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March 20, 6:12 AM, 2008 · No Comment · Previous · Next  

Cusanus’s Great Continuum

[Image]
Les très riches heures de Jean, duc de Berry: August—falconers hunt in a field before the Château d’Étampes (1415)

Conexio autem universorum per ipsum est, ut omnia, quamquam sint differentia, sint et conexa. Quapropter inter genera unum universum contrahentia talis est inferioris et superioris conexio, ut in medio coincident, ac inter species diversas talis combinationis ordo exsistit, ut suprema species generis unius coincidat cum infima immediate superioris, ut sit unum continuum perfectum universum.

All things, however disparate they may appear, in truth are bound together. There is in the genus of things such a connection between the higher and the lower order that they come together at a joining point. Such an order obtains among the species that the highest species of one genus coincides with the lowest of the next genus. This is in order that the universe may be one, perfect and continuous.

Niclas Krebs, later Cardinal Nicholas of Kues, De docta ignorantia, lib. iii, cap. i (1440) in: Nikolaus von Kues’ philosophisch-theologische Werke in deutscher und lateinischer Sprache, vol. 1, p. iii/6 (S.H. transl.)

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December 2009

THE GENERAL ELECTRIC SUPERFRAUD
Why the Hudson River Will Never Run Clean
By David Gargill

THE MASTER OF SPIN BOLDAK
Undercover with Afghanistan’s Drug-Trafficking Border Police
By Matthieu Aikins

MERMAID FEVER
A story by Steven Millhauser

UNDERSTANDING OBAMACARE
By Luke Mitchell

Also: Dave Hickey and Wendell Berry

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