This volume offers a detailed and highly informed commentary on Nicholas of Cusa’s programmatic work On Learned Ignorance. Harries is an experienced guide to the ambiguities and challenges of this text, with repeated references to earlier thinkers such as Dionysius the Areopagite, Thierry of Chartres, Albert the Great, and Meister Eckhart, to echoes in later philosophers such as Descartes and Kant, and to the varieties of contemporary interpretations. As the Howard H. Newman Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Yale University, Harries is well known for his earlier studies of Kierkegaard and Heidegger, as well as discussions of aesthetics, nihilism, infinity, perspective, and truth. 

While Harries offers very helpful historical background, he is primarily seeking “what Cusanus still has to teach a modern reader” (5) in areas where Cusanus challenges more recent presuppositions, especially “a distinctly modern self-assertion or self-elevation that has made our human reason the measure of reality” (6). Harries hopes that the wisdom of Nicholas of Cusa can contribute to healing the divisions of the modern and post-modern worlds by teaching us that human reason is not the ultimate measure after all (5-6). Harries notes the relation of Cusanus to Immanuel Kant with regard to acknowledging the limits of reason and then in some way moving beyond them (5, 64, 186, 445); he explicitly mentions the concerns of Friedrich Nietzsche (34, 456) and those who live in “a godless age” (66).

Much of the discussion circles around the paradox that on the one hand there is no proportion between the finite and the infinite and thus our language cannot capture the meaning of the infinite but on the other hand we can understand “incomprehensibly” beyond the limits of reason through reflecting on the coincidence of opposites. Harries ponders how Nicholas guides us to acknowledge and transcend the limits of reason by opening to a type of “not-knowing” that brings insight into opposites coinciding: “Reflection on the finitude of our reason presupposes that there is something in us that allows us to transcend this limitation: that allows us to embrace the unknowable unknowingly, so that our ignorance becomes learned” (46).  The upshot for language is: “The literal meaning must be left behind. Words can provide no more than uncertain pointers” (61).  A further implication is that human reason also fails to fully understand created reality, which is always a contracted infinite partaking of the divine infinity and thus transcending our reason: “But the truth of things escapes us human knowers” (63).

In considering the relation between the Absolute Maximum and the Absolute Minimum, Cusanus proposes the famous image of the coincidence of opposites, though Harries rightly cautions that this is not an easy resolution: “Our reason cannot make sense of this coincidence. . . we comprehend the coincidence of opposites only incomprehensibly, in the foundering of reason” (73). Nonetheless, as the ancient wisdom teachers Socrates, Job, and Solomon acknowledged, there can be a positive gain in acknowledging limitations: “To become learned about one’s ignorance is to become aware not just of the limits of reason, but also of what transcends its reach. Only on the other side of the coincidence of opposites can God be glimpsed” (78). Even though God is beyond the coincidence of opposites (75), this language provides a way of reflecting on the divinity and humanity of Jesus Christ and on the relations of the Divine Trinity, which provide Nicholas with a theological resolution to the philosophical conundrum. The “shipwreck” of reason provides an invitation to move beyond the limits of reason into “comprehending God incomprehensibly” (76).

Citing the examples of Nicholas’s contemporary critic Johannes Wenck and his more recent interpreter and critic Jasper Hopkins, Harries warns against interpreting this work solely in terms of ordinary philosophical logic and advises the reader to read On Learned Ignorance at least twice if one is going to hope to understand it: “once to glimpse that [underlying] meaning and then, having gained a first understanding of it, to test it by returning to the beginning to read it once more” (82).  For readers tossed about by the storms of modernity and post-modernity and troubled by the shipwreck of reason, Harries’s commentary presents an invitation to a voyage: “The doctrine of learned ignorance is born of a freedom willing to leave behind the security of the established and accepted. Such willingness recalls the courage of the sailor willing to leave terra firma behind” (37). The “Concluding Personal Postscript” relates the commentary to the intellectual journey of Harries’s life. For this journey Harries is an informed guide and an insightful companion.