Learned ignorance

Learned ignorance (docta ignorantia) is the title of Nicholas of Cusa’s book of 1440 and the name of its central idea. The infinite, Cusa argued, bears no proportion to anything finite, and so cannot be grasped by a mind that knows by comparison and measurement. The wise person is the one who knows this ignorance most fully: not as a failure, but as the right relation of the finite mind to the infinite.

Cusa found the phrase in Augustine, who used it in a letter on prayer for the knowledge that we do not know what to ask for. Its roots are older still: Socrates, in Plato’s Apology, is wise only in knowing that he does not know; Dionysius the Areopagite taught that God is known by unknowing; and the Cloud of Unknowing urges the contemplative to leave all knowledge beneath a cloud of forgetting.

Learned ignorance is not scepticism. For Cusa it is the beginning of a way of knowing by which the mind, aware of its limits, can approach the truth ever more closely, as a polygon with more and more sides approaches a circle, and can be drawn beyond reason into the vision of God.