V. as an ambassador to
Constantinople and to the Reichstag at Frankfort; was made Cardinal in
1448, and Bishop of Brixen in 1450. His feudal lord, the Count of Tyrol,
Archduke Sigismund, refused him recognition on account of certain quarrels
in which they had become engaged, and for a time held him prisoner.
Previous to this he had undertaken journeys to Germany and the Netherlands
on missionary business. During a second sojourn in Italy death overtook
him, in the year 1464, at Todi in Umbria. The first volume of the Paris
edition of his collected works (1514) contains the most important of his
philosophical writings; the second, among others, mathematical essays and
ten books of selections from his sermons; the third, the extended work, _De
Concordantia Catholica_, which he had completed at Basle. In 1440 (having
already written on the Reform of the Calendar) he began his imposing series
of philosophical writings with the _De Docta Ignorantia_, to which the
_De Conjecturis_ was added in the following year. These were succeeded by
smaller treatises entitled _De Quaerendo Deum, De Dato Patris Luminum, De
Filiatione Dei, De Genesi_, and a defense of the _De Docta Ignorantia_. His
most important work is the third of the four dialogues of the _Idiota_ ("On
the Mind"), 1450. He clothes in continually changing forms the one supreme
truth on which all depends, and which cannot be expressed in intelligible
language but only comprehended by living intuition. In many different ways
he endeavors to lead the reader on to a vision of the inexpressible, or
to draw him up to it, and to develop fruitfully the principle of the
coincidence of opposites, which had dawned upon him on his return journey
from Constantinople (_De Visione Dei, Dialogus de Possest, De Beryllo,
De Ludo Globi, De Venatione Sapientiae, De Apice Theoriae, Compendium_).
Sometimes he uses dialectical reasoning; sometimes he soars in mystical
exaltation; sometimes he writes with a simplicity level to the common mind,
and in connection with that which lies at hand; sometimes, with the most
comprehensive brevity. Besides these his philosophico-religious works
are of great value, _De Pace Fidei, De Cribratione Alchorani_. Liberal
Catholics reverence him as one of the deepest thinkers of the Church; but
the fame of Giordano Bruno, a more brilliant but much less original figure,
has hitherto stood in the way of the general recognition of his great
importance for modern philos