 In Book II of On Learned Ignorance Cusanus deals with the created universe. The natural universe counts as the limited or contracted maximum that is the image of the absolute Maximum. Here Nicholas introduces another central metaphor to capture the relationship between God and creatures, the metaphor of enfolding and unfolding (complicatio/explicatio). He expands the “folding” metaphor he inherited from the twelfth-century school of Chartres. While all beings are “enfolded” in the undifferentiated oneness of their Divine Source, they are at the same time an “unfolding” of God in time and space. “Insofar as He is the unfolding,” Nicholas writes, “in all things He is that which they are, just as in an image the reality itself [veritas] is present” (II.3, Hopkins translation). In Neoplatonic terms, one must think the unfolded universe we experience and all that is real in it as at once enfolded in the Creator on whom it depends. God encompasses every thing created in a dialectical outflow and return to God without any creatures ever being identified with the God on whom they depend, that One who remains both present to them yet ever absent and beyond. What the “unfolding/enfolding” couple captures is the dynamic relationship between divine Original and created image.