Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) isn’t a household name, even among households steeped in the Judeo-Christian theological tradition. He tends to get lost in the shuffle—dwarfed by the late medieval giants who preceded him such as Maimonides, Aquinas, and Ockham, and obscured by the Reformation apologists who followed such as Luther, Calvin, and Hooker. Yet Cusa’s mystical intuitions about the nature of God are among the most eerie and profound ever put to paper. Inadvertently, though, he may have sounded the death knell of rational theology.
To make sense of God, Cusa turned not only to holy scripture but to plane geometry. Here is where his main contribution lies. The axioms of geometry forced him to wrestle with the mind-boggling difficulties of infinity. Cusa began by supposing that God must be infinite—in his words, the “Absolute Maximum.” It was a traditional notion in Cusa’s time. Saint Anselm, four centuries earlier, had described God as “that than which none greater can be thought.” But Cusa pushed the idea of God’s infinite nature farther, zeroing in on the logical paradoxes that resulted from actual infinity.
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