Connecting Nicholas of Cusa, Gottfried Leibniz, and the Founders of the USA to Jesus Christ and Greek Thinking in 500 B.C.

One can connect the negative theology of Nicholas of Cusa to the New System, Monadology, and infinitesimal calculus of Gottfried Leibniz. These thoughts of Cusa and Leibniz can then be connected to the thoughts of the founders of the USA and the Laws of Nature and Nature's God, which are found in the U.S. Declaration of Independence. However, the thoughts of these modern thinkers can be connected also to the ancient teachings of Jesus Christ and to he 500 B.C. Greek teaching of Anaxagoras. These modern and ancient connections prove that knowledge of a monotheistic God and the universe has been progressing scientifically for over 2500 years and that free nations under a monotheistic God would eventually emerge, as the USA did in 1776. In this blog, I will present this common thread.

Give Anaxagoras credit for developing the idea of Parmenides who said "All is One." (click) The 'All in One' idea is repeated by Jesus Christ in John 14:20 as '".. I am in the Father, and ye in me, and I in you." In Bk.II, Ch. Five of his book 'On Learned Ignorance,' Nicholas of Cusa expands the 'All in One' idea with the words 'Each thing is in each thing' and the words "From Book One it is evident that God is in all things in a such way that all things are in Him." If each thing in the universe is divisible and originate from an indivisible God, each thing in the universe has an infinite number of indivisible parts.

I am unable to connect Cusa directly to Gottrried Leibniz (1646-1716). However, I conclude that Leibniz could have learned about Cusa's indivisibles through the thinking of Galileo, who knew about Cusa's work. Anyway, Cusa's indivisibles are found in Leibniz's New System, which opposes Newton's billiard ball universe. In No.56 of Leibniz's Monadology, he says that every thing is connected to alll other things. Cusa's indivisibles are also found in Leibniz's infinitesimal calculus and the true atom defined in his book on 'Monadology.' The use of Cusa's indivisibles are found by Galileo;s thoughts on the extension of bodies. These connections set the stage for the development of functional relations in the field of mathematics.

England's Queen Anne and her grandmother, Sophie, wanted Leibniz to become Prime Minister. Had Leibniz received this position, the U.S. Revolutionary War would not have happened, Americans would be speaking German, and Cusa's book On Learned Ignorance would be a common book in the USA in the early 1700s.. Instead, Christian Wolff (1679-1756) and Ben Franklin's European assignments made sure that the phrase 'Laws of Nature and Nature's God" were included in the Declaration of Independence. The rejection of the divinity of Jesus Christ by Franklin is a sign that Ben participated in the heated debates between the Newtonians and Leibniz. Franknin's statement at the signing of the Declaration of Independence --- We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately -- is an indicator that the founders knew the 'all is one' theory. These debates continue yet today between materialists and spiritualists. Only the personalities and philosophical names have changed.

In closing, I noticed that Immanuel Kant shows his sensitive to the '"All in One" idea in his "Critique of Pure Reason' in the Preface to Second Edition. There, Kant talks about 'organized bodies' sayings, "... every member exists for every other, and all for the sake of each other, so that no principle can safely be taken in any one relation, unless it has been investigated in the entirety of its relations to the whole employment of pure reason."