"Not-knowing", by Alois M. Haas
A commentary on "The Vision of God"
Since Socrates taught it to his disciples, not-knowing has been regarded as the highest form of wisdom, so to speak. But not merely ignorance in itself, rather the knowledge of not-knowing. Only if you know that you know nothing and persist in this infinitely—this negative potential—it becomes clear that negation need not always be negative in a moral sense. Instead, negation is a tool of thought, practically the very driving force of thinking.
Thus, this idea must be maintained: the knowledge of not-knowing. Many have reflected on this concept of negation, which has a long philosophical history, always harking back to Socrates, with varying degrees of agreement or dissent. Culture, in any case, strives against forgetting the knowledge of not-knowing.
This means that negation was very soon relativized with moral categories. However, mystics repeatedly addressed the topic of not-knowing, as we have touched upon several times. Not-knowing, in the sense that God Himself is the nothingness of all constraining designations—that all names are, in a way, mere pointers to the postulate of God.
This ignorantia emerges in the 15th century, during a time when the Catholic Church was able to produce some highly esteemed scholars. Among them, Nicholas of Cusa plays a significant role.
And in his thought, not-knowing naturally also occupies a prominent position. In what context? I would like to illustrate this with his treatise De Visione Dei (On the Vision of God).
First, he arranges a scenario for how a contemplation of images can be conducted in a religious sense. He presents an image of God's face with a beard, majestic, to a community of monks, and the monks must gather around the image. The image possesses a feature that was an invention of the 15th and 16th centuries—namely, that the figure depicted is a cuncta videns, one who sees all. Artists achieve this with some kind of technique, arranging the eyes so that the figure seems to look at all viewers.
This cuncta videns can also be found in secular images. For example, someone sits at the edge of a painting and gazes out at the viewers, so that wherever the viewer stands, they feel seen by the cuncta videns, the all-seeing one. This tactic is now applied to the concept of God.
Cusa says that this image, wherever we stand, wherever we move around it, continuously looks at us. It grants us its gaze in every moment of our engagement with the image. This form of contemplation has a profound meaning, for it is essentially the prototype of what would later become the all-seeing eye in the Baroque period. When a vast eye is depicted above in a church, representing God seeing all.
This may sound trivial, but it is profoundly spiritual. God sees me always. And for Cusanus, God is the one who grants me life, who grants me the capacity for contemplation, who enables me to accomplish an intellectual feat normally beyond human ability. Namely—and this is a new configuration—the viewer stands before a celestial wall that must be overcome.
To achieve this, one must perform a particular act: consider what in the world prevents one from doing so. The image of the wall represents a barrier, and overcoming the barrier is, according to Orphic tradition, taboo and not considered a reasonable action. Yet here the question arises: I must overcome the wall. And what does the wall symbolize for Cusanus? For him, the wall symbolizes the barrier that renders everything in human life oppositional.
The oppositio rerum, so to speak—the mutual opposition of everything against everything else. I must transcend this wall, and when this occurs, something remarkable happens: a coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites. The event occurs, prefigured in God as the all-seeing one, in which I too can reconcile all opposites simultaneously within the One Self.
If this is possible, I succeed in leaping over the wall. Then I find myself in a state of not-knowing that no longer burdens me, but rather a blissful not-knowing that liberates me from all oppositions and brings me closer to divine unity. This means that all human thought—working as it does with oppositional categories—must ultimately coincide in a convergence of these opposites, allowing freedom for the human being and providing the path to the divine.
And this, fundamentally, is also a not-knowing of oppositions and, if you will, their destruction.