THEOLOGY ALBUM

Introducing ‘Searcher (Paradise Wall)’ - the first song from our forthcoming Theology Music Album.

We are happy to announce that the first song from our new theology music collection is out now!

The album is being produced collaboratively between indie artists and academics from the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University - in this case with Dr Silvianne Aspray and Dr Susann Kabisch. Each track in the album uncovers one attribute of the character of God that has either been forgotten or is often misunderstood. Music and lyrics are written by the artists, recasting academic texts into pop music form. The texts draw on the broad spectrum of Christian thinkers in history, including lesser known, but equally rich scholars.

This first song, titled ‘Searcher, Paradise Wall’ uses the writings of the renaissance theologian and philosopher Nicolas of Cusa, specifically, his work challenging the myth of God as merely an abstract concept that we can— through our own capabilities— grasp and control. Cusa uncovers God as a wholly other person, the search for whom is dangerously beyond our control.

View the full music video here and read Nicolas of Cusa scholar, Dr Silvianne Aspray’s commentary on the song below.

Searcher/Paradise Wall

A theological commentary by Dr Silvianne Aspray

The theologian and philosopher Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) was one of the most creative thinkers in Europe in the 15th century. 

Born in Germany, he spent much of his life travelling around Europe engaged in Church diplomacy. Some of Cusa’s writings stem directly from his engagement in Church politics. In one of them (De Concordantia Catholica) he sketches out – for the first time in Western history – a democratic voting system which he suggests should be applied in meetings of the Church. 

Most of his writings, however, expound his central insight that human beings should aim to achieve what he calls a learned ignorance when speaking and thinking about God. Cusa tells us of a moment of deep insight he had when on board a ship travelling back from Constantinople: "I was led (by, as I believe, a heavenly gift from the Father of lights, from whom comes every excellent gift) to embrace incomprehensible things incomprehensibly in learned ignorance.” Much of Cusa’s work can be understood as trying to make sense of this insight and to pass it on to others.

Put in basic terms, he thinks that because God, by virtue of being God and not another thing in the universe, is beyond the categories that we know. We cannot understand God in a normal, rational mode of understanding. Instead, Nicholas of Cusa proposes an alternative mode of comprehending God “incomprehensibly, in learned ignorance.”

One aspect of this learned ignorance, for Cusa, is to go beyond the either-ors that structure our language and understanding of the world: the either-or between being big or small, active or passive for instance. When trying to think our way to God, we need to attempt to go beyond such dualities, as God is not limited by them – God is not just very big, but neither is God infinitely small. God, for Cusa, is beyond such opposites altogether. Put differently: God is never on one end of a spectrum on which we human beings also are. God is beyond the spectrum. 

From our human point of view, this is unthinkable, or at least very difficult to think, but this is one of Cusa’s points: There are different perspectives, and our human perspective on who or what God is, is not like a bird’s eye perspective: all-encompassing and easy to grasp and survey. Rather, we are always journeying towards a deeper understanding, and who and where we are on the journey forms our perspective. The insight that any attempt of knowing something about God involves a search in which our whole being is involved, is the guiding principle of “Searcher”. 

Cusa tells us of a bowling game he invented which serves as an image of this search. The game can be seen in the video and is very simple: A wooden ball is rolled through concentric circles, and the aim is for it to come to rest at the centre. This simple task is made much more difficult, however, because the wooden ball has a cavity on one side, which means that it will never go straight. Metaphorically speaking, we are such balls, aiming for the rest which can be had in God, but, wounded by sin, we cannot be rolling there in a straight line, but only ever in roundabout, searching motions.

Once Nicholas of Cusa was asked whether human beings can see God. He replied that whoever asks this question is seen by God first, who enables their very search. Activity and passivity cannot be parsed apart neatly when it comes to God. The experience of being seen is captured in the film by the figures on the balconies which seem all-seeing, all around the actors. 

In the same text on seeing God and being seen by God, Cusa says that all he can do is try to lead his readers by the hand into a holy darkness. There are no short-cuts. The searchers need to experience the journey themselves. 

But what is it that searchers might find in the holy darkness they are being led into? Nothing that is tame, or easily graspable. Beyond all opposites, God is alive and awe-inspiring. Cusa uses the image of the Paradise Wall beyond which, he says, all opposites coincide in God. As human beings, we might at best glimpse momentarily beyond that wall, even though we will find it hard to express anything of this experience, given that we think in structures of opposites.

Cusa is playful in trying to express the coincidence of opposites in God, beyond the Paradise Wall. He uses the example of a spinning top, which is a recurring visual theme in the video: If you drew two points opposite each other on the surface of a spinning top, and then spun the spinning top infinitely fast, then these two opposing points would coincide.

Again and again Nicholas of Cusa refers to God as the “Father of Lights” (following the letter of James in the New Testament). The theme of light and lights is thus one which the song and the video repeatedly feature. Even the geometrical figure of the overlapping triangles as laid out on the ground and painted on the actors’ faces is a reference to this. One of the triangles is a pyramid of light, and the other a pyramid of darkness, and the figure represents, for Cusa, how there is no place in the universe which is entirely devoid of light, and hence of God: The tip of the pyramid of light reaches all the way to the bottom of the pyramid of darkness. 

The chorus “if I could be mine, you’d be mine” is a transposition of one of the most famous lines in Nicholas of Cusa’s works, a word given to him from God, as he says: “Be yours and I will be yours.” The insight remains the same: There is a sense in which each individual mirrors or reflects God in a very specific way; no-one else ‘reflects’ the creator in the way a particular individual does, if they choose to pursue the path of wisdom.