Showing posts with label Nicholas of Cusa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nicholas of Cusa. Show all posts

Friday, September 29, 2023

The Pope and Dracula

Pope Pius II (18 October 1405 - 14 August 1464) was very busy, looking for political alliances and ways to expand his authority.

It wasn't all politics: in 1461 he canonized Saint Catherine of Siena. Much of the rest of his energy was put into more worldly actions, however, even if they had religious goals.

One of his first actions in 1458 was to make an alliance with Ferdinand II of Aragon who was pressing a claim to Naples (Naples was being contested between the House of Aragon and the House of Anjou.) In 1461, however, he persuaded King Louis XI of France to abolish something called the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, established in 1438 that required a Church Council every ten years that had power to overrule the papacy in France. Louis thought that, in turn, Pius would support him in the Naples question, but Pius stood by his alliance with Ferdinand and Louis reinstated the Pragmatic Sanction again.

He tried to mediate between the two sides of the Thirteen Years' War between Poland and the Teutonic Knights. Failing to bring them to agreement, he declared both groups anathema.

When Duke Sigismund arrested Nicholas of Cusa (when he was bishop of Brixen) for attempting reforms and reclaiming lost diocesan revenue, Pius excommunicated Sigismund.

He was very concerned about the Turks, who had come as far west as they ever had in 1453 with the taking of Constantinople. He convened a congress in Mantua in 1459 to arrange a new Crusade against the Turks. The attempt failed; Christendom did not rise to the occasion. He did, however, inspire a prince of Wallachia, a province in Romania, to mount a war against Sultan Mehmed II of Turkey. That prince was named Vlad Tsepes, also known as Vlad III, or Vlad the Impaler, but whose other nickname came down to modern times as a famous literary figure: Dracula.

Tomorrow I'll tell you about how Dracula tried to save Christendom from infidels.

Wednesday, January 4, 2023

Ramon Lull's Life

Ramon Llull (1232 - 1315) has been mentioned before. Born in Majorca, he married but lived what he later called a licentious life until, at the age of 30, as he writes in his autobiography Vita coaetanea ("A Contemporary Life"),

Ramon, while still a young man and Seneschal to the King of Majorca, was very given to composing worthless songs and poems and to doing other licentious things. One night he was sitting beside his bed, about to compose and write in his vulgar tongue a song to a lady whom he loved with a foolish love; and as he began to write this song, he looked to his right and saw our Lord Jesus Christ on the Cross, as if suspended in mid-air.

He develops three goals: change his life completely and focus on God, convert everyone to Christianity, write the definitive book against the errors of unbelievers.

The first goal meant leaving his wife and two daughters and travel the world, never to return to his family.

He approached the second goal a little more methodically. In order to convert the Saracens, he needed to be able to talk to them. After giving up all his worldly goods and making several pilgrimages to shrines, he went back to Majorca and purchased himself a Muslim slave in order to learn Arabic from him. He spent the next nine years studying Latin and Arabic, and expanding his knowledge of both Christian and Muslim theology and philosophy.

The third goal would take the remainder of his life, as he wrote and re-wrote a series of books, producing a massive philosophical system that tries to cover so many ways to examine questions and determine proper answers that it includes features that are considered precursors to computation theory and an election theory 450 years before French mathematicians developed it.

His philosophical system was enormously elaborate, and did not catch on in his lifetime. In the generations following, however, people like Nicholas of Cusa adopted some of Llull's ideas. Others were not so supportive. In 1376, an inquisitor named Nicholas Eymerich obtained a papal bull to prohibit Llullian teaching. Llull's philosophy was forbidden in the Faculty of Theology in France.

One of Llull's great successes was part of his second goal: he believed that to spread the truth of Christianity required understanding the language of those you wanted to convert. He argued all over for the creation of schools of language to aid this goal. In 1311, the Council of Vienne at Llull's urging created chairs of Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic at the universities of Bologna, Oxford, Paris, and Salamanca.

As understanding as he seemed to want to be, he argued that Jews refusing to convert needed to be expelled from their countries.

He produced many written works, including his book about knighthood, summarized here.

There is a story that Llull was stoned to death sometime in 1315 or early 1316 in Tunis, where he spent several years trying to convert the Caliph and the people. Llull's tomb is in Majorca, at the Franciscan church in Palma.

Nicholas Eymerich is an interesting character, and since this blog has not looked closely at the job of an Inquisitor, I think it's time.

Thursday, August 21, 2014

Geert Groote

A 19th century depiction of Geert Groote's Brethren of the Common Life
In Latin he was called Gerardus Magnus, but when he was born (in October 1340) in the Dutch city of Deventer, he was called Geert Groote. He was sent away to study, first at Aachen, then at the University of Paris where he studied theology, nominalism, canon law, medicine, astronomy, and even a little magic.

In 1362 he became a teacher in Deventer, where his success and reputation encouraged him to adopt a lavish lifestyle, until a fellow student, Henry de Calcar, made him see the inappropriateness of this. Groote started to change in the early 1370s, inclining toward mysticism and a more humble life. In fact, he gave his worldly goods to the monastic Carthusians and started preaching a life of repentance.

He gathered a small band of followers who called themselves Broeders des gemeenen levens [Dutch: "Brethren of the Common Life"]. The Brethren did not take vows, but merely gave up their possessions to live in a community where they devoted their waking hours to mass, religious reading and preaching, and manual labor. Meals were eaten as a group, with Scripture read aloud. It had all the hallmarks of a monastic life without the need to be clergy. They founded schools; Nicholas of Cusa attended one.

Before he died (20 August 1384), he organized some of the Brethren who wanted a more "regular" life into Augustinians; he died before this plan was complete, but his disciple Florens Radewyns established a monastery at Windesheim that became the center of up to 100 monastic houses called the Windesheim Congregation.

Groote promoted a style of piety now referred to as Devotio Moderna ["Modern Devotion"]. It was a search for inner peace based on self-deprivation and silent meditation on Christ's Passion. One of the students in his school, Thomas à Kempis, was inspired to write The Imitation of Christ, a work that (I believe) has never been out of circulation since the 15th century.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Nicholas of Cusa: Ecumenist

After the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the Turks, Nicholas of Cusa (c.1400-1464) wrote De pace fidei (On the Peace of Faith), in which he envisioned a conference in Heaven of representatives of all religions, including Islam and Hussites (the followers of Jan Hus were one of the first Christian Protestant movements, over a century before Luther).

The imaginary conference concluded that it was possible to have a single unified religion, even if it manifests in many different versions with separate practices. After all, the Roman Catholic Church had co-existed with the Eastern Church for centuries; the Eastern Church may not have recognized the authority of the Pope over the East, but the East and West did consider themselves two parts of the same faith.

Nicholas clearly prefers and exalts Christianity, but is willing to find accord with others. He had written Cribratio Alchorani (Sifting the Koran), which acknowledges that Islam and Judaism still possess seeds of the truth. Let me be clear: Nicholas doesn't treat Islam or Judaism as equals with Christianity—in 1451 he had used his authority as a bishop to require Jews in Arnhem to wear badges, and he had imposed other restrictions on Jews that were later lifted by Pope Nicholas V. The fact, however, that a well-known Catholic prelate and respected theologian could write on and publish such tolerant ideas was remarkable for the time.

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Reasoning Wrong

Nicholas of Cusa (c.1400-1464) believed in using reason to determine how the universe worked. He did not exactly take a "scientific" approach: he argued from his understanding of metaphysics and, in some cases, numerology. His guesses, however, were better than some early scholars' observations.

Because he could not accept that God was finite, and since God is not separate from the entirety of the universe, he argued that the universe must by necessity be infinite. Also, because God must provide the center for His own totality, the Earth cannot be at the center of the universe—that would mean Earth was the center of God. Not being at the center of the universe, the Earth cannot be immovable, and it, along with the Sun, must be in motion just like every other observable heavenly body. This idea influenced Giordano Bruno.

Again, denying perfection for anything but God, he would not accept planetary orbits as perfectly circular, paving the way for Kepler (who referred to Nicholas as "divinely inspired") to design elliptical orbits in his planetary theory.

Cusa's thoughts on what we now call infinitesimals in his De Circuli Quadratura (On Squaring the Circle) helped Kepler out when trying to calculate the area of a circle, by picturing it as an infinite series of triangles. Cusa's reasoning for this was that the circle encompassed all other forms. Cusa's and Kepler's work was later important to  Leibniz' Law of Continuity.

Tomorrow: his views on bringing religions together.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Nicholas of Cusa

American History has a charming anecdote that the head of the US Patent Office once declared there was nothing left to invent. The background for this fable is explained here. Someone in 2010 said that we create as much data in 2 days as in all of 2003. Our ability to find and learn new things looks like it will never match the things there are to learn.

With the amount of knowledge being gained rapidly accelerating, why don't we know everything yet? Will we know everything?

Nicholas of Cusa (c.1400-1464) had an opinion on this. He outlined the problem in the opening remarks of his De Docta Ignorantia (On Learned Ignorance):
It so far surpasses human reason, however, to know the precision of the combinations in material things and how exactly the known has to be adapted to the unknown that Socrates thought he knew nothing save his own ignorance, whilst Solomon, the Wise, affirmed that in all things there are difficulties which beggar explanation in words;
He argued, however, that every living creature is
endowed with suitable faculties and activities; ... there is in them a discernment that is natural and in keeping with the purpose of their knowledge, which ensures their natural inclination serving its purpose and being able to reach its fulfillment.
If that is true, he says, then limits to our ability to know things must be built-in by our Creator for a purpose. And that purpose is that, at the end of our reasoning, when reason fails, we must turn to faith for the ultimate answers.

For this, Nicholas has been declared an anti-intellectual by at least one prominent modern scholar. But this misses his point: until we reach the limits of what we can figure out, we must travel as far as we can with reason. Just how far Nicholas of Cusa let his reason take him (and in ways that were appreciated by men like Bruno, Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler) I will explore this week.