THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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possibility and reality. The latter above all: the denial of a separate, still existing possibility in the entirety of the world, maintaining as it were the finished emptiedness of
the universe as one which is closed, — denotes a strange interruption in the perspective of infinity in Bruno himself; and this precisely in accordance with the wishful
image of a cosmically existing perfection. For only finite things are, according to Bruno, not everything they can be, indeed for him the formative power inherent in things
never wearies of creating new forms, but in the entirety of the universe the possible and the real are supposed to coincide perfectly, because it is itself perfection. For if
it still contained an unrealized possibility, if all the possibilities had not been realized in it, then — so Bruno argues — it would lack something, and thus would not be
perfect. But Bruno thereby applied not only the classical concept of harmony and that of the Renaissance to the universe, with art which has supposedly everywhere
achieved its goal, but also the ens perfectissimum of scholastic theology. And in addition, against all prospects of open unrealized elements in the world, the divine
‘Possest’, ‘Can be’ of God in Nicholas Cusanus, as the absolute reality in which ipso facto all possibilities are realized. Thus Bruno once again introduced a finiteness
into his infinity, namely that of being statically enclosed in the extent and entirety of the universe itself; at this point therefore, towards the future, the ceiling of the
heavens is not yet broken. The temptation to this is of course — as goes without saying in the great anti­theist — not theology, but ultimately the great wishful landscape
of the world as a completed work of art. And the work of art points to the artist, to something divine as artist — in world­immanent and workmasterly terms precisely
in the heart of nature itself. But Bruno has thereby again employed possibility, if not in the Totum of the world, then at least for every individually shaping element within
this Totum, and above all for the workmasterly element within it: the ‘natura naturans’. This is the fire of life which formatively runs through things, the π
oncom vtend iota vtend
τεχ хó of Heraclitus, but inseparably linked with matter. Matter is the birth­giving womb, it contains all its forms and designs
potentially, and brings them to light at the same time with its own potentiality: ‘Thus we attain a more worthy view of the Godhead and this Mother Nature who
produces, preserves and incorporates us again in her womb, and we will henceforth no longer believe that any body is without a soul, or even, as many lie, that matter
is nothing other than a cesspit of chemical substances’ (Werke, 1909, VI, p. 120f.). Matter has other ‘dimensions’ in the form of man, others in that of the horse, others
in the form of the myrtle, others in that of the eye: but
vtilde