The fifteenth-century German Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa led a busy and wide-ranging life. Educated in liberal arts and law at Heidelberg and Padua, Nicholas was a leading figure in the Conciliarist movement, and later served as a papal legate to both Constantinople and throughout Germany. As Bishop of Brixen, he pursued reform so aggressively that Duke Sigismund of Austria repeatedly sent him into exile. Nicholas was still in exile when he died in the Umbrian town of Todi in August of 1464.
Today, Nicholas is best known as the authority of philosophical works so innovative that Ernest Cassirer (in The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy) dubbed him the “first modern philosopher.” He might also be called the first modern scientific thinker, known to Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler. His mathematical insights prepared the ground for the development of calculus, he concluded that the earth is not the center of the universe, and he was certain that planetary orbits were not perfectly circular. Still, “modern” is a misleading adjective to apply to Nicholas. He was more mystical than secular, and his arresting scientific insights arose more often from speculations in numerology or etymology than from observation or experiment.
In a crucial sense, though, Cassirer had it right. Augustine could stare in wonder at a spider eating a moth, but then he chided himself for succumbing to curiosity, which he thought of as a form of the “lust of the eyes.” Medieval thinkers by and large followed suit, often citing the same passage in 1 John that shaped Augustine’s views on the matter. Not Nicholas. He was modern in this sense at least: He valorized curiosity. For Nicholas, intellectual life was a pursuit, a quest, an endless exploration, or, as he liked to put it, a hunt for quarry that can never be captured.
By his own testimony, Nicholas had “run . . . like a hunting dog” toward Plato, Aristotle, and other ancients, toward Augustine, Dionysus, John Scotus, as well as scholastics toward like Anselm, Hugh of St. Victor, and Thomas Aquinas. He studied the Koran as well as the Bible, pondered technical “curiosities” and picked at philosophical knots, and raced from canon law to theology to mathematics to astronomy. He disdained purity, whether in style or subject matter, mixing Germanisms into his Latin and musing over the everyday objects that escape many philosophers. Few thinkers of any age would have thought to write a treatise on bowling, but Nicholas did, and one of his works includes an extended meditation on a spoon.
He was on the prowl for manuscripts as well as for ideas. Most famously, he made off with the sole surviving copy of Tacitus’ De Germania, which he rescued from a cupboard at the abbey of Fulda, copied, and passed on to the secretary of the Roman Curia, Poggio Bracciolini. In retrieving Tacitus, Nicholas became the first modern man to know this text that played such a significant role in the rise of German nationalism. While exiled in Italy during the last year of his life, Nicholas worked on a summation and defense of intellectual hunting in a treatise entitled De Venatione Sapientiae (available in Toward a New Council of Florence: On the Peace of Faith and Other Works by Nicolaus of Cusa). He chose his title carefully. Since the twelfth-century, venatio – hunting – had been included among the seven “mechanical arts” that ran parallel to the seven liberal arts. By calling one of his last works “Concerning the Hunt for Wisdom,” Cusa was adopting the scholastic outlook that combined intellectual and practical arts into a single system. Learning, Cusa implied, was a kind of “craft.”
The metaphor of the hunt did other work for Cusa as well. Every creature, he argued, “has the industriousness to hunt for its own nourishment and has suitable sight (lumen) and has organs suited for its hunting.” Like the animals, human beings hunt because we have bodily needs, but we are not mere animals. Our “intellectual nature” too is “alive” and must be “nourished” by the “food that is similar to its life,” that is, by “the food of intelligible life.” Without nourishment, the mind like the body will “expire and perish.” Our minds are driven by appetites as much as our bodies are, so that “by an appetite innate to our nature, we are stimulated toward obtaining not only knowledge but also wisdom, or savory knowledge.”
In this hunt, our weapon for capturing wisdom is logic, which Nicholas, following Aristotle, called “a most exact instrument for pursuit both of the true and of the truthlike.” When he spoke of logic, Nicholas did not have in mind a precisionist instrument to slice and dice wisdom or the world. “A dialecticis libera nos, Domine,” he wrote in an apology for his epistemological theories, “Deliver us from the dialecticians, O Lord.”
One of the grand themes of Cusa’s philosophy was what he called “learned ignorance,” an ignorance “learned” in both senses of the term – an ignorance that must be learned and an ignorance that is the true form of wisdom (learn-ed). Anticipating J. G. Hamann’s critique of the Enlightenment, Cusa pointed to Socrates as an ancient exemplar of learned ignorance: “he knew that he was ignorant, whereas the others (who were boasting that they knew something important, though being ignorant of many things) did not know that they were ignorant.”
For Cusa, learned ignorance rested on theological foundations. Because the Wisdom we chase is the Triune Creator Himself, we can no more capture wisdom and pin it in a display case than we can master God. But this theological point has global epistemological import: Since we cannot exhaustively know the Cause and Source of things, we cannot know those things exhaustively either; and thus we are as learnedly ignorant of the precise character of finite things as we are of the infinite God. Nicholas was no skeptic. We can know, but for Cusa we always know through a glass darkly; the giant ignorance always looms over our dwarfish knowledge. There is always another book to write, or read; there is always another manuscript awaiting discovery among the shards in some godforsaken cave or on some forgotten library shelf.
The great temptation is to bring the hunt to an end prematurely, but Nicholas knew that this to be a path to mediocrity. He scorned second-rate philosophers and theologians who never embark on the hunt themselves and are instead satisfied with gorging on what others have killed. Most students, he complained, “spend time with certain positive traditions and their forms; and when they know how to speak as do the others whom they have set up as their instructors, they think that they are theologians.” Because they have never launched out on a real hunt, they don’t know just how elusive the prey is: “They do not know that they are ignorant of that ‘inaccessible Light in whom there is no darkness.’” True lovers of wisdom hunt without rest, knowing all the while that Wisdom will grow ever larger, and its glory ever more blinding, as they approach.
Cassirer had Nicholas partly right when he called him the first modern philosopher, but it is more accurate to say that he represents a Christian modernity that is equal parts science and theology, mathematics and mysticism, knowledge and learned ignorance. He was modern because he was curious, and he encouraged curiosity in others, and he was modern because for him “innovation” was not necessarily a bad word. Yet, he sketched a modern sensibility that differed radically from the aimless groping of the secular modernity that came to dominate. He was on the hunt, but he knew already what he hunted because his quarry has made Himself known. Cusa hunted Wisdom with the certainty that Wisdom has found him first; certain that he are more known than knowing, more captured than capturing; more prey than hunter.
To the victors who write the textbooks of intellectual history, this alternative modernity never registers, but as John Milbank has long argued it has been more subterranean than stillborn, moving from Cusa through Renaissance philosophers to Vico and Hamann and Kierkegaard and Rosenstock-Huessy and a host of other prophets against secularism. If this tradition died, it died, perhaps, like the seed that must be buried in the ground before it can produce fruit.