Article
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Nicholas of Cusa in dialogue with his sources: the redefinition of Platonism
Claudia D’AMICO
Original title: Nicolás de Cusa en diálogo con sus fuentes: la re-definición del platonismo
Published in Nicholas of Cusa in Dialogue
Keywords: Medieval Platonism, Nicholas of Cusa, Sources.
This paper presents the Cusanus’s thought given its knowledge of the Platonic tradition considering its Christian version –Dionysius, Scotus Eriugena, the Chartrenses, Meister Eckhart, Bertold of Moosburg – as some authors Athenian Neoplatonism, especially Proclus. The text is divided into three points (I) the presence of this tradition in early works; (II) the defense of these sources in the Apologia doctae ignorantiae; (III) the reinterpretation of tradition from new receiving texts from 1450.
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Man’s “knowledge” and “ignorance” for God in the teaching of Gregory of Nyssa and Nicholas of Cusa
Eirini ARTEMI
Original title: Man’s “knowledge” and “ignorance” for God in the teaching of Gregory of Nyssa and Nicholas of Cusa
Published in Nicholas of Cusa in Dialogue
Keywords: Gregory of Nyssa, Knowledge of God, Nicholas of Cusa, Ousia, attributes.
The knowledge of God has been the main subject of the theological teaching since the expanding of the Christian doctrine and teaching. Ecclesiastical writers as Gregory of Nyssa and Nicholas of Cusa accept that the knowledge about God is conventional and symbolic (deliberately). His attributes are known, however His essence “ousia” is not known. God is in finite. He is unlimited in every kind of perfection or that every conceivable perfection belongs to Him in the highest conceivable way. God is self-existent and does not depend on any thing else for his existence. The biblical I am that I am. Related to divine immutability: God does not undergo any change. God is externally related to the world: no event in the world has any effect on God. God conforms to the substance metaphysics of Greek philosophy. A substance is independent, self- contained, and self - sufficient. Man knows only the God’s attributes and not His “ousia”. This happens, because the finite human mind cannot grasp the essence of the infinite God. Besides God is unknowledgeable and inconceivable to His “ousia” while He is knowledgeable and comprehendible to His energies. It is clear that it only is possible for man to acquire indistinct “amydros” and weak “asthenis” vision of God according to his attributes “ta kathautou”. In this article, we are going to examine this knowledge and vision of God through the writings of eastern and western ecclesiastical writers, Gregory of Nyssa and Nicholas of Cusa.
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Nicholas of Cusa in Dialogue in year 1453: theatral dimension and dialogical significance of De pace fidei and De visione Dei
João Maria ANDRÉ
Original title: Nicolau de Cusa em diálogo no ano de 1453: dimensão teatral e carácter dialógico do De pace fidei e do De visione Dei
Published in Nicholas of Cusa in Dialogue
Keywords: Dialogue, Nicholas of Cusa, Philosophy of Language.
In this article, we propose an approach of two works of Nicholas of Cusa written in the year 1453: De pace fidei and De visione Dei. First, is conceptualized its theatral dimension from the devices convocated in each of this two texts. Such devices show how the dialogical dimension, if it is the exposition form in some works of Nicolas of Cusa, it’s also present in texts that do not have the dialogue form. Second, we call the attention to the philosophy and theology of word and language implicitly or explicitly developed in these two works.
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Time, History, and Providence in the Philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa
Jason ALEKSANDER
Original title: Time, History, and Providence in the Philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa
Published in Nicholas of Cusa in Dialogue
Keywords: Divine Providence, Nicholas of Cusa, Philosophy of History, Temporality, Time.
Although Nicholas of Cusa occasionally discussed how the universe must be understood as the unfolding of the absolutely infinite in time, he left open questions about any distinction between natural time and historical time, how either notion of time might depend upon the nature of divine providence, and how his understanding of divine providence relates to other traditional philosophical views. From texts in which Cusanus discussed these questions, this paper will attempt to make explicit how Cusanus understood divine providence. The paper will also discuss how Nicholas of Cusa’s view of the question of providence might shed light on Renaissance philosophy’s contribution in the historical transition in Western philosophy from an overtly theological or eschatological understanding of historical time to a secularized or naturalized philosophy of history.
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The sublime: from word to silence
Waldir BARRETO
Original title: Lo sublime, de la palabra al silencio
Published in Pleasure in the Middle Ages
Keywords: Beautiful, Imagination, Reason, Sublime, Understanding, Unrepresentable.
This essay presents a didactic and expositive approach the historical-philosophical deployment of the sublime’s concept since the retrieval of the term, according to its translation of the Greek into French, until the reinstatement of meaning, according to its shift from rhetoric to philosophy, through Anglo-Saxon valuation of the imagination, the birth of Aesthetics, philosophical premise, Burke’s key of terror and his distinction between pleasure and delight, the game of faculties in Kant, and the characterization of the radical informality of the sublime.
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Human or Computer Assisted Interactive Transcription: Automated Text Recognition, Text Annotation, and Scholarly Edition in the Twenty-First Century
M. J. CASTRO-BLEDA, J. M. VILAR, S. ESPAÑA, D. LLORENS, A. MARZAL, F. PRAT, F. ZAMORA
Published in Pleasure in the Middle Ages
Keywords: Ancient documents, Assisted transcription, Interactive automatic text recognition, Multimodal human/computer interaction.
Computer assisted transcription tools can speed up the initial process of reading and transcribing texts. At the same time, new annotation tools open new ways of accessing the text in its graphical form. The balance and value of each method still needs to be explored. STATE, a complete assisted transcription system for ancient documents, was presented to the audience of the 2013 International Medieval Congress at Leeds. The system offers a multimodal interaction environment to assist humans in transcribing ancient documents: the user can type, write on the screen with a stylus, or utter a word. When one of these actions is used to correct an erroneous word, the system uses this new information to look for other mistakes in the rest of the line. The system is modular, composed of different parts: one part creates projects from a set of images of documents, another part controls an automatic transcription system, and the third part allows the user to interact with the transcriptions and easily correct them as needed. This division of labour allows great flexibility for organising the work in a team of transcribers.
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The Concept of Beauty in Medieval Nativities from England and Spain
Vicente CHACÓN-CARMONA
Published in Pleasure in the Middle Ages
Keywords: Beauty, Landscape, Music, Nativity, Religious drama, Shepherds.
Medieval nativity plays, in particular those dealing with the adoration of the shepherds, tend to depict two well distinct worlds, namely before and after the characters learn about the birth of the Messiah. English and Castilian playwrights depict the postlapsarian world prior to Jesus’s birth as a gloomy, barren place inhabited by rough ignorant creatures awaiting their redemption. Even if beauty is not staged as such in these plays, it is clear that the characters, due to their moral state, are unable to appreciate the aesthetics of their surroundings. It is the aim of this article to analyse and compare the strategies utilised by the authors in order to stimulate the characters and make beauty somehow apparent to the spectators both in the English and the Castilian traditions. Special attention is paid to the roles played by landscape, language, and music.
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Painful Pleasure. Saintly Torture on the Verge of Pornography
Sarah SCHÄFER-ALTHAUS
Published in Pleasure in the Middle Ages
Keywords: Body, Hagiography, Pornography, Torture, Women Saints.
Within female hagiographical narratives, stimulating, pornographic, and often sadistic endeavours can be detected; gendering the tortured body parts such as the tongue, teeth or the breast and thus supporting the development of (negative) erotic fantasies. This paper will explore the connection between pornography, torture, and hagiography and investigate the ambiguity of this ‘painful pleasure’, which, despite any assumptions, is not only enjoyed by the male torturer when cutting off these symbolically significant body parts, but recurrently so it seems also by the saint herself, who more than once cheerfully exclaims that ‘the pains are my delight’ (St Agatha).
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The Pleasure of Martyrdom
Brigit G. FERGUSON
Published in Pleasure in the Middle Ages
Keywords: Art History, Emotion, Martyrdom, Sculpture, Thirteenth Century.
A late thirteenth-century Stoning of St. Stephen, currently in the Cathedral Museum in Mainz, Germany, shows the martyr smiling radiantly in the midst of his execution. In contrast to Stephen’s saintly bliss, his executioners scream in rage. The narrative of St. Stephen, from the Acts of the Apostles, reports that those present at Stephen’s trial ‘viderunt faciem eius tamquam faciem angeli [saw his face as if it had been the face of an angel]’ (Acts 6:15). Although the biblical story describes Stephen as crying out to God at the moment of his death, the makers of the Mainz relief applied the description of the saint as angelic – which they understood to mean that he smiled softly – to the martyrdom in order to highlight his joy at dying for Christ. Stephen’s calm joy makes him angelic, while the anger of the attackers makes them demonic. The Mainz relief is far from the only representation of a blissful saint in medieval art. Early Christian and medieval hagiography is full of saints who taunt their persecutors or are described as smiling while they die. This is also true, for example, in the story of St. Vincent. In contrast, the persecutors of these saints often experience debilitating, blinding rage. Drawing on visual and textual hagiographies, this paper explores the implications of martyrs’ smiles, arguing that their calm pleasure in the face of suffering both asserts the power of their belief in salvation and serves to disarm their persecutors. The contrast between calmly smiling saints and their immoderate enemies underlines the importance of emotional restraint for Christian virtue.
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“Personal Jesus”: Adam of Bremen and ‘Private’ Churches in Scandinavia During the Early Conversion Period
Dimitri TARAT
Published in Pleasure in the Middle Ages
Keywords: Adam of Bremen, Hamburg-Bremen, Local Churches, Local Kings, Scandinavia.
In modern research it is customary to describe the 50s and the 60s of eleventh century as a first phase of the struggle for independence by the local churches in Scandinavia. All of them were officially subordinated to the church of Hamburg-Bremen, even if some of them found themselves under the influence of the Anglo-Saxon church. However, careful reading of Adam of Bremen’s Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae Pontificum indicates that in fact the period at the end of the first phase of Christianisation, was a period of personal initiatives by local rulers to control the missions and religious establishments in their lands. These religious initiatives by rulers in 1050s and 1060s turned the control over the local churches into a political tool against unwelcome foreign influences. However, it would be a mistake to try and describe this period as an awakening of a national church movement in Scandinavia for ecclesiastical independence. The kings simply wanted to keep the church subjected only to them.
