This paper will explore the deeper meaning of the ancient Greek term theoria in the context of Nicholas Cusanus' treatise De Visione Dei (1453). It will argue that the text's deeply neo-Platonic theme of contemplation as seeing culminates in the figure of Christ, found at the end of the treatise. Christ represents, for Cusanus, the high point of the Christian-Platonic tradition of contemplation, since he is both the model contemplative and the supreme object of contemplation. Cusanus' unique contribution is related to the ambivalent genitive of the Greek term "theoria tou theou," the contemplation of God. Theoria is a verbal noun that does not in itself evoke a subject or object. This is similar to the famous genitive ambiguity of ἀγάπη τοῦ θεοῦ, "love of God" (e.g., "In this the love of God was revealed to us" 1 Jn. 4:9). Theoria tou theou at once evokes God as He who contemplated and He who is contemplated, and this idea is further refined by the Incarnation, in which the bodily Christ both sees and is seen. An application of the coincidence of opposites that defies the simple logic of subject and object, this version also evokes the original, pre-Aristotelian use of the term theoria as a pilgrimage. Cusanus himself has arrived from the east with an icon, a gift to the monks of Tegernsee to whom the treatise is dedicated, and this serves as a reflective space for the paradoxical exercise of theoria to be performed. After ascending up to the Trinity, the theoria-pilgrimage then re-descends to earth, to Christ - the summit to whom one paradoxically "descends." He is the model of object of our contemplation, the terminus ad quem of theoria, but also of the scholarly life: for just as the experienced scholar can read a small portion of a book and divine its arguments, so too does (human) Christ see only the eyes of the interlocutor, and as divine, is able to read the contents of the soul.