CUSA, Nicolas De [Nicolaus Cusanus] cardinal fl401-1464), was the son of a poor fisherman named Krypffs or Krebs, and derived the name by which he is known from the place of his birth, Cues or Cusa, on the Moselle, in the archbishopric of Treves. In his youth he was employed in the service of Count Ulrich of Manderscheid, who, seeing in him evidence of exceptional ability, sent him to study at the school of the Brothers of the Common Life at Deventer, and afterwards at the university of Padua, where he took his doctor’s degree in law in his twenty-third year. Failing in his first cause he abandoned the legal profession, and resolved to enter the church. After filling several subordinate offices he became archdeacon of Liège. He was a member of the Council of Basel, and dedicated to the assembled fathers a work entitled De Concordantia Catholica, in which he maintained the superiority of councils over popes, and assailed the false decretals and the story of the donation of Constantine. A few years later, however, he had reversed his position, and zealously defended the supremacy of the Pope. He was intrusted with various missions in the interests of Catholic unity, the most important being to Constantinople, to endeavour to bring about a union of the Eastern and Western churches. In 1448 he was raised by Pope Nicolas V. to the dignity of cardinal; and in 1450 he was appointed bishop of Brixen against the wish of the Archduke Sigismund, who opposed the reforms the new bishop sought to introduce into the diocese. In 1451 he was sent to Germany and the Netherlands to check ecclesiastical abuses and bring back the monastic life to the original rule of poverty, chastity, and obedience,—a mission which be discharged with well-tempered firmness. Soon afterwards his dispute ...with the Archduke Sigismund in his own diocese was brought to a point by his claiming certain dues of the bishopric, which the temporal prince had appropriated. Upon this the bishop was imprisoned by the archduke, who, in his turn, was excommunicated by the Pope. These extreme measures were not persisted in; but the dispute remained unsettled at the time of the bishop’s death, which occurred at Lodi in Umbria on the 11th August 1464. In 1459 be had acted as governor of Rome during the absence of his friend Pope Pius II. at the assembly of princes at Milan; and he wrote his Crébratio Alcorani, a treatise against Mahometanism, in support of the expedition against the Turks proposed at that assembly. Some time before his death he had founded a hospital in his native place for thirty-three poor persons, the number being that of the years of the earthly life of Christ. To this institution he left his valuable library.
The interest of Cusa for later times lies in his philosophical much more than in his political or ecclesiastical activity. As in religion he is entitled to be called one of the “Reformers before the Reformation,” so in philosophy he was one of those who broke with scholasticism while it was still the orthodox system. In his principal work, De docta ignorantia (1440), supplemented by De Conjecturis libri duo published in the same year, he maintains that all human knowsledge is mere conjecture, and that man’s wisdom is to recognize his ignorance. From scepticism he escapes by accepting the doctrine of the mystics that God can be apprehended by intuition (intuitio, speculatio), an exalted state of the intellect in which all limitations disappear.
God is the absolute maximum and also the absolute minimum, who can be neither greater nor less than He is, and who comprehends all that is or that can be (“deum c∙sse omnia, ut non possit esse aliud quam est ”). Cusa thus laid himself open to the charge of pantheism, which did not fail to be brought against him in his own day. His chief philosophical doctrine was taken up and developed more than a hundred years later by Giordano Bruno, who calls him the divine Cusanus. In mathematical and physical science Cusa was much in advance of his age. In a tract, Reparatio Calendarii, presented to the Council of Basel, he proposed the reform of the calendar after a method resembling that adopted by Gregory. If he was not before his own age he was not behind many in the present day in a treatise De Quadratura Circuli, in which he professes to have solved the problem; and the same remark applies to a prophecy that the world would come to an end in 1734, which he hazarded in his Conjectura, de novissimis diebus. Most noteworthy, however, in this connection is the fact that he anticipated Copernicus by maintaining the theory of the rotation of the earth.
The works of Cusanus were published in a complete form by Henri Petri (1 vol. fol. Basel, 1565). See Hartzheim’s Vita Nicolaus de Cusa (Treves, 1730), Martini’s Das Hospital Cues und dessen Stifter (Treves, 1841), and ScharpfΓs Der Cardinal und Bischof Nie. von Cusa als Reformator in Kirche, Reich, und Philos. des 15 Jahrhund. (Tübingen, 1871).
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