HoP 375 - Paul Richard Blum on Nicholas of Cusa

Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Nicholas of Cusa with Paul Richard Blum, who is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University, Maryland, but is speaking to me from Germany. We're both in Germany. So hello, Professor Blum. Yeah, hello. And we don't have any time difference, so that makes things easy. Speaking of time, let's talk a little bit about the period in which Nicholas of Cusa lived. He can be seen as a figure who binds together the Northern and Southern Renaissance because he studied in Italy. He was even in contact with Byzantium, he traveled to Constantinople. But he was German, and most of his life was spent in Germany or in German-speaking lands. And you're someone who's worked on Renaissance topics across Europe. So I thought, actually, before we start talking about Cusanus, maybe I could ask you to say something about the relationship between philosophy in Italy and philosophy in the rest of Europe in, let's say, the 15th century, when Cusanus was alive. Yeah, that's an interesting approach, because indeed, when we speak about Renaissance philosophy, we usually think about Italy, and then a little bit more Italy, and then gradually we might also extend to other parts of Europe. That has to do not so much with reality, but with the Italian approach to their national philosophy in the 19th and 20th century, which is now overcome. So we should say that at that time, in the 15th century, there was philosophy all over Europe, but it was not organized in terms of nations or languages or these kind of things, but it was organized by the schools and by communities. By schools, I mean universities, communities, I mean, for instance, religious orders. Think of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas, born in Italy, worked in Naples, in Rome, and in Cologne, and in Paris, and then back to Rome. And that was because he was going from university to university, and he was a Dominican friar. And similar things happened also in Germany and in other parts of Europe. Think of Germany. Nikolaus of Cusa studied in Heidelberg, because that was the university you would go. And when he came back from Padua, he went to Cologne, because again, that was the university that was one of the best-renowned universities of the time. And so he met his friends and his colleagues there, not according to being Germans or being Italians, but according to what they had to offer. In France, we had, before Cusanus, we had Jean Garçon, a theologian with a lot of new innovative approaches to religious and theological and philosophical things. He, for instance, advocated the rebirth of Dionysus the Areopagite, a very important influence on humanism and Renaissance philosophy in terms of negative theology and critique of human understanding. We had, also in France, Demond de Cervantes, as he's called by Montaigne, a Catalan who worked in Tours, and he was important because he invented basically the concept of natural theology, that is, theology done with philosophical means. And then, let's see, yeah, in England, we had Wycliffe and the Wycliffeites, which is not just a religious movement, but a movement of critique of traditional approaches to scholarship and also to the Bible, which then influenced the Czech intellectuals, Jan Hus, the most famous, who was burned at the Council of Constance in 1415. And, of course, we had Byzantium, the flourishing cultural area in Byzantium. So, besides Italy, there were intellectual centers all over Europe, but as I said, they were not organized by language. They all, except for the Byzantines, they all spoke Latin when they did their scholarly work, their teaching, but they were kind of an inter-European network that was not paying attention to nations. We also should remember that it's important that at that time, in the 15th century, basically until the Thirty Years' War, Europe was a horrible patchwork of little principalities and monarchies and rivaling cities that had nothing to do with what we understand in the modern world as a state or as a nation. Yeah, and in fact, that was, I mean, in my question, I'm sort of using the words Germany and Italy to refer to geographical areas and not, obviously, not political entities. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You could say something like south of the Alps and north of the Alps, something like that, you know? Yeah, absolutely. It was a geographical destination and not so much a political and definitely not an ideological area. And what would you say Cusanus took from the time he spent south of the Alps or in Italy, as we might say, because people often relate what he's doing to earlier German figures, in particular Meister Eckhart, who also is a great negative theologian. And at first glance, reading through Cusanus's works, one might feel that there's not much sign of anything distinctively recognizable from the Italian Renaissance. Yeah. He went, after he finished his studies in Heineken, he went to Padua because he wanted to perfect his legal studies, his studies in canon law, which is something you need as a career church person, which he was and wanted to be. And Padua was one of the law faculties that had the best renown in Europe at that time. So he went there. But on the side, or in addition to that, he also studied mathematics. And he befriended Paolo del Porto Toscanelli, a mathematician and scientist, which influenced Niccolò de Cusa a lot. So he went to Italy because the scholarship was there. And what he brought back was, for instance, his speculations in mathematics, which played out throughout his life in his various works. And we have a lot of mathematical examples in works like Unlearned Ignorance, like the infinite line, which is both curved and straight, and so on. So things I discussed in the last episode. Speaking of learned ignorance, that's one of his most famous philosophical concepts, along with the coincidence of opposites. And maybe I'll ask you about that first, and we'll see if we can ramp up to talking about learned ignorance and find out how much we don't understand it. Beginning then with coincidence of opposites, when he argues for that, or when he lays out the idea, it can look like he's endorsing some kind of irrationalism because he critiques certain kind of constraints that you find within Aristotelian logic. And in particular, he seems to be saying that there's a kind of limitation to philosophy that's still being done within the scope of the principle of non-contradiction. In other words, that you're not allowed to contradict yourself. So do you think that that would be a reasonable charge to lay at his door? That he's just kind of rejected reason by trying to transcend it? Or do you think that we can understand Kouzanis' philosophy while remaining within some kind of rational, logically coherent framework? The approach you are presenting is precisely a later development that came up with the critique of Aristotle, critique of Aristotle's logic, and then the rebuttal to that. So for instance, a person like Pomponazzi that is at the end of the 15th century, and then early 16th century, he emphasized the logic and descriptors of logical operations in Aristotle and came to the conclusion that everything that has to do with God, with faith, is irrational, is a matter of pure faith. That's, we call it, fides. So it came to a skeptical approach to the teachings of religion and of revelation, which then said, okay, so we just have to believe. He's not the first one, but he's the most prominent of those. On the contrary, what Kouzanis is doing is he's trying to stretch the means of rational approach, and that also ties into his research in mathematical paradoxes like the circle and the straight line that are incommunicable. And he asks, maybe there is a way to communicate them or to make them compatible. His idea of coincidence of opposites is apparently mystical. It's apparently, you could also say skeptical. But what he is trying to do is look how far we can get once we follow the line of reasoning. And then we come to the coincidence. And the standard example is, of course, that if you have a curve, a circle, if you extend that as far as possible and still more and still more, then it approaches the straight line so that the straight line, which is opposite to the curved line, actually coincide, are the same. And the other way around, if you reduce the circle, if you reduce it and reduce it and reduce it, you come to something like a point. And the point on a circle is exactly the same point as a point on a straight line, so that, again, the straight line and the curve coincide. Or even you could say the extension coincides with the non-extension in a point. The idea is he stretches the capabilities of human rationality, of human reasoning, to where it finds its own limits. And limits, of course, being a mathematical term in itself, appropriately. Yes, okay. Okay. And obviously, he also thinks that there's an extent to which stretching reason to its limits or to infinity, maybe we could say, because that's like where the asymptotic curve, as it were, meets the line, if you sort of take it to infinity. It seems obvious then, and I guess he says this quite clearly, that we're there transcending the human capacity truly to understand what's going on. And that brings us to this notion of learned ignorance. Yeah. And I think here, an obvious question is, why is learned ignorance better than normal ignorance? Or to put it another way, if I start out not knowing anything, and then it seems to me I'm learning some things, and I'm acquiring knowledge, but then I go through this course of study together with Cusanus, and wind up pushing reason to infinity, and I wind up not knowing anything in the end again, then why couldn't I have just started, or stayed where I started, and stayed in this state of mere ignorance as opposed to learned ignorance? The learned ignorance, maybe we should go back to the Latin wording, and the Latin wording is docta ignorantia. That is, you could say the taught ignorance, the ignorance that has been taught what it can do and where it comes from. So if we come back to the coincidence, the coincidence is not just a joke, but it is also searching for the point of departure of the finite and measurable extensions we know, quantities we know. The point of coincidence is also the starting point of what there is. CB. Like finite lines would be segments of this infinite line where opposites coincide, for example. Exactly. And for instance, the show jokes are actually points, and lines are also actually points, however that works. So having said that, the learned ignorance is that about our knowledge of the divine, of the absolute. And the absolute, by definition, is not extended, is not finite, is not traceable in any human way, but the absolute is also the basis of everything that is not absolute, that is relative, that is finite, that is related. So when he had this insight on the ship on the way from Constantinople to Padua, or Venice, he saw that if we want to understand what God is, and if we presuppose that God is the origin of everything there is, we have to, instead of making pious formulas, repeating pious formulas, instead of that, we have to make clear to ourselves that this is also the origin of our possible thinking. And therefore, the ignorance, I don't know who is God, or the ignorance God cannot be proven rationally, turns into a learned or an informed ignorance, an informed ignorance, namely, uh-huh, in order to be able to think in finite terms, we have to be able to understand that this has its origin beyond the finite, and beyond the humanly thinking. That's really nice. So learned ignorance would relate to normal knowledge the way that a point relates to a line, because the point that generates the line, but the point isn't a line yet. Exactly, yeah, very good. Yeah, that's what I mean. Okay, that's really nice. And so just to spell that out in terms of my original question, that's not true of normal ignorance. So if you just don't know anything, right, because you haven't studied, or you haven't thought about it, or for whatever reason, that kind of ignorance, obviously, is not the source of knowledge. It's just a privation or lack of knowledge. Yeah, exactly. And not knowing Chinese, which applies to me, is not constitutive for my speaking English or speaking German. Okay, we could probably keep talking for the rest of this interview about these problems because they're so complicated and intriguing. But I did want to ask you about another dimension of his thought, because it's something you've written a whole book about, and this is what he thinks about other religions, and in particular about the idea of forging peace between Christianity, or the kind of Christianity he accepts, and other religions, notably Islam. But as you just mentioned, he traveled to Constantinople, he was in touch with the Byzantines, and he had a really distinctive position on the relationship between faiths. Just to lay a kind of framework and background for that, could you say something about what other intellectuals in this period were saying about relationships with Islam and Judaism, so that we kind of have something to contrast Cusanus to? The most famous, of course, was Raymond Lull. That is about 100 years before Nicholas of Cusa, but Cusanus read Lull's works. Raymond Lull was a Mallorca, Catalan. He was a layperson, at least not a real priest. And he had the idea to convert the Muslims to Christianity, and he had the idea to do that with rational arguments, with reasoning. And for that, he developed a certain mathematical theory, mathematics again. So his idea was, there is a fundamental way of human thinking that makes it possible to think about God, to believe in God, and to worship God. And this human thinking is communicable between the Christians and the Muslims and also the Jews. So he was certainly a paradigm for this approach to negotiate with other religions. Raymond Lull was influenced by Raymond Lull with his natural theology. There is a line that goes into the 15th century. In the 15th century, there were quite a number of other intellectuals that were trying to understand and trying to communicate with Islam, but most of them were hostile. Whereas Nicholas of Cusa is the most prominent of these, said it must be possible to find common ground in the religious effort. And on what did he base this optimistic assessment of the prospects of reconciling the differences between these two faiths? I'm not quite sure whether he's really optimistic. Maybe he is more desperate, and then takes the means that are available to him. His famous treatise on the peace of religion, the Passifidei, which he wrote on the occasion of the fall of Constantinople in the hand of the Ottoman Empire, he, in vivid terms, shows the stress and his shock about this event and the brutality of the war. And from there, he comes and says, there must be a peaceful way. And then he looks for where could that peaceful way begin. And it would begin with the observation that, in modern terms, religious feeling is common to all humanity. And that religious argument has to go back to the understanding of an all-powerful God that willed the plurality of religions to be there. In the same way as humans are different among individuals and among groups and among peoples, and among tribes, in the same way, God also willed that they have their peculiar individual ways of worshipping. So instead of saying, they all got it wrong, as we do that in many religious wars, he says, no, they all got it right. We only have to find out why they got it right. What is it that they actually got right? And that would be, for instance, the existence of the coming of Christ. The religious wars were also close to him, not only with Constantinople, then Greece, but also, for instance, the Hussites. I mentioned the Hussites in the early 15th century, when Jan Hus was executed. Cosannus dealt with the religion of the Bohemians, that is now Czech Republic, in the Council of Basel. He was engaged in that dialogue with the Hussites. And the problem was, they got it kind of right, but were hostile to the Catholics, or what would be now called Catholics. So he was trying also to reach out to them and say, look, what is it what we have in common? And if I remember correctly, for instance, the bone of contention, the communion in two forms, in bread and wine, for Cosannus was not an issue. He said, well, we can negotiate about that. That doesn't make it. So his approach was, if there is a difference, if there is a contrast, there must be a common ground that is also then communicable. A lot of people think that this somehow reflects his idea of the reconciling of opposites. So just as you have apparently contradictory properties like, say, straight and curved coming together in God, so the differences between religious groups would vanish once you ascend to a sufficiently high level of perception about the divine. I mean, is there anything to that, or is that just a kind of loose analogy? No, no, that's actually to the point. Cosannus wrote also a treatise in which he investigated in detail the Qur'an on the basis of translations that were available to him. And he found in the Qur'an the formula that is the basis of his piece of religion, namely, there is one faith in a variety of rites. And he found that in this Qur'an, and he used it. So he picked from the enemy the reconciling formula. And so, yeah, and that is something like making the opposite meet. One last question. I can't resist asking you about this because this is something I only know about from reading your work. Cosannus is one of the earliest non-English philosophers to have been translated into English, I guess. There's already a 17th-century translation of his works by someone named Giles Randall. Exactly. Can you explain how this came about, and also say, did it have a big impact on English intellectual culture, or is it more like a kind of curiosity? For one thing, I haven't understood yet the details and the mysteries of religion in England in the 17th century. That is very difficult, and obviously, it's so difficult that it led to the founding of the United States. So, from what I understand, also, Giordano Bullo was in the late 16th century in London, and he was there because there was so much religious tension that the troublemaker like Giordano Bullo was very welcome, but was able to flourish there, and he was not the only one. So, in the 17th century, early 17th century, the climate in England was very diverse, from what I understand, and there was a strong movement or a strong climate of mystics and popularizers who were interested in the non-official practice of religion. So, they translated, for instance, the Theorie der Deutschen, the German theology, which was a spurious book, and which also was, by the way, made public by Martin Luther in Germany, and a few other mystical treatises. And so, George Vandell and others were interested, were excited by the mystical aspect of the because you can read all his treatises, Conjectures, and so on, you can also always read them also in mystical key. We tend to read them in rationalist keys, but a mystical interpretation is well possible. There are mystical elements, and he was, as you mentioned, influenced by Meister Eckhart and Heinrich Acampo, who were in part mystics. So, they picked on that and brought and used, for instance, the treatise On the Vision of God to advocate their mystical approach. And for that reason, Cusanus was welcomed together with a few other writings of his, the Idiota Dementor, the Private Person of Mine, that would be the title of this book, was also translated. And so, there were circles that were intrigued by Nicholas of Cusa's mystical aspects, which also was, of course, supported by the fact that there was no real official Cusanus school in the 16th, 17th century, as opposed to, for instance, the Neoplatonic School of Massimo Ficino, the Machiavellianism of Machiavelli, and other authors of the Italian Renaissance who basically created the school. That was not so with Nicholas of Cusa. He was kind of forgotten. One book on the reception of Nicholas of Cusa is indeed, Maya Uzza, was entitled The Presence of the Forgotten One. It traced the presence of Cusanus in the writings, even when he wasn't quoted. And that's why it was an English religious, mystic religious welcome resource that was not abused by the official schools. Well, next, we're going to be moving on to someone who was never forgotten, I would say, and had a huge impact on his immediate environment. And that is Erasmus, maybe the leading thinker of the so-called Northern Renaissance, and a great example of how humanism sort of spread out from Italy to the rest of Europe. So, I will thank Paul-Richard Blum very much for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. And please join me next time when we will be looking at Erasmus here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.