The gaze of god

Abstract

The article deals with the treatise of Nicholas of Cusa De visione dei. In the foreword to this treatise Nicholas of Cusa leads the monks from Tegernsee through »perceptible experimentation«, which is to take them from the realm of the visible to realm of the invisible and true, explicated in the following discourse of twenty-five chapters. The author analyses the concept of a »seeing« God, the connection between savoir and voire, the Cusan foundation of human knowledge on mathematics as the most certain mode of savoir/voire, where visus oculis and visus intellectualis coincide. The main stress is laid on the analysis of »perceptible experimentation«, described in the foreword of the treatise, and on the first six chapters, where mystical theology is explicated. A certain homology of the two modes of vision in the mathematization and infinitization can be established through the comparison of the Cusan desubstantialized and relativized universe and the world, constructed by the art of perspective. The point of the gaze of God is of special importance: this gaze turns out to be a »spot« which, because of its being unimaginable, impels the exercise and, at the end, represents the point of subjectivation.