Docta Ignorantia Research Articles

On the Actuality of Integrative Intellect-Mystical Asceticism as Self-Realization in View of Nicolaus de Cusa, Ibn Sīnā, and Others

I argue for a transformative revival or actualization of the very core of an integrative, methodologically secured form of intellect-mystical asceticism. This approach draws on traditional sources that are re-examined from a systematic—synthetic and transcultural—philosophical perspective and in light of the multi-civilizational global environment of the 21st century. The main traditional points of reference in this paper are provided by Nicolaus de Cusa and Ibn Sīnā, and I refer to a few others, such as Attar of Nishapur, in passing. In the beginning, I develop a basic concept of intellect-mystical asceticism. It is distinguished from mystification, science, scientism, and modes of everyday communication and cognition. After that, I make the case for an updated, transcultural approach to intellect-mysticism that can foster the internal (social) and external (environmental) reintegration of the human noosphere and technosphere in future planetary development. In this context, a modern intellect-mystical philosophical notion of “knowing non-knowing” (wissendes Nichtwissen, docta ignorantia) is developed. It is inspired by Nicolaus de Cusa and contextualized from a systematic transcultural angle at the same time. Finally, I discuss the problem of the practical, or rather, ascetic realization of the related possibilities of intellect-mystical self-enfolding. Here, the preceding steps of the reflection are mapped onto an outline regarding distinct developmental stages of such a transformative intellect-mystical practice in Ibn Sīnā’s Remarks and Admonitions (al-Ishārāt wat-Tanbīhāt).

More Trouble for a Troubled Geist: Finding Certainty in the Uncertain through Creative Unknowing

ABSTRACT The main response to the multiple crises besetting Western societis in the past decades has been the attempt of the academic and scientific as well as political circles to gain a sense of orientation—and of social cohesion—by two main modes of thinking: identity politics and evidence-based knowlegde. Regarding the latter, I argue that if scientific knowledge is reduced to facts, data and numbers, as the basis for political decisions without any alternatives, it would become a dogma propagating the truth—that is, a new religion. Politicians will no longer have to struggle with other perspectives, once there is a consensus about following the line that “the numbers or the facts speak for themselves.” While many people would perhaps find in this new religion a guarantee of security in an insecure world, this sense would be illusionary. I argue that the role intellectuals should play in a spiritual crisis of this kind is paradoxically to cultivate a sense of more security by strengthening a culture of “insecureness” or docta ignorantia against the dogmas within science and religion. To create and encourage a new art of questioning and listening, and of learning to appreciate non-knowledge as the basis of coming together. This notion is found in the Greek and Christian as well as the Jewish tradition of European thought, and it continues in the works of modern thinkers such as Paul Ricoeur, Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Hartmut Rosa, and of philosophers who focus on the question of the ineffable. My aim is to present this quality of certainty within uncertainty by examples from different fields, including philosophy, art and psychotherapy, and to elaborate on the paradoxical question: does a troubled Geist need more trouble in order to help us find a sense of orientation through disorientation?

The Russian Cusanus: S. L. Frank and the Russian reception of Nicholas of Cusa

AbstractDuring the intense philosophical and theological renaissance of the Russian Silver Age, the German Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) received a unique appraisal in the work of Semyon Liudwigovich Frank (1877–1950), hailed by some as ‘the greatest Russian philosopher’. This paper will show that five of Frank's central philosophical arguments can be traced directly to Cusa's writings. Once these key arguments are taken together with Frank's own comments about Cusa, it can be concluded that Frank saw himself as Cusa's modern successor, presenting his ideas in a different intellectual context. In this sense, we can speak of Frank as the ‘Russian Cusanus’. The arguments in question include Cusa's docta ignorantia, our knowledge of being, the recognition of absolute being as ‘non‐other’, the identity of possibility and actuality in the absolute, and finally the coincidentia oppositorum.

Is the ‘docta ignorantia’ a form of ‘philosophari in Maria’?

Cusanus’ learned ignorance is a complex notion that is explained as a form of introduction into Christian wisdom. The different meanings of how God exceeds our conceptual reach and remains ineffable despite all metaphorical approaches are laid out in three steps: the first is devoted to God (conicidencia oppositorum), the second to the Universe (complicatio/explicatio) and the third to the God-man, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is represented here as an intermediary, as measure and mediator between God and creation, the finite and the infinite. Along these lines I highlight three main aspects of docta ignoratia as especially relevant for contemporary thinking. These aspects will be used to evaluate the extent to which Cusanus’ powerful proposal to reinterpret Christian reality can help us respond to Pope John Paul II’s exhortation in Fides et ratio to understand and to exercise Christian reflection as philosophari in Maria.

DISTINCIÓN E INDISTINCIÓN DEL EJEMPLAR Y LA IMAGEN

Dos años después de la publicación de De docta ignorantia aparece un texto acusatorio, De ignota litteratura (1442) de Iohannes Wenck. En este texto, Wenck afirma que la propuesta del Cusano comete en muchos casos los mismos errores de algunas doctrinas condenadas, entre otras la de Meister Eckhart. El artículo aborda especialmente la objeción que aparece como “cuarta conclusión” que atiende al tema de la identidad entre el ejemplar y la imagen y las consecuencias relativas a la posibilidad de divinización del alma. A partir de esto, explicita la noción de imagen en Meister Eckhart a fin de trazar algunos vínculos de semejanza y diferencia con lo presentado por el Cusano en el escrito cuestionado y consecuentemente extraer algunas conclusiones acerca de la consideración del objetor.

Inefabilidad e Incomprensibilidad divinas en Agustín de Hipona y la teología negativa de Mario Victorino

In the first part, we will develop the Augustinian conception of divine “ineffability” and “incomprehensibility”, in order to show the importance of both notions in his theological conception. In the second part, Marius Victorinus ‘s negative theology will be discussed. We will conclude pointing out three elements that confirm the influence of Victorinus on the theological conception of the Bishop of Hippo: 1) only the beginning is discernible and defined by its own existence, 2) the priority of the principle with respect to all opposition, 3) docta ignorantia as a way of knowing more adequate to approach the divine nature, than rational knowledge.

La imagen de la sphaera infinita del anónimo Liber XXIV philosophorum en la maxima doctrina ignorantiae de Nicolás de Cusa

The present article explores the theological and cosmological aspects of the Liber XXIV philosophorum’s image of the sphaera infinita in De docta ignorantia of Nicholas of Cusa. The paper is structured as follows. First, I describe the Liber, specifically focusing on its Definition II. Secondly, I address Nicholas of Cusa’s reception of the Liber, analyzing the strictly theological use of the sphaera infinita’s image in De docta ignorantia I. Thirdly, I study the cosmological use of said image in De docta ignorantia II. Finally, I examine the sphaera infinita’s passage from the theological to the cosmological domain in the maxima doctrina ignorantiae, and against most of the hegemonic scholarship, I show that the use of the image in the Cusan cosmology remains strictly theological.

“Apophatic Entanglement” and the Politics of Unknowing: Catherine Keller

Catherine Keller, professor of constructive theology at Drew University, has crafted a tellingly cryptic book that challenges not merely the reader's intellect but also the validity of any forms of knowing that claim achievable certitude. Heeding Nicholas of Cusa's fifteenth-century exhortation for docta ignorantia, or “knowing ignorance” (17), Cloud of the Impossible (the title is derived from a phrase in Cusa's De vision Dei) serves to underscore the salience, when it comes to current global ferment involving dilemmas of public governance and mutual coexistence, of humbly knowing that we do not know. At a time when innumerable conundrums of governmentality,…

Alteridad, número y reflexión trinitaria en Nicolás de Cusa

This article addresses the concomitant negativity regarding alterity in cusanian thought and the possibility of recognizing the traces of the unitrinity principle in the finite. To achieve this, (i) it is analysed the negative verification of alterity in the metaphysics of finitude linked to contingency; (ii) it is described the articulating function that the number plays in the understanding of finitude as created multiplicity by the first principle, God, insofar as this creation is a deployment of the divine number’s potency; finally, (ii) it is analysed the place that alterity has in the trinitarian argumentation of the first book of De docta ignorantia, with which it will be shown how alterity opens up a space for a consideration of the first principle that, although it excludes from itself all alterity, at the same time, grounds the totality.

Dialectical logic for mythical and mystical superstructural systems (ii)

Purpose The distinction between essence and existence cannot be a distinction in God: in the actual infinite, essence and existence coincide and are one. In it, maximum and minimum coincide. Coincidentia oppositorum is a Latin phrase meaning coincidence of opposites. It is a neo-Platonic term, attributed to the fifteenth-century German scholar Nicholas of Cusa in his essay, Docta Ignorantia. God (coincidentia oppositorum) is the synthesis of opposites in a unique and absolutely infinite being. God transcends all distinctions and oppositions that are found in creatures. The purpose of this paper is to study Cusanus’s thought in respect to infinity (actual and potential), Spinoza’s relationship with Cusanus, and present a mathematical theory of coincidentia oppositorum based on complex numbers. Design/methodology/approach Mathematical development of a dialectical logic is carried out with truth values in a complex field. Findings The conclusion is the same as has been made by thinkers and mystics throughout time: the inability to know and understand the idea of God. Originality/value The history of the Infinite thus reveals in both mathematics and philosophy a development of increasingly subtle thought in the form of a dialectical dance around the ineffable and incomprehensible Infinite. First, the authors step toward it, reaching with their intuition beyond the limits of rationality and thought into the realm of the paradoxical. Then, they step back, struggling to express their insight within the limited scope of reason. But the Absolute Infinite remains, at the border of comprehensibility, inviting them with its paradoxes, to once again step forward and transcend the apparent division between finite and Infinite.

Mother Teresa's Mysticism: A Christo-Ecclesio-Humano-Centric Mysticism by Robert M. Garrity

Reviewed by: Mother Teresa's Mysticism: A Christo-Ecclesio-Humano-Centric Mysticism by Robert M. Garrity Matthew L. Lamb Mother Teresa's Mysticism: A Christo-Ecclesio-Humano-Centric Mysticism by Robert M. Garrity (Hobe Sound, FL: Lectio, 2017), 208 pp. Fr. Robert Garrity has written a fine introduction to St. Mother Teresa's life of mysticism in her service of the poor. In the first part of the book, he introduces the reader to the theological contexts of [End Page 284] Catholic mysticism that influenced Mother Teresa's mysticism. In the second part, he introduces the reader to the contributions Mother Teresa has made to the development of Catholic mysticism in our times. Part I has eight chapters. In the first chapter, Fr. Garrity clarifies that mysticism is a genuinely experiential knowledge of God and his divine presence. For Mother Teresa, it was both a speculative and an experiential knowledge of God and his presence in the poor. Chapter 2 introduces the reader to mysticism understood as experiencing God's presence. It is, as John of the Cross states, an "unknowing" that is known, a docta ignorantia by which God purifies the mind and heart of the mystic. Chapters 3 and 4 further explore this in John of the Cross and his "dark night" and the mysticism of "suffering and darkness." Mother Teresa sees this in Jesus's cry of "I thirst" from the Cross. For her, this is a thirst for love, a thirst for souls to love that Jesus redeems humanity in his suffering on the Cross. Because of Mother Teresa's letters on the darkness and suffering of her own soul, Fr. Garrity devotes chapter 5 to a detailed introduction to St. John of the Cross and his insights into the dark night of the senses, imagination, and intellect as purifying the mystic's knowing and loving as she enters a mystical theology springing from God's indwelling. Chapter 6 sketches the Christological and ecclesiological dimensions of Mother Teresa's mysticism in her service of Christ and his Church among the poorest of the poor. Her mysticism is Christocentric in its love and service of the poor, thereby offering a new emphasis to the ongoing traditions of Catholic mystical theology. Chapters 7 and 8 conclude part I with a preliminary assessment of what is distinctive in Mother Teresa's mysticism as a deep appreciation of Christ as present in the poor. It is a mystical union with Christ in the poor that does not, as Fr. Garrity shows, in any way diminish the importance, emphasized in St. John Paul II's Centesimus Annus, of seeking economic, scientific, and other means of improving the lives of the poor. Catholic mystical theology is not opposed to reason and science. Part II provides eight chapters outlining the contributions Mother Teresa has made to Catholic mysticism and theology. Fundamental to these contributions is her insistence on the divine and human natures in the Person of Jesus Christ, who founded the Catholic Church with her governance, sacraments, and mission to the world. Chapter 9 shows how Mother Teresa's mystical theology both draws on the long traditions from the Catholic mystics and provides a new emphasis on the significance of these traditions in fostering service to the poor and destitute. Mother Teresa was insistent on fidelity to the Catholic Church and her hierarchy in order to reveal to the secular world that service to the [End Page 285] poor is indeed at the heart of Catholic faith and fidelity. Chapter 10 is an important clarification of Mother's experiential Christology. Fr. Garrity shows various aspects of Mother's mysticism: its intimate union with Christ on the Cross, its Marian devotion in receiving Jesus in the Eucharist, and how Mary in her earthly life excelled in faith, hope, and charity. He also warns readers that Mother now and then engaged in a "spiritual hyperbole" that resulted in misguided statements, such as that Jesus "became sin" and so was rejected by the Father (101–2). Chapter 11 acquaints the reader with the universal soteriology of Christ's "thirst" for souls. Drawing on St. Irenaeus and St. Bernard, Mother Teresa seeks to...

The Poverty of Philosophy

This article explores the essence of philosophy as a situation of authentic asking (poverty) which transcends the bounds of pragmatic knowledge. The poverty of philosophy is investigated in three meanings: liminality, abandonment, freedom. Liminality means that basic philosophical concepts are not ontologically given, they point to the openness of being, so docta ignorantia, learned ignorance is posited as the archetypal form of philosophy. Learned ignorance here means the knowledge of the whole (freedom, truth, God, soul, death, etc.). Knowledge of these is not gained experientially, not amassed, nor passed on, but rather exists in the special mode of already-knowledge. This knowledge leads to the dichotomy of captivation for fundamental philosophical concepts that precedes reflection and “grasp” of the instrumental mind, which turns the world as a whole into the object of power-seeking (V. Bibikhin). Abandonment: philosophy unfolds as thinking after the catastrophe of great beginnings. Historically, philosophy emerges with the collapse of mythological thinking. Philosophy is defined as post-catastrophic thinking, thinking in the state of abandonment. Freedom: philosophy as a self-collected readiness to place oneself at the edge. The author points out the marginality of philosophy, which doesn’t represent any metasubject (nation, state, class). This article shows philosophy’s destructive influence on myth, using the juxtaposition of community and society. Myth is shown to be a meta-narrative that integrates the community through a grand story of identity, marginalizing the Other and taking away her voice. At the same time, community is not an alternative project to be implemented as “utopia”; it is called to resist the final immanentization of society by generating splits and disruptions. The author outlines the main characteristics of community: the interruption of myth through giving voice to outcasts, and the destruction of the mimetic stance of “sacred beginnings”; the dispersion of subjective collectedness in existence- at-the-edge of a simulacrum; the introduction of the principle of ontological inadequacy (M. Blanchot); the gainsaying of the alternative between the singular and the general through articulating a “singular plural” (J.-L. Nancy), “any” being (G. Agamben); com-patibility as division (of joint space of coexistence and resisting homogenization); death as extreme openness to the other; communication as an ontological phenomenon beyond the function of representation and passing “information”; and memory as preservation of the traumatic Forgotten (J.-F. Lyotard). This article analyzes contemporary culture’s simulation of poverty, where exoticism of amassed impressions replaces liminality, the place of abandonment is taken by the apocalyptic rhetoric of postmodernity, and freedom is simulated through the biopolitical themes of security.

Semyon Frank about Leo Tolstoy: "The Knowing Ignorance" (Docta Ignorantia)

Semyon Frank about Leo Tolstoy: "The Knowing Ignorance" (Docta Ignorantia)

THEOLOGY, SCIENCE, AND CLOUD OF THE IMPOSSIBLE

AbstractAs a work of constructive theology attentive to the deconstructive edge of theology itself, Cloud of the Impossible offers a contemplative space for fresh transdisciplinary encounters. The ancient apophatic practice (of “unsaying,” docta ignorantia) here fosters a knowledge tuned to its own currently indeterminate edges. The present conversation surfaces issues of religion in relation to both science and ethics. It effects a multilateral advance in thinking the “apophatic entanglement” by which a relational ontology, with its attention to the materiality of our fragile planetary interdependence, is intensified through a theology of disciplined uncertainty.

Testimony of Experience: Docta Ignorantia and the Philadelphia Association Communities, By Bruce Scott, PCCS Books, 2014, £22.00, pb, 252 pp. ISBN: 9781906254643

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Mathematical theologies: Nicholas of Cusa and the legacy of Thierry of Chartres

Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction: Toward a Genealogy of Christian Neopythagoreanism PART ONE The Genesis of Neopythagoreanism: A Synopsis 1. Platonic Transformations of Early Pythagorean Philosophy 2. The Neopythagorean Revival: Henology and Mediation 3. The Late Antique Preservation of Neopythagoreanism PART TWO The Pearl Diver: Thierry of Chartres's Theology of the Quadrivium 5. The Discovery of Folding 6. Thierry's Diminished Legacy PART THREE Bright Nearness: Nicholas of Cusa's Mathematical Theology 7. The Accidental Triumph of De docta ignorantia 8. Chartrian Theology on Probation in the 1440s 9. The Advent of theologia geometrica in the 1450s 10. Completing the Circle in the 1460s Epilogue Bibliography

The Interreligious Dialogue in De docta ignorantia of Nicholas of Cusa

This article explains the method followed by Nicolaus Cusanus (Nicholas of Cusa, 1401–1464) to develop the theme of difference in relation to identity, and the way in which, following this perspective, Cusanus first comes to formulate a discourse of interreligious dialogue. We can interpret the theory on conjecturality expounded by Cusanus in De docta ignorantia as a system of thought that proves essential to understand the irenic model of De pace fidei, because it is in virtue of this metaphysical assumption that he affirms that absolute truth cannot be reached and infinity is incomprehensible to all. By developing the theme of concordantia differentiarum (concordance of differences), Cusanus elaborates in De docta ignorantia the theme of the coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites). In exploring this connection, I shall consider his work for the purpose of underlining the relevance of the themes of identity and difference to the focus on interreligious dialogue.

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

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. …

Non aliud quam docta ignorantia. Wegmarken einer Transzendentalphilosophie des Transzendenten bei Nikolaus von Kues

The essay seeks to provide an introduction to the philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa, drawing on his major works to discuss fundamental concepts like ‘learned ignorance’ ( docta ignorantia ), ‘conjecture’ ( coniectura ) and ‘living image’ ( viva imago ), with a focus on his epistemology and anthropology. It is argued that Cusa puts forward a transcendental philosophy which sees the transcendent God as an archetype of the human mind. The resulting conception of the human mind as a thinking subject has a close affinity with the Neo-Kantian philosophy of existence of Heinrich Barth (1890–1965). In conclusion, the author proposes an additional connection between Cusa and modern themes, by proposing ideas about contemporary education inspired by Nicholas of Cusa.

The Second-Person Perspective in the Preface of Nicholas of Cusa's De Visione Dei

In De visione Dei’s preface, a multidimensional, embodied experience of the second-person perspective becomes the medium by which Nicholas of Cusa’s audience, the benedictine brothers of Tegernsee, receive answers to questions regarding whether and in what sense mystical theology’s divine term is an object of contemplation, and whether union with God is a matter of knowledge or love. The experience of joint attention that is described in this text is enigmatic (paradoxical, resisting objectification), dynamic (enactive, participatory), integrative (cognitive and affective), and transformative (self- creative). As such, it instantiates the coincidentia oppositorum and docta ignorantia which, for Cusa, alone can give rise to a vision of the infinite.