Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), a German philosopher and cardinal from the Moselle, gave one of his Latin treatises the name of a cut stone. Naming a book after a beryl might lead a reader to expect an account of its origin, colour or value. Nicholas needs remarkably little of that information. What interests him is the moment someone holds the worked stone to the eye and sees something through it.
Beryl is a bright, white, transparent stone. It is given a shape both concave and convex, and the person looking through it reaches what was previously invisible.
– Nikolaus von Kues, De beryllo, 1565, p. 267.[1]
Transparency alone will not do the work of this example. The beryl has been given a shape that requires two contrary descriptions. The same lens curves inwards on one side and outwards on the other. Someone using it has no need to choose between the two. Taken together they describe the single instrument through which that person is looking. What makes the stone interesting here is the way it draws attention beyond its own attractive appearance.
In the very next sentence Nicholas imagines what such a beryl would be like if it could be fitted to the eye of the mind. This time the paired extremes are the greatest and the least. Someone able to think them together might come closer to the indivisible origin of things for which he is searching. The optical comparison by itself does surprisingly little to solve that difficulty. It does, however, give readers a familiar action to return to during a demanding argument. In the first chapter Nicholas expressly invites them to exercise their own judgement. In the end each must hold the beryl to their own eye.
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Here all the little blades of grass and wood and stone and all things are one.
Meister Eckhart (um 1260–vor 1329)
Meister Eckharts mystische Schriften. In unsere Sprache übertragen von Gustav Landauer · p. 126
Our translation from Gustav Landauer’s German rendering
The great mother is the earth. The stones in the earth’s body, I think, are what is meant by her bones. These are what we are told to throw behind our backs.
Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BCE–17/18 CE)
Metamorphoses · 1951 · p. 30–31
Our translation from the Latin
Perhaps this block of marble is only a heap of infinitely many living bodies, or like a lake full of fish, although the eye can ordinarily distinguish these animals only in bodies that have partly decayed.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716)
Brief an Antoine Arnauld vom 30. April 1687 · 1846 · p. 96–97
Our translation
When you bend down towards all this activity, it is almost as if you could overhear the hidden history of how plants grow and the quiet beating of the mountain’s heart.
Very little. One makes marble out of flesh, and flesh out of marble.
Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
Œuvres complètes de Diderot, tome II. Philosophie · p. 105
Our translation
The fleeting sunbeam has been captured and enclosed in your mysterious core.
Friedrich Hebbel (1813–1863)
Excerpt. Our translation from the German edition of 1904
I thank you, silent stone, and bend down towards you: I owe you my life as a plant.
The precious stones which are the foundations denote truths Divine shining through in the ultimate of order.
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772)
Arcana Coelestia · 1938 · p. 318
Clause from the cited English edition. Initial capital supplied.
The finest artist has no conception that a single block of marble does not enclose within its excess. Only the hand that obeys the intellect can reach it.
And he the bard, a crystal soul Sphered and concentric with the whole.
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