Partakers of the Divine: Contemplation and the Practice of Philosophy

3. A Stranger Modernity

3 A Stranger Modernity Nicholas of Cusa, Hans Blumenberg, and the Origins of Our Age I once said, perhaps rightly: the earlier culture will become a heap of rubble and finally a heap of ashes, but spirits will hover over the ashes. –—Ludwig Wittgenstein1 In the preceding chapter, we saw the way that Anselm integrated inquiry and contemplation, or theory and theoria, through an adorative and self-implicating practice of philosophy and theology. But Anselm’s project was undertaken within a decisively medieval and monastic milieu. Can we still entertain such an approach today? Can philosophers of religion and theologians today pursue a modern or, at any rate, a nonanachronistic integration of contemplative transformation and philosophical discovery? For some, such an integration must seem an impossibility, for, they may ask, is not the very identity of modernity bound up with the separation of theory and theoria? Hans Blumenberg, for instance, has argued that the essence and legitimacy of the modern age is found in the way it unleashes theoretical curiosity from any moral, spiritual, or religious implications. If Blumenberg is right, then the prospects for a retrieval of contemplative philosophy are dim, indeed. In this chapter, however, 1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, CULTURE AND V ALUE, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 3e. 131 I argue that there are reasons to be suspicious of Blumenberg’s account and of the self-consciously noncontemplative modernity he champions. To do so, I follow Blumenberg in zeroing in on one particular historical moment. Central to Blumenberg’s sweeping genealogical narrative is a reading of Nicholas of Cusa—the most important German, even perhaps the most important European, thinker of the fifteenth century—but I argue that Blumenberg’s interpretation of Nicholas is inadequate precisely because it overlooks the essentially contemplative nature of Nicholas’s philosophy. Moreover, I show that this contemplative dimension of the Cusan’s thought is not in any way opposed to those aspects of modernity he so remarkably anticipates. Blumenberg is right to place Nicholas at a critical point in the transition to our own age; however, what Nicholas reveals is not that modernity has no room for contemplation but, rather, the contingency and contestability of the historical separation of philosophical inquiry from contemplative and spiritual elevation. In this light, the separation of theory from theoria is revealed as a merely epochal phenomenon, one we may yet overcome. Nicholas of Cusa, Hans Blumenberg, and Modernity For some time now, the identity of Nicholas of Cusa—who he was, what he accomplished, and what his legacy might yet be—has been bound up with the identity of modernity itself. There is good reason for this. Nicholas was one of the most prodigious thinkers of the fifteenth century. Canon lawyer, cardinal, diplomat, mathematician, philosopher, astronomer, writer, mystic: there is hardly any area of renaissance culture that he did not engage. His youthful work, The Catholic Concordance, a seminal text in political history, is one of the earliest arguments for the principle that political legitimacy rests on the consent of the governed. Nicholas wrote a commentary on the Qu’ran and his De Pace Fidei is an important textual precursor to the ecumenical movement of the last century. In mathematics, his discussions of both the infinitesimal and of relative motion prepared the ground for Leibniz’s and Newton’s later discovery of the calculus, and arguably played a role in Cantor’s work on cardinal and ordinal infinities. Half a century before Copernicus, Nicholas argued that the Earth was neither at rest nor that it lay at the center of the universe, and he anticipated Kepler by arguing that the orbit of the planets and the stars could be neither circular nor uniform. He was apparently even the first to use concave lenses to correct myopia.2 2. Vincent Ilardi, Renaissance Vision from Spectacles to Telescopes (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2007), 80. Cf. Nicholas of Cusa, De Beryllo §6. 132 | Partakers of the Divine His philosophical achievements are equally notable. Ernst Cassirer names Cusa the “first modern thinker” because, on Cassirer’s reading, Nicholas is the first important philosopher to have embraced the subjective or epistemological turn. As Cassirer writes, “His first step consists in asking not about God, but about the possibility of knowing God.”3 Cassirer is hardly alone in seeing in Nicholas a certain inauguration of modernity. In La Philosophie de Nicholas de Cues, Maurice de Gandillac...