Nicholas of Cusa
1401-1464 · Renaissance Humanism · Prominent
Cusanus was a German cardinal and mathematician. He wrote in On Learned Ignorance that knowing you cannot know God is the highest knowledge available, and that in God the largest and the smallest coincide, the way a circle straightens into a line as it grows. He was a churchman of high rank and still denied the earth any privileged place at the center of things, picturing a universe with no bound to it.
Signature
The position Cusanus is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Opposition
- strongly leans Concurrence
- Paradox
- Coincidentia Oppositorum / Limit
Positions on the 13 axes the sources answer
- Natural Processes
- leans Purposeful (75 on a 0–100 scale from Mechanistic to Purposeful)
- Society
- leans Collectivism (29 on a 0–100 scale from Collectivism to Individualism)
- The Divine
- strongly leans Indescribable (96 on a 0–100 scale from Describable to Indescribable)
- Beauty
- leans Objective (75 on a 0–100 scale from Subjective to Objective)
- Universals
- mildly leans Realism (31 on a 0–100 scale from Realism to Nominalism)
- Identity
- leans Unchanging (25 on a 0–100 scale from Unchanging to Changing)
- Meaning
- leans Inherent (88 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Nature of Reality
- leans Unity (25 on a 0–100 scale from Unity to Multiplicity)
- Ground of Being
- mildly leans Transcendence (67 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
- Truth
- leans Objective (71 on a 0–100 scale from Subjective to Objective)
- Opposition
- strongly leans Concurrence (92 on a 0–100 scale from Sublation to Concurrence)
- Ethics
- leans Means (71 on a 0–100 scale from Ends to Means)
- Allegiance
- leans Global (71 on a 0–100 scale from Local to Global)
7 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Cusanus refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Trinitarian Monotheism / Panentheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Government
- Hybrid Regime
What is your ideal form of government? - Highest Good
- Union with God
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Good Real, Evil Privative
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - Perception
- Eidetic Intuition / Symbolic Forms
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Skepticism / Receptive Intellect
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Divine Command / Virtue
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Divine Providence
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Beginning of Things
- Indistinct from Present
What is the origin of reality? - Economy
- Gift Economy
What is the ideal organization of economic life? - Language
- Logos
What is the fundamental nature of language? - Paradox
- Coincidentia Oppositorum / Limit
What is the status of paradox? - Law
- Divine Law
What is the ultimate source of legitimate law? - Death
- Union with the One / Judgement
What happens at death? - Role of Emotion
- Path to the Divine
What is the proper role of emotion? - Human Nature
- Redeemably Corrupted / Imago Dei
What is human nature? - Primary Bond
- The Divine
What is your primary bond and loyalty?