God as li Non-Aliud: Nicholas of Cusa’s unique designation for god

Nicholas reprises his thinking about God and creatures in his De li Non-Aliud (1461), a work that echoes his earlier writings with an original “name” for God. Part I of the article reviews the puzzling initial chapter of this dialogue. Part II explains how using the phrase “the Not-Other” (li Non-Aliud) to refer to God provides the dialectical basis for thinking the paradoxical relationship of the divine One to the created others. Part III takes up Nicholas’s visual analogies that suggest how “not other” as a designation for God recalls some of his earlier ideas in The Vision of God/De visione Dei. Part IV makes Nicholas’s reliance on Dionysius and Proclus explicit in pointing to a God “beyond being and intelligibility.” The whole dialogue thus explains how to frame God’s oneness dialectically in order to do justice to the relation of infinite God and finite creatures.