Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement

I am not hereby giving my final endorsement to the learned ignorants of the Cusanus philosophism.

—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

FROM HIS TROUBLED EPISCOPAL SEAT IN BRIXEN, Nicolas of Cusa composes in 1453 a letter to his friends, the monks of Tegernsee, over in Bavaria. It takes the form of De visione Dei, his major book since De docta ignorantia, written thirteen years earlier. In the parcel he includes a painting as a gift, meant for the brothers to use as a “sensible experiment” (sensibile experimentum). In his preface he introduces the painting to them as an instance of a genre he identifies as “the all-seeing image.” “Through the painter’s subtle art its face is made to appear as if looking on all around it,” he writes. “Many excellent pictures of this kind may be found, such as that of the archeress in the forum of Nuremberg; that of the great artist Rogier in the very valuable painting which hangs in the court at Brussels; that of a Veronica in my chapel at Koblenz.”¹ The list bursts with the colors of the early Renaissance. Rogier van der Weyden, for instance, whose work Cusa saw firsthand in Brussels (thought to be a self-portrait of the artist, since lost), was a brilliant contemporary experimenter in the arts of perspective. And according to such diverse interpreters as Ernst Cassirer, Michel de Certeau, and Karsten Harries, so is Cusa. But what would this avant-garde perspectivism, radiant with the positive sensory phenomena of the world, have to do with the old cloud of the imperceptible, which Cusa almost single-handedly conveys to earliest modernity?

When viewing one of these “all-seeing” paintings, you watch its figure’s eyes watching you. You “discover that the face looks unfailingly on all who walk before it even from opposite directions.”2 Its eyes move with your movement. The viewer is gazing upon its painted gaze: the observor is being observed by the observed. Entranced by this instantaneous interrelation of seeing with the seen, Cusa has titled his book with a wordplay: De visione Dei, the “vision of God,” a two-way genitive—is it our vision of God or God’s vision of us?—mirrors the mirror-play of the image enigmatically. “What other, O Lord, is your seeing . . . than your being seen by me?”³ It is one thing to note that a seeing eye is seen; quite another, to identify the active seeing with the passive being seen. What is happening to the notion of God in the mirror of the omnivoyant image? Does it appear now as the effect of my vision, a perspectival projection? Or is my vision the effect of its gaze? It is the movement of this epistolary contemplation on the moving gaze of the immobile icon, a movement that stirs one seeming contradiction after the next, that will eventually push Cusa into the cloud. And it is in that cloud that he crashes into the “wall” of a theological “impossibility.”

In this chapter we observe an optics, a theoria, of the infinite. It begins in De docta ignorantia, where already the medieval cloud of unknowing morphs into a new perspective on the infinite and thus on perspective itself. It is not a matter of a special privilege of the sense of sight—though indeed Cusa plies throughout his works the interplay of theos and theoria, “vision.” The practice of the learned ignorance will itself provide a new lens upon the relation of the infinite that theos names for the unbounded manifold of finite creatures. In Cusa, as de Certeau argues in a late, loving essay, “each particular positive entity is no longer defined by its status in an ontologically hierarchized cosmos.” Each creature appears now as the “direct witness to . . . a ‘point of view’” whose relation to others “manifests infinite potentiality.”⁴

It is this early Renaissance experiment in perspective, in other words, that we will see negative theology begin to unfold the positive materiality of the universe. In this perspective the world gets recognized, impossibly for Christian thought to that moment, as itself a certain kind of infinite. We will therefore first trace the contemplative logic that moves Cusa from the painting to movement itself—and into the cloud: a cloud painted with the dark brilliance of the Dionysian lineage. But this is another epoch, and in Cusa a deep resistance to the regnant Aristotelian logic of the scholastics kicks in, along with fresh readings of classical, hermetic, and apophatic texts. Layers, strata, striations of tradition and innovation fold with an eerie succinctness into Cusa’s pages, in the cloudy precision of the learning mindfully “learned in its own ignorance.”

The present Cloud’s own inquiry can then push forward only by reaching back into the cosmology of the 1440 De docta ignorantia. For in Cusa, as I hope to show, the knowing ignorance discloses not just an apophatic panentheism, but the holographic vision of a radically interrelated universe. Here, in other words, appears for Western thought the deep fold between nonknowing and nonseparability. It will be important to notice how his mindful nonknowing yields—in terms of the material universe of physics—a quite impossibly prescient knowledge. The earth moves.

THE PAINTED FACE

There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival “knowing”; the more affects we are able to put into words about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our “concept” of the thing, our “objectivity.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals

Cusa meant his exercise, his sensibile experimentum, to supplement the brothers’ reading of his book, to illustrate and test it in experience. They are to hang the painting up, stand around it equidistantly, as along the periphery of a circle, and notice that “from whatever place one observes it the face will seem to observe oneself alone.” Thus “you are present to all and to each . . .”—he frequently transposes his text into prayerful address—“as if you had concern for no other.”6 Then they are to move about. And its gaze will move with each of them as they move, with all of them simultaneously, no matter where in the room they walk, even as it remains fixed in the immobility of the iconic surface. As the boundary between subject and object kaleidoscopes and blurs, the vision itself comes into focus: “while I look at this painted face from the east, it likewise appears that it looks at me in the east, and when I look at it from the west or the south it also appears to look at me in the west or the south.”⁷

Cusa had considerable experience with the cardinal directions. As a German student emigrant to Italy, he was eventually as a canon lawyer tangled in the great turmoil over papal power at the Council of Basel; later he rejoins the papal party to be dispatched East on the great ecumenical journey to Byzantium of 1437. The breakthrough of docta ignorantia—that idea, that key—had come to him in the night “at sea en route back.” He would for the rest of his life be constantly in motion through Europe as a papal legate, reformer, and cardinal. And somehow he is finding time to enfold the mobile perspective in writing as well.

Cusa would have encountered the contemplative use of icons during the expedition to Constantinople. Indeed the Eastern church, when not in the throes of iconoclasm, also reads its icons of Christ or other sacred figures as mysteries of reciprocation. “Whoever sees it sees himself or herself. Whoever sees it is seen.”⁸ Thus the art historian Marie-José Mondzain interprets the icon’s gaze. “Christ,” she writes, “is not in the icon; the icon is toward Christ, who never stops withdrawing.” An icon effects an apophasis of the eyes. The silent image escapes not only speech but gaze.⁹ The icon, contemplating us, becomes in its turn “God’s gaze at the contemplator’s flesh, which gets caught in an informational and transformational circuit of relationships.”¹⁰ In this Byzantine medium the epistemic and the ontological flow nonseparably, even as the seen is also always already seeing. Yet Cusa has in view works of fifteenth-century Europe, very different—precisely in their three-dimensional perspective—from the flat, symbolic surfaces of medieval art, Eastern or Western. The omnivoyance has reappeared in new form. It now grips the viewer in the intensified point of view of a radiantly worldly spatiotemporality. And the paintings let Cusa bring to view point of view as such.

Jean-Luc Nancy writes of the very medium of painting: “The self-coincidence of the image in itself excludes its conformity to a perceived object or to a coded sentiment or well-defined function. On the contrary, the image never stops tightening and condensing into itself. That is why it is immobile, calm and flat in its presence, the coming-together and co-inciding of an event and an eternity.”11 This language of condensing inadvertently echoes the Cusan “contraction,” and indeed coincidentia of movement and stillness, in which, later, in De visione, that very coinciding becomes event, incident—the co-incident. Even or especially in its performance of the illusory art of perspective, the painted icon marks its point of view as such and thus distinguishes its simulacra from conformity to objects.

For instance, in a painting I have enjoyed at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Rogier van der Weyden paints the apostle Luke sitting across from Mary and sketching her portrait while she gazes at the baby she is feeding. Thus citing the tradition of Luke as patron saint of painters, the artist foregrounds painterly perspective itself. The columnar architecture of the painting opens out onto a veranda and into the infinite horizon, at which another couple, their backs to us, gazes, preventing our own gaze from reifying the iconically lactating Madonna. Our own gaze is conducted through the circuit of relations away from idolatrous fixations. It is possible in historical context “to interpret the attempts of painters such as Rogier van der Weyden to grasp something of the infinity of space as a symbolic activity, analogous to our attempt to grasp God.”¹² The lost painting that for Cusa was an event, a bit differently, represents a genre whose subjects’ gazes fix our own and so provoke the synchronistic circuit between fixity and mobility, passivity and activity, being seen and seeing.

Fascinated with Cusa’s “perceptible experimentation,” Michel de Certeau finds him in this epistolary work “dislodging its addressees from their prejudicial position.” It thus “makes way” for the entire Cusan theory. “It is a question of an ‘exercise’ (praxis). A doing will make possible a saying. This propaedeutics is moreover customary in spiritual development and in the relations between master and disciple: ‘Do it, and you will understand afterward.’ It also has the import of a laboratory observation whose theoretical interpretation will come later. It plays on the double register of a ‘spiritual exercise’ and a scientific experiment.”¹³ Indeed, given the astrophysical breakthrough we will witness unfolding in Cusa’s cosmology, this doubling also registers the emergent interplay of apophasis and cosmology (neither of which occupy de Certeau, who focuses on the breakthrough of perspectivism in the 1453 text). Yet in the opening address to the “dearest brothers” the exercise is prescribed precisely as a practice of the negative strategy that we have tracked through the last chapter: “by means of a very simple and commonplace method, I will attempt to lead you experientially into the most sacred darkness.” The cipher of the dark cloud is luminously clear.

In this text of “the painted face” as the “icon of God,” and so as the visible image of the invisible God, Cusa alludes to the Pauline figure of the face: that face seen in Corinthians “in a mirror, an enigma.” But here every face comes into play and into question: “In all faces the face of faces is seen veiled and in an enigma.” Thus distributing, disturbing or diffracting any face-to-face imaginary of God, Cusa proceeds to paraphrase the hymnic opening of Dionysius’s Mystical Theology: “It is not seen unveiled so long as one does not enter into a certain secret and hidden silence beyond all faces where there is no knowledge or concept of a face.”14 Then Cusa condenses our long historical trail of clouds into one metonymically overloaded sentence: “This cloud, mist, darkness, or ignorance into which whoever seeks your face enters when one leaps beyond every knowledge and concept is such that below it your face cannot be found except veiled.”¹⁵

To push into this cloud is to leap through the veil. The nebulous veil does not pose any rigid boundary. The seeker does not remain passively content with notknowing but is driven forward by an ardent desire to know more, to see more. But the knowing will not be satisfied by any object, not even a divine one; and the seeing sought “knows that so long as it sees anything what it sees is not what it is seeking.” Within this self-subverting discourse, it is again a Neoplatonic eros that energizes the leap: “your seeing inflames me to the love of you and through inflaming feeds me.” No reifying knowledge but an intimate knowing (yada) is sought, by a desire inflamed by tantalizing glimpses, and in the interstices of a mathematically rigorous speculative capacity, fed not by lack but by love.

. . .

The precise truth shines forth incomprehensibly in the darkness of our ignorance.

—Nicholas of Cusa, De Docta Ignorantia

In recapitulating the cloud lineage, Cusa presumes his own earlier explication of negative theology in the culmination of part 1 of De docta ignorantia. Its “sacred ignorance” is never a matter of pitting negation against affirmation but of affirming that “in theology negations are true and affirmations are inadequate.” Logoi about theos are not therefore false, but prone to idolatry. It is worth returning often to the following crystallization of the precise relation of the apophatic to the kataphatic, with its ironic allusion to the eidolon of Caesar: “Therefore the theology of negation is so necessary to the theology of affirmation that without it God would not be worshiped as the infinite God but as creature, and such worship is idolatry, for it gives to an image that which belongs only to truth itself.”16

The problem is not the image—not even “the painted face”—but the gaze that turns it to idol. Theology itself is never not tempted to idolize its own propositions, its “affirmative names” (such as, he avers, the “Father,” “the Son,” and the “Holy Spirit.”) In his exposition of the relation of affirmative and negative theologies, Cusa does not seek a balance of the two or a via eminentia beyond both, but rather their mutual enfolding in the coincidentia oppositorum he has coined in the same text. And in the context of the docta ignorantia the co-incidence of negative and affirmative theologies answers precisely to that of the infinity of the all-enfolding complicatio and the unfolding, explicatio, of all finitudes. For “according to the theology of negation, nothing other than infinity is found in God. Consequently”—as in Gregory of Nyssa’s epektasis—“God is unknowable either in this world or in the world to come, for in this respect every creature is darkness, which cannot comprehend infinite light” (34). The infinity is itself paraphrased throughout part 1 as the complicatio, the divine folding-together, or enfolding, a concept drawn from the twelfth-century Thierry of Chartres. If the infinite folds together as Godself all the finite creatures, the creation will itself therefore no longer count as finite. The cosmology of part 2 will thus leap beyond the prior negative and affirmative theologies.

It is precisely the separability, the divisibility, the oppositionalism of creaturely affirmations—the names that creatures give and the names of creatures—that breaks down vis-à-vis the divine: “Since, therefore, no such particular, no such discrete thing, which has an opposite, could apply to God other than in the most diminutive way, affirmations, as Dionysius says, are unsuitable” (122). But God is not one thing as opposed to another, not an entity transcendently separated from other entities: “But because God is not a substance which is not all things and to which something is opposed and because God is also not a truth which is not all things without opposition . . .” (122), the affirmative names (always picking out a being, an essence, an entity) remain inadequate. For God, as infinite, “is not any one thing more than God is all things.”

Pantheism panic alert? It may sound throughout Cusa: this God “unfolds in and as all things” (135). But “the panic is as predictable alarm as it is misplaced”: God is not all things, any more than God is any thing.17 God is not a substance including all or excluding all. God is not such a One. Nor such a many. Indeed—hear again the echo of an autodeconstructive Platonism—“from the standpoint of infinity, God is neither one nor more than one.”¹⁸ Each of these “conjectures”—and that is his word for what theology may do; it may not “know” but conjecture—is uttered in the tone of a loving contemplation, strangely nondefensive. It is the early Renaissance, a moment relatively free of the inquisition.

Has Cusa’s nonknowing nonetheless rendered theology meaningless—no logos left for theos? His answer brings a fresh twist to the conversation: “if affirmative names apply, they apply to God only in relation to creatures.”¹⁹ For we take any attributes—creator, justice, father, son—from creatures and so “transfer names to God.” He is trying to say something about metaphor. But something more radical than a mere transfer of human qualities to “God” is at stake. By insisting that anything we “may say about God is based on a relation to creatures,” he undoes any claims of theology to transcend its perspective, the sociocreaturely context of its relations.

Let me suggest that from this apophasis unfolds, becomes explicit, a radical relationality, and so the relativity of perspectivism, that was gestating in apophatic theology all along. For perspective is nothing other than a view. A point of view only exists as one among many. So it may affirm its own perspective only relatively, only in relation. Perspective casts the shadow of its own possible negation. Affirmative relationality unfolds from negative theology as the fold, angle, or—in Cusa’s language—contraction, that is perspective itself. As Karsten Harries, for whom the Cusan infinite is key to the emergence of a modern or indeed postmodern perspectivism, argues, the “doctrine of learned ignorance—on which, as he himself says, his cosmological speculations depend—is inseparable from this principle of perspective. To become learned about one’s ignorance is to become learned about the extent to which what we took to be knowledge is subject to the distorting power of perspective.”²⁰

Indeed the learned ignorance opens with an appeal to a method of perspective, by which one compares what is relatively known to what is relatively unknown. “Every inquiry is comparative and uses the means of comparative proportion.”21 Hopkins translates this helpfully as “comparative relation.” But as for Cusa the infinite escapes all proportion (ratio)—and therefore comprehension—one wants the allusion to a scholastic debate. Cusa in fact departs here from the tradition of the Thomistic analogia entis, by which we are enabled to know God not univocally but proportionally. For Cusa the boundless excess of the infinite at once exposes the finitude of our perspectives—which are always comparative relations—and enflames our relation to that very infinity. Perspective escapes both the univocity and equivocity that worry Aquinas, without resolving itself in the eminent way of analogy. More simply, it can be said to open a third way, that of a participatory ontology endebted to Thomas but radicalized, open-ended, and so precisely infinite, a way between relativism and certainty into a modernity that never quite was.²²

YOU ARE MOVED WITH ME

To return to the “icon of God”: if the image eludes idolization, it also destabilizes vision, putting perspective itself in view and in motion. In this it differs from the emergent figurative art, which anchors its angle of perception in a fixed and external perspective.²³ De Certeau admires the rendition of the “movement . . . that does not offer any object to be grasped,” that is caught up “in the relations of subject to subject.”²⁴ He captures in Cusa’s style and content an “excess without object, an ‘impossible’ that one can ‘grasp’ in itself only by believing it also of another.”²⁵ It is then the existential interplay of shifting, contracting perspectives with the “you” of this discourse that produces this enigmatic insight: “Your vision, Lord, is your face.” This “you” refuses to behave as an object of vision; it appears in its nonseparability from the perspective, the “face,” by which it is viewed. And, as the following meditation demonstrates, the perspective is not a mere angle of vision but a feedback loop charged with any manner of passionate affect: “Consequently, whoever looks on you with a loving face will find only your face looking on oneself with love. And the more one strives to look on you with greater love, the more loving will one find your face. Whoever looks on you with anger will likewise find your face angry. Whoever looks on you with joy will also find your face joyous, just as is the face of one who looks on you.”²⁶

Like all apophatic thinkers, Cusa exposes to view the anthropomorphism that infects our theologies. But with him it is not just a matter of projections of the human face onto the divine. For when “a person attributes a face to you, one does not seek it outside the human species since one’s judgment is contracted within human nature.”27 Contraction here signifies the way in which an individual enfolds the potentiality of its species. Contraction and fold are closely allied notions in Cusa. So contraction produces perspective: “if a lion were to attribute a face to you, it would judge it only as a lion’s face; if an ox, as an ox’s, if an eagle, as an eagle’s.”²⁸ God appears back to us in our various images, personal, lionesque, ox-or eagle-like, in a relation that relativizes any theological image. The perspectival God, however, is not identified with any point of view. God enfolds all and unfolds within all, but, as Cusa puts it splendidly, “is not contracted, but attracts.” This power of attraction, like Whitehead’s Divine Eros, does not control but lures.

If contraction effects the illusions of perspective, it also makes a perspective possible. Cusa is leading the brothers along the outer edge of perspective, where a viewpoint not only frames but partially, in a proto-Kantian sense, constructs its other. Is he leading them to reflect upon that dynamism that Feuerbach would much later call projection? From his point of view one might read projection not as mere delusion but as necessary contraction. Of course one might infer from our inevitable projections the divine nonexistence. Cusa, with greater nuance, demonstrates the nonexistence of any representable God-object, any discrete divine being. But that nonknowability remains the function of its indiscrete infinity; it effects here not atheism (though Rosenzweig suspects it of such) but relation.

Reflecting on the philosophical implications from a neo-Kantian point of view, Ernst Cassirer discerned in this Cusan relationality a “pure interpenetration,” anticipating the best of modern epistemology. Like Harries half a century later, Cassirer reads the painted face as “a sensible parable” of a new perspectivalism. “The true sense of the divine first discloses itself when the mind no longer remains standing at one of these relationships, nor even at their simple total, but rather collects them all in the unity of a vision.” Then, continues Cassirer, “we can understand that it is absurd for us even to want to think the absolute in itself without such a determination through an individual point of view.”²⁹

The individual viewpoint, however, only takes place in its interdependence with the others: the “more eyes,” the more vision. All perspectives—in the “free will” of their individuality the early modern Cusa builds always in—remain relative to each other and simultaneously to the encompassing infinite.30 Cassirer, who in 1921 offered perhaps the first major philosophical interpretation of Einstein, was rocked by Cusa’s anticipation of special relativity.³¹ The question of movement relative to a standpoint, to what appears to be standing, had occupied Cusa in De docta ignorantia, in a passage that does eerily read like Einstein.³² “How would a passenger know that one’s ship was being moved, if one did not know that the water was flowing past and if the shores were not visible from the ship in the middle of the water? Since it always appears to every observer, whether on the earth, the sun, or another star, that one is, as if, at an immovable center of things and that all else is being moved one will always select different poles in relation to oneself, whether one is on the sun, the earth, the moon, Mars, and so forth.”³³

As Harries comments, “the poles by which we orient ourselves are fictions, created by us. As such they reflect what happens to be the standpoint of the observer, his particular perspective.”³⁴ (He thinks it not accidental that the learned ignorance to which Cusa attributes his cosmology came to him on the long journey by sea.) We will soon return to the astrophysical meaning of this parable with which Cusa is making his impossible leap beyond the medieval certainty of an earth fixed at the center of the universe. Here let us take in the movement of his thinking on this momentous question of “being moved.” From the materiality of the cosmos unfolding out of the apophatic theology, it turns to the painting as a material parable of the apophatic relation. Here the meaning of “being moved” registers in a more humanly relational key. “You . . . are my journey’s companion; wherever I go your eyes always rest on me. Moreover, your seeing is your moving. Therefore, you are moved with me and never cease from moving so long as I am moved.”³⁵

We see again that this “being moved” carries both the sense of an affective passion (you move me, I am moved to tears) and of a spatial relation. Indeed this relationality that relativizes knowledge oscillates tonally between the poles of the cool cosmological speculation of the polymath and the heat of apophatic eros. But the co-incident of intimacy and infinity in the God-relation, in, that is, the finite viewpoint as address of the infinite as You, cannot then settle into an authoritative theology, cardinal appropriate.

Instead, the exercise in relational perspective releases a cascade of conceptual folds, problems, and contradictions. It moves the contemplation of the icon to a climactic crisis, an aporetic event of movement itself. It is precipitated by the following recapitulation: “You, Lord, see all things and each single thing at the same time. You are moved with all that are moved and stand with all that stand.”36 This apparently innocent theologoumenon releases the discursive turbulence of something which “seems wholly inaccessible and impossible.” It will require, beyond any calm unsaying (let alone any placed feminist horror), “courage to do violence to myself.”

ENTER THE CLOUD

The conceptual crisis must be read against the background of the long dominant classical theism. Its God moves the world but is never moved by the world. As the Unmoved Mover “He” cannot be “done unto,” affected, altered. Indeed the God of the Aristotelian-Thomist actus purus cannot take the passive voice. From a Broken Web had noted how Aristotle, and following him Thomas, identified the masculine with the rational and the active, the act alone worthy of the image of God and capable of the separative transcendence of its absolute; the feminine (no coincidentia here) is linked to passive matter and reactive affect and reads as “the category of monster.”³⁷ It happens that Cusa humorously identifies his own learned ignorance (and its awkwardly Germanic Latin) with “the unusual, even if monstrous.”³⁸ I do not suggest that Cusa is directly challenging orthodoxy, let alone its gender. He was the most diplomatically nuanced of monsters. He presumes a classically changeless absolute, even as he questions its terms. For “you neither are moved nor rest, since you are . . . absolute from all these things that can be conceived or named.”³⁹

Gazing all the while at the painted face, Cusa probes on: “you stand and you proceed and you neither stand nor proceed.” And so he refuses—even if the immobility of the “icon of God” and his own scholastic reason demand it—to grant “rest” its classical privilege. For “motion and rest and opposition and whatever can be expressed” are all “subsequent to this infinity” (you).⁴⁰ Here he may be following a gesture of Plotinus. If the absolute is the infinite, it cannot be identified with immobility, changelessness, rest. For these signify nothing but opposition to motion and change. And the optics of the infinite brooks no opposite, no overagainst. The divine boundlessness, in other words, belies the boundary formed by classical theo-logic: of mover versus moved, active versus passive, aseity versus affect. By way of this specific instance of “being moved,” it is the root epistemology of opposition, based on Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle, that Cusa confronts—as he acknowledges “the coincidence of opposites, above all capacity of reason.”

And now the cloud: “Hence, I experience how necessary it is for me to enter into the cloud and to admit the coincidence of opposites, above all capacity of reason, and to seek there the truth where impossibility confronts me.”41 The cloud lies above, always overhead. But we completely miss its meaning if we coat that “above” in the stale associations of a mind above a body or a truth transcending its world. This reflects the Dionysian darkness above the light in which the cognitive verticalism of the classical ascent is itself suspended. “And above reason, above even every highest intellectual ascent when I will have attained to that which is unknown to every intellect and which every intellect judges to be the most removed from truth, there are you, my God, who are absolute necessity.”⁴² The most removed from truth. At least from the truth of pontiffs, professors, pundits—of those who are in the know. But Cusa does not leave us in mere darkness: “And the more that cloud of impossibility is recognized as obscure and impossible, the more truly the necessity shines forth and the less veiled it appears and draws near.”⁴³

The cloud of impossibility is emitting its epiphanous luminosity. In an earlier chapter he has explicated this cloud, or darkness, as an optical effect: “for that cloud in one’s eye originates from the exceeding brightness of the light of the sun. The denser, therefore, one knows the cloud to be the more one truly attains the invisible light in the cloud.”⁴⁴ Not by overcoming its darkness, but through the frightening entrance into it. In distant memory Sinai rumbles.

Does the language of “the necessity,” however, reinscribe metaphysical certitude at a higher level? Is it another ontotheological reappropriation, foreclosing on the unpredictable? Or, by contrast, does it here signify the very condition of its possibility—the perspective of the “impossible possibility of the im-possible”? Its necessity would then coincide with that impossibility which, according to Derrida, “is also the condition or chance of the possible.” To it testifies the “must,” for example, of the gift: “therefore giving, if there is any, if it is possible, must appear impossible.” Or, regarding forgiveness, “this impossibility is not simply negative. This means that the impossible must be done.” If this ethically eventive discourse appears incommensurate with any Neoplatonic ascent, perhaps this semblance of mere contradiction emits its own cloud. Derrida in this late conversation describes negative theology as “a non-knowing that is not lack, not sheer obscurantism, ignorance, or non-science, but simply something that is not of the same nature as knowing.”45 And now, as we noticed in chapter 1, crediting Cusa’s docta ignorantia with this alternative possibility, Derrida voices carefully “a certain impossible possibility of saying the event.” This speech will not trade surprise for knowledge, but “produces the event beyond the confines of knowledge. . . . This kind of saying is found in many experiences where, ultimately, the possibility that such and such an event will happen appears impossible.”⁴⁶

In other words what appears impossible, what takes place beyond knowledge, may become—in the event, in the place, of the cloud—not only possible, but actual. From this perspective the Derridean necessity of what “must appear impossible” resonates with the Cusan necessity of impossibility across the great gap of historical incommensurability. The indeterminacy upon which poststructuralism, like process thought, insists, is hardly formulable in Cusa’s context. It finds an antecedent, however, in his radical avowal of freedom. So if we let Derrida supplement Cusa’s necessary impossibility with the event of the indeterminate, Cusa may simultaneously deepen Derrida’s impossibility with its own apophatic potentiality. And Derrida gently magnifies the ethics beyond the mystical intimations. The hospitality of Derrida’s political notions, the attractive power of the “democracy to come,” of a more democratic democracy, the “indeconstructible justice” of the more just justice, may paradoxically become, through the ancestral hospitality of this cloud, more actually possible. For the cloud anticipates what Derrida has called the “ordeal of undecidability” to which their apparent impossibilities, the planetary crowd of them, subject us—while not for a moment sparing us the necessity of deciding.

If the rhetoric of the impossible is not to paint a quixotic face upon postmodern hopelessness, it must not muffle our attention to what may really—against the odds of habit, against the determinations of power—be possible. Indeed, of the word possible Derrida insists that it “is not simply ‘different from’ or ‘the opposite of’ impossible, [which is] why in this case, ‘possible’ and ‘impossible’ say the same thing.”47 If here the logic of the coincidentia oppositorum seems to haunt deconstruction, perhaps through its countercultural European reverberations via Giordano Bruno, it must be heard also in its originative context, still unencumbered by absorption in Hegelian dialectic or Jungian individuation. Then the seen seer, the moved mover, and, as we will soon discuss, the created creator, may approximate the “nondialectizable contradictions” for which Derrida gives the examples of “the ‘maybe,’ the possible-impossible, the unique as substitutable, singularity as reiterable”—contradictions that for Derrida “constitute so many challenges to traditional logic.”⁴⁸ Caputo has now unfolded an entire theology of “maybe” from the aporetics of the impossible.⁴⁹ Indeed he notes that “the oppositions and conflicts we everywhere encounter” send us “hurtling into dialectical opposition, into war, only if we do not look up and see these opposites in their point of ‘coincidence’ (Eckhart and Cusanus—whom Milbank pits against Scotus as the beginnings of an alternate modernity).”⁵⁰

The event of the aporia—the thwarting of our presuppositions, our reason, our best reasons—drives deconstruction even as it socks Cusa into the cloud. The desired co-incidence happens not without incident. The slap and slam of contradiction serve Cusa as the price of admission to the cloud. The impasse of the impossible in this passage of De visione turns into passage itself. In a dreamlike conflation of word-pictures, a wall suddenly appears in the cloud. A hard obstruction within the misty uncertainty. The wall is said to be “girded about with the coincidence of contradictories,” formed or woven of these apparently exclusive polarities—apparent, because here they materialize as inseparably interwoven. “This is the wall of paradise, and it is there in paradise that you reside.”⁵¹ Not a glimpse of heavenly afterlife, but of an almost accessible ecstasy, the holy of holies where “you”—the infinite interlocutor—are ever immanent.

If any polar logic slams right into the wall, we read next that “the wall’s gate is guarded by the highest spirit of reason, and”—transgressively—that “unless it is overpowered, the way in will not lie open.” Is Cusa advocating confrontation with the angelic gatekeeper of Eden, Gabriel himself? Or does this highest spirit perhaps symbolize the whole theological legacy? The Angelic Doctor? The tutelary spirit of scholasticism, Aristotle? Or Cusa’s rationalist superego? This, at any rate, is the boundary-violation that Cusa marks with “the courage to do violence to oneself.” This is not some variation of Medieval self-flaggelation. For Cusa—perhaps the finest reasoner of his epoch—such challenges to traditional logic hurt.

We have to do here with existential contradiction, oppositions that pinch and paralyze, not with an abstract dialectics of preestablished opposites. If the text time-travels, it has us ask: What impossibility do you crash against now? Which cloud of intensified uncertainty must you enter? What contradiction between immobility and movement, paralysis and action, realism and hope, love and responsibility, justice and forgiveness, ultimacy and doubt? What transgression might see you through?

CREATABLE CREATOR

For I am confronted by the wall of absurdity, which is the wall of the coincidence of creating with being created, as if it were impossible.

—Nicholas of Cusa

After the glimpse through the wall, the author’s perspective is carefully marked: “when I am at the door of the coincidence of opposites . . .” (252). The teaching of the image, whose seeing is its being seen, now bursts into a theo-optics that—far from merely privileging sight as a predictable critique must presume all along—collapses every convention of vision, physical or spiritual. “For you are there where ‘speaking, seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, reasoning, knowing . . . are the same” (253).52 In one way this pansensorium makes explicit what is implied by the traditional unity of divine attributes. But something else is going on in the crisis, the epiphany, of this synesthetic cascade.

Here seeing “coincides with being seen, hearing with being heard, tasting with being tasted, touching with being touched. . . .” This series comprises a disclosure of divine passivities, each correlated to an activity. And each is “impossible,” forbidden by the Aristotelian logic “guarded by the angel stationed at the entrance of paradise.”⁵³ But Cusa, in this thinking, this sensing, this writing that hurts, resists particularly the angel of actus purus. The invisible one whom he “sees” in this vision, still unfolding the “sensible experiment,” he addresses thus: “You are visible by all creatures and you see all. In that you see all you are seen by all.” We have to do not with the privileged vision for the mystagogue. This is a sight utterly available to all—invisible not because of its distance but because of its proximity. “You, therefore, my invisible God, are seen by all and in all sight you are seen by everyone who sees.” But this intimacy does not flatten into pure immanence. “You who are invisible, who are both absolute from everything visible and infinitely super exalted, are seen in every visible thing.”54 It is the “in” of a panentheism, still clothed in an absolute—but one that with Cusan irony can be kept outside nothing at all. It is absolute not as separate from all things, but as less separable than anything else and therefore different from everything.

In this passage there occurs a yet more dramatic co-incident of the activity with the passivity of God. “But this wall is both everything and nothing. For you, who confront as if you were both all things and nothing at all dwell inside that high wall which no natural ability can scale by its own power.”⁵⁵ So the freedom of a gift, undaunted by the boogeymen of an atheism of nothing, or a pantheism of everything, presses on: “For I am confronted by the wall of absurdity, which is the wall of the coincidence of creating with being created, as if it were impossible for creating to coincide with being created.”⁵⁶

And yet apparently it does. The “as if” already puts a crack in this impossibility. But how can God the Creator also be created? How can the uncreated be also creature? Truly an absurdity for any received theology. For “creating and being created alike are not other than communicating your being to all things so that you are all things in all things and yet remain absolute from them all.” This divine in-and-as-all is the very being of creation. The divine “all in all” is not eschatologically deferred. Yet difference is not collapsed. Immanence then would not undo the distinction of God and world but their division. That it remains so nearly impossible to put this “you” into theos logos—without indulging in wasteful polemics or evasive abstractions—is a symptom of the cloud. And elsewhere Cusa thematizes that nonseparability of God from the world as the apophatic: “we see most truly this indivisibility is not apprehensible by any name nameable by us or concept formable.”⁵⁷ On the other hand, it is exactly what he does name—as a conjecture, not a comprehension—non aliud, not other: than itself or than any other. “Non aliud” is another discursive apophasis, which is at the same time another experimental kataphasis.⁵⁸

Nonetheless, this theos calls, it communicates, it seeks to be communicated—and so to be created: “to call is to create, and to communicate is to be created.” To communicate is to be created: yes, surely any event of dialogue, of significance conveyed and received, does constitute me anew. Yet it is God being created in this communication. At a certain point Cusa seems to solve the absurdity thus: the infinite God is “beyond this coincidence of creating with being created” and is “neither creating nor creatable.” Has apophasis just restored orthodoxy? If so it is restored only in being simultaneously transgressed—for he then immediately refuses to rank creating above creatability. This is indeed apophatic discourse, an unsaying that unsays even its prior unsaying—only to say something unpredicted. “So long as I conceive a creator creating [creatorem creantem], I am still on this side of the wall of paradise. And so long as I imagine a creatable creator [creatorum creabilem], I have not yet entered, but am at the wall.”59

In other words the “creatable creator,” while coming apophatically unsaid, comes closer to paradise than does is the “creating creator”! The infinite—what seems all or nothing—will in knowing ignorance escape “anything that can be named or conceived.” Creator is such a name. But inasmuch as we are going to name (you) “God”: “You are not therefore creator but infinitely more than creator, although without you nothing is made or can be [possit] made.”⁶⁰

In other words, there is no restoration of a proper creation from nothing, non de deo sed ex nihilo (Augustine). No representation of a transcendent creator unilaterally creating from a nothing outside of Himself [sic] can withstand the perspective of this doubly affirming and negating coincidentia. If I were to press again the perspective, the conjecture, of the creatio ex profundis—and so also of the infinity, where there is no boundary between the divine infinity and the tehom of creation—I would point to the relational creativity of Genesis as the code of a communicative creation radical in its reciprocations. I might direct the reader to a passage of the Zohar where Elohim is called a palace. “The secret is: ‘With Beginning, [blank space] created Elohim.” “The ‘secret’ message is urgently doubled. Elohim now signifies a created place, a palace (binah, womb) not ‘the Creator.’”⁶¹ But here instead, in the cloud rather than the deep, let us ask: what does the impossible figure of the creatable creator make possible?

The very grammar of creatibilem, the creatable—that which “can be created,” which it is possible to create—functions for Cusa almost indistinguishably from that of the “created” (creatur). In other words, the divine passive that has shadowed the entire argument signifies divine possibility: the ability to be created. The creature is the creatable, as the creator is the one who creates. And in the acute paradox, the aporia of their unexpected co-incident, the familiar image of the creating creator is unsaid (deconstructed, not destroyed) by the unpaintable icon of the creatable-creature-creator, as truly creative as it is communicative. In other words the ablility to be created signifies potentiality in God—a notion just as impossible for classical doctrine as is the divine passivity. In fact it is the same impossibility: for—and here we are up against the wall of ontotheologic—possibility is to actuality as passivity is to act.

If God as pure act suffers neither potentiality nor receptivity, this metaphysically guarantees that He [sic] suffers not at all. Suffering means not only the lack of negative affect, but of being affected, influenced, “moved,” in any sense. The divine impassivity really does classically mean no passivity—which in this logic means precisely no potentiality. What is already perfect, fully actualized, cannot by this logic be altered. Change would entangle God in the time of creatures, in finitude. As the Angelic Doctor sums it up unambiguously: “The being whose substance has an admixture of potency is liable not to be by as much as it has potency; for that which can be, can not-be. But, God, being everlasting, in His substance cannot not-be. In God, therefore, there is no potency to being.”62

This absolute priority of act over possibility does not intend to demean the potentialities in the world. But its dichotomy functions hierarchically, with or without God. We noted earlier its echo even in a strand of Derrida, in a reduction of “possibility” to the predictable, a nonevent, a non-act. Cusa might, with no infidelity to the old “not-being,” agree with Aquinas that God cannot not be. But he transgresses the angelic prohibition to announce: “absolute possibility is God.”⁶³

COINCIDENTIA AND CONTRAST

It is as true to say that God creates the world, as that the world creates God.

—A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality

What then shall we make of the resemblance of Cusa’s creatable creator to Whitehead’s proposition, formulated half a millennium later? It occurs as the final “contrasted opposite” in the series of six chiasmic antitheses that lend a liturgical ring to the conclusion of Process and Reality. He calls them “apparent self-contradictions.” An apophatic reserve is in play: it is “just as true to say” functions like Cusa’s “as if.”64 Whitehead nuances the crucial twist: “in each antithesis there is a shift of meaning which converts the opposition into a contrast.”⁶⁵ Might we collate Whitehead’s technical use of “contrast” with Cusa’s coincidentia oppositorum? The latter wraps apparent contradictions, seemingly impossible to reconcile, into the enfolding complicatio. Similarly, Whitehead’s notion of contrast encodes the root dynamism of his vision. It is by virtue of the conversion of “incompatibilities into contrasts” that complexity arises, that becoming is embodied in process, that difference is gathered—we can say enfolded or contracted—in the concrescence of the actual occasion. Each actual occasion is a space-time perspective, as indeed “each actual world is relative to standpoint.”⁶⁶ The indeterminate becoming of each perspective receives considerably more emphasis in the twentieth-century model, to be sure.

It is not for the sake of an iconoclastic inversion that Whitehead can from one perspective call God “the first creature of creativity.”⁶⁷ He is emphasizing over against classical notions of changeless and impassive omnipotence a divine becoming “not before all creation, but with all creation.”⁶⁸ When he writes that God “does not create the world, he saves it,”⁶⁹ he is undoing every imperial notion of all-determining power. Cusa, so many centuries earlier, never denies the divine omnipotence, only its standard meaning. For both, the agency of no creature is constrained by divine influence. And, also for both, “without you nothing is made.” In Whitehead it is the creative process, everlastingly infini, unfinished, that gives rise to God and world: the ultimate contrast. God mediates, as the principle of concretion, that creativity. Creativity drives God’s becoming—never from nothing—in response to the becoming of the world.

If the startling apophatic signifier of a creatable creator in Cusa resonates with Whitehead’s figure of the creature-God, the latter was not aware of the antecedent. His becoming, creatable, deity is signified as “the consequent nature of God.” It is a compassion for the world, a feeling-with, a place of passion or passivity, the receptive medium of the universe. One may compare it with the divine enfolding, the complicatio. In Hartshorne’s rendition, God becomes “the Most Moved Mover” unfolding in a universe that can be called “the body of God.” As it turns out, Cusa (without the benefit of critical animal theory) also approved Plato’s trope of the universe as an “animal.”70 This animal-cosmos is one living organism or body animated not just by a secondary anima mundi “immersed in it”—but by “God as its soul.”⁷¹ Within it the perspectives of particular animals come into their own, we noted earlier, as cosmological contractions, seen by and seeing the creature-creator.

In Whitehead’s own strong divergence from the Aristotelian-scholastic actus purus, the creative aspect of God is distinguished from the receptive, or consequent, nature. It is called “primordial” and is eternally initiating, creating through the eros of the “lure.” But in this activity it remains in itself “deficient in actuality,” its content being that of pure possibilities abstract in themselves. They become active potentiality, pressing for incarnation, only in the self-creative process of the world. That world remains different from God and yet as intimately non aliud, not other, as her own body. It is in the coinciding consequent character that the divine is becoming. Hegel, who drew from Bruno and from Schelling in this, if ambivalently, had been perhaps the first to think systematically the divine self-actualization as a becoming. For Whitehead, however, that becoming is the actualization not of a determinate dialectic but of the indeterminate creativity: “the many become one, and are increased by one.”⁷² That one—unlike Cusa’s still Neoplatonic One, however prone to redistribution—is just one among many momentary ones, unfolding as a singular event by enfolding, or “prehending,” its universe.

In other words, across a world of divergence, both thinkers keep in play—in experimental conjecture—a nonoppositional binary dynamic of the creating and the creatable God. One can say of both that the creating is by “attraction” or by “calling,” therefore by communication rather than manipulation, and that the being-created of God is the event of being-moved by the moving manifold. The implication would be that all those iterating passives, suggestive of divine receptivity, mean that in our feelings of God God is feeling us. This reciprocity of prehension is little more than the claim that in seeing the “face of God” what we see is God’s vision of us. But Whitehead draws the explicit inference: therefore we make in that moment a difference to, and so in, God. And it remains impossible for Cusa to infer that the divine would receive something from the creatures. They are “unable to impart anything to God, who is the maximum.”⁷³ We add nothing to God, as already the infinite contains all that is or can happen.

Yet as we are enfolded, complicans, in God we creatures—each already in Cusa “a finite infinity or a created god”74—are not identical with but nonseparable from the maximum.⁷⁵ That enfolding resembles the integration or re-membering of all—“a tenderness which loses nothing that can be saved”⁷⁶—in the consequent nature of Whitehead’s God. The actual occasion perishes and is “objectively immortal,” received in the divine. But its subjective immediacy happens in its actual world. Creaturely difference remains for both thinkers free and irreducible. But in process theology it does add something: not the classically primordial possibilities but their actualization, the endless random and free variations of actuality. In other words we the creatures impart everything—all the things that exist—to God. Who otherwise would not exist as a God, a relation to the world, but would remain a bodiless not-thing, condition of the possibility of everything, but truly absolute of all relation. That is the infinite—closer to Whitehead’s creativity than to his God—as abstracted from the creation.

In Cusa human freedom breaks, prayerfully, into its earliest Renaissance exuberance: “Sweetness of every delight, you have placed within my freedom that I be my own if I am willing. Hence unless I am my own you are not mine . . .” (I am oddly reminded of the feminist insistence on my finding the self before losing it again to any dominant “you.”) “You do not constrain me, but you wait for me to choose to be my own.”⁷⁷ And if this human capacity to “listen to your Word” and be “free and not the slave of sin” emerges from facing the Face, let us note that it cannot be read as humanist (let alone feminist) defiance; nor as an early modern intensification of the privilege of Man as Imago Dei. It bursts in context out of a contemplation of the nonhuman plenary of creatures enfolded in God. The sense of reasoning freedom here comes always apophatically entrained in a cosmos of relations.⁷⁸

“And then in the cloud I find a most astonishing power.” . . . This cloud-power turns out to be the “principle that gives being to every power both seminal and not seminal,” unfolded as “that power in which it virtually enfolds a tree, together with all the things that are required for a sensible tree and all that accompany the being of a tree.” Note again the empirical specificity. And it leads Cusa to realize that “thus in you my God the tree is you yourself.”⁷⁹ This is the work of divine explicans, unfolding through the contraction—“that power of seed, which is contracted” to its species. The divine potentia unfolds as the virtuality (no abstract but rather an active potentiality) of the seed. And then we encounter in this text that leaves implicit the astrophysics of De docta, this cosmological optic: “O God, you have led me to that place in which I see your absolute face to be the natural face of all nature.”80

No wonder he could say above that “you are seen by all and in all sight.” Far from privileging an anthropomorphic face, the icon of God has radically distributed itself across the face of the universe, across the surface of all materialities. The contractions of perspective iterate through the creation: “if a lion were to attribute a face to you, it would judge it only as a lion’s face.”⁸¹ Mystical vision becomes what Latin American thinkers such as Sylvia Marcos call “cosmovision”: a contextual embodiment of the particularity of perspective.⁸² In its cloud epiphany, the face of all creatures, here seen as “the art and the knowledge of all that can be known,” opens right out of the practice of learned ignorance. And it effects not a mystical indifference to the world but the flourishing of its manifold arts, sciences, and practices of conviviality.

The unfolding, enfolding soul of the world becomes in process-relational cosmology receptive to affect and impact and—consequently—open-ended in its infinity. Of course any coinciding of Cusa and Whitehead plies its own theopoiesis, its own cloudy construction. For it is not a matter of simply updating a half-millennium old figure by breaking nonknowing into the overt indeterminacy of all becoming. The apophatic relationalism also supplements process theology, so as to check the latter’s particular temptations to objectification. At any rate the affinity of these perspectives only comes to fruition by way of the mutual attraction of their cosmologies—and this only for the sake of the possibility of a convivial ecology now, of the painfully attractive possibility that we “can do,” are yet “able to do,” posse, life together.

POSSIBLE GOD

Overcoming the angel of reason, Cusa does not back out of the cloudy co-incident of the creating with the creatable, the lover with the lovable, the actual with the possible. Yet he is up against a wall of self-contradictions not to be resolved in one book. His thought betrays a wobble, a “violence” to himself, even in the play of its experimentation. At one point he exacerbates the Aristotelian view of possibility: “the dark chaos of pure possibility.”83 Yet later in the same book we read that “all possibility exists in absolute possibility, which is the eternal God.”⁸⁴ That is a dramatic difference: from a hell of mere possibility, merely unactualized—to the heaven of absolute possibility. The possibility of breaking open the impossible and therefore the project of this book is at stake! He clarifies: “in God absolute possibility is God, but outside God it is not possible; for nothing can be found that would exist with absolute potentiality, since all things other than the First are necessarily contracted.”⁸⁵ This distinction anticipates Whitehead’s primordial nature, comprised of the “eternal objects” as “pure possibilities,” abstract from their actualization (contraction) by creatures.

In De visione we saw Cusa make explicit an illicit grammatology of divine potentiality. Soon thereafter, preoccupied with the coincidentia of possibility and actuality, he coins possest, fusing posse and est, as a new name for God, possi-being. Yet, as Peter Casarella argues, this term still does not represent a complete break from the Thomist sensibility. “Even when he terminologically drifts away from the Aristotelian-Thomistic doctrine of God’s pure actuality, Cusanus is still in fundamental agreement with many aspects of the theory.” For “he is not claiming that God’s actuality is mixed with the potency to develop into something other than God.”⁸⁶ As Casarella stresses, actuality and potentiality “coincide” in God, for God, as Cusa reiterates in De Possest, “is free of all opposition.” God’s explicatio “in and as all things” may or may not be read as the potency to develop into something “other than God,” inasmuch as the creation is indeed different from God. And yet it is “other” in a limited sense. The text titled pointedly De Non Aliud offers, by way of an abstruse apophatic dialectics that engages Dionysius intensively, “Not Other” as the name of God, as God is not the Other of any others: “Not-other is not other than anything, it does not lack anything, nor can anything exist outside of it.”⁸⁷ So then we must infer that the possibilities that compose God do not actualize something “other than God” inasmuch as there is no such other. But as the world is “not other than other”—a nonseparable other, a difference, to add our less paradoxical supplement—divine possibility does (impossibly for Thomism) find actualization in the world of others.

The situation becomes even less apologetically salvageable in Cusa’s last piece of writing. Here Cusa, just weeks before his death, declares with “delight” that posse ipsum—translatable as possibility itself—is now his favorite name for God. For nothing that is can be—without first being possible. And nothing that one does can be done unless it is possible to do it. The argument is disarmingly practical: “What young boy or young girl, when asked if they could carry a stone and having answered that they could, when further asked if they could do this without posse [being-able], would deny it emphatically?”88 Posse ipsum thus names the ultimate condition of the possibility—of any activity. If we identify that posse as “God,” then there is no doubt of its reality: not that he means to offer a proof of God’s existence so much as a resignification, another experimental name made possible by all the negations.

Nor is he at this point concerned to harmonize the breakthrough with his prior thought, which he blithely unsays: “Posse ipsum—that than which nothing can be more capable, prior, or better, and that without which nothing can be, live, or understand—is a far more suitable name than possest or any other.”⁸⁹ Posse, related to potentia as either potentiality or power, a nominalized verb meaning more literally “being able” or “able to do,” doesn’t translate neatly. It suggests Gayatri Spivak’s reading of Foucault’s pouvoir/savoir. “Pouvoir is of course ‘power.’ But there is also a sense of ‘can-do’-ness in ‘pouvoir,’ if only because, in various conjugations, it is the commonest way of saying ‘can’ in the French language.”⁹⁰ This can-do energizes Cusa’s last pass at the possible. But it is crucial that one not misread it as God’s ability to do this or that. He is speaking of our own ability, of what the girl or the boy—the creature—can do. Once we admit that our every free action is preceded by the possibility of that action, we are living evidence of that posse ipsum—the power of our ability, which is being offered as the name and utterly visible sign of God. Of what was darkly invisible, Cusa now says that, like the figure of Wisdom, she “shouts in the streets.”⁹¹ He exuberantly unsays his lifelong preference for the unsayable darkness, an apophasis that of course is serving as the sine qua non of this moment of illumination. I will not say that all that unsaying of the God of power and might has cleared the space—within the formidable patriarchy of Rome itself—for this apparition of Sophia, she who does not do to or for but empowers us. No I will not.

In this last text, as Casarella concedes, the lines of continuity with Aquinas “are severed, once it is maintained that in God possibility itself is prior to actuality.” Potentiality for Cusa did not earlier signify a lack or a predictability, inferior to actuality and extrinsic to God. But now it has become the privileged signifier of divinity. This “God who may be”—in Richard Kearney’s “poetics of the possible God” and his critical supplementation of Cusa—makes possible, but does not itself make happen. Otherwise, as Kearney rightly worries, a crisis of theodicy looms.92 Of course we creatures are never separate from that enfolding infinity, but that does not render us its pawns. No more are my cells, organs, or even quanta controlled by “me.” If posse ipsum unfolds or contracts in actualization, it is we ourselves who do it. Who ply, who layer, fold, and do it. We might not. But we can. Every historic irruption of the “yes we can” is, of course, likely to disappoint. But we do not have God to blame.

The indiscrete infinite can no longer be mistaken for a sovereignty manifesting its power over the world. The eternally possible is becoming actualized—here, now—through the decisions of creatures. Christian theology did not follow Cusa either to or through this cloud. Indeed, soon after and to the north, it turned sharply toward the all-determining and predestining God, whose grace is all that counts. The incomprehensible infinity became the inscrutable will. But the path not taken may open differently in the present darkness.

Now we hear of the theology of maybe, of perhaps, of divine weakness—calling us to do what we “can do.” But if a discourse of mere powerlessness seems (when for instance we feel helpless before corporate depredations) to waste too much potential, let us summon our cloud power. We might even in certain contexts translate the divine power, in fidelity to the Latin omnipotentia, as divine omnipotentiality. It would unfold indeterminately in all creatures, in a perspectival one by one—“as if directed just to me.” It is truer to say that this posse ipsum is actualized than that it acts: it does not make, but makes possible the actual creature, the actualization of the creature. Therefore each creaturely contraction expresses not the act of the creator but the agency of the creature. Theology haunts each of us with the gift of our own ability, our responsability. But really, now, never mine alone but widely and wildly “ours.”

. . .

Every person, place and thing in the chaosmos of Alle anyway connected . . .

—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

It is with Cusa that the apophatic divinity undergoes its supreme complication. Here the ancient cloud breaks into the endless crowd of folds: “God, therefore, is the enfolding (complicans) of all in the sense that all are in God.”93 The negative infinity—the maximitas—folds together everything in itself and so as itself. So Cusa’s panentheism destabilizes any picture of a container-God: the “all in God” is not that of all the finite others lodged within a bigger One. Its “in” signifies precisely enfolding, not enclosure. For the linguistic ambiguity between folding in and folding together is not just translational. The infinite is the enfolding of all finitudes, it is (in this perspective) the complicans, the com-pli-cating itself. And the complicating means a folding together of all in all. Is it the ultimate entanglement, in a smoother imagery of folds? At the same time, in its chiasmic crossover, the complication performs its own explication: “and God is the unfolding (explicans) of all in the sense that God is in all.”⁹⁴ This much was nebulously implicit in certain emanations of Neoplatonic panentheism, especially in Thierry of Chartre’s earlier use, probably derived from Boethius, of the explicatio/complicatio as metaphor of God.

We turn however with Cusa to the crystallized texture, the atmospheric density, of the “all.” In the complicatio, the cosmic many that compose the all fold into a coincidentia with the divine one. For all things in God are “without diversity.” He does not contradict the presumption of divine simplicity. Yet that simplicity now hardly resembles the classically simple One. (After all, even simplex has its fold. Consider Heidegger’s Ein-falt.) Does the togetherness of a one that is “not the opposite of a many”—a plurisingularity, as I have translated Elohim—here produce a different consistency of the singular God? Cusa, by way of Eriugena, partakes of the apophatic reading of the same second hypothesis of The Parmenides noted in the last chapter, according to which “unity itself is parceled out by being, and is not only many but indefinitely numerous.”⁹⁵ In Cusa the possible God unfolds from an unknowing that coincides with theological wisdom. Mystery is not traded for mastery. For if theologians transcend our nonknowing, in the name of Jesus, revelation, or even justice, we practice Christian idolatry. We observed in Cusa’s exercise with the icon the breaking up of the face of God across an endless cosmic surface of faces. God does not vanish into a void but evaporates into the impossible cloud—of possible perspectives. Of possibly infinite perspective(s).

However, it is something different from God as such that comes, at a definite swerve of Cusa’s writing, into view. That difference is—everything. From the cloud perspective of the present book, the everything that is the creation bursts with book 2 of De docta into a radically new visibility. It is here that the fold between apophatic theology and an affirmative cosmology materializes. As Mary-Jane Rubenstein enfolds his achievement in her splendid Worlds Without End: “What Cusan cosmology comes down to, what it opens up, is something like a ‘perspectival multiverse.’”96 Not a bunch of separate universes, but the multiplicity of a boundless materialization, boundlessly interactive—or, in Karen Barad’s posthumanist sense, to be considered in the chapter to follow, intra-active.

In other words, in the excess that overflows from the negative infinite, a paradigm of radical relationality now reveals itself. Chiasm within chiasm: its explication comes in succinct and unmistakable code: “In the First Book it was shown that God is in all things in such a way that all things are in God, and now it is evident that God is in all things as if by mediation of the universe. It follows, then, that all are in all and each is in each.”⁹⁷

Has this intuition of “all in all and each in each” come so explicitly into any texts of the Christian West before this? Cusa attributes the phrase to the sixth-century Anaxagoras, a protégé of Pericles. And indeed, that ancient idea of an original multiplicity did not make it into mainstream Greek, or subsequent European, thought. Hoping that his readers might grasp it “more clearly than Anaxagoras himself,” Cusa offers the following condition of radical interrelation as an inference from the God-world relation: if God is unfolded in everything and every thing enfolded in God, then the “everything” of the universe as a whole is the way God is in every thing. This is important: there is no chance here of a standard pious interiority of “God within,” as there might be in the icon’s reflected and refracted gaze “as if on me alone.” That would be a misreading, as the perspective of the icon precisely exposed that one-on-one relation as shared by every creature in the universe. If God is in me, it is me-with-the-whole-universe attached. “As if by mediation of the universe”: but that is the universe from the point of view that “I” signify. If “I” am not wiped out by the cosmic immensities—and just how immense, collapsing the entire medieval framework, is what comes to light in this very book—it is perhaps because that entire pluriverse contracts itself to me. In me. As me. As you.

“In each creature, the universe is the creature”:a thought of such luminous darkness that it is still hardly thinkable. “And each receives all things in such a way that in each thing all are contractedly this thing.”⁹⁸ So creation at large is contracted in each creature, as possibility is contracted in its actualization; as unity “is contracted through plurality, just as its infinity is contracted through finiteness, its simplicity through composition.”99 In other words, it is as if the universe is what it is only in the perspective of each and all of its creatures. But each creature is its perspective on its universe. And that thought invites Whitehead: “Each actual creature is a locus for the universe.” In other words, in a unremarked affinity with the Shekhinic tent of dwelling, “every actual entity has to house its actual world.¹⁰⁰ As he renders Einstein: “the principle of universal relativity directly traverses Aristotle’s dictum, ‘A substance is not present in a subject.’ On the contrary . . . if we allow for degrees of relevance, and for negligible relevance, we must say that every actual entity is present in every other actual entity.”¹⁰¹ This being-present-in—whether in God or in another actual entity—signals the direct contestation of the substantialist metaphysic of an entity, as a bounded being externally related to all its neighbors, contained within a bounded universe, contained within an external God (whose unboundedness is thereby assumed and contradicted.) It is an answer to the so-called metaphysics of presence, not its reprise.

The Whiteheadian concrescence—becoming concrete, actual—performs its own version of a contraction into a particular space-time standpoint. Because “everything is in a certain sense everywhere,” each creature composes itself of its universe at that moment. That “certain sense” refers to the way each creature is a potentiality for all future ones. Therefore it is as active possibility, not as concrete actuality, that each is in each. And the universe from the perspective of one creature is no more the same universe as that of another, than one creature is the same as another creature. The multiplicity of perspectives diffract the cosmos not as a mere plurality of worlds but as an intertwined multiverse. Rubenstein, writing the history of the astrophysical multiverse, adds this luminous optic: “Creation is the expression of God, the contraction of God, the holographic dwelling-place of God, and yet creation is not God . . .” Cusa will often express this difference as a matter of number: whereas God is unity itself, the universe is unity “contracted in plurality.”¹⁰² If, however, Cusa began the pivotal passage by inferring that allare-in-all from God-is-in-all, the reasoning now doubles back and inverts itself: “Since the universe is contracted in each actually existing thing, it is obvious that God, who is in the universe, is in each thing and each actually existing thing is immediately in God, as is the universe.”¹⁰³

This is a yet more radical formulation: because the universe is in each, God is in each. From our own entangled relations, we may infer an infinite complication. What has shifted in this chiasmic inversion? From the world summed up in me, or in that irksome fly, we sense, by this alter-knowing, the entwining infinite. Now “it is obvious” that each thing—as the universe that each thing contractedly is—is “immediately” in God. Yet Cusa had just written that God is present as if (as if) by mediation of the universe. So God, by the mediation of the universe that is that creature, is immediately present to all creatures. In other words, the immediacy of God to each creature is mediated by the universe as that creature. By a simple analogy, I sip, in the immediacy of this coffee, the world. That sip mediates the unfathomable manifold of contracted, compacted, relations (chemical, economic, ecological, affective.) (As if I do—for most relations to the universe blur into the cloud—and into irrelevance.) What experience of immediacy is not highly mediated?

We may sense what is at stake for Cusa: medieval theology, like its cosmos and its church, is wrought of great hierarchies of mediation. The hierarchies convey divine revelation to limited and sinful human capacities; they protect the mystery, provide institutional discipline for the multitudes. Cusa conjectures at once a mysteriousness transcending any authorities and more intimately present, available, than those mediators permit. The intensive complicatio of the infinite is now folded into every finitude. The very order, kosmos, of reality is by this gesture dramatically complicated—made at once much larger and much closer. The cloud has precipitated the whole cosmic crowd. Cosmos becomes chaosmos (and coincidentally Joyce did muse over Cusa and Bruno, and we will see how Deleuze, who loves the Joycean chaosmos, embraces the figure of the fold in cognizance of these theological origins). In the third book of Cusa’s De docta, Christ comes as the name of the mediator of the immediacy of the infinite to the finite. But then he appears against the background of a radically reconfigured theocosm. The relentless work of the coincidentia of the infinite and the finite brings the whole ladder of mediations down. Mediation plies the immediate: you the universe.

In context Cusa is explicating the arcane medieval conundrum that he probably found cited in Meister Eckhart. Attributed to Hermes Trimegestus, the purported author of the Hermetic Corpus, and probably formulated in a twelfth-century pseudo-Hermetic text (the pseudonyms of the nameless mystery continue), it famously reads thus: “God is an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere, whose circumference nowhere.”104 Cusa had already developed its theological meaning in his first book’s conjectures on the circling infinity. Indeed in the opening of De docta ignorantia Cusa intensified the logic of infinity through his mathematical analogies. As the circle expands to infinity, it coincides with a line (imagine looking at one segment of a circle, which, as it expands, seems to be straightening): so opposites coincide in infinity. “Infinite unity, therefore, is the enfolding of all things,”¹⁰⁵ For nothing can be outside of what is infinite. It has no boundaries to be outside of.

“Taken seriously,” as Harries notes of the sphere without boundary, “the metaphor threatens to shatter every hierarchy.” It yields a world in which God cannot be separated from anything anywhere. It is however in book 2 of De docta ignorantia “that Cusa makes the unprecedented move of applying the Hermetic formula to the universe itself.”¹⁰⁶ If an apophatic cosmology can be said to billow out of this mystical underground—alter-knowledge indeed—what possible relevance to what later science would call “knowledge” could it have?

EARTH MOVING

As a historian of science, Alexander Koyré captures the novelty thus: “We cannot but admire the boldness and depth of Nicholas of Cusa’s cosmological speculations which culminate in the astonishing transference to the universe of the pseudo-Hermetic characterization of God.”¹⁰⁷ Suddenly an impossible expanse of world—hardly more comprehensible half a millennium later—bursts into view. Here Cusa passes from his meditation on the negative infinity that is God to his “corollaries for inferring one infinite universe.” He makes the move as follows: “the universe is limitless, for nothing actually greater than it, in relation to which it could be limited, can be given.”¹⁰⁸

With this leap to a boundless universe, Cusa becomes “the thinker who is most often credited or blamed for the destruction of the medieval cosmos.”¹⁰⁹ Bruno follows in his cosmological footsteps two generations later. Bruno, in a discourse lacking all apophatic reserve, multiplies the infinity of the world into an infinity of actual worlds. Cusa, differently, never simply identifies this illimitable multiplicity of the world with the divine infinity. He unsays the infinity of the universe even while saying it experimentally. A certain neti neti nuances his discourse: the world is a “contracted infinity,” not a negative or absolute infinity, and “in this respect it is neither finite nor infinite.”110

The contracted infinity does not take the place of the negative infinity, but, as it were, gives it place: it materializes it. Indeed from the perspective of posse ipsum, the universe may be said to actualize this God’s possibility. It is the whole universe, not the little human speck of it, that is made in imago dei. And so the startling riff: “every creature is, as it were, a finite infinity or a created god. . . . It is as if the Creator had spoken: ‘Let it be made,’ and because God, who is eternity itself, could not be made, that was made which could be made, which would be as much like God as possible.”¹¹¹ God is not creatable—but asymptotically close to it. But if we then imagine a creator God here, facing a universe “in his image” we have of course backed away from the wall and lost the glimpse. “Cusa, in other words, is shattering the simple mirror-game between God and the universe by folding God into God’s own image, as its omnicentric center. The universe does not resemble a God who stands outside it; it resembles God only insofar as it embodies God, everywhere in the universe, equally.”¹¹² Thus Mary-Jane Rubenstein interprets this historical moment of the holographic multiverse. We have to do with a ubiquitous embodiment, a pan-carnation of God equally distributed. And indeed precisely that equality in fact is the second (non)person of Cusa’s trinity, as aequalitas, a Christic equality that is “the enfolding of inequality.”¹¹³

We have however yet to consider the most dramatic cosmological yield of the application of the learned ignorance to the infinite sphere. This conjectural appli-cation happens just after the disclosure of the all-in-all and each-in-each. “The world, whose center and circumference are God, is not understood,” he writes. The unknowable infinite has lent its incomprehensibility to the world: an apophatic cosmology indeed. This lets him infer that though the world is not negatively infinite, “it lacks boundaries within which it is enclosed.” If it lacks boundaries, that is, some sort of definite perimeter, it follows that it lacks also any “fixed and immovable center.” And therefore: “The earth, which cannot be the center, cannot lack all motion.”¹¹⁴

There, he said it: a then impossible truth steps forth with no fanfare or dread, so mildly that again one might miss it, as apparently almost everyone did. Yet there is no vagueness in this reasoning. “Therefore, just as the earth is not the center of the world, so the sphere of fixed stars it not its circumference, even though, by comparison of earth with the sky, the earth itself seems near the center.”115 He has thereby demolished—as an illusion of geocentric perspective—the entire medieval Aristotelian conception of the fixed earth surrounded by a sphere of fixed stars. Thereby he is anticipating by a century Copernicus’s infinite universe and moving earth. Copernicus’s revolutionary model is heliocentric. But Cusa continues: “there are no immobile and fixed poles in the sky.”¹¹⁶ There is no fixed center at all. As Koyré says of Cusa’s conception, “it goes far beyond anything Copernicus ever dared to think of.”¹¹⁷

Yet Harries judges it symptomatic of modernism that even Koyré remains reluctant to dub Cusa a precursor of modern science. For his cosmology “is not based upon a criticism of contemporary astronomical or cosmological theories, and does not lead, at least in his own thinking, to a revolution in science.”¹¹⁸ An oddly anachronistic dismissal, as there was not yet the notion of a science separate from the other disciplines. Cusa was quietly perpetrating a revolution, without a history of such revolving models, tested by experiment, to build on. And, as Harries stresses, he was a polymath engaged in the technology and science of his age, even as he remained a hard-working ecclesiastic. He was a lifelong friend of Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, the leading mathematician of the period.

Cusa’s uncannily correct astronomy takes place, however, as the contraction of a revolutionary theology. And it remains monstrous not only to such a heresy hunter as the Heidelberger John Wenck, who failed to make his charges stick.¹¹⁹ In its transdisciplinary theological speculation it is abandoned by the science for which it prepares the way. Secularist science prefers, not surprisingly, to begin its own salvation history with an inflammatory, though no less mystical, sixteenth-century martyrology. The fact that the flamboyant heretic Bruno derived his major ideas from the more circumspect and diplomatic Cusa remains largely buried in those coals. Cusa died of old age as an admired cardinal. The trauma of the Protestant heresy was still in the future. The spirit of Renaissance rather than inquisition prevailed through much of the fifteenth century. And, given Cusa’s explicit influence also upon Copernicus and Descartes, one may concur with Harries’s suspicion that God is the obstacle to Cusa’s acknowledgment in the history of science.

During the intervening centuries the bifurcation of science and religion produced the modern world. With it came the civilizational specialism that rips fact from value, cosmos from ethos, finitude from infinity. The decentered earth, circling within an illimitable universe, spun free not only of the divine infinity but of any sense of human limits. In a mindless parody of the lost divinity, we are to grow infinitely, exploiting the planet as limitless resource. But then how can Cusa help? Does he not foster—nay, launch for earliest modernity—the celebratory freedom to be “my own” as a “created god, a finite infinity” within a boundless cosmos? Won’t this cosmotheology only give spiritual sanction to our now deadly expansiveness? Might not standard theologies of creaturely limitation, divinely supervised, work more practically to urge upon religious populations the necessary limits to growth? And, for the rest, why not just leave science and its secular allies to reveal the impending ecological catastrophe?

MATERIALIZING THE FOLDS

I hope the exercise we have undergone so far suggests that, to the contrary, we must now as a species face the wall of our self-contradiction. It is our entrainment in an unfathomably crowded cosmos that calls us each and all to account for ourselves. We are immensely gifted, and our cooperative creativity backed by survival skills yields also unrivaled competitive aggression. Our great gift turns to poison. It is backing up on us, turning our home toxic. In our finite infinity, our responsibilities for the creation are inescapable: there is no separate reality to which we can flee. Our entanglements may be communally enlivening or systemically unjust, lovable or lamentable, but never erased. And within the cloud we face as a species it is that fold of infinite possibility that makes possible—and deeply uncertain—our potential to actualize that other, more convivial, world. Create world together we will, willy-nilly, we “created gods.” Posse ipsum. Yes we can. The question is what world it will be.

Reading Cusa is an exercise in speculative despecialization. One returns in his cloud not to a prescientific and interior mysticism but to the rigorous contraction, which is at the same time an expansion outward, of negative theology as relational cosmology. If there is in our civilization now also some spreading openness to the intuition of interconnection, perhaps we should not too brusquely write it off as pop spirituality or neoromanticism. Perhaps instead we should lend it the historical depth of the luminous darkness in which another modernity could have unfolded. I find myself walking a few steps here with Milbank when he suggests that “in Eriugena, Eckhart, and Cusanus, we catch a glimpse of a road not taken.”120 It is specifically in the Renaissance transdisciplinarium of Cusa that the natural science of that alternative modernity burst into materialization—by way of the darkly infinite relationalism. The darkness therefore signifies also the mourning for lost possibility. We cannot go back and pick up the path not taken. And in some ways we would not want to.¹²¹ But we can follow its trail of clouds across our own landscape. More practically, I am saying that, in order to cultivate what Connolly calls a “positive resonance machine,”¹²² an efficacious network of social response to the crises of a planetary interdependence, we will need a more learned ignorance than we have yet collectively been able to muster. Only some pragmatic coincidentia of spiritual and secular perspectives can set such a change in motion. Can move the earth.

To such planetary resonance, the name of God need not always pose an obstruction. What unfolds in the cloud-space of the Cusan God is a multiverse of perspectives, proliferating holographically, irresolvable into any fixed proposition. If we move to stabilize the image—it has already moved with us. A bit like the quantum uncertainty the next chapter will consider. For, says Cusa, “our eye must turn itself toward an object because of the quantum angle of our vision.”¹²³ What, do I now claim him also as precursor of quantum mechanics? No. Quantum here simply means a quantity or minimum. And he goes on to say: “But the angle of your vision, O God, is not quantum but infinite.”¹²⁴ This is theology, not physics. The God Who May Be, God perhaps, the perspective of the enfolding infinite, will no more do our physics for us than fix climate change. Or throw a rock.

For that reason theology in the perspective of the cloud cannot unfold, it cannot explicate itself to the world at large, without current entanglements in natural science—in the disciplines of the material world. Theology, especially Protestant, cut off its own cosmological potentiality early on and inspired materialism of the capitalist sort. So we may need something like the new materialism.¹²⁵ And the rising influence of the Deleuzian chaosmos, key to Connolly’s world of becoming, and also of the “vibrant matter” of Jane Bennett or the divinanimality of Derrida, suggests a rhizome early entrained in both the Neoplatonic complicatio and the Whiteheadian God(as we shall see in chapter 5). The fresh attention to a livelier matter signals a new relationalism, rigorous in its attention to its bodies. Bodies sensuous, disabled, queer, vital. Not just fellow human ones, not even just fellow mammals, but bodies all the way down. Process theology is thus based on an originative engagement of physics and evolutionary biology.

Yet theological experiments in direct response to very recent science must take continually new form. So, in the next chapter, in the interest of the positive resonance, we will examine the apophatic entanglement of quantum entanglement itself. We will then ask with what sort of coincidentia we have to do, when, for example, a theoretical physicist speculating on the missing link between quantum and relativity physics proposes an “indivisible universe” based on the simultaneous interplay of “enfolding and unfolding” at every level of reality? As we move from this part’s theological Complications to the next part’s entangled Explications, we also break into a more radical uncertainty, and, which is not the same thing, a more pronounced indeterminacy, than Cusa ever anticipates. This lets us raise questions of contemporary planetary ethics to which Cusa may provide certain interreligious clues but no answers in theory or practice acceptable in our time.¹²⁶ The historical crossover from the luminous darkness to the embodied relationality patterns for us the chiasm of an apophatic entrainment that happens, if it happens, only in the present.

If we shift now from the ancestral theology of clouds to more recent materializations, folds that have appeared in this chapter will come into sharper focus. The quantum angles multiply along with the crowds they entangle.

. . .

The iconic surprise for Cusa of the moved and moving God followed, as we have seen, the cosmological surprise of the moved and moving earth. In the contraction of his vision, a whole chaosmos of intra-active movement is set in process, a perspectival multiverse of process. Its possibilities become active, they become new, only as we realize what we—each in each and all in all, in utter limitation—can do. Infinite possibility breaks in each actualization into its finite embodiment, its fragile difference, its peculiar perspective upon all the others. If the eye of a fifteenth-century icon has followed us this far, perhaps it mirrors, or rather diffracts, now a new complicatio: where the maximum coincides with the minimum in an entangled materialization that offers another nickname for the Name—the Infinite Complication. And in its name we continue to contemplate its infinite perspective, which, altogether unlike our own, “sees all things simultaneously around and above and below. Oh, how wonderful to all those who examine it, O God, is your sight, which is Theos!”127 But the wonder falls flat if we read his “all things simultaneously”—or indeed that of some quantum superpositions—as a holistic determinism. The nebulous nonknowing perhaps only now floats into the turbulent atmosphere of an irreducible indeterminacy—the implication not yet explicate of the infinite as the unfinished. Observed and observing.

At this rate, the negative theology that also negates itself will never, not even in the dregs of the postmodern, achieve a purely materialist theoria. Something of this cosmic voyeurism, this always already reciprocating gaze, will peek through. The glimpse of it may make for a better materialism. As the minimum with the maximum, so each contracted viewpoint—when examined—may coincide with what infinitely attracts it.