Nicholas of Cusa (Cusanus) (1401–1464)

Nicholas of Cusa (Kues), a German cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, philosopher, jurist, mathematician, and astronomer, is widely considered as one of the greatest geniuses of the 15th century. He received a doctorate in canon law from the University of Padua in 1423. His ideas influenced philosophical, political, and scientific thought and anticipated the work of astronomers Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler.

Generally speaking, Cusa's theory of time exemplifies a Christian Platonism whose elements already had a long tradition (in, e.g., the work of Saint Augustine of Hippo, William of Conches, Albert the Great, and Saint Thomas Aquinas). Cusa's elaborations of this material, however, are sometimes quite original. Space permits inclusion here of only a few examples from among his many discussions of the topic.

In De venatione sapientiae (1463), Cusa begins his exposition of the subject by dealing with eternity, the image of which is time (imago aeternitatis). Eternity itself (aeternum) has to be distinguished from “perpetuity” (aevum et perpetuum): Whereas eternity is a mode of duration that has absolutely no beginning and no end, such that it is the peculiar mode of being of God who can himself be called eternity (aeternitas), perpetuity designates a duration that has no beginning and no end within the realm of time. On the other hand, the subjects of perpetuity, like the heavenly entities (caelestia) and the objects of pure thought (intelligibilia), transcend the realm of coming-to-be and perishing. Those passages, where Cusa distinguishes two senses of eternity—the pure eternity of God and the derivative eternity of the perpetual elements of the cosmos—have to be understood according to the same passages; that is, they also reflect the distinction between eternity and perpetuity. Cusa describes eternity as the realm of things that have a being as possible things (posse fieri). The existence of such possibilia is a necessary condition for God's being able to create the sensible world. The eternal objects themselves, however, are not created, but initiated (initiata). In this respect, Cusa echoes the Scotistic model of eternal ideas within God, which are the elements of the world in possibility while they are necessary in their own form of existence as possibilia. Time, on the other hand, has the connotation of change, of coming-to-be and perishing—in other words, of the sensible world. Only in this respect, Cusa sometimes also uses the Aristotelian definition of time as a measure of motion. The creation of the sensible, or timely, world is described in Neoplatonic terms as the unfolding (explicatio) of that which exists not unfolded (complicité) in the intelligible realm of perpetuity. The intelligible world is already structured in a way that enables God to create our world in its beauty. It is probably because of this connection of both the intelligible and the sensible world that Cusa sometimes calls the world itself eternal (aeternus) without qualification: the world in its entirety, that is, including the intelligible world, has no beginning in time; rather, it is the realm within which time begins and ends. In the eternity of God himself, on the other hand, the difference between the two worlds of being able to coming-to-be (posse fieri) and existing actually (esse actu) is suspended, because he alone is what he can be (possest). It is obvious from these remarks that Cusa's theology stays fairly close to the classical Neoplatonic system from late antiquity, though he reformulates it in terms that show some traces of the earlier Christian discussions. In ancient Neoplatonism, however, these ideas about time and eternity were closely connected with the idea of an eternal cosmos, which contained only a limited number of souls that migrated from one body to another one. Thus, it is no surprise that Cusa has [Page 916]difficulties explaining in which way the eschato-logical elements of Christian thought—that is, the resurrection of the dead—can be explained as related to time. In his early work De docta ignoran-tia, he explains that at the time of resurrection we will arrive, because of the end of all motion, at a place beyond time (supra tempus). But this process of transcending that way of being into which we have been born cannot be explained by philosophical reasoning, and consequently Cusa in his subsequent works does not give a new treatment to this question.

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