[PDF] Nicholas Of Cusas On Learned Ignorance eBook

Author : Donald F. Duclow
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 340 pages
File Size : 19,69 MB
Release : 2024-08-01
Category : History
ISBN : 1040247547

GET BOOK

The medieval Christian West's most radical practitioners of a Neoplatonic, negative theology with a mystical focus are John Scottus Eriugena, Meister Eckhart and Nicholas Cusanus. All three mastered what Cusanus described as docta ignorantia: reflecting on their awareness that they could know neither God nor the human mind, they worked out endlessly varied attempts to express what cannot be known. Following Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, they sought to name God with symbolic expressions whose negation leads into mystical theology. For within their Neoplatonic dialectic, negation moves beyond reason and its finite distinctions to intellect, where opposites coincide and a vision of God's infinite unity becomes possible. In these papers Duclow views these thinkers' efforts through the lens of contemporary philosophical hermeneutics. He highlights the interplay of creativity, symbolic expression and language, interpretation and silence as Eriugena, Eckhart and Cusanus comment on the mind's work in naming God. This work itself becomes mystical theology when negation opens into a silent awareness of God's presence, from which the Word once again 'speaks' within the mind - and renews the process of creating and interpreting symbols. Comparative studies with Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius, Anselm and Hadewijch suggest the book's wider implications for medieval philosophy and theology.

Author : Peter J. Casarella
Publisher : CUA Press
Page : 313 pages
File Size : 15,33 MB
Release : 2006-03-29
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0813214262

GET BOOK

This volume offers a detailed historical background to Cusanus's thinking while also assaying his significance for the present. It brings together major contributions from the English-speaking world as well as voices from Europe.

Author : Cardinal Nicholas (of Cusa)
Publisher : Paulist Press
Page : 408 pages
File Size : 30,28 MB
Release : 1997
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780809136988

GET BOOK

For the first time in one volume in English are the spiritual writings of this outstanding intellectual figure (1401-1464) whose work anticipated modern problems of ecumenicity and pluralism, empowerment and reconciliation, and tolerance and individuality.

Author : Clyde Lee Miller
Publisher : CUA Press
Page : 206 pages
File Size : 26,55 MB
Release : 2021-03-12
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0813234166

GET BOOK

“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 :
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 536 pages
File Size : 11,42 MB
Release : 2019-01-14
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9004385681

GET BOOK

The authors focus on four major thematic areas – the reform of church, the reform of theology, the reform of perspective, and the reform of method – which together encompasses the breadth and depth of Cusanus’ own reform initiatives.

Author : Nicholas of Cusa
Publisher : Cosimo Classics
Page : 113 pages
File Size : 21,53 MB
Release : 2016-03-10
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1616409894

GET BOOK

Known for his deeply mystical writings about Christianity, Nicholas of Cusa wrote this, his most popular work, against a backdrop of widespread Church corruption. God, he believed, is found in all things, and thus cannot be perceived by man's senses and intellect alone. The path to ultimate knowledge, then, begins in recognizing our own ignorance. Deeply influenced by Saint Augustine, Nicholas mixes the metaphysical with the personal to create a deeply felt work, first published in 1453, designed to restore faith in even the most jaded.