But it is obvious that the essential being of things can only be reached through this stage of knowing. Thus Nicholas of Cusa in speaking of his “learned not-knowing” is really speaking of nothing else but “knowing” come to a new birth, as an inner experience. He tells us himself how he came to this inner experience. “I made many efforts to unite the ideas of God and the world, of Christ and the Church, into a single root-idea; but nothing satisfied me until at last, on my way back from Greece by sea, my mind’s vision, as if by an illumination from above, soared up to that perception in which God appeared to me as the supreme Unity of all contradictions.” To a greater or lesser extent this illumination was due to influences derived from the study of his predecessors. One recognises in his way of looking at things a peculiar revival of the views which we meet with in the writings of a certain Dionysius. The above-mentioned Scotus Erigena translated these writings into Latin, and speaks of their author as the “great and divine revealer.” The works in question are first mentioned in the first half of the sixth century. They were ascribed to that Dionysius, the Areopagite, named in the Acts of the Apostles, who was converted to Christianity by St. Paul. When these writings were really composed may here be left an open question. Their contents worked powerfully upon Nicholas as they had already worked upon Scotus Erigena, and as they must also have been in many ways stimulating for the way of thinking of Eckhart and his colleagues. This “learned not-knowing” is in a certain way preformed in these writings. Here we can only indicate the essential trait in the way of conceiving things found in these works. Man primarily knows the things of the sense-world. He forms thoughts about its being and action. The Primal Cause of all things must lie higher than these things themselves. Man therefore must not seek to grasp this Primal Cause by means of the same concepts and ideas as things. If he therefore ascribes to the Root-Being (God) attributes which he has learned to know in lower things, such attributes can be at best auxiliary conceptions of his weak spirit, which drags down the Root-Being to itself, in order to conceive it. In truth, therefore, no attribute whatsoever which lower things possess can be predicated of God. It must not even be said that God “is.” For “being” too is a concept which man has formed from lower things. But God is exalted above “being” and “not-being.” The God to whom we ascribe attributes, is therefore not the true God. We come to the true God, when we think of an “Over-God” above and beyond any God with such attributes. Of this “Over-God” we can know nothing in the ordinary sense. In order to attain to Him, “knowing” must merge into “not-knowing.”