Becoming God: The Doctrine of Theosis in Nicholas of Cusa

Conclusion

C o n c l u s i o n A look at the notion of “theosis” in Cusanus’s philosophical and theological treatises shows that even those texts that deal primarily epistemological issues (De docta ignorantia, for instance) give clues to his metaphysics.The movement from cataphatic to negative and supereminent theology is driven by a certain understanding of human beings and God. It is only because we can theorize about the infinity of God that we can make statements about learned ignorance and the limitations of human rationality. Nicholas of Cusa stands at the very beginning of Renaissance thought, and thus the modern world. He makes claims of both radical union with and complete separation between God and creation similar to those of the earlier thinkers. His suggestion that created things may be just as unknowable as God derives from the interplay of both claims. Nicholas’s concern with subjectivity in knowledge and his cosmological speculation have been the focus of intensive study because of their implications for his location within either medieval or early modern thought.The issue of whether he is a medieval or a modern is a peculiarly Western question that leads to doubts about his orthodoxy. He is clearly a medieval thinker but is much closer to the Eastern Church fathers than to other medievals. While Gregory was significant for his contributions to a doctrine of  creation that is foundational for a theory of deification, Maximus is important for his Christology. Moreover the crucial influence of PseudoDionysius is indisputable.Theophany in Nicholas of Cusa is both a basis for theosis and as an aspect of theosis in its own right. Cusanus’s unique name for God,“the Not-other” eclipses ordinary categories of definition. It emphasizes divine self-referentiality, highlights God’s immanence, and describes the foundational ontological role that God plays for creation. God defines all things, but is himself indefinable. Moreover, for God,“to define” means to be the cause both of things and of their possibility. Since theophany is the primary disclosure of God, Cusanus does not favor an analogical approach to God (although in De coniecturis he admits a second-order analogy). Instead, he sees God as enfolding both being and not-being, that is, absolute possibility or nothingness. Moreover , instead of a traditional doctrine of creation ex nihilo, Nicholas offers his theory that the infinity of God encompasses even the opposites of possibility and actuality. The Absolute that manifests in plurality leads to an affirmation of the individuality and (limited) perfection of all things. Not only does Cusanus avoid traditional medieval hierarchical views of creation, but he also locates the source of things’ variety in contingency. Because it reflects the absolutely Infinite and Eternal, the universe itself is seen as (privatively) infinite and eternal in its own right. Its unity is a result of the divine manifestation of Unity into difference. Moreover, in the third book of De docta ignorantia, Cusanus defines the maximum contractum (contracted maximum) as something that would be both absolute and contracted, existing as both God and creature. Because humanity is a microcosm, including both the lower and higher natures, the contracted maximum would be a human being. Thus, Cusanus sketches the logic behind God’s self-manifestation in Christ, whom he calls “the Equality of being all things.” Although human reason is negatively portrayed in De docta ignorantia , it has a positive, constructive aspect as well. Not only is the frustra-   c o n c l u s i o n tion encountered by the mind in its attempts to know God something that moves the mind beyond itself, but De coniecturis points to its locus as the imago Dei. Human creativity is the imaging of divine fecundity as the conjecturing mind creates the conceptual world. Cusanus had good reasons for adopting an epistemological perspective and an emphasis on the instrumentality of the mind. Rather than simply following the tradition of Greek philosophy, he is aware of the availability of thought as an expression of a larger theological movement .The “universal receptivity” of the mind is symbolic for the deification of the created order, the triumph over space and time, and the return to the infinite God. Although Cusanus compares things of the sensible world to books through which God speaks, he argues that the mind ascends from the temporal and particular to the eternal and universal, and then to God. The...