Nicholas of Cusa and Times of Transition PDF Download

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Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004382410
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) was active during the Renaissance, developing adventurous ideas even while serving as a churchman. The religious issues with which he engaged – spiritual, apocalyptic and institutional – were to play out in the Reformation

Author: Jason Aleksander
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004536906
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Mystical Theology and Platonism in the Time of Cusanus engages with the history of mystical theology and Neoplatonic philosophy through the lens of the 15th century philosopher and theologian, Nicholas of Cusa. The volume comprises nineteen essays that break down the barriers between medieval and Renaissance studies, reinterpreting Cusanus’ place in the history of thought by exploring the archive that informed his thinking, while also interrogating his works by exploring them from the standpoint of their later reception by modern philosophers and theologians. The volume also offers tribute to the career of Donald F. Duclow, a leading scholar in the field of Cusanus studies in particular and of the history of mystical theology and Neoplatonic philosophy more generally.

Author: Donald F. Duclow
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000957632
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Engaging Eriugena, Eckhart and Cusanus contains two new essays and nine others published between 2005 and 2019. The essays explore Eriugena, Eckhart and Cusanus as bold thinkers deeply engaged with their times and culture. John Scottus Eriugena, Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa are key figures in the medieval Christian Neoplatonic tradition. This book focuses on their engagement with practical, experiential issues and controversies. Eriugena revises Genesis’ Adam and Eve narrative and makes sexual difference and overcoming it central to his Periphyseon. Eckhart’s Annunciation sermons urge his hearers to give birth to God’s son within their lives, and he develops a distinctive approach to pain and suffering. His radical preaching on the Eucharist and mystical union was judged heretical but was later taken up by Nicholas of Cusa. Coins and banking became key symbols in Cusanus’ exploration of humanity as created in God’s image, and he used mechanical clocks in reflecting on time and eternity. "Engagement" also describes these thinkers’ reception of their predecessors and how later readers appropriated their works. Eriugena struggled with the legacy of Augustine and the Greek Fathers. Eckhart’s theology of suffering provoked varied responses from his students Henry Suso, Johannes Tauler and the twentieth-century therapist Ursula Fleming. Cusanus provides the volume’s lynchpin as two articles analyse his reading of Eriugena and Eckhart, and a third discusses how he deftly countered Johannes Wenck’s accusations of heresy. The book will be of interest to students of Medieval Philosophy, Theology, Spirituality and their place within Cultural History.

Author: Agnieszka Kijewska
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040038255
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 143

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Book Description
Economy and Theology: Cusanus's Theory of Value, a study from the field of the history of philosophy, responds to the present-day interest in what is referred to as economic theology. This study aims to show that value (valor), one of the fundamental concepts of contemporary philosophy and economics, has its genealogy in the thought of Nicholas of Cusa. Starting from the economic context (the concept of price/pretium), Cusanus proposes the theory of value that, on the one hand, is objectively rooted in the Divine act of creation (God as the Minter) and, on the other hand, requires reading by human beings (human mind as a banker). While this theory appears in Cusanus’s late work The Bowling-Game, it is underpinned by his theory of knowledge, theory of human beings and human cognition against the background of his vision of the universe. Thus, the aim of the book is to try to answer the question about the role and tasks of human beings as a principal player in economic and social game. This description of human position emerges from the creative tension between human philosophical and theological reflection and certain economic solutions.

Author: Clyde Lee Miller
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 0813234166
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
“Learned ignorance,” the recognition that God is beyond us and our knowing capacities is the theological concept for which Nicholas of Cusa is most famous. Despite God’s apparent absence Nicholas offers original ways to think about God that would unite his presence with his absence. He called these proposals “conjectures” (coniecturae). Conjecture and conjecturing are central to the methodology of Nicholas’s philosophical theology and to his thinking about human knowledge. By using concrete examples from the everyday life of his times as symbolic imagery Nicholas makes what we say about God imaginatively available and theoretically plausible. He called such conjectural symbols “aenigmata” (= “symbolic or ‘enigmatic’ conjectures”) because they partially clarify and likewise point to an exact truth that is beyond us. Novel and imaginative, Nicholas’s conjectural examples break with the traditional medieval Aristotelian examples and provide further evidence of his role as a figure bridging medieval and Renaissance thought. Following his earlier book, Reading Cusanus (The Catholic University of America Press, 2003), Clyde Lee Miller here examines and comments on the meaning of “conjecture” in Nicholas of Cusa. The Art of Conjecture: Nicholas of Cusa on Knowledge explores what Nicholas meant by conjecture and its import as demonstrated in his treatises and sermons. Beginning with Nicholas’ On Conjectures, Miller analyzes a series of conjectural symbols and proposals across Nicholas’s less frequently discussed texts and recently published sermons. This early Renaissance thinker offers an original and ground-breaking way of framing speculation in philosophical theology and more generally in philosophy itself.

Author: Valentin Gerlier
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000582558
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Crossing the boundaries between literature, philosophy and theology, Shakespeare and the Grace of Words pioneers a reading strategy that approaches language as grounded in praise; that is, as affirmation and articulation of the goodness of Being. Offering a metaphysically astute theology of language grounded in the thought of Renaissance theologian Nicholas of Cusa, as well as readings of Shakespeare that instantiate and complement its approach, this book shows that language in which the divine gift of Being is received, apprehended and expressed, even amidst darkness and despair, is language that can renew our relationship with one another and with the things and beings of the world. Shakespeare and the Grace of Words aims to engage the reader in detailed, performative close readings while exploring the metaphysical and theological contours of Shakespeare’s art—as a venture into a poetic illumination of the deep grammar of the real.

Author: Ferrero Hernández, Cándida
Publisher: Servei de Publicacions de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
ISBN: 8449089182
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
The eleven essays included in this collective volume examine a range of textual genres produced by Christians and Muslims throughout the Mediterranean, including materials from the Corpus Islamolatinum, Christian propaganda and polemical works targeting Muslims and Jews, Inquisition records, and Christian and Muslim sermons. Despite the diversity of the works under consideration and the variety of methodological and disciplinary approaches employed in their analysis, the volume is bound together by the common goals of exploring the propaganda strategies premodern authors deployed for specific aims, be it the unification of religious, cultural, and political groups through discourses of self-representation, or the invention of the political, cultural, religious, or gendered other. Many of the essays offer critical re-readings of works that are obscure or have never been studied, while others shed new light on the cultural and textual interactions between Christians, Muslims and Jews. The volume is divided into four sections, the first of which is comprised of three chapters on the Corpus Islamolatinum that furnish new evidence showing the important role this “encyclopedia” played in spreading knowledge about Islam and contributing to the creation of propaganda and polemics against Islam among European intellectual circles. The chapters in section two offer novel interpretations of the hermeneutical strategies underlying the composition of polemical works such as the lives of Muhammad and Pedro de la Cavalleria’s Zelus Christi. The essays in section three identify some common hermeneutical strategies in the use of anti-Jewish and anti-Islamic arguments to polemicize against religious others or edify Christians and illuminate intertextual relations between authors and genres (disputatio and praedicatio). Finally, section four introduces the gender perspective: the genered nature of the accusations of Judaizing in the analysis of the transcripts of the inquisitorial court of three sisters who were tried in Barcelona in 1496, on the one hand, and two studies that explore the constructions of identities and gender relations reflected in various Islamic sources from opposite ends of the Mediterranean. They offer glimpses of women as subject (s) and as object (s) of preaching and show how such texts can reify or subvert traditional binary gender roles.

Author: Paul Richard Blum
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 0813236207
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
The Renaissance was a period of great intellectual change and innovation as philosophers rediscovered the philosophy of classical antiquity and passed it on to the modern age. Renaissance philosophy is distinct both from the medieval scholasticism, based on revelation and authority, and from philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who transformed it into new philosophical systems. Despite the importance of the Renaissance to the development of philosophy over time, it has remained largely understudied by historians of philosophy and professional philosophers. This anthology aims to correct this by providing scholars and students of philosophy with representative translations of the most important philosophers of the Renaissance. Its purpose is to help readers appreciate philosophy in the Renaissance and its importance in the history of philosophy. The anthology includes translations from philosophers from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and it ranges from works on moral and political philosophy, to metaphysics, epistemology, and natural philosophy, thereby providing historians and students of philosophy with a sense for the nature, breadth, and complexity of philosophy in the Renaissance. Each translation is accompanied by an introduction by a historian of Renaissance philosophy, as well as select secondary sources, in order to encourage further study. This anthology is a companion to Philosophers of the Renaissance, edited by Paul Richard Blum and published by Catholic University of America Press in 2010, which included essays on the writings of the same group of philosophers of the Renaissance: Raymond Llull, Gemistos Plethon, George of Trebizond, Basil Bessarion, Lorenzo Valla, Nicholas of Cusa, Leon Battista Alberti, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino, Pietro Pomponazzi, Niccolò Machiavelli, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, Juan Luis Vives, Philipp Melanchthon, Petrus Ramus, Bernardino Telesio, Jacopo Zabarella, Michel de Montaigne, Francesco Patrizi, Giordano Bruno, Francisco Suàrez, Tommaso Campanella.

Author: Nathan Ron
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030249298
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
This book investigates how Erasmus viewed non-Christians and different races, including Muslims, Jews, the indigenous people of the Americas, and Africans. Nathan Ron argues that Erasmus was devoted to Christian Eurocentrism and not as tolerant as he is often portrayed. Erasmus’ thought is situated vis-à-vis the thought of contemporaries such as the cosmographer and humanist Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini who became Pope Pius II; the philosopher, scholar, and Cardinal, Nicholas of Cusa; and the Dominican missionary and famous defender of the Native Americans, Bartolomé Las Casas. Additionally, the relatively moderate attitude toward Islam which was demonstrated by Michael Servetus, Sebastian Franck, and Sebastian Castellio is analyzed in comparison with Erasmus’ harsh attitude toward Islam/Turks.

Author: Pavel Floss
Publisher: Schwabe Verlag (Basel)
ISBN: 379654195X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Out of the broad variety of Cusanus' work, this book discusses six of his writings, careful not to isolate them from the whole of his work. It instead presents them against the maturation of Cusanus' thinking as it developed from his first sermons up to his shortest philosophical text De apice theoriae. The texts in question are De docta ignorantia, De coniecturis, Idiota de mente, De beryllo, Trialogus de possest and De apice theoriae. In the search for God, or rather in Cusanus' lifetime eff orts to have his spirit touch the fi rst principle and the basis of all things, new perspectives on the world and man within would open up for Cusanus. Respecting this basic intention of Cusanus' thinking, the author primarily deals with Cusanus' ontotheological (metaphysical) claims and, in their context, turns his attention to the cosmological, or anthropologico-gnoseological opinions.