De docta ignorantia

All our wisest and most divine doctors have agreed that visible things are truly images of invisible things, and that the creator can be seen knowably by creatures as it were in a mirror and in an enigma. But this, that spiritual things, unattainable by us of themselves, are investigated symbolically, has its root in what was said above, since all things have to one another a certain proportion, hidden to us however and incomprehensible, so that from all things one universe arises, and all things in the one maximum are the one itself. And although every image seems to approach the likeness of its exemplar, yet besides the maximal image, which is this itself which the exemplar is in unity of nature, there is no image so similar or so equal to its exemplar but that it could be infinitely more similar and more equal, as has now been made known from what is above. But when inquiry is made from an image, it is necessary that there be nothing doubtful at the image in whose transumptive proportion the unknown is investigated, since the way to uncertain things can only be through what is presupposed and certain. But all sensible things are in a certain continuous instability on account of the material possibility abounding in them. But things more abstract than these, where consideration of things is had, not as though they wholly lack material appendages without which they cannot be imagined, nor as though they wholly underlie fluctuating possibility, we see to be most firm and most certain to us, as are mathematical things themselves, wherefore in them wise men have skillfully sought examples for investigating things through the intellect, and none of the ancients who was held great attacked difficult things by any likeness other than mathematical, so that Boethius, that most learned of the Romans, asserted that no one could attain knowledge of divine things who wholly lacked exercise in mathematics. Did not Pythagoras, the first philosopher both in name and in deed, place all investigation of truth in numbers? Whom the Platonists and even our first men followed to such an extent that Augustine, ours, and after him Boethius, affirmed without doubt that number was the principal exemplar of things to be created in the mind of the founder. How could Aristotle, who wished to appear singular by confuting his predecessors, otherwise hand down to us in mathematics the difference of species than that he compared them to numbers? And the same, when he wished to hand down knowledge of natural forms, how one is in another, necessarily fled to mathematical forms, saying: as the triangle in the tetragon, so the inferior in the superior. I pass over his innumerable like examples. Aurelius Augustine too, the Platonist, when he investigated the quantity of the soul and its immortality and other most lofty things, fled to mathematics for aid. This way so pleased our Boethius that he constantly asserted all doctrine of truth to be comprehended in multitude and magnitude. And if you wish me to say it more compendiously: did not the opinion of the Epicureans concerning atoms and the void, which both denies God and shatters all truth, perish solely by mathematical demonstration of the Pythagoreans and Peripatetics? namely that one cannot arrive at indivisible and simple atoms, which Epicurus supposed as a principle. Proceeding in this way of the ancients, concurring with them we say that, since the way of approaching divine things is open to us only through symbols, we can then use mathematical signs more fittingly on account of their incorruptible certitude.