 A MERICAN C U S A N U S S O C I E T Y 

2017 NEWSLETTER Volume XXXIV

Editor: Meredith Ziebart

Bernkastel, Roman-origin medieval castle above town of Bernkastel-Kues

Photo: Il Kim
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Volume XXXIV December 2017

Table of Contents

1. 2016 ACS Business Meeting Sessions of the American Cusanus Society at

Reports the 52nd Annual Congress on Medieval
Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 11-14, 2017
American Cusanus Society Business
Meeting at Western Michigan University, Conference Program .......................................27
May 11, 2017...........................................................2 Abstracts .............................................................27
Banquet Address: Tamara Albertini .............29
2. Recent Conferences

Watanabe Lecture and Celebration of 3. Book Descriptions & Reviews

Kiyomi Koizumi Watanabe, September 23-
24, 2017 Gettysburg, PA
Conference Report .............................................3
Gettysburg 2017 Toast: A Personal Recollection
of Morimichi Watanabe and Kiyomi Koizumi
Watanabe, Il Kim ..................................................5
Renaissance Society of America
Annual Meeting, March 30-April 1, 2017
Chicago, Il
Conference Program .........................................8
Abstracts ...............................................................9
Presentations:
The Helix and the Circle in Cusanus’ De ludo globi,
Paula Pico Estrada ..............................................12
Isabelle Moulin, ed., Participation et vision de Dieu
chez Nicolas de Cues ...............................................37
Marica Costigliolo, The Western Perception of Islam
between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: The
Work of Nicholas of Cusa ......................................41
Thomas Leinkauf, Sein und Denken: Die
Bedeutung und Funktion der artes liberales im
Denkansatz des Cusanus ........................................43
David Albertson, Mathematical Theologies: Nicholas
of Cusa and the Legacy of Thierry of Chartres .........44
Peter Casarella, Word as Bread: Language and
Theology in Nicholas of Cusa ..................................44
Richard J. Serina, Jr., Nicholas of Cusa’s Brixen
Sermons and Late Medieval Church Reform ............47

The Council’s Warlords: Milanese Appropriations of the 4. Bibliography .............................................49

Conciliar Authority, Thomas Woelki ...................17

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Volume XXXIV
contributions by T. Albertini, I. Bocken, C. Catà, E.
Faye, M. Ferrari, A.-H. Klinger-Dollé, J. C. Margolin,
and R. H. Trowbridge.]
Frangenberg, Thomas, “Auditus visu prestantior:
Comparisons of Hearing and Vision in Charles de
Bovelles’ Liber de sensibus,” The Second Sense: Studies in
Hearing and Musical Judgement from Antiquity to the
Seventeenth Century, ed. Charles Burnett, Michael Fend
and Penelope Gouk (London: The Warburg Institute,
University of London, 1991), 71-94.
Logan, Marie-Rose, “Bovillus on Language,” Acta
Conventus Neo-Latini Amstelodamensis (Proceedings of the
Second International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, Amsterdam
19-24 August 1973), ed. P. Tuynman, G. C. Kuiper and
Eckhardt Kessler (Munich: W. F. Verlag, 1979), 657-
666.
Sanders, Philip M., “Charles de Bovelles’ Treatise on the
Regular Polyhedra (Paris, 1511),” Annals of Science, 41:6
(1984), 513-566.
Victor, Joseph M., Charles de Bovelles, 1479-1553 [sic]. An
Intellectual Biography (Geneva: Droz, 1978).
Victor, Joseph M., “Charles de Bovelles and Nicholas
de Pax: Two Sixteenth-Century Biographies of Ramon
Lull,” Traditio 32 (1976), 313-345.
Victor, Joseph M. “The Revival of Lullism at Paris,
1499-1516,” Renaissance Quarterly 28:4 (1975), 504-534.
Zorach, Rebecca, “Meditation, Idolatry, Mathematics:
The Printed Image in Europe around 1500,” The Idol in
the Age of Art, ed. R. Zorach and M. Cole (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2009), 317-342.
 
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December 2017
3. Book Descriptions & Reviews
Participation et vision de Dieu chez Nicolas
de Cues, ed. Isabelle Moulin
Paris: Vrin, 2016, ISBN 9782711627196, 178 pp.
Participation et vision de Dieu chez Nicolas de Cues is the result
of an academic meeting that was held in 2012 at the
Institut d’Études Médievales, set at the Institut
Catholique de Paris, France. This collection of essays
successfully carries out the difficult task of presenting a
general panorama of Nicholas of Cusa’s thought while
at the same time suggesting new lines of research. The
presence of Thomas of Aquinas, the importance of
creation and a phenomenological perspective are among
the not so usual themes that appear in this book. It is to
be noted that the analysis of Cusanus’ thought in each
of the essays is developed from a philosophical point of
view that does not leave aside the fact that his
philosophy has Christological bases.
In her introduction (“Entre Moyen Âge et Renaissance.
Nicolas de Cues et la Vraie Icône de l’Invisible”), Isabelle
Moulin chooses three topics to show Cusanus’ role as a
mediator between the Middle Ages and Modernity: his
symbolic use of mathematical sciences, the astronomical
revolution introduced by De Docta Ignorantia, and his
perspectivism. In each of these points she finds both the
overture to a new age and the omnipresence of God,
which reveals the true meaning of his innovations. But
not only this, she argues. These three fields also show
the central role that creation has in Cusanus’ thought,
an idea leading directly to the problem that gives this
book its title, i.e., participation. Since God is an infinite
that escapes all proportion, participation cannot be
thought of in terms of analogy of being. Moulin finds
the answer to this difficulty in her analysis of De Visione
Dei, where Cusanus elucidates creation by transferring
the Neoplatonic model of intellectual production to one
based on sight. The coincidence between seeing and
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being such as it is discussed in the treatise shows the
significance of creation. Since to see is for God to
bestow being, creation exists because He sees it. But
there is another aspect to this: reciprocally, the hidden
God is revealed in creation as the God who is seen.
Therefore, precisely because without Him the universe
would be nothing, creation is theophany.
The next contribution also highlights the epistemic
value that creation has for Cusanus. In “Le Tableau comme
Phénomène: de la Phénoménologie du Voir à la Theologie
Mystique”, Jean-Michel Counet analyzes the
phenomenology of seeing in De visione Dei. At the
beginning of the monk’s ascent toward mystical
theology, the author finds wonder, both at the fact that
the portrait’s gaze is at the same time mobile and
immobile and at the understanding that the other monks
are also experiencing, as he does, that each of them is
the only one to be seen by the portrait. Counet, who
resorts here to Book II of De Docta Ignorantia, argues that
Cusanus conceives that this wonder, which is at the
origin of every pilgrim’s journey towards God, is not
caused in the first instance by Him but by the experience
the pilgrim makes of the world’s unfathomable essence.
Thus, “seeing God” consists in encountering the world
through the two modes of knowledge that pertain to
human beings. While the sensitive-rational mode
perceives the world as a theophany, the intellectual
mode apprehends that God transcends His
manifestation in the same way that the human intellect
transcends its own productions.
The world as theophany is also Vincent Giraud’s
point of departure in “La Question des Signes dans le
Compendium de Nicolas de Cues”. While the author
acknowledges the importance of creation in Cusanus’
thought, he also, in an insightful reading of Compendium,
wonders why the autumnal Cusanus resorts to signs to
repeat what he has said before. With this question in
mind, Giraud interrogates the text, seeking to discover
the philosophical sense that signs have for Cusanus’ late
thought. Compendium begins with the statement that
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Oneness cannot be singularly in the many, as it is in
itself, but rather in a way that can be communicated to
the many. Multiplicity, therefore, is communication, that
is, sign: everything that appears must be understood as
significatio or communication – communication of
Oneness, but also of individual things, since nothing can
be apprehended as it is in its singularity, in that which
makes it unique. Therefore, everything that human
beings encounter is given to them by means of signs. At
a first level, these signs are material, but the result of
their apprehension is another type of sign, the sensitive
one, which, preserved by memory in the imagination,
becomes a more abstract sign than the previous one. We
thus have a scale where material signs are signs of things,
sensible signs are signs of material signs and imaginative
signs are signs of sensible signs. Although all animals
know by means of signs, only human beings aspire to
apprehend a sign free from all relation to matter. This
absolute sign is Truth, whose communication is the
created world. Here Giraud locates Cusanus’ unique
conception of signs. Whereas the previous tradition
understood the ascent from signs to culminate in an
interpretation of creation, Cusanus goes a step further
and establishes invention as the way of signifying that is
peculiar to humanity. The distinctive operation of the
mind will thus be the creation of signs, while its
reflective capacity will allow it to discover itself as image,
or sign, of the creative power of God. In this way, the
hierarchy of signs is crowned by the human mind,
creator of intellectual signs.
The questioning of the world as theophany
introduced by Vincent Giraud’s article is taken to the
opposite extreme in the following contribution, “L’Un
sans l’Être. Le Statut Méontologique de la Créature” by Hervé
Pasqua. The author addresses the difficult problem of
the non-ontological status of creatures, such as it
appears in two writings from Cusanus, De Aequalitate
and De Principio, both dated 1459. In De Principio,
Cusanus bases himself on Proclus’ Commentary to take
up the problem posed by Plato’s Parmenides: Oneness is
not an act of being, because if in addition to Oneness it
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were also an act of being, then how could it remain one?
Cusanus, who conceives Oneness without being, is
therefore left only with Oneness’ relationship to itself.
For it to remain one, the only relationship that Oneness
can conceive is its own Equality. Oneness is perfectly
equal to itself and this Equality, engendered by self-
knowledge, manifests that Oneness is not sterile but
fecund. Through the generation of Equality, Oneness is
both principle and principiated. De principio, precisely,
investigates Oneness as principle, that is, as the
metaphysical foundation of the many. But if Oneness is
not an act of being, what ontological status can the
multiple and divisible world that comes from it have?
The answer is radical. Creation is not a substantial effect
of being but a reflection of Oneness. As a reflection,
creation is similarity, but since the Creator is not being
but Oneness, the creatures’ status is non-ontological. In
themselves, creatures – whose truth and essence rests,
hidden, in the divine Word – are pure nothing.
“Le Clin d’Oeil de Léonard à Nicolas: Vision, Participation
et Eschatologie chez Nicolas de Cues” by Christian Trottman
examines the gnoseological consequences of Cusanus’
metaphysics. Is human knowledge confined to
conjecture? Or does the coincidence of opposites offer
a method for reaching oneness in the many? The author
uses the scheme ‘P’ presented by Cusanus in De
Coniecturis to argue that the interaction between the
pyramid of light and that of alterity represents a dynamic
progress towards an eschatological realization in which
everything that participates in the light of Oneness is
called to be clarified. Trottman takes his cue from a
point made by Jocelyne Sfez in L’ Art de Conjectures de
Nicolas de Cues (Paris, Beauchesne, 2012), namely, that
the ‘P’ scheme does not represent two triangles but two
pyramids, a figure found not only in Neoplatonic
metaphysics but also in the geometrical optics of
Alhazen. While the Greek tradition explained the origin
of vision as the encounter between a ray of light emitted
by the eye and another one emitted by light, Alhazen
postulated that, although all the points of an object
radiate light, only rays perpendicular to the pupil are the
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cause of the vision. Translated into Cusanus’ theory of
knowledge, the scheme – completed with figure U,
which organizes the hierarchical degrees of the universe
– represents the inevitable bias of all human knowledge.
Trottman, however, emphasizes that just as reason can
rectify the sensory perspective, intellect can rectify the
rational one and thus each level of rectification implies
a new degree of overcoming the opacity of the object of
knowledge. In this way, the optical origins of the ‘P’
scheme would lead to an “optimistic relativism” (109).
Although the eye only receives rays that are
perpendicular to the pupil, the foundation of all
luminous irradiation is God, the absolute Truth.
Towards this Truth strives the human soul, which has
the capacity to perfect itself in terms of its end,
deification. Since for Cusanus the beatific vision is not
attainable in this life, the ultimate meaning of the human
mind’s journey is realized eschatologically.
If the final end of human beings is deification, there
must be a dimension of knowledge that cannot be
reduced to intellectual speculation. In “La Vision du
Crucifié dans le Sermons de Nicolas de Cues”, Jean-Claude
Lagarrigue examines the place of faith in Cusanus’
sermons. One content of the Christian revelation stands
out already in the first sermons: the suffering of the
Crucified. The humiliation of God in Christ appears as
the arch intended to bridge the gap between the finite
and the Infinite. Lagarrigue rescues the Franciscan
origin of the significance of crucifixion in Cusanus’
thought. Unlike Thomas of Aquinas (who held the
thesis that Christ suffered in his human, not in his divine
nature, and therefore that his intellect did not suffer),
Nicholas follows Bonaventure in the conviction that
Christ’s sufferings included the intellect. He maintains
this position in the late sermons, where he spells out its
consequences. If the passion of Christ, in His infinite
gaze, includes all, then it must also include the suffering
of the condemned. This strong thesis was taken up in
1509 by Lefèvre d’Etaples, in his commentary on Psalm
XXX, and taken to the extreme by Luther, who states in
his Commentary on Romans that Christ suffered as a
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condemned man. Lagarrigue shows the difference
between this thesis and that of Cusanus. While for
Luther Christ suffers punishment in our place in a
person-to-person substitution (penal substitution), for
Cusanus He suffers because his compassionate gaze
includes humanity as a whole (moral substitution). The
theology of the Cross running through the sermons,
concludes Lagarrigue, does not imply a fideism that
could be opposed to the intellectual speculation of the
treatises. Indeed, the progressive ascent from sense to
intellect that they propose does not culminate in
theoretical knowledge but in the darkness of distress. In
the dark night of its own death, the intellect meets the
Crucified. The journey, therefore, is not about
transcending reason through the intellect, but about
founding intellect in faith.
The book concludes with two articles that open a
dialogue between Cusanus and the scholastic tradition
which preceded him. In “Analogy, Creation, and Descent in
Cusa and Aquinas”, Simon Oliver refers to the theory of
descent in Cusanus’ Christology in order to examine a
problem not fully solved by Aquinas’ doctrine of
analogy: If things exist preeminently in God, why does
God create? To answer this question, Oliver analyses
the metaphor of creation as descent which Cusanus
develops in De Dato Patris Luminum. Creation is a full
donation of God, received in accordance with the finite
being of the recipient, i.e., contractedly. As Cusanus
clarifies in Book II of De Docta Ignorantia, this does not
mean that there exists something, previous to the
donation, which would receive it. Rather, the donation
is the gift of being itself, without this implying
pantheism: God remains eternally absolutus or free of all
contraction. Creation is thus a descending theophany,
but as Oliver remarks, for Cusanus there is only one
theophany, and it is the Word. Creation, therefore “is
the receipt, in contracted temporal form, of the Father’s
self-gift which is first, and eternally, the begetting of the
Son” (135). This theophany of the Word through whom
all things are made culminates in the Incarnation of the
Word in Jesus Christ. So, why does God create? The
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answer given by Cusanus is that God creates to become
incarnate, a doctrine which implies that the Incarnation
does not depend primarily on human sin but rather is
the consummation of God’s theophany.
While the previous article looked at the relationship
between Cusan thought and Thomistic realism, in
“Mathesis and Methexis: The Post-Nominalist Realism of
Nicholas of Cusa”, John Milbank examines its departure
from Franciscan nominalism. Instead of taking Cusanus
as a figure who stands on the border between the
medieval and modern ages, this author prefers to
consider his thought as a path not taken which still lies
open to us (149). This path amounts to finding new
answers to the problems raised by nominalism, the
school of thought which threw realism into a crisis.
Cusanus’ path is new in the sense that it acknowledges
the crisis and therefore avoids returning to Aristotelian-
Thomistic realism to address it. This he does at different
levels. His ontology refuses the idea, which can be found
in Duns Scotus, of degrees of quanta of univocally
shared transcendental perfections. Instead, Cusanus
recovers the Platonic and Christian idea that the finite
world exists through participation in a divine principle
and is structured by way of the divine proportion. But
he allows no room for quantification: the divine number
is unknowable to the human mind and the mathematical
examples that the mind creates are but symbols. As for
the individual being, it is the only thing that exists. But
since its truth lies in the infinite divine Truth, the
individual is always striving to realize its ontological
nature, which exceeds the way in which each entity, as a
material being, can exist. This ontological tension
between finite and infinite finds its epistemological
correlate in Cusanus’ rejection of the principle of non-
contradiction. Not only Truth, but also the truth of
finite beings, is beyond all opposition. Although the
consequence for the human mind is that all of its
knowledge is conjectural, there is no skepticism in this.
Cusanus’ metaphysics are crowned by the figure of
Christ, in whom the individual creature coincides with
the divine essence, and the conjecturing power
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coincides with the Truth. Thus, concludes Milbank, for
Cusanus the one reliable human conjecture is the
Church, as the body of Christ.
Paula Pico Estrada
Marica Costigliolo, The Western Perception
of Islam between the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance: The Work of Nicholas of Cusa
Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2017, ISBN
9781498208192, 163 pp.
While this book translates and considerably expands
Marica Costigliolo’s dissertation 104, the American
Cusanus Society and I have been involved in its
development. Acknowledging the Society’s role, Marica
Costigliolo thanks Morimichi Watanabe for inviting her
to give her “first paper on Cusanus and Islam” at
Kalamazoo in 2009 (xv). She also spoke for the ACS
during the Renaissance Society of America’s 2010
meeting in Venice, and I invited her to participate in the
2012 Gettysburg conference on Cusanus and Islam. Her
essay from Gettysburg appeared in the conference
proceedings 105, and forms the basis for her book’s final
chapter. I also reviewed draft chapters of the book, and
our friend Cary Nederman wrote the Foreward. For
these reasons, what follows is less an objective review
than a personal response to Marica’s work.
The book’s back cover briefly states my view of the
work:
Marica Costigliolo has given us a remarkable and
insightful book. It offers fresh, precise studies of
Nicholas of Cusa’s two extraordinary works on
Marica Costigliolo, Islam e Cristianesimo: mondi di differenze nel
104
Medioevo: il dialogo con l’Islam nell’opera di Nicola da Cusa (Genova
University Press, 2012).
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December 2017
Christian-Muslim relations, and links them to his
political and theological writings. As Costigliolo
examines Nicholas’ sources and discusses
Renaissance and Byzantine writers on Islam, she
redefines medieval inter-religious dialogue, and
traces shifting Western perceptions of Islam from
‘enemy’ to ‘other’. This book thus has an ambitious
agenda, and fulfills it admirably.
Here I shall expand on this.
Discussions of Nicholas’ De pace fidei have long
focused on its dialogue form, but usually within a naively
modern view of tolerance that ignores the work’s
context. In contrast, Costigliolo describes medieval
dialogue as “a structure where conflict could be
thematized” (2) – a structure that includes disputation,
“commentary, paraphrase, interpretation, and not only
intellectual exchange between two or more
interlocutors” (12). In this broad sense, Cusanus’ De pace
fidei and his Cribratio Alkorani, which analyzes the
Qur’an, are both dialogues. Costigliolo also focuses on
difference/otherness and identity/unity as guiding
threads throughout Nicholas’ works. These themes
often figure in philosophical and theological readings of
Cusanus, but here they take on political and sociological
weight as well.
Chapter Two explores the metaphor of the body in
De concordantia catholica’s efforts to harmonize differences
within both church and empire:
The church, as a corpus mysticum, is an organic unity
or concordantia and exercises its powers through a
representative organism, which is an expression of
common consent. This organism is the council,
which represents the church in its unity. (23)
Nicholas of Cusa and Islam, edited by Ian Levy, Rita George-
105
Tvrtković and Donald Duclow (Leiden: Brill, 2014).