The church, the councils, and reform: the legacy of the fifteenth century

7. From Conciliar Unity to Mystical Union: The Relationship between Nicholas of Cusa’s Catholic Concordance and On Learned Ignorance

7 From Conciliar Unity to Mystical Union TheRelationshipbetweenNicholasof Cusa’s Catholic Concordance andOn Learned Ignorance } Jovino miroy Delineating the relationship between the two major early works of Nicholas of Cusa, the Catholic Concordance (De concordantia catholica , 1433;hereafter DCC)1 and On Learned Ignorance (De docta ignorantia, 1439; hereafter DDI),2 is crucial in the writing of the cardinal’s early biography . Joachim Stieber has taken pains to demonstrate the less than altruistic reasons for Cusanus’s change of political alliance in 1437.3 But This is a revised version of Jovino Miroy, “From Unity to Union: The Relationship between the De concordantia catholica and the De docta ignorantia,” in Nicolas de Cues:Les methodes d’une pensée, ed.JeanMichelCounetandStephaneMercier(LouvainlaNeuve:Publicationsdel’Institutd’études medievales,2005),135–54,and is printed here with the permission of the original publisher. 1. De concordantia catholica, ed. Gerhard Kallen, in NC, vol. 14 (Hamburg, 1964); The Catholic Concordance, trans. Paul Sigmund (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Concordance Catholique, trans. Roland Galibois (Sherbrooke, Quebec: Centre d’études de la Renaissance, Universit é de Sherbrooke, 1977). See also Paul Sigmund, Nicholas of Cusa and Medieval Political Thought (Cambridge,Mass.:Harvard University Press,1963);and Morimichi Watanabe,ThePoliticalIdeasof Nicholasof Cusa,withSpecialReferencetoHis“Deconcordantiacatholica” (Geneva:Droz,1963). 2. De docta ignorantia, ed. Ernest Hoffman and Raymond Klibansky, in NC, vol. 1 (Hamburg: Meiner,1932);“On Learned Ignorance,”in SelectedSpiritualWritings, trans.H.Lawrence Bond (Mahwah , N.J.: Paulist, 1997), 85–206; De la docte ignorance, trans. Louis Moulinier (Paris: PUF, 1930). Numbers in parentheses refer to paragraphs of the Latin text and English translation. 3.“The fundamental career decision of Cusanus in 1436/37 can be attributed far more plausibly to motives related to his social status, his quest for benefices, and his professional training as a canon lawyer”;Joachim Stieber, “The ‘Hercules of the Eugenians’at the Crossroads:Nicholas of Cusa’s Decision for the Pope and against the Council in 1436/1437—Theological,Political,and Social Aspects,” in Nicholas of Cusa:In Search of God and Wisdom, ed. Gerald Christianson and Thomas M.Izbicki (Leiden:Brill,1972),221–28,at 221. 155 it would be a red herring to try to find out from these texts the reasons Cusanus had for abandoning the council’s majority and siding with the minority. Cusanus ’s reasons might be related to events that happened in the Council of Basel after DCC came out.4 Nevertheless,if we compare the two works,what can we say is the historical and conceptual relationship between them? In his “Nicholas of Cusa and the End of the Conciliar Movement:A Humanist Crisis of Identity,” James Biechler takes DDI as the beginning of Nicholas of Cusa’s philosophical program. He also states that Cusanus disowned his earliest major work, making only two references to it in his later works and excluding it from the collection of his works.5 Cusanus’s abjuration of DCC is probably the greatest proof against any assertion that it occupies a place in the whole body of his theological, mystical, or even metaphysical corpus. Biechler explains this by proposing that Cusanus experienced not only a radical change in his political affiliation but even a conversion comparable to that of other medieval thinkers.He says:“It is my contention that Cusanus’abandonment of the conciliar party in favour of alignment with the papal position was far more than a political act.More comprehensively understood, his change of allegiance involved a fundamental realignment of religious and theological values as well as other significant intellectual and vocational changes.”6 He sees “learned ignorance”(docta ignorantia) as the expression of the new intellectual synthesis that Cusanus reached when he abandoned conciliarism and became a papal legate. Biechler vehemently opposes the view that continuity exists between the two texts.Disagreeing with Paul Sigmund,who has traced some similarities between the two texts in his famous work on DCC, he thinks that there exists only an illusion of continuity, arising from the “preservation of language.”7 Biechler’s account , however, is actually even more untenable than the ones he tries to refute, for in explaining Cusanus’s shift from conciliarism to papalism he simply says: “One might say that Nicholas one day simply found himself on the side of papacy and only later modified and developed a rudimentary ecclesiology to support his new allegiance.”8 According to Biechler,it is for this reason that Edmond Vansteenberghe thought that Cusanus had a change of practical judgment only...