Mathematical Theologies: Nicholas of Cusa and the Legacy of Thierry of Chartres by David Albertson (review)

Mathematical Theologies presents a history of Christian Neopythagoreanism as a critique of what Albertson calls the mathesis narrative: the “Neo-Kantian narrative of modernity’s origins—common to Husserl, Koyré, Cassirer, and Heidegger, and centered on the dramatic leap into mathematized or geometrized vision of the cosmos by Galileo and Descartes” (8). In Albertson’s well-documented synthesis, students of the history of philosophy, science, and theology will recognize similar arguments about how the mathematization of nature (often accompanied with univocal metaphysics) precipitated the removal of the divine from the modern secular world. Albertson holds that the divorce of mathematics and theology was not a logical necessity but an accident of historical contingency.

The book is divided into three parts that correspond to Albertson’s genealogy of Christian Neopythagoreanism. The first surveys ancient (Neo-)Pythagoreanism and culminates in the mathematical theology of Augustine’s early De ordine and De musica and Boethius’s quadrivium writings. These works represent Christian theology’s few interactions with mathematics in antiquity. However, since Augustine’s later writings rejected his earlier project and Boethius in effect isolated the discourses of theology from mathematics, they also established the parameters for theology’s missed opportunities. In the twelfth century, Thierry of Chartres (Part Two) reopened the question of theology’s relationship to mathematics. Working primarily with the little Augustinian, Boethian, and Platonic material that he had, Albertson argues, Thierry nevertheless inherited the full plethora of ancient Neopythagoreanism’s possibilities for mathematical theology. For a variety of historical reasons (not least of all the Aristotelian reorientation of late medieval theology and philosophy), this Chartrian project was later critiqued and neglected. Mathematical theologies resurfaced only with Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64) (Part Three). Albertson studies the De docta ignoratia, sermons, and important later works, like the De ludo globi. He ends his genealogy with Cusanus’s grounding of mathematics in the Incarnation. His mathematical theology, he reasons, reverses the mathesis narrative’s accepted conclusions and hints at how it is relevant to the present mathematized age.

There is much to commend in Albertson’s book. He is especially good at explaining Thierry’s modal theory and carefully examining how Cusanus relied largely on the writings of Thierry and two anonymous treatises, the Hermetic De septem (which is influenced by, but contradicts, aspects of Thierry) and the Fundamentum (which critiques him). Cusanus scholars will greatly benefit from Albertson’s reconstruction of how the Cardinal’s mistaken attribution of these contradictory Chartrian materials to the same Boethian commentator allowed him repeatedly to reconfigure the possibilities of mathematical theologies. Following Flasch’s genetic method for Cusanus’s works, Albertson nevertheless rejects his conclusions that Cusanus’s late philosophical works freed themselves from Christological/Trinitarian theology. However, in his genealogical counter-narrative to the mathesis narrative, Albertson needlessly rehearses a medievalist polemic with the Renaissance. On a few occasions, he claims that Cusanus’s retrieval of (Neo-)Pythagoreanism was “authentic,” unlike his Renaissance peers who ironically affected “an imaginary Greekness” (173) and who were distracted by the “red herring of Pythagoras legends” (255). These comments actually direct the reader toward missing pieces in the history of Christian Neopythagoreanism. To cite two examples, Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), the Latin translator and commentator of all of Plato’s dialogues and Plotinus’s Enneads, also translated the Platonic mathematics of Theon of Smyrna and the largest ancient Greek corpus of Neopythagoreanism, Iamblichus’s De secta pythagorica. Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples (c. 1455–1536), the humanist teacher of mathematics at the University of Paris who oversaw the publication of Cusanus’s books and editions of numerous mathematical works, also traveled to Florence to study the new educational currents. They are perhaps beyond the scope of Albertson’s book, but there is certainly room for them in the genealogy-history of Christian Neopythagoreanism, especially if it focuses more on its theological dimensions than its...