Creatotori assimilativi. Natura e arte in Cusano

The phrase “creatores assimilativi”, which appears in the title of this essay, occurs in a Sermon given by Cusanus in Innsbruck on 29 December 1455. In this phrase, Cusanus combines two appa- rently opposite concepts, describing, on the one hand, the spontaneity (“vis creativa”) of the mind and, on the other, its receptivity (“vis as- similativa”). Even in his writings, Cusanus ascribes both concepts to the mind, and this has often led the philosophical historiography of the twentieth century to offer divergent interpretations of his thought; interpretations that, relying on one or the other of these concepts, have regarded Cusanus as the first modern thinker or, instead, have stressed his continuity with the tradition of medieval realism. Tensions of this kind also recur in other areas of Cusa’s thought. The aim of this paper is to show that these tensions, such as that between “creatio” and “as- similatio”, are irreducible to the “modern”-“pre-modern” dialectic and are not even the sign of the indecisiveness of a thought that would have remained on the threshold of a modernity that it would not have been able to cross. Rather, these tensions constitute, and often inten- tionally so, the peculiarity of Nicholas of Cusa’s thought and have a productive philosophical significance, as this article aims to show with regard to the Cusanian view of human praxis.