1. The new Neoplatonism
In their enthusiasm for all that came from Antiquity the humanists were also great lovers of Greek philosophy. We know that philosophy had always played a very great role among medieval scholars; in so far there was nothing new. What made a difference is that humanist scholars could make use of the original Greek texts, which had now become available and were being printed. For the study of Greek the fall of Constantinople was a blessing in disguise.
During the Middle Ages. the dominating philosophical influence had been Aristotle (although Plato had never been far away), but now he was much criticized. This meant a great change in the mindset of the fifteenth century. Laurentius Valla (ca. 1407-1457), for instance, had not much good to say of the Stagirite. His philosophy was abstruse and abstract, the purest sophistry; even the word `barbarism' cropped up. Aristotelian dialectics did not provide real insight.[i] Other philosophers, like the humanists Rudolf Agricola (1443-1485) and Luis Vives (1492-1540), followed suit; there was a general tendency not to refer `slavishly', as they called it, to older philosophers.
This does not necessarily mean that Aristotelianism has entirely fallen out of favour; there still were many professed Aristotelians. Yet, on the whole, an important shift in philosophical interest occurred, in the direction of Platonism, or rather Neoplatonism, especially in Italy. This shift was therefore so important, because, as Copleston writes, it was not "a question of setting one philosopher against another, Plato against Aristotle ... It was the religious side of Neo-Platonism, as well as its philosophy of beauty and harmony, which particularly appealed to the Platonists and what they particularly disliked in Aristotelianism was the tendency to naturalism which they detected therein."[ii]
There was also a marked tendency towards mysticism in Neoplatonism and even esotericism. This became evident in the works of Marsilius Ficinus (1433-1499). He began his career as an author with two works in which he sang Plato's praises. He studied medicine in Bologna, but never became a physician. Learning Greek at the Medici court in Florence was more to his taste. It was Marsilius who, helped in this by Cosimo de'Medici, founded in 1462 the Academia platonica in a country house in Careggi; this institution became highly instrumental in the spread of Neoplatonism. He used his knowledge of the Greek language to translate works of Plato and Iamblichus. His enthusiasm for mysticism led him to translate the Orphic Hymns,[iii] whereas he was also the one who introduced Hermes Trismegistus[iv] to the western world.
In 1473, when he was already forty years old, he became a priest. He hoped that he could bring people who were doubtful about the Christian religion or even averse to it, back to the faith along the road of Platonism. What he aspired to was a sort of syncretism of pagan philosophy and Christian faith. In his view what Plato wrote was theology rather than philosophy, which becomes apparent in the title of his main work, the Theologia platonica. When Plato spoke of love in his Symposion, on which Ficinus wrote a commentary, he found that his ideas about it were not much different from those of Saint Paul. The idea behind this was - it would remain popular for a very long time - that there had been an original revelation, to be found in Plato (but not in Aristotle!), in Neoplatonists like Plotinus, in Hermes Trismegistus, in the apostles John and Paul, and in Saint Augustine, probably étonnés de se trouver ensemble. It was a revelation that spoke of the beauty and harmony, displayed by the regularity in the cosmos and nature.
It was well-meant, but we may entertain a reasonable doubt whether this syncretism was really the appropriate means by which the sceptics and doubters could be led back to the Christian faith. It might well be that they would consider this faith as a late instalment of that original revelation and would prefer to stick to the authentic thing. In any case, the ecclesiastical authorities were distrustful of this syncretism. When Pico della Mirandola wished to hold a disputation in Rome in which he would prove that Platonism and the Kabbala and Neoplatonism and the Christian faith were in fact one and the same thing, they forbade it.
There is a Gnostic-dualistic tinge to Pico's notion of the construction of the universe, the macrocosm. We live in the sublunar world in which man is the microcosm. Above us is the celestial world, which is not the heaven, but the `floor of heaven' along which the planets circulate. And above this is the supracelestial world, the world of God and the angels. It is Christ who enables the faithful to reach this highest world. This is not definitely un-Christian, of course, but it reminds me somewhat too much of Gnostic ideas. The same suspicion arises, when I turn to Pico's cousin Giovanni Francesco Pico della Mirandola (1452-1498). He said that divine revelation is discovered by man through his `inner light'.
2. Docta ignorantia
a. Ignorance as a virtue
Ignorance is usually not considered to be a virtue, but since nobody is omniscient, it is unavoidable that one is ignorant about many things, even highly important subjects. Most ignorance is not culpable, but it is also nothing to be proud of. It is only when one has to teach or use it, that one must have knowledge of geometry; otherwise it is not necessary. Yet, this is different, when it comes to tenets of the faith. If one starts from the premiss, as medieval theologians did, that one is morally obliged to be conversant with these principles, ignorance cannot be excused. The question then is whether it is culpable or not.
It will be evident that pagans in far-off countries, who, as human beings, have the moral obligation to have knowledge about the faith, nevertheless were in the excusable impossibility of acquiring this knowledge. There was much discussion among scholastic theologians, especially in Thomas, about sorts of ignorance and about the degrees of culpability caused by ignorance. We need this paragraph to contrast this ignoranec with something quite different, something that is rather the opposite.
There is a sort of ignorance, which is considered a virtue, seen as it is as wise. Standing before his judges, Socrates related that a friend of his, Chaerephon, once went to Delphi and asked the oracle if there was anyone wiser than he, Socrates. No, said the Pythia, there was no one wiser. Socrates at first did not understand what this meant, for he did not find himself to be so very wise, and surely not wiser than all others. A very special kind of wisdom must be meant. He interviewed people of all walks of life and came to the conclusion that, because they were experts in their occupations, they thought they were wise in almost all other respects. Then Socrates understood what the Pythia had meant: only the God is wise; human wisdom is of little or no value. His own wisdom was to know this. Henceforward, he went about investigating people and showing that they were not wise - which was to become his undoing.[v]
This allegedly superior form of ignorance came to be called docta ignorantia, learned ignorance; it was a concept that had come to stay, although it never played a paramount role in medieval scholarship. However, late medieval scholars interpreted Socrates in their own way. "To the Middle Ages the Athenian philosopher was in general a precursor of Christianity ...; he incorporated the dissatisfaction with pagan wisdom ... His confession of not knowing is seen as a striving after a higher wisdom."[vi] This was thought of as holding earthly wisdom, including theology and philosophy, as not being of great worth; one should, instead, concentrate on things divine.
One finds this in late medieval mysticism, of which we shall yet come to speak: mystics did not think that either philosophy or theology would bring one any closer to the vision of God. We find it also in the Devotio moderna, the nature of which Stadelmann characterizes as petty bourgeois. Its adherents were people who kept aloof from the great problems of Church and society. Theology and philosophy remained closed books to them. Instead, they preferred to live, privately, pious lives, occupying themselves with things from on high.[vii]
This is what Thomas à Kempis (1380-1471) had to say. "Human nature wants to know secret things and to hear what is new; it will learn what is external and experience much through the senses ... But grace does not bother itself about new things nor does it want to have knowledge of curious things, because all this has come forth from the old corruption [i.e. original sin]."[viii] Whether this is what Socrates meant is another question; it rather is a sign of the depressive mood of the last decades of the fifteenth century, a typical fin de siècle sentiment. The Dutch humanist Wessel Gansfoort (1419-1489) was not interested in the problem of truth (he was a nominalist); only one thing was really important: to love thy neighbour.[ix]
b. Nicholas of Cusa's life
The docta ignorantia gets quite another appearance, when we turn to one of the most fascinating figures of the Late Middle Ages, Nicholas Cusanus (1401-1464). He was born as Nicholas Kryft or Krebs in the village of Kues (Cusa) on the Moselle, as the son of a simple fisherman. In spite of these humble origins he made a brilliant career for himself in the Church as well as in scholarship. He received his first education in the school of the Brethern of the Common Life at Deventer (NL), after which he studied at the universities of Heidelberg and Padua; at this institution he became a doctor of canon law in 1423.
Having become a priest in 1426, he first served as a parish priest in Koblenz, but already a year later the bishop of Treves sent him to Rome as his procurator. Soon Nicholas became acquainted with leading humanists, not the least of whom was Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the later Pope Pius II. He too occupied himself with editing old manuscripts, for instance, the comedies of Plautus. Nonetheless, he did not aspire to an academic career, although he could easily have had one.
In 1432 the bishop-elect of Treves, Ulrich of Manderscheid, sent him as his deputy to the Council of Basle. At first Nicholas supported the conciliarists, who found that the authority of an ecumenical council superseded that of the Pope, but later he choose the side of Pope Eugene IV (1431-1447), who defended the papal supremacy. He then became a diplomat in the service of the Holy See. In 1437/1438 he visited Constantinople and accompanied the Emperor John VIII (1425-1449) to the Council of Florence. He was also a frequent visitor of German Diets. In 1448 he was made a cardinal and became prince-bishop of Bressanone (Brixen) in the Tyrol in 1450, while also serving as papal legate in Germany from 1450 to 1452. He died on August 11, 1464, in Todi. His legacy is the Cusanus Hospital, which he founded in his native village; this institution preserves his large library.
In spite of all these activities, this very busy man found the time to write and publish a number of important works, some on theology and three on mathematics. He pleaded for ecumenism avant la lettre. In his De pace fidei, written in 1453 after the fall of Constantinople, he concluded that there was in fact only one religion, although the rites may vary. Yet he remained an orthodox Roman Catholic by postulating that the divine logos would bring all religions to the insight that their own specific religion would be found in the Catholic Church, which represents Christ.
c. The uncertainty of theological knowledge
However, some of his works are more important for the subject under consideration. In his De coniecturis of 1440 he posited the uncertainty of all human knowledge. In the same year he published his De docta ignorantia, followed in 1449 by Apologia doctae ignorantiae. The guiding principle of Nicholas' life was harmony; as a diplomat he was always solving problems and reconciling opponents. There may be differences, but first and foremost there should be unity. We find this in his notion of God; in God all distinctions are fused into each other, even essence and existence, the difference between which was so important to the scholastics. We cannot say that he is great or small, for in him it is the same thing. God, therefore, is the ultimate synthesis of all opposites, which Nicholas calls the coincidentia oppositorum; he is the absolute unity in whom there are no distinctions.
Do we know what this means? No, we do not; we are incapable of understanding this. We live in a finite world, we occupy ourselves with finite things, we are finite ourselves. We can apply nothing of this to God; we have no yardstick with which the inifinite may be measured. This is high and fine. Too high! For what Nicholas is doing is stripping God of everything in which he resembles humans. Or rather, in which we resemble him. What Nicholas does in fact is to abandon the great concept of the thirteenth-century Scholastics, the analogia entis, the analogy of being, which says that God the Creator left his imprint on creation and above all on man; in consequence, the Creator and the created resemble each other.
According to Nicholas, we approach God along the via negativa. We do not know who or what God is, only what he is not. All that we can say of created things cannot be said of him; nothing positive can be stated of him. Although God is the infinite unity, it cannot be said that he is one, for 'one' is a finite concept, which ends where `two' begins. We must not apply finite concepts to God, and all numbers are finite.
Yet what about the Trinity then: God one in three persons? Yet saying that God is the infinite unity does not bring us any further in our understanding of him, because he transcends the world so much that we cannot know what this unity means. In consequence, as Copleston expresses it: "discursive reason cannot penetrate God's nature."[x] This is what Nicholas called the docta ignorantia, the learned ignorance. It is of course not the ignorance of a pagan who has never heard of God or the stupidity of one who does not want to know him. It is the ignorance of one who is deeply convinced of God's uniqueness and transcendence.[xi]
d. God and the world
What about the relationship between God and the world? Did Nicholas' notion of God's absoluteness imply that there is no such relationship? If he thought so, he would have been a Gnostic, which he was not. This relationship is one of the oldest and hardest problems of philosophy; it is that of finiteness and infiniteness and related to that of unity and multiplicity or
plurality. How can plurality originate from unity? Not all philosophers succeeded in solving this dilemma; in my opinion Nicholas did not either.
He explained the existence of the multiple, multifarious world as a `contraction' of the divine being. God's unity `contracts' itself into plurality, so that infinity becomes finitude, simplicity composition, eternity succession, necessity possibility.[xii] He describes the universe as the infinitas contracta and the contracta unitas. It escapes me what a `contracted unity' is. I should rather think that plurality is not caused by contraction, but by expansion and extension.
Nicholas describes God as the absolutum maximum and the universe as the contractum maximum; the latter originated from the first by means of emanation. There seems to be no specific, biblical act of creation. Nicholas is skating over thin ice here. In his view God is the essence of the world, which is an essence in a state of contraction. If he states that God is in the world (God's immanence), but also that the world is in God, does this signify that, rather than God being immanent in the world, the world is immanent in God? And if this is so, are God and the world then existentially distinct from each other then? He was laying himself open to charges of pantheism, not wholly without reason, when we hear him say that humanus est igitur Deus, that man is a human god. Copleston calls such statements `bold'[xiii], but I for one would call them imprudent.
e. Nicholas' discussion with Wenck
We should not be surprised that Nicholas was indeed accused of pantheism in expressis verbis. The charge was ridden by one of the pundits of the late fifteenth century, Johannes Wenck, who was a professor of theology in the University of Heidelberg; as a theologian he was a realist, in the line of Thomism. He reacted to Nicholas' book De docta ignorantia with his De ignota literatura (1442); as the word ignota, unkown, proves, the tone was contemptuous. Yet, says Stadelmann, his contempt hides a great fear, for he found his opponent to be a destructive person. Nicholas' book was `not in accordance with our faith, offensive to pious minds and even distracting from the allegiance we owe to God.'[xiv] Nicholas was a `pseudo-prophet' and a `pseudo-apostle'. Wenck fiercely attacked Nicholas' idea of emanation: a God who unfolds is not the same as a God who creates. And if the world is `in God', is it then autonomous, does it possess a specificity, an essence of its own with regard to God?
Nicholas' heavy stressing of God's absoluteness, says Wenck, our total ignorance, learned or not, about his being, means the total bankruptcy of all knowledge. Why be a theologian then, if no logos, no rational discourse about God, is possible? True enough, our knowledge of God is necessarily relative; this was the standpoint of both the Scholastics and Wenck, but Nicholas' professed ignorance is nothing but professed nihilism, because he undermines the basic premisses of rationality.[xv]
Nicholas defended himself, especially against the charge of pantheism, in his Apologia de docta ignorantia of 1449. Although he could prove that his opponent had misunderstood him in many respects, he stuck to his guns. I ask myself whether he had really thought through the consequences of his theory. Wenck was doubtless intellectually his inferior, but he had a point. Nicholas dualistically rejected all the fruits of scholastic thought. To put it as succinctly as possible: the Scholastics had taught that we can know; Nicholas held that we cannot know. This is not only an anti-scholastic position; it is in fact anti-intellectual. There is also a total disregard of the piety of ordinary believers, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim, of all denominations and of all times. They are told that they cannot knowingly approach God. Nicholas was a priest, even a cardinal, but he was not a pastor. As such he was typical of the late fifteenth century. Nicholas's ideology was a symptom of the depressive mood of these decades. It is as though he asks: is there any sense in theological certainty?[xvi] What Luther attempted to achieve was, essentially, reopening the road to God.
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LITERATURE
COPLESTON, Frederick, History of Philosophy, 3.II. Garden City (NY), 1963 (19521).
STADELMANN, Rudolf, Vom Geist des ausgehenden Mittelalters. Stuttgart/Canstatt, 1989. Neudruck der Ausgabe Halle, 1929. Bd. 14 der Deutschen Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte.
NOTES
[i].. Copleston, History of Philosophy 3.II, 22.
[ii].. Copleston, History of Philosophy 3.II, 15.
[iii].. For the Orphic Hymns see Vol. I, Ch. IV, § 10.
[iv].. For Hermes Trismegistus see Vol. VIII, Ch. II.
[vi].. Stadelmann, Vom Geist des ausgehenden Mittelalters 71.
[vii].. Stadelmann, Vom Geist des ausgehenden Mittelalters 75.
[viii].. Thomas à Kempis, De imitatione Christi 3.54.
[ix].. Stadelmann, Vom Geist des ausgehenden Mittelalters 75/76.
[x].. Copleston, History of Philosophy 3.II, 42,
[xi].. Copleston, History of Philosophy 3.II, 41/42.
[xii].. Copleston, History of Philosophy 3.II, 47.
[xiii].. Copleston, History of Philosophy 3.II, 47.
[xiv].. Quoted Stadelmann, Vom Geist des ausgehenden Mittelalters 40, note 1.
[xv].. Stadelmann, Vom Geist des ausgehenden Mittelalters 39-43.
[xvi].. See for this also Stadelmann, Vom Geist des ausgehenden Mittelalters 43-44.