Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64).
I have learnt that the place wherein Thou [God] art found unveiled is girt
round with coincidence of contradictories, and this is the wall of Paradise
wherein Thou dost abide.... Thou art there where speech, sight, hearing,
taste, touch, reason, knowledge and understanding are the same. . . . Thine
eternal Word cannot be manifold nor diverse... . Now and Then coincide in
the circle of the wall of Paradise . . . it is beyond the Present and the
Past that Thou dost exist and utter speech!... the wall of absurdity which
is the coincidence of creating with being created.... While I imagine a Creator
creating I am still on this side of the wall of Paradise. .. . I have not
yet entered, but I am in the wall!
These Cusan fragments are from Visio Dei, trans. Emma Gurney Salter, 1928,
published in Mysticism, F. C. Happold (Baltimore, Md., 1963), pp. 305ff.
Nicholas was a cardinal, author of On Learned Ignorance, in which he wrote that contraries coincide
(or are reconciled)
in God. This doctrine is said to have influenced Bruno. Nicholas was a mathematician who used lines, circles, and triangles to illustrate infinity.