The Analogical Turn

Rethinking Modernity with Nicholas of Cusa

Johannes Hoff

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780802868909
• eBook ISBN: 9781467439022
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia cristiana

Recovers a 15th-century thinker's original insights for theology and philosophy today
Societies today, says Johannes Hoff, are characterized by their inability to reconcile seemingly black-and-white scientific rationality with the ambiguity of postmodern pop culture. In the face of this crisis, his book The Analogical Turn recovers the fifteenth-century thinker Nicholas of Cusa's alternative vision of modernity to develop a fresh perspective on the challenges of our time.
In contrast to his mainstream contemporaries, Cusa's appreciation of individuality, creativity, and scientific precision was deeply rooted in the analogical rationality of the Middle Ages. He revived and transformed the tradition of scientific realism in a manner that now, retrospectively, offers new insights into the "completely ordinary chaos" of postmodern everyday life.
Hoff's original study offers a new vision of the history of modernity and the related secularization narrative, a deconstruction of the basic assumptions of postmodernism, and an unfolding of a liturgically grounded concept of common-sense realism.

PART I

Nicholas of Cusa: Pioneer of a Forgotten Path into the Modern Age

Nicholas of Cusa’s work displays the traces of a time affected by historically unprecedented religious, political, and cultural upheaval. He compared himself with a “hunting-dog” (venaticus canis) following his native instinct, and this explains why it is so hard to track the various “hunting fields” that attracted his attention.¹ As a discoverer, jurist, diplomat, mathematician, astronomer, cartographer, philosopher,theologian, and cardinal, he seems to have been above all a “perpetual traveler.”²

Nineteenth-century historiography interpreted the historical turbulence that prompted Cusa’s tireless activities as the laboratory of a universal history of progress. The reception of his writings in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was along these lines. Cusa was depicted as a “precursor of the modern natural sciences”³ and as a “forerunner of modern philosophy of subjectivity”;⁴ his attachment to the Middle Ages was considered to be a mere leftover from the childhood of Western rationality. Only the late modern criticism of Western rationality has sensitized us to the inconsistencies of this one-dimensional narrative of progress.

Cusa perceived himself as a Renaissance philosopher, offering fresh and unprecedented insights; but he managed to combine this self-perception with one of the most sophisticated attempts to recover the medieval unity of faith and reason, wisdom and science.⁵ Against the backdrop of the Scotist and nominalist decline of Christian learning in the fourteenth century, Cusa thus appears as one of the few thinkers that remained undauntedly attached to what Henri de Lubac called the “symbolic realism”⁶ of the twelfth century.

In the light of this legacy, Cusa never expressed any sympathy for analytic attempts to reduce the symbolism of wisdom-based philosophical and religious traditions to allegedly more elementary truths said to be uncontaminated by the symbolically saturated reality of our everyday life. While the latter trend obscured the fundamental character of liturgy as the source of science and wisdom since Berengar of Tours (†1088),⁷ Cusa’s thinking is comparable only with Thomas Aquinas’s eccentric attempt to recover the Augustinian tradition of the early Middle Ages in the face of the Aristotle-Renaissance of the thirteenth century.⁸ As with Aquinas, the middle path between conservatism and innovation protected Cusa from the modern inclination to question the biblical synthesis of wisdom and science, for example, in the name of a foundationalist theology of revelation (as did Calvin, Suarez, Barth, Rahner, etc.), an epistemological foundationalism (as did Descartes, Locke, Newton, Einstein, etc.), or a foundationalist concept of freedom and subjectivity (as did Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Lacan, etc.).⁹

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1. Cf. De apologia doctae ignorantiae, n. 21 (Hp nn. 14-15); also De venatione sapientiae, ch. 1 n. 4. Quotations of Cusa’s writings throughout are based on the critical edition of his works (h) in Nicolai de Cusa, Opera omnia, iussu et auctoritate Academiae Litterarum Heidelbergensis ad codicum fidem edita (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1932ff.). Unless otherwise indicated, English translations are based on Nicholas of Cusa, Complete Philosophical and Theological Treatises of Nicholas of Cusa, trans. Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis: Arthur Banning, 2001). The numbering system is based on the above critical edition (h), which is also electronically available, along with a selection of German translations and the Hopkins translation (http://www.cusanus-portal.de/). Deviations in the numbering system of the translated text are indicated as “Hp.” Cusa’s biography is comprehensively documented in Acta Cusana. Quellen zur Lebensgeschichte des Nikolaus von Kues (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1966). Cf. also Erich Meuthen, Nikolaus von Kues. 1401-1464. Skizze einer Biographie, 4th ed. (Münster: Aschendorff, 1979); and Nicholas of Cusa. A Companion to His Life and His Times, ed. Morimichi Watanabe, Gerald Christianson, et al. (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011). Biblical quotations are based on the New Revised Standard Version (1989), but I have frequently modified the translation in view of the Latin Vulgate.

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The material in this introductory section appeared in a different and significantly shorter form in a German essay under the title: “Nikolaus von Kues (1401-1464),” in Arbeitsbuch Theologiegeschichte. Diskurse. Akteure. Wissensformen, ed. Gregor Maria Hoff and Ulrich H. J. Körtner (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2012), 359-78.

2. Michel de Certeau, “The Gaze: Nicholas of Cusa,” trans. Catherine Porter, Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 17.3 (1987): 2-38, 2.

3. Cf. Stefan Schneider, “Cusanus als Wegbereiter der neuzeitlichen Naturwissenschaft?” Mitteilungen und Forschungsbeiträge der Cusanus-Gesellschaft 20 (1992): 182-221; Fritz Nagel, Nicolaus Cusanus und die Entstehung der exakten Wissenschaften (Münster: Aschendorff, 1984). For a contrary reading, cf. Fritz Krafft, “Das kosmologische Weltbild des Nikolaus von Kues zwischen Antike und Moderne,” Mitteilungen und Forschungsbeiträge der Cusanus-Gesellschaft 28 (2003): 249-89.

4. For a critical discussion of this modern reception, cf. Hubert Benz, “Nikolaus von Kues. Initiator der Subjektivitätsphilosophie oder Seinsdenker?” Theologie und Philosophie 73 (1998): 196-224; and Hubert Benz, Individualität und Subjektivität. Interpretationstendenzen in der Cusanus-Forschung und das Selbstverständnis des Nikolaus von Kues (Münster: Aschendorff, 1999).

5. Cf. Josef Stallmach, “Der Verlust der Symbiose von Weisheit und Wissenschaft in Neuzeit und Gegenwart,” Mitteilungen und Forschungsbeiträge der Cusanus-Gesellschaft 20 (1992): 221-49.

6. Cf. Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages, trans. Gemma Simmonds (London: SCM, 2006), 221-47.

7. Cf. de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 221-47, and 259-60.

8. Cusa’s thinking was less influenced by Aquinas than by the via antiqua of the Albertist tradition; cf. Rudolf Haubst, “Zum Fortleben Alberts des Großen bei Heymerich von Kamp und Nikolaus von Kues,” in Studia Albertina. Festschrift für B. Geyer zum 70. Geburtstag (Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1952), 420-47. However, the influence of Aquinas is anything but insignificant; cf. Rudolf Haubst, “Nikolaus von Kues auf den Spuren des Thomas von Aquin,” Mitteilungen und Forschungsbeiträge der Cusanus-Gesellschaft 5 (1963): 15-62. As for the divergence between Aquinas’s transformation of the Augustinian tradition and the Franciscan Neo-Augustinianism subsequent to Duns Scotus, cf. Alasdair C. MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (London: Duckworth, 1990), chs. 5-6.

9. Cf. Johannes Hoff, “The Rise and the Fall of the Kantian Paradigm of Modern Theology,” in The Grandeur of Reason: Religion, Tradition and Universalism, ed. Conor Cunningham and Peter M. Candler (London: SCM, 2010), 167-96.

CHAPTER 1

Cusa’s Path to the “Wisdom of Unknowing”

Nicholas Cryfftz, later to be known as Nikolaus von Kues, Nicholas of Cusa, or Cusanus, was born the son of a wealthy townsman in 1401 in the remote Mosel village of Kues, not far from the oldest city of Germany, Trier. After a brief period of study at the then nominalist University of Heidelberg, he enrolled in the University of Padua (1417-23). This led him to a new world of humanistic and scientific erudition. However, Cusa’s encounter with the emerging cosmopolitism of the modern age not only shaped his encyclopedic thinking, it also spurred his search for alternatives to the “inflating scientific pretensions” (scientia superba et inflans)¹ of his educated contemporaries. While enrolled in law school, he spent his time with rising stars of the Renaissance period such as his lifelong friend Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, the physician, mathematician, musicologist, astronomer, and cosmographer who finally cared for him on his death bed, and created about ten years later the map Christopher Columbus used on his first voyage to the new world. Also around this time began his friendship with the canon lawyer and diplomat Guiliano Cesarini, who later became president of the Basel Council, and to whom Cusa dedicated his three-volume magnum opus On Learned Ignorance (De docta ignorantia, 1438-40) together with the sequel On Conjectures (De coniecturis, 1442).

After obtaining his doctoral degree in canon law, Cusa enrolled in Cologne in 1425 where he familiarized himself with the Augustinian-Platonic philosophy of the Albertist scholar, Heymeric de Campo, his senior by six years. In this period, he encountered for the first time the works of the Majorcan writer and philosopher Ramon Llull (1232-1312), and the mystical theology of Dionysius the Areopagite. His path led him first, however, to take on the office of a diplomat and canon lawyer.

Cusa’s first landmark work, De concordantia catholica (1433), intervenes in the most prominent conflict of the Basel Council (1432-49) in which he participated initially as a juridical lobbyist, and subsequently as spokesman of the moderate conciliarists. The question at issue was, “is the council superior to the Pope or the Pope superior to the council?” Cusa defended the superiority of the council based on the ecclesiology of the church fathers and the medieval understanding of the Church as “mystical body of the one Christ” (unius Christi mysticum corpus).² However, Cusa’s position was more sophisticated than his conciliarist companions might have expected, since he was convinced that the Church was a “mystical body” in the symbolic realist sense of this word. The expression “body” was thus in his view more than a poetical description for a juridical “corporation” that represents the contractual consent of an individualist system of “checks and balances.” It denoted the abiding presence of the past in the liturgical gathering of the present time, and indicated our responsibility to interpret the visible signs of this sacramental presence in the light of an unfulfilled cosmic future.

This highly anachronistic position is characteristic of his unique style of thinking: Cusa was always quick to engage the past to critique the present in innovative ways. On one hand, De concordantia catholica considered the Church as a radical egalitarian organism in which every part contributes equally to the unity and harmony (concordantia) of a holistic body; but, on the other, Cusa insisted that this egalitarian body is more than a synchronic gathering of the present time. It is answerable not only to its present members but also to the “votes of the ages.”³ The principle of concordance unites the past with the present, and requires the present members of the body of Christ to preserve the legacy of their ancestors as a resource for the future. Hence, the principle of equality requires us to maintain a hierarchical structure in which the genius loci of the longest-lasting place of sacred legitimacy in the preservation of unity, harmony, and peace adopts a preeminent position.⁴ The superiority of the council does not relieve it from its responsibility to act in agreement with the cathedra of Rome, and its acting guardian, the Pope, whose “rulership exists for the sake of the unity of the faithful in order to avoid schism.”⁵

It comes therefore as no surprise that Cusa changed sides as early as ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Part I: Nicholas of Cusa: Pioneer of a Forgotten Path Into the Modern Age
• Part II: Nicholas of Cusa and the Genealogy of Modern Concepts of Space and Autonomy
• Part III: Cusa’s Alternative Vision of the Age to Come
• Index