The Elephant in the Room: Nicholas of Cusa and the Mystical Basis for Pluralism

Abstract

In the past few decades, a growing body of literature focused on the ‘return of religion’ has added important nuance to the discussion of pluralism, religion, and violence. This paper explores these postsecular critiques through the ancient parable of the Blind People and the Elephant. It argues that secularism maintains an ontology that assumes violence which forecloses the possibility of pluralism. Recent reappraisals of mysticism are at pains to highlight its ethical and political implications. This paper puts these bodies of literature in conversation to offer a mystical basis for pluralist ethics. To this end, a particular western Christian mystic, Nicholas of Cusa, in his work The Vision of God (1453) is shown to provide a theoretical and ethical basis for pluralism. The decision to focus on his mystical work The Vision of God is because the metatheoretical question of pluralism is addressed here in how unity with the divine means unity between the members of a community, which is worked out in an ethical practice of dialogue. By engaging Cusa’s mysticism in the context of postsecular critical theory, an alternate basis for pluralism is offered that sharply contrasts with that offered by secularism.

1. Introduction

Pluralism ties together theory and ethical praxis: how people in a shared space are expected to interact is shaped by how that space is conceived. The dominant, though increasingly critiqued, approach to pluralist ethics remains a secular one, wherein the basis for pluralism requires a neutral space that sees ethical encounters defined by certain codes of conduct. However, In the past few decades, a growing body of literature focused on the ‘return of religion’ has added nuance to this discussion (Lynch 2000; Thomas 2014), which is necessary because the simple secularist assumptions about this religion–violence nexus still dominate the field (Hurd 2012, p. 945; Lynch 2014). This paper takes these postsecular critiques as its starting point, exploring them through the ancient parable of the Blind People and the Elephant, a perennial reference point for questions of pluralism and violence. It argues that secularism maintains an ontology that assumes violence and thus relies on violence in order to establish peace. Such violence forecloses the possibility of pluralist theory or ethical praxis.

Another option is offered in this paper in the form of political mysticism. Mysticism is used to avoid the problem of recognition in less critical engagements with ‘religion’ which tend to argue that the solution to violence is less or more ‘religion’ (Birnbaum 2023; Hurd 2012, p. 947; 2015, p. 22). The religion–violence nexus is avoided by focusing on the alternate ontology that a mystical approach to political theory offers. Such an offering seeks to address the metatheoretical questions of the basis for global dialogue and the ways in which theological traditions can help answer the question of pluralism (Lynch 2000; Thomas 2000). The focus in this paper is on how a particular western Christian mystic, Nicholas of Cusa, in his work The Vision of God (1453) can be seen providing the ontological basis for a deep pluralism. Because traditions of mysticism are ubiquitous around the world, the assumption is not that this is the only version of pluralism that can be found but that other non-western traditions will have similar ontological groundings for pluralism which can then be met in dialogue (Kamal Pasha 2011, 2013; Zhang 2015).

The richness and uniqueness of Nicholas of Cusa’s work has led others to consider his work on the question of pluralism as well. He is known to a political audience primarily due to his work The Catholic Concordia (Nicholas of Cusa [1434] 1991), which is perhaps the earliest example of an argument for the rule of law and the necessity of consent of the governed.1 He is known on questions of religious pluralism due to his work De Pace Fidei (Peace between Faiths) (1453) (Bossoletti 2024; Riedenauer 2024), which imagines a harmonious theological order worked out in a heavenly council between all the peoples of the earth, determining the core truth of ‘one religion in many rites’ (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1994, p. 635). The decision to focus on his mystical work The Vision of God is because the metatheoretical question of pluralism is addressed here in how unity with the divine means unity between the members of a community—a point that is central to properly understanding his other works too.2 Moreover, work on The Vision of God usually focuses on Christian unity (Falque 2019; McGinn 2005, p. 462). The focus is rarely on the broader ramifications of Cusanus’ mystical work and never in the context of postsecular political theory.3 By engaging with Cusa’s mysticism in the context of postsecular critical theory, an alternate basis for pluralism is offered that sharply contrasts with that offered by secularism.

2. Secular Pluralism

2.1. The Blind People and the Elephant

The oldest version of the parable of the Blind People and the Elephant seems to appear in the Pali Canon,4 and in this context, it criticizes and ridicules the various ‘recluses and brahmins, wanderers of various sects’ for constantly falling into conflict with each other. It compares them to a group of blind people being allowed to feel one part of an elephant by the king after which they are asked what an elephant is. Depending on the part of the elephant that the blind people feel they offer wildly different answers; to those who felt the head, an elephant is like a huge jar; those who felt the ear, a large fan; those who felt the tusk, a plough; the leg, a pillar; and the tail, a broom. These blind people end up coming to blows, and the message offered is clear: ‘Some recluses and brahmins, so called, are deeply attached to their own views; peoples who see only one side of things engage in quarrels and disputes’ (Udāna and Itivuttaka [1997] 2007, p. 84).

Secularism can be understood as an attempt to solve the problem raised by the parable. It starts with the same message: insisting on subjective views, particularly those informed by theology, necessarily leads to violence. In response, since the term was first used in the 1854 work Principles of Secularism by George Holyoake, secularism has sought to unite humanity on principles that are objectively true and discoverable through public rationality and accessible to any individual (Cady and Hurd 2010, pp. 3–4). Such an accommodation is brought about by bracketing any subjective, theological considerations that cannot be verified objectively (Cady and Hurd 2010, pp. 4–5). Secularism argues that this is not bracketing contentious issues but delineating between issues that can be made subject to public reason and issues which cannot. This expands beyond theological or even normative arguments to any perspective drawn from subjective experience itself. This gives us the border between the political public, and the depoliticised private. The question that determines the division of life between these two categories is the possibility of approaching issues of contention ‘objectively’ or not. An issue is ‘political’ if it is believed that it can be solved through shared rational discourse and attention; it is depoliticised when this is believed to be impossible.

Returning to the parable, the limited subjective experience of the blind people is not enough for them to provide a decent answer to the question of what an elephant is. Similarly, the secularist wants to remind us that any visions of and for the broader reality that we share are inevitably as partial and flawed as saying that an elephant is a jar, a large fan, a pillar, or a broom. There is a chasm between the subjective and the objective that we cannot hope to cross, which is the same qualitative difference between opinions and facts. When we confuse the two and try to cross this chasm, we are likely to come to blows, just as the blind people did when their rival visions of the elephant were revealed as incompatible. The argument for secularism, therefore, is a strict separation between these beliefs that we are privately confident about and our public actions, where a stance of ignorance is enforced.

In this context Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, following José Casanova (1994, p. 19), talks of ‘the functional differentiation of the secular and the religious spheres’ (Hurd 2008, p. 5). The related terms ‘secular’ and ‘secularisation’ match this core idea of separation. Hurd describes ‘the secular’ as the ‘epistemic space carved out by the ideas and practices associated with such settlements’ (Hurd 2008, pp. 12–13). For Hurd, secularisation is ‘the historical process through which these settlements become authoritative, legitimated, and embedded in and through individuals, the law, state institutions, and other social relationships’ (Hurd 2008, p. 13). Casanova offers a slightly different definition of the term, understanding it in terms of the process by which things, people, and concepts move from the ‘religious’ to the ‘secular’ realm (Casanova 2019, p. 8). There are two things to note here. First, there is great diversity among thinkers who would agree with Casanova’s understanding of secularisation. The same process is noted in very different ways and with different consequences by thinkers as diverse as Harvey Cox (2013), William Cavanaugh (2011), and, famously, by Carl Schmitt (2005). Second, there is a subtle significance behind the difference between Casanova and Hurd on this point. The main difference in Hurd’s understanding is that this settlement is not a unidirectional movement. For Hurd, the categories of ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ are perpetually open to contestation. Therefore, the process through which a ‘secular’ space gains authority is not solely by its annexation of traditionally ‘religious’ things, people and concepts. For Hurd, an authoritative settlement of the two spheres of life could involve movement in both directions. The significance of this is explored below. For now, it is enough to say that what secularism means for any aspects of life deemed private, based on subjective opinions, is that it is only relevant to politics indirectly; it is not itself political. Somebody’s identity is only politically relevant to the extent that it tells us how and why that person engages in politics proper—why they vote a certain way, why they engage in political violence, etc.

The above point speaks directly to the question of managing diversity in society. The pluralism that secularism offers is bought at a price. People are allowed to enter public life as individuals who bracket their private subjectivities and find unity upon their shared view of objective reality. In other words, pluralism relies on the border between the public and the private. The assumption here is that the subjective and the objective are fundamentally at odds with each other. Applied to the individual and the group; it says that individual goods and collective goods are qualitatively different, and one must necessarily need to be sacrificed in the pursuit of the other. A ‘perfect’ society, where this tension between the individual and the collective is dissolved, is not just impossible to attain but dangerous to pursue, because such a pursuit fails to adequately recognise this qualitative difference. Objectivity can only be reached by sacrificing subjectivity and vice versa. The blind people will never agree about what an elephant is. There is a push to purify the population of all who fail to adequately separate these two logics, as those (individuals and societies) who fail to do so are presented as irrational and prone to violence.

2.2. And the King Was Delighted

There is a line in the version of this parable found in the Pali Canon that is often forgotten in the various retellings: ‘Saying “An elephant is like this, an elephant is not like that! An elephant is not like this, an elephant is like that!” they fought each other with their fists. And the king was delighted’ (Udāna and Itivuttaka [1997] 2007, p. 84) (emphasis added). What is it about his subjects erupting into violence with one another that prompts the king’s delight? The parable does not say why, but contemporary postsecular theory offers clear answers that bring to light overlooked wisdom from this ancient parable.

As noted above, secularists have often claimed that the border between the private and public can be discerned via objective means, that the division between public and private is not something that is decided, but something that is discovered. However, this is precisely the point that postsecularism emerges to contest. In response, postsecular scholars argue consistently that the distinction between the political public and the unpolitical private is neither natural nor neutral. As scholars like Hurd and others note, this separation is artificial, and the decisions that present something as either ‘religious’ or ‘secular’ are arbitrary and socially constructed and continually contested. A core feature of postsecular politics has shown that the border between these categories—and therefore the processes that inform the decision that constructs the border between public and private—is not neutral in either its origins (Bain 2017, 2020) or in how it is maintained in secular societies. What is ‘secular’ (public) and what is ‘religious’ (private) are fluid and contested (Scherer 2013, pp. 1–3; Wilson 2022, pp. 1–2).

With this point in mind, we can return to the parable with an answer for why the king might be so delighted. If the border between the public and the private is arbitrary, then it relies upon some form of decision making and therefore provides an authoritative role for such a decision maker. Viewed this way, the king’s legitimacy as king becomes clear, as he who decides on the boundaries of society is authorised by the violence of the subjects (Agamben 2015, pp. 33–38). The violence presents a problem that kingly authority finds legitimacy in solving. This is clear throughout modern secular political theory. The conflict of the blind is representative of the prepolitical violence that is the basis of sovereign authority in secular thought. The king, who holds the capacity to make such a decision, derives his legitimacy from this capacity to decide, which is the definition of sovereignty for Schmitt, and cements this legitimacy through his ability to police this border. The worse the violence, the greater the demand for obedience the king can make. This can be seen in secular thinkers since Hobbes (where the demand is absolute because the violence is absolute). That this violence is presented as a fact of nature is the same argument that there are some things that are “naturally” political or not, presenting the decision to politicise or depoliticise something as a politically neutral discovery rather than a politically charged decision—something which further cements the sovereign’s authority as somehow written into the laws of nature itself.

The presentation of this separation as natural entrenches associations that have shaped the world we live in. As such, even the category ‘religion’ itself along with the categories of ‘race’, ‘gender’, ‘sexuality’, etc. are contested over time and constructed in ways that are often co-constitutive in part to manage this boundary and keep identitarian and normative matters firmly out of politics (Kamal Pasha 2017; Khan 2021; Prentiss 2003). Such an exclusion emerges as a means to legitimise colonial violence, with backwards irrational fanatics (seen as natural inferiors) in need of modern secular enlightenment. These ideas persist in discourses surrounding ‘Islamism’ and ‘terrorism’, wherein the violence of the secular state is presented as an unfortunate necessity against the irrational violence of a ‘religious’ other (Cavanaugh 2009, p. 17; Mavelli 2012). This connection of religion with violence emerges in the founding myth of the modern state-system and the competitive colonial projects between these states. Therefore, a core part of postsecular literature explores this in terms of the reckoning with the West’s narrative of its own origins and its colonial encounters. Talal Asad’s genealogies of ‘religion’ (Asad 1993) and ‘secularism’ (Asad 2003) show how these concepts developed alongside the West’s colonial encounter with the Islamic ‘Other’ (Asad 2013). Tomoko Masuzawa’s work shows how these processes persist in the language of ‘world religions’ (Masuzawa 2005). In each case, irrationality and violence is not just assumed; it is ontologically connected to some identities and used as justification for their control and exclusion from public life.

The process of depoliticising an other requires trapping them in an identity that is defined by conflict, which thus justifies their depoliticization and exclusion from the public space. Agamben’s concept of the included exclusion is very useful here because the depoliticised are used as resources; the secular sovereign needs them. The sovereign appeal to transcendence (being above the conflict) is dependent upon their use of those who are defined by the conflict (Agamben 1998, pp. 26–28). If the decision about what is ‘political’, ‘religious’, ‘unpolitical’, etc. is an arbitrary one, then so is the construction of these categories. Secularism requires, and therefore conceptually produces, this unpolitical aspect of life to inform the underlying logic of internal exclusion (Agamben 1998, p. 28; 2015, pp. 35–37). In other words, their identity is portrayed as the root of the violence, much like the blind people are defined in the parable by their blindness. Interestingly the parable itself notes something that modern versions of this argument leave out: the king himself limits the part of the elephant that the blind people can feel (Udāna and Itivuttaka [1997] 2007, p. 83). The irrationality of their subjectivities, in other words, is artificial. Their insistence on their limited view of an elephant was not because of the irrationality of their subjectivity, but the limited information that they were allowed before the attempt at public reasoning. Once reminded that true neutrality does not exist,5 it becomes clear that this claim to neutrality only serves to undermine dissent against sovereign authority, just as in this experiment set up by the king, secular approaches to pluralism suggest a neutral observation and outcome but are rigged to produce a specific outcome. By focusing the attention on the violence of the blind people, and in doing so emphasising and ontologising the problems that are associated with subjectivities, the secular sovereign removes themselves from critique and claims an artificial objectivity. Far from being an argument about difference leading inevitably to conflict, the parable in this reading becomes a critique of secular power in line with contemporary postsecular thought.

2.3. The Assumption of Violence

It may be argued that accepting the border between the public and private as an arbitrary construction is not problematic so long as the decision which determines that border is taken not by some tyrannical king but by a consensus of the public based upon what they deem acceptable. There is diversity in postsecular literature, and this dispute is one of many key areas of disagreement.6 However, this debate distracts from the point that when the arbitrary nature of this decision is recognised, the core claim that powers secular visions of pluralism is called into question.

Secularism assumes an apolitical form of life that is indifferent to the political–public life that shapes it. The ‘religious’ exists as a category here just as prepolitical ‘nature’ does, representing the ungovernable, chaotic, and violent aspects of life that must be removed or tamed by a secular sovereign. The claim that there is anything that is unpolitical links to the idea that the subjective and objective are not just distinct, but at odds, i.e., that there are aspects of our lives that simply are sources of violence, and this is unavoidable. Such an assumption means that any push for unity would need to sacrifice difference, and any attempt to respect and leave space for difference would need to be at the cost of unity. In other words, secularism assumes violence; it views life that is not shaped by a rational secular sovereign as unavoidably violent and chaotic. Talal Asad makes this point explicitly (Asad 2003, p. 8). Moreover, the reason for this violence is the difference/diversity that exists in this prepolitical nature. Difference itself is seen as a problem and a source of violence (Blaney and Tickner 2017; Inayatullah and Blaney 2004). Secularism bases its claim to legitimacy on a promise of security that ‘solves’ this violence by bracketing difference under the aegis of a shared public rationality.

The most direct way of challenging this is to endorse a worldview which does not assume violence, that does not see difference as the source of violence, and therefore sees any depoliticization as a failure to properly affirm all aspects of life in all their diversity. Such an assumption would be that a peaceful unity does not require homogenisation and that diversity and difference are not a basis for fragmentation and disunity.7 This is the only basis for a true pluralism, and I argue in the next section that it is found in mysticism as its political form.

3. Mysticism: Nicolas of Cusa—The Elephant Looks Back

3.1. Mysticism

To demonstrate that a certain form of political mysticism allows for a unity that does not homogenise and a diversity that does not fragment, first, it is necessary to briefly explain how mysticism is understood here. It is important to note at the outset that although I am drawing from a Christian, Neoplatonist tradition to inform this understanding, this is not a work of Christian apologetics, and mysticism as it is understood here can arguably be discerned in perhaps every theological tradition (Shafiq 2023).

Mysticism is a specific mode of devotional theological practice (Flory 2019, pp. 219–24; McCabe 2019; Perkins 2019; Podmore 2017, p. 201) aimed at union with the divine. The focus on union with the divine resonates throughout the literature (Boulnois 2021, pp. 106–7; Nelstrop et al. 2009, pp. ix, 1–2; Trostyanskiy and Gilbert 2019, pp. 1–2). Andrew Louth writes the core claim of mysticism ‘can be characterized as a search for and experience of immediacy with God. The mystic is not content to know about God, he longs for union with God’ (Louth 2007, pp. xiii–xiv). George Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou both describe mysticism as maintaining ‘divine/human communion’ as the goal of life (Demacopoulos 2013, p. 267; Papanikolaou 2012, p. 2). Such union is understood to be utterly transformative of the practitioner. As Julia Lamm writes, it is a transformation of ‘the whole person: intellect, affections, emotions, will, body, and actions’ (Lamm 2013, p. 13).

The central claim that union with the divine is the goal of life suggests two further related points. The first is that ‘there is something constitutive of the human being that is already reflective of the divine and which forms the basis for the human movement into the likeness of God’ (Papanikolaou 2020, p. 574). If life has its ultimate home in the divine, it must already reflect the divine at its core (Papanikolaou 2012, p. 2). The second is that this something is not immediately obvious, which links to the etymological basis of the term mystical, as mysterious, secret, hidden (Trostyanskiy and Gilbert 2019, pp. 3–4). These points combine in a near paradoxical relationship because reality must already reflect its divine destiny, but in ways that are only clear to those who have uncovered the secrets of how. It is important to note that in such a context, talk of the ‘invisible’ or ‘hidden’ reality does not mean ‘otherworldly’. The union with the divine that the mystic pursues is not a secret in the sense of knowledge that is jealously guarded; it is an experience that is impossible to finally or fully explain. It exceeds language and perhaps even logic; it is ineffable (Fortuin 2019, p. 69; Trostyanskiy and Gilbert 2019, pp. 5–6). And yet, the moments when this is achieved, these moments where justice and love are realities that we experience, ‘show what the final goal of transformation will look like and—quite simply—declare that it is possible and imaginable’ (Williams 2020, p. 19). The mystic, therefore, tries to cultivate a different way of seeing, but this is not an abstraction away from the mundane because of the apparent flaws in mundane ways of seeing, nor is it a bracketing of these mundane ways of seeing because of their flaws. Because of this, mysticism as a devotional practice can be understood in terms of hermeneutics (McIntosh 1998, pp. 42–43), a practice of realising (in the double sense of gaining an understanding and of making present) the divine in the world, and then trying to communicate that to others. Such a transformation is a perfection and fulfilment of the mundane, never a denial of it. Thus, as Mark MacIntosh writes, we ‘remind ourselves that such a transformation of human perceptivity makes it more fully human, not less’ (McIntosh 1998, p. 61).

It is important to specify the broad interpretation of mysticism that is being endorsed here. The usual understanding of mysticism is that this devotional practice aimed at union with the divine is something undertaken by spiritual elites, who through intense focus and devotion achieve some form of ecstatic union, momentary but life-changing, and report back to the rest of us in mystical texts. There is a tendency, when discussing mysticism ‘to place emphasis on special altered states—visions, locution, raptures, and the like’, experienced by the individual (McIntosh 1998, p. 31). This view of mysticism has become standard through the popularity of mystics like Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross in early modernity, and also from more contemporary studies where this becomes the model of ‘religious experiences’, such as those famously studied by William James in his work The Varieties of Religious Experience (James 1917), an approach which dominated ‘Religious Studies’ until the end of the previous century (Schmidt 2003, p. 274). The view of mysticism I am endorsing is different from this but still entirely faithful to the broader tradition; it does not view mysticism as the purview of a spiritual elite, and it challenges the assumption that mysticism is purely about attaining some form of fleeting ecstatic moment of union with the divine. Mystical theology is not about trying to attain intense altered emotional states or ‘isolated, irrational, or paranormal events’ (Lamm 2013, p. 4). Instead, it views both the devotional practices and the transformation that it is supposed to encourage as much more everyday.8 Informing this is the understanding that this divine reality that we are called for unity with is ontologically basic, and its realisation is, therefore, not a fleeting achievement of a spiritual elite. It is the goal that informs and defines all life.

Following on from the previous point and in direct contrast with secularism, there is no basis here for any conceptual separation internal to life between the facts of how things are and the opinions about how they should be. The impulse for the mystic is the opposite: to hold things together in creative tension rather than separate them out. As Lamm writes, this often plays out in ‘holding and even heightening the tensive relation between opposites’ (Lamm 2013, p. 14). Such practice is based on a sense of paradox derived from the dual claim that life is already reflective of the divinity that is its destiny. Such a point cuts both ways; against a politics that has been sanitised from theology and a theology that supposes itself unconcerned with ethico-political practice. As Maria Exall writes, this is about encouraging ‘a theology of human action in the world, … [an] understanding that there is no opposition between spirit and flesh, body and soul, interiority and exteriority, and God and creation’ (Exall 2017, p. 84). The aim of such work is to unify reality with itself and the divine, something which necessarily ‘involves a new way of living’ (McIntosh 1998, p. 29). This is a constant in this mystical tradition, as Charlotte Radler notes: ‘[f]or most Christian mystics, the experience of the presence of God not only alters their interior journey but also radically transforms their exterior life’ (Radler 2012, p. 211). MacIntosh stresses how this works to undo the ‘harsh and pristine separation of thought from feeling, form from content, and most devastatingly, theory from practice’ (McIntosh 1998, p. 4). Papanikolaou emphasises that, in this view, ‘there is a recognition that the divine is present in and through the practices’ (Papanikolaou 2012, p. 166). The pursuit of union with the divine is simultaneously the pursuit of a mode of being in the world that is the fulfilment of what each living thing is supposed to be, at peace with and embedded in the world around it (McIntosh 1998, pp. 9–10).

The mystic is one who seeks to promote this transformative realisation, which is the same as the realisation of the divine in the world, and the affirmation of all that life is called to be; it is a ‘this-worldly mysticism’, to borrow Maria Exall’s phrase (Exall 2017, p. 80). Miroslav Griško writes that this becomes the goal of all ethics: ‘an eschatological project of deification’ (Griško 2017, p. 106). It is a task that is nothing other than ‘deification of the cosmos’ (Griško 2017, pp. 106–7). Ultimately, this speaks to the question of pluralism because it maintains that this divine mode of existence is what provides the basis for our existence and what we are called towards. There is no need for compromise, because these divine aspects of life are when each subjectivity is affirmed. It is a mode of living where the whole and the part exist without competition or compromise. This divine reality holds with no recourse to force or violence. It speaks to a form life that is, in the words of Mark MacIntosh, ‘communal and cosmic’ (McIntosh 1998, p. 62).

3.2. Nicholas of Cusa and the Vision of God

To illustrate how this form of mysticism contrasts with and offers an alternative to the secular approach to pluralism, I will turn to Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), in particular his mystical work The Vision of God.9 As Bernard McGinn writes, by the measure of personalised ecstatic experiences, ‘Nicholas (by self-confession) appears to have been a failed mystic’ (McGinn 2005, p. 432). However, based on the approach outlined above, Nicholas of Cusa’s work takes on huge significance. As McGinn notes, Cusa’s work represents a serious intellectual exploration of the broad transformation that emerges from the pursuit of mystical union with the divine (McGinn 2005, p. 432). The context that provoked Cusa to write The Vision of God also speaks directly to the central question of pluralism as well. In the mid-1400s the monks of Tegernsee, not unlike the brahmins of the parable, were apparently mired in debates about how mystical theology should be understood, debates that spread far beyond their monastery, and they reached out to Nicholas of Cusa to help (Casarella 2013, pp. 396–97; Marion 2016, pp. 306–7; McGinn 2005, pp. 445–56; Pizzi 2022, p. 46). In response, Cusa wrote The Vision of God and sent it along with an icon to the monks in 1453. In the prologue of the work, Nicolas of Cusa explains why he included the icon and encourages the monks to play out an experiment that has fascinating parallels with the experiment run by the king in the parable.

He tells the monks to hang the icon on a wall and stand in different positions ranged in front of it. He writes: ‘First of all, then, marvel at how it is possible that [the face] behold each and every one of you at once’ (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 115). Then Cusa encourages the monks to move. Here, it is noted that it is not just that the icon’s eyes always look at each person, but that they simultaneously follow each person, even when these people are walking in opposite directions (Hopkins 1985, p. 18). Cusa writes ‘that face does not desert anyone who is moving—not even those who are moving in opposite directions… And while he considers that this gaze does not desert anyone, he sees how diligently it is concerned for each one, as if it were concerned for no one else’ (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 117). The work uses this experiment as a jumping off point for Cusa to explore and explain how he understands mystical theology and its relevance for those living in community with one another.

Cusa describes the icon as omnivoyant, all-seeing, and he uses this concept to discuss divine vision. Taylor Knight notes how in Cusa’s time, it was becoming increasingly accepted that a dispassionate scientific gaze derived from new theories of objective perception was the only thing that could deliver certitude in observation (Knight 2019, p. 116). Such an approach is on show in the parable of the Blind and the Elephant; the only one who sees things objectively is the king who sits at a distance, above the violence of the blind people. The term ‘god’s-eye view’ is now commonly used to describe this and used as a focus of critique for critical political theorists (Kurki 2021, p. 823; Thomas 2010, p. 519). As Knight puts it, in this view, ‘The gaze becomes the a priori condition of a spatial system and is not itself part of this system. The perceiver is no longer tangled in the perceived’ (Knight 2019, p. 116). Such an analysis is shared by Jean-Luc Marion who describes how ‘the royal road to true knowledge’ (Marion 2016, p. 318) comes to be predicated on the voyeuristic desire, interestingly linked by Marion to monarchic power, to see without being seen (Marion 2016, p. 319).

Marion points out that this gaze is necessarily extractive and that this problem is grounded in this dispassionate rationalist assumption of modern metaphysics, culminating in Cartesian ego-centrism. The Cartesian voyeur, like the king, has no reason to consider their others in terms of affording them their full humanity, for all he knows they may not even be real (Marion 2016, p. 320). It follows that whether their full humanity is recognised or not is down to the decision of this voyeur-sovereign, and this decision is made based upon the sovereign’s needs and wants. The others become a resource that this sovereign draws upon. ‘Indeed, the establishment of methodological knowledge grounded in reason restricted Descartes to the possibility of considering other men, potential others, only as objects’ (Marion 2016, p. 319). This approach to vision creates a binary between seeing and being seen: the objectifying voyeuristic gaze and the objectified, gazed-upon. As Marion points out, this binary raises all sorts of problems due to how the claim to rationality covers the emotions behind this dynamic (Marion 2016, pp. 319–23; Pizzi 2022). The sovereign’s gaze is fearful; it wants to see as much as possible without being seen. A world of sovereigns who seek security in this way makes for a world that is fearful, asocial, and violent.

3.3. A Living Mirror

With the experiment, Cusa is trying to highlight another way of seeing that does not abide by the logic of this binary. Knight points out that at this early stage, Cusa already saw that the claims to objectivity and certitude were arbitrary; the exact measurements that they offered ‘created their own universality: they were only certain from one particular perspective and were not measurable absolutely’ (Knight 2019, p. 122). For Cusa, the divine vision cannot be understood in terms of this view from nowhere. Something which is clear from the experiment where Cusa places the omnivoyant icon in the midst of the people and asks them to gaze upon it. If we compare Cusa’s experiment to the parable, then the omnivoyant sits in the same position as the elephant, unlike the king who watches his blind subjects from a distance, seeing without being seen. Cusa describes God as ‘Absolute Sight’ (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 119). For him, this Absolute is not a pure way of seeing that is found through bracketing out and abstracting away from ‘normal’ ways of seeing, but it encompasses them (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 121) and perfects them (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 119). The all-seeing, the omnivoyant divine vision does not transcend the subjectivities of the world; it is enmeshed in the web of their interconnections. Rather than this view from nowhere, Cusa interprets the all-seeing as a view from everywhere because it must be true that ‘absolute sight embraces all modes of seeing’ (Knight 2020, p. 828).

For Cusa, there seem to be no limits to how this is interpreted. At first, he notes in the experiment, the monks can see that the gaze mirrors their movements, it is responsive to their positionality. ‘Cusa … encourages his friends to immerse themselves into the experience of mirroring, and celebrates this possibility as a gift of grace that reveals the uniqueness of every person’ (Hoff 2013, p. 56). Later in the text, he argues that the same is true for mood as well, writing: ‘Whoever looks lovingly will be looked upon lovingly; whoever looks angrily will be looked upon angrily; whoever looks joyously will be looked upon with joy’ (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 137). Cusa extends this even beyond the human, arguing that just as humans look upon the divine face as humanlike ‘if a lion were to ascribe to You [God] a face, he would judge it only lionlike; an ox oxlike; and an eagle eaglelike’ (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 137). This final point also has a double meaning. Not only is Cusa extending his argument beyond the human; the choice of animals is significant. Each is related to a gospel writer (human—Matthew, lion—Mark, ox—Luke, eagle—John); thus, the point also speaks to the question of theological difference. The gospels are different accounts of the same story, and their diversity speaks to how God appears to reflect the diversity of the world in every way that it is diverse.

The divine vision, which reveals and reflects the truth, is found through the subjective vision(s) of those who see themselves reflected in it. However, as Cusa is quick to warn, this does not mean that each subjectivity somehow constructs what is true. Addressing the divine, he writes ‘the one who looks unto You does not bestow form upon You; rather, he beholds himself in You, because he receives from You that which he is’ (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 195). The divine reflects the diversity of existence not because it is some amalgam of that existence but because it reflects the truth of what each thing in existence is. As Cusa puts it, ‘And so, that which You seem to receive from the one who looks unto You—this You bestow, as if You were a living Mirror-of-eternity’ (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 195). What is revealed from the divine mirroring of our subjectivities for Cusa is not that the divine is a projection of each or even a projection of all, but that each when looking upon the truth sees as much as they are able based upon who they are and how they are looking (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 195). As a result of this Cusa writes ‘my face is a true face; for You, who are Truth, have given it to me. My face is also an image; for it is not Truth itself but is the image of Absolute Truth’ (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 197). As Knight puts it, ‘The ‘living mirror of eternity’ does not conform to us. Rather, we are revealed in it’ (Knight 2019, p. 122). For Cusa, God is the ‘Truth of all faces’ only because all faces are images of the divine face (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 135).

3.4. Beyond Reason

Cusa’s position here is apparently self-contradictory. He simultaneously argues that each will see their own subjectivities reflected back to them in the face of God and that they will also see ‘all things plainly,’ with nothing hidden form them (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 145). The contradiction emerges elsewhere too. Cusa gives the example of two readers, one faster than the other. God, he writes, reads ‘with both of them’, matching their different speeds simultaneously (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 151). But God also ‘beholds the entire page’; therefore, Cusa writes, ‘You do not read one thing in eternity and another thing in time, in accompaniment of those who are reading. Rather, You read one and the same thing—doing so in one and the same manner’ (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, pp. 151, 153). Knight summarises this neatly in the contradictory claim that the omnivoyant gaze sees all and each simultaneously (Knight 2020, p. 820); ‘It sees particularity and totality at once’ (Knight 2019, p. 114). Such a contradiction confuses the nature of the subjective and the objective, which is exactly the point that provokes the secularist to insist on their separation. For the secularist, the failure to oppose the subjective particular and the objective total is irrational and invariably results in violence. However, in Cusa’s work, their confusion is precisely his aim. Cusa is not only aware of this contradiction; he embraces it and it draws his focus throughout the work. Indeed, as has been pointed out by Hopkins and others (Casarella 2013, p. 390; Hopkins 1985, p. 17), even the title of the text The Vision of God is intentionally ambiguous in terms of the subjective and objective.

What Cusa is focusing on are the points wherein the subjective is converted to an objective vision without transcending or negating its subjectivity. What concerns Cusa is not the quantitative expansion of subjective vision but its qualitative transformation. He describes himself standing before the omnivoyant gaze: ‘an image which I behold with sensible eyes. And I attempt to view with inner eyes the truth which is pointed to by the painting’ (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 161). As Michel de Certeau writes, Cusa’s experiment aims to provoke ‘going beyond meticulous observation, [so that] the spectator grasps in it a splendor that the eye cannot see. Then one “seeing” gives way to another’ (de Certeau 1987, pp. 8, 13). This is not a supernatural way of seeing, and this is clear from the examples that Cusa gives, equating this deeper vision with a deaf person who is able to read the lips of others, or a scholar able to understand the intention of a book’s author by only reading a few pages (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, pp. 239, 241). The ability that Cusa is encouraging is the ability to hold together both the subjective (contracted, partial, finite) and the objective (uncontracted, infinite) simultaneously. The point is that the opposition between the subjective and the objective is what leads to a form of blindness; a failure to grasp reality in front of us. Cusa presents an understanding of their indistinction. To do so would be to view things truthfully, something impossible for the extractive secular gaze that divides reality one way or the other.

Central to Cusa’s thought is the assertion that the capacity to see truthfully is something that lies beyond the bounds of human reason; this is why he emphasises the contradictions that produce this capacity to see. As Johannes Hoff points out, for Cusa, human reasoning requires something to be finite in order for it to be understood, but reality is infinite (Hoff 2013, pp. 50–51). The result of this is that all graspable knowledge remains unsatisfying, as we are called to perpetually reach beyond our grasp, entering a space where, as Cusa writes, ‘The intellect knows that it is ignorant … For to understand Infinity is to comprehend the Incomprehensible’ (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, pp. 179, 181). Cusa gives an example: ‘a man who has an insatiable hunger is not fully satisfied by a snack which he can eat. Nor is he fully satisfied by food that does not reach him but only by food which does reach him and, though eaten continually, can never all be eaten up, since it is such that it is not diminished by being eaten, since it is infinite’ (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 205). Neither the infinite in the abstract or the finite in the instance is enough to satisfy; as Cusa puts it, ‘the intellect can be fully satisfied only by an intelligible object which it knows to be so intelligible that this object can never fully be understood’ (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 205). Therefore, the infinite found in and through the finite is impossible and yet necessary when the human capacity for truth is taken seriously. So, Cusa writes, ‘Therefore, when I assert the existence of the Infinite, I admit that darkness is light, that ignorance is knowledge, and that the impossible is the necessary’ (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 181). To seek truth, then, Cusa writes of the need to ‘enter into obscuring mist and to admit the coincidence of opposites, beyond all capacity of reason’ (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 159). Here, he describes reaching ‘the door of the coincidence of opposites, guarded by the angel stationed at the entrance of Paradise’ (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 163).

3.5. Held Together by Love

If truth-seeking takes us beyond reason, then what can guide the conversion of subjective vision into a truthful subjective–objective, divine vision? Cusa’s answer is found in a relational ontology held together by love. As Cusa writes, addressing God, ‘Your seeing is loving’ (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 125), and ‘Your seeing is Your Being’ (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 127). Therefore, Cusa writes ‘if You were to withdraw Your countenance from me, I would not at all continue to exist’ (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 127). At the point of transformation, divine sight is held by the subjective seer, but the seer is also simultaneously held and sustained by this divine sight, so the seer, when they see in this way, is also being seen. As Knight puts it, ‘The omnivoyant is not only something that sees. It is that from which seeing takes place’ (Knight 2020, p. 821). The apparent contradiction arises from the necessity, as Cusa sees it, of remaining open to the truth that their vision participates in. It is this openness that forms the basis of reality, because this point where the infinite and the finite are confused is how creation happens. As Taylor Knight writes, ‘The substantial vision unfolds reality through its very seeing, … Absolute seeing surpasses perspective absolutely by creating. To be seen by God is to be’ (Knight 2019, p. 135). Emmanuel Falque puts it simply: ‘I am “made” under the gaze of God’ (Falque 2019, p. 762). Such creation is driven by love, because it is an affirmation of what is. As Marion writes, ‘Here, seeing no longer aims at regarding, but at safeguarding—making the one toward whom the gaze is extended feel that he is taken into consideration as the unique beloved’ (Marion 2016, pp. 326–27). The divine gaze, which is loving and creative, calls all to fulfil what they are: ‘Thus, under the icon’s gaze, I finally enjoy myself because for the first time I become who I am’ (Marion 2016, p. 328). Love sees truly because it wants that which is loved to be what it is; it gives reality, participating in creation. The contrast with an extractive gaze that emerges from nowhere and drags what it desires into nothing is stark. For Cusa, it is this creative love that remains our guide after the point at which reason breaks down.

Cusa explains that this begins with the self. He questions how it is possible for the divine infinite to be loving in such a way; how such a relationship can even begin: ‘How will You give Yourself to me unless You likewise give to me the sky and the earth and everything in them? Indeed, how will You give Yourself to me unless You also give me to myself?’ (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 145). The divine answer he hears is “Be your own and I will be yours”’ (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 147). He continues: ‘Hence, unless I am my own You are not mine… You can be mine only if I too am mine… You do not coerce me; rather, You await my choosing to be my own’ (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 147). Such a choosing to participate in reality is the basis for the properly ordered love of the self. It is right that we prefer our own being and mode of being to all others, because the distinct aspect of reality that we occupy belongs to us (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 125). As Hoff and Knight have pointed out, Cusa argues from this basis that any point of reality could be considered the centre (Hoff 2013, p. 56; Knight 2019, p. 123; 2020, p. 827). Any could imagine themselves in the position of the divine; that is what this self-love means. Seeking to be who we are is seeking to realise the divine as it relates to our particular existence.

Yet, this is precisely how the experiment unfolds, because any could imagine themselves in the position of the divine; the contradictions that arise between subjectivities provide a basis where love offers the path to community whilst reason breaks down. Cusa bakes this into his experiment—the monk moving west will see the gaze move west, and the monk moving east will see the gaze move east (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 115). Reason breaks down through the contradiction between two truths: that it appears as if God loves only me combined with the realization that this is true for everyone else. Hoff clarifies the paradox: ‘that the all-seeing gaze, which is looking at everyone as if it were looking at no one else, is looking simultaneously at everyone else’ (Hoff 2013, p. 61). Cusa notes exactly this, describing God as ‘present to each thing as if You [God] were concerned with no other thing at all’ (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 125). From my brother’s perspective, it seems like the gaze is not even looking at me. Yet from my perspective, the gaze is not looking at my brother. At this point, where the secular sovereign of the parable sits back, delighted at the violence brought on by the contradiction between subjective visions of the blind, Cusa encourages the subjects of his experiment to ask each other what they see, and when the contradiction is confirmed, he encourages them to believe each other, despite the contradiction (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, pp. 115, 117).

Belief in each other becomes essential, because each one’s knowledge of their relation to the infinite (the truth of each position) cannot be communicated (Falque 2019, p. 784). Michel de Certeau, echoed by Bernard McGinn (McGinn 2005, p. 462), Jean-Luc Marion (Marion 2016, p. 308), and Peter J. Casarella (Casarella 2013, p. 400), puts the significance of this well, writing that ‘the Cusan exercise, in its final stage, allocates to it a dialogical and social body that stems from communication, which has as its basic mainspring a relation of subject to subject … This would be the case for love, or insanity’ (de Certeau 1987, pp. 20–21). de Certeau stresses that this insanity, as he dubs it, is not what is believed, but the act of believing, and it is this same act, at once epistemological and ethical, that forms the basis of the community: ‘(“You too?” “Yes.” “Not possible!”)’ (de Certeau 1987, pp. 33–34). It is through this trusting and believing of the other that the divine life is realized in the world, or as de Certeau puts it, ‘Belief is thus the moment, to be repeated indefinitely, by which the insanity of the gaze is transformed into discourse and into history’ (de Certeau 1987, p. 21).

3.6. The Elephant Looks Back

How this relates to the parable is telling. As noted above, the equivalent of the omnivoyant in Cusa’s experiment in the parable would be the elephant. Essentially, the elephant takes on the position of the divine. The divine positioning of the elephant is not much of an imposition on the Hindu scripture, and the brahmin’s failure to grasp the divinity of the creature that they abstractly recognise as divine is no doubt part of the point. It also is not much of an imposition on Cusa’s work, as can be seen in the work of Taylor Knight and Thomas Pfau, who expand on the more-than-human understanding of the omnivoyant to offer divine positionings of the whale and the kestrel, respectively, in their engagements with Cusa.10

The self-love that Cusa highlights is not found in the insistence of each blind person that their image of the elephant is correct; such a vision remains extractive. Cusa would encourage the blind people to grasp, through their subjective feel, the deeper truth that is the elephant feeling them feeling it—the deeper truth that they are in relationship with the elephant. Here, the particular vision is not wrong and does not need to be denied; rather, as de Certeau writes, ‘it is changed from within, or rather revealed to itself, restored to the “impossible” that inhabits it’ (de Certeau 1987, p. 29). This is not about cobbling together the different visions of what an elephant is. An elephant, after all, is also not well described as a broom attached to a wall with a pot stuck to the front standing on four tree stumps. The gaze of the icon holds the monks in communion both with each other and with itself. Likewise, it is the elephant that holds the blind people together, and the denial of the reality of the elephant (which is total under the secular sovereignty of the king) can only ever deny the community that the blind people might share. From this point, the engagement and movement of the blind people are not an attempt to fix an image of what an elephant is so much as they are about entering into dialogue with each other. Such dialogue requires belief and respect for the other’s different relationship with the elephant. Cusa ‘does not presuppose the silent assurance of an order that would be its pedestal; on the contrary, it has to take responsibility itself for the “dialogic” construction of a social order’ (de Certeau 1987, p. 31). In other words, it is this dialogue, not the fixed image of an elephant, that gives the community shape: ‘the experience of the gaze consists in believing without seeing, thus in living in society, in “understanding each other”’ (de Certeau 1987, p. 19). As Knight puts it, ‘Those in front of the omnivoyant gaze (the monks who walk back and forth) are, as it were, the omnivoyant gaze itself, unfolded in space and time’ (Knight 2020, p. 824).

de Certeau writes that in this doing and saying, this moving, asking, and believing, the monks create a society wherein ‘the plural (“all and every”) is not suppressed by the “one”’ (de Certeau 1987, p. 20). Such a society, held together by the mutual trust and love of those in the society, does not have a fixed form but, according to the creative love that powers it, becomes ever more internally diverse. It is, as Knight puts it ‘a being-held-together that is so maximal it can withstand, indeed it creates, maximal difference’ (Knight 2020, p. 821). Cusa suggests a reality where each exists ‘in the best manner it can and that all other existing things exist only in order to serve the following end: viz., that this thing upon which you are looking exist in the best way’ (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 125). Because God loves each, each should love themselves and each should serve (love) the distinct mode of being of every other (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 125). In this vision, it can literally be said that love holds reality together. Here, there is no compromise between the individual and the whole because the whole is made up of each individual being as much themselves as they can. Here, we have a unity that does not homogenise and a diversity that does not fragment.

4. Conclusions

Secular reason says that objective truth is distinct from subjective truth and thus logically seeks objective grounds for society by bracketing all subjectivities. Cusa advocates the opposite. Pluralist communities can only be found by maintaining the coincidence of opposites between subjective and objective (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 159). Cusa writes that the differences that exist throughout reality are maintained and harmonised in the divine infinite ‘in which all otherness is oneness and all diversity is identity’ (Nicholas of Cusa [1453] 1985, p. 123). It is the failure to maintain this paradox that results in violence. Violence is in no way inevitable, and nor is it a natural consequence of difference; it is a mistake and a sign that at some point we have failed ourselves, each other, and the divine. This is confirmed by the following parable in the Udana, again addressing the conflict between the various brahmins, which concludes that they fall into conflict because they lack truth, like falling over in a stream because they lack a firm foothold (Udāna and Itivuttaka [1997] 2007, p. 85). This does not deny that conflict exists based upon different subjectivities. But if this difference produces violence in an individual or group, then it shows that they have failed to grasp the deeper truth of their subjectivity. This point is not unlike the differentiated understanding of the concept of ‘religion’ that Markus Riedenauer draws from Cusanus’ work De Pace Fidei (Riedenauer 2024); Riedenauer writes that ‘The consequence of Cusanus’s ontology … is that unity be found in plurality and not in opposition to it. … the point is not to eliminate pluralism, but to eliminate its disintegrative potential’ (Riedenauer 2024, p. 142). By embracing our subjectivities and using them as a basis to meet others, pluralist communities can be formed and expanded.

Counterintuitively, the security that brings freedom is won not through power but through vulnerability; through trust; and when things go wrong, through forgiveness. To the extent that the blind people realise this, they may also realise that the king with his cruel and self-serving experiment is not their protector. He is superfluous to their community; indeed, his usefulness is predicated on them having no community, on them remaining ignorant and angry. As noted above, this is not an attempt at Christian apologetics, although Nicholas of Cusa’s writing should not be removed from its Christian context. Cusa’s mysticism offers a theoretical basis for pluralism that cannot be separated from its application in ethical practice. As with the monks, it is only by embracing the particularity of the tradition we draw from that we can invite dialogue with others who occupy different positions. Bracketing subjectivities can only ever be a temporary restraint in the face of actual violence; it can never form the basis for any community. The desire for rationality and security might lead us to conclude that it is impossible to build a society upon such groundless dialogue, but the apparent impossibility does not detract from the necessity. There is no other way of forming pluralist societies; only the ethical practices of mutual respect, trust, and—ultimately—love can ground pluralism. Such pluralism manifests as a dialogue that remains open and dynamic, a manifestation of the divine amongst us. Therefore, from the approach of political mysticism, this dialogue emerges as simultaneously impossible and necessary.