Reading Cusanus: Metaphor and Dialectic in a Conjectural Universe

This text presents readings of six of the most important theoretical works of Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1463). Though Nicholas’s writings have long been studied as either scholastic Aristotelian or proto-Kantian, Miller locates Cusanus squarely in the Christian Neoplatonic tradition. He demonstrates how Nicholas worked on his own original synthesis of that tradition by fashioning a conjectural view of main categories of Christian thought: God, the universe, Jesus Christ and human beings. Each reading reveals how Nicholas’s project of
learned ignorance
is played out in striking metaphors for God and the relation of God to creation. The six works read span the last quarter of Nicholas’s life (1440-1463) and include
On Learned Ignorance ,
Conjectures ,
The Layman - About Mind ,
The Vision of God ,
The Not Other
and
The Hunt of Wisdom . These readings are explications of the text; they interpret each work as a whole and focus in particular on the themes that order the work and how these get played out in its details.