Nicholas of Cusa

Nicholas of Cusa, also known as Nicholas of Kues or by the Latin Nicolaus Cusanus, was a German cardinal of the Catholic Church, born in 1401 in Kues on the Moselle and died in 1464, who worked simultaneously as a philosopher, theologian, canon lawyer, mathematician and astronomer during the early Renaissance. He is best known for his 1440 treatise On Learned Ignorance, which develops the idea of docta ignorantia, learned ignorance, the view that the human mind can never fully grasp the infinite truth of God and that recognizing the limits of one's own knowledge is itself a form of wisdom, together with his related doctrine of the coincidence of opposites, on which contradictory qualities are unified in the infinite. Working in a Christian Neoplatonist and humanist vein, Nicholas of Cusa also anticipated later scientific ideas, including a universe without a fixed center or edge, and he was an active churchman who played a significant role in the Renaissance-era councils and politics of the Catholic Church.