Between a Christian metaphysics and a thought of man as producer of his own world, the philosophy of Nicolas of Cusa marks the transition to modernity: this is shown by the study that Frédéric Vengeon devotes to the anthropology of Cusain.
How can a humanist XXIe century can it include those we call “ Renaissance humanists ”, without projecting our mental categories onto them ? We are at the crossroads of two anthropocentrisms: that of these Europeans of XIVe And XVe centuries which decided to decenter the world from God towards man ; that of current readers who see them as precursors of their own concerns. It is this reading difficulty that Frédéric Vengeon faced in reporting on the philosophy of Nicolas of Cusa (1401—1464), which has been the subject, for several years, of numerous translations in France, with significant divergences.
A selected reading of Nicholas of Cusa
To read a rich work, much more often commented on by theologians than by philosophers, Frédéric Vengeon chose a precise and rarely adopted perspective, that which relates to the anthropology of Nicolas of Cusa.
The author seeks to distance himself from the neo-Kantian interpretation that Ernst Cassirer gave in Individual and Cosmos in 1927. According to Cassirer, Nicholas of Cusa would inaugurate modernity by seeking universal laws of nature and by developing autonomous thought vis-à-vis metaphysics. It would make the human mind an autonomous legislative activity. Frédéric Vengeon corrects this interpretation by showing that, for Cusain, the instrument of knowledge of nature is proportion and not law, and that his affirmation of the spirit is inseparable from a metaphysics of the infinite. In other words, Cassirer goes too quickly in extracting Cusain from the Middle Ages ; certainly, he partly breaks with the categories of scholasticism, but he is not yet a modern.
All enlightenment being first of all the rejection in the shadow of other perspectives, F. Vengeon puts the historical approach in the background, both the search for the sources of Cusain and that of his posterity. He avoids listing the litany of theologians and mystics whose texts he knew perfectly (Augustine, Erigena, Dionysius the Areopagite, Anselm, Thierry of Chartres, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Master Eckhart, etc.) , to make only a few discreet references. He leaves aside the sermons and the legal texts, to study only the philosophical corpus.
He prefers to highlight four components of the biographical context which seem to him decisive in the Cusain’s orientations: the Neoplatonic influence, membership in the Catholic hierarchy, the fall of Constantinople and the intellectual rise of Florence. The convergence of these four lines would have pushed Nicolas of Cusa to see in man a subject who constructs his world thanks to the power of his mind, mathematics playing in his time the role that Aristotelian logic had previously played as a main operator of the different sciences. While approximately following the plan of the Learned Ignorance (1440) which is the most systematic presentation of his thought (1 — God ; 2 — The world ; 3 — Man), Frédéric Vengeon reconstructs Cusan anthropology in successive touches. It proceeds following the method of dispute: each section begins with a problem opposing two contradictory theses ; then follow the elements of response from both sides, with supporting quotes and explanatory commentary on these quotes. Finally, he presents the solution provided by Nicolas of Cusa as an original overstepping, sometimes with a twist in the debate. This very effective method gives the book a tension which makes reading it fascinating. The numerous quotations – sometimes a little long – give access to the most beautiful pages of Cusain ; their collection would constitute an excellent selection for an introductory work.
The anthropology of Cusain
Frédéric Vengeon presents the anthropology of Nicolas of Cusa on the basis of a conception of man as a productive power. Man is above all an actor in his world, and an actor in himself. The problem to be solved is the following: man is a second God endowed with free power ; yet God is an infinite power ; then, how can we reconcile these two powers which cannot be in rivalry? ? On the one hand, man is an autonomous being, capable of producing his own world ; he is even the god of his own world. On the other hand, God envelops everything and develops in all his creatures. “ The passages from God to the universe, then from the universe to creatures must be understood as dynamic processes of envelopments and developments of the same fundamental Being. » (p. 72) How to hold together the two centers carried out by man, on God and on himself ?
The solution involves a theory of mind (or thought, mens). Man is a being composed of a mind and a body ; he is a mixed and middle being. The little treatise of Cusain entitled Of mind (1450) can be considered as the exposition of his theory of knowledge. It shows the main capacities and operations of the human mind: measurement of things, production of mathematical notions, establishment of proportions, assimilation to known objects ; there mens makes man an image of God, or, more precisely, an image of God’s creative power.
Through numerous examples borrowed from human activities (digging a wooden spoon, minting coins, painting a picture, inventing a game, etc.), Nicolas of Cusa underlines the essential role of technique, in the sense of manual production enlightened by thought, in human existence. Man is even, as a free being, the producer of his own life. But let’s not see this as an existentialist anthropology: the one who perfectly realizes the human essence by concentrating humanity and divinity in himself is Christ. The anthropology of Cusain is justified by his Christology.
This results in several very instructive consequences. Nicholas of Cusa observes that man can only judge humanly, namely from within his nature, without having access to the gaze of God hidden behind the wall of paradise. Perspectivist relativism is the necessary law of human knowledge which, because it is finite, can never achieve precision and only advances from conjecture to conjecture. F. Vengeon gives (p. 173) the example of the historical-geographical classification of humanity that Cusain sets out in his From Conjecturis (1440): the men of the North are still in childhood ; orientals are more mature, more intellectual ; Westerners are still light and fickle. However, the center of the human world remains Rome. This relativist perspective on civilizations shows the new admiration for the learned East, holder of Greek manuscripts. Nicholas of Cusa is himself the product of two cultures, those of Germany and Italy, but within a single religion, pre-Reformation Christianity. This relativism reflects on theology: what is God, seen by man ? Fortunately, the Bible and mystical intellectual vision will prevent him from going astray.
Current debates
Current research, revived by new translations, opens debates on the meaning of this work. Without going into the technicalities of the discussions, F. Vengeon does not avoid them and clearly gives his point of view. And first (p. 13), the question of henology (or theory of the one): depending on the texts, we can think that the Cusain places the Being of God before its trinitarian structure, or that he places his uniqueness before his being. Koch’s interpretation, published in 1956, made the intellectual evolution of Cusain a progressive shift from an ontology towards a henology. For F. Vengeon, who agrees with the thesis of J.-M. Counet, the opposition is reabsorbed in a metaphysics of the infinite which is based on the Anselmian definition of God as maximum being. This definition allows “ the conversion of Being and One » (p. 29), because God is all that can be. He is a “ possest » (neologism created by Cusain to designate God as the power to spread his being).
We can also debate the status of his mathematical work, all devoted to solving the squaring of the circle. In this enterprise, Nicholas of Cusa wants to show the power of the coincidence of opposites in the domain of infinity. Indeed, contrary to the principles of Aristotelian logic, in infinity, the opposites come together: the minimum is maximum, a polygon with an infinite number of sides becomes a circle, the curved line will be a straight line, and, therefore , it seems possible to make the perimeter of a square coincide with the circumference of a circle. But it is an obvious failure. He ends up invoking a mystical notion, intellectual vision, to present a resolution that is unacceptable to mathematicians. F. Vengeon concludes: “ Basically, Nicholas of Cusa can only be convinced of the lack of precision of his demonstrations. He sees it as a sign of the truth of his principles in the resolution of rational problems. » (p. 193) As if the failure was only a confirmation of his theory of knowledge. Nevertheless, the cries of victory at the end of each mathematical treatise show us an author convinced of his success. The status of his twelve mathematical texts remains to be clarified.
The relationship of Cusain with his painter and architect friends Brunelleschi and Alberti, who, in Florence, invented the central perspective, is well analyzed (p. 149 et seq.) ; his texts on the gaze and on the image demonstrate that it was for him an object of intense reflection. We discovered at the time that the representation of reality is an intellectual construction, that to see, you have to see yourself seen. F. Vengeon states: “ At XVe century, infinity remains outside the picture » (p. 152) and this would be a point of disagreement between Cusain and the artists. But he does not recall that the Cusain also had the opportunity to meditate on the altarpiece of Jan van Eyck, The mystical lamb which, without being constructed according to a central perspective, includes a partial perspective, and is designed as an invitation, through the image, to mystical vision. The author emphasizes that painters could not show infinity and hid the vanishing point (for example, by the head of Christ or by a boat on a horizon line): was this an incapacity of their thinking or the temporarily closed door to God that the spectator should open himself ?
Finally, the texts of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa on the Church and religions, particularly those which were written after the fall of Constantinople, inspire today an interpretation which makes him a precursor of the Vatican II. “ It is a universal ecumenism which centrally posits the unification of rites in a single religion. » (p. 215). This reading seems very generous to us. The way Nicholas of Cusa “ thames » the Koran, to see only a Christianity which ignores itself, demonstrates that, for him, Christianity was the only possible truth.
This work, by exposing complex philosophical thought in the most exhaustive way possible, while maintaining clarity, can only encourage reading the translations which, finally, make Cusain’s work accessible to French readers. At the same time, it reveals the formidable epistemological obstacles of this reading: how to fairly evaluate the thought of a moment ?