THE PREPARATION OF RENAISSANCE: DIETRICH OF FREIBERG, MEISTER ECKHART, NICHOLAS OF CUSA

Abstract

1. Introduction The intricacy of the concept of the Renaissance, as witnessed at least since the middle of the 19th century, has matched the historical import of the substance (for a survey of the topic see e.g. Horowitz 2005, Black 2001, Kristeller 1979, Hay 1973, and Bouwsma 1959). The debates on the issue have not only reminded us of the continuities between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (e.g. Kristeller 1956:553-583), but have also delineated the possibility of speaking about different Renaissances on the grounds of respective internal, temporal, or geographical aspects. (1) However, to give the contestable side of the matter a wide berth here, I will set my eye on the two rather patent features of the phenomenon. First, Renaissance, as is signaled by the word itself and attested to also by the avowals of its first Italian representatives, actually enclosed a sharp experience of rebirth articulated in resistance to the so-called glut of darkness of the former historical period. (2) That is, the revival of antiquity, at least in the case of the Italian Renaissance, is something to which I would wish to award reliability. Second, Renaissance studies have revealed quite convincingly that humanism possessed a central place in the intellectual and moral yardsticks of renasci (Kraye 1979, Kristeller 1956). Without doubt, the new accent on the relatedness of knowledge to the human, as set against the transcendent cravings of the age of tenebrae, can be taken as another aspect of a reversion to the ancient values that had become lost in the meantime. I would like to pitch at both statements a bit more spatial undergirding and to say that together with the recovery of ancient humanism, the Renaissance adopted to a degree as well the ancient concept of space, where the locus--understood in the metaphysical sense as something providing us with a hypertext for our statements about the world--was taken as derivative from bodies, or even identified with them. (3) This kind of corporeal rendition of space was given an exemplary definition by Aristotle (see Physics, 212a27f). However, to achieve a correct footing for our investigation into the Renaissance, the elements of antiquity need to be complemented with the characteristics connecting the Renaissance with the heredity of medieval culture. The transcendent, including infinity, which was located in the Middle Ages in the God, was surely not undone in the Renaissance, but was exactly integrated into its explanative space, true, at the price of certain enigma of the system. My claim is that the Renaissance's embodied space, building on the extension and interrelationship of bodies, came to be provided on its borders with some kind of transcendent clues that implied, quite paradoxically, the annihilation of the extended matter and of the spatial articulation offered by it. Suggesting that the Renaissance was a period that started first to consider seriously and in a mathematical way the possible empirical intimations of the medieval divine infinity, I propose to take the schema of embodied space with a sign of infinite on its border as a symbol for much of the metaphysical, artistic and scientific deliberations that the present article claims to follow. Actually we can say that the Renaissance was beaten to the punch by some pagan traditions in its provoking a submission of corporeal quantities to the, so to say, transcendent nonchalance. As is well known, the metaphor of the infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere played a pivotal role in Nicholas of Cusa's ponderings about how the different geometrical figures approach each other when related to infinity (see Mahnke 1937:76ff-109 et al.; Harries 2001, Brient 2002). Thus, Nicholas infers, the curves of the sphere, being augmented to infinity, should become more and more similar to their tangents, that is, the curved lines should approach straight ones and the curved spaces should become increasingly flat (Docta ignorantia 1. …