This volume contains studies on Nicholas of Cusa and his times. The first section is concerned with Cusanus' context, beginning with a historiographic essay by Francis Oakley on the impact of Brian Tierney's Foundations of the Conciliar Theory. Among the topics addressed are the long-term continuation of the Council of Basel (1431-1449) and the issues of ecclesiastical income which it addressed. The second part is concerned with Cusanus' thought on the Church, both in his conciliarist and papalist phases. Included is the first translation into English of Nicholas' Reformatio generalis. Attention also is paid to Cusanus' reforming efforts and the relationship of his thought on these issues to his earliest speculative writings. The third part is concerned with Nicholas' ideas on Christ and mystical experience. Particular attention is paid to the De visione dei, including its relationship to Renaissance art. The volume concludes with wide-ranging essays on the larger significance of Cusanus' speculative thought. An update of Thomas M. Izbicki's bibliography of Cusanus scholarship in English is included.

This is the first commentary to have been written on Nicholas of Cusa's most famous work, On Learned Ignorance. This fact testifies to the difficulty of what has long been recognized to be the most significant philosophical text produced by the Renaissance. While there are many passages in the work that can be cited in support of Cassirer's celebration of Cusanus as the first modern philosopher, that judgment is challenged by the way his work is rooted in a faith and a tradition likely to strike us as thoroughly medieval. This commentary shows how closely the two are linked. Despite the many ways in which what the cardinal has to say belongs to a past that the progress of reason would seem to have left irrecoverably behind, it yet provides us with a continuing challenge. Key to On Learned Ignorance is the incommensurability of the infinite and the finite, of God and creation. Cusanus lets us recognize the essential transcendence of reality, so different from the ontology implied by Descartes' insistence on clear and distinct understanding, which has presided over the progress of science and has helped shape our world. What makes Cusanus' thought important is not the way it anticipates modernity, but the way it challenges often taken-for-granted presuppositions of our worldview, most importantly a distinctly modern self-assertion or self-elevation that has made our human reason the measure of reality. If it is impossible to deny the countless ways in which our science and technology have given us ever deeper insights into the mysteries of nature and improved our lives, it is equally impossible to deny that this very progress today endangers this fragile earth and the quality of our lives. Cusanus can help us preserve our humanity.

The volume focuses on the relation between Cusanus and Aristotle or the Aristotelian tradition. In recent years the attention on this topic has partially increased, but overall the scholarship results are still partial or provisional. The book thus aims at verifying more systematically how Aristotle and Aristotelianism have been received by Cusanus, in both their philosophical and theological implications, and how he approached the Aristotelian thought. In order to answer these questions, the papers are structured according to the traditional Aristotelian sciences and their reflection on Cusanus' thought. This allows to achieve some aspects of interest and originality: 1) the book provides a general, but systematic analysis of Aristotle's reception in Cusanus' thought, with some coherent results. 2) Also, it explores how a philosopher and theologian traditionally regarded as Neoplatonist approached Aristotle and his tradition (including Thomas Aquinas), what he accepted of it, what he rejected, and what he tried to overcome. 3) Finally, the volume verifies the attitude of a relevant Christian philosopher and theologian of the Humanistic age towards Aristotle.

In The Religious Concordance: Nicholas of Cusa and Christian-Muslim Dialogue, Joshua Hollmann examines Nicholas of Cusa’s unique Christocentric approach to Islam. While many late medieval Christians responded to the fall of Constantinople with polemic, Nicholas of Cusa wrote a peaceful dialogue (De pace fidei) between Christians and Muslims as synthesis of religious concordance through the person and work of Jesus Christ. Nicholas of Cusa’s Christ-centered dialogue with Muslims sheds further light on his broader Christ centered theology over his entire career as philosopher and theologian. Drawing upon Nicholas of Cusa’s philosophical foundations for religious dialogue and peace, Joshua Hollmann convincingly proves that Cusa constructively understands religious diversity through the concordance of religion as centred in Christ.

Economy and Theology: Cusanus's Theory of Value, a study from the field of the history of philosophy, responds to the present-day interest in what is referred to as economic theology. This study aims to show that value (valor), one of the fundamental concepts of contemporary philosophy and economics, has its genealogy in the thought of Nicholas of Cusa. Starting from the economic context (the concept of price/pretium), Cusanus proposes the theory of value that, on the one hand, is objectively rooted in the Divine act of creation (God as the Minter) and, on the other hand, requires reading by human beings (human mind as a banker). While this theory appears in Cusanus’s late work The Bowling-Game, it is underpinned by his theory of knowledge, theory of human beings and human cognition against the background of his vision of the universe. Thus, the aim of the book is to try to answer the question about the role and tasks of human beings as a principal player in economic and social game. This description of human position emerges from the creative tension between human philosophical and theological reflection and certain economic solutions.

At the end of the nineteenth century, German theologians and philosophers rediscovered the Renaissance cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464). Immediately they hailed Cusanus as the first modern thinker, a brilliant German rival to the French Descartes. But since the founding of the Cusanus critical edition in 1927 up to its conclusion in 2005, historians have gradually learned that Nicholas was more of a medieval preacher and contemplative than a modern philosopher. Yet over the same century, modern German and French readers were already digging into Nicholas's many works. There they encountered an exciting voice with fresh perspectives about God's immanence in the cosmos and the awesome capacities of the human mind. Leading philosophers and theologians from Erich Przywara to Karl Jaspers to Hans-Georg Gadamer, and from Gilles Deleuze to Jacques Lacan to Michel de Certeau, found their own thinking stimulated by the cardinal's innovative concepts and interdisciplinary style. Even as Nicholas shifted from modern to medieval among historians, he was emerging as a contemporary interlocutor for moderns and postmoderns. Who could have guessed that the first debate between Jean-Luc Marion and Emmanuel Falque would take place over the fifteenth-century mystical dialogue, De visione dei? If Meister Eckhart found his moment amidst Deconstruction in prior decades, Nicholas of Cusa is our thinker for today. His interests anticipate themes in continental philosophy of religion, whether alterity, invisibility, the fold, or the icon. His habit of interweaving philosophy and theology anticipates current debates on the thresholds of phenomenology. Our volume first maps the contours of modern receptions of Nicholas of Cusa in French and German spheres, and then beyond Europe to the Americas and Japan. It also hosts the next round of engagement by some of today's most original Christian thinkers: Emmanuel Falque, John Milbank, and David Bentley Hart.