Nicholas Chrypffs (or Krebs) (1401-1464) was born in Cusa (Kues), a small village of Trier on the Moselle River; German by origin, he studied in Italy and became bishop of Brixen. He maintained an intense diplomatic, religious and governmental activity, together with a B contribution to the scientific research . It is understandable that among his writings there are many works on Philosophy, law, politics, mathematics and astronomy.

The main topic that runs through the philosophical pages of the Cusano is that of the knowledge of God, which we always reach -according to his expression- per speculum et in ænigmate. Being the Good, the One and the supreme Power, the human knowing approaches Him by means of conjectures, for which financial aid the instrument of mathematical science; although, under the influence undoubtedly of John Eckhart, he maintains that God, in last written request, remains hidden to the human understanding. In this sense, the negative way for the knowledge of the divine prevails in the Cusano. In addition to Meister Eckhart, we find antecedents of his position in Scotus Eriugena, Pseudo Dionysius Areopagite, St. Augustine, Plotinus and Plato himself.

The structure of his system is like that of a building constructed from above. The first intuition is the One-God, on which everything else rests and depends. He insists on the absolute transcendence and unknowability of God, and yet he asserts that the science of God precedes any other knowledge. The reason is because God is the exemplar of all things, and, if the exemplar is ignored, diversity cannot be known.

All his thought unfolds in function of the Neoplatonic contraposition between two great orders of being. On the one hand, God, absolute unity, most simple, inaccessible to the senses and to discursive reason, and only perceptible by the intellectus. On the other hand, the sensible universe, realm of plurality, of numbers and the numerable, and of movement. To these two great orders of being correspond, respectively, two modes of knowledge: the intellect and reason.

His most famous doctrine is the so-called coincidence of opposites, where the Socratic-Platonic topic of "learned ignorance" also appears. According to this doctrine, God is the infinite being in whom all things coincide. It is the idea of harmonious unity or synthesis of the opposites gathered in the Absolute in an incomprehensible way, since He Himself transcends all differences and oppositions. The question alluded to, as is evident, is indissolubly linked to the Neoplatonic ideas of complicatio and explicatio. According to these theories of the Cushanist, the being of the finite is characterized by the presence of the infinite and the Absolute in it, while the total transcendence of God is emphasized. It must be specified at this point that the two terms, immanence and transcendence, are unequal: certainly, the finite implies the presence of the Infinite in it, but it is not necessarily given with the Infinite. Otherwise, the infinite could not do without the finite and one could not speak of a true transcendence. In other words, things cannot be considered without God, but He can be without finite entities: "If things are considered without Him, they are nothing, like issue without unity. If He Himself is considered without things, He is and things are nothing." This presence, however, never implies an identification of pantheistic cut, but the theory of expression that entails the complicatio and explicatio sample, fundamentally, the mutual belonging of God and the world, implying the radical dependence of the latter.

Nowadays, his theory of knowledge and of the mind has been emphasized above all. According to Nicholas of Cusa, the intellective soul, when it scrutinizes within itself, contemplates God and all things; thus we read in The Hunt for Wisdom: "Because the knowledge is assimilation, it finds all things in itself as in a living mirror endowed with intellectual life, which looking into itself sees in itself all things as assimilated to itself. And this assimilation is the living image of the creator and of all things". In the light of this doctrine, he links the knowledge of things with the self-knowledge of the soul as the image of God and, in this sense, supposes a new way of understanding the knowledge.

In knowing things by assimilating them into itself, the soul recognizes itself as a living and intellectual image of the Creator. Now, since the understanding is a living and intellectual image of God, who is not other than God with respect to anything, it therefore contemplates him in itself when it enters into itself and becomes aware that it is an image of the same nature as its archetype.

As a "living image", it has then the capacity to recreate in itself all things that, as exemplars, are in the intellect or divine Logos, and for this reason it is also called the measure of things; this is how it is expressed in The Beryl: "For this reason man finds in himself, as in the reason that measures them, all created things". The idea of measure here implies that the human mind assimilates in itself all things in order to, by participation of the divine power, assimilate them notionally, which is to make them intelligible within itself or to endow them with meaning. Between the Middle Ages and modernity, we can assert that the human being measures all other things, but, in final, the unit of measure is not in him, but in the Absolute.

For Nicholas of Cusa, the human mind is the image of God; but this does not imply that it exists as a sort of copy that limits itself to reflecting the world. Being an image, it is capable of making manifest the content of the divine Logos. But it is above all a living image that imitates the Absolute by recreating the created, which means that, in knowing, it configures, or recreates, a notion of the things of the world, and these then acquire an intelligible meaning for the human mind.

In reality, the mind is not a sort of explicatio of the divinity (as the world can be), but is properly "image of the eternal complication". In this sense, it can be affirmed that one of the principles that govern Nicholas of Cusa's thought is this idea of the mind as an image of the divinity.

In the dialogue on the mind he explains very well that the mind possesses a force or power, which, even needing the stimulus of the senses, because it is the image of the absolute complication, which is the infinite mind, has the power to assimilate itself to every explanation"; this is what is implied in being the image of the infinite simplicity that complicates all things. Therefore, he says that we experience, therefore, that the mind is that power which, although it lacks all notional form, nevertheless, can, stimulated, assimilate itself to all form and produce notions of all things, similar in a certain way to a healthy sight which is in darkness and has never been in the light; that sight is deprived of all actual notions of visible things, but when it comes into the light and is stimulated, it assimilates itself to the visible so as to have a notion.

Another of Cusa's great current themes is the question of freedom. For Nicholas of Cusa, the cognitive and volitional attainment of one's own truth corresponds to the free will. This freedom is nothing but the image of divine omnipotence: "And this power that I obtain from you and in which I possess the living image of the power of your omnipotence, is the free will"(The Vision of God). The person who is conscious of his freedom is at the same time conscious of God, because to be the image of God means nothing other than to be capax dei, capable of participating in God; and it is precisely as the living image of God that man discovers his freedom.

Surely the above is best represented in a work written around the same time as The Vision of God, that is, The Game of the Ball, where Nicholas explains well the journey of the soul towards its own center, which is none other than the divine. There he emphasizes how man sets himself in motion with his soul, in whose nature it lies precisely to be the force of his own movement. He refers, evidently, to a purely intellectual movement subject . He teaches then how the soul knows itself in its intellectual nature; and that the functions of the intellective soul are: thought(cogitatio), consideration(consideratio) and determination(determinatio). Such intellectual functions are understood as essentially related to freedom and creativity. For this reason, in other works, such as The Beryl, man is considered as a second God, since it is in his free and creative activity that the human person resembles and approaches God.

Freedom is not then a force of decision towards yes or no, but the capacity of self-determination according to the very nature of what one is. In the contemporary research , there is a coincidence in considering that freedom for the Cusano is not in the first place the freedom of choice, but he understands freedom in the line of self-realization and self-configuration.

In the Cusano's way of philosophizing we can finally glimpse the characteristic outline of modernity: a non scholastic philosophizing, an exaltation of the human being as a microcosm, the use of mathematics to refer to metaphysical questions. He also agrees with the spirit of the Renaissance by taking up the patristic and Augustinian Philosophy and drawing inspiration from Neoplatonism beyond the Arab mediation that had conditioned medieval scholasticism. Within, therefore, his humanistic interests, he reflects himself as a thinker of his time, opening in this sense the way to modernity. However, it should be noted that his religious perspective kept him sheltered from the derivations that naturalistic and secularized humanism entailed in other thinkers, both contemporary and later. In the modern Philosophy authors such as Leibniz, Malebranche, Schelling or Hegel will take up some of the central thesis of Nicholas of Cusa's speculation, incorporating them into their respective systems from their own interpretations.

In Book XII of his Metaphysics, Aristotle had spoken of God as "an eternal and immobile substance, separate from sensible things", that "moves being immobile" the world from the first of the "translations", which is the "circular", in the manner "as the understanding is moved by the intelligible". For Giordano Bruno - Filippo Bruno di Nola - this conception - that is, a God, first being, constituted in otherness with the world, separated from what must be considered his work - is incompatible, from its very root, with that which in a precise way has served as the starting point of his thought. From this perspective, the immobile motor, alien to the very life of the universe, constitutes, in his eyes, nothing but a great source of philosophical sterility. We understand then his words: "God is not an external intelligence, which makes the universe move in a circular way; it is more worthy of Him to be an internal principle of movement, that is, the very nature, the very form, the very soul that all animate beings possess, insofar as they are"(De Immenso et Innumerabilibus).

The whole philosophical concern of the Nolan is based precisely on the conviction that the Absolute has manifested itself fully in nature and that, consequently, the task of philosophizing lies precisely in unveiling or discovering - through the study of the natural - the divine being, who has revealed himself in such a way.

Nature is sample in Bruno as the adequate way for the human knowledge of divinity; and insofar as his proposal entails the overcoming of the - in his eyes - Aristotelian dualism Absolute-world, it will certainly be difficult to carry out a separate consideration of the Absolute, for nothing else but the world is its necessary explanation. In other words, to speak, in Bruno, of the Absolute requires precisely to consider the world implied in it; just as to expatiate on the world requires a reflection on the divinity which is perfectly and completely manifested in its work. If we add to this the silence about transcendence, we can understand that Bruno's reflection leads to an exaltation of nature, which is elevated to the rank of the divine.

The consideration of the Absolute from that characteristic activity, which is the production of things, sample - both in the De Immenso et Innumerabilibus and in the De la Causa, Principio et Uno - that this production cannot be understood except as the unfolding of the divine essence. For, indeed, in Bruno's eyes, the mode of action of the one who is the ultimate perfection demands that what is produced be seen as a sort of replica of its maker, since otherwise the author could not be discovered in his work; the divine essence must therefore be found as unfolded through the infinite variety of the creatures that populate the universe. And this in such a way that the world does not appear as something opposed to the divine power, but rather as - so to speak - the visible part of its perfection.

To raise then the question of a God beyond the world is not for the philosopher, to whom is incumbent, rather, the inquiry of God in the world: to think about Him through "these magnificent stars and luminous bodies, which are as many inhabited worlds, great living beings and eminent divinities"; which, "since it is impossible for them to possess being by themselves (....), it is necessary that they have a beginning and a cause and that, in accordance with the greatness of their being, their living and their action, they manifest and proclaim in an infinite space, innumerable times, in an infinite space, innumerable times, in an infinite space...), it is necessary that they have principle and cause and that, in consonance with the greatness of their being, their living and their action, they manifest and proclaim in an infinite space, in innumerable ways, the infinite excellence and majesty of their first principle and their first cause".

The natural is then exalted, elevated to the rank of the divine, to such an extent that the Absolute must be "naturalized", definitively calling into question its transcendence with respect to the world. It is not risky to affirm from here that we find ourselves before a clear manifestation of the principle of autonomy that has undoubtedly presided over modern thought. Indeed, if this principle gave rise, on the one hand, to the rationalist systems belonging to the Cartesian side, with their deistic doctrine of a universe subsistent in itself that can be constructed independently of its absolute foundation; it is no less true that, on the other hand, it has derived in this consideration of an infinite universe that, being such, must also make philosophical speculation on the transcendent Absolute vain: God and the world are equated, in Bruno - initiator of this second current - in that primordial attribute, which is now infinity. From this last affirmation, the Absolute does not appear as the opposite or the distinct from the world, but - strictly speaking - as the complicating unity of the multiplicity unfolded in the world; and it is precisely from this aspect that God appears in Bruno's system as cause and principle.

In this context, when it comes to God, "principle" and "cause" do not designate different things: "when we say that God is the first principle and the first cause, we understand one and the same thing with financial aid of different definitions". For, in Bruno's understanding, the Absolute must be first cause, insofar as all beings depend on Him as their ultimate foundation; but He must also be understood as principle, since, in some way, He must "inspire" intimately the movement of things toward their own perfection; He must "animate" all entities interiorly; that is, to the Absolute we can apply both the concept of "cause" and that of "principle": He is efficient cause, insofar as He determines the being of the universe from without; but He is also principle, insofar as He gives it life and determines it as its inner form In this respect, some passages of the Nolan are extremely explicit: "We say that God is first principle, insofar as all things come after Him, according to a certain order of anteriority and posteriority, whether according to nature, or according to duration, or according to the order of dignity. We say that God is first cause inasmuch as all things are distinct from Him, as the effect is distinct from the efficient, and the thing produced from the producer. And these two definitions are diverse when it comes to natural things: what is anterior and more worthy is not always the cause of what is posterior and less worthy, as for example the point is the beginning of the line, but not its cause (...), and so 'beginning' is a more general term than 'cause' "(Of Cause).

The proper sphere in which, according to the Nolan, human knowledge of the Absolute is established. That sphere, we warned then, is none other than the universe itself; that is, he who is the first principle and the first cause is to be known in the same measure in which he is and remains present - immanent, we said - in what is produced by him. We arrive in this way, not so much at a supreme being, existing beyond, in a supposed supralunar world; but rather at the foundation of every being, intimately present to each one, more than the very being of each thing can be present in that thing itself.

Under this aspect, Bruno's God manifests himself to us from the notion of anima mundi, soul of the universe, inherited, in his thought, from Plato, Stoicism and Plotinus "the first and principal natural form, the formal principle or efficient nature, is the soul of the universe, which is the vital, vegetative and sensitive principle of all things". The affirmation of the presence of this universal soul in the cosmos, eliminates from entrance the Aristotelian consideration of a God, pure intellect, alien to the world; and makes the world a living manifestation of the divine: the anima mundi is the spirit that penetrates all things and is in all things.

The Absolute, from this way proposal by Giordano Bruno, is not seen in itself, but in the universe, in which it works incessantly; neither is it considered as transcendent the cosmos, but it is seen as its own perfection and harmony. In a word, God, as the soul of the world, is the active power present in all things; which, in turn, is not confused - is not identified - with the entities to which it gives life: there is a fundamental difference between the universal formal cause and the particular form of each thing, the former being the principle that animates and informs the entities interiorly: "Although we hold that the soul of the universe is indivisible according to its substance, we readily notice that it is multipliable, just as the same voice resounds in innumerable places; and then, although present in all the places where it is heard, it does not itself remain divided"(Of the Cause).

Bruno's is a pantheism developed in the form of the Stoic-Platonic doctrine of the Anima mundi, in which the world of creatures - which is now a sort of "epiphany of Jupiter" - loses its own limits and becomes a reflection of the universal soul. It is undoubtedly an exaltation of the universe in which God himself has manifested himself according to his power, but at the cost of blurring the character of his absolute transcendence; from here, it is not risky to maintain that we are before the attempt to trace a theology founded on a cosmology, in which the Absolute is found only in and through nature. In other words: nature is always the place and the means where man enters into relationship with the divinity, the only way of access to the Absolute. Giordano Bruno could not be more explicit in this regard: "That God, as absolute, has nothing to do with us but insofar as he communicates himself to the effects of nature, and is more intimate to them than nature itself; he is undoubtedly the nature of nature, and is the soul of the soul of the world, if not the soul itself"(Spaccio della Bestia trionfante).

It is true that, from a strictly theoretical point of view, the Philosophy of Giordano Bruno does not pretend to deny the principle of divine transcendence; but what is certain is that it turns to the development of the idea of the immanence of the divine in nature and in man.

The idea of immanence in Giordano Bruno is sample in his work The Heroic Furies . The main argument that runs through the central pages of this writing of the Nolan is marked by the well-known motif - or metaphor - that conceives the human being as a "hunter" of the highest to which he can aspire. The tradition of this image of hunting undoubtedly goes back a long way. Plato already used such a simile when defining man's life in this world as one of "desire" and "hunting" for truth, deploring the "mixing" of the soul with the evil of the subject and of the sensible. In this same line, we find the clear Neoplatonic antecedent of our author in the work of Plotinus, who, in dealing with man in the First Ennead, also takes support in the texts of Plato -mainly in the Theaetetus and the Phaedrus. It is also used by Nicholas of Cusa, in his work De venatione sapientiae, expressing the interest of the Philosophy in the "hunt for wisdom", which, in the manner of a "learned ignorance", wonders about the Absolute as possest, non-aliud or unum.

Advancing from these motives, Bruno gave man the task of his deificatio. This divinization is only possible through an intellectual contemplation of the Absolute; and this is what human reason strives ceaselessly for, for it knows that the sight of such a desired object must transform the eye itself that sees into the object contemplated: the infinite, in this case; Giordano Bruno assumes here without doubt an important point of Plotinian gnoseology. In the Dialogue The Heroic Furies - more literary than philosophical - he describes the paths followed by the soul in search of infinite unity; unity that transcends, surpasses and envelops it, but to which - both intellect and will - it cannot help but tend. Bruno also follows here the tradition of Plato's Symposion, Dante's Convivio , Ficino's De amore, the Dialoghi d'amore of Leo Hebrew, as well as the commentary on the "love songs" of Pico della Mirandola. In particular, the Nolano turns to the myth of Actaeon.

Actaeon represents the human intellect, the highest rational capacity of the person, who goes in search, on the hunt, of infinite wisdom; which is manifested in this universe. Well, according to Giordano Bruno, the human intellect must seek that very actual infinity in and through that most perfect manifestation: the infinite explained, the cosmos - in the myth called Diana. And that is where the Absolute is sample as "light in the shadows of the subject": "The Monad (is) the true essence of the being of all; and if (the intellect) does not see it in its essence, in its absolute light, it contemplates it in its progeny, which resembles it and is its image; for from the monad which is the divinity proceeds this other monad which is nature, the universe, the world, where it is contemplated and reflected as the sun in the moon; and through which it illuminates us, remaining in the hemisphere of intellectual substances."

Indeed, before the contemplation of the infinite universe -Diana-, the intellect -Achaeon-, sets out to conquer it, since it represents the only means of access to the Absolute. And to the extent that, by means of knowledge, the intellect assimilates itself to the known object, a sort of identification of the intellect with the universe occurs that prevents the ascent to the true infinite: this is what is explained in the myth as the death of Actaeon. Death here signifies the non-appearance of the ultimate end to which the human intellect aspires: "because the ultimate end must have no end, since in that case it would not be ultimate. It is, therefore, infinite in intention". And, in any case, there is in Bruno a clear choice in favor of the infinite search without end, rather than the classical option for transcendence: "for a heroic nature," are his words, "would rather fall or fail worthily in high undertakings in which it shows the nobility of its genius than triumph to perfection in things less noble or low.

Soto-Bruna, María Jesús, El Renacimiento, de Nicolás de Cusa a Giordano Bruno. Razón heroica y libertad, Eunsa, Pamplona 2020.

Cassirer, Ernst, Individuo y cosmos en la Philosophy del Renacimiento, Emecé, Buenos Aires 1951.

Colomer, E., De la Edad average al Renacimiento, Herder, Barcelona 1975.