The Omnivoyant Icon

Cusa instructs the monks to place the painting at the centre of a room and walk around it, observing how the icon's gaze follows each monk individually while simultaneously following all the others from their different positions. Each monk experiences the icon as looking directly at him — yet the icon does not move, and this is not an illusion but a genuine feature of the painting's construction. From this exercise, Cusa draws his first philosophical point: divine vision is like the omnivoyant image — it accompanies each creature from within, from the creature's own position, while remaining absolutely one and undivided.

Human vision is perspectival: I see from here, at this angle, in this direction. My seeing of a thing depends on my position relative to it, on the lighting, on my state of attention. God's vision, by contrast, has no position — it is not from anywhere, it is not at any angle, it does not depend on anything outside itself. It does not move between objects in the way my attention does. It is absolute — unconditioned, simultaneous, inexhaustible. For Cusa, this absolute seeing is identical with God's act of creating: to be seen by God is to exist; the created thing is what is held in being by divine attention. God's vision and God's creativity are the same act.

The culminating meditation of De Visione Dei is the recognition that the human soul's seeking of God and God's prior seeing of the soul are two aspects of a single movement. The soul seeks God, but God has already found the soul — has always been seeing it, holding it in being. The mystical ascent towards God is not a journey into an unknown but a growing recognition of a presence that has always been there, a turning of the creature's limited gaze to meet the unlimited gaze that has never left it. This is Cusa's theology of love: to love God is to recognise that one is already loved, to seek what is already infinitely near.

De Visione Dei (1453) was composed as a meditation guide for the Benedictine monks of Tegernsee, who had written to Cusa asking for a practical introduction to mystical theology. The omnivoyant icon Cusa sent with the text has not survived, but descriptions suggest it was a Flemish painting in the Rogier van der Weyden tradition.