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— Constantine's Sword - James Carroll
Nicolaus was a man of genius, not only an inventive philosopher and theologian but a mathematician whose speculations anticipated Copernicus (1473–1543).
The free play of this man’s spacious mind led him to apply the insights of one discipline to another.
He titled one essay, for example, “The Theological Complement Represented in the Mathematical Complements.” ==By means of such “complements,” he developed from mathematics a feel for what the Catholic theologian David Tracy calls “the logic of the infinite.” Tracy describes Nicolaus of Cusa as “the most balanced of the great Renaissance thinkers.” Instead of thinking of God in constrained images equivalent to mathematical symbols of the sphere or circle or triangle, Nicolaus proposed thinking of God in an image more like the line, which is by definition unbounded, impossible to hem in or to possess.== The discursive reasoning of the scholastics, who slavishly imitated the method of Thomas Aquinas without preserving his spirit, seemed the opposite of such logic of the infinite to Nicolaus, and he criticized the prevailing theology of his day, in effect, for doing too much with too little.
Nowhere was that theology better expressed than in the anathemas issued by the Council of Florence, just referred to.
Theologians spoke of God as if they understood God fully, and they sought to enforce a uniformity of thought that left no room for mystery, ambiguity, or paradox.
Nicolaus of Cusa saw, on the contrary, that God is God precisely in escaping and transcending total comprehension by human beings.
==Just as a line is defined by its movement in two opposite directions at once, so God is “the coincidence of opposites,” the one in whom maximum and minimum fall together.
In God, this coincidence occurs in such a way that the contraries maintain their differences, which, mathematically speaking, is why God is more like a line than a point.
Nicolaus of Cusa’s masterwork was called On Learned Ignorance, and his approach to God is characterized as apophatic, which means to posit by negating (an apophasis: “I will not bring up my opponent’s questionable financial dealings”).
Nicolaus argued not that God is unknowable, but that God’s unknowability is the most profound and illuminating thing humans can know about God.
This idea is the theological equivalent of the Copernican insight into the cosmos—that the earth revolves around the sun, not vice versa—that would come a generation later.
Both ideas mean, as Tracy put it, that the old cosmology is finished, the closed system is collapsed, replaced by an open, infinite system.==