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Cusanus Today
Thinking with Nicholas of Cusa between Philosophy and Theology
Edited by David Albertson
Foreword by Jean-Luc Marion
Imprint: Catholic University of America Press
At the end of the nineteenth century, German theologians and philosophers rediscovered the Renaissance cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464). Immediately they hailed Cusanus as the first modern thinker, a brilliant German rival to the French Descartes. But since the founding of the Cusanus critical edition in 1927 up to its conclusion in 2005, historians have gradually learned that Nicholas was more of a medieval preacher and contemplative than a modern philosopher.
Yet over the same century, modern German and French readers were already digging into Nicholas’s many works. There they encountered an exciting voice with fresh perspectives about God’s immanence in the cosmos and the awesome capacities of the human mind. Leading philosophers and theologians from Erich Przywara to Karl Jaspers to Hans-Georg Gadamer, and from Gilles Deleuze to Jacques Lacan to Michel de Certeau, found their own thinking stimulated by the cardinal’s innovative concepts and interdisciplinary style. Even as Nicholas shifted from modern to medieval among historians, he was emerging as a contemporary interlocutor for moderns and postmoderns. Who could have guessed that the first debate between Jean-Luc Marion and Emmanuel Falque would take place over the fifteenth-century mystical dialogue, De
visione dei?
If Meister Eckhart found his moment amidst Deconstruction in prior decades, Nicholas of Cusa is our thinker for today. His interests anticipate themes in continental philosophy of religion, whether alterity, invisibility, the fold, or the icon. His habit of interweaving philosophy and theology anticipates current debates on the thresholds of phenomenology. Our volume first maps the contours of modern receptions of Nicholas of Cusa in French and German spheres, and then beyond Europe to the Americas and Japan. It also hosts the next round of engagement by some of today’s most original Christian thinkers: Emmanuel Falque, John Milbank, and David Bentley Hart.
David Albertson is associate professor of religion at University of Southern California. Jean-Luc Marion is a French philosopher and Roman Catholic theologian.
"A significant contribution. Nicholas of Cusa is a figure who often gets appropriated by modern audiences in strange new ways—sometimes as an arch-humanist of the ‘Renaissance,’ other times as the inventor of ‘modernity.’ This volume avoids such caricatures by placing Cusanus within his proper late medieval context, while also attending closely to the unique contributions he did make—concerning the concept of infinity, for instance—to a culture that was in the midst of transforming into something that we could no longer properly call ‘medieval.’"
~Sean Hannan, MacEwan University, Edmonton, Canada
"With a typically learned and astute foreword by Jean-Luc Marion and a likewise rich and informative introduction by the volume’s editor, leading Cusa scholar David Albertson, Cusanus Today beautifully illustrates the profound relevance of this liminal and singular figure to ‘our own plural and fragile modernities’ as the introduction so aptly puts it. Featuring essays by a host of today’s foremost theologians and philosophers and exploring Cusa’s importance within a range of major thinkers and trajectories, from German Idealism through phenomenology and hermeneutics to the Kyoto School, psychoanalysis, and more, the volume stands not only to inform and to enrich our thinking about Cusa and his complex, generative reception history but also to inspire and to enhance our thinking with Cusa about numerous questions of urgency today, including the character and limits of metaphysics; relations among philosophy, theology, and mathematical science; interreligious dialogue; alterity and iconicity; vision and visuality; and relations among technology, human creativity, nature and artifice"
~Thomas Carlson, University of California, Santa Barbara
"This volume revisits the extraordinary thought of Cusanus for a new generation of scholars. It marks a timely and topical retrieval of one of the most original thinkers of the vital debate between philosophy and theology. It makes this great Renaissance mind our contemporary."
~Richard Kearney, Boston College