Speaking of the Unspeakable: Negation as the Way in Nicholas of Cusa and Nagarjuna

Abstract

On the face of it, a comparison between a fifteenth century European Christian and a second to third century Indian Buddhist should be an unrewarding adventure. The lives of Nikolaus Krebs (1401-1464 A.D.), cardinal of St. Peterad-Vincula, and of the Bodhisattva Nagarjuna (c. 150-250 C.E.) of the monastery of NagarjunIkooda have nothing in common besides their commitment to religious institutions. Yet when we read their writings, we find a similar concern in each to lead their audiences from the apparently comprehensible ordinary world to an incomprehensible no:some:thing,l and they do this by a more or less thoroughgoing use of negation. Nicholas of Cusa, as he has come to be called, was born at Cues on the Moselle, into an intellectually stormy climate. During his life the Catholic Church split asunder, Constantinople fell, John Huss began what would later be called Protestantism, and the Inquisition continued to search out deviant thinking.2 He was influenced both by Scholastics such as Albertus Magnus and by apophatic mystics such as Pseudo Dionysius. A mission to Constantinople put him in contact with the rival monotheism of Islam and the apophaticism of the Holy Orthodox Churches, and he records that it was on his return voyage from there that he was visited by what he regarded as a divine gift, allowing him to embrace incomprehensibles incomprehensibly through acquired ignorance.3 Subsequently, he seems to have tried to express this vision by the use of negation and symbol, becoming more and more apophatic and pulling away from the via intelligibilis of the Scholastics, to the extent that he was been accused of muddle-headedness.4 Nagarjuna was probably born in Adhra Pradesh, and lived at Dhyanakataka.5 The region was not only, at the time, heavily Buddhist, but it was a meeting point of Greek and Dravidian cultures. His name is associated with the prajnapdramita sutra corpus, an extensive body of Mahayana scriptures ranging in length from considerable tomes down to a single syllable. Prajnaparamita is