De docta ignorantia

NICHOLAS OF CUSA, CARDINAL, TO THE MOST REVEREND FATHER JULIAN, CARDINAL, HIS REVERED PRECEPTOR, GREETINGS.

Your greatness, even your most proven intellect, will rightly wonder what I mean by choosing you as judge while I attempt rather rashly to spread my barbarous follies before you — as though any leisure remained to you, busied as you are with the greatest public affairs at the Apostolic See in virtue of your cardinalatial office, and as though you, after supreme acquaintance with all the Latin writers who have flourished hitherto and now with the Greeks, could be drawn to this perhaps most inept conception of mine by the novelty of its title, you to whom the sort of mind I have has long been most fully known. But this wonder, I hope, will allure your mind, so eager to know — not because you suppose something previously unknown inserted here, but rather by the boldness with which I have been led to treat of learned ignorance. For they say that a certain sad sensation in the mouth of the stomach precedes the natural appetite, so that nature, which strives to keep itself sound, is thereby stimulated and restored. So I rightly think that wondering precedes philosophizing and the desire to know, so that the intellect, whose being is to understand, may be perfected by zeal for the truth. Rare things, even though they be monsters, are wont to move us. Wherefore, my peerless preceptor, in your humanity deem that something worthy lurks here, and receive from a kinsman whatever manner of reasoning in divine matters my great labor has made most welcome to me.