infl uenced Nicholas, but his important intellectual roots
are in Proclus and Pseudo-Dionysius. In spite of his
signifi cance few later thinkers, apart from Giordano
Bruno, understood or were infl uenced by him until the
late nineteenth century.
Born in Kues (between Koblenz and Trier), Nicholas
studied liberal arts (and perhaps some theology) at Hei-
delberg (1416–1417) and canon law at Padua, where he
earned his doctor decretorum (1423) and made initial
contacts with Italian humanists and mathematicians. He
studied and taught canon law at Cologne (1425), where
Heimericus de Campo introduced him to the ideas of Al-
bertus Magnus, Ramon Llull, and Pseudo-Dionysius. He
soon ended his formal schooling and became secretary,
then chancellor, to the archbishop of Trier. He refused
chairs of canon law at Louvain in 1428 and 1435, pre-
ferring administrative work in the church. As an expert
at the Council of Basel (1432–1438), he wrote on the
Hussites, papal authority, and reform of the calendar. His
important conciliarist treatise, De concordia catholica
(On Catholic Harmony, 1433), stressed the principles
of representation and of consent of the governed and
embodied his lifelong commitment to bring harmony
and unity out of confl ict and diversity.
In 1437 Nicholas changed his support from the
conciliarists to the pope to better work for unity. He
traveled in the delegation to Constantinople seeking to
reunite Greek and Roman churches. Ordained a priest
by 1440, he traveled as legate to Germany for the next
ten years on behalf of the papal cause, and was named
(1448) and made (1450) cardinal. He was appointed
bishop of Brixen in Tyrol the same year, but traveled to
Germany and the Low Countries to preach the jubilee
year and issue edicts of reform. His efforts to reform his
own diocese led to enmity with the local archduke; twice
Nicholas had to fl ee to Rome. After 1458 he remained
in the papal curia of Pius II at Rome. Nicholas died in
1464 en route to Ancona from Rome.
His important masterpiece of 1440, On Learned Ig-
norance (De docta ignorantia), was the foundation for
his writings over the next quarter century. While fully
engaged in practical ecclesiastical affairs, Nicholas also
wrote some twenty philosophical/theological treatises
and dialogues, plus ten works on mathematics, focusing
on the problem of squaring the circle and on using math-
ematics in philosophical theology. The three books of
On Learned Ignorance expound his central ideas about
God, the universe, and Christ. Nicholas was to extend,
expand, and modify these speculations in later writings.
“Learned ignorance” is so called because it involves
acknowledging the limits of human knowledge when we
seek to know what God is (or, indeed, what the exact es-
sence of anything amounts to). Our rational knowledge
is a kind of conceptual measuring designed for the fi nite
realm of more and less, but unable to reach the absolute
maximum and thus inadequate for measuring the infi -
nite God. There is no humanly conceivable proportion
between God and creatures. Yet for Nicholas, we are
supposed to move in ignorance beyond reason’s inad-
equacies in hopes of touching God (incomprehensibiliter
comprehendere) through a kind of intellectual-mystical
vision wherein all things are one. Since God’s fullness
comprises everything, Nicholas invokes the idea of the
coincidence of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum)
as the ontologicai correlative of learned ignorance. By
limiting the principle of contradiction to the realm of
fi nite creatures and their differences, we recognize that
in divinity all opposites coincide in the transcendent
infi nite oneness. The lack of resemblance between God
and creatures means that all our knowledge of God must
be metaphorical.
Nicholas’s later writings propose conjectural meta-
phors for exploring the limits of our knowledge and at
the same time seeking the God beyond. Of particular
import are De coniecturis: On conjectures (ca. 1442),
where Nicholas proposes a hierarchical Neoplatonic
ontology as a speculative conjecture (while pointing
out that all our conceptual knowledge is provisional or
conjectural) and Idiota de mente: The Layman—About
Mind (1450), which parallels our minds’ creation of a
conceptual universe and the divine mind’s creation of
the actual world. In De visione Dei: The Vision of God
(1453), Nicholas proposes an all-seeing icon to hold
together for imagination and thought how our striving
to see God is one with God’s seeing us.
De possest: On Actualized Possibility (1460) and De
li non aliud: On the Not-other (1461–1462) work out
two descriptions, or “names,” of God. The fi rst stresses
how in God all possibilities are real or actually exist; thus
in God possibility and actuality coincide. The second is
concerned to express how God is and is not present to
created things—intimately connected (“not other than”)
yet never identical with (not “nothing else but”) crea-
tures in space and time. Each of these metaphors and,
indeed, all of Nicholas’s later writings are calculated
to initiate dialectical thinking so that one may move
from thinking of God and creatures as exclusive and
exhaustive alternatives to seeing them as identifi ed, yet
not identical. God is to be seen as both all and nothing
of created things; creatures are limited images of the
divine infi nite oneness that they cannot resemble yet
for which they ceaselessly strive.See also Albertus Magnus; Llull, RamónFurther Reading
The Catholic Concordance, trans. Paul E. Sigmund. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991.
De ludo globi = The Game of Spheres, trans. Pauline Moffi tt
Watts. New York: Abaris, 1986.NICHOLAS OF CUSA