Nicholas of Cusa Biographical novel Jean Bédard January 2010 E-mail: [email protected] Translation by Richard Clark 1 2 Table des matières Nicholas of Cusa ................................................................................................................... 1 Table des matières ................................................................................................................ 3 Prologue ................................................................................................................................. 4 The Church Victorious ........................................................................................................ 6 The beauty of the world .................................................................................................... 11 The state of the world ........................................................................................................ 19 The witches .......................................................................................................................... 23 The trial ................................................................................................................................ 32 The execution ...................................................................................................................... 40 The reform ........................................................................................................................... 43 The betrayal ......................................................................................................................... 48 The pendulum ..................................................................................................................... 52 The capture of Constantinople ........................................................................................ 57 The confession .................................................................................................................... 62 The massacre ....................................................................................................................... 67 The master of princes ........................................................................................................ 75 In the trap ............................................................................................................................ 82 At the castelet of Andraz ................................................................................................... 85 The saint ............................................................................................................................... 90 At Rome, the measure ....................................................................................................... 94 The union of the Churches ............................................................................................. 100 The humiliation ................................................................................................................. 110 The defeat .......................................................................................................................... 117 At the Vatican ................................................................................................................... 121 Umbria ................................................................................................................................ 125 The end .............................................................................................................................. 129 The encounter ................................................................................................................... 131 Epilogue ............................................................................................................................. 134 3 Prologue "There will be seen on earth an animal species that will unrelentingly fight itself with great losses. It will assign no limits to its malice. There will then arrive a time when it will no longer kill by the thousands, but by the thousands of thousands. It will eliminate the plague and cholera so as to make itself master of its own destruction. It will wrest from Nature her rights over death so as to have more flesh to mangle in its wars, its divisions, and its obsessions. It will ruin its own soul in infernal machines. O earth! how slow you are in opening to engulf in the deep crevices of your abysses this too-cruel monstrosity! You have tied it with bonds that escape its understanding. You have written your instructions in a language that it cannot understand. You have made innumerable hopes hover over its head. Are you crazy, O earth! to engrave in its heart inaccessible aspirations? Here it is mad with rage. It gnaws its limbs like a fox caught in a trap. It simply cannot understand itself any longer and here it is twirling around in its own chaos as if it were drunk from its own death." This prophecy of Leonardo da Vinci, written fifteen centuries after the birth of Christ, finally brought my decision to a head. I had to write what I had seen and heard with an ink capable of passing through deluges, earthquakes and unheard-of explosions. I had in fact described my adventure to several persons at the castle of Milan where Leonardo da Vinci had settled down for a while, but it seemed to me appalling to write it. Must we feed this monster, give it powder for its flames and iron for its cannons? For if you give this beast a single spark of light, it recovers in rage, builds back its flesh, swells like a tumor and makes the whole earth stink. Shouldn't we let it starve to death by depriving it of any hope! Never again repeat the error of Moses, Jesus and Mohammed who came to sow words of hope and in so doing threw it back into its conflagrations, its exterminations and its annihilations. Fortunately, I have reached the age where the hand no longer has the energy of the pen; I am going to die, carrying with me the marks that the singular philosopher has made in me. It was at the moment when I was going to give up that I was witness to the following event. That morning, the rain was falling like the prelude to a deluge. With black ink and a very fine pen, master Leonardo was doing some studies on the movement of water, waterspouts, the loops that form in torrents, the spirals seen in storm clouds. He advanced the pen, made dots, made the pen glide, removed it, stood back, repeated the action, caressed the sketch, stained it, slashed it, threw it on the ground and started over again. It was a frenzied fencing match and by evening the floor was strewn with rough drafts and blots on papers abused and sometimes torn. When exhaustion got the better of him, he huddled on the ground amidst his drawings. I thought he was going to cry, but he took up his lyre and made it resonate with a suffering that tore my heart. And then suddenly he arose like a flame, spread out a small square of parchment on his easel and executed a Vision of the Deluge that was most astonishing. This is what freed me. 4 One might have said it was a night boiling with inexhaustible whirlwinds sweeping all the earth away in its anger. But such was the magic of the drawing: no one could know if it was about a death or a beginning. The dark mass could just as well represent the mucous membranes of a uterus in the act of making its little one than the final cataclysm of the beast. There was no circle, but everything was circular, there was no angle, but everything was angular, nothing was closed in such a way that it was never possible to distinguish the end from the beginning. It was a chaos full of rage, it was the matrix of a colossal intelligence, no one could determine it in advance. So then, who could say if the beast was desirable or adorable? Perhaps it was preparing its inner parts for the coming of a marvelous being. Its anger might be divine! Was it necessary, perhaps, that the night become incommensurable for some globules of light finally to happen? Because the brilliance of the stars is minuscule in comparison with the immensity of the night, because the flowers are scattered here and there on the thin film of an earth of terrifying abysses, because the acts of love are drowned in the horrors of war, it seems as if chaos is winning. But perhaps a trickle of light is worth as much as a torrent of darkness! Leonardo's composition made me waver. As I was unable to tell if the ark would survive the deluge, his drawing left me wobbling between terror and the sublime. And perhaps it was in that vacillation that humanity would come into being! Hope is a very small doubt in the obviousness of our woes, but a drop of sperm in a woman's womb is just as small. Leonardo had just made me come to a decision; I too was going to sow my seed, cast my testimony into the chaos of history. The earth has its reasons not to engulf that monster in the abyss, for one never knows if it might not arrive at humanity. I too do not condemn it. Like Jesus, the Cardinal wanted peace, and he precipitated war, but the war he produced, what will it produce? Uncertainty compels me to relate my adventure. I said to myself that if one casts a mixture of seeds into the earth, the result depends on the soil. If it is a soil for thistles, it will grow thistles and if it is a soil for lily-of-the-valley, it will grow lily-of-the-valley. Now, this beast, it is perfectly obvious, tramples and crushes the soil that feeds it so much that it