Nicholas Krebs took the name Nicholas of Cusa (also known as Nicholas Cusanus 1401-1464) in honor of his birthplace, the small German village of Cusa on the Moselle River. He showed such high promise as a boy that at the age of twelve he received a scholarship to study with the Brothers of the Common Life at Deventer in the Lowlands, a mystical group devoted to experiencing unity with God as inspired by a widely influential book of the time, the Imitation of Christ, authored by one of their fellows. Over the next twelve years he went on to study the arts, philosophy, law, mathematics, the sciences and theology at the universities of Heidelberg, Rome, Colone and Padua, from which he received a doctorate in law. In 1433, at the age of twenty-nine, he became an ordained priest and pursued a series of ecclesiastical appointments culminating in his becoming Cardinal in 1448 and Bishop of Brixen in 1450.

bio by Daniel Kolak in Lovers of Wisdom
(Wadsworth, 1997)