Renovatio et Unitas—Nikolaus von Kues als Reformer. Theorie und Praxis der reformatio im 15. Jahrhundert Ed. by Thomas Frank and Norbert Winkler (review)

This volume originated in a February 2011 workshop and a fall 2011 conference at the Free University at Berlin. The authors attempted to bridge the gap between philosophical and historical perspectives, between vita activa and contemplativa in Nicholas of Cusa and in the context of his writings situated between the medieval and early-modern eras. The result is ten contributions on various aspects of renovatio, unitas, and reformatio. The emphasis is on the concrete reform initiatives with reflection on the theoretical implications of reformatio. The introduction points out the shift from reformatio as personal improvement in the earlier Middle Ages (see Gerhart Ladner’s The Idea of Reform, Cambridge, MA, 1959) to the later ideas of structural-social change and the Janus perspective of looking back to a golden age and forward to the wrath of God to come unless reform occurred. For Cusa, there were conceptual reform, personal renewal, and the process of ridding institutions of abuses. In the last part of his life after the collapse of the Council of Basel and external reform, Cusa turned more to interior reform.

The first study by Hans Gerhard Senger puts Cusa’s dilemma in the context of the controversies with the Hussites—the issue of unity versus renewal/reform—and this Bohemian question stayed with Cusa for the last thirty years of his life. For him, the truth of the Church ontologically was rooted in its unity. Interestingly, he wrote on renovation in his sermons but not in his other writings. Renovatio could never be a valid ground for breaking unity, and so reform was not an issue if division then occurred.

Isabelle Mandrella treats reform dealings and speculative thought in Cusa, who had been asked for guidance by the monks at Tegernsee. It took him thirty years to finish his tract De Beryllo, and his De docta ignorantia presents in a highly theoretical and abstract manner his thoughts on the active and contemplative life; freedom; and the concepts of the new, obedience, and the one and the many while referring to the story of Martha and Mary. For Cusa, “the many” is always unstable, and so unity is the norm for the thinker and reformer. He looks at the striving for knowledge and truth as a dynamic and always renewed process, and so one must be open to the new to reach a better understanding. Man is called to go beyond the here and now of self-will to the true freedom of God’s will.

Norbert Winkler’s discussion of the link of Cusa to Meister Eckhart is centered in the Christological concerns that arose about Eckhart. In a dense and complex analysis Winkler explores some facets of this story: Eckhart’s condemnation in 1329, the role of the ideas of Albertus Magnus, the tension between the Aristotelian worldview and neo-Platonist/Hermetic thought, the influence of Tauler and Suso, and discussions on formal analogy and the idea of participation. He presents seeing and knowing as one and the same for Eckhart and Cusa, and it is God’s seeing that holds the creature in its being, whereas for Cusa, the human only sees through a glass darkly. For mankind, Christ is the teacher of complete wisdom, for he alone is fully the homo divinus. For Eckhart and Cusa, the real enemy to be conquered is that self-love that is opposed to love of God and of the other.

For Thomas Leinkauf, Cusa, unlike later figures, did not see himself as a reformer, since he did not desire to throw out the old. He expressed Greek ideas as ones changed by Judeo-Christian thought—in God, possible being and actual being are absolutely in one; God was...