ther contacts with the cosmopolitan importers of Greek texts. Cusanus knew
everybody: the north German mystic Denis the Carthusian (268 in Figure 9.6);
the humanist Piccolomini, a key patron as papal secretary and then pope;
Pletho, the paganizing Byzantine scholar who influenced Cosimo di Medici to
found the Platonic Academy in Florence; the anti-scholastic philologist Lorenzo
Valla. Later Cusanus corresponded with the young German scholars Peurbach
and Regiomontanus, subsequently the leading mathematicians of the century.
Cusanus’s great work, On Learned Ignorance (1440), was the precipitate
of these contacts. Here he defends the reality of universal Forms, freeing
Platonism from its connection to the Aristotelean cosmology of nested spheres.
Developing the mathematical notion of infinity, Cusanus arrives at the coinci-
dence of opposites: all geometrical shapes merge when enlarged to an infinite
scale; applied to cosmology, this means that the universe is a sphere whose
periphery is nowhere and its center, accordingly, is everywhere. The universe
is no longer hierarchical but decentered. In part this is a philosophical expres-
sion of the mystical vision, but also of the implications of nominalism; all
ultimates are paradoxical, and man at best can only become aware of his own
limits, which is his own transcendent nothingness. Cusanus was the only
outstandingly creative philosopher during several generations. The scholastics
were stalled in their factionalism; the mystics had largely abandoned abstract
discourse; the Humanists were engrossed in reviving the classic texts of antiq-
uity. Cusanus was the individual in whom these opposing negations intersected;
in him the coincidence of opposites flared up briefly into a vivid and idiosyn-
cratic vision.
The bases of intellectual life continued to decentralize still further. Univer-
sities, once centered in France and England, now proliferated, especially in
Germany. The most sustained network of successful Humanists were the
religious politicians who constituted the intellectual core of the Reformation.
Martin Luther was a biblical professor at Wittenberg, a newly founded uni-
versity on the eastern frontier of Germany; his colleague and collaborator
Philipp Melancthon was a protégé of Reuchlin. Humanist skill with classic
texts was turned to the politically explosive issues of biblical scholarship and
to throwing off medieval accretions of scholastic theology and canon law.
Colet, Erasmus, Agrippa, Vives, and Paracelsus are linked in another network,
based in typical Humanist careers: partly courtiers under political patronage,
partly university professors of theology, Greek, and even Kabbalism.^15 But
the Reformation was radically decentralizing and these networks, marginally
philosophical at best, lead no further in abstract philosophy.
In the chaos of lay-oriented positions at the end of the 1500s, two charac-
teristic styles are represented by Bruno and Montaigne. Like the occultists and
Protestant sect leaders before him, Bruno was a feverish entrepreneur in an
unsettled religious and intellectual situation. He abandoned the Dominican
500 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths