Nicholas of Cusa 1401 – 1464

Nicholas of Cusa was a German cardinal, philosopher, and mathematician at the threshold between the medieval and Renaissance worlds. His treatise On Learned Ignorance argued that the highest human wisdom is the recognition that the infinite is not commensurable with the finite, and he developed the doctrine of the coincidence of opposites in God. He anticipated several themes of early modern thought, including an infinite universe and the relativity of motion. He served as a reformer of the Church, a diplomat for the papacy, and a patron of humanist scholarship.

Nicholas of Cusa — Nicolaus Cusanus, born Nicolaus Krebs — was born in 1401 at Kues on the Moselle, the son of a prosperous boatman. He studied at Heidelberg, then took a doctorate in canon law at Padua in 1423, and added theological studies at Cologne. Ordained priest around 1430, he served as a delegate at the Council of Basel and rose rapidly in papal service, accompanying the Greek delegation to the Council of Florence in 1437-1438 and being created cardinal in 1448 and bishop of Brixen in 1450.

His major works are the De Docta Ignorantia (1440), De Coniecturis, the Idiota dialogues, the De Visione Dei sent to the monks of Tegernsee, the De Pace Fidei written in the year of the fall of Constantinople (1453), the De Beryllo, the De Possest, the De Non Aliud, and the late De Apice Theoriae. He also produced an early critical study of the Donation of Constantine, sermons, and works on calendar reform and astronomy.

Cusanus thought God as the coincidence of opposites, the absolute maximum and minimum that exceeds all opposition; he argued, against the Aristotelian cosmology of his contemporaries, that the universe has no fixed center and no circumference, and he conceived 'learned ignorance' as the human knower's proper response to the infinite. He was thus a major late-medieval source for the cosmology of Bruno and Kepler and for early-modern philosophical theology. He died at Todi in Umbria in August 1464.