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WILHELM SCHMIDT-BIGGEMANN The Dialectic of the Absolute Beginning. On a Copper Engraving in Heinrich Khunrath’s Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae Dicsono: […] Ecco dumque che della divina sustanza, sì per essere infinita, sì per essere lontanissima da quelli effetti, che sono l’ultimo termine del corso della nostra discorsiva facultade, non possiamo conoscer nulla, se non per modo di vestigio come dicono i Platonici, di remoto effetto come dicono i Peripatetici, di indumenti come dicono i Cabalisti, di spalli o posteriori come dicono i Talmutisti, di spechio, ombra et enigma come dicono gli Apocaliptici. De la causa, second dialogue1 First Cause in Giordano Bruno and Heinrich Khunrath Bruno’s De la Causa is, in general terms, an explication of Liber de Causis, influenced by Proclus, in which the question about the first cause is answered by maintaining that the first cause is principally unknowable, since a cause is only conceivable as a cause in contrast to its effects. Since our thinking itself is dependent upon the first cause, we ourselves can only conceive of ourselves in this secondary position and are accordingly unable to grasp the first cause in itself. As Bruno expresses this fact, we can gain “no other knowledge from the first principal and from the first cause other than in the less effective manner which consists in knowing its traces, provided that the whole springs from its will and its goodness.”2 This means that one does not know the first cause, because it conceals itself as principle behind its difference. “To know the universe accordingly means, therefore, to know as it were nothing of that which concerns being and the substance of the first principal, for it is a knowing of the accidents of accidents.”3 Thus, one cannot principally know the first substance. “Therefore, it is clear we can know absolutely nothing whatsoever about the divine substance—be it infinite; be it the furthest from the effects which, for their part, constitute the most extreme possibility of our discursive cog- 200 Reflections of an Intellectual Burning nitive faculty—apart from one way which the Platonic thinkers call trace, the Peripatetics removed effect, the Kabbalists husk, the Talmudists backwards view or behind view, the Apocalyptics mirror, shadow, or puzzle.”4 This theory of the first cause is represented by Khunrath in a fantastic, metaphysical image. As distinguished from Bruno’s metaphysics of substance , Khunrath delineates a Christian interpretation of this first reason; and yet, at the same time, a curious dialectic reveals itself here. Imagery is always spatially extended; and if it portrays this extension with spiritual symbols, then one might ask whether the outer side of the first cause does not already contain, as a spiritual process, extension; and whether there is such a thing as spiritual space and a corresponding spiritual extension. (An example of this imaginary extension is geometry, the figures of which have to be fundamentally extended, without being spatial in a material sense.) With Bruno, the first emanation of the One is space, which is indeterminate between extension and materiality. This space, as the Second after the absolute beginning—i.e., as the first externalization of the divine beginning —has systematically the same position as that of the inner Trinitarian Christ in Christian theology, which, in turn, is also the logos of creation (Schöpfungslogos). With Bruno, this logos manifests itself in the extension and only in the extension—i.e., in Christian-dogmatic terms, the Christologization of space—and this corresponds to that which later came to be known as Pantheism. The essence of Bruno’s heresy lies in his claim that there is no externalization of God apart from that of the emergence of space. Bruno writes, “There is a kind of form, the first to form itself, to extend itself and dependent [upon the first cause]. Because it forms the whole through and through, it is in everything; because it extends to everything , it mediates the perfection of the whole with the individual parts; because it is independent and does not have any activity of its own, it is able to convey the activity of the whole and similarly the name and the being of the whole to the parts. This first form is the material form—like, for example , that of fire; for each part of the fire warms, is called fire, and is fire.”5 In the year 1560, Heinrich Khunrath was born in Leipzig. He died in 1605 in Leipzig or Dresden...

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