Series: German Mysticism & Legal Theory

The fol­low­ing text is the first study of a two-​part mono­graph writ­ten by Nikolai Berdy­aev1, the former Marx­ist mil­it­ant turned auto­di­dact and Chris­tian exist­en­tial­ist, and was pub­lished in the journal Put’ in Feb­raury 1930. It seems to have been writ­ten as a tan­gen­tial reac­tion to a read­ing of Koyré’s La Philo­sophie de Jacob Boehme, which Bedy­aev reviewed in 1929. While Berdyaev’s con­cerns appear to be primar­ily con­fes­sional — he places Boehme’s mix of Luther­an­ism and mys­ti­cism with his own East­ern Church-​tinged exist­en­tial­ism on the same side against the author­it­ari­an­ism of Rome — the width and open­ness of his read­ing mani­fests itself in his assent­ing embrace of the Ungrund, that noth­ing con­sidered as a pure unground­ing which is argu­ably Boehme’s most crit­ical con­tri­bu­tion to philo­sophy. With the Ungrund, might we not say ...
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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 ...
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