In his most recent book, The Analogical Turn: Rethinking Modernity with Nicholas of Cusa, Johannes Hoff describes Cusa’s body of writings as “a seriature (in the sense of Jacques Derrida): a cord, rope, or series of unique gestures designed to approximate the apocalyptic turning-point at which God comes to mind” (189). Something similar could be said here. The Analogical Turn is a work that defies—perhaps intentionally (see 56!)—linear analysis, exposition, or summary. Indeed, on a first reading the chapters appear to lack, as Hamann once said of Socrates’s maxims, “the bridges and ferries of method that would have established a community among them.” Upon closer inspection, however, one discovers a method that bears some analogy to the “bowling game” that Cusa invented and is the subject of his first book—a game in which “skillful players might be able to move their bowl in a helicoidal circle around the target point” (157). In other words, though the development of Hoff’s argument is not linear, and anyone looking for a straightforward exposition may very well be frustrated, each chapter nevertheless brings us closer to the target of seeing what Hoff sees in Nicholas of Cusa: a pre-modern visionary whose thought has the post-modern potential to lead us beyond the modern dialectic between univocity and equivocity, and back to an alternative, pre-modern analogical vision of the age to come (xv).

The basic argument here, accordingly, is that modern dialectics have blinded us to reality—either in the way that modern scientific rationalism tries to extort from creatures a univocal meaning they have never had, or in the way that postmodernism denies that creatures have any intrinsic meaning at all that is not a function of culture, the will to power, or the play of différance. In short, both of these extremes—“the univocity of modern scientific rationality and the ambiguous equivocity of post-modern pop culture” (xv)—have rendered reality opaque. And so we need to go back to Cusa’s analogical rationality if we are to go forward into an apocalyptic future in which the world will be seen for what it is, a transparency of divine things, and one can “see in every creature an image of the divine amabilitas” (206). Fittingly, therefore, the work concludes with a mystagogical ascent to a Cusa-inspired vision of God. Given the richness of this work and the limitations of the present review, however, some delimiting and focusing of perspective will be necessary. In the following, therefore, I will limit my comments to those aspects of this work that I found most interesting, but also integral to the kind of perspective Hoff wants to provide.

The Analogical Turn turns on Cusa’s overturning of modern perspective, which Hoff traces back to the work of Cusa’s contemporary and fellow priest, Leon Battista Alberti (1406–72), who “applied the mathematical methods of Euclid to the art of painting” (47). On the face of it, there does not seem to be anything problematic here: Alberti’s mathematical mapping of perspective can subsequently be seen in the geometrical art of Piero della Francesca, who is best known and admired for his paintings of gospel scenes (e.g., The Baptism of Christ from 1450). Nevertheless, Hoff sees a problematic turning point here that will subsequently define the “world picture” (in the Heideggerian sense) of the modern age. The problem, as he sees it, is that the vanishing point of the work of art mirrors that of the viewer, eo ipso “putting the latter in the position of a sovereign observer who can control the space of his perception as if it were nothing but a mirror image of his subjective position” (48). In other words, from this point on, Hoff argues, modern perspective is defined not by a “being seen” (as one is seen by the gaze of an icon) or by a misty seeing of the invisible through the visible—one could just as well say, of the infinite through the finite—but by the dominant viewer (the new and only topos noetos) and this viewer’s imaging of reality in narcissistic terms, according to his conception of it. In short, reality is now configured in my image and according to my representation of it. Thus, according to Hoff’s genealogy, the “winged eye” of Alberti (which appears on the flipside of his portrait medallion) leads directly to the “thinking I” of Descartes’s cogito (57)—and thence, one might add, to the synoptic transcendental ego of Kant.

At this specular point a distinctly modern perspective is established (which for Hoff is also the presupposition of modern individualism). For once the artist no longer sees his or her task as a mimesis of the Creative Art, as an iconic rendering of the invisible through the visible—as Alberti insisted, “the invisible is not the business of painters” (57)—the symbolic universe of the Middle Ages gives way to the “digital universe of Descartes and Leibniz” (69). Corporeal entities, as for Descartes, come to be regarded as “nothing but ‘extended things’ (res extensae) that can be represented analytically, based on functions and equations, without remainder” (64); and so, inspired by visions of a mathesis universalis, matters of symbolic concern are “pushed aside in favor of simpler strategies of scientific progress” (65). Thus, as Hoff keenly observes, it was ironically modern artistic innovation—initially its obsession with geometrical “truth-likeness,” but then its dialectical flight into the dreamy, illusionary world of the Baroque (57)—that led to scientific contempt for art (as irrelevant to the search for truth); and, more generally, for the “symbolic sensitivities of theologians, artists, and poets” (65)—in short, for any metaphysical sensibility that sees in the world more than modern science, even in its wildest dreams of progress, can contain. To be sure, there were some things that did not fit the mathematical model perfectly, such as the “squared circle”; but Leibniz proffered a solution even to this seemingly insuperable problem by defining the mathematical constant as an “irrational number” (65), thereby making it possible to disregard “every deviation in mathematical space as a quantité négligeable” (65).

Now, turning to Cusa, what Hoff finds so interesting about the German cardinal, and why he finds him so important for us to consider today, is that Cusa understood Alberti’s vision of reality (its epistemology and corresponding ontology) and decidedly rejected it. Without denying “the possibility of representing a circle, for example, with a polygon composed of a potentially infinite number of sides and internal angles,” he nevertheless maintained that “mathematical comparisons can only provide us with conjectures and not precise descriptions of our analogical world” (67). In other words, anticipating Kurt Gödel mutatis mutandis by nearly half a millennium, Cusa argued that because the world is structurally analogical, and opposites coincide in God alone, an exhaustive mathematical account of reality is impossible (66). In short, nothing can be pinned down and mastered; the Continental, Hegelian desideratum of a complete system and the Anglo-American desideratum of a final analysis are equally impossible. For in our world, in which everything is “enmeshed in the comparative logic of excedens (exceeding) and excessum (exceeded), of larger and smaller” (68), “nothing has the analytic ‘property’ [of being] one with itself. We may make rational conjectures about the identity of individual substances, but they are never analytically precise” (164).

For this reason, as Hoff observes, “Cusa had no use for Leibniz’s ‘Principle of Sufficient Reason.’ He felt no need to contort his mind in order to justify the uniqueness of our being in the world as ‘inalienable property’ by means of rational calculations” (165). On the contrary, Cusa saw in the modern dream of a mathesis universalis (insofar as this entailed the presumption of completeness) a distortion and flattening of reality, a reduction of its mystery to a deceptive mastery, moreover, a premature grasping (patterned on the story of Genesis 3) after godlike knowledge of all mysteries—and, as such, an obstacle to our mystagogical ascent through kenotic abasement (following the contrasting pattern of Christ, who did not cling to his “own” or to any “inalienable property,” but emptied himself, according to Phil 2:6f.). Thus, just as Heidegger once did for his own purposes, Hoff can summarize Cusa’s metaphysical vision in the words of Angelus Silesius’s famous poem, “Die Ros ist ohn warum; sie blühet, weil sie blühet. Sie acht nicht ihrer selbst, fragt nicht, ob man sie siehet” (165).

What gradually comes to light here has enormous metaphysical, existential, and even political consequences; for even one’s politics is invariably a reflection of one’s implicit or explicit metaphysical commitments. Whereas, on the modern model, which funds “the liberal societies of the modern age,” “every singularity is identical with its essence” (165) and thus a “one” unto itself, for Cusa “nothing but God is One and identical with itself” (164). This is not to deny that creatures possess an analogical “oneness” as images of the “divine simplicity” (162); but, as Hoff notes, as analogical singularities, “the uniqueness of created individuals is neither analytically accountable nor conceivable as a ‘property’ that creatures ‘have’” (162). Rather, “the miracle is that every creature and every person is a singularity, not despite, but exactly because it owes everything it is to a giver whose perfections cannot be owned” (163). Indeed, rather than being one’s own property, according to Hoff’s Cusa-inspired metaphysics I cannot but “receive the gift to be one with myself” (165).

Just how different this Christian-Neo-Platonic vision is from that of modern Western liberalism (for which the individual is his or her own inalienable property) goes without saying. In the language of Paul, “You are not your own” (1 Cor 6:19); in the language of James, “Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow” (Jas 1:17). In other words, in an image of the triune simplicity, to be one is to be related (which is also why the sexes cannot be understood in isolation but refer to one another). Or, to put it in the paradoxical words of the gospel, one finds one-self precisely by losing one-self in love (Matt 16:26)—as with marriage, which is therefore an icon of human completeness (Mark 10:8), pointing to the perichoretic completeness of the Trinity. Such, in any event, is the paradoxical precision of the gospel, which gives the lie to rationalistic dreams of a final analysis: nothing created can be itself by itself. But as Cusa and Plato before him realized, seeing things for what they are, as unique images of the divine “oneness,” is not something everyone can see. As Hoff puts it, “For the same reason that the believer has to lose herself in order to find herself, she has to lose the world in order to see it as it actually is” (206). Indeed, contra the myth of the Enlightenment, which is arguably an ignis fatuus, even a kind of darkness, it requires a conversion away from oneself to the light, which one does not by rights possess in oneself. In the memorable words of Augustine, arguably the greatest of Christian Platonists, “si ergo accedendo illuminamini et recedendo tenebramini: non erat in vobis lumen vestrum, sed in Deo vestro” (In Joh. Tract. XIX, xii).

Here is not the place to debate the extent of Augustine’s Neo-Platonism, or, for that matter, his criticism of the Platonists (e.g., in book VII of the Confessions, where the emphasis begins to shift toward divine humility and the necessity of the church and of sensible, sacramental mediation as a remedy for intellectual pride). It would be safe to say, though, that Cusa’s doctrine of divine simplicity as a coincidence of opposites makes it easier for him to say why this turning toward the divine light is not simply a Platonic epistrophē but precisely a turning toward Christ in humility and learned ignorance as the One in whom maximum and minimum incomprehensibly coincide. Indeed, for Cusa, the Platonic epistrophē, which demands a turning away from the mundus intelligibilis toward the mundus intelligibilis, is actually accomplished in no other way than by turning to the incarnate Word—in whom alone we face the One who is otherwise invisible and unknown. As Hoff wonderfully puts it, “Whoever turns his face to God turns his face to the face of Jesus” (213).

Thus, precisely at the height of the influx of Platonism into Western Christianity, in the wake of the Council of Florence (1438–39) and the subsequent establishment of the Platonic Academy under the leadership of Ficino, Cusa radically transformed Platonism by centering it not simply in an ad hoc way, but now with metaphysical justification, on the person of Christ. For “he is both uncontracted qua his divine nature and contracted qua his human nature; and this enable us to redirect our attention: whoever calls his name and turns his face to his face is facing the invisible gaze of the Father who sent him (Jn 12:45)” (213). Moreover, “Christ is not only the light of truth that manifests itself in the darkness of his creation. He is also the way to this truth (Jn 14:6); and this way can only be found in the ‘body of the faithful (corpus fidelium) . . . called the Christ-formed universal gathering (Christiforme ecclesia catholica) . . . and made up of all rational spirits adhering to Christ’” (219). For, as the one in whom the uncontracted and the contracted, the infinite and the finite, coincide, Christ is the one who “enfolds within [himself] (in se complicare) all multitude and, thus, is unreplicable, since it is the enfolding of all multiplication, or multitude” (161).

Cusa thus provides a remarkable metaphysical justification for the church in that here, in the one body of Christ, we see the manifestation of metaphysical reality: that multitude is nothing other than the unfolding and explication of oneness; that individuals are therefore metaphysically referred not to themselves, but to him. For metaphysically, “I am an image of the divine ‘one’ that owes everything it is to its participation in the divine oneness” (161). Indeed, in keeping with Cusa’s analogical metaphysics, for which nothing but God is by nature one with itself, it is in turning toward Christ that we are made whole and become by grace the “ones,” the unique individuals and—by incorporation into Christ—members of the one body that we really, metaphysically are. This is why at various points Hoff notes that, in our fallen state, “we are not what we are” (212), and that, picking up on a cue from Augustine (sermon 272), we must therefore become what we are, which is to say, that we must become what we are in Christ (13, 211). As Cusa writes in De docta ignorantia (before Luther!),

Our justification is not from ourselves, but from Christ. Since He is the complete fullness (omnis plenitudo), in Him we obtain all things . . . Therefore, the higher a man ascends in the immortal virtues, the more Christlike he becomes. For minimum things coincide with maximum things. For example, maximum humiliation (humilitatio) coincides with exaltation (cum exaltatione): the most shameful death of a virtuous man coincides with his glorious life, and so on—as Christ’s life, suffering, and death manifest all these points to us (185).

There is thus for Cusa, following Paul, no higher (Platonic) term of contemplation or speculation than what one can see in Christ and him crucified: “Sunt igitur omnia mysteria in crucifixione innocentis Christi complicate” [all mysteries are enfolded in the crucifixion of the innocent Christ] (181). Indeed, as Hoff notes, “the crucifixion is the key to Cusa’s ‘hunt for wisdom’” (181). For not only is Christ the real and symbolic center of the universe in that he manifests the oneness of God (as the coincidence of the infinite and finite, the absolute maximum and the minimum); he also invites us into his oneness with the Father as members of his one body: “That they may be one even as we are one, I in them and thou in me, that they may become perfectly one” (John 17:23).

What is arguably most striking about Cusa’s re-vision of the Platonic tradition, however, is that this invitation to share in the oneness of God (at which point of self-abandonment it becomes possible to see God as the non aliud, as the “non-other” than every creature) is less an invitation to a Platonic-mystagogical ascent as it is an invitation to a Christian-mystagogical descent (to the point of conformity to the Cross of Christ). For “unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24). Thus, to employ that most precise trope of paradox, whose mysterious form is a sign of a greater precision than anything modern analytic method could attain, we come to see that, as Heraclitus prophetically intimated, “the way up and the way down are one and the same” (Diels B60): we come to see that the ascent occurs by way of a descent, by way of a following of Christ (to his cross) in order to rise with Christ (in his resurrection).

But, once again, such a metaphysical vision is inaccessible to the modern man, who is immured in his modern perspective—the perspective of “the modern Narcissus,”1 who puts himself “in the position of the eye point of a mathematically generated picture” (151), and precisely thereby makes his eye unreceptive to the light of the vision of God. As Hoff puts it, quoting Kleist, “nur schade dass das Auge modert, das die Herrlichkeit erblicken soll” [it’s just a pity that the eye molders that is called to the vision of glory] (167). As much as this book is about ontology, it is therefore also—and perhaps even more so—about conversion, metanoia: for it is only when one actually becomes “an image of divine simplicity” (169) by becoming one with Christ that one can see the world for what it most truly and most precisely is: an analogy of the One who is manifest in Christ. As Cusa puts it, “Created things . . . are not seen perfectly unless their Creator is seen” (207), which, in turn, is possible only when Christ their archetype is seen, and in him all things (John 1:3). Indeed, only then, as we are turned toward Christ (213), and the “incomprehensible light of the creator shines forth in our desire” (206), does the universe (uni-versum) in all its splendor come into view: only then are we able to see “in the real space of face-to-face encounters” (99) the “invisible in the visible” (203), and “see in every creature an image of the divine amabilitas” (206).

There is much more to be said about this admirable book, which is itself like a beryl stone—to advert to the title of Cusa’s little book from 1458—in that it furnishes material suitable for a new perspective. I have not mentioned, for example, the importance of the vera icona (or, in this case, its replica) to Cusa’s inversion of the modern perspective (215). Nor have I drawn out the important political implications of the Analogical Turn, which seeks to overturn not only the modern dialectic between univocity and equivocity, but also its corresponding political dialectic between “individualism and totalitarianism” (227). All of this stands in need of development. In the meantime, given the richness of Cusa’s vision, we can be grateful to Johannes Hoff for having opened our eyes a littler wider to it—and to seeing just how important Cusa is to the recovery of the kind of metaphysical vision that the Church so desperately needs. Now is not the time to shrink back from metaphysics, as some are wont to do, but rather to give the Christian faith the kind of metaphysics it deserves and, in fact, implies—not an alien metaphysics, to which the faith must conform, but a metaphysics which the faith itself, as its proper articulation and explication, demands. One of the greatest attempts in this direction was made in the twentieth century by Erich Przywara, SJ, most famously in his Analogia Entis; and, given what Hoff has shown us in this book, we may not be surprised to learn that, in an interview from 1954, Przywara admitted that his own thought coincides most nearly not with that of Plato, or even Augustine, but with that of Nicholas of Cusa.2

I. Refugium

With this work of philosophical theology Johannes Hoff hopes to recover an ecclesial framework for life, and along the way, to reexamine old categories such as Christian learning, sensus communis and liturgical space. The book traces a self-described “Ultra-Orthodox” itinerary—influenced by the Radical Orthodoxy of John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock. Beyond that, the book aims at nothing less than the overthrow of the “nihilistic rationality of Western modernity,” and the modern world picture.

Hoff turns to the fifteenth-century theologian and cardinal Nicholas of Cusa to find “an alternative vision of the age to come.” The philosophy of Cusanus might offer “new insights into the ‘completely ordinary chaos’ of post-modern life.”

II. Bad Modernity

The life of Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) extended over the greater part of a century which saw the opening of modernity, however understood: the Battle of Agincourt, the Italian Quattrocento, the fall of Constantinople, the Council of Constance. Nicholas was aware of these movements, and was perhaps energized by the atmosphere of disruptive change. He offered “an uncompromisingly orthodox response to the challenges of early modernity.” In doing so, like other humanists of his day, Nicholas searched in the past to find new resources for the future.

In this fascinating treatise, theologian Johannes Hoff does something similar, by returning to the writings of Cusanus, who “offers an alternative modernity.” Hoff’s own critique of modernity provides the central impulse behind this work, and like Gillespie (Theological Origins of Modernity), he is critical of the secularization thesis. What is wrong with modernity? Modernity undermined religion and demystified the world, causing the loss of liturgical space and the world picture it sustained—while the sensus communis was abandoned. Modernity unleashed nihilistic rationality—which flowed from Franciscan sources to Cartesian and Kantian outlets. Late modern technological society seems to haunt the discussion, which Nicholas of Cusa is said to have opposed “just at its point of emergence.”

Hoff regrets the loss of a poetical, vague world in which religion and selfhood flourished in the presence of the symbol. Rationalism—of a type here rejected as “nihilism”—seems to mean a deconstructive criticism of cherished beliefs, a pattern of thought corrosive of common sense and destructive of the shared spaces of liturgy and orthodox religion.

To lay the groundwork for his approach to optics and spatial representation, Hoff explores the problem of objective space and its connection to selfhood. Fichte diagnosed the abyss between subject and object, but like other Romantics, failed to bridge it. The early Romantics drove their carriages ever farther away from the intellectual legacy of medieval times, and the warm hearths of orthodoxy:

The philosophy of early Romanticism did not build on the habitualized wisdom of liturgical attempts to touch on . . . the untouchable limits of human language and reason through contemplative practices of prayer and praise.

Two stark abysses: between God and the world, between subject and object, yawned wider as modernity unfolded.

Hoff dislikes “modern liberal society” and its world picture. In considering this viewpoint, which one often hears from both the right and the left, I fell into a reverie, imagining the bourgeois order of late medieval cities, defended by stone walls and towers with pointed roofs, where a new cultural intensity was sparked by literacy and numeracy. Prosperous burghers walked down narrow streets, jingling their keys, but thinking within a Mediterranean-wide perspective, especially in seaports. Communal life was still centered in huge late-Gothic cathedrals. This was the generous soil of Renaissance humanism, which opened new possibilities for the laity. My reverie went so far as to recall Thomas Mann’s essay “Lübeck as a Way of Life,” with its praise of bourgeois civilization. What are the benefits of a liberal, bourgeois social order? A degree of personal safety, the availability of higher education and public libraries, café tables, symphony orchestra performances? Yet when it comes to intellectuality and brilliance, scholarship after 1914 (to choose a date) was shaped by ardent seriousness and tragic experience, sheer abundance of knowledge (including of other religions) and virtuosity. If we need the depths of ancient-medieval religion and ecclesiastical tradition, we also need the energy and pensive brightness of modernity. At the same time, scholarship now exists in a culture which Von Balthasar termed “technical civilization in its final state, in which we run the risk of being overwhelmed and dehumanized.”

III. Christian Learning

It is surprising and wonderful to read Hoff’s appraisals of Dionysius, Augustine, and Aquinas. These are like stars shining overhead for those travelling along an ancient road, the via antiqua. Nevertheless in Hoff’s view, the divisive hand of the moderns was raised against them. The Kantian tradition, because it absorbed nihilistic elements from Alberti to Descartes, has something “profoundly wrong” with it. The alternative to such destructive trends would be the restoration of Christian learning as a basis for a shared world. We should recall, however, that it was the Kantians and post-Kantians, from Hermann Cohen to Ernst Cassirer, who set out to recover Cusanus for the modern world.

The thinkers and ideas mentioned in this book amount to a theoretical syllabus of the West, from Augustine to Derrida. Chesterton defends Aquinas against Descartes, Certeau disputes with Henri de Lubac, Hölderlin stands on the edge of a Kantian abyss. Lacan, Hugo Ball, Angelus Silesius add a note of mystery and melancholy. I like the intensity of these discussions. Hoff wants to “read [Cusa’s] philosophical writings in the light of later developments.” These encounters fascinate, but temporally they clang on the ear of an historian, as in these passages:

As distinct from modern Christians, who frequently feel intimidated by the indisputable success story of the analytic rationality of the Western sciences, Cusa had no use for Leibniz’s “Principle of Sufficient Reason.”

Cusa never tried to decompose the misty proportions of our everyday experience into . . . the Cartesian opposition between body and soul, or the transcendental-philosophical distinctions between subject and object.

Hoff is more drawn to the misty north than to the clarity of the Mediterranean. The artistic achievements of northern Renaissance painting, and the philosophical and theological work of Cusanus are highlighted, while Quattrocento Italy is blamed for the arrival of modern spatial knowledge. Ocular, nihilistic trends of the West are said to have their origins in Italian early modernity.

Renaissance humanism comes in for negative appraisal, having set in motion a bad modernity with its negative analytical reflexes and its revival of ancient philology. Nicholas himself was an exponent of Christian humanism, if an eccentric one. While admitting this, Hoff blames humanist philology for the “nominalist disconnection of language and imagination.” Worst of all, it led to the rise of the expert. Mathematical scientists dominated the visual world, while

educated scholars subjected the authority of the divine word to the authority of institutionalized teaching-agencies, which assured the credibility of their public representatives through the historical-critical hermeneutics of a revealed body of linguistic knowledge.

Biblical knowledge is only fully alive in the echoing voices of the liturgy. One strange effect of Hoff’s discussion is that Cusanus appears as a figure in contrast to the direction ultimately taken by modern rationality and the liberal arts.

Hoff views biblical philology as something destructive, rather than as a scholarly encounter with temporal and intellectual depths in the Word. He argues that, as a consequence of biblical philology and historical criticism, Christians were alienated from liturgy and the Word: “The liturgical cultivation of attitudes of trust in the common sense of our everyday perception disappeared.” However, modern-day philology, exegesis, and philosophies of language and hermeneutics have been companions to theologies of the Word. This was partly due to the influence of Buber and Gadamer.

Christian learning is not well explained, although frequently mentioned. As a form of intellectual life, Hoff argues that it was undermined by Scotism and the via moderna. Christian learning was something contemplative, rather than analytical, and deeply rooted, rather than willfully chosen. Hoff does not directly call for a return to the (pre-philogical) “biblical and Platonic roots of Christian learning,” but he does hint at the excellence of an older way.

However, as Henri de Lubac explained, masters in the school of Chartres liked to say that those erudite in biblical studies were blessed: beati sunt literati. Given that Christian learning is a centuries-old tradition, how should we appraise its history? Pelikan’s Christian Tradition might serve as shorthand for the diversity of sources. And patristic streams became medieval rivers: as detailed in Ghellinck’s Patristique et Moyen Age or Lubac’s Exegèse medievale.

While recognizing theology as the ne plus ultra of theory, one admires biblical criticism and source-critical patristics as a sophisticated and dedicated kind of research. Historical study has been a basic form of Christian learning for centuries. Its excellence greatly flourished in modern times, to name only Jean Mabillon, Caesar Baronius, and the Bollandists. Christian learning thereby absorbed the methods of criticism, la critique. We might include modern scholars such as Louis Bouyer, Jean Daniélou, Yves Congar, and Henri de Lubac. This was a scholarly and religious trend. With the help of a ressourcement in patristics, Vatican II became a forum in which the voices of the dead could be heard. This phenomenon seems to accord with Cusa’s concern for earlier times and former generations, as Hoff explains:

[The mystical body] denoted the abiding presence of the past in the liturgical gathering of the present time, and indicated our responsibility to interpret the visible signs of this sacramental presence in the light of an unfulfilled cosmic future.

Finally, considering the collaborative project Biblical Thinking by Pierre Ricoeur and André LaCocque, one should not admit that Christian learning lies in ruins.

IV. Lob den Herren

In Hoff’s view, Cusanus thought along entirely different lines than the Italian painters and thinkers of his day: because of his theological and liturgical orthodoxy, he recognized this lovely world as a misty space. Misty space is a key term, often used here. Hoff explains it by reference to the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451). The Fathers at Chalcedon insisted on the faultiness of the world and its separation from the divine, while affirming their intimate connection. This kind of space remained open to Cusanus—who (so to speak) resolved the Kantian antinomies from within the misty liturgical space of a cathedral.

Liturgical praise is a genuine encounter with the invisible. Liturgy discloses ultimate realities: therefore Cusanus could say that the “most wise science consists in the praise of God who fashioned all things from out of His praises.” Nicholas never strayed far from the setting of liturgical space: the actual naves, columns, choirs, and candles, thus pointing a way out of modern alienating space. Cusa taught a mystagogical ascent

that leads, via the misty space of a conjecturing power that is characterized by liturgical practices of faith and belief, to the contemplation of the invisible source of the visible creation.

The practice of liturgical praise (latreia) can “inform our perception of the world.”

If liturgical space can be rediscovered, so might liturgical wisdom. Unlike the stag’s leap of Romantic philosophy, liturgical wisdom is the “habitualized wisdom of . . . contemplative practices of prayer and praise.” We might even recover the “ecclesial tradition of the Middle Ages”:

the living community of the body of Christ was called to rediscover the testimony of the Holy Scriptures time after time through the shared liturgical exercise of our perception, imagination, and theoretical contemplation.

It is harder to praise the Maker starting from the coordinates of Cartesian space. Hoff contrasts the spatial understanding of Cusanus with the mathematical precision and virtual reality of perspectival art.

V. Gold Sky

Misty space is an imprecise, traditionalist, communal world. You might think of it as “the world unplugged.” This misty world reflects the divine face, and depends upon it. This is the “uncompromising, orthodox character of Cusa’s ontology of perception.” Hoff therefore rejects the “lethal state of purity” instituted by Kantians and Hegelians, in favor of Cusa’s liturgical imprecision. Two ontologies and two accounts of perception and art are in perpetual conflict.

A major strand of this book is Hoff’s concern with the artistic representation of space in the Renaissance, and its legacy for the Western imagination. Following Paul Klee’s Credo of 1920: “art does not reproduce the visible, rather it makes visible.” Hoff asserts that liturgical modes of space were overthrown by the introduction of linear perspective in the Italian arts after Masaccio, and the theorization of this method in Leon Battista Alberti’s De pictura (1435). Throughout, Hoff engages the work of Hans Belting, as painting, perspectival theory and the “picturing” of the world are developed as a central theme. Hoff blames Alberti for initiating a sense of space in which the viewer’s eye is transfixed by an artificially obtained point, a deadening of living space. Hoff’s point seems to be confirmed if we consider the perspectival scheme of Masaccio’s Trinity fresco in Santa Maria Novella (1425–1428). It is as though Alberti set these perspectival theories in stone, in the marvellous interior of Sant’ Andrea in Mantua (1472–1492).

Alberti’s perspectivism contributed to what Heidegger called the modern world picture. Historians and philosophers have perhaps overlooked the fact “that the innovators of Cusa’s time were largely thinking with paint and brush, not with paper and pencil.” This means that the history of philosophy must be complemented by art history. Linear perspective allowed for mathematical control, but it brought about a “nihilistic obsession with representational security.” Hoff says that the early Renaissance merger of the liberal and the fine arts was “just another step in the representationalist direction of Bacon, Duns Scotus, Ockham, and Alberti.” This lineage is blamed for the rise of a bad modernity. As a result of perspectivism, point of view became just another place to get lost, causing selfhood to drift and float.

Here again, in Hoff’s view, Cusanus conceived of space as mystagogical rather than analytical. The “yardstick of our search for the truth,” to follow Nicholas, “can only be approximated . . . in the analogical language of prayer and praise that unites the universal with the particular.” Cusa’s understanding of space led from the faces and objects around us toward the God on whom the world rests. God is absolute vision and absolute looking. But it should be recalled that, in the view of Cusanus, our knowledge is uncertain without the light of mathematics: Nihil certi habemus in nostra scientia, nisi nostram mathematicam. This was a call to precision.

Hoff considers Cusanus to have been part of “a north Burgundy network” associated with the devotio moderna (c’est discutable). Such a network might connect Cusa’s theory of space to the practices of northern painters such as Jan van Eyck and the Cologne Master of the Life of the Virgin. Here was a misty realism “more rigorous and realistic” than the mathematics of the Italian style. Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece eschewed the use of a vanishing point, since the goal was to lead viewers “via the mediation of the visible, to the contemplation of an invisible light.”

However, the Altarpiece is by no means easy to fathom, because of the very intensity of the visible. Crowds of clerics arrive in Dionysian droves, old hermits step gingerly through a mountain pass, crusaders approach on prancing horses as saintly women advance with palm branches. All these figures converge on a liturgical vortex: the hallucinatory, unearthly image of the sacrificial Lamb. The eye wanders off to the horizon, where the lofty towers of heavenly Jerusalem are seen, with its unknowable gardens, fields and mountains fading into blue.

As Hoff explains, painters like Van Eyck moved away from the high gothic style, with its elongated figures and saints frozen in otherworldly pools of gold. That traditional golden background had been a liturgical space:

The coincidence of natural colors with the supernatural qualities of gold was perceived as the touching point between the not yet fully actualized reality of our visible world and the invisible plenitude of its creator.

What is missing from this account is the fact that Burgundian painters depicted direct encounters, such as Dieric Bouts the Elder’s Virgin and Child (ca.1455–1460) with its tender portrait of mother-love, or visionary encounters, such as Van Eyck’s Virgin of Chancellor Rolin (1435).

Hoff maintains that painters in direct contact with Nicholas of Cusa offered different solutions. The triptych in Nicholas’ Hospital in Kues returned to the “mystagogical use of gold.” The triptych, attributed to the Cologne Master of the Life of the Virgin, no doubt reflects Cusa’s own ideas and spiritual practices. The crucifixion occurs in an eerie landscape that recedes to a blue horizon of woods, meadows and mountains. But overhead the sky has become a gothic field of gold, an unapproachable realm of difference. In Hoff’s view, this golden sky teaches a Cusan lesson about the need for conversion, an absolute turning point, metanoia.

Nicholas of Cusa dedicated his life to a “hunt for wisdom.” But if no sky of gold should appear overhead, perhaps wisdom can still be searched for in the blue depths of the mountains, by those walking along an ancient road?

Johannes Hoff’s The Analogical Turn is a dazzling, though often dizzying study. Though its subtitle purports it to be a study of Nicholas of Cusa, its actual subject is far grander and more ambitious. Hoff’s book is nothing less than a penetrating genealogical study of modernity itself, focusing especially on the realms of science and culture. The great achievement of Hoff’s book is the way he manages to think “outside the Age of the World Picture” by disputing Martin Heidegger’s infamous claim that Western nihilism was the inevitable result of the philosophical trajectory that began with Plato and Aristotle. It was possible, so Hoff avers, to avoid our nihilistic fate well into the early modern period (xxi). The burden of Hoff’s book is to demonstrate that the nihilistic malaise of modernity—the “inability to reconcile the seemingly black and white univocity of scientific rationality with the ambiguous equivocity of postmodern pop culture” (xv)—is escapable through a turn to analogy.

In this appreciative critique, I will respond to two main aspects of Hoff’s work: his genealogical narration of the rise of modernity and the ambiguous place of the incarnate Christ in the “alternative modernity” that Hoff proposes through his creative reappropriation of Nicholas of Cusa. My concern is that Hoff’s reading of Cusa is largely controlled by his genealogy of modernity, and this leads to a problematic reading of Cusan Christology. Whereas Cusa’s “analogical turn” is to the incarnate Christ, it seems that Hoff’s analogical turning is toward a Christ who is more principle than person.

I: A(nother) Genealogy of Nihilism

According to Hoff’s narrative, modernity is the fruit of the artistic rejection of the symbolic sacramental realism of the ancient world in favor of an anthropocentric perspectivism. Influenced by the representationalism of late medieval theology, especially that of the Franciscans following Duns Scotus’s so-called “univocity of Being,” painters and artisans of the burgeoning Italian Renaissance begin developing a new form of perspective. This modern perspective creates a crisis of vision that results in a kind of schizophrenia in our contemporary sensibility: the irreconcilable split between the all-seeing, totalizing vision of rationalist philosophy and science and the empty ambiguities of postmodernism. Hoff lays most of the blame for this at the feet of Leo Battista Alberti. It is Alberti whose reformation of our experience of the world in terms of our viewing of the painting sparks a revolution in the metaphysical imagination, drawing us into the age of the World Picture. By developing (and indeed over-emphasizing) the vanishing point of the painting, Alberti’s artistic legacy is a dramatic bifurcation of the world into the poles of “visible” and “invisible.” According to Hoff, our modern world was forged by figures split along the lines of this dichotomy:

1) Those who privilege the invisible at the expense of the visible: Hölderlin, Novalis, Wagner

2) Those who privilege the visible at the expense of the invisible: Alberti, Descartes, Locke

Then there is a third group:

3) Those figures who opt for a dialectical synthesis of the poles that “compromised the ontological difference between creator and his creation”: Hegel, Schelling, Moltmann, and Žižek (141).

It is the second group—those who privilege the visible at the expense of the invisible—that have won the day, at least insofar as our contemporary world is driven by the attempt to gain technological mastery over abstract representations of the world. The scientistic aesthetic of our day is one that sees the world as a straightforwardly materialistic, demystified place. This superficially materialistic world can be genealogically traced back from Locke and Descartes through Alberti’s polarizing of the world, back to the “representationalist Franciscans” of Radical Orthodoxy folklore. In other words, the confluence of the Franciscan emphasis on the abstract representation of the world and the mathematization of space in the Italian Renaissance, results in the “freezing” of the world in abstract and idealized representations that can be conceptually or technologically mastered. Alberti and the Franciscans inadvertently set the stage for the Cartesian “masters and possessors of nature” to appear.

Thus far, Hoff’s genealogy follows the well-trod path of Radical Orthodoxy with relative fidelity. Hoff’s Scotus does not carry quite as much of the blame as in other RO books, but the Subtle and Marian Doctor is read suspiciously and without much attention to his, well, subtlety. As Daniel O’Connell highlights in his own review of Hoff’s book, there is a preexisting genealogical narrative at work in this text, one that is historically and philosophically problematic.

For O’Connell, the danger of such a preexisting narrative is that it obfuscates Nicholas of Cusa. My own concern is that it obfuscates the so-called villains of the narrative—the Franciscans (Bonaventure, Scotus, Occam), and perhaps even Alberti himself.1 The complexities of history are elided in favor of statements like:

That these [sacramental] visions were later deleted from our collective memory was not the outcome of an Hegelian or Marxist law of history, but rather the contingent effect of power games that favored analytical accounts of “scientific realism,” despite their inferior grasp of reality. (72)

Or vague assertions, such as:

Unlike the representationalist tradition of the late Middle Ages and modern age, God was not an entity beside other entities that might be part of a totalizing theistic “world picture” or excluded from it in favor of an atheistic counter-image. (81)

Such claims are big and important and interesting, but they are more often than not left in a “misty space” in the grand narrative.

Despite a great deal of impressive analysis of Alberti, Hoff’s large-scale genealogy suffers because he does not show his work. The associations between Franciscan representationalism, Alberti’s perspectivism, and Cartesian philosophy are intuited but not demonstrated. Insofar as Hoff’s creative reappropriation of Cusa is presented as a solution to “modernity,” the historical dimension of his argument is of critical importance. If Alberti’s artistic revolution was as transformative as Hoff claims, then certainly the connections can and should be drawn with more care. His genealogy may work for those of his readers who, like me, have spent time in RO circles and are familiar with the narrative. But for readers on the outside, I fear the genealogy as it currently stands fails to convince. I worry that at this point the RO narrative has become a kind of echo chamber and thus a kind of static representation of history that Hoff so clearly wants to escape.

In opting for the genealogical method, Hoff signals that his book is not meant to be read primarily as a history. His genealogical method is deeply voluntaristic, but its real value comes through its aesthetic power: seeing the history of the West in a new way. The conviction that even ideas embedded in artistic innovation have far-reaching philosophical and scientific consequences is one of the great strengths of Hoff’s genealogical method. But such claims must be handled with care, acknowledging that the proposed narrative is heuristic and rhetorical. The danger consists in the aesthetic being presented as a straight-forward history. Instead of a complex and nuanced account that highlights the complexities of the birth of modernity, we get a flattened out, progressive series of monocausal events (e.g., Franciscan representationalism leads to Alberti’s perspectivism, which leads to Cartesian abstraction, which leads to modern nihilism, etc.). I am concerned that Hoff’s genealogy ends up reducing the complexities of history in favor of a controlled and controllable monocausal narrative that can be overcome by means of the applied technē of “counter-narration.”

The specific danger of this technique of counter-narration for Hoff’s book is that it sets up a philosophical problem that requires a philosophical answer. Rather than giving an explicitly philosophical rebuttal, Hoff opts to respond theologically and mystically, turning to Cusa’s liturgy and Christology for resources to address the philosophical and aesthetic perils of modernity. The problem is that these theological themes end up as idealized, metaphysical abstractions that are used as philosophical solutions. In other words, I fear that Hoff’s genealogy often ends up controlling his theology.

II: “Misty” Liturgy and an Abstract Christ

Though the first half of Hoff’s book is dedicated to his genealogical narrative, more important and more interesting is his creative reading of Nicholas of Cusa and the possibility of an “alternative modernity.” Cusa’s figure pragmatica stands in direct contrast to the myopic narcissism of Alberti’s modern perspective; likewise, Cusa’s cosmology contrasts with the frozen, representationalist world of Cartesian ontology.

According to Hoff, Cusa stands in direct lineage with Aquinas and the symbolic or sacramental realism of the medieval period. The modernity that we have is the legacy of Franciscan representationalism; the modernity that we could have is the legacy of Thomist and Cusan symbolic realism. The possibility of the latter is what Hoff’s book presents us with.

Cusa’s alternative modernity opens with the turn away from the univocity of Being (the evident legacy of the Franciscans) toward the analogical: the “misty space” between the absolute universal and the absolute particular—the appreciation of the “abstract, interchangeable values” and the “singular and unique” (68). Cartesian univocity attempts, but fails, to “develop a universal vision of the world on the level of rational abstractions or proportional mathematical calculations alone” (69). Descartes’s “scientific realism” is exposed as anything but realistic—it can only emerge in a frozen representation of the world: “A man had to believe something that no normal man would believe . . . The modern philosopher claims, like a sort of confidence man, that if once we will grant him this, the rest will be easy; he will straighten out the world, if once he is allowed to give this one twist to the mind.”2

Throughout the book, Cusa is triumphed as a philosopher and theologian of common sense—or at least a thinker whose mystagogical metaphysics begin with a commonsense, realistic vision of the world in all of its dynamism and mystery. Cusa’s learned ignorance “never began with paradoxical or counterintuitive basic assumptions that rested on the promise that everything will straighten out once we have allowed him to twist our mind” (73). Whereas Alberti’s rejection of the invisible “paved the way to a non-realist, representationalist view of scientific ‘realism,’” Cusa preserves the sacramental, mysterious nature of the world. He gives us a world in which the visible is theophanic of the invisible.

There are two central aspects of Cusa’s thought that Hoff draws on. The first is Cusa’s “coincidence of opposites,” outlined in his majestic On Learned Ignorance (1440). The second is Cusa’s mystical theology, developed especially in terms of the icon in De vision dei (1453). Through these two dimensions of Cusa’s thought, Hoff develops an alternative history of the West—one in which liturgy is the source of wisdom, the sensus communis is the way to understanding, and truth is apprehended not by mathematical vision but the apophatic grasp of love. Such a happy future is only feasible within the conceptual “misty space” of analogical vision. According to Hoff, this analogical seeing is formed in us primarily through the liturgy and its apophatic language of prayer and praise.

Though Hoff’s Cusa is largely controlled by his reading of de Certeau, the brilliance of the Renaissance theologian gets to shine in the latter half of the book. Cusa’s great accomplishment was his doctrine of the coincidence of opposites, a method of resolving contradictions from the perspective of divine infinity.3 At true infinity, that is in God, all philosophical and metaphysical contradictions are resolved without sublating the differences or denying the reality of their contradiction. In On Learned Ignorance, Cusa outlines a series of coincidences which culminate in the hypostatic union in the person of Jesus Christ. His three coincidences are as follows:

• God as the “absolute maximum” beyond all discursive knowledge. This is the source of Cusa’s mystical apophaticism, wherein God is non-Aliud who enfolds all Being;
• The cosmos as the “contracted maximum” where all finite things are part of a united whole, but unfolded throughout the world.
• Most centrally, in Christ who, for Cusa, is the analogia entis. As the God-Man, Christ is the coincidence of the absolute and contracted maximum.4

For Cusa, the “analogical turn” is the turn to the incarnate Christ. Christ is the revelation of the truth of God and the world, and the meeting place of heaven and earth. What Cusa’s Christ does, through his becoming a visible image of the invisible (Col 1:15), is open the pathway to a contemplative, ecstatic vision of God. The divine union with the world in the hypostatic union enfolds all created being within the universality of his divine filiation. For Cusa, there is an undeniable emphasis on the incarnation and the historical Christ. It is through history that Christ transforms history, making possible the broken unity between God and world. Christ, the historical and visible image of God, counters the idolatrous gaze of fallen humanity by raising humanity’s vision through the visible world to the invisible, ineffable God. For Cusa, Christ is both icon and sacrament. Christ, in fact, re-renders our world sacramental, that is, as the “explicatio of the complicatio.”5

This is also where, for Cusa, the tasks of philosophy and mystagogy meet. Philosophy “is always simply the view through the unfolded into the enfolded.”6 Mystical theology—or Cusa’s “philosophical mystagogy” (213)—is learning to see and to experience that “every creature is an image of its creator” (214). When we learn to see God in the finite faces around us, we discover (beyond knowing), that our vision of God is nothing other than the vision of God of us: “Our ability to see God is nothing but a mode of participation in God’s loving seeing” (206). In Hoff’s construal, liturgical performance becomes a theological aesthetic, or an aesthetic path to Christ.

Hoff is a little light on Cusa’s incarnational Christology, but he nevertheless indicates that Christ’s flesh is the location of the ultimate coincidence of the universal and the particular, the truth of God and the truth of the world. “It is the contingent singularity of the incarnated universality of God alone that mediates between all differences, including the difference between the universal and the particular” (68).

Yet this is what I find curious. Who is Christ in Hoff’s narrative? According to Hoff, Cusa “considered our natural desire to see God as more than a matter of religious concern: the praise of God is a matter of scientific significance” (69). Certainly. To confess Christ as the “truth” (John 14:6) is to confess him as the truth of all things. But I wonder if the way Hoff construes Cusa’s Christology leaves us with a Christ who functions more as a cosmic cipher—the “universal principle” (69)—than as the Son of God who meets me through faith in Word and Sacrament. I am not confident that I am reading Hoff correctly here, so I hope he will be good enough to clarify: in constructing his “aesthetic path to Jesus” (xxvi), are we encountering a Christ of Cross and Resurrection or a Christic élan that functions as a metaphysical counter to a domineering philosophical rationalism? Has Hoff given us an aesthetic path to Jesus or an aesthetic path through Jesus to a different end? Surely a Christ whose function is limited to completing an ontological aesthetic is more suited to Hegel than to Cusa.

And so I wonder how exactly the incarnate Christ functions for Hoff’s Cusa: does he simply render the world a visible theophany of the “invisible” or does he also draw us into a living imitation of himself whereby human nature and subsequently human culture are transformed through personal reunion with God? Much of this will hinge, no doubt, on Hoff’s genealogical diagnosis of modernity. Is modernity a conceptual problem that can be redressed through a conceptual reimagining? Is modernity an aesthetic problem that can be redressed through an aesthetic reimagining? Hoff’s narrative seems to favor both of these. It seems though that Cusa’s emphasis on the incarnate life of Christ (especially, but not exclusively, in On Learned Ignorance) also challenges us to consider the need for a dramatic reimagining of modernity.7

Hoff offers a tantalizing prospect of this dramatic turn in his final chapter when he indicates that Cusa was part of the late medieval devotio moderna and its emphasis on the imitation of Christ (214). This idea is dangled in front of us and then quickly passed by. If Hoff wants to reclaim a realist and sacramental world, then Christ, Church, liturgy, and sacrament—no matter how aesthetically useful they are—cannot be “frozen” in an abstract conceptualism. They must be performed. Hoff often insists, quite rightly, that the language of prayer and praise do metaphysical work. But for all this insistence, Hoff’s Cusa reflects but he does not pray.

I recognize that no single book can do everything, and perhaps the questions I’m asking are beyond the purview of Hoff’s book. Yet I cannot help but think that Hoff’s claim that prayer and praise are metaphysically performative should be demonstrated through a consideration of the actual liturgy. The dazzling thing about Nicholas of Cusa is the way that he manages to hold all of these together—the conceptual and the doxological; the philosophical, theological, and spiritual. Each abide in the One who himself is the truth—the analogical meeting place of heaven and earth, where the love of wisdom and the love of God are one and the same.

III: Conclusion

Hoff’s book is a fascinating account and raises the question of the relationship between science, philosophy, and the arts. It is interesting and important reading. But it is tantalizingly incomplete. The question presses: now that Hoff has invited us to see modernity in this way, now what? The diagnosis has been made. Can we—should we—labor to turn back the clock and undo the last six hundred years of industrialization, war, genetics, capitalism, medicine, and indoor plumbing? Can Hoff’s Cusa function for us today except in a world that has been artificially repristinated to the late medieval context of Cusa himself? That Cusa proposed an alternative modernity is an intriguing idea. But is that alternative still open and available for us today? Can we rediscover the path that Cusa took, certainly overgrown now with brambles and weeds, and make our way down it, undoing the works of our ill-conceived modernity? Hoff’s ressourcement of Nicholas of Cusa is still in need of a constructive vision of the way forward from within the modernity that we do have, and not simply from a vision of an alternative modernity that we don’t. I am eager to see what comes next; it has already been a journey well worth taking.

I.

This new work from Johannes Hoff is a daring and fascinating attempt that explores not merely the philosophy and theology of the high and late Middle Ages, but what those positions taken then might mean for us and our own understanding of both the modern and postmodern periods. As he notes in his preface:

The central thesis of this book is twofold: first, that Kant’s primary achievement was a brilliantly succinct summary of the late medieval and early modern decline of Christian learning, but no more than this; and second, that Cusa’s encounter with Alberti in the first half of the fifteenth century marked the critical moment when an alternative version of modernity was still possible. (xxi)

In a bold claim, he tells us that Heidegger was mistaken “in proposing that the emergence of Western nihilism was an inescapable fate that originated in Plato and Aristotle. On the contrary, it originated in early modernity, and it would have been possible, in principle, at least, to avoid this fate” (ibid.).

This is only the latest step in the long journey of Cusa research. Looking back over the past century, one can witness a certain dialectic in the history of Cusan studies. For a long time, it was common that one would insist that Cusa, while not a direct influence on moderns such as Kant, had in fact anticipated themes of Kantian and even early Romantic philosophy (e.g., Fichte and Schelling) and, to a lesser extent, those of Hegelian philosophy. This tendency to see Cusa as a forerunner of the moderns was perhaps inevitable, given the key role that Ernst Cassirer played in the early days of Cusan studies, and his own philosophical orientation as a neo-Kantian. By 1927, Cusa was dubbed “the first modern philosopher” in Cassirer’s groundbreaking study, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy.

More recently, however, ideas of this sort came under suspicion and a chorus of voices were raised against the idea of Cusa as “the first modern.” One of the stronger voices of the past fifteen years is that of Jasper Hopkins in his “Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464): First Modern Philosopher?”1 Hoff also takes up this theme in his book, and agrees, in general, with Hopkins. One might say that Cusa, from early on (with Cassirer, with Klibansky), was “sold” as one of the first modern philosophers (or at least a proto-modern), perhaps to raise interest among the larger scientific community in Cusanus research and the production of a critical edition. Now that one takes a second look, however, it would seem that he was not really modern in these ways and that, if we follow Hoff, his ideas were in many respects opposed to the Cartesian analytic stream of early modern thought.

II.

In this ambitious book, Hoff takes us a step further into the topos of Cusa and his relationship to modernity. Hoff proposes to find lines of division not only between Cusa and Descartes, but also in Cusa’s own day and before, during which some—in particular, Leon Battista Alberti—set off along a path that would lead almost inexorably to Cartesian thinking about the world and the self—a thinking based in a mathematization of the space of the world. Others, however, according to Hoff, Cusa chief among them, chose a different path: one which preserved the symbolic and analogical thinking of the high Middle Ages, while putting forward certain ideas which represented an alternate modernity, albeit one which ultimately did not come to fruition.

One of the most refreshing elements in this work is that Hoff is well read in the work of the “younger” Cusan scholars (Inigo Bocken, Harald Schwaetzer, Tom Müller, Niels Bohnert, et al.). Too often, the groundbreaking work of these younger scholars is left out of account—a sort of “gerontocracy” all too familiar in Germany holds sway in the attention paid to this scholarship and the places given it at conferences. Here, in Hoff’s work however, they are not merely cited but their ideas are integral to Hoff’s thesis about the emergence of modern thinking about space and autonomy.

As he attempts to explicate the genesis of modern ideas about space and autonomy, Hoff distinguishes between the “conservative innovators” (e.g., Jan van Eyck, Fra Angelico, and Nicholas of Cusa), on the one hand, and “the main representatives of the finally dominating stream of the early Renaissance upheaval” (Brunelleschi, Alberti, Lorenzo Ghiberti, and Donatello), on the other. He seeks to locate the dividing line between them “in the broader context of later developments” (i.e., in the rise of Cartesian thinking) (60). One might be surprised to see a list (on both sides of this divide) composed mostly of painters and artists, but as Hoff points out: “Modern scholars tend to perceive Cusa as a Janus-faced maverick trapped between the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance . . . largely due to the post-Cartesian narrative of scientific progress that blinds them to the fact that the innovators of Cusa’s time were largely thinking with paint and brush, not with paper and pencil” (69). Indeed, it is one of the most refreshing elements in Hoff’s work that he takes account of the writings of art historians like Belting, Tritz, et al. and the philosophico-historical researches of Inigo Bocken and Harald Schwaetzer into the connection between art and philosophy, to make this point. The mathematization of space and the independence of the autonomous subject or ego are not invented by Descartes; they emerge almost two centuries earlier, in the dominant artistic culture of the Renaissance (as exemplified by Alberti and Brunelleschi), which then is taken up by others and, eventually, Descartes. Hoff cites Inigo Bocken in a footnote: “Descartes and Kant have essentially done nothing else than provide a philosophical justification of that which was presaged in the art of the Renaissance—in the art of painting, which Alberti wanted to justify as a type of science.”2

III.

This portion of the book is well written, and the argument is clear. There does in fact seem to be an opposition between the ideas of Cusa regarding space and our vision of the world, on the one hand, and the perspectival representationalism of Brunelleschi and Alberti on the other hand. And it does seem plausible to say that the views of Alberti “won out” as it were, and went on to give rise to Descartes’s treatment of space and his notions about the autonomy of the thinking “ego.”

Unfortunately for the reader, beyond this distinction, Hoff presents us with a broader set of notions that attempt to display a fault line running through the history of philosophy. The two sides of this fault line he classifies as realist vs. representationalist. Representationalism, he tells us, is first glimpsed in the philosophy of Duns Scotus and other Franciscans (Roger Bacon and, as a proto-representationalist, Bonaventura). This representationalist “moment” or pattern of thought proceeds in the later centuries of thought to become a legacy of modern philosophy. Hoff will allow that this representationalist way of thinking is eventually questioned and deconstructed; but even those who deconstruct it do not escape from the representationalist dialectic, according to Hoff. Realism, however, is a view we can find in Thomas Aquinas and Nicholas of Cusa, among others, and is a “common-sense” realism (of the senses and the intellect), and more true to the reality of the world. It is difficult to see where Hoff derives this realist/representationalist dichotomy, though he makes intellectual hay with this distinction throughout the book. Yet it seems to me that (although he distances himself somewhat from “Radical Orthodoxy” in his preface), his ideas seem to depend on the ideas of Catherine Pickstock and John Milbank, such as can be seen (most recently) in Milbank’s Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People.3

This dichotomy, and the reading of Scotus which it entails (which Tim Noone has called “blaming the Franciscans”), is highly problematic from a philosophico-historical perspective. Moreover, certain postulates of Radical Orthodoxy, including this one, undergird Hoff’s entire project, which aims to show how Cusa presents us with an alternate modernity and what that alternate world-picture looks like. If this modernity is “representationalist” and its view of being breaks with the apophatic tradition (as he tells us: on account of “univocity” in Scotus), then Cusa must be shown to be “not-this”: he must be displayed to us as an analogical or symbolic realist in the “Dominican” school of Thomas Aquinas, and not only this, but as a thinker for whom the highest mode of discourse is based in faith and is liturgical (Pickstock’s work on philosophy and liturgy is cited here several times). The problem here is that these elements of Radical Orthodoxy are imported under cover of darkness, as it were, and they structure his arguments, but several of them are not made explicit. Moreover, they distort our understanding of Cusa’s own thought.

IV.

Among the several issues that could be raised by this use of Pickstock and Milbank’s ideas is, first of all, that this portrayal of Scotus’s thought—not least of all Scotus’s thought portrayed as lacking in philosophical rigor! (42)—displays a highly problematic view of the history of medieval philosophy. It is a view of decline, or entropy, one in which, after Scotus, the whole affair begins to go downhill and descends into modern and then postmodern decay (like Schlingensief’s decaying rabbit in his production of Parsifal). On the contrary, as Tim Noone and Steve Marrone have shown in various places, the narrative of the late thirteenth century is one in which both Scotus and Thomas Aquinas are on the side of a moderate realism, while Henry of Ghent, eager to preserve an illuminationist account of knowing derived in large part from Bonaventure, is the one who casts doubt on the ability of the senses to provide us with certitude.4 Both Aquinas and Scotus, rejecting illuminationist theories of knowledge, pursue a moderate realist course and defend the acquisition of knowledge through the senses against these attempts by Henry to unseat the senses as a reliable guide to knowledge. In the Thomist account (which Scotus follows), in exchange for giving up the proposition that humans can know divine ideas, one gains a naturalist account of knowledge attainable by human beings.

In other words, if Scotus is the beginning of a long decline, Thomas is right there with him, his partner in the “crime” of rejecting Augustinian illuminationism. But for Hoff, one must not reject illuminationist analogical realism. One must find this thinking in Aquinas and one must find it again in Cusa, since for Hoff Cusa and Aquinas are “on the same side” it would seem, the Dominican and the later Cardinal Cusa, radicalizer of Dominican ideas, arrayed against the Franciscan “enemy.”

V.

There is a larger problem here, however, with Hoff’s account of Cusa’s own thought. He is so focused on portraying Cusa as a non-representationalist and someone who embraces the symbolic realism of Thomas Aquinas (which portrayal is no doubt true—quodammodo), that he neglects Cusa’s epistemology, even going so far as to claim that “the modern concept of ‘epistemology’ is not applicable to Cusa” (30). It seems to me, however, that this concept should apply to Cusa, that we should be asking ourselves about Cusa’s theory of knowledge and how this knowledge-theory functions scientifically. I don’t mean to suggest here that we should impose an anachronistic distinction between philosophy and theology on the writings of Cusa, or that we should work with a narrow definition of “science,” but, if we can, we should try to understand Cusa as a speculative thinker who has managed to reconcile in his own thought the two realms of the intellectual and the spiritual. Even at the “high point of theory” (apex theoriae), Cusa’s thought does not melt away into faith, or some sort of mysticism à la Teresa de Ávila, as Hoff would seem to think (cf. final paragraph of 166), but persists in its attempt “to embrace incomprehensible things incomprehensibly.” This high point of theory is something we are able to achieve through our own power, specifically through the sight of the mind (visus mentis), which Cusa called (in De apice theoriae) “the supreme power (posse) of the soul.”5 The “paradoxical truth” of this moment, when visus mentis confronts God himself, and sees that it cannot see, does not pass over into faith as a mode of knowledge, even if one would assume (and rightly) that the person undergoing these experiences has faith. But this moment for the sight of the mind is the high summit of contemplation or, as Aristotle would have put it, of theoria. It is still, through and through, philosophical.

But again, with Hoff, we are confronting yet another Milbank-ian notion, that philosophy does not ultimately abide, but passes over into theology and, more specifically, into liturgical theology—philosophy was always already implicitly theological. Philosophy’s natural place is in the context of theology. There is no independent philosophy, because to have an independent philosophy would only make theology one more discipline among many.6 This view—a sort of standing Hegel on his head—collides with the claim about a supposed symbolic (analogical) realism upon which Cusa and Aquinas agree (and therefore by extension they agree upon the subsequent absorption of philosophy by theology/liturgy). I say these collide because one entails a narrative about the history of philosophy and theology (Aquinas at the apex of thought and then the long slow decline initiated by Scotus and Ockham) and the other always already seeks to negate philosophy in its independence.

VI.

Some time ago, the intellectual historian Kurt Flasch made an attempt to “rescue” Meister Eckhart from the mystical current that would seek transform his rigorous thought, especially in his Latin works, into a “misty” affective mysticism.7 More recently, he has pushed this idea further, and presented us with similar narrative in which Meister Eckhart is put forth as the “philosopher of Christianity.” One whose “German mysticism” comes from—of all places—an Arabic spirit (specifically the teachings of Averroës as passed on by Albert of Cologne to Dietrich of Freiberg and Meister Eckhart). Flasch’s Eckhart is, in fact, rigorously philosophical in his thinking, even if it leads him into statements that imply otherwise to the casual reader.

I would like to make a suggestion deriving from these works by Flasch. One can agree with Hoff that Cusa’s theory of knowledge is an illuminationist theory, replete with various levels which symbolically reveal one another. One can also agree, wholeheartedly, that Cusa provides us (without his having been aware of it) an alternative to the clear and distinct modern world picture of Descartes. Nevertheless, these elements in Cusa’s thinking do not come from Aquinas: Cusa’s view of the deity as the form of all things, as the not-other owes much more to Dionysius the Areopagite (and Albert’s reading of him). Moreover, Cusa is an illuminationist in a different tradition, one which draws on Albertist thinking: not only of Albert himself but on Meister Eckhart and Dietrich of Freiberg. As Flasch and Alain de Libera have shown, the Dominican tradition was in fact quite heterogeneous, and historically, as much as one might value Thomas Aquinas, it is in fact more logical to place Cusa in the “illuminationist” theory of mind that descends from Albert of Cologne.8

My primary objection, then, to this work is that it distorts Cusa’s own thinking by attempting to fit him into a box, that of the Thomas Aquinas of Milbank and Pickstock, when in fact, not only is their account of Aquinas deeply flawed, but even if we had a more realistic, historiographical account of Aquinas’s thinking, we would be hard-pressed to join Cusa to Aquinas, not least because their two readings of Dionysius the Areopagite are so extremely different. This is a powerful work, strong and well worth reading, but because there is a ready-made history of philosophy and the ideas it contains, the work hobbles.