Would a Creator really want ceaseless exaltation from us, as the Church suggests? It’s a question that vexed a younger Mark Vernon. Now, reading the insights of a 15th-century scholar, he may be closer to an answer

You’d think a vicar would know about praise, what with all the hymn singing, candle lighting and godly ritual that role requires. Well, when I was a curate – which is a three-year apprenticeship for vicarhood, and was as far as I got in clerical life – a question about praise undid me. A fellow priest was putting together a series of talks about aspects of church life and asked if I could do one on praising the Lord.

He probably thought it was quite an easy subject, and so a nice one for a junior. But the request floored me. I instantly realised I had no idea what praise is about. Worse, I found it actively distasteful. Images of a bearded patriarch in heaven receiving the adoration of angels strumming harps flooded my mind, followed by questions. Why would God demand a source of non-stop worship? What kind of deity needs to be extolled at all times? And what does that say about we humans, shouting from the Earth to the rock of our salvation? Are we no more than condemned creatures, simpering and grovelling to a narcissist on high? Christianity often makes it easy to conclude we are not.

I had been attending church for years, often liking it, but arguably the most basic reason for doing so eluded me. I knew about awe and wonder, of course. Who doesn’t go into a medieval gothic cathedral, or even a modest modern chapel, and at least momentarily sense that such a place is sacred, designed to reveal higher dimensions? I knew about personal need, as well, and the desire to pray for myself and others, when hopeful or suffering. And even as a young curate, I had experienced the satisfaction that a priest might find in conducting a funeral or wedding. Rites of passage help people. But giving glory, exalting? Why this stress on offering ceaseless praise to the holiest?

I knew the official answer. God is worthy of praise because God is the source of everything, including life itself. But does a parent, also involved in human origins, require continual acclaim and perpetual adoration? Sometimes a fleeting indicator of thanks from offspring is welcome, of course. But a parent who needed to be venerated 24/7 would be a parent undoing the life of their child.

I knew the practical answer too. Praise makes you feel better. It lifts your spirits. But I’m wary of such utility. If I thank you because gratitude delivers happiness to me, isn’t that fake appreciation, which you would instantly sense to be vacuous? Surely praise seeking a personal buzz would be outed by the Almighty?

My problem with praise clarified other difficulties I was having in the church and became pivotal. I left, with the quandary lingering ever since. Until recently. Decades on, I think it has been resolved.

A reframing of my issue has come with discovering the ideas of Nicolas of Cusa, a 15th-century Renaissance polymath. He was interested in matters from philosophy to cosmology, mysticism to experimental science. He is nowadays sometimes referred to as the first modern thinker and is finding renewed interest among contemporary philosophers worried about the loss of meaning in our times.

Born in 1401 in the German town of Kues near Koblenz, where the elegant Moselle joins the mighty Rhine, Nicolas is perhaps best known for his notion of “learned ignorance”, a quick version of which was given by Donald Rumsfeld in his pithy summary of epistemology. A person who possesses learned ignorance, as opposed to brute ignorance, knows their unknowns and also that there are unknown unknowns. Nowhere is this lack clearer than in human knowledge of God, Nicolas stressed, though he also derived a string of mind-blowing analogies that simultaneously highlight the limitations of our minds and delight in what lies over our perceptual horizons.

Consider a spinning top, he suggested. If it spins too slowly, it’s likely to topple. Conversely, the faster it spins, the more stable it becomes. So, a top spinning at infinite speed would be completely stable. This, Nicolas continued, is a way of glimpsing the coincidence of seeming opposites in God, who is said paradoxically to be both inexhaustibly responsive and never changing. Boundless flexibility and complete reliability can go together.

Praise was another concern for Nicolas. How to understand it properly, which I had failed to do, arose from his consideration of the two great challenges to ancient thought that seeded the perceptual shift which became the modern worldview. In the jargon they’re known as nominalism and voluntarism. The first roughly states that nothing in the cosmos carries any meaning beyond its own existence, which is the exact opposite of the premodern view, in which everything has symbolic significance. The second roughly states that God is completely free to do things as God wills, with the corollary that the way things are in the cosmos is completely arbitrary: they are as they are simply because God says so, and if God changed God’s mind about, say, what is good, then what is good today would become bad tomorrow.

The upshot of both is personal disorientation and a cultural crisis, because of living in an apparently purposeless cosmos. Hence the sceptical view that dominates today, which was summarised by the physicist Steven Weinberg: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”

Nicolas saw such nihilism coming and aimed to head it off at the pass. Remember the infinitude of God, he said. The cosmos is born of that immensity. What looks like arbitrariness is, therefore, really myriad expressions of divine life. We should actually expect the world to look endlessly multiple and confusingly various, to the point of seeming random and haphazard, because that is what dazzling infinity looks like from the perspective of finite creatures like us. Whereas in truth that variety is as many manifestations of divine life. As was put by the poet Thomas Traherne, who probably read Nicolas: “What bound may we assign, O God, to any work of thine! Their endlessness discovers thee In all to be Divine; A Deity That will for evermore exceed the end Of all that creature’s wit can comprehend.”

Listen to Traherne’s lavish words. In them you can hear what this has to do with praise. You can feel it. Praise is not something God requires, Nicolas realised. Rather, words of joy spring spontaneously from the simple fact of abundant existence, when properly perceived as such. We are part of the excessiveness of God, and praise is an unprompted expression of being aware of participating in that spinning infinity.

We give a “wow”, a “gosh”, a “eureka”! And in that moment, know we belong and are glad. That was the talk I might have given when I was a curate.

This article appears in Idler #91.

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