Coincidentia Oppositorum

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Coincidentia oppositorum — Latin for the coincidence, or coming-together, of opposites — names the idea that the contradictions which separate finite things fall away in the infinite. Greatest and least, centre and circumference, the maximum and the minimum: in a being without limit, the doctrine holds, these cease to stand against one another and converge.

The phrase belongs to Nicholas of Cusa, the fifteenth-century German cardinal and philosopher, who made it the hinge of his De Docta Ignorantia — “On Learned Ignorance,” of 1440. His starting move was a confession of limit: the infinite cannot be measured by the finite mind, so the most exact knowledge of God is the knowledge that God exceeds every concept. From there he argued by way of mathematical images. A circle’s curve, made infinitely large, becomes indistinguishable from a straight line; an infinite triangle and an infinite circle would be the same figure. What holds opposites apart is finitude; remove the limit, and the opposition dissolves. In God, Cusa concluded, the maximum and the minimum coincide — a claim he offered not as paradox for its own sake but as the only speech adequate to a reality past the reach of either-or.

The thought has a long ancestry and a longer afterlife. Behind it lies the negative theology of the Neoplatonists and of the writer known as Pseudo-Dionysius, for whom the One stands beyond being and beyond every name a mind might assign. After Cusa the figure recurs across early-modern esoteric and mystical writing. Giordano Bruno took the coincidence of contraries as a key to an infinite universe; the Lutheran shoemaker-mystic Jakob Boehme built his cosmogony on the strife and union of opposing principles, darkness with light, wrath with love, within the Godhead itself. Each gave the idea its own grammar, and the differences are real: Cusa reasons toward an unknowable God, Boehme narrates a divine becoming.

In the twentieth century C. G. Jung borrowed the phrase for his psychology, using it for the reconciliation of opposing forces within the psyche that he treated as the aim of individuation, and finding in alchemy’s union of contraries a symbolic record of the same process. Whether his usage names what Cusa meant, or only shares its words, is a question scholarship has not settled; the appropriation is genuine, the equivalence less so.

What recommends the formula to so many hands is its economy. It supplies a single move for any system that places its highest principle beyond the divisions of ordinary thought — a way of saying that at the summit the distinctions which organise everything below no longer hold. That it keeps resurfacing, in mystic, philosopher, and psychologist alike, marks less a shared doctrine than a shared problem: how to speak of something held to lie past the categories in which speech is built.

→ In the library: Steiner — Mystics of the Renaissance (Boehme, Bruno) (1911)

→ Related: The One · Neoplatonism · Emanation · Nous · Gnosis