NEW SOLIDARITY July 4, 1980 Page 6

The Neglected Importance of

NICHOLAUS OF CUSAby William Jones

It is an urgent necessity to revive the life and work of the great 15th century Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa as the basis for establishing among broad layers of the population, and among religious leaders in America, a clear understanding of the principles underlying the Neoplatonic tendency of Christianity and of the three great religions of the world. This has become particularly urgent in the face of the cancerous growth of irrationalist and irreligious cults posing as legitimate expressions of Christian belief (Children of God, Jesus people, the charisma ties, and so forth).

The propagation of such cults worldwide Cardinal Nicholaus of Cusaby the most un-Christian and immoral (1401-1464) in a contemporarypolitical interests centered in the old portrait in an altarpiece by aEuropean feudal oligarchy and its U.S. Flemish artist.affiliate, the Council on Foreign Relations, has been done to quell opposition to the oligarchy's economic and social policy of genocide (The New Dark Ages) from humanist elements within the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic religious communities, Just as these same interests deployed the "Islamic fundamentalism" of Ayatollah Khomeini to turn the Middle East into a hotbed of war, disease, and economic misery, they are deploying kookish cults in Western Europe and the United States to destroy the moral fabric of these nations and to soften them up for murderous austerity policies.

The first stage in this campaign was to create by means of the environ-mentalist movement a seeming opposition between science and religion, Science was portrayed as a Frankenstein monster ruling over man, while religion was presented as a ''flight into the interior" with psychedelic drugs

or "meditation" used as aids on the ''journey." Aldous Huxley and the equally irreligious Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin, the celebrated guru of the Aquarian Conspiracy, saw psychosis as the ultimate stage of this "religious experience." The second stage in the campaign was the creation of drug-using terrorist cults composed of young people brainwashed into psychosis and deployed out to recruit new proselytes and to destroy all elements of rationality among the younger generation.

This process has not occurred without resistance from key U.S. religious forces. But the resistance has unfortunately been limited to isolated attempts at maintaining certain formal aspects of traditional religious practice, rather than a concerted effort to reassert the principles of apostolic (Neoplatonic) Christianity as a means of exposing and destroying this new form of paganism in Christian guise. Often enough, traditional religious leaders have simply raised their hands in despair. If civilization is to survive—and this is precisely the question at issue—the unity of "natural science" and "spiritual science" must be revived. The work of Cardinal Cusa is essential to that task.

The 15th Century Setting

In 1401, the year of Cusa's birth, Europe had still not recovered from the Black Death, which had reached its peak around 1350, and had eliminated between one-third and one-half of the population. The economy was in shambles. In many parts of Europe, particularly in Cusa's homeland, Germany, there was not even a semblance of civil authority.

The Catholic Church, which had previously represented a key center of political and spiritual administration, was rent by factional warfare in which the various national and local interests vied for control of the Church—and its important property holdings. Bishoprics, instead of serving as centers for spiritual administration, were treated as ordinary feudal domains, with all the privileges accruing to such fiefdoms.

The Holy Roman Empire, earlier the administrative and legislative organ for a large portion of Central Europe and northern Italy, had become, after the death in 1262 of the last great Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II, little more than a name. Authority in the realm was exerted solely by the numerous petty feudal princes or by the plundering bands of itinerant knights who roamed the countryside. The arbitrary whims of these petty

tyrants was the law of the land, with not even a semblance of a uniform code of justice.

The economic devastation, combined with the destruction of all political authority, led to the complete breakdown of morality and the proliferation of irrationalist cults such as the flagellants, who performed public spectacles of self-immolation. Witch-hunting received a new lease on life. Scenes from Khomeini's Iran give perhaps the best sensual picture of the state of affairs at this time. Superstition was rampant. Idolatry and mysticism were common-place phenomena. If Europe were to survive, it would be necessary to develop a marginal force of "engineers" and "scientists" who could develop new technological modes of production which would increase agricultural productivity sufficiently to feed the population, and to educate them in the use of such new technologies. This would, however, require a direct confrontation with the irrationalist elements on a broad front.

Cusa's Education

Nicolaus Krebs was born in the small village of Kues (Cusa) in the Moselle Valley, the son of a river boatman. All evidence attests to the fact that Cusa received his elementary education at the hands of the Brethren of the Common Life (who were also the educators of Erasmus of Rotterdam and the French king, Louis XI). The Brethren were one of the few religious groups at that time that based their teaching on genuine "city building" principles, and the study of the Greek classics, in particular the works of Plato, was a vital element in their curriculum.

After a period with the Brothers, Cusa continued his preparation for an ecclesiastical career at the Universities of Cologne and Heidelberg, and at the great scientific center of that day, the University of Padua in Italy. Although specializing in canon (church) law, Cusa also studied mathematics, dynamics (physics), astronomy and cartography—all areas in which he was to make significant contributions. After concluding his education, Cusa was appointed secretary to Cardinal Orsini, the Papal Legate to Germany. The humanist political forces within the Church were attempting to launch a thoroughgoing reform of the shattered Church and the Holy Roman Empire in order to establish an institutional base from which to revive Europe's economy. Their efforts had crystallized around the calling of a general Council of the Church, first at Pisa, then at Constance in southern Germany, and finally in the late 1420s in the city of Basel, Switzerland.

Unfortunately, also active in the conciliar movement were the reactionary feudal oligarchy and their prelates, whose sole interest was in utilizing the Church as a means of further plundering. The ancestors of the same oligarchical circles today backing the reactionary Lefebvre in France were active at this early date. At times they used ultra-democratic rhetoric in order to prevent the humanists from uniting the Church on a principled basis. In this, they were aided by the sheeplike character of the majority of people engaged in the council, who were simply pursuing their own petty local interests and trying to gain appointments, prebends, or general influence.

One of the key people at the council and a personal friend of Cusa, the Italian Cardinal Julian Cesarini, however, was attempting to give the humanist forces a clearcut program of action. It was undoubtedly in collaboration with him that Cusa wrote the Concordantia Catholica as a general program around which the humanist conciliar faction might be organized.

The Concordantia Catholica is much more than a political program for the conciliar movement. It is the most extensive elaboration since Dante's De Monarchia of the principles on which a republican nation-state must be based, going even further, than Dante in several key areas. Rather than being a plea for "pure democracy" as it is often portrayed, the Concordantia begins with the notion of natural law as the guideline for all policymaking, the criteria of which are discernible by reason. The constitution of a nation-state and complementary legislation must be in coherence with natural law in order to claim legitimacy.

Elaborating on a concept which is strikingly similar to the motto of the United States, E Pluribus Unum (Out of the Many, One), Cusa explains that the strength of the nation-state lies in its ability to utilize the capacities of its entire citizenry in improving and enriching (developing) society. It is the task of the nation-state (here represented by an alliance between the Church and the Holy Roman Empire) to develop and enhance those intellectual and moral qualities of the individual by means of which the individual can contribute to the common weal.

The re-establishment of social order, the development of a national code of justice and a court system, the encouragement of commercial activity, and a program of moral and intellectual education to develop the population into a citizenry were Cusa's immediate goals, which he urged the council to adopt.

Cusa knew that a rational citizenry which understood, and was morally committed to improving the commonwealth, also provided the best guarantee against the manipulation of the reins of government by private interests working to the detriment of the nation. A republican citizenry would choose as its leaders those who were "strong in reason" and thus assure the maximum rate of development of society.

Cusa called for a thoroughgoing reform of the Church and of the Empire in order to transform them into the political institutions on which such a social order could be built. But the antirepublican oligarchs and their "democratic'' demagogues succeeded in turning the Basel council into a brawl which, in the words of a participant, would have made a tavern seem like a place of worship. When Cusa realized that nothing was to be achieved with this anarchic body, he went over to the side of the Papacy, which he saw as the only remaining force for unity in the Church, and began working with the papal forces to break up the council.

Cusa succeeded in taking with him some important converts from the conciliar movement, including Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II.

Cusa's talents were quickly recognized by the new pope, Eugene IV. He was sent in 1436 as an emissary to Greece to negotiate with the Greek patriarch on convening a general ecumenical council with the participation of both the Roman Catholic and the Greek Orthodox Church. Since the 11th century Europe had been divided as a result of the schism between the Eastern and Western churches. The new Pope was desirous of holding a council where doctrinal differences could be ironed out, paving the way for a reunion of the two bodies.

The negotiations were successful and a general council was set up in Florence, where the top theologians from both churches discussed their doctrinal differences.

The Florence Council resulted in a proclamation of unity between the two churches in 1440, but this was repudiated not long after by the Greeks who realized that it was not linked to a commitment to military aid in repulsing the Turkish threat as they had hoped. Far more lasting, and indeed of world historical importance for the future of Europe, was the introduction into Italy of the corpus of Platonic and Neoplatonic writings. The Greek Platonist Gemisthos Plethon, a delegate to the council known as the greatest Platonic

scholar of his time as well as a political organizer and economist, spent his free time in Florence lecturing on Plato at the request of Cosimo de' Medici, the city's de facto ruler. Plethon had become a friend of Cusa's during the tatter's diplomatic journey to Constantinople to set up the council.

The "lectures"—more like extemporaneous discussions at banquets among the international elite gathered in Florence—were later institutionalized in the Platonic Academy of Marsilio Ficino, which the Medici family founded to translate and propagate the entirety of Plato's works in Latin throughout Europe.

Fight for Platonism

Slightly earlier, during his mission to Greece in the late 1430s, Cusa began to realize the necessity of consolidating an international Platonic ''cadre-force" around scientific principles. Reason—man's ability to formulate new ideas as the basis for scientific and technological innovations—was for Cusa the characteristic which distinguished man from the beasts. The ontological fact of material progress was thus in correlation with the epistemological assumption that the fundamental characteristic of knowledge was the process of the development of knowledge. It was this understanding—reinforced by his association with the Greek Platonic leader Plethon—that made Cusa an implacable enemy of Aristotle and Aristotelianism. Since the time of Thomas Aquinas in the late 13th century, Aristotle had supplanted the Neoplatonic current of the Apostles and Church Fathers as the philosophical basis of Roman Catholic Church doctrine. But Aristotle only recognized fixed categories of mind and reality and had no way of explaining the process by which man perfects himself, or approaches God.1

Even Aquinas, who had carried out the anti-Platonic subversion of the Christian faith, was forced to borrow from Plato and the Neoplatonists to explain points on which Aristotle was obviously bankrupt!

'Learned Ignorance'

The methodological starting point for Cusa's next major writing, his "Docta Ignorantia" (Learned Ignorance), was the famous saying of Socrates that the only thing he knew was that he didn't know. Contrary to the agnostic's shrug of the shoulders at the impossibility of knowing anything, Cusa's doctrine of "learned ignorance" was based on the rigorous Platonic distinction between particular—ephemeral— knowledge, and the hypothesis-generating process by which new knowledge is developed. Cusa used a term of St. Augustine's,

"learned ignorance," to playfully describe the paradox of the truly wise person who knows this underlying process.2

Learned ignorance does not define a categorical area of "unknowable." Instead, the knowledge of one's non-knowledge provides the direction thought must take in order to acquire what Plato termed "the hypothesis of the higher hypothesis."

As Cusa explained it in the introduction to his first mathematical work, De geometricis transmutationibus (On Geometrical Transformations): "The Best Preserver of all things has wisely decided that the divine power of knowledge be not extinguished, but that through an ever livelier interest it be directed to that which is still unknown, but nevertheless accessible to thought. We therefore devote ourselves to passionately investigating that which is hidden, in order to enjoy more thoroughly the strength of our own spirit." Cusa was to spend his entire life looking for new pedagogical means of explaining and communicating this transfinite quality of reason.3

The devastating critique of Aristotle contained in the Docta Ignorantia was implicit rather than directly polemical—undoubtedly for tactical reasons. But later, when he was attacked by a leading Aristotelian from the University of Heidelberg, Johannes Wouck, Cusa launched a counterattack in the form of a "Defense of the Docta Ignorantia." Here Cusa, in the guise of being one of his own students, openly admits the impossibility of Aristotelians understanding the subject matter of Learned Ignorance—since they denied the existence of scientific creativity (reason).

In the cosmology of Docta Ignorantia, Cusa foreshadowed Copernicus in his arguments against an earth-centered universe. If the world is infinite, as Cusa asserts it must be in order to be coherent with the infinite nature of God, then there is no center, or else the center is everywhere.

The figure of Christ occupied a central role in Cusa's pedagogical efforts to enable his contemporaries to grasp such paradoxes, with their far-reaching implications for understanding and increasingly mastering the physical universe. Although each individual participates in the life of the divine through his or her use of reason, each individual's share is necessarily finite and limited. Christ, as both God and man, is the historical representative of the union of the human and divine (consubstantiality). Cusa, in a series of tactically focused dialogues, used the figure of Christ—the Creator as Man—to educate Christians to their actual human identity—Man as Creator.

(To be concluded)

NOTES

1. See Criton Zoakos, "Aristotle, Political Warfare, and Classical Studies," The Campaigner, Vol. 11, No. 7-8, Sept-Oct, 1978.

2. In terms of the pedagogical construct used by Lyndon LaRouche in his economic writings, we can say that if n, n+1, n+2 . . . , represent successive states of knowledge, then N would represent the process underlying the development of these successive states. N is thus a transfinite principle of generation for all of these states of knowledge, and yet is not definable in terms of any one of them.

3. Cusa often used geometrical examples to explain the difference between the world of the finite and the infinite (transfinite). For instance, if you draw a finite line tangent to a finite circle is is clear that the line (which is straight) is not congruent with the circle (which is curved). If, however, we extend both to infinity, they would become congruent at infinity, if one judged from the fact of the decreasing angle of tangency which is approaching 0 as the circle approaches infinity. Cusa insisted that the laws of the infinite were not simple extrapolations of the laws of the finite, but were rather of a qualitatively different character.

A Sample of Cusa's Pedagogical Method

The following excerpt of the introduction to Cusa's booklet, "De Visione Dei" (The Vision of God) provides a small sample of the pedagogical method he applied to uplifting the largely backward flock of Christians entrusted to his care.

Forced to contend with the idolatrous use of religious images as sacred objects in their own right—only one of the pagan abuses Cusa and his Neoplatonic cothinkers fought—the great Cardinal slyly conceived of taking his readers through a process of higher and higher reconceptualizations of their own thoughts as they contemplated a painting. Naturally he chose as his examples the works of the Neoplatonic masters of his own lifetime, such as the Flemish genius Roger van der Weyden, famous merely as "Roger." As the essay progresses, Cusa demonstrates to the reader the concept of the Trinity and of a God understood as being wholly without the particular

attributes of any "face"—all through the discussion of the painting of a face. This particular booklet was addressed to a wide popular audience.

If I strive in human fashion to transport you to things divine I must needs use a comparison of some kind. Now among men's works I have found no image better suited to our purpose than that of an image which is omnivoyant—its face, by the painter's cunning art, being made to appear as though looking on all around it. There are many excellent pictures of such faces—for example, that of the archeress in the marketplace of Nuremberg; that by the eminent painter, Roger, in his priceless picture in the governor's house at Brussels; the Veronica in my chapel at Coblenz, and, in the castle of Brixen, the angel holding the arms of the Church, and many others elsewhere. Yet, lest ye should fail in the exercise, which requireth a figure of this description to be looked upon, I send for your indulgence such a picture as I have been able to procure, setting forth the figure of an omnivoyant, and this I call the icon of God.

This picture, brethren, ye shall set up in some place, let us say, on a north wall, and shall stand round it, a little way off and look upon it. And each of you shall find that from whatsoever quarter he regardeth it, it looketh upon him as if it looked on none other. And it shall seem to a brother standing to eastward as if that face looketh toward the east, while one to southward shall think it looketh toward the south, and one to westward, toward the west. First, then, ye will marvel how it can be that the face should look on all and each at the same time. For the imagination of him standing to eastward place cannot conceive the gaze of the icon to be fixed and unmoved, he will marvel at the motion of its immoveable gaze.

If now, while fixing his eye on the icon, he walk from west to east, he will find that its gaze continuously goeth along with him, and if he return from east to west, in like manner it will not leave him. Then will he marvel how, being motionless, it moveth, nor will his imagination be able to conceive that it should also move in like manner with one going in a contrary direction to himself. If he with to experiment on this, he will cause one of his brethren to cross over from east to west, still looking on the icon, while he himself moveth from west to east; and he will ask the other as they meet if the gaze of the icon turn continuously with him; he will hear that it doth move in a contrary direction, even as with himself, and he will believe him. But, had he not believed him, he could not have conceived this to be possible. So by his brother's showing he will come to know that the pictures face keepeth in sight all as they go on their way, though it be in contrary

The great "Deposition" altarpiece by the Flemish painter Roger van der Weyden, painted in 1435, the year before Nicholaus of Cusa went to Constan-tinople. Here as in Cusa's writings, the image of Christ is used as a means of conveying the notion of "Man the Creator" through "the Creator as Man." Interestingly, the wealthy Nocodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, the two fig-ures shown closest to Christ and strongly emphasized in the painting, are portrayed as members of Neoplatonic elite supporting the Christian movement.

directions; and thus he will prove that the countenance, though motionless, is turned to east in the same way that it is simultaneously to west, and in the same way to north and to south, and alike to one particular place and to all objects at once, whereby it regardeth a single movement even as it regardeth all together. And while he observeth how that gaze never quitteth any, he seeth that it taketh such diligent care of each one who findeth himself observed as though it cared only for him, and for no other, and this to such a degree that one on whom it resteth cannot even conceive that it should take care of any other. He will also see that it taketh the same most diligent care of the least of creatures as of the greatest, and of the whole universe.

'Tis by means of this perceptible image that I purpose to uplift you, my most loving brethren, by a certain devotional exercise, unto mystical Theology.