Introduction

In De quaerendo Deum, Nicholas of Cusa – at the origin of a mystical ascent – writes of the way in which an external object is ‘taken up into consciousness’, from the five external senses, through the ‘common sense’, to the imagination and the intellect. In De visione Dei – when depicting the culmination of a mystical ascent – Cusa used this same theme of the ordo cognoscendi in order to establish his claim both for a visio Dei and for only a pregustus thereof.

In these two texts and passages, I will suggest, an important confluence obtains. In the first, Cusa presents an Aristotelian model of the nature of sensible cognition, or aesthetic. In the second, Cusa presents a neo-Platonic, and specifically Origenist, aesthetic. Cusa, I will suggest, inherits and synthesizes the Aristotelian doctrine of the common sense (sensus communis) and inner senses (sensus interiores) with the Origenist doctrine of the spiritual senses (sensus spirituales). These aesthetics, I will suggest, respond to distinct experiential exigencies, propose distinct faculties and imagine distinct ends of cognition, and thus are incongruent. For this reason, a disaggregation of these doctrines is essential to a comprehension of Cusa's theological aesthetics. Once their particular character and role is set out, we will be able to appreciate the way in which Cusa establishes their coincidentia within his account of the theological significance of sensibility. For in Cusa's superposition of an Origenist theological aesthetic over an Aristotelian theory of cognition, neither escapes in its original, Aristotelian or Origenist, form.