The relation of the Middle Ages to the modern world is a popular topic these days. Medievalists are discussing the long Middle Ages while modernists suggest that there was an early modern era.
This volume deals with this issue through the life and work of one man, Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), a polymath who made significant contributions in several learned fields. The theme of his writings was the search for "unitive harmony and the coincidence of opposites" in a world he saw as fragmented (xix). The editors argue that the key to understanding Cusa and his importance lies in "his resolute endeavors to reform the Church at the genesis of modernity" (xvi). As a bishop, he strove to improve the spiritual life of lay Catholics. He was also a participant in the conciliar controversy, first in support of the conciliar movement and then turned to the papal position. He participated in efforts to reconcile the Eastern Christian Churches with the Latin Church and even saw the ultimate reconciliation of all religions into one universal faith. His work in mathematics sought to reconcile religious faith with efforts to see the world in rational and mathematical terms.
The book's four sections deal with Ecclesiastical Reform, Theological Reform, Reform of Perspective, and Reform of Method. The Introduction and the Epilogue discuss the significance of Cusa, his long-term impact on modern thought, and the role of Ernst Cassirer in focusing attention on him and away from the Italian Renaissance thinkers that Jacob Burkhardt had seen as the most importance thinkers of the age, and the forerunners of the modern world.
Although the book deals with sophisticated concepts, the opening article in Part 1, Church Reform, opens with Pope Eugenius IV and the men around him. Thomas M. Izbicki and Luke Bancroft see him as "A Difficult Pope", who underwent a significant transformation, replacing "known friends and supporters" with "men whose allegiance and capabilities" provided the pope with "much-needed competence", men such as Cusa. This transformation marked the pope's "reassertion of papal authority in Rome and abroad" (67-68). It may also explain Cusa's move from the conciliarist position to the papal regarding reform. It would come from the top, led by a reforming pope and his learned officials.
Three articles deal with Cusa's relation to and influence on figures involved in the work of Church reform: Leon Battista Alberti, Martin Luther, and Paolo Sarpi. Il Kim demonstrates that Cusa and Alberti shared a common interest in reform, Cusa stressing a return to "a simple, unadorned form of communal faith" expressed within "simple interior spaces for prayer", while Alberti the architect stressed a return to "simple church interiors" that would serve Cusa's purpose (77). Such a reformed Church would be "more communal than hierarchical..."(81).
Next, Richard J. Serina turns to Cusa's influence on Martin Luther. Scholars have denied that Luther was connected "with any possible medieval precursors", but recently, some have argued that Luther's early criticism "was essentially in continuity with the normative medieval tradition of papacy and reform", and similar to that of Cusa (105-106). Luther, the theologian and scripture scholar, eventually concluded that the corruption of the Church was the result of the dominant role of canon lawyers such as Cusa who had produced "layers of ecclesiastical jurisprudence" that blocked reform (122).
In the final article here Alberto Clerici discusses Paolo Sarpi, a Venetian monk and scholar who shared three important interests with Cusa, interests that span the Middle Ages and modernity: conciliarism, mathematics, and celestial physics. Defending Venice in a conflict with the papacy, Sarpi relied on the work of Cusa and other conciliarists, demonstrating that the conciliar movement may have lost the battle with the papacy, but its principles continued to circulate.
The shared interest of Sarpi and Cusa in mathematics and "a keen interest in celestial physics", led Thomas Kuhn to conclude that Cusa played a significant role in the early stages of the development of Copernicanism and early modern science (137).
These articles stress that Church reform remained important to Cusa even as he moved from the conciliar position to the papal. His writings circulated and cited in the writings of later figures, Catholic and Protestant. There is, however, a paradox in his position. On the one hand, he associated reform with strong papal and scholarly action but, as Kim argues, he sought to restore the spirit and form of the early Church, leading to a "more communal and less hierarchical" Church.
The second part of the book deals with Cusa's influence on Martin Luther and John Calvin and with the claim that Cusa's ideas were linked to earlier Catholic mystical writings that were pantheistic in nature.
Like Il Kim, Joshua Hollmann argues that "Cusanus' theology and theological method of Christ and the coincidence of opposites bear striking similarities to the coincidental Christology and anthropology of Luther's Freedom of a Christian that deserves attention" (153-154).
For Gary W. Jenkins, Cusa's mystical writings involved him in the Reformation debates about the nature of the Holy Trinity. He argues that Cusa's theology "illuminates Trinitarian controversies of the sixteenth century", especially as these controversies affected John Calvin (183).
The final article deals with the criticism that Cusa's "teaching on God as the complicatio or enfolding of the world" led to accusations of pantheism" from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries(199). Matthew T. Gaetano points out that ecclesiastical officials had long been wary of theologians and mystics "that they judged to confuse God with creation..." (200). One of Cusa's contemporary critics accused him of being in the tradition of the "Waldensians, Eckhartians, and Wyckliffites", those who failed "to distinguish God and the creation appropriately"(201). Cusa rejected this assertion, attributing the charge to the critic's membership in the "Aristotelian sect", the scholastic tradition that Cusa opposed (202). Gaetano observes, however, that there were orthodox Catholic theologians who saw Cusa's "vision of God and creation could help to renew early modern Catholic theology and philosophy" (223).
These articles demonstrate that Cusa's thought dealt with many of the significant theological issues that the reformers, Catholic and Protestant, were raising as well as in the long-standing issue of pantheism that concerned the Catholic Church. Luther and Calvin may not have read Cusa, but he dealt with issues with which the reformers wrestled, while Catholic critics saw in the same works a pantheistic streak that reached back to medieval heretics.
In Chapter 8, Luisa Brotto compares an unlikely pair of philosophers, Cusa and Giordano Bruno. She opens with a statement from a nineteenth-century scholar who argued that "Bruno had more completely and more coherently developed a kind of pantheism that had remained somewhat implicit, although unresolved in Cusanus' works" (231). Cusa, however, "never disavows the Catholic faith, whereas Bruno condemns it" (232). Both men also shared the idea that religion can and should be transformed into the keystone of a peaceful public and political life." This common goal, however, "led them to radically different conceptions of religious reformation"(233). Brotto concludes that "according to Cusanus and Bruno, mutual tolerance and interaction can allow humanity to exist in harmony", the universal concord that Cusa sought to achieve (252).
In the next three chapters, Eric M. Parker, Derek Michaud, and Nathan R. Strunk discuss Cusa's influence on the Cambridge Platonists. Parker observes that Cassirer proposed that the English interest in the Platonic tradition "was of Cusan provenance" (257). Here again, one of the Cusan themes that attracted attention was his notion that ultimately all conflict and discord could be resolved.
For Derek Michaud, Cusa's thought has much in common with the Cambridge Platonist John Smith: they had similar theories about the "spiritual senses of the soul" that involve "a mystical path of knowledge" that "transcend[s] the stale precision of the scholastics", but there is no evidence that Smith was familiar with Cusa's work. These writers also differ as to how the spiritual sense enables humans to know God. In Smith's version, "one spiritually senses God directly; while for the Catholic Cusa, sense reveals the pattern necessary for contemplation of the Divine" (285).
In the final entry in this section Strunk examines the links between Cusa and the English Platonist Henry More who lived two centuries later. Both responded "to the replacement of a stable, geocentric universe with an increasingly-moving, decentered one" reflected in Copernicus's work and contemporary scientific work on motion. Cusa's goal was to defend the principle "of the living dynamism of divine presence in the world [and] remains consistent with a physical universe in unceasing motion". Two hundred years later More sought "to transpose the Platonic conception of world-soul in order to reformulate cosmologies that can assimilate and respond to changes in understanding the world like the ubiquity of motion and homogenization of space made normative by early modern science" (307). Both men denied that early modern scientific developments "led to the separation of God from the world..." (308). There is no evidence that More read Cusa, but it is clear that "he inherited, like Cusanus, the Platonism translated and commented on translated and commented on by Marsilio Ficino" (334 n.73).
In the final section of the book, the writers discuss the influence of Cusa on theological debates in France, Eastern Europe, and Germany from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Richard Osterhoff points to the influence of Cusa on the well-known French reformer Jacques Lefèvre d'Etaples who edited the Opera Omnia (1514) of Cusa's works. He opened the introduction to this edition with the praise awarded Cusa from Giovanni Andrea dei Bussi: Cusa was "a model of erudition who had mastered all forms of history, mathematics, civil and church law, Aristotelian philosophy, and Christian theology" (339). Lefèvre added that Cusa was also "the most talented interpreter of an ancient theology", by which he meant the work of Boethius (342).
Roberta Giubilino discusses "possible links between Cusa and the French scholar Guillaume Postel who, like Cusa, believed "in the possibility of establishing lasting concordia among all religions, cultures, and languages, thus promoting greater unity in the universe" (371).
Chapters 14 and 15 discuss Cusa's influence on the Czech "philosopher and theologian", Jan Amos Comenius (387). According to Pavlar, "Nicholas of Cusa prepared the way for" Comnenius who, like Cusa, had a project of universal reform..." (411).
For Simon Burton, Cusa's writings "offered Comenius an escape from the rigid world view of scholastic Aristotelianism towards a more dynamic and mystical, Christocentric view of reality", one rooted in the Platonic tradition (417).
In the final chapter in this section, Jan Makovsky examines Cusa's relation to the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz. Both men "held that there would be no peace among peoples...without the unity of the Church and a peace among all religions based on a true dialogue" (451).
In the Epilogue, Michael Moore turns to the question of why Ernst Cassirer turned to Nicholas of Cusa as the exemplar of a significant figure in the transition from the medieval to the modern era. In his opinion, Cusa wanted to ensure that "the truths and institutions of the Catholic church would survive during a period of ecclesiastical crisis, by taking strength through reform..." (485).
Cassirer, seeking "the origins of modern philosophy", believed that philosophy "could provide orientation and guidance for thought in regard to the human condition and the modern experience of historical trauma" (485). He saw in Cusa's world the violent trauma that he was experiencing in post-WWI Germany where the "Hegelian vision of a progressive realization of Spirit in the realm of ideas was countered by a sense of deep crisis, a sensation of historical break" (486). This sense of crisis led to "new directions" in the "philosophy of history and historical method..." (487).
For Cassirer, Cusa was a preeminent Renaissance figure in place of the figures that Burckhardt and subsequent scholars had identified as such. He noted, however, that Cusa "was connected to those fascinating Italian thinkers who were his contemporaries, and shared their interests" (487). It was "the multi-dimensionality of Cusanus, whom he presented as a central figure of the Renaissance" that fascinated Cassirer (490). Cusa's work was the "combination...of humanistic activities with new scientific insights" that "greatly appealed to" Cassirer (499). In this he opposed "propositions of human fatedness, and absolute historicity" associated with his contemporaries Spengler and Heidegger." Cassirer asserted that we must affirm freedom" (501).
One might visualize this volume as a large table with Cusa at the head and the philosophers and theologians sitting around it. Cusa sets the agenda for a discussion of his two fundamental themes, reform and concordance. The various scholars discussed, men with the competence, allegiance, and capabilities that Eugenius IV had sought, join him. Some knew Cusa, others had read him, and yet others had not read him but contributed to issues that he had raised. Over the course of three centuries, from Cusa to Leibnitz, these scholars discussed a wide variety of themes related to Cusa's basic interests. They were examined, discussed, and modified. By the eighteenth century, the intellectual world that Cusa represented had largely been replaced but his goal of universal concordance remained alive.
The extensive bibliographies that follow each chapter enable the reader to participate in the discussion.