Sometimes the term “Renaissance” is understood in a broad sense as a period of rapid and intensive cultural development, replacing long periods of spiritual and creative inertia. In this broad sense, we speak of the Carolingian Renaissance of the 8th-9th centuries, the Renaissance of the 12th century, associated with the rise of urban life in Europe, as well as the Georgian, Iranian, Armenian, Arabic, Indian, and Chinese “Renaissances”.
In the narrow sense of the word, the “Renaissance” is the revival of the ideals and values of ancient culture, which began in the 14th century in Northern Italy and in the 16th century covered most of Western Europe.
“Renaissance” (like “Middle Ages”) is not so much a chronological category as a spiritual one. It is in the area of spiritual life that the basis of the uniqueness of this era lies, allowing us to clearly distinguish it from both the Middle Ages and the New Age. If we do not take this uniqueness into account, then we will have to add the Renaissance either to the Middle Ages or to the New Age, or reduce it to a dependent transitional period between these two great eras.
Justification of matter and veneration of nature. The main feature of the spiritual originality of the Renaissance is a deep respect for nature and for every manifestation of life as a symbol, an image of the Absolute. The Middle Ages knew God, leaving the world, the New Age knew the world, leaving God, and only the Renaissance, knowing the world, knew God – not “from effects to cause”, as in Thomas Aquinas, but from the image to the Prototype, from the sign to the meaning. Bruno and Campanella, dying and subjected to tortures that were more terrible than death, defended not their private view of the truth and not their right to know the world scientifically, they defended the divine dignity of man and the world and each thing in it. And they defended it not so much in the face of the Inquisition, but in the face of emerging businessmen who needed nature for their undivided use.
The change in attitudes towards nature that occurred during the Renaissance can be illustrated by the famous saying of Nicholas of Kuzan: “The Universe is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere”
[14] . For comparison, in the Middle Ages, the Universe was considered, in accordance with the metaphysics of Aristotle and the cosmology of Ptolemy, to be limited by an impenetrable “sphere of fixed stars.” Infinity frightened both the mind and the imagination. The Earth, although considered the center of the universe, was still its worst part (as the “sublunary world,” the lowest sphere where the light of the One reaches in its most refracted form), and therefore it is unworthy of being known and perfected—all human hopes and aspirations must be connected with Heaven and posthumous retribution. One must simply run from the earth—per aspera ad astram, to the stars of the spirit through the thorns of matter.
In the New Age, on the contrary, the Universe, figuratively speaking, no longer had either a “circle” or a “center”: its infinity was recognized by reason, but it still not only did not attract, but frightened reason and will, demanding that we arm ourselves against the unknown with the armor of science. “No center” means no starting point, no meaning, no support for life.
Only in the Renaissance did the infinity of the unknown attract man, inspire him to the feat of knowledge, because he knew that God is present everywhere in nature (“the center is everywhere”), which means that man will find support, life and meaning everywhere in nature. Modern science knows only one form of life – protein, and only one celestial body that has it – the Earth. Therefore, the Cosmos must seem like a dead abyss, where only occasionally sparks of life flare up for a moment. The thinkers of the Renaissance knew about the infinitely diverse forms of living beings, therefore they considered any world suitable for life – both planets and stars. For them, the Cosmos was a beautiful populated city, where harmony and love reign.
In its attitude to nature, the New Age, at least until the German Romantics of the 19th century and Schelling, is closer to the Middle Ages than to the Renaissance: nature was treated with arrogance or, at best, with indifference or condescension. Its entire purpose is to serve the needs of man, primarily material needs. And only the Renaissance admires nature and bows before it, and the main need with which man turns to it is the thirst for true knowledge. Knowledge of nature, and through it – knowledge of oneself and knowledge of God, its Creator.
Since in all centuries a woman was considered closer to nature than a man and involved in its generative power, then everything that was said above about nature can also be applied to a woman. In the Middle Ages, a woman was a “vessel of evil”, she should be avoided or restrained whenever possible. And in the New Age – before the German romantics – she was already “debunked”, deprived of the aura of mystery. And only in the Renaissance was it the earthly woman, the beloved, wife and mother, who was the object of veneration as a manifestation of the generative, creative aspect of the Deity – hence the stunningly earthly images of unsurpassed beauty of the Madonnas of the Renaissance.
Among other main features of the Renaissance spirit, the following can be mentioned.
“Debarbarization”. No matter how high the cultural achievements of the young, predominantly Germanic, peoples who came to the European arena to replace the Greeks and Romans, in the minds of the progressive thinkers of the Renaissance the entire era after Antiquity seemed to be an era of barbarism. Europe owed much of its awakening to the East. In the centuries preceding the Renaissance, it was the Arab-Muslim world, stretching from Portugal in the west to Indonesia in the east, that was the bearer of advanced cultural values and traditions. Already in the era of the Crusades, finding themselves in the very heart of the Muslim world, the European knights learned a great deal from their enlightened opponents. The trade relations established later with the Arab countries also became channels for the transmission of cultural values, artistic taste, and philosophical and scientific ideas. Medieval values, medieval traditions, the level of education, the language itself – “common Latin”, the Vulgate, were felt by Italian humanists as shameful relics of barbarism.
“True piety” is the search for a living contact with God. Even during the Crusades, visiting the places of Jesus’s life and death, European pilgrims moved from a somewhat frozen piety, characteristic, for example, of the Cluniac monks of the 11th century, to a more living and emotional experience of the Gospel story. Then came the great saints – St. Bernard and St. Francis of Assisi, who gave new examples of piety as a fiery striving of the spirit, sweeping away all official boundaries. In the 14th-15th centuries, the religious self-awareness and religious experience of Europeans reached an intensity and acuteness unknown either in the Middle Ages or in the New Age. Ordinary people heatedly discussed the intricacies of doctrine. Crowds of flagellants walked from city to city
[15] . External forms of religiosity no longer satisfied religious feeling. The time had come to search for an internal connection with the Creator in one’s own soul. In the religious self-awareness of the advanced thinkers of the Renaissance, the entire previous era of Christianity now appeared as a dark superstition, which was finally being replaced by “piety.” At the end of the 15th century, Aonio Paleario wrote that human souls seemed to have awakened from sleep, and “the ancient superstition, which had masqueraded as piety,” which had spread along with the darkness of barbarism, was replaced by “true piety.”
The time of great discoveries. The Renaissance was a turning point both in cultural life and in the development of civilization. In the 15th and 16th centuries, discoveries were made that fundamentally changed the course of life for the peoples of the European continent, causing an acceleration of the rhythm of life and an expansion of the scale of activity from narrowly local to global. The main discoveries among these were the compass, gunpowder, and printing.
1) Compass. The discovery of the compass allowed sailors to embark on risky voyages across the oceans, into the unknown. The narrow boundaries of the medieval world were broken by great geographical discoveries, and the crystal sphere of fixed stars that bound the Universe was shattered. Human thought emerged from the “world egg” and rushed into infinity. Man began to feel himself a “citizen of the world” again, and a “global worldview” was formed.
2) Gunpowder. The discovery of gunpowder in Europe (long known in China, like the compass) was immediately used to create new destructive types of weapons – cannons and small arms. The Venetian arsenal, full of cannons and cannonballs, entered legend as a symbol of Venice’s military might and the foundation of its trade and cultural ties with the East.
3) Printing. The first books were published in Europe in the 15th century in Germany (the so-called incunabula), but at that time they were still relatively rare and expensive. In the 16th century, as Tommaso Campanella proudly asserts, more books were published than in the previous 5,000 years, and this is most likely true.
General features of the Renaissance philosophy
Often the main achievements of this era are considered to be only the great works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and Luther’s religious reform, while in the field of philosophy the great spirit of the era was allegedly insufficiently manifested or not manifested at all. We hope that from the following exposition it will become obvious that this is not so.
The revival of ancient philosophy is the first merit of the philosophy of the Renaissance. Although the works of many Latin ancient authors were known in the Middle Ages, they were rewritten and interpreted in the Vulgate – a common, corrupted Latin, from which the Italian language later developed, and were used mainly for scholastic studies. The original Greek texts were practically unknown and unclaimed. From the very beginning of the Renaissance, humanists passionately sought original Greek and Latin texts, rewrote them (and with the spread of printing in the 15th – 16th centuries – printed them), studied, compared, and subjected them to philological criticism. Until the end of the 18th century, European philosophers became acquainted with ancient authors through translations made during the Renaissance.
The three main tendencies (sometimes stages) of the philosophy of the Renaissance are considered to be: 1) humanism; 2) neoplatonism; 3) natural philosophy. The heyday of humanism is considered to be the period from the middle of the 14th to the middle of the 15th century, of neoplatonism – from the middle of the 15th to the first third of the 16th, of natural philosophy – the rest of the 16th century. But humanism did not cease to be characteristic of the thinkers of the Renaissance with the development of neoplatonism, it simply took a different form, more philosophical and theoretically substantiated, while retaining all of its basic provisions. Almost all thinkers of the Renaissance, including neoplatonists and natural philosophers, can be called “humanists” in the broad sense. Similarly, neoplatonism was not supplanted by natural philosophy, but entered it in a “sublated” form.
Ancient Neoplatonism was revived, elevated and ennobled by Christianity. In the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Proclus, the One Deity is incapable of incarnating in the finite being of the material world, therefore the ancient Neoplatonists treated the Christian doctrine with great mistrust, in which the mystery of the Incarnation opened up the possibility of a different understanding of matter: if matter is capable of containing God in all the fullness of perfection, then it is not, by definition, a “lack of being”, the beginning of sin or evil, darkness conquered by light, but an active creative force that fulfills all the plans of the Creative Mind. True, such a rethinking of matter was not realized in Christian dogma in the first centuries of Christianity, but the philosophers of the Renaissance proceeded precisely from this understanding of Christianity in their justification of matter.
Natural-philosophical pantheism. Most representatives of the Renaissance philosophy can be called “pantheists” in one sense or another, if we consider Dionysius’s thesis to be pantheistic: “God is all in all and nothing of all.” But the pantheism of the Renaissance differs from the pantheism of, for example, Spinoza, in that God is not only the “beginning” and “end,” but also the “middle” of the Universe as a whole and of each thing: the beginning – as the first cause and the infinitely deep foundation of being and essence; the end – as the limit of perfection, the goal of all aspirations and the all-encompassing integrity of the universe; and the middle – as the individual essence of each thing, considered “from the point of view of eternity.” The individuality of each thing lies in the way in which God (the infinite basis) unfolds itself in a given thing. From this follows a conclusion of enormous ideological significance about the absolute significance of each individuality: the more individual and unique a being is, the more clearly the “ray of Light of the Divine,” which it is, manifests itself in it.
The whole world and every part of it express the attributes of the Deity. Thus, Campanella proclaims: “The whole world and every part of it consists of power, wisdom and love.” These are the three so-called “primalities” – the three main perfections of God, corresponding to his three hypostases.
Dante
The great Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) anticipated the ideas and values of the Renaissance in many ways. The picture of the world as it is presented in the Divine Comedy is still quite medieval, and is the result of the combination of Ptolemaic-Aristotelian geocentrism and Catholic theology. “Objective” space and time do not exist in this picture, they are replaced by hierarchical relations of values: what is more important is earlier and closer. Beyond the sphere of fixed stars is the fiery Empyrean, and at the top of the Hierarchy is the Trinity. And yet a number of features allow us to speak of Dante as a forerunner of the ideas of the Renaissance.
Man’s destiny is not only for heavenly bliss, to which religion leads, but also for earthly bliss, granted by philosophy. Earthly bliss presupposes the possibility of achieving the highest possible perfection on earth, that is, “deification” (Neoplatonic theosis) – not through the rejection of the earthly, but through its elevation to perfection through knowledge and creativity. Dante throws to man a brilliant and prophetic call to nobility, feat and valor not for the sake of an abstract God, but for the sake of divine Love.
The poet is led to contemplation of the Trinity by Beatrice (“Bliss”), the personification of divine Love in the guise of an earthly woman.
One of the main motives of the “Comedy” is a call for active work on earth. In Dante, even Hell does not let the inactive in, and after death they pray for death, but are doomed to forever wander through a mess of their own blood, tears and worms that eat it all up.
Renaissance Humanists
The term “humanity” (humanitas) was introduced by Cicero to denote the quality that Roman culture inherited from Greek culture. This concept was then used by the early Church Fathers, contrasting the emerging Christian morality as more humane with the degrading mores of the empire. The founder of the humanist movement in Italy can be considered Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374), the first poet of pan-European fame, to whom popes and kings listened. He was one of the first to give an example of a “humanist” as one engaged in the “humanitarian” sciences (primarily the collection, translation and commentary of ancient texts, philological criticism and philosophy). In the West, the meaning of the term “humanism” is often reduced to these activities. But the thinkers of the Renaissance themselves understood it much more broadly and deeply – primarily as an affirmation of human dignity and nobility.
Virtue-valor. One of the fundamental characteristics of the Renaissance is the restoration and elevation of the ancient understanding of virtue as valor
[16] . In the Middle Ages, the Christian concept of virtue as the merit of a purely spiritual life, the Gospel “treasure in heaven”, dominated. In secular life, cruelty, treachery and meanness of rulers almost always reigned supreme, while subjects preferred to tolerate all their atrocities, hoping to deserve heavenly retribution. Renaissance thinkers began by transferring virtue to the soil of real active life, demanding from a creative person the highest spiritual and volitional effort (Bruno’s “enthusiasm”). Thus, Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) calls on those “who have the muses in their hearts” to develop sciences and arts “with all diligence and spiritual effort.” “Valor will give you wings,” writes Petrarch, wings for a noble deed. Valor is contrasted with family merit and hereditary social status: “Valor is not shown in what has already been done, but in what must be done” (2: 101-102). It “never rests, is always in action and always, as before the beginning of a battle, keeps its weapons ready” (Ibid.).
One of the foundations of humanism was the praise of human creativity. Creativity is not only the prerogative of God, but man can also become like God in creativity. Moreover, the world created by God is sometimes considered by humanists only as material for man’s creativity, and only man, through his labor, imparts an image of perfection to God’s creations.
Civic consciousness. Unlike the Middle Ages and imitating Rome, the Italian humanists, still aware of themselves as the heirs of the Roman statesmen, called for valor not only in spiritual life, in the struggle against one’s own vices, but also in the arena of civil life – striving with zeal and diligence for the good of the state. The examples of such active virtue-valor in civil life were the humanist chancellors of the Florentine Republic – Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406), who during his 30 years of chancellorship educated a whole galaxy of brilliant humanists, and Leonardo Bruni (1374-1444).
Nobility. Many treatises by Renaissance humanists are devoted to the topic of nobility (nobilitatis). Works “On Nobility” were written by Vergerio, Bracciolini, Manetti and other authors. The concept of nobility was especially important for humanists, since it expressed a new ideal of man and his dignity. In the lives of many humanists, the old idea of nobility and dignity, based on the nobility of family, possession of land and estates, wealth, and military exploits, stood in their way as an obvious or implicit obstacle. The division into “noble” and “ignoble” was very significant at that time: the title of “noble” gave a certain position in society, opened many doors, for example, the right to seek the hand of a noble girl, hold honorary positions, and so on. Humanists prove that “nobility does not come from outside, but comes from one’s own virtue” (2: 161). “…This nobility of yours is only a kind of brilliance and empty arrogance, invented by human stupidity and vanity.” “I (myself) approve of the view of the Stoics, which seems to me the most correct”: “nobility is born from virtue alone” (2: 172).
Dignity-nobility, although it does not exclude the conditions of wealth and noble origin, understands them only as favorable prerequisites for genuine dignity, which includes spirituality, culture, virtue and “rules of life”. “Rules of life” – this is what humanists call what came to be understood as “virtue” later, in developed bourgeois society, and which essentially represents decency: honesty, accuracy, even punctuality in the performance of one’s duties to trading partners and the state. “Virtue” for humanists is still akin, as in Antiquity (both Greek and Roman), to valor – which is courage, fearlessness, asceticism, “zeal in the performance of duty.”
Renaissance understanding of immortality. The attitude of Renaissance thinkers to the afterlife of the soul is also imbued with the spirit of nobility and valor. They considered it inhuman to consign to eternal torment, especially for sins before the “god’s vicars” – the pope and his servants. The ancient understanding of immortality was closer to them: only that which was not subject to time and the temporal during life is immortal in man – an intense, heroic striving for Truth, Good, Beauty. It was emphasized that only intense striving could “crystallize” the rays of Divine Light in the heart of man.
Uniformity of human nature. Another common feature of the Renaissance spirit was the conviction of the uniformity of human nature and, accordingly, of the potential equality of all people. Already Niccolò Niccoli, a friend of Poggio Bracciolini, relies on this thesis as a commonplace that does not require proof, while
Plato and Aristotle, on the contrary, taught about the innate natural difference of people according to the quality of their soul. The Catholic hierarchy, without directly referring to these authorities, also assumed different dignity of priests and laymen, which, however, did not come from nature, but from God’s blessing, transmitted by the Church. The humanists of the Renaissance relied primarily on Stoicism, which affirmed the equality of all people before God as “citizens of the Cosmos”, as well as on early Christianity, with its spirit of brotherhood. Without denying the actual differences in the nature of people, their physical, mental and creative abilities, the humanists emphasized the equal opportunities for improvement for everyone: “From any state it is allowed to rise above fate” (Salutati).
Justification of human nature. Against the dogma of original sin.
The thinkers of the Renaissance were not, as is sometimes imagined, atheists or pagans. Nor were they “anticlericals” (opponents of the Church). Although they rejected the institution of monasticism as contrary to the development of life, many of the Renaissance thinkers held positions in the hierarchy of the Church, and the early humanists, led by Petrarch, sought “their dear canonicates” (profitable parishes), which gave them the greatest possible freedom for their humanitarian pursuits at that time. Nor did they lose their spiritual connection with Christianity. Thus, in Petrarch’s soul until his death there was a struggle between the Renaissance love of life and the Christian ideal of “withdrawal into oneself”, most clearly expressed by Augustine: noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi, in interior hominem habitat veritas (“Do not seek anything outside, read within yourself, in the inner man dwells the Truth”).
Humanists openly confessed Christ, the sacraments of the Incarnation, Resurrection, communion, etc. But they understood the spirit of Christ’s teaching in many ways differently than the representatives of the official Vatican. The main point of disagreement was the dogma of “original sin.” It is difficult to overestimate the influence of this dogma on the worldview, world- and self-perception of believers of that time. Man was taught to look at his body with disgust, bordering on horror: after all, from the body, since it is “born in sin” and inherits the original sin of Adam and Eve, comes the danger of losing the eternal soul or condemning it to eternal torment in hell. Hence the teaching of the Church on contempt for the insignificance of man, from which only priests can rise, with the help of grace transmitted through the church hierarchy. A woman was considered especially dangerous for the salvation of the soul – “a vessel of sin”, “a servant of the devil”, a voluntary or involuntary, conscious or unconscious tempter of man. In the Middle Ages, church leadership especially cultivated such an attitude towards the body and women – in the 13th century, the treatise of Pope Innocent III (1198 – 1216) “On Contempt for the World, or the Insignificance of the Human Condition” (3: 117-130) was very popular. Using many references to Scripture, the author convinces the reader of the unhappy lot of man on earth. (For example, the Scripture says that a child begins to cry from the moment of birth, and laugh only on the fortieth day, and so on). Human feelings themselves are essentially declared a vicious source of evil. The happiest, from the point of view of Innocent III, are unborn babies.
The humanists did not directly deny the dogma of original sin, but with their interpretation they almost completely destroyed its meaning. “…Of course, everyone is born in sin. Try not to add (to this sin) more serious ones, although there is purification from them too.” And then follows something almost heretical: “And that first sin is often washed away at the very threshold of life and a dazzling purity fills the soul” (2: 127). The humanists set themselves the task of reducing the impact of this dogma on the self-awareness of believers, and their works are full of encouraging assurances: “The glory of one does not perish from the sin of another …” (2: 128); “Before birth you did not deserve anything – neither glory nor dishonor” (2: 129), writes Petrarch. These admonitions are continued by all subsequent humanists. Buonaccorso Montemagno assures a person: “The soul of people in itself is pure and free.”
Supporting their thoughts with references to Scripture, humanists defend the highest, even divine dignity of man. Petrarch uses the dogma of the Incarnation for this purpose: God, having sent His Son to Earth, chose for His incarnation not the body of an angel, but the body of a man, thereby showing that the body as such is not the source of sin. “The inexpressible piety and humility of God (expressed in the Incarnation) is the highest happiness and glory of man, in all respects an exalted and hidden mystery, a wonderful and beneficial connection, which I do not know how heavenly, but human language cannot express” (2: 133). Moreover, man is not deprived of divine dignity already in this life: Christ was incarnated in man, “in order to become man, to make man a god”. “What, I ask, can a man think of more sublimely than to become God? Here he is already God (ecce jam Deus est)”. This corresponds to the Gospel teaching: “Jesus answered them, ‘Is it not written in your law, “I said, “You are gods”?”’” (John 10:34).
Also, man is the only being (of mortals) endowed with an immortal soul, therefore only man is not destroyed by death without a trace. Man is the fruit of divine labors, can he really be lost or worthless? Then God’s labor would be in vain. “You are God’s harvest, which must be winnowed on the threshing floor of the judgment seat and poured into the barn of the Most High Father” (2: 134).
In the dogma of the Resurrection of the dead, Petrarch emphasizes that people are resurrected together with their bodies, and therefore, possession of a body is a necessary condition for the completeness and perfection of man. “Even if it (the body) is frail and weak, it still has a pleasant appearance, is erect and capable of contemplating heaven… There is hope that after death the body will also be reborn, will become light, luminous, immaculate, and can be used with even greater glory. And it will surpass not only human but also angelic dignity” (2:133). In his interpretation of the dogma of the Resurrection, Petrarch balances on the brink of heresy: then “human nature itself will be united with the divine in the same way as in the one who was God and became man,” i.e., all people will become equal to Christ, and possession of a body will not be an obstacle to this.
Poggio Bracciolini formulated the common conviction of all humanists in the purity of nature: “What is inherent in us by nature is least worthy of censure.”
After Petrarch, many of his arguments in defense of the “honor and dignity” of man were repeated in one form or another by other humanists – Gianozzo Manetti, Poggio Bracciolini, Pico della Mirandola.
Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457) presents humanism in a new form. For Valla, the main authorities are no longer the Stoics and the Church Fathers, but Epicurus and Lucretius, although Valla tries to “Christianize” the ethics of Epicurus just as the early humanists did the Stoics. In his main work, “On the True and False Good” (1831), he calls pleasure the only true good. This pleasure is, first of all, bodily – Valla criticizes Stoicism and Christian asceticism for denying its value. According to Valla, true Christianity has nothing in common with asceticism: the Creator created so many opportunities for pleasure in the world that “God’s Providence was rather Epicurean.” The fullness of sensual life is a necessary condition for the fullness of the life of the soul. “Why do I have only five senses, and not fifty or five hundred!” exclaims the philosopher. Likewise, after death, the possibility of bodily pleasure is preserved in Paradise, where we will receive perfect and incorruptible bodies. But bodily pleasure must be supplemented by pleasure of the soul, or spirit, which is granted by virtue, creativity and knowledge. True, virtue has a completely different meaning for Bella than for the Stoics or in Christianity. Since the main value for all living things is the preservation of their individuality, then “virtue” is that which benefits the individuality. Therefore, for example, self-sacrifice is meaningless. “Even God cannot be served without the hope of reward.” The highest pleasure of creativity and knowledge awaits man in Paradise, where the limitations of earthly existence will be lifted.
The humanistic Epicureanism of Lorenzo Valla played a major role in the development of the concept of homo universale in Italy in the mid-15th century — a “universal man,” a naturally and comprehensively developing personality, perfect in its inclinations. An example of such a personality is Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), a brilliant artist, sculptor, engineer, who deeply understood his own art and the art of his entire era.
Renaissance Neoplatonism
By the middle of the 15th century, the emancipation of thought brought about by the humanists began to bear new fruit. The Neoplatonic ideas brought to Italy from Byzantium by George Gemistus Plethon (c. 1355-1452) fell on fertile soil. Neoplatonism preserved and developed the main achievements of the humanists, the ideas of human freedom, dignity and nobility. But at the same time, the limitations of the previous “philological” humanism became obvious. The philosophical outlook of the humanists, enchanted by the brilliance of the ancient Latin of Cicero and Horace, was quite narrow; their main philosophical authorities were Cicero and the Roman Stoics. Subsequent thinkers of the Renaissance treated the “philological obsession” of the early humanists with humor. However, the collection, translation and criticism of ancient texts continued, but their understanding was already carried out on a qualitatively different philosophical level.
Nicholas of Kuzan
Nikolai Krebs, later known as Nikolai of Cusa, was born in 1401 in southern Germany, near the city of Trier. At an early age he ran away from home and found refuge in the family of Count Theodoric von Manderscheid, who patronized him for a long time. He was educated first at the school of the Brothers of the Common Life in Deventer (Holland), where mystical traditions were strongly influenced, then at the universities of Heidelberg and Padua, where he became involved with the humanist movement. Having taken orders and entered the service of the papal chancery, he quickly advanced, in 1448 he became a cardinal under Pope Nicholas V, and Pope Pius II (in the world – Piccolomini, a friend of Cusanus), made him his chief adviser and, in fact, the second person in the Catholic hierarchy. Kuzanets used his influence to humanize the Roman Church, to restructure it on the principles of love, freedom and reason, and to prepare the theoretical ground for the reunification of the Christian Church. He gave a philosophical interpretation of the dogmas of Christian doctrine, combining the teachings of the Fathers of the Church, primarily the negative theology of Dionysius the Areopagite, and the legacy of ancient philosophers, primarily the Pythagorean numerical symbolism. Kuzanets’ main works are “On Learned Ignorance” and “On Assumptions”. In his other works, he developed and explained the principles set forth here. Nicholas of Kuzan died in 1464.
Methodology of Cusanus. “Learned ignorance”. The final Truth, according to Cusanus, is unattainable, since any knowledge is a proportionality of the unknown with the already known, but “there is no proportion between the infinite and the finite”. This is a key position not only in epistemology, but also in the ontology of Cusanus. It means that no matter how much knowledge of the conditional multiplies, it will never give knowledge of the absolute reality; no matter how much finite being expands, it will never become absolute. Consequently, “the Infinite, eluding all proportionality, remains unknown” (4: 1, 50).
But the Unconditional lies not only beyond the conditional, but also at its foundation. Therefore, the deepening of the knowledge of the conditional also cannot have an end: “The ultimate precision of combinations in corporeal things and the unambiguous reduction of the unknown to the known” are also impossible (4: 1, 51).
Therefore, “…all that we wish to know is our ignorance,” and all our knowledge is nothing more than a “supposition.” Therefore, knowledge is infinite: “Reason is as close to truth as a polygon is to a circle”: the increase in knowledge can be compared to the increase in the number of sides of a polygon, but no matter how much we increase this number, the polygon will never coincide with the circle: the mind, thinking discretely, cannot comprehend Infinity, in which all opposites not only coincide, but dissolve in Unity.
In this formulation of the question one can see an anticipation of the question of Locke, Hume and Kant about the limits of human knowledge. But the “skepticism” of Cusanus is greatly softened by his recognition of faith (almost equated with intellectual intuition) as the highest source of knowledge. Man, being a conditional and limited being, could not even want or think of searching for the Unconditional Truth if there were no Light of this Truth in himself, if man himself (as reason) were not this Light. This is precisely what gives man the possibility of learned ignorance: not simply “I know that I know nothing,” or “I know to what limits I know,” but “the Light of Truth incomprehensibly shines in the darkness of my ignorance.”
“Dialectic” of Kuzan. The final Truth is beyond reason, and the highest form of knowledge accessible to it is the comprehension of the coincidence of opposites. God is above the coincidence of opposites, He is their condition and the unity that contains them, but their coincidence is the “gate” leading to the supra-rational contemplation of God.
Opposites lie at the very foundation of the being of things: “All things consist of opposites in varying degrees, having sometimes more of one, sometimes less of the other, revealing their nature from two contrasts by the predominance of one over the other” (5: 171).
Therefore, the highest method of knowledge also consists in identifying opposites and attempting to bring them together: “…I am very often occupied with the coincidence of opposites and constantly try to arrive at an intellectual vision that surpasses the power of reason” (4: 2, 197). “The ability to constantly concentrate on the conjugation of opposites is a difficult art,” the philosopher admits (4: 2, 111).
“Dialectical Theology” of Cusanus. God as the Absolute Maximum and the Absolute Minimum. Using Pythagorean numerical symbolism to comprehend God, Cusanus defines God as the “Absolute Maximum”. “I call that the Maximum than which nothing greater can be. But such abundance is proper to the One”. Our understanding, according to Cusanus, is incapable of “uniting opposites in their source by the paths of reason”. But, rising above any discourse of reason, we see that “the Absolute Maximum is infinity, to which nothing is opposed…”. If the Absolute Maximum includes everything, then “the Minimum coincides with it”, “…free the Maximum and the Minimum from quantity, and you will see that they coincide”. Unity cannot exist outside of plurality, because, firstly, plurality would be impossible in that case, and secondly, unity would not be Absolute Unity, since it would not include everything. “…The universal unity of being proceeding from It
[17] is also a maximum, proceeding from the Absolute and therefore existing in concrete certainty as the Universe; accordingly, its unity was determined in plurality, outside of which it cannot exist.” “…It could not, however, exist outside of the plurality in which it resides, because it does not exist without limitation and cannot free itself from it.” The Absolute Maximum turns out to be in a certain sense dependent on plurality, and therefore on the Other, the beginning of plurality, that is, on the First Matter. God and Matter turn out to be essentially two eternal, irreducible Beginnings, which can neither exist nor be thought of without each other.
God as One. The Absolute Maximum is One, “otherwise among things there would be neither difference, nor order, nor multiplicity… and indeed there would be no number at all.” “Such a unit is not a number.” Why is the Unit (as well as the Pythagorean “Monad”) “not a number,” if in arithmetic 1 is the same number as 0, 5 or 2? But, in essence, all numbers, including fractions, only show in what proportion something is to the unit accepted as a unit of counting. Thus, in physics we conditionally, by agreement, accept 1 m, 1 kg, and so on as a unit. The standard meter kept in Paris is not a “measure of length” (of any specific thing), it is a measure for measuring lengths. Moreover, if the meter is a conditional measure, then the Unit in the world of numbers is an unconditional measure of everything conditional. Therefore, the Unit is not a “number of anything”, but a condition of the possibility of any calculation and computation. And therefore, Kuzanets, like Pythagoras, did not consider the Unit a “number”, but a beginning in which all numbers are “folded” and from which they “unfold”.
Trinity of God. All names, according to Cusanus, are “the result of the movement of reason”, which is much lower than reason and cannot rise to the point of combining opposites. Cusanus quite boldly asserts that even “the name
The Trinity and His three Persons (“God the Father,” “God the Son,” and “the Holy Spirit”) are given according to the property of creation,” i.e., it is an anthropomorphization (humanization) of God. Kuzanets recognizes the dogma of the “non-merger and inseparability” of the three Persons of the Trinity, but calls these Persons “Unity, Equality, and Connection” and gives a philosophical justification for this. God, as has already been shown above, is One. The multitude arises when the One (unit) is repeated n times. But the very possibility of repetition must be inherent in the One. Kuzanets expresses this as follows: before Unity can be repeated two, three, or more times, it must be repeated once
[18] . This repetition means nothing other than that Unity is equal to itself. Thus, the second hypostasis of God is established (in theological terms, “born”) — Equality. Furthermore, Equality is nothing other than Unity; they coincide, agree, and are united. The connection of Unity and Equality “proceeds” from both of them (as the Holy Spirit “proceeds” from the Father and the Son in the Catholic Creed) and is the third Person of the Trinity. Using only pronouns, the entire Trinity can be defined, according to Cusanus, as “This, That, and the Same.” (“That” refers in another way to the already known “This,” and “Same” to their identity.)
This philosophical justification of the Trinity goes back to Augustine (he had the names Unity, Equality, Concord), while Cusanus himself traces his proof back to Pythagoras (for which we have no exact confirmation).
God as Non-Other. Following the negative theology of Dionysius the Areopagite, Cusanus defines God as “Non-Other”: “Neither substance, nor being, nor one, nor anything else”; “neither non-being, nor nothing.” “Non-Other” is an analogue of Plato’s concept of “Identical” and serves to designate Unity, exceeding both Being and Non-Being. Non-Other expresses the very principle of the coincidence of opposites. In relation to Non-Other, Other is the principle of plurality and change (Plato had the same concept).
The intelligible light of the Other is the principle of both knowledge and existence of everything Other, just as sound is the condition of both knowledge and existence of what is heard, and light is the condition of both knowledge and existence of what is visible.
Sound, indeed, does not exist outside of hearing as such (a vibration of air is not yet a sound until it is heard by someone). But light “in itself”, “pure light”, not refracted by anything, is invisible, as Kuzanets asserts, to human sight. We see, strictly speaking, only color, i.e., only the light that has been refracted in some way. To be convinced of this, it is enough to look at the starry sky and the Moon at night. The rays of sunlight illuminating the Moon fill almost the entire space of the night sky (with the exception of the cone of the earth’s shadow), but they are invisible because there is no “other” in which they could be refracted sufficiently to become visible to our eye. Similarly, the Light of the Other is comprehensible only in refraction and reflection in the Other and on the surface of the Other.
If we add to this that, even when refracted, Light remains the same Light, accepting only “adventitious” properties that do not change its nature, then it becomes clear how, from the point of view of the Cusanus, God as the Other can underlie all that exists, be in all that exists, be all that exists (immanent to it) and at the same time remain transcendental and incomprehensible. And in this understanding of God, his unity and trinity are “inseparable and unmerged”; this follows from his definition: “The Other is nothing other than the Other.” In this artificial formula, God-Other is one three times: 1) “in himself”; 2) in “his other” – in the being of nature (which is becoming); 3) in the return of the Other to the Other.
God and the World: The Pantheism of Cusanus. In developing his dialectical pantheism, Cusanus refers, on the one hand, to the Areopagite, on the other, to the Hermetic tradition. “Theologians rightly assert that God is all in all and at the same time nothing of all.” “…The One, as Hermes-Mercury spoke of him, is fit to be called by the names of all things and by none of all names” (4: 2, 103).
The image that Kuzanets considers to describe very successfully the relationship between God and the world is the image of the king or commander. He finds this allegory in Proclus: “What remains separate in the state, is originally and integrally in the king himself and his life.” In absolute monarchies, everything that has the meaning of “state” – that is, has being as “state”, receives this meaning-being through its relationship to the king; “state” is equal to “sovereign”. In the will of the king and in his very person are contained (in a condensed form, as Kuzanets likes to say) decrees, seals, measures, army, judges, taxes, and so on. Even laws carved on tablets would remain a dead letter without the king – he is their living being. In the same sense, Aristotle said about the commander that he, being the goal of the army, gives the army “everything that makes him an army” – unity, organization, purpose, fighting spirit. This is also the relation of God to the world. If the sovereign is the “entelechy” (realization) of the state, if in him the entire state can only be considered a “state” (since the state is something unified, and the king is the one who makes the state unified), then we can say that “the state is the sovereign.” Similarly, and about the world only in this sense can we say that “the world is God,” that is, the world receives the meaning of “being” only in relation to God.
True, based on this analogy, one could say that a king without a kingdom is not a king, just as a general is not a general without an army, i.e., God would not be God outside of his relationship to the world that unfolds from him. For the Cusanus, of course, it is impossible for the world to condition God in any sense. God’s relationship to the world is not subject to either natural or internal necessity. Even Plato and Aristotle, according to the Cusanus, did not see that “every creation is the intention of the will of the Almighty…” “Both clearly believed that the creator-mind produces everything through natural necessity, and from this comes their entire error” (4: 2, 114).
The Presence of the Absolute in the World. The presence of the Absolute in the world, or the immersion of the world in God, is one of the “commonplaces” of metaphysics. Augustine wrote: “I would not be, I could not be at all, if You did not abide in me.” Thomas Aquinas asserts the same: “… it is necessary that God abide in all things, and that in the most inward way.” The change introduced by Cusanus into this teaching follows from the awakening of individuality characteristic of the Renaissance: God must not only be the infinitely distant Origin, the final Goal and the infinitely deep foundation of each thing. If God in relation to individuality is only its infinitely deep foundation, then individuality has no independent ontological meaning, dissolving in the divine “ocean of essence,” and in reality “from the point of view of eternity” only the universal exists. Cusanus is the first in the history of European philosophy to set the task of revealing the Absolute in individuality as such. This can only be achieved with the help of his method of “combining opposites.”
Following strictly his “dialectical” method, Kuzanets comes to a paradoxical conclusion: the finite is infinite in its finiteness. “…A finite line is not divisible into non-lines, due to which it is indivisible in its foundation… It turns out, therefore, that the foundation of a finite line is an infinite line!” A line is finite because it differs from any non-line, for example, a plane; but as a line it is infinite because nothing can make it more of a line than it is, or less, i.e., as a line it embodies absolute actuality, albeit in a limited form. Without this dialectic of the finite and the infinite, it is impossible to imagine or understand even the possibility of the existence of the Absolute in the finite, and therefore, the embodiment of God in man.
In identity with itself, in being itself, is the truth of every thing, its divinity, its absoluteness. The problem, according to Cusanus, is that limited things can never be absolutely identical to themselves – because they are eternally striving for something other than what they are, and therefore are in an eternal flow of becoming (in Cusanus’ language this sounds like “things participate in the Other”, that is, matter). If man or any creature could fully realize what he really is and be satisfied with this, he would merge with the Absolute. But in history, from Cusanus’s point of view, this happened only once – in the mystery of the Incarnation.
“Christology” of Kuzan (Doctrine of the “concrete maximum”). Of particular importance for Kuzan is the doctrine of the “concrete maximum” – the philosophical justification of the mystery of the Incarnation. As we have already said, it was this point of church teaching that was especially important for the thinkers of the Renaissance, since it was the basis for justifying the material aspect of nature and man.
“All limited objects,” writes Kuzanets, “are between the maximum and the minimum. Although for each given thing both a greater and a lesser degree of limitation is conceivable, however, without going into actual infinity: an infinite number of degrees of being is impossible…” The actual (realized) infinity of degrees would mean that the number of degrees has reached infinity, which is impossible, since “infinity cannot be reached by addition and excess.” Consequently, any real series of degrees of being is finite. No limited thing can either rise to the Absolute Maximum or descend to the Absolute Minimum, just as He can neither descend nor ascend to it. From this it follows further that “no being can attain the maximum perfection in its kind without passing into another kind.” After all, the maximum perfection of any thing, according to Kuzanets, is God.
“If there were, after all, an actual maximum of a specific species, for a given specificity it would be actually everything that could potentially be of both this species and its general genus” (4: 1, 147). Thus, the maximum line not only exhausts all possible lines, but coincides with all geometric figures and the point.
Such a specific maximum would be:
1) “the fullness of this species and the whole genus as a prototype, life, form, foundation and perfect fullness of the truth of everything that is possible for this species”;
2) would be “in an incomparably high equality with any individual of this species” and “would encapsulate in its fullness all their particular perfections”;
3) will be “both God and creation”, and the basis of its existence will be only the Absolute Maximum;
4) will be incomprehensible (to the mind), since it is impossible to think in any way
a) its connection with the final,
b) its occurrence in time;
5) will not be God (only), nor a creation (only), nor their union (for their union is unthinkable).
Thus, the hypothetical concrete maximum would be, in essence, a “theophany”, a direct manifestation of God in the world. Such a manifestation, according to Kuzan, is possible only in human nature. This is the “middle nature”, “the highest level of the lower and the lowest level of the higher orders”, uniting the lower and the higher. Human nature “contains the mental and sensory nature and draws together the entire Universe: it is a microcosm, a small world, as the ancients rightly called it.”
Christ is not only the incarnate Savior. He was from the beginning, as one of the Persons of the Trinity, co-eternal with the Father, and He was the “channel” through which the “outpouring” (emanation) of all that was created from the First Cause took place. “…Through Him… as through the beginning of their emanation and the final goal of their return (reductionis), they (created things) would proceed from the absolute Maximum into concrete being, and ascend to the Absolute” (4: 1, 151). Since “emanation” is a concept outside of time and space, Christ is not only the “ladder” of the descent of beings in the beginning and the ascent at the end, but now and eternally He is the Living Connection of all that is with the Absolute. If it were not for Christ and the connection He establishes, “there would be neither Creator nor creation: after all, how could it be said that the concreteness of creation comes from absolute divine being, if this concreteness were incompatible with God? It is precisely thanks to the concrete Maximum (Christ) that all things could not simply exist from the Divine Absolute, but also proceed from Him as concrete thanks to the highest union with Him in this their concreteness (limitation)” (4: 1, 152).
Although the teaching about Christ is presented in such a way as not to contradict church dogma, it contains, in a “condensed form,” conclusions that are rather close to the Hermetic tradition (and at the same time reflecting the teaching of Christ as it was rediscovered in their hearts by the thinkers of the Renaissance).
“The Concrete Maximum” (Christ) is one, and cannot be two, three, etc., but not because only one born man (Jesus) became God, but because all individuals who have reached a certain level in love and knowledge merge into one with Christ (ascending in the degrees of this unity, entering first into the Body of Christ – the Church, then into the Soul and Mind). “As everyone who loves abides in love, so all who love the Truth abide in Christ” (4:1,171).
Christ is not so much a person as a principle, therefore the “second coming” of Christ can be realized not in one body, but in the aggregate of souls who have accepted Ero into their hearts (who, as it is said in the Apocalypse, will have His Name on their foreheads).
The nature of Christ already forms the basis of the nature of every man; the second is the unfolding of the first, and the ascent to Him will not be an “evolution” (unfolding), but an “involution” (collapse) or “reduction” (reduction to the basis). The more a man tries to separate himself and distinguish himself from other men, the further he is from Christ (in essence, this is an attack on the papacy), since Christ is the incarnate living equality of all men (“identity”).
Enfoldment and unfoldment. Cusanus describes the relationship between God and the world with the terms “unfoldment” (explicatio) and “enfoldment” (complicatio), sometimes “development” (evolutio). These concepts are closer to Neoplatonic “emanation” than to Christian “creation”.
Kuzanets illustrates the concept of “unfolding” with examples: a line unfolds from a point, time from a moment, and movement from rest. The entire Universe is the unfolding of God. “In the one God everything is enfolded, since everything is in Him; and He unfolds everything, since He is in everything.” “Everything that has been created and will be created unfolds from that in which it exists in a folded form.”
Unfolding and folding (as “emanation” in Neoplatonism) are timeless concepts, no processes in time correspond to them. This can be illustrated by the figure: center and circumference – Absolute
Minimum and Absolute Maximum, the spiral is an entity unfolded from them. Depending on the direction in which the drawing is rotated, the spiral will seem to be “coming out” from the center or “coming in” to it, but this is only an illusion. “The way up and the way down are the same” (Heraclitus).
Justification of matter. Like Plato, Cusanus prefers the term “Other” to the term “matter” (hyle). The term “Other” conveys a purely metaphysical meaning, far removed from everything sensory, better than “matter” or “substance”. On the one hand, the Other always lacks something, the Other is weakness and makes weak everything to which it is mixed, while the Non-Other is absolute Power. But, on the other hand, the Other is just as much a necessary condition of knowledge, thought and being as the Non-Other.
It was not by chance that Kuzanets replaced Plato’s name “Identical” with “Non-Other”: although ontologically Non-Other is higher than Other and contains it in itself, the name “Non-Other”, derived from the word “other” by adding the prefix “not”, shows that Non-Other is unthinkable without Other, so that they represent, as it were, two poles of everything that exists (the same for Plato – Identical and Other). “In order to become a sensory substance, it (Absolute substance) needs matter capable of perceiving it, without which it cannot be realized as a substance” (4: 2, 209).
The material world (“participating in the Other”) is, of course, imperfect, but this imperfection is treated by Cusanus in a fundamentally different way than, say, by Thomas Aquinas: it is only a relative imperfection that gives being its individuality. The ascent to Absolute Perfection is an approach to dissolution in the One God, but individuality in itself has an absolute value, which consists in the fact that:
1) it reveals (“unfolds”) one of the countless potentialities of God;
2) in the identity of a limited thing to itself, the unconditional enters into the conditional,
Absolute into relative, God into the world.
Numerical symbolism. Kuzanets makes very extensive use of arguments, analogies and symbols based on numbers and numerical relationships, as well as geometric examples. Having a very high regard for Pythagoras, Kuzanets traces the main provisions of his teaching to him, even if the connection with the real views of Pythagoras cannot be established with certainty. The preference given to number follows from the teaching on learned ignorance and the relationship of cognitive abilities: firstly, “…if we are given access to the Divine only through symbols, then it is most convenient to use mathematical signs because of their enduring reliability.” Secondly, only mathematics, as Pythagoras taught, can accustom a person to use his pure reason, which must be free from imagination and feelings.
Cusanus always willingly presents various aspects of his philosophy in the form of mathematical symbols. Thus, one of the key numerical models in his metaphysics is the system of “four unities” (see fig.). “The mind contemplates its own universal being in these four distinct unities.” The First Unity, (1) is “the highest and simplest Reason,” which the cognizing mind of man calls “God.” (From this we can conclude that “God” is only a name for a certain aspect of self-knowledge.
(2) – “Unity of the root”, in numerical expression – 3 or 10, in metaphysical – Reason, Intellect. (3) – “Unity of the square”, 9 or 100 – the soul, the unfolding and concretization of Reason. And (4) – “unity of the cube”, 27 or 1000 – the body and the corporeal world. The name “four unities” emphasizes the fact that each of the unities encompasses the entire universe, that is, as Kuzanets says, “everything in God is God, in reason – reason, in the soul – the soul, in the body – the body.”
The four unities correspond to four cognitive abilities: (1) – faith, or “learned ignorance”; (2) – reason; (3) – intellect; (4) – feelings and imagination. Faith, as can be seen from the diagram, covers the entire sphere of knowledge, including the remaining cognitive abilities: this means that without faith, a person will not have access to the fullness of truth not only of reason and intellect, but even of sensory knowledge.
Each lower cognitive faculty contacts the higher one only at one point: this symbolizes that each cognitive faculty is a unity that enfolds in itself all the diversity and differences given in the lower cognitive faculty. This means that one concept (idea) of reason can be compared with an infinite number of concepts of the understanding, and one concept of the understanding with an infinite number of sensory data. Since feelings are the lowest (fourth) unity, which does not enfold in itself any difference of a lower level, therefore, feelings do not give us knowledge of the differences of things. The differences of sensory things, that is, complexes of sensory qualities, are established only by reason. In almost the same sense, the neo-Kantian Cohen criticized sensory knowledge, arguing that it is incapable of giving us even knowledge of the unity of an object – since all sensory data are relative, fluid and deceptive. The teaching of Cusanus that Reason (Logos) creates the world through self-determination can also be attributed to the transcendental point of view.
Faith is above reason and precedes it, but it is not “trust” in authority, even in Holy Scripture, but the light of Divine Reason and Love, which, illuminating the soul, makes it capable of seeing the Truth. “If you do not believe, you will not understand”
[19] . Human reason is “light from the Light” of Divine Reason, and therefore it is able to touch the Absolute in “learned ignorance”. Man must not “take anything on faith”. He must test every assumption with the fire of his faith, and accept only those that will stand this “test by fire”.
Another favorite and frequently used geometric image by Kuzanets is the so-called “paradigm”, which is two pyramids, of light and shadow, penetrating each other and symbolizing two Principles, the One and the Other. Unity is a kind of “formative light”, otherness is a “shadow” producing material density. The base of the pyramid of Light is the One, the Abs. Maximum. The base of the pyramid of Shadow is the Other, the pole of Matter. Both of these Principles are present in every number, permeating the entire world and every form. Kuzanets especially emphasized that at the base of the pyramid of Light there is a point of Shadow, and at the base of the pyramid of Shadow there is a point of Light. Thus, the poles of the Principles are likened to the poles of a magnet, which cannot exist, or even be thought of, without each other. (1), (2) and (3) – respectively, the higher, middle and lower worlds, the worlds of reason, soul and body. The One embraces the entire universe, penetrating right up to the pole of darkness.
Cosmology. The finiteness and infinity of the world depend, according to Cusanus, on the point of view. The world exists as infinite if we consider it as folded at the point of Maximum and Minimum, that is, in God. In itself, as the unfolding of God, the world cannot be actually infinite, since then it would coincide with God. But “it still cannot be considered finite, because it has no boundaries between which it is enclosed” — that is why Cusanus calls it boundless. Boundlessness is the fundamental incompleteness of the world as a process, as well as any process of measurement, knowledge of the world. No matter how much we look for the boundaries of the world, we will not find them, since the world has no external boundaries, it is limited only by itself, by the fact that it is exactly what it is, and not what it could be. (Only God is “all that He could be” — hence another name for God in Cusanus — Possest, possibility-being). “The universe is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” Therefore, the Earth is no more the center of the world than any other point in the universe, and “its circumference is not the sphere of fixed stars.” “It is impossible to find a middle for the stars, equally distant from the poles.” Only God “is the center of the Earth, and of all spheres, and of everything that is in the world.”
Kuzanets claimed that not only the Earth, but also the Sun are not the center of the cosmos. There is not a single fixed point in the Universe, since movement is relative. He also assumed the existence of many inhabited worlds similar to ours, and an even greater number different from ours, so that not a single “star region” is uninhabited. Like Bruno after him and our K. E. Tsiolkovsky, Kuzanets believed that living beings can consist of matter both denser than ours and more subtle and fiery, so life is possible both in the depths of planets and on blazing stars. But this diversity does not diminish the dignity of the Earth and man living on it: “Man does not desire another nature, but tries to be perfect in his own, inherent to him” (5: 230).
As we see, in essence, Cusanus anticipated the discovery of Copernicus and even went further. This philosopher was far ahead of his time in many matters, but his ideas, as it happens, were not appreciated in their full significance. The development of Neoplatonic thought in the Renaissance proceeded independently of him. His works were not published for 300 years, from 1565 to 1862, and only the neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer honored them with an unbiased analysis and placed Cusanus at the head of all Renaissance philosophy (6).
Florentine Platonic Academy
In 1459, Cosimo de Medici, the head of the Florentine Republic, sanctioned the establishment of the Platonic Academy here. From this point on, the development of Neoplatonism in Italy entered a new phase. It is difficult for us to fully appreciate the significance of the theoretical work that was carried out in the Academy with the aim of creating a unified philosophical and religious doctrine based on the synthesis of the teachings of Plato, Aristotle, Hermes Trismegistus and the Neoplatonists. This work did not lead to the creation of a new original philosophical system, and the mystical and symbolic principles adopted from the Hermetic, alchemical and Kabbalistic traditions fell into disuse in modern times, which is why many researchers considered the philosophy of the Florentine Neoplatonists to be merely an eclectic combination of disparate teachings. However, when assessing the work of the Academy, one cannot help but take into account the goals that the Academy set for itself and the specifics of its understanding of “scientificity”. The aim of the Academy was not to create yet another philosophical teaching in a long line of previous ones, but, on the contrary, an attempt to synthesize and construct, on the basis of the philosophical systems of the past, a certain “unified teaching” that could have the force of “scientific truth.”
“Scientificity” was also understood differently than in the New Age. Thus, the head of the Academy, Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), in his extensive study “Platonic Theology on the Immortality of Souls” did not set the task of reconstructing Plato’s thought in its historical concreteness, in its “flesh and blood”. He was interested only in the spirit of Plato’s teaching, but here he strove for the utmost scientific certainty, which can be achieved in only one way – contemplation (intuitive experience). Since Ficino did not distinguish between intellectual and mystical contemplation, scientific certainty and mystical experience merged into one for him.
However, neither the single teaching nor the “spiritual science” of the Florentines was in demand in the New Age. The influence of the Academy on the further course of development of philosophy was expressed above all in the creation of a special atmosphere of philosophical and literary life here. Unlike the universities of that time, it was not a corporation with strictly observed official duties. “Plato in his Academy was the first in Europe to show an example of a completely free organization of philosophical and scientific thought. Ficino and Pico della Mirandola were the first to revive it” (6: 211).
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), a friend of Ficino and the second man in the Academy, despite his very short life, managed to do much for philosophy. Friends called him Princeps Concordiae – the Head of Concord, and this perfectly characterizes him as a philosopher. His goal was “philosophical peace” (pax philosophica) – a universal agreement of opinions in a single synthesis. But, in accordance with the proverb “if you want peace, prepare for war”, Pico had to conduct constant polemics with opponents of such an “union”, primarily with Church leaders. Pico’s main works are “900 Theses”, which he was going to defend in a dispute “with the whole world” at the age of 23, “On Being and the One” and “Heptaplus” (from heptapylos, “seven-gate” – a book dedicated to the sevenfold and other numerological keys).
For Pico, philosophy is Philosophia Perennis, the eternal philosophy, “the revelation of eternal Truth, unchangeable in its fundamental features.” The spirit of the Renaissance manifests itself in his “900 Theses” as an unprejudiced desire to give life in his thought to all the achievements of the wisdom of the past, both ancient and medieval. Pico differed from Ficino in that he “did not swear allegiance to Platonism,” thought even more broadly and wanted to embrace the entire universe of thought with his synthesis.
Pico considered the most solid support for the “universal agreement” to be the Kabbalah, a Jewish mystical teaching that, in his opinion, provides the keys to understanding the symbolism of both books – the book of Nature and the book of Revelation. “This is the first and true Kabbalah, which I was the first of the Latins to make clear mention of. It is this that I use in my conclusions.” According to Pico, only by following the Kabbalah can one understand the true divinity of Christ, therefore, not only does the Kabbalah not contradict Christianity, but it is a necessary part of it. “No knowledge assures us of the divinity of Christ more than Magic and the Kabbalah.”
Just as Kuzanets made every point in space the center of the world, Pico made every moment of history its potential center. But in order for this potential to be realized, at that time all the thoughts and aspirations of the past must be reproduced (“revived”) by the creative effort of the thinker and artist – then these thoughts can also be transmitted to the future.
Hence the thesis about the fundamental freedom of the creative person: nothing is given to him, he must obtain everything himself (Pico’s fundamental struggle against astrology and its belief in fate is connected with this – let’s recall Petrarch’s book on the same topic). The main dimension of freedom is Pico’s “sacred claim” and the object of his admiration – the freedom of man to transform himself. “A certain sacred aspiration fills the soul, such that we are not satisfied with the average and strive for the highest, trying with all our might to follow it when we can and want to.” This freedom is absolutely unlimited, to the point that man can “become one spirit with God.”
Cassirer sees here in Pico an anticipation of Kant’s division of the “world of nature” and the “world of freedom.” But Pico, in fact, does not offer anything new, but merely brings together the teachings of the Platonic tradition: “There is nothing great on earth except man, there is nothing great in man except reason and soul. If you rise to this, you will surpass heaven, if you bend down to the body and look at heaven, you will see yourself as a fly and less than a fly.” “The miracles of the soul are greater than heaven” – this is the conclusion to which Pico brings everything true that is in philosophical teachings.
German Humanism and the Reformation
At the end of the 15th and 16th centuries, the humanist movement swept the main European countries. This current of thought developed significantly in Germany, where it merged with a broad religious movement. The most authoritative German humanists of the older generation were Erasmus of Rotterdam (1469-1536) and Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522), who were called “the two eyes of Germany” in German humanist circles.
Erasmus of Rotterdam was the first of the great German writers to set himself the goal of reconciling religious convictions with common sense. He was little interested in dogmatic theology as such, but he attached even greater importance to inner religious convictions. He believed that the foundations that inner experience gives us are sufficient for religious consciousness, and that support in dogmatics and metaphysical speculations is completely superfluous. He clearly recognized the limits of reason and constantly reminded the reader of them. His famous work, “In Praise of Folly,” is directed not only against ossified religious and social institutions, but also against the claims of reason to know the ultimate truth, even with regard to everyday things, not to mention otherworldly ones. “… Happiness does not depend on the things themselves, but on the opinion we have formed about them.” “… For in human life everything is so obscure and so complex that nothing can be known for sure, as my academicians (skeptics), the least pretentious among philosophers, rightly assert. And even if knowledge is sometimes possible, it often takes away the joy of life” (7: 58-59).
Despite his skepticism, or perhaps because of it, Erasmus sets as his goal “the sovereign reflection of the understanding on the content of faith, by means of which (reflection) it is divided as the relation of God, Christ, man, free will and the actions of God as to mutually alien independent factors” (8: 69). Subjecting the New Testament to philological criticism, sometimes biased, Erasmus proceeded from the difference between the infallible Christ and the apostles, who were simple people and could make many mistakes. He considered the Gospel of Mark to be an extensive excerpt from the Gospel of Matthew, and also generally denied that the Apocalypse belonged to John, believing that it was fraudulently introduced into the New Testament by a certain Cerinthus.
Erasmus’ rationalization of Christianity was, in essence, a form of expression of his humanism. Like the Italian humanists, he denied eternal punishment for sins. At the same time, Erasmus does not deny the dogma of retribution beyond the grave, but brings it into line with common sense and moral feeling: there is no other hell than the torments of an unclean conscience.
In the old controversy about the relationship between free will and predestination, which had been dying down and then flaring up with new force since the time of the early Church Fathers, Erasmus defended free will (in his work On Free Will). We cannot deny predestination when we reason theologically or metaphysically, but when it comes to moral consciousness (and inner experience) and moral responsibility, it is impossible to deny free will. Luther opposed this teaching of Erasmus in his work On the Bondage of the Will, and the controversy continued without hope of universal agreement.
Unlike the Italian humanists, the German humanists developed their activities not at princely courts, but mainly at universities. Among the German universities, the University of Erfurt played the greatest role in the humanist movement. It was here that at the beginning of the 16th century a circle of young associate professors was formed, among whom Mucianus Rufus stood out (at the same time, in 1501-1505, Martin Luther studied there). Then Johann Pfefferkorn, with the support of the Catholic Church, initiated the so-called “case of the Jewish books” – simply put, a demand to ban and burn the books of Jewish mystics and, in general, all ancient books, except for the Bible. Johann Reuchlin in his “Letters of the Dark Men” spoke out against the burning of books. The Church exerted enormous pressure on him, but the Erfurtians, led by Mucianus Rufus, stood up for him. The Jewish books affair became the “Reuchlin affair”: suddenly it turned out that there was public opinion in Germany, and the Church would have to take it into account in future.
Reformation. October 31, 1517.
Martin Luther (1483-1546) published (according to legend, nailed to the gates of the church in Wittenberg) his 95 theses, “out of love for the truth and the desire to bring it to light.” At first, Luther’s “Theses” and his subsequent works united around themselves a large part of German society, very diverse in terms of level of consciousness and interests, economic and political – Luther succeeded in this, since he did not specify what specific conclusions should follow from his religious reform for public life. After Luther’s Leipzig dispute on June 26, 1519 against Johann Eck, a wave of leaflets and brochures swept across Germany. “They combined text with engravings, which made the meaning of the address clear even to the illiterate… An appeal to the masses, a discussion of current religious and socio-political problems in a form accessible to the people – this was a fundamentally new phenomenon… The centuries-old monopoly of the Catholic Church in the sphere of ideology was undermined” (9: 253).
In 1520-1521, Thomas Müntzer led a peasant movement that separated from the Lutheran movement to overthrow not only the church but also the secular exploiters. Müntzer’s followers understood service to God as an active expulsion of evil from the world, and they wanted to create a new kingdom of peace and goodness with blood and iron. (Müntzer’s work “On the Life of the Tender Flesh in Wittenberg” is devoted to a sharp criticism of Luther’s conciliationism.)
When Emperor Charles V forced Luther to recant in 1521, he replied, “I stand by this and cannot do otherwise,” and he was forced to hide for a year in Wartburg Castle. At this time, new leaders of the Reformation emerged, and the movement began to stratify along social and property lines: the lower strata of the burghers united around Zwingli, and the middle ones around Karlstadt.
Karlstadt, a zealous opponent of Luther’s theology, already in 1520 expressed doubts (in the spirit of Erasmus) whether Moses was the author of the Pentateuch and whether the Gospels had reached us in an undistorted form. In 1521, like Rousseau later and still later Tolstoy, he called on the students of Wittenberg to abandon their studies and go to plow the land. Soon he himself stopped wearing the robes of a priest and sent them to walk around in peasant clothes.
Luther’s reform had a profound influence on the entire subsequent history of European culture and philosophy, so that without it it is impossible to understand their further development. This influence was expressed to the greatest extent not in Luther’s positive statements, but in the liberation of the Christian consciousness from certain “bonds”. These “bonds” are the following
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1. The division of people into priests and laity.
“They hid and kept silent about the fact that “in case of need, everyone is allowed to baptize and absolve sins.” Consequently, “… it is necessary that the priest among Christians be only an official” (and not the organizer of the mystical connection with God in the sacrament of the liturgy).
“…A shoemaker, a blacksmith, a peasant, each has his own occupation and craft, and at the same time they are all equally dedicated to being priests and bishops.”
2. The inadmissibility of interpretation of Scripture by laymen.
3. The superiority of spiritual power over secular power.
“(God) has instituted among men two kinds of government. One is spiritual. In it the sword does not rule, but the Word of God, by which men are to become pious and justified, and by such justification to obtain eternal life. And in such justification God directs by the Word which he has bequeathed to the preachers. The second is secular government by means of the sword. By means of secular government those who do not wish to become pious and justified for eternal life are nevertheless compelled to be pious and justified before the world” (9:189).
Faithfulness to the vow – this is what, according to Luther, the “burden of Christ” should be reduced to, and the vow should not be given to a person (the Pope or another), but to God and to oneself, and the vow can only consist of what contributes to the elevation of the soul in love for the Lord, and everything else is superstition, destructive to the soul. Thus, the entire system of the Catholic hierarchy is undermined at its roots.
4. Luther rejects church services (masses) and sacraments – except for two, Baptism and Communion. Even the latter were considered only as a way to strengthen faith and were deprived of mystical meaning.
5. The need for external “good works” (especially donations to the church); “works without faith are dead.”
“Faith is a divine work in us, which changes and regenerates us, killing the old Adam in us; it makes us completely different people in heart, mind, feeling… It does not ask whether good deeds should be done, but before asking, it has already done them. And whoever does not undertake such deeds is an unbeliever… It is impossible to separate deed from faith, just as it is impossible to separate burning from flame.”
The origins of the “ethics of duty”. In Luther’s distinction between the individual and the deed, one can see the origins of Kant’s future “ethics of duty”. Catholics, by comparison, claimed that the individual in itself could possess characteres indelebiles, indestructible qualities that elevated (or degraded) it in comparison with others. According to Luther, only the deed gives a person his status, and everything depends on how he carries out this deed – as a service to God or for his own purposes. For Catholics, the “subject” is the “invisible organism” of the soul, on whose qualities its dignity and rights in society depend. Luther reduces the “subject” to the subject of moral responsibility, to the one in man who listens to the voice of conscience. And in this respect, we are all equal before God. Luther’s ethics is the ethics of duty, in the spirit of which Kant was educated two centuries later.
6. Luther also rejects confession and affirms the freedom of human conscience: his heart is free before God from all the laws and commandments of the Catholic Church.
Natural philosophy
The 16th century in Italy was marked by the aggravation of the tragic contradiction between the ideals of Renaissance humanism and the inert consciousness of the masses, which hardened with any deterioration in material well-being. The “golden age” of the Renaissance was the second half of the 15th century and the first decades of the 16th. Then came the decline, the Catholic reaction to Luther’s reform – the Counter-Reformation, and the onset of the Inquisition. Already from the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century, the Italian states waged unsuccessful wars with Spain and Germany. The discovery of the Americas and long-distance navigation changed trade routes – the former route through Italy to the East was no longer in such demand, which led to a deterioration in the material situation of Italian cities. In such conditions, the last great thinkers of the Renaissance often met with misunderstanding and were persecuted, but, despite this, with genuine heroism they continued to carry the ideas of humanism, now in the form of natural philosophical teachings.
Occult sciences: magic, astrology, alchemy. “Natural philosophy” is, according to Bernardino Telesio (1509-1588), the philosophy of nature explained from its “proper principles.” His main work was called “On Nature According to Its Proper Principles.” But Telesio himself, Cardano, Kepler, and virtually all the natural philosophers of the Renaissance understood the “causal connection of nature” and “its proper principles” much more broadly than the scientists of the New Age. They put the influence of the luminaries and the hidden properties of things in first place in terms of significance in the connection of natural phenomena. The concept of “hidden properties” does not include anything that would contradict the model of scientificity: the properties of phenomena hidden from superficial observation by the naked eye and the unprepared, unmethodical mind are the main subject of study of any science. The only difference between Renaissance science, which continued the traditions of medieval alchemy and ancient astrology, and the science of the New Age is the presence of such qualities of the observer as faith, imagination (what is today vaguely understood as “intuition”) and moral purity among the necessary conditions for observation. Only by possessing these qualities did a scientist have a chance to achieve success in science, which, by and large, coincided with magic (more precisely, natural magic). Magic, as a disinterested and exclusively good-directed knowledge of nature, was opposed to “nigromancy”, witchcraft, fortune-telling and other crafts that were far from true magic. Campanella gives a common understanding of natural magic for the Renaissance: “Natural magic is a practical art that uses the active and passive forces of things to achieve amazing and unusual results, the causes and methods of which are unknown to the crowd” (15: 164).
Alchemy. Alchemy is a branch of applied magic that deals with the “transmutation” (transformation) of “base” substances into noble ones. In the Middle Ages, the main goals of alchemists were the “philosopher’s stone”, which allowed base metals to be transformed into gold, and the “elixir of life”, which prolongs life and restores youth. Many great alchemists (for example, Albertus Magnus, the teacher of Thomas Aquinas) were rumored to possess these secrets.
During the Renaissance, alchemy itself underwent a “transmutation” in accordance with the spirit of the times. Traditional alchemical practices were now reinterpreted as a justification of nature and matter.
Man tries in vain to find in nature the source of his vices and troubles. “God the Creator is holiness itself, therefore everything done by Him and in His world is sanctified by Him and through Him” (Paracelsus) – therefore, nature itself, before desecration by man, is pure.
The justification of matter has another, deeper meaning. Prima Materia (First Matter) of the alchemists and Paracelsus is “pure object and unity of forms”, therefore it can take any form; it is not created by God, it is co-eternal with Him. Initially chaotic, it is justified (redeemed, sanctified) by God in the process of creation. The task of the alchemical art is to assist the Creator in this justification of matter. How is this achieved?
All things, according to the teachings of the alchemists, are permeated with the emanation of the Divine Word, which they called Archeus (Archeus) and Spiritus Mundi (World Soul). This emanation was symbolized by gold. The alchemists believed that gold is the “crystallized” rays of the Sun, accumulated on Earth in certain places where there are suitable conditions for this (respectively, silver is the rays of the Moon). Similarly, the emanations emanating from the “Spiritual Sun” (“Light” in the Neoplatonists and the Cusanus) accumulate in the righteous and wise soul. In working with metals, the goal of the alchemical art is to isolate the “quintessence of gold”, which has the power to transform lower metals into gold, i.e., to give matter the image of perfection, thereby justifying it. In the spiritual aspect, the same action means the release of a “pure substance” of “spiritual gold” in the human soul – eternal and indecomposable grains of spiritual accumulations. The action of this quintessence was compared with the influence of Christ on humanity: this is the transformation of the natural man (“Old Adam”) into a divine man, a God-man (“deification” of the Neoplatonists). Thus, the perfect alchemist became involved in the act of divine creation, and at the stage of its completion.
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) (Nolan) was born in the town of Nola at the foot of Vesuvius and therefore said that Vulcan (the god of fire) was related to him, which is confirmed by his entire life, full of fiery feat of service to Truth. Having left the Dominican monastery and the clergy in 1576, he wandered around Europe, everywhere encountering persecution or deaf misunderstanding – in Italy, Switzerland, France, England, Germany. “And since in the world there is a constant war between light and darkness, between science and ignorance, then everywhere I was subjected to hatred, abuse and insults, even not without danger to life” (10: 194). Having lost hope of finding soil for his ideas in a foreign land, Bruno returned to his homeland, where betrayal, a long process of the Inquisition and burning at the stake awaited him.
“No one observes so long and so widely the law of love,” wrote Bruno, “which was pronounced … by God, the Father of all things, so that, in harmony with nature, it teaches universal philanthropy, according to which we love even our enemies, so that … we rise to the image of him who raised his sun above the good and the bad and sprinkled with the moisture of mercies the righteous and the sinners. Such is the religion which, in spite of disputes and disputes, I observe both from the dictates of my soul and from the custom of my people” (From the “160 Theses”). In his youth, however, by his own testimony, he was an adherent of materialism in the spirit of Epicurus and Lucretius. Apparently, this was a reaction to the scholastic Aristotle, with the study of whom Bruno’s philosophical education began. But in his mature years, his views became closer to Plato, the Neoplatonists, and especially Nicholas of Cusa, to a “more contemplative philosophy.” However, Bruno still valued materialism more than Aristotle: materialism should not be rejected and can even be studied, “if you have the leisure.” Although Aristotle’s influence will remain dominant in both Bruno’s terminology and conceptual apparatus, he does not value Aristotle’s views highly, since they “rely more on imagination and are far removed from nature.” Bruno’s main works are the dialogues “On the Cause, the Beginning, and the One,” “On Infinity, the Universe, and the Worlds,” and “On Heroic Enthusiasm.”
The Philosopher’s Duty. Like Socrates, Bruno considered philosophizing to be a service to God. How can I be indifferent, he wrote, “… to the divine duty, according to which we are not to be like the blind, but are destined to become guides of the blind and in this body of human society are numbered among those to whom the office and destiny of the eyes is assigned… and who are entrusted to serve truth and light to the best of their ability.” As Bruno believed, the divine duty of the philosopher is to be “the eyes of humanity.” The eyes are the most important part of the body: “The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is single, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness” (Matthew 6:22, 23). The true philosopher elevates the many in the thinking of humanity to the One and thereby brings the light of the One into the consciousness of humanity. In the same way, true poetry illuminates the feelings of men, and true religion illuminates the spirit. Moreover, for Bruno, true religion and true philosophy ultimately coincide, since Truth is one, and knowledge of Truth is the best way to honor it and approach it. Therefore, the philosopher is like a priest of the cult of Light and with his thought establishes a connection between the One and the world of men.
“Religion” of Bruno. Like Socrates and Protagoras in ancient times, Bruno was accused of attacking religious values, while he, on the contrary, sought to restore their connection with life and experience. God must be sought, but not in the Bible or in the ecstasies of the mystics, but “… in the invincible and inviolable law of nature, in the piety of the soul that has well assimilated this law, in the radiance of the sun, in the beauty of things that come from the bosom of our mother nature, in her true image, expressed physically in countless living
beings that shine in the boundless vault of the one sky (i.e. in the stars and planets), live, feel and think, and praise the highest Unity.” “So let us turn our faces to the delightful radiance of light, let us listen to the voice of nature and let us follow wisdom in simplicity of spirit and with a pure heart, considering it above all other things” (10: 194).
At his trial, one of the main charges brought by the Inquisition was that he had claimed, “If I wanted to, I could have achieved that there would be only one religion in the world” – and these were most likely his actual words.
The doctrine of knowledge. Bruno’s dialectic is based on the dialectic of Kusan, with the difference that Bruno fills it with more real, living content. The polarities underlying all that exists are for Bruno not simply speculative principles, but living, active forces (attraction and repulsion, creation and destruction, etc.). “If we think carefully, we will see that destruction is nothing other than emergence, and vice versa.”
Bruno brings about the unity of ontology and epistemology: since reason does not “belong” to man, but rather acts through him, the process of man’s cognition of the world is an action accomplished through man – an action of harmonizing and integrating the universe. Nature, through human cognition, ascends from the many to the One by the same steps by which the One descends to the many. “We, rising to perfect cognition, … collapse multiplicity, just as Unity unfolds in the descent to the creation of things” (11: 144). In other words, cognition is a cosmic process, the reverse of the process of creation of the world, complementing and completing it – the elevation of the world to perfection, to unity, to God.
The doctrine of the “two books”. In the question of the relationship between experience and revelation as two sources of knowledge, Bruno adhered to the concept of the “two books”, which was professed before him by Averroes, Kuzan, Cardano, Telesio. This doctrine is that one and the same Single Truth was revealed by God to man in two ways: through the “Book of Nature” and the “Book of Revelation”, so that from any of these books one can know the Cause and Beginning of the universe, God. In the Middle Ages, this doctrine served to justify scientific knowledge in the face of theology, recognizing that the Book of Revelation is more accurate and perfect than the Book of Nature, since it was given directly by God, while the Book of Nature is comprehended through the “dark glass” of the senses. By the 16th century, the “Book of Nature” began to be valued higher. Bruno’s view can be expressed in the words of his contemporary Orphelius: “They say that there are two treasures, one is the written word (verbum scriptum) and the other is the word that has become a fact (verbum factum). In the verbum scriptum Christ is still swaddled in his cradle; but in the verbum factum the Word is embodied in divine creation and there, figuratively speaking, we can touch it with our own hands.”
The doctrine of the Principles is the central point of Bruno’s mature philosophy. He develops a doctrine of the Principles of the universe that is freer from the limitations of church and Aristotelian dogma than that of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, although it does not essentially contradict the foundations of Christianity. Bruno speaks of God as the One Principle of Principles, in which all principles and causes converge and coincide. But such a Principle would be absolutely beyond our cognition. Since we come to the cognition of God by the effort of our reason and faith, we comprehend in Him, according to Bruno, two Principles, the Cause of their separation and mixture, and the result of their Mixture.
The One. Putting the One as the highest goal of knowledge and the aspiration of reason, Bruno in every way emphasizes the difference between his One and the One of Aristotle and the Peripatetics (even the Neoplatonists). In his opinion, for them (especially for the Peripatetics), the one being, the substance underlying the world, is nothing more than an abstract concept, an empty logical form.
For Bruno, the One, although it is accessible only to the eyes of the mind (and then only barely), still represents a living dialectical reality: as the source of being and life, it pulsates in every atom, as Reason in the beating of the thought of every thinking being.
The One – in itself and in the form of two Principles, form and matter – is worthy not only of knowledge, but of admiration, respect, gratitude, as the Cause and Principle of this entire most beautiful universe. This is the “true religion”, the religion of love, which Bruno professed, in the eyes of the Inquisition, too straightforwardly.
In the One all opposites coincide: minimum and maximum, nature and God, matter and form, the variability of the flow and the constancy of laws, possibility and reality. Contradictory judgments about one and the same thing turn out to be true in Him.
Bruno accepts the position of Cusanus that “only God is all that He can be” (and therefore Cusanus calls possest, “possibility-being”) – in God “reality and possibility are one and the same”. What is fundamentally new in relation to Cusanus is that in Bruno’s possest “possibility” is matter, and “being” is form. In God they converge, coincide and are One and the Same, therefore it must be said “that everything, in accordance with substance, is one, as Parmenides, who was unworthily considered by Aristotle, perhaps understood” (11: 106). God, as the “first substance”, the First Beginning, the One Beginning of Beginnings, is, on the one hand, “active possibility”, ideal “forms-prototypes”, according to which all things are produced by matter. But, on the other hand, “She (the First Substance) is matter, a passive possibility, underlying, abiding and present, coming almost always to the One. For there is no such thing as a descending from above giver of forms, who would form things from the outside and give them order.” That is, “God” in the usual understanding as an active, creative principle in the Universe, and “matter,” according to Bruno, are only two equivalent aspects of the One, distinguishable in it only by reason. “Matter is in reality inseparable from Light, but distinguishable only by reason.”
Reason and reality. Bruno, following Plato (Philebus, 27b), calls Reason not the “Beginning,” as form and matter, but the Cause. The difference between the Beginning and the Cause is as follows: the Beginning is “that which internally contributes to the structure of a thing and remains in the effect, such as matter and form, which remain in the composition, or the elements of which a thing is composed and into which it is resolved” (11:61). The Cause is “that which externally contributes to the production of a thing and has being outside the composition, such as the efficient cause and purpose…” (Ibid.).
Reason, as Bruno (and before him, Plato, Kuzanets, and others) asserted, is the beginning of every measure and the basis of all boundaries. In the terminology of the 19th century, reason can be called the “transcendental basis of reality.” Reason, which distinguishes the poles of active and passive principles in the One, is the first condition of multiplicity. Therefore, all reality, of which man is a part, is conditional and relative.
In relation to the One, all things are “faces” or “waves on the surface”: “And that which forms multiplicity in things is not the Being, not the Thing, but that which appears, which is presented to the senses and is on the surface of the thing” (11: 141). “… All this, which produces in bodies a variety of formation, completion, figures, colors and other properties and general definitions, is nothing other than a different face of one and the same substance, a transient, mobile, changing face of the motionless, stable and eternal Being” (11: 139). A projection, a shadow cannot act on another projection or shadow, therefore, between things of sensually perceived reality, causal interaction is impossible. The cause of any thing or event is the condition of its relative being – that which united the poles of the Principles – and this, according to the definition of Plato and Bruno, is only Reason.
Reason “belongs to no one.” The division into “thought” and “thinker” is purely logical, and there is no subject of thinking distinct from thinking itself. One could say that thought “thinks itself.” Therefore, human reason is inseparable from Divine Reason, as a ray of light is inseparable from light itself.
Justification of matter. Matter in one of its meanings is “Night”, “the underlying, the darkness that fills all chaos”. It is the primordial mother, containing in her womb all forms in a folded state. Uniting under the action of Reason with the Light of the Forming Principle, she generates forms, unfolding them from herself. “Forms, insofar as they are derived from the potentiality of matter, and not introduced from without by an active cause, are more truly in matter and have the basis of their being in it.”
The concept of “matter” means possibility for Bruno, as for Aristotle. But the Peripatetics understood matter almost exclusively as a “substrate”, a substance that takes form. Bruno insists on a more elevated and “speculative” understanding of matter; it is not comprehended by the senses, but only by reason. Nevertheless, matter for Bruno is not a logical abstraction, as for Aristotle, but a real, living and active principle.
Bruno exalts matter much more than Cusanus, who in his Paradigm had only an infinitely small point of the Other present in the Identical, whereas Bruno identifies the Other and the Identical in the Absolute.
Bruno goes even further and asserts that not only in the Absolute, but also in natural matter, possibility and reality coincide in a certain way, since:
1) matter (nature) does not receive forms from outside, but produces them from within itself;
2) matter itself never turns into reality, therefore it is not a “possibility” in this sense;
3) form “consists in the continuous ability of matter.”
Together with matter, woman is also justified. Metaphysicians say (in Bruno’s dialogue – through the mouth of Polyinnius, referring to Aristotle’s opinion from the first book of “Physics”): she strives for form and is never satisfied.
Bruno rejects this accusation: 1) matter receives nothing from form; rather, it itself gives forms the opportunity to be realized; 2) matter does not strive for forms, but generates them from itself; 3) matter no more desires forms (generating them) than it turns away from them (destroying them).
Matter, Bruno concludes, is an eternal, perfect thing, “divine being in things.”
Soul and life. The inner capacity of matter to form is called by Bruno the “soul of the world.” It is not only within matter, but also constitutes its defining quality and dominant aspiration. Consequently, everything is animated, and life strives to manifest itself wherever it finds a suitable conductor. Life is as indestructible as matter.
The mind is the main ability of the world soul. Since the soul is the “power” of matter, then the mind is not an external “giver of forms”, as the Peripatetics believed, but “the active cause within each thing”.
“The soul is the immediate formative cause, the internal force proper to every thing, like matter itself, governing itself.” “The soul is the master, acting from the center of the seed, creating according to nature; it forms and seizes, sculpts and devours the immediate matter: it is the mover, acting from within.”
Bruno’s “ladder of being” takes on the same outward appearance as Plotinus’, but the understanding of each step is essentially different (and it is more convenient to define the steps in reverse order, from matter to the One, although this is not essential).
1. Matter is an aspect of the Absolute; at the same time the substance for creativity and creativity itself.
2. The soul is an ability and power, an inseparable potential for creativity from matter.
3. The mind is what realizes and directs this potential; the “trigger” and “sight” for the living aspiration of the soul, the “helmsman” who rules not from without but from within matter, the “inner artist” who sculpts forms from within matter. “Fills everything, illuminates the Universe and induces nature to produce its species properly.”
The One is the same as the Universe, infinite, eternal, motionless as a whole, but self-moving in each of its parts.
Immortality of the soul. In his life and death, Bruno gave the most striking example of the Renaissance understanding of immortality. Bruno based this understanding on three convictions.
Firstly, life is indestructible in the Universe, and with the destruction of one form of manifestation of life, its power does not diminish at all, but forms a new form; that is why Bruno recognized the Pythagorean teaching on the transmigration of souls (metempsychosis) as “plausible”;
But the individual form of the soul is not eternal, it is transient, which is confirmed already during a person’s life; everything in nature is a flow, nothing remains the same the next moment, the old dies, but through this death the new is born (as through the death of a grain a sprout).
What passes from the old form to the new is not the old individuality, which, like the body, was only a vessel for the spirit, nor, as the Peripatetics believed, the abstract speculations of reason. The new form can be animated only by a strong desire or a dream, and most of all by the burning of the spirit, the heroic striving to know the Truth and bring its light to men.
Therefore, like Socrates and Christ, Bruno was sure that by his death, the feat of Truth, he conquers death – not only for himself, but for many who can be inspired by his “heroic enthusiasm.” Such a death is the closest possible approach to immortality for a mortal man. The sacrifice of finite life for the sake of infinite and universal life is the best justification of man’s existence on earth and the shortest path to immortality. “Death in one century grants life in the centuries to come.”
The Universe. G. Bruno actually identifies the One and the Universe. This is understandable: if the first two “hypostases” of the One are form and matter, then their union cannot be the transcendent One of Plotinus, but must embody the Universe in its entirety. “So the Universe is one, infinite, motionless… It is not matter, for it has no figure and cannot have one, it is infinite and boundless. It is not form, for it does not form or shape another, given that it is everything…” Within the Universe, movement is eternal, but the Universe itself does not move, for it fills itself with itself. For the same reason, it does not arise and is not destroyed. “Nature itself… is nothing other than God in things.”
The flow reigns in everything: “Nothing changeable and complex in two separate moments consists of the same parts arranged in the same order… Nothing can be called identical to itself twice.”
All things naturally strive for self-preservation under the influence of the “natural impulse to seek that place where it (the body) can best and more easily preserve itself and maintain its present existence; for to this alone do all natural things strive, however ignoble this striving may be.”
Life in the Universe, according to Bruno, is the rule, not the exception: “We believe that habitable places are rare for living beings of our kind… but it is not proper to consider that there is a part of the world without soul, life and sensation, and therefore without living beings. For it is stupid and absurd to think that there cannot be other beings, other kinds of reason than those accessible to our senses.”
Atoms. Bruno reinterpreted the concept of the “Absolute Minimum” of Cusa as the “first matter” and “substance” of things. “The One consists of the indivisible.” “Nature carries out a division that can reach the smallest particles, which no art can approach with its tools.”
From the Minimum – the atom, the monad – everything unfolds through movement. Thus in geometry the fixed point contains all figures in a folded form and unfolds them all through movement. Bruno denies the Aristotelian concept of movement, according to which any movement presupposes an external impulse. “The movement of atoms comes from an internal principle.”
The minimum, i.e., the atom, contains the potential of everything, just as one spark contains the possibility of a world fire. Campanella rightly noted that for Bruno, “The Atom is God.”
Ethics of heroic enthusiasm. Bruno rejects personal immortality as the basis of morality. “For even if we expect another life and another existence, our life will not be the same as the one we live now. For this life passes forever without any hope of return.” But since life is short, it must be filled to the limit with activity, work, creation.
Bruno himself embodied in his life a model of heroic enthusiasm. Serving the truth in our “iron age,” he says, is necessarily associated with heroism. “Heroic enthusiasm” means “that admirable spiritual intensity characteristic of philosophers,” which elevates a person both above physical torment and above death itself.
“In my thoughts, words and actions I know, have and do not strive for anything other than sincerity, simplicity and truth. This is how they will judge me where they will not believe that heroic deeds and merits are fruitless and aimless…”
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