"Children find everything in nothing,
adults find nothing in everything"
-Giacomo Leopardi
In his book You Are Gods David Bentley Hart has a chapter on Nicholas of Cusa, in which he contrasts the great mystic's intuitions with the those of Leopardi, the great poet of pessimism :
"In one of the earlier passages in his Zibaldone, Leopardi reflects at considerable length upon what he takes to be a sentiment common to all of us: a sense he believes we all share of the “nullità di tutte le cose,” “the nullity of everything,” the insufficiency of every pleasure to satisfy the spirit within us, and “our inclination toward an infinite that we do not comprehend.” It is, taken as a whole, a tour de force of psychological phenomenology.
It also, however, begins from a logical error; for, according to Leopardi, both this persistent dissatisfaction within us and the infinity of longing that underlie it can probably be ascribed to a cause “more material than spiritual.” Which is to say, he begins by assuming a contradiction: that an infinite intention, exceeding every finite object of rational longing, could arise spontaneously from finite physical causes, without any transcendental end to provoke it as, at least, an intentional object and capacity of the rational will.
But how, then, could we experience this tendenza at all as an actual intelligible volition beyond what lies immediately before us, and arrive at an aware- ness that it is unfulfilled? An intention without a final intentional horizon can be experienced neither as fulfilled nor as unfulfilled.
And yet Leopardi recognizes that our desire for pleasure is limitless in duration and extent, and that we would not exist as the beings we are without it; it belongs to our substance, he says, not as a longing for this or that, but as a desire for the pleasing as such.
And here he is quite correct. One can desire nothing finite as an end wholly in itself, but only, “as abstract and limitless pleasure.”
“Following on one pleasure, the soul does not cease from desire for pleasure, just as it never ceases thinking, because thought and desire for pleasure are two operations equally continuous with and inseparable from our existence.”
Indeed. But, then, what Leopardi’s reflections actually reveal is that our ability to desire anything as a purpose conceived by the willing mind is inexplicable unless we presume that the source of that desire is a tran- scendental object (real or supposed) to which our rational wills are—at least, again, intentionally—wholly adequate.
As a matter of simple fact, all purposive human desire is animated at its most primordial level by an unremitting volition toward (for want of a better term) the divine. Cor nostrum inquietum est donec requiescat in te, to coin a phrase.
One can see, of course, why as unremittingly dour a godless genius as Leopardi would not be inclined to follow his musings to the conclusion they appear to entail. To grant that the human spirit is capable of a genu- inely infinite intentionality is already to grant that the sort of bleak materialism he presumed is at best paradoxical, at worst incoherent. If nothing else, it would mean that even that aspect of human character that seems most irrational—our inability to rest finally content in any proximate and finite end of longing—is in fact the result of a prior and wholly rational relation between human spirit and the proper end of rational freedom as such.
That irrepressible disquiet is not merely the insatiable perversity of aimless appetite, magically positing an ever more exalted end for itself somewhere out there in the nowhere of the will’s spontaneous energies, but is rather a constant and cogent longing that apprises us of the true ultimate rationale that prompts the mind and will to seek any end at all, and therefore to be capable of recognition, evaluation, judgment, and choice in regard to proximate ends: a rationale that lies elsewhere, beyond the limits of the finite.
This also, moreover, touches upon a very old issue within the history of Western metaphysics: the gradual discovery that infinity is not merely a name for unintelligible in- determinate extension—as was the prejudice of early Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic thought—nor even merely a positive rational category; rather, infinity is also a proper name for that necessary terminus of all real rational freedom apart from which neither reason nor freedom could exist. Plotinus is perhaps the first Western thinker to have grasped this explicitly. In Christian thought, it was Gregory of Nyssa who first unfolded the principle at length, and with consummate brilliance.
But no Christian figure after Gregory, with the possible exception of Maurice Blondel, grasped the principle in all its dimensions as fully as did Nicholas of Cusa. As he writes in De visione dei: “Were God not infinite, he could not be the end for desire.” To which, of course, corresponds the reciprocal proposition that nothing desired as a limited quiddity, without any remainder of the “ever greater,” can be in itself the sole final cause prompting that desire.
Actually, the sixteenth chapter of De visione is oddly similar in some ways to that passage from Leopardi cited above, though of course radically different in intonation. You, God, says Nicholas : “are the form of every desirable thing and are that truth that is desired within every desire”; “to taste of your incomprehensible sweetness, which becomes more delightful to me to the very degree that it seems more infinite,” is to see that, precisely because the divine is ultimately unknown to all creatures, “they might in holiest ignorance possess a greater contentment, as though amid an incalculable and inexhaustible treasure.”
Hence, the creature’s ignorance of God’s full greatness is a “supremely desirable feasting,” for the intellect. And hence, also, it is God’s will both “to be comprehended in my possession and also to remain incomprehensible and infinite,” because he is a treasure whose end no one can desire. Neither can this rational appetite desire the cessation of its own existence. The will may long either to exist or not to exist, but appetite itself cannot desist from itself, for it “is borne into the infinite.”
“Indeed, intellectual desire is borne on not into that which is capable of being greater and more desirable, but into that which is incapable of being greater or more desirable. . . . Therefore, the end of desire is infinite.”
And so, says Nicholas, with exemplary precision: “Therefore you, God, are infinity itself, which alone I desire in every desire.” God shines forth in human longing, and so that longing leads us to God, casting all finite and comprehensible things aside as it does so, for in them it can find no rest; thus it is led ever onward from God who is the beginningless beginning to God who is the endless end.
One sees God, then, under the form of a certain rapture of the mind, and thus discovers that the intellect cannot find true satisfaction in anything that it wholly understands, any more than it could in something that it understands not at all; rather, it must always seek: “that which it understands through not understanding.”
And so, then, it is only within God’s own infinite movement of love that any rational desire exists, coming from and going toward the infinite that gives it being.
Infinity itself, which alone I desire in every desire. And yet, for Nicholas, quite unlike Leopardi, this very insatiability—this indomitable longing for the infinite within each stirring of finite longing—is also a kind of ecstasy, an eros that finds its highest possible delight precisely in its own perpetual dissatisfaction.
Where Leopardi (in his Schopenhauerian way) sees only evidence of the blind, indeterminable striving of idiot will, Nicholas recognizes from the first that nothing could actually prompt an appetite for the infinite that is truly capable of drawing us toward finite ends except a real intelligible horizon of rational longing, against which the intellect can measure and evaluate any finite object of desire.
Every limited terminus of rational desire, then, is recognizable to the intellect only and precisely as a contraction and mediation of that formally limitless terminus. And so Nicholas sees this exquisite state of elated frustra- tion as nothing less than the original intentionality of spirit toward God’s revelation of himself in all things, an openness of spiritual creatures to all things, through which all things are reciprocally opened up to spiritual creatures.
God’s “facies absoluta”—his absolute face or aspect—is the “natural face of every nature,” the “art and knowledge of everything knowable,” and so the “absolute entity of all Being.” He is the face of all faces, already seen in every face or aspect of any creature, albeit in a veiled and symbolic manner; he is the infinite treasure of delight glimpsed within every delight, manifesting himself in all that is and by every possible means of attracting the rational will to himself.
Nor is the mind’s ascent beyond every finite end merely a journey into the indeterminate; rather, it is a true engagement with an end at once both infinite and rational, because it is nothing less than God’s own end, his essence, the only possible determinacy for an infinite nature.
We receive the world, therefore, and the world is available to our spiritual overtures, entirely on account of this prior infinite appetite for an infinite end, this desire to know the infinite in a real “infinite mode”: that of incomprehensible immediacy, unknowing knowledge. We are capable of knowing anything at all only because the primordial orientation of our nature is the longing to know God as God, to see him as he is, rather than as some limited essence.
For that vision to be achieved, however, all finite concepts must be surpassed by the intellect as it ascends to a more direct apprehension. That hunger for the infinite as infinite, which can never come to rest in any finite nature, is also the only possible ground of the mind’s capacity for finite realities as objects of rational knowledge or desire. But for our inextinguishable intentionality toward the “face of all faces,” no face would ever appear to us.
