How To Be An Agnostic
Learned Ignorance’. In it he pointed out that wise people from
Solomon to Socrates realised that the most interesting things
are diffi cult and unexplainable in words and that they know
nothing except that they do not know. How, then, are we to
interpret human beings’ desire to know? The answer is that we
desire to know that we do not know. This is the great challenge
of the intellect:
If we can fully attain unto this [knowledge of our ignorance],
we will attain unto learned ignorance. For a man – even one
very well versed in learning – will attain unto nothing more
perfect than to be found to be most learned in the ignorance
which is distinctively his. The more he knows that he is
unknowing, the more learned he will be.In this learning, one learns something about what one does
not know, as it were. Nicholas thought that truth was unitary,
simple and absolute – and this was why it was unknowable:
human beings know in ways that are multiple, complex and
relative. The nature of human knowledge, therefore, is that
it always results in contradictions. But it is in the coincidentia
oppositorum – the realm in which all contradictions meet – that
God dwells. Nicholas’s book is full of mathematical examples,
which he uses by way of analogies, to make the point – triangles
that are circles at infi nity, and so on. His words carry challeng-
ing implications for atheists and theists alike. For atheists, he
stresses that whatever they envisage God not to be, they must
allow that image to be the most perfect thing possible. For
theists, he emphasises that it is idolatrous to name God after
created things, and that affi rmative theology needs the sacred
ignorance of negative theology to remember that God is ineffa-
ble. He concludes that strictly speaking God is neither known in
this life nor in the life to come, since being infi nity only infi nity
can comprehend itself. ‘The precise truth shines incomprehensi-
bly within the darkness of our ignorance’ is a typically paradox-
ical formulation of his message.