Nicholas of Cusa, vol. 1. Minneapolis: The Arthur J. Banning Press, 2001. Abbreviated as DDI.
De filiatione Dei, translated as “On Divine Sonship,” by Jasper Hopkins. 1994. A miscellany on Nicholas of Cusa. Minneapolis: The Arthur J. Banning Press.
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Shaffer, N.J. (2013). Nicholas of Cusa’s Understanding of Theophany and the Retrieval of a “New” Model of God. In: Diller, J., Kasher, A. (eds) Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5219-1_32
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