The Legacy of Learned Ignorance presents, as Morimichi Watanabe, the President of the American Cusanus Society, in his preface indicates, the papers of a conference held at the Catholic University of America in October 2001 in order to celebrate the sixth centenary of the birth of Nicolas of Cusa.
After an helpful, extensive introduction, given by the editor Peter Casarella, the volume opens with a translation of "Nicholas of Cusa's Sermon on the Pater noster ," translated by Frank Tobin and introduced by Nancy Hudson. She gives the necessary philological information and a short overview on the main points of this famous sermon, written in the Mosel-Franconian dialect.
In his essay "Seeing and Not Seeing," Bernard McGinn points out that Nicholas of Cusa's place in the history of Christian mysticism has not been fully appreciated. McGinn argues that the De visione Dei cannot be subsumed under the categories of medieval mysticism, because it not only reformulates the fundamental thoughts of the dialectical Neoplatonic mysticism of Dionysius, Eriugena or Eckhart, but also integrates the opposing scriptural positions of seeing God not as a summary, but as a new creation.
The essay "Nicholas of Cusa's Relationship to Anselm of Canterbury" by Jasper Hopkins tries to work out Anselm's influence on Cusanus. For Hopkins there can be no doubt that Nicholas was not drawing his knowledge from secondary sources, but read the corpus of Anselm itself. Hopkins analyzes in a few considerations various passages in which Cusanus quoted Anselm.
In his interesting article "The question of pantheism from Eckhart to Cusanus," Luis Dupré argues that in spite of the fact that pantheism was a term created in the eighteenth century, not only were the problems which Eckhart and Cusanus treated the same, but moreover the Cusan thinker followed in most essentials the metaphysics of the Thuringian master's writings. Dupré's analysis of Cusanus' works points out that neither Nicholas nor Eckhart can be suspected of pantheism, because the cardinal added the distinction between perspectival and absolute knowledge.
The metaphor of man as a living image of God is considered by Wilhelm Dupré in his essay "The Image of the Living God. Some Remarks on the Meaning of Perfection and World Formation." Wilhelm Dupré gives the historical background to understand the idea of Cusanus in its proper context. Unlike Raimundus Sabundus, who also used the term viva imago , Cusanus stresses the fact of internal mental dynamics. Dupré underlines that the mind as a process is trinitarian; it includes a theoretical, practical and affective significance. The combination makes human beings able to be free and creative. Rightly, Dupré argues that Cusanus' idea of man as living image ought to be discussed as an alternative in our postmodern time.
The paper "On the Power and Poverty of Perspective. Cusanus and Alberti," by Karsten Harries also deals with the topic of (post)modernity. The main point of his article is to show the relationship between both thinkers insofar as he points out the common structure of Alberti's perspective construction and the idea of coniectura ," i.e. of several different points of view. He interprets Alberti's De pictura as an attempt at--as Heidegger later called it with regard to Descartes--"the age of the world picture." "Picture" is understood as something produced by and centered on a subject. This attempt includes a loss of transcendence, as Harries points out. In his opinion, Alberti figures as a precursor of Descartes; in this sense Cusanus is the man who recognizes the poverty that shadows the power of "the age of the world picture," who "can help us to open windows in the house modernity has built, windows to transcendence" (108).
Walter Andreas Euler's starting point in his "An Italian Painting from the Late Fifteenth Century and the Cribratio alkorani of Nicholas of Cusa" is Wolfgang Speyer's interpretation of a picture (in Das Münster 1992, 215 n.), in which he described the three men in the picture as representing the founders of the three religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. According to Speyer, the picture's message is inspired by a theology like that of Cusanus. Thereupon Euler turns to a discussion of Cribratio alkorani ," a late work of Cusanus. He describes Cusanus' evaluation of the Qur'an: The holy text of Islam can be understood as a "primitive stage on the way to true Christianity" or as a "subtle but diabolical attempt to deny Christianity's core ideas." Both matters of interpretation appear in Cribratio alkorani ." But in spite of this ambivalence Euler emphasizes rightly the fact that Cusanus himself has studied the Qur'an several times and seriously--and there are only a few authors who did so, at least in the age of Cusanus.
Il Kim refers in his "A Brief Report on the Painting of the Three Haloed Figures" to the same painting as Euler. He doubts the interpretation of Wolfgang Speyer. In his opinion the three men are Moses, Christ and St. Luke. Kim argued that one can see a reclining ox beside the figure, while Speyer interpreted the figure as Mohammed. Moreover, Kim dates the painting toward the second half of the sixteenth century.
Thomas Prügl deals with "The Concept of Infallibility in Nicholas of Cusa." In a detailed analysis he maintains that infallibility belongs, according to Nicholas of Cusa, to the "most essential characteristics of the Church." To his considerations we have to add that in the theological and philosophical works of Cusanus the term hardly ever appears.
Cary J. Nederman's paper "Empire Meets Nation" concerns "Imperial Authority and National Government in the Renaissance," as the subtitle indicates. In contrast to authors like Sigmund or Watanabe, he implicates Nicholas of Cusa in the formulation of the national state by arguing that the commitment to the idea of an universal empire of Cusanus (and Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini) does not preclude acceptance and justification of the national state.
Paul E. Sigmund gives a comparative study of "Medieval and Modern Constitutionalism," looking at "Nicholas of Cusa and John Locke" (subtitle). Sigmund sums the discussion about the link between fifteenth-century and seventeenth-century constitutionalism. According to him continuity exists between the two periods, but only the later one can be understood as a modern conception of constitutionalism. Although the theory of Nicholas of Cusa seems to be very medieval, if we look especially at its hierarchical aspects, Cusanus' thought anticipates modern constitutional institutions, as Sigmund shows.
In her clear paper Elizabeth Brient discusses the question "How can the Infinite be the Measure of the Finite?" She interprets three examples of Cusanus in their function to illustrate this paradox and summarizes: "He uses the example of the number series to figure the unfolding of creation in all its multiplicity from divine unity. His reflections on the nature of the continuum, in turn, serve to articulate his conception of the immanence of the infinite in the finite [...] Finally, the maximum polygon, which is resolved into identity with the circle, figures the link between the infinite and the finite [...] as a limit-concept."
Quoting Cusanus's "The Earth is a Noble Star," Regine Kather gives an overview of "The Arguments for the Relativity of Motion in the Cosmology of Nicolaus Cusanus and Their Transformation in Einstein's Theory in Relativity." She sustains on the one hand that the starting point of the theory of relativity is different from the cosmology of Cusanus, but stresses on the other hand that the view of the world of both thinkers converges "in a certain respect."
Summing up one has to state that unfortunately this book comes late--in the meantime (since 2001) many studies and volumes dealing with related topics have been published. It would have been very interesting to integrate these recent positions into this volume. But nevertheless Peter Casarella and the contributors have presented a book which leads to many fundamentally convincing aspects of the legacy of learned ignorance.