6.02.2003

Parallels between writing a poem, having self-consciousness, and Nicolas Cusanus' theory of "learned ignorance".

The idea that, because our ideas about God & Reality are always (even if only slightly) incommensurate with those things in themselves, it follows that we inhabit a human universe, in which all knowledge is metaphorical & creative, human-produced, including our metaphors for God. Absolute knowledge is a delusion; art alone creates an authentic model (because it's only a model), because the model makes allowance for the unknown, because the creative model is an imitation of divine free creation. (The Incarnation is the only "hard evidence" of the specifically human meaning of the universe.)

But one doesn't NEED such justifications (any more than one needs a poem).

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