Bóg jako Byt Absolutny. Filozoficzna interpretacja traktatu De docta ignorantia Mikołaja z Kuzy

Abstract

An important stage in the European philosophical tradition was the decline of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance. One of the representatives of this period of the European philosophical tradition was Nicholas of Cusa who was undoubtedly one of the greatest thinkers of the fifteenth century. He worked primarily on the question of the nature of the Supreme Being. The central treaty, in which Nicholas expressed his vision of the Absolute, is the work entitled On Learned Ignorance (De Docta ignorantia). At the core of his philosophy of God lies the belief of radical ontological and cognitive transcendence of Absolute. He formulated the theory of a “learned ignorance” (docta ignorantia). The deepest truth we can get from this ignorance is the claim that God is a “coincidence of opposites” (coincidentia oppositorum), which is the greatest ontological discovery of Nicholas of Cusa. According to another of his formulas God is also the greatest (maximum) and the smallest (minimum), because apart from God there is nothing greater or smaller than He himself Nicholas’ image of Absolute, embedded in a finite world of phenomena and rules of logic functioning in this limited reality, is largely derived from his delight over the infinite and unlimited. As a result, his mind centers on the idea of the infinite and everlasting Maximum which is divided into three types. Maximum of the first type is Maximum absolute et simpliciter — Maximum absolute and non-relative which is God. The second type is Maximum contractum - Maximum contractual - limited and finite. The most paradoxical is a Maximum of a third type that Nicholas describes as a Maximum both absolute and limited and that is Jesus Christ himself. This Maximum combines, without confusion, what is absolutely transcendental with what is limited, i.e., the Creator with the creation. The transition from this hypothetical, preliminary knowledge of Maximum, both absolute and limited, to an identification of that Maximum with the person of Jesus Christ is an act of faith. Because faith in a form of complicité (involute) includes everything that we can understand intellectually, and intellectual understanding means the development (explication) of faith that seeks to achieve unshakable confidence. The innate desire, present in each human person, to know, which cannot be satisfied by what is temporal, stimulates a man to take a spiritual journey along the path of learned ignorance. So, Nicholas of Cusa, in his treatise De docta ignorantia, volens nolens, combined into one system two potentially opposite currents of human cognitive activity — faith and reason. In this way, he introduced to philosophical speculation the issues of a strictly confessional nature - the whole spectrum of Christian revelation which focuses on the person of Jesus Christ and on the works that he introduced.