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Among the works of Cusa, an important figure in Certeau’s inquiry, is De Icona Dei (The Picture of God). The entire chapter, though drawing on the entirety of Cusa writings, revolves mainly around the “look” emanating from an unidentified painting, presumably of the face of Christ. This chapter is an elucidation of Cusa’s observation that the look seems to follow its recipient, and this experience is shared by all spectators of the look. On the basis of this paradigm, and the text of Cusa’s introduction to De Icona Dei, we follow the implications of this all-seeing look, in the way it relates the others to God and to each other, which, like Teresa of Ávila's Moradas, mediates human access to the divine. The introduction, addressed to “brothers” (or monks), outlines a peripatetic spiritual exercise, which might be characterized as the practice of a perspectival/geometrical approach to infinity and the other.

This chapter analyzes Ernst Cassirer's concept of religion both generally as it fits within his theory and specifically in relation to the historical problematization of European secularization, the idea of enlightenment, and the political problem of tolerance. It explains Cassirer's notion of the “religious” as an unsystematic cultural symbolic system and analyzes his interpretation of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. The chapter also shows how Cassirer's interpretation of religion and the Enlightenment influenced his reading of Nicholas of Cusa.

This chapter discusses Nicholas of Cusa’s use of Thierry of Chartres’s theology in his first mystical treatise in 1440, the three books of De docta ignorantia (“On Learned Ignorance”). The first book weds negative theology with Neopythagorean mathematics, drawing on Thierry’s model of the arithmetical Trinity as well as De septem septenis. The second explores the theological meaning of the quadrivium and the cosmological meaning of Thierry’s folding and four modes of being. To articulate the four modes, Nicholas cited the critique by Fundamentum naturae instead of Thierry’s writings themselves. Cusanus seems to have considered them comparable texts, perhaps by the same author. In the third book Cusanus’s Christology defines the divine and human natures of Jesus in terms of his first and second books. This theory of Incarnation therefore both synthesizes the three books of De docta ignorantia and harmonizes Thierry’s words with those of his most acute critic.

This chapter considers the semiotics of Nicholas of Cusa (1407–64) in order to integrate the two dimensions of culture—its anthropological breadth (Poinsot) and its theological height (Aquinas)—that were outlined in the previous two chapters. Cusa’s metaphysics of participation is the key theme here. All organisms cognise and communicate by means of signs, and this sign-making attains to truth by participating finitely in the infinite meaning of things hidden in the divine Word. The same process is at work in the making of material artifacts. The making of signs and artifacts is understood as adding to the range of natural forms, so that culture is an elaboration of nature. From this point of view, culture is a ‘diagonal’ process in which the horizontal breadth of creaturely semiosis participates in the vertical height of the semiotic Trinity.

This chapter explores the meaning of “learned ignorance” as understood by the unusual fifteenth-century scholar and Cardinal of the Catholic Church, Nicholas of Cusa. Building on the writings of ancient authors and Thomas Aquinas, it explains the meaning of Nicholas' statement that we do not know how God is, but only how God is not. Nicholas wrote not only at a time when the Latin Church was especially interested in re-establishing a better relationship with the Greek Church, but also when it feared the advance of Muslim armies along its eastern borders. With regard to Islam, Nicholas studied the Qurʾan to which he applied a pia interpretatio, that is, a faithful interpretation of Islam's sacred book—an interpretation that he believed would help Christians purify incorrect thinking about the Trinity and the Incarnation. Nicholas emphasized that not-knowing actually resulted in a valuable kind of knowing: “the more we are instructed in this ignorance, the closer we approach the truth”.

Apophatic theology has little to (un)say about bodies, whereas it speaks volumes about that which it deems worthy of unsaying. It treats bodies generally not as wicked or repulsive, but as sites of obstruction, suffering, distraction. Since feminist theology as a collective comprises a critical mass of that body-affirming movement, and since some are also dangerously attracted to the apophatic way, the cloud of the impossible engulfs the present exploration from the start. Nicholas of Cusa oddly appears as a mediator both of method and of content. He would plunge one not into an empty chasm but into the “cloud of impossibility”. The necessity of entering the “cloud of impossibility” is no mere metaphysical inevitability, but an all too familiar experience. If we do not cling to a certainty whose oppositional purity we doubt anyway, we enter the Cusan cloud. Then we may relinquish the binary structure of the impasse itself. This chapter examines the cloud of the impossible and the relation between deconstruction and negative theology.

This Introduction surveys several challenges facing Cusanus scholarship stemming from its origins in Neo-Kantian circles in the early twentieth century. Nicholas of Cusa was valued as a fifteenth-century prophet of scientific modernity, but at the same time his thought unsettles customary accounts of the nature of modernity. Because Cusanus integrates number and mathematical measurement into the heart of his Christian theology, there is no strict division between religion and science. This counterexample problematizes the notion that the rise of the mathesis universalis in Galileo and Descartes represents a dramatic rupture with the late Middle Ages. To correct this narrative (first introduced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger) requires one to understand the significance of Thierry of Chartres in the formation of a bona fide medieval Christian Neopythagoreanism.

Brad Bannon argues that comparative theology both challenges and enables us to think differently about how scriptural revelation takes place. He begins by considering how to reformulate Christian theological questions through comparative theology. A half-century ago, Lutheran theologian Rudolf Bultmann provocatively answered “no” to a question he posed: Can the written words of John’s Gospel reveal the Word-become-flesh? Through an engagement with classical Vedānta texts, Bannon encourages us to reformulate Bultmann’s question: How might scriptural revelation occur as an event in the community’s midst, aside from—or subsequent to—the (necessary) activity of reading? Bannon then explores the question and possible answers in two primary and very influential instances of Hindu and Christian theological works: Śaṅkara’s commentarial Vedānta and a sermon by Nicholas of Cusa. By (re)incarnating the Word (whether Johannine or Vedic), the preacher and guru envision revelation as taking place beyond and subsequent to the activity of reading, in the lived and practiced word.

This chapter investigates the nature of divine infinitude from a cross-cultural perspective by bringing Sri Ramakrishna into conversation with classical Indian philosophers as well as Western philosophers and theologians. Maharaj identifies what is distinctive in Sri Ramakrishna’s conception of divine infinitude within the Indian philosophical context by comparing it with the Vedāntic views of the Advaitin Śaṅkara, the Viśiṣṭādvaitin Rāmānuja, and the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Viśvanātha Cakravartin. The remainder of the chapter ventures into cross-cultural territory. First, Maharaj briefly identifies some striking affinities between Sri Ramakrishna and the medieval Christian theologian Nicholas of Cusa. He then brings Sri Ramakrishna into dialogue with the contemporary analytic theologian Benedikt Paul Göcke, who claims that God is infinite in the radical sense that God “is not subject to the law of contradiction.” Finally, Maharaj triangulates Sri Ramakrishna and Göcke with the Continental philosopher Jean-Luc Marion.

Part II of this book takes the account of human culture developed in Part I and extends it backwards into biological and physical nature to reveal culture’s third dimension of natural ‘depth’. This chapter begins that task by considering the biosemiotics of Aquinas, Cusa, and Poinsot, according to which all organisms live, know, and communicate by means of signs. Together these medieval thinkers offer a rich account of the semiotic processes of receptive sensation and expressive communication in non-human organisms, especially emphasising the diversity of semiotic repertoires among species and the single metaphysics of signification that is common to humans and non-human organisms. The production of meaning through signs is then a vast phenomenon of which human culture is but one local expression. The biosemiosis that is in play among all living things represents the biological depth of culture.

In a late essay, Peirce produces a strange and difficult argument for the validity of belief in God, an argument which hinges in large part on a vague mystical feeling he characterizes as “musement.” Rather than judge the validity of Peirce’s argument this essay will use “musement” as the starting point for a consideration of the relationship of tension between the “science” of theory and private religious experience. Writings on religious feeling from Jonathan Edwards and William James will be considered alongside the systems theory of Heinz von Foerster, George Spencer-Brown, and Niklas Luhmann. Ultimately, the claimed “universality” of systems theory and Peirce’s semiotics are seen as “self-limiting” theoretical frameworks and in this way are able to observe their own improbability.

This chapter begins with the Fourth Crusade (1204), which scholars have long noted marks the start of the schism between the Latin and Greek Churches far better than the events of 1054. The Latin occupation of Constantinople demonstrated to the Byzantines the kind of authority the pope expected to wield in the Eastern Church. As a result the anti-papal arguments that had emerged in the twelfth century were now brought forward in an increasingly polemical manner. It was becoming clear that the idea of “church union” meant something radically different to each side—for the popes, the Greeks were disobedient children who must return to obedience, while the emperors and their unionist allies still spoke of the “restoration of communion between sister churches.” Unfortunately, each attempt at union only proved how irreconcilable the two models were, frustrating those who continued to argue in favor of better relations.

This chapter begins with an account of the calendar-reform initiative spearheaded in 1411–17 by Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly at the Councils of Rome and Constance, followed by an in-depth look at the repeated efforts towards a new calendrical legislation made at the Council of Basel in the years 1434–40, which saw the matter debated by a specially created commission or task force. The final part continues the story into the second half of the fifteenth century, highlighting in particular the role of print technology in the dissemination of calendrical and astronomical knowledge. Special attention is given to the activities of the astronomer Johannes Regiomontanus, whose premature death in 1476 prevented him from assisting Pope Sixtus IV in preparing a reform of the ecclesiastical calendar.

This chapter draws explicitly on the thought of Nicholas of Cusa to shed further light on often unexplored dimensions of interreligious dialogue. It firsts describes the link between learned ignorance and interreligious conversation. Next, it describes the author's own experience of an interreligious conversation between Jews, Christians, and Muslims that took place during a course at the Cardinal Bea Institute in Rome. It then analyzes that encounter on the basis of Jewish exegetical interpretations of the sensory experience of Israel at Mt. Sinai.

This chapter is focused on the only text about a crucifixion that we find in the Qur’an. It is a difficult text. For, in sura 4, there appears to be a crucifixion of Jesus; and yet, the Qur’an forcefully denies the reality of Jesus’ crucifixion by Judaeans (not by Romans). “They killed him not”, reads the Qur’an, “nor did they crucify him”. The question then becomes: If Jesus is not crucified in sura 4, who is crucified? The dominant Islamic interpretation of the most cryptic words in sura 4—“so it was made to appear to them”—is that a man other than Jesus died in his place on the cross. The origins and fortunes of this idea are lightly sketched in this chapter, which concludes with a question: What might it mean, that Pilate is perceived as ‘innocent’ in pagan, Judaic, and Islamic traditions?

Lefèvre described his own mathematical turn as a kind of conversion. This chapter explains what motivated his turn to mathematics, considering the place of mathematics in fifteenth-century Paris in relation to court politics and Lefèvre’s own connections to Italian humanists. But more importantly, Lefèvre’s attitude to learning and the propaedeutic value of mathematics drew on the context of late medieval spiritual reform, with its emphasis on conversion and care of the soul. In particular, Lefèvre’s turn to university reform seems to have responded to the works of Ramon Lull, alongside the devotio moderna and Nicholas of Cusa, which he printed in important collections. With such influences, Lefèvre chose the university as the site for intellectual reform.

This chapter takes up the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis in order to empirically enrich the nature-culture theory developed thus far. It considers three themes in the EES—phenotypic plasticity, genetic accommodation, and niche construction—and uses these to argue that the agency of organisms has a nontrivial influence on the evolutionary futures of species. The upshot of this argument is that habits are heritable (though this Lamarckian theme is now to be understood in a Darwinian context). The evolutionary influence of organism agency implies a phylogenetic expression of art in nature. An evolutionary extension of Poinsot’s customary sign is also suggested here, so that nature is ‘habituated’ in its forms and ‘customised’ in its meanings by the natural art of evolution. There is, then, a cultural dimension present through the whole biological order and through all of evolutionary history.