Nicholas of Cusa Quotes on God
Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) was a German cardinal, mathematician, and philosopher whose On Learned Ignorance (De Docta Ignorantia, 1440) gave fifteenth-century theology one of its most original philosophical statements. The doctrine of learned ignorance holds that the divine reality infinitely exceeds the categories of finite human cognition, but that the disciplined recognition of this excess — the learning of one's ignorance — is itself a genuine knowledge of God available to philosophical reflection. The corresponding doctrine of the coincidence of opposites in the divine — God as the absolute maximum that is also the absolute minimum, the center of every infinite circle — frames Cusa's distinctive philosophical theology, and the closely related cosmological and mathematical writings prefigure aspects of the early modern scientific revolution that would mature in the following century.
Quotes
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Attributed to Nicholas of Cusa:
“God is the absolute maximum and the absolute minimum at the same time.”
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Attributed to Nicholas of Cusa:
“All things are what they are because the infinite makes them so.”
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Attributed to Nicholas of Cusa:
“The center of the universe is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere.”
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“It is you, O God, who is being sought in various religions in various ways, and named with various names. For you remain as you are, to all incomprehensible and inexpressible. When you will graciously grant it then sword, jealous hatred and evil will cease and all will come to know that there is but one religion in the variety of religious rites.”
Great Thoughts Treasury -
“God, therefore, is the one most simple essence of the entire universe.”
ibid. -
“Within itself the soul sees all things more truly than as they exist in different things outside itself. And the more it goes out unto other things in order to know them, the more it enters into itself in order to know itself.”
Nicholas of Cusa and Jasper Hopkins (Translator). On Equality. 1459. -
“Life, as it exists on Earth in the form of men, animals and plants, is to be found, let us suppose in a high form in the solar and stellar regions. Rather than think that so many stars and parts of the heavens are uninhabited and that this earth of ours alone is peopled – and that with beings perhaps of an inferior type – we will suppose that in every region there are inhabitants, differing in nature by rank and all owing their origin to God, who is the center and circumference of all stellar regions”
De docta ignorantia -
“The universe has no circumference , for if it had a center and a circumference there would be some and some thing beyond the world, suppositions which are wholly lacking in truth. Since, therefore, it is impossible that the universe should be enclosed within a corporeal center and corporeal boundary, it is not within our power to understand the universe, whose center and circumference are God . And though the universe cannot be infinite, nevertheless it cannot be conceived as finite since there are no limits within which it could be confined.”
ibid. -
“I am a -living shadow and Thou the Truth... Therefore, my God, Thou art alike shadow and Truth; Thou art alike the image and the Exemplar of myself and all men.”
De Docta Ignorantia(On Learned Ignorance) (1440) -
“See, therefore, how you, the philosophers of various schools of thought, agree in the religion of the one God, whom you all presupposed in that which you as lovers of wisdom acknowledge”
De Pace Fidei(The Peace of Faith) (1453) -
“We praise our God, whose mercy rules over all His works and who alone has the power to bring it about, that such a great diversity of religions would be brought together in one harmonious peace”
De Pace Fidei(The Peace of Faith) (1453) -
“In God, absolute unity is absolute multiplicity, absolute identity is absolute diversity ; absolute actuality is absolute potentiality”
De Docta Ignorantia(On Learned Ignorance) (1440) -
“You will not find another faith, but rather one and the same single religion presupposed everywhere”
De Pace Fidei(The Peace of Faith) (1453) -
“All men strive and hope for nothing other than eternal life in their human nature. For this they instituted purgations of souls and sacred rites, in order to be better adapted in their nature to that eternal life.”
De Pace Fidei(The Peace of Faith) (1453) -
“I behold Thee, 0 Lord my God, in a kind of mental trance”
De visione Dei(On The Vision of God) (1453)