It has since become habitual to say that England owes her central part in the balance of power to her marginal position. As in Cusanus's Experiments with the Scales, 'one pound can counterbalance a thousand pounds by its distance from the centre of the scales.' But while that paradox has tended to harden into a dangerous political commonplace, Cusanus, primarily interessed in theology, derived it from a more general and queer-sounding postulate; namely, that periphery and centre are interchangeable in God. Like many other Renaissance thinkers Cusanus had a liking for the pseudo-Hermetic image which compares God to an infinite sphere whose circumference is nowhere and whose centre is everywhere; and in so far as 'everywhere' and 'nowhere' amount to the same, the contraries of periphery and centre become interchangeable. God is in all the world, that is, in the smallest part of it; and yet all of the world is also in God, since he embraces and transcends it. Maximum and minimum are one. By pushing the contraries to their extremes Cusanus thought that he made them vanish; but whaver may be said against his claim on the grounds of logic, it has been pragmatically confirmed on at least one point: the conclusions of the extreme mysticism of Cusanus agree wih the observations of practical politics. To be placed outside a political situation is to occupy a privileged position within it. As transcendence and inherence coincide in God, so the central position of a worldy power is often secured by its eccentricity.
Edgar Wind. Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance. Faber and Faber Limited (1958).
(Carl Schmitt acena e sorri.)
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