The ancients and the existence of GodNicholas of Cusa was born in the German city of Cusa (Kues), born in 1401 and died in 1464. His main book and masterpiece is "De docta ignorantia".. According to him, there are several ways of knowing: first, by the senses, which do not give us a sufficient truth, but only by means of images or sensations. Secondly, by reason or understanding, which understands in an abstract and fragmentary way those images or sensations in their diversity. Thirdly, by the intelligence which, aided by supernatural grace, leads us to the truth of God. This truth makes us understand that the infinite Being is impenetrable; we then understand our ignorance with respect to the infinite Being; this is what true philosophy leads us to, to the "learned ignorance"The highest knowledge consists in this.
A friend of Pope Eugene IV, the Pope of the union of Christians, he was a member of the papal delegation that accompanied Emperor John VIII and Patriarch Joseph on their journey from Constantinople to Italy, which resulted in the return and union of the Greek Orthodox Church to the Roman Catholic Church.
On that return voyage from his mission to Constantinople, on the high seas he had a decisive experience for his philosophical conception: how the horizon of the sea seems to be stretched out like a straight line; and yet what is seen is part of a circle with a very large radius due to the spherical shape of the Earth. This experience influenced the content of his work "De docta ignorantia": we know that our finitude can never reach the truth in all its fullness and precision; and the more we are aware of our ignorance the more it becomes a learned ignorance, a philosophical wisdom; this wisdom starts from doubt, but presupposes the existence of truth, which can only be founded on an infinite, eternal and creative intelligence.
The union of the Churches was proclaimed on 6-7-1439 in the church of Santa Maria dei Fiori, in Florence. But this union failed after a short time. Metropolitan Isidore of Kiev proclaimed the union upon his arrival in Moscow, but was soon arrested by Prince Vasili, who forbade the Russian church to accept any union with the Latins.
In the Byzantine Empire, the Greek bishops, returning from Florence, found an adverse popular climate; although the union was promulgated in the cathedral of St. Sophia on 12-12-1452, in the presence of Emperor Constantine XI, the papal legate and the Byzantine patriarch, a violent tumult was started by the clergy and monks who raised the cry, seconded by the masses: "Let the turban of the Turks reign over Constantinople rather than the mitre of the Latins!".
Half a year later, that cry would have its sad fulfillment: on May 29, 1453, the capital fell to the Turks, the last emperor of the Eastern Empire died in battle and the Byzantine Empire ended its days. In Rome, Isidore of Kiev, fled from Russia, and Bessarion of Nicaea, who became two cardinals of the universal Church, were for years like a living memory of something that could have been, but was not because men did not want it to be. Meditating on the fall of Constantinople, Nicholas of Cusa conceived his grandiose vision of a future universal conciliation, in his work "De pace fidei". (On the Peace of Faith), completed before 14-1-1454.
Following Pope Pius II to the Adriatic coast, where the fleet of the Christian crusade against the Turkish invasion would meet, Nicholas suffered the last attack of a chronic illness and died in Todi (Umbria) on 11-8-1464. Three days later his friend Aeneas Silvius, Pope Pius II, died in Ancona. The remains of Nicholas of Cusa were transferred to Rome and buried in the titular cardinal's church, St. Peter in Vinculis. His heart rests in Kues (Cusa), about 50 km northeast of Trier, in one of his foundations, the hospital of St. Nicholas, which for more than five centuries has housed the poor and sick and where valuable classical, patristic and medieval manuscripts that Nicholas had collected in his travels in the East and West are kept.
René Descartes, a native of The Hague (in Touraine, France), was born in 1596 and died in 1650. He was educated at the Jesuit school in La Fleche. In 1640 he went to Paris and there he felt a total skepticism. In order to see the world, he embraced military life in Holland, where he resided from 1629. From 1649 he resided in Stockholm at the invitation of Queen Christina, whose conversion to Catholicism was influenced by his conversations with Descartes himself, who had previously converted.
He thinks that thought does not deserve trust, because it often falls into error. On the other hand, mathematics and logic are not sciences that serve to know reality. And he will not admit in his philosophy a single truth that can be doubted. There is nothing certain but I, and I am nothing but a thing that thinks. This is the first indubitable, evident truth: the "cogito, ergo sum".
But, further on, Descartes says: I find in my mind the idea of God, of a most perfect, infinite, omnipotent entity, who knows everything. This idea cannot come from nothing, nor can it come from myself, who am imperfect, finite, weak, full of ignorance, because then the effect would be superior to the cause, and this is impossible. Therefore, the idea The idea of God must have been placed in me by a superior entity that reaches the perfection of that idea, that is to say, by God himself.
Born in 1623 in Clermont-Ferrand, France, to a family of jurists and financiers, he received a humanistic and scientific education. In 1647, in Paris, he became acquainted with Descartes' philosophy and with Descartes himself, from whom he distanced himself and whom he harshly criticized.
On November 23, 1654, he experienced a profound shock that radically transformed his life, which he recorded in his writing, the "Memorial".. In this writing he describes his encounter with the living God, "the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, not the God of the wise men and philosophers: the God of Jesus Christ". He conceived the project of writing a broad apologia for Christianity and began to take notes and jottings, which were published, after his untimely death, on August 19, 1662, under the title of "Thoughts.".
To the incredulity of the "erudite libertines" and to the cold and self-confident reason, Descartes-like, which Pascal calls the "spirit of geometry"-, is contrasted with a "spirit of refinement," which opens itself to the totality of human experience, both lofty and dramatic. This spirit includes the heart, because "the heart has reasons that reason does not understand"..
Knowing oneself to be miserable and in need of regeneration is the initial step on the path that leads to recovering one's own original greatness. Pascalian wisdom is ordered, then, to conversion. One of the enemies of that conversion is divertimento, existential superficiality, the flight from the real by means of the surrender to diversions with which one tries to avoid any confrontation with the essential; another enemy is the self-sufficiency of the self that encloses itself in a cold and geometric reasoning that drowns the heart.
For Pascal, God is a Being, partly hidden and partly manifest: he manifests himself sufficiently so that we can perceive his reality; but he also hides himself, so that approaching him implies faith, surrender and merit. God reveals himself to us in Jesus Christ as the living God, a God who is accessed through a faith and a love that, starting from the recognition of sin, opens up to trust in his mercy.
Corresponding member of the Royal Academy of Jurisprudence and Legislation of Spain.
