History of Modern Philosophy: From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time — John Shaqi
History of Modern Philosophy: From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present TimeFalckenberg, Richard
Philosophy
History of Modern Philosophy: From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time
Falckenberg, Richard
Philosophy, Modern -- History
God is related to the world as unity, identity, _complicatio_, to
otherness, diversity, _explicatio_, as necessity to contingency, as
completed actuality to mere possibility; yet, in such a way that the
otherness participates in the unity, and receives its reality from this,
and the unity does not have the otherness confronting it, outside it. God
is triune only as the Creator of the world, and in relation to it; in
himself he is absolute unity and infinity, to which nothing disparate
stands opposed, which is just as much all things as not all things, and
which, as the Areopagite had taught of old, is better comprehended by
negations than by affirmations. To deny that he is light, truth, spirit,
is more true than to affirm it, for he is infinitely greater than anything
which can be expressed in words; he is the Unutterable, the Unknowable,
the supremely one and the supremely absolute. In the world, each thing has
things greater and smaller by its side, but God is the absolutely greatest
and smallest; in accordance with the principle of the _coincidentia
oppositorum_, the absolute _maximum_ and the absolute _minimum_ coincide.
That which in the world exists as concretely determinate and particular,
is in God in a simple and universal way; and that which here is present
as incompleted striving, and as possibility realizing itself by gradual
development, is in God completed activity. He is the realization of all
possibility, the Can-be or Can-is (_possest_); and since this absolute
actuality is the presupposition and cause of all finite ability and action,
it may be unconditionally designated ability (_posse ipsum_), in antithesis
to all determinate manifestations of force; namely, to all ability to be,
live, feel, think, and will.
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