De docta ignorantia

Being about to treat of the highest doctrine of ignorance, I must take up the nature of maximality itself. By maximum I mean that than which nothing greater can be. Abundance, however, belongs to unity; unity therefore coincides with maximality, which is also entity. But if this unity is universally absolute from every respect and contraction, it is manifest that nothing is opposed to it, since it is absolute maximality. The absolute maximum is therefore one, which is all things, in which are all things, since it is the maximum. And since nothing is opposed to it, the minimum coincides with it at once, wherefore it is also in all things. And since it is absolute, it is then in act every possible being, contracting nothing from things, from which are all things. This maximum, which is also believed without doubt by the faith of all nations as God, I shall labor to investigate incomprehensibly above human reason in the first book, with him as guide who alone inhabits inaccessible light. In the second place, just as absolute maximality is absolute entity, through which all things are what they are, so too is the universal unity of being from that which is called the absolute maximum, and hence existing contractedly as the universe, whose unity is contracted in plurality, without which it cannot be. This maximum, although in its universal unity it embraces all things, so that all things which are from the absolute are in it and it is in all things, nevertheless has no subsistence outside the plurality in which it is, since it does not exist without the contraction from which it cannot be absolved. Of this maximum, namely the universe, I shall add certain things in the second book. In the third place the maximum of the third consideration will subsequently be made manifest. For since the universe has subsistence only contractedly in plurality, in those plural things themselves we shall investigate the one maximum in which the universe subsists in act maximally and most perfectly as in its end. And since such a one is united with the absolute, which is the universal term, because the most perfect end is above all our capacity, of that maximum, which is at once contracted and absolute, which we name Jesus ever blessed, I shall subjoin a few things, according as Jesus himself inspires. But the one willing to attain the sense must lift the intellect above the force of the words rather than insist on the properties of terms, which cannot be properly adapted to such great intellectual mysteries. One must also use exemplary manuductions transcendently, leaving sensible things behind, so that the reader may ascend readily to simple intellectuality, for seeking which way I have endeavored to open it to common minds as clearly as I could, avoiding all roughness of style, manifesting at once the root of learned ignorance, even in the inapprehensible precision of truth.