De Gandillac’s Cusanus: Order of Justice and Nexus of Love

Series: German mysticism and legal theory

As Nic­olaus Cus­anus’ thought developed from the ground-​breaking Docta Ignor­antia one can detect that move­ment that each thinker must make as they pass to the limit, and pass right through. In the fol­low­ing selec­tion, Maurice de Gan­dillac shows us how Cus­anus (here de Cusa) car­ries out his deep med­it­a­tion on the syn­thesis of justice and love in life; a syn­thesis which is itself liv­ing, a life. Cus­anus already seems to have under­stood that the mod­ern ques­tion announced in Descartes’ Third Med­it­a­tion – what God-​given per­fec­tions lat­ent in me have I yet to actualise? – might not be answer­able by ref­er­ence to the self; rather by ref­er­ence to the over­com­ing of the self – that the per­fec­tions in ques­tion are a mat­ter not of a dif­fer­ent quantum, but of a qual­it­at­ive change and sub­la­tion in the human.

In con­sid­er­ing these ques­tions of life and human per­fec­tion, Cus­anus becomes a site for the encounter between Hegel and Deleuze, and this is no won­der, for as the reader may well be aware, it was De Gan­dillac who stood as Deleuze’s doc­toral tutor. In Zones of Imman­ence (1985) Deleuze writes:

What a shame that [de Gandillac’s] greatest book, La philo­sophie de Nic­olas de Cues, is now so hard to find, not hav­ing been reprin­ted. In its pages we watch a group of con­cepts being born, both logical and onto­lo­gical, that will char­ac­ter­ise “mod­ern” philo­sophy through Leib­niz and the Ger­man Romantics. One such concept is the notion of Pos­sest, which expresses the imman­ent iden­tity of act and power. And this flir­ta­tion with imman­ence, this com­pet­i­tion of between imman­ence and tran­scend­ence, already tra­verses the work of Eck­hart, as well as the work of the Rhine mystics…

So when we read the fol­low­ing beau­ti­ful explic­a­tion of Cus­anus’ thought on the need for a liv­ing uni­fic­a­tion of the order of justice and the lov­ing nexus, we can­not but help but find the seeds of a cer­tain kind of Deleuzian thought.

As usual the trans­la­tion is free. The selec­tion is drawn from the “hard to find” La philo­sophie de Nic­olas de Cues which was tracked down to a Dek­enat in Limburg(!). 

When Descartes, in a com­pletely dif­fer­ent philo­soph­ical con­text, dis­covered in the thought of Man the indubit­able mark of divine Action, he wondered whether the idea of the Infin­ite cor­res­pon­ded to a sort of vir­tu­al­ity, whether the indef­in­ite per­fect­ing of the human spe­cies – the pro­gress­ive dia­lectic of the Spirit across future civil­isa­tions – jus­ti­fied the pres­ence in us of a “seal” that is incom­pat­ible with a cur­rent stunted-​ness. If Car­dinal de Cusa had had the same scruples with respect to the his­tor­ical appear­ance of the Man-​God, he would have per­haps ascribed to the Cartesian response, which rests on the very neces­sity of an Act which would be wholly other than a Power [Puis­sance¹], of a Being which would be irre­du­cible to a becom­ing, with much greater read­i­ness than his double doc­trine of the Limit and the Pos­sest would entitle him – more than Descartes – to the use of Schol­astic ter­min­o­logy. But his actual response would be drawn from the per­sonal char­ac­ter of sin and redemption.

The demand of the liv­ing Christ con­cerns each per­son vitally. The mon­ads are abso­lute sin­gu­lar­it­ies which are only imper­fectly expressed in signs and acts. In order to attain the real ground, the quid­dity of each among them, one requires noth­ing less than the infin­ite divine thought. That is why, moreover, indi­vidu­als only take on their true value through a con­cord which exceeds them. Every col­lect­ive imper­at­ive which neg­lects sin­gu­lar voca­tions is pure oppres­sion; con­versely, there is no voca­tion what­so­ever which is real­is­able without a com­munal incor­por­a­tion. This how­ever is insuf­fi­cient if one remains on the plane of the indef­in­ite and the con­trac­ted. De Cusa’s the­ory of the Incarn­a­tion thus presents the double char­ac­ter of a soci­olo­gical pos­it­iv­ism and a mys­ter­i­ous struc­tur­al­ism which responds to the demands of nature itself. At the centre of these two move­ments, the very notion of the irre­place­able per­son alone gives both the entirety of their sense.

As the light has need of col­our in order to mani­fest itself in the indef­in­ite vari­ety of col­oured sur­faces, like­wise, we know, the totally “uncon­tract­able” Unity abso­lu­tis­sime requires, in order to spread itself to the mon­ads spe­cialis­simes, not a cos­mic inter­ven­tion which would be a sort of deriv­at­ive God, but rather that uni­ver­sal inter­pen­et­ra­tion which is expressed upon the plane of know­ledge by the inex­haust­ible play of intel­li­gible rela­tions. Each man, like­wise, is in a sense the entirety of Human­ity per­ceived under a unique “point of view”, and, through it, the entire cre­ated world. It is for this sin­gu­lar man to become con­scious of his role, for him firstly to will his own faith­ful­ness to the demands of being itself.

adverte human­it­atem tuam uni­ver­sum esse tuum ambire,
teque divin­it­atem in ejus con­trac­tione participare

But this con­scious­ness is impossible, as is the will to accom­plish it, without a com­munal incor­por­a­tion where there will be real­ised the syn­thesis of justice and charity.

It is a com­pletely essen­tial idea that de Cusa did not invent, but for which he knew how to find strik­ing for­mu­la­tions. It per­mits him to exceed the clas­sical quar­rel between the indi­vidual and the social, to give all its value to the Gos­pel par­able of the vine and the branches [John 15.1 – 17]. That the mys­tery of per­sonal voca­tion resides in the sin­gu­lar rela­tion of the per­son to the infin­ite which is within; that each “sep­ar­ate” indi­vidual has need of an internal renais­sance, of a “dei­fic­a­tion” or a “fili­ation” which jus­ti­fies the Pas­calian anguish and the “drop of blood” spilled for “each” sin­ner; that the human drama be com­pletely other than the rational demands of an eth­ical uni­ver­sal­ity or a con­tra­dic­tion which is always over­come by a formal dia­lectic – de Cusa did not doubt it for an instant. But without avail­ing him­self of the lan­guage of Comte, he already knew that the isol­ated man is no less an abstract fic­tion than human­ity, under­stood as “genus” or “spe­cies”. The divine life itself, as soon as we man­age to think it, appears as a rela­tion of Per­son to Per­son. It is there­fore pre­cisely not a monad which, even as far as it bears in itself the Trin­it­arian power of the Tran­scend­ent, par­ti­cip­ates in the double pro­cess of Lev­el­ling and Con­nex­ion, nor con­scious­ness which, at the three stages of sen­sa­tion, reason, and intel­lec­tion, which will dis­cover the pre­mon­i­tion of a Justice and a Love.

The organic unity of the body, con­ceived in the man­ner of the Stoa in a very optim­istic fash­ion, already pre­fig­ures this har­mo­ni­ous com­mu­nion where noth­ing is sac­ri­ficed for noth­ing, but where everything con­spires in the interest of all. In sen­sa­tion we eas­ily dis­cover a phys­ical need of order, an adapt­a­tion of the liv­ing body to its envir­on­ment, an erot­i­cism through which the indi­vidual com­mu­nic­ates the inten­tions of the spe­cies while unit­ing with other indi­vidu­als through the most intim­ate link. With reason we attain a greater spir­itu­al­isa­tion by the same effort, attain per­cept­ive syn­thesis, gen­er­al­isa­tion, the equan­im­ity of the ancient Sage, the ideal of solid­ar­ity of the mod­ern cit­izen. It will be neces­sary how­ever that, by coin­cid­en­tia oppos­itorum, the intel­lect exceeds even this plane and leads us to the para­doxes of the Third term, there where alone the ordo iusti­tia mixes with the con­nexio amorosa, where the rewards of the deserving are at the same time the par­don of faults, where the per­son flour­ishes in the forgetting.

Yet this Auf­hebung is only pos­sible through the infin­ite love of man for God which mixes with the very love of God for man. But this double love, which is expressed in the pre­cepts and coun­sels of the Gos­pels, is only a Life through the very per­son­age of Christ incarn­ated and the through the mys­tical Body which pro­longs its pres­ence in the indef­in­ite dur­a­tion of the ages.

It is very import­ant there­fore that the divine gift be not interior illu­min­a­tion, not invis­ible renewal of souls, but an event which inter­venes in a tra­di­tion, which is per­petu­ated in insti­tu­tions. As with bio­lo­gical life, spir­itual life is the work of a com­munity and Christ is present in hearts only because he is at one and the same time the com­mon source of lives and the sin­gu­lar model of each among them.

The daily nour­ish­ment that Sunday Prayer demands – this is not only an intel­lec­tual doc­trine; it is divine Wis­dom become co-​substantial with the saved soul. While other foods are lost in us to nour­ish us, this food alone raises us to him and unites us in him, like the parts of a com­plete organ­ism. To sep­ar­ate from the all, it is to be con­demned and per­ish just as if the fin­ger decided to cut itself from the hand. This incor­por­a­tion sup­poses a social engage­ment; it is expressed vis­ibly in a church mem­ber­ship. And if the sin to be pardoned is that of each of us, sal­va­tion is only appro­pri­ate for the col­lectiv­ity of sin­ners in solid­ar­ity, to the extent that they mutu­ally recog­nise them­selves as broth­ers in sin and as broth­ers in hope.

Tomorrow’s selec­tion: Jakob Böhme: the tragedy of free­dom and the curse of the law

This entry was posted on 15 August 2012 at 3:18 am and is filed under Critical Legal Theory, Series: German Mysticism & Legal Theory. Published under Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License: You are welcome to share and remix this content for non-commercial purposes. Kindly acknowledge and hyperlink the source.