'But Following the Literal Sense, the Jews Refuse to Understand': Hermeneutic Conflicts in the Nicholas of Cusa's De Pace Fidei

In the midst of the De pace fidei’s imagined heavenly conference on the theme of the possibility of religious harmony, Nicholas of Cusa has Saint Peter acknowledge to the Persian interlocutor that it will be difficult to bring Jews to the acceptance of Christ’s divine nature because they refuse to accept the implicit meaning of their own history of revelation. What is peculiar about this line in the dialogue is not merely that it flies in the face of what Cusanus scholars tend to regard as an ecumenical spirit in Nicholas’ call to interreligious dialogue and mutual toleration. Rather, the statement reveals a peculiar hermeneutic principle at work in Nicholas’ understanding of the tension between truth and doctrine and the way that this tension informs human practice. Accordingly, by grappling with Nicholas’ portrayal of an imagined failure of Jews to practice interpretation correctly, I hope to shed light on Nicholas’ philosophy of religion in a way that neither ignores his anti-Judaism nor reduces the significance of his views to one of its most unpleasant manifestations

Nicholas of Cusa

Given the significance of Nicholas of Cusa’s ecclesiastical career, it is no surprise that a good deal of academic attention on Nicholas has focused on his role in the history of the church. Nevertheless, it would also be fair to say that a good deal of the attention that is focused on the life and thought of Nicholas of Cusa is the legacy of prior generations of scholars who saw in his theoretical work an opportunity to define the most salient features of transformations in the habits of thinking leading from the Middle Ages into the epoch of modernity. Thus, although contemporary scholars have not been able to achieve any clear consensus on the question of whether Nicholas belongs to the Middle Ages or to modernity, the field of Cusanus studies has become much more attentive to the possibility that the uniqueness and significance of Nicholas’s vision is a function of his ability to synthesize and redeploy a variety of strands in the Catholic intellectual tradition—strands that are as apt to involve practical matters of canon law and church reform as they are to hinge on a unique and richly developed mystical theology. Given the flourishing of the attention devoted to Nicholas in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the choices about which texts to include in this article were difficult ones. The rationale for this article’s predominant focus on scholarship of the late 20th and early 21st centuries is that, insofar as the recent studies listed here enter into the debates that have been shaped by their predecessors, the sources mentioned here will point readers to the prior work in the field not acknowledged here

Two Poems

Poetry by Nicholas Bradle

An introduction to The Horse Whisperer

An introduction to The Horse Whisperer, by Nicholas Evan

Anthropocene by Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal, and Nicholas De Pencier

Review of Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal, and Nicholas De Pencier\u27s Anthropocen

Book Review: The Beginning and End of Religion

A review of The Beginning and End of Religion by Nicholas Lash

Rain Shadow by Nicholas Bradley and Cloud Physics by Karen Enns

Review of Nicholas Bradley\u27s Rain Shadow and Karen Enns\u27 Cloud Physics

The Digital Natives Will Not Save Us: Reflections on the shallows

Review of Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (2010)

Who was Jesus?

Reviewed Book: Wright, November T. (Nicholas Thomas), Bp. Who was Jesus?. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; London: SPCK, 1992