The Bond of Love: Cusanus on Participation and Divine-Human Wholeness

The ‘Gestalt’ (a form or a whole) of Gestalt Psychology is defined as that which is "other” than the sum of its parts. The "other” is significant. It is not to be confused with “more than” which carries the implication of “more of the same”. This is the sense of Cassirer’s view of a historical account of the Renaissance or of any other major historical period. That is, the other is a qualitative whole that we experience as "the spirit of the age”: by this term we mark an identity of a period of history in much the same way as we understand a person or a work of art or respond to nature as revealing a style of being, a manner of approaching the world.

This experience of ‘otherness’ is of something "beyond us, yet ourselves”, as Wallace Stevens puts it: in taking us out of our selves it confirms and enlarges our identity. We can surmise that such episodes play a part in the normal course of human development, both at the individual and collective levels, as a joint differentiation of self and world.

In the religious thought of the Renaissance the Whole which is beyond us, yet ourselves, is God, who, being the Absolute that is eternal and infinite, cannot be dismissed as a style of being alongside the human Gestalts. God is the encompassing Whole; humanity lives in the particular and can only know that which derives from particular experiences. Just as Plato had defined the Good as beyond the sensory particular, Nicholas Cusanus (Cassirer, 1964) argues for the absolute difference between the human and the divine. We cannot ascribe to God any human limitation and we cannot deduce or infer God on the basis of empirical evidence, because that only places us within the realm of “more” and “less”. How then can we conceive of any relationship between the two?

In the first place, Cusanus argues, we have learned our ignorance. We can progress from that false direction to a more productive one. Now this learned ignorance must be understood in a certain way if we are to get to the heart of Renaissance religion. It could be interpreted as a purely intellectual matter, a question for the logical mind which perceives one path closed leading to one that is open. And, indeed, Cusanus explicitly denies that this transformation is a matter of feeling alone, wanting a logical grounding of his approach. But we should not neglect the extent to which religion in this period is taken for granted as a fundamental view of life and one that incorporates the most intense feeling; logic may well be significant for the philosopher who is equipped with the certainty of religious experience, but that certainty is itself founded upon a world view that essentially unites feeling and logic into its synthesis of wisdom.

How then does Cusanus integrate that which he has separated so radically? Having accepted Plato’s dichotomy of ideas and that which is available to the senses, he draws upon Plato’s notion of ‘participation’ to describe their mode of interaction. The conceptual distinction between idea and sensory, he argues, does not, as Cassirer (1964) states, “cut through the vital knot of experience” (p. 22). There is in that “knot” a sense both of the subjective sensory and the objective other of the ideal. Whilst a conceptual or logical analysis points to the separation of the two categories, in the life of consciousness the two are present together: the logical separation holds because the idea cannot be experienced as a defined whole, but it can be experienced in the individual instance which reflects the whole.

There is in existence itself no separation of the two - each lends itself to the other - but it is the separation of the individual and universal which ‘permits’ their mutual penetration. In this respect, he argues, human psychology parallels cosmic order. He sees the universe as a multiplicity of different movements, each circling around its own centre but also united through participation in the same universal order; equally, every spiritual being has its centre within itself and participates in the divine in centralising this value within itself. The logic of Cusanus, one which characterises the major movements of mysticism, is that of a contradictory identity that unites the individual with the universal.

We witness in his writings a seemingly strange but convincing conjunction: caution with respect to what can be known empirically, combined with a celebration of the necessary unity of individual and universal. Together they create a most tolerant Humanism. We no longer need to search for and define “the One True Faith” since all ‘expressions’ of faith are drawn from particular circumstances and thus suffer the limitation of all empirical induction. They should be regarded and respected, therefore, as different expressions of an underlying universality. But arguably, they should be respected only to the extent to which each follows this principle and does not seek to impose itself on others, since in doing so it would deny the principle. We may well live in the realm of probability, but in faith we participate in the idea of the Whole which is indivisible. An ethical claim is thus made, one that requires the exercise of both feeling and intellect - the mystic and the logical: for to live in the values inspired by our interdependence not only demands that sense of interdependence in the ‘form’ of love; it demands the work of the intellect in the ‘practice of’ love - the measures of tolerance, humility, balance, and proportion, which together form the wisdom and subtlety of love.

For Cusanus the realm of value is above all else that in which humanity can exercise its freedom ofjudgment. Value itself arises from God - it is that which, being beyond us, can be our measure, but without the application of intellect, one would not know whether value existed. It is our capacity for evaluation through comparison and judgment that ‘forms’ value. Indeed, he asserts, without that evaluation, we would not know how precious everything in the universe is. With this statement alone we can understand the fundamental achievement of Renaissance thought in separating itself from the medieval Christian perspective, for it makes our freedom decisive in the achievement of revelation of the spiritual. Without that freedom, God would remain forever hidden from us. But evaluation is exercised, also, as a matter of course in everyday life.

It is the distinguishing feature of reason itself to compare and find difference, to balance one thing against another, to estimate the worth of something. Once more, we are led back to the mutuality of idea and the sensuous. The formation and recognition of the idea occurs through sensory experience in both the mundane and sacred realms. The sacred arises when we recognise it within the mundane and when we then consolidate these experiences in a form in which the mundane is, in its wholeness, a revelation of the sacred. Cusanus uses the metaphor of the seed within us that requires to be planted in "the soil of the sensible world in order to blossom and bear fruit”.

It is that newly defined sense of freedom enjoyed by the mind that gives the Renaissance its sense of a unity within diversity. For example, the symbolisms of the aesthetic and of the mathematical are united in Leonardo’s perspective, since both utilise ideas of form and proportion to achieve harmony. Astrology begins to lose its interest in the determination of human events in the light of the scientific discoveries of Kepler and Galileo demonstrating the form of the universe. In religious thinking, we also discern a movement away from predestination to choice: Cusanus saw humanity in its spiritual manifestation as the middle point, the bond between the divine and the secular, insofar as we take upon ‘ourselves’ the task of realising the divine through our own values and acts: this vision of the self is that of a being that interiorises its relation to the divine order of the world in the act of bonding with it. Such acts are necessarily symbolic - we do not have direct access to reality - but their symbolic function is to allow the ideal to permeate the sensible world. Only then do we possess true vision. Only then does the presence of the other impress itself upon us as simultaneously spiritual and physical.

Kaske (2019) defines this middle order as the realm of love. It is in love that we experience the transcendent whole. Love is "the bond of the world”. It reconciles the disparate elements of the world in an inclusive vision that allows us to perceive each particular as a ‘function’ of the whole. We then experience that whole as a synthesis of the sensuous and the idea. If you love someone, you love the idea of them; the sensual with all its diversity is incorporated in the idea: its particularities and contradictions become subservient to and enhance the whole. And, essentially, the idea itself is not experienced as self-derived but as something other than oneself in its potential universality and absoluteness. Love, as the middle realm, thus faces two ways - inwards for the perfection of the self, and outwards to the realisation of its potential in our relation to the natural and interpersonal world: love’s enlightenment, love’s work. It is perhaps, the major achievement of Renaissance thought to suggest a possible form of human life governed by a principle of coherence that unites the individual with the absolute, art with science, mathematics with mysticism, and, above all, the sense of a freedom which can choose its own necessity.

There is an interesting parallel between Ficino’s Christian mysticism and the Sufi mysticism of Ibn ‘Arabi and Rumi, whose central tenets of sympathy and compassion are developed through the "creative imagination” (Corbin, 1997). I shall consider the role of imagination more adequately subsequently. At the moment I merely wish to add a rider to the Renaissance emphasis upon the logical nature of enlightenment to the divine: Cusanus, for example, speaks of a joint ‘participation’ of part (the individual human) and whole (God) as though that unity has the inevitability of a logical structure. But arguably, the logic presupposes an already existing connection of a feeling towards the divine, present in some degree in human awareness and brought to fruition by such participation. Perhaps it is the case that in the Renaissance, as in the Middle Ages, that sense ‘was’ implicit - powerful, ever-present, and all-pervading, so that reference to its role in human experience was assumed. Moreover, the question of human development - the evolution of humanity both at the levels of the individual and of species - was not yet an issue. But as soon as this issue is addressed the question of causality emerges and the qualities of compassion and love, evident in human social relationships, may then be seen as an empirical bridge between the secular and the sacred.

In this context it is essential to remember that the assertion of the ‘otherness’ of the whole refers to the experience of a qualitative summation, one that does not form a fixed boundary line around itself but has an openness that may contain contradictions within its potential for growth. Dewey (1931) remarked that a feeling ‘is’ of the “situation”. More precisely, it is the perception of your engagement in the situation and, as such, it may give guidance to the expectations you have in relation to that engagement. Feeling as engagement both provides the context in which "an experience” can develop (it is the hidden ground for the appearance of the figure) and is an essential part of the intentionality of consciousness (the directedness towards an object which confers upon it the quality of “otherness” and therefore its reality): it is both contextual and directional, circumference and centre. There is, then, no justification for excluding feeling from the work of intellect. Indeed, if feeling is that which drives intellectual endeavour, we may look to its appearance when original thinking needs to be called upon, whether in the Humanities, the Arts, or Mathematics and Science. Creative imagination is the intelligence of feeling, a fusion of thought, feeling, and value in any creative endeavour.