Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM 67
library of manuscripts. Together with his younger contemporary, Ficino, he
played an important part in the Renaissance revival of Platonism.
Cusanus and his contemporaries did not make the distinction now recognized
between Plato and the school of Neoplatonism begun by Plotinus. By the end of
the seventeenth century Leibniz had begun to make distinctions between the true
Plato and the distortions of and accretions to his thought to be found in the
writings of his successors. 5 But such distinctions were not made by the religious
Neoplatonists of the Renaissance. They inherited a tradition in which Plato had
been presented in a Christianized form. Important as a background source for
Cusanus are the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius—the writings falsely attributed to
St Paul’s first Athenian convert Dionysius the Areopagite. These writings had
influenced Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1327) and the medieval Rhineland school
of mysticism to which Cusanus was indebted. He was also indebted to Proclus
and commissioned a translation of his Platonic Theology.
Typically of the religious Neoplatonists Cusanus took God’s creation of the
world to imply that the world reflected God’s infinite nature. The world, for him,
is a ‘contraction’ of God and each finite thing is in turn a ‘contraction’ of the
larger universe. It follows that all things, including contradictory opposites,
coincide in a harmonious unity. If that is so then the principle of contradiction is
not a necessary condition of truth and human reason is not equal to grasping the
true nature of the world. Cusanus accordingly taught what he called ‘learned
ignorance’, partly in opposition to the Aristotelians and their insistence on the
principle of contradiction. He also taught the ‘negative theology’ of Pseudo-
Dionysius, that God transcends all positive knowledge we can have of Him.
Cusanus’s Platonic tendency to mysticism and scepticism in religious matters
did not prevent him from having definite opinions in cosmology. If, for example,
the universe is a mirror of God then it should, he thought, be conceived as having
no determined boundary. The view that everything in the universe is a microcosm
of the whole also committed him to rejecting the Aristotelian orthodoxy that the
heavenly bodies were made of a different substance from the earth. Cusanus
departed in these and in a number of other respects from the established
cosmology of Ptolemy and Aristotle.
The case of Cusanus illustrates how Neoplatonism helped to liberate some
from the (as it happens, false) assumptions of Aristotelian science and thus
contributed to the development of what, with the benefit of hindsight, we would
judge to be a truer view of the world. The influence of Neoplatonism on how
people thought about the world was not, however, invariably helpful in this way.
The view that man is a microcosm of the universe (the macrocosm) played a
central part in the thought of Paracelsus and the very influential tradition of
occult philosophy during the Renaissance. That view, to which we shall return, 6
led to a number of false beliefs, for instance about what in nature could be used
to cure what diseases in humankind.
Cusanus was himself part of a tradition of philosophy in Germany which was
to continue throughout the Renaissance period and beyond. That, no doubt, is