The Renaissance lawyer, theologian, and mathematician Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64) is often cast as a forerunner of modernity. While Ernst Cassirer praised him as a protomodern ahead of his time, for Hans Blumenberg Nicholas wandered in the medieval wilderness, never entering the Promised Land. Building on Hans Urs von Balthasar's insights in the 1960s, Louis Dupré turned the script on its head in his influential Passage to Modernity (1993). Nicholas was, rather, the last thinker able to hold together the late medieval synthesis of God, world, and soul, which, once broken apart by nominalism, gave way to the alienations of modernity. By preserving whole what later centuries could not, and by holding the secret to restoration, Nicholas was not so much a prophet of modernity as its angelic savior.
In this passionate and freewheeling essay, his second book on Nicholas of Cusa, Johannes Hoff follows the Dupré narrative. Hoff contends that Nicholas’ theological writings anticipated, avoided, and unwittingly critiqued the intellectual disjunctions that would come to plague modernity. Hoff frames his argument around Nicholas’ 1453 meditation on an icon of Jesus’ face, De Visione Dei (On the Vision of God). When God is envisioned through the icon's infinite perspective, all the customary modern distinctions—visible and invisible, hearing and sight, subject and object, materiality and transcendence—fall away. Cusan thought overcomes stubborn oppositions within modern spatiality, subjectivity, and ontology by discovering their dialectical coincidence in God. Nicholas therefore shows the way toward an alternative, holistic modernity that remains truer to the phenomenal Lebenswelt than the calcified rationalism of Descartes or Kant.
Among Hoff's unique contributions is his claim that Nicholas overcame the “modern world picture” through his attention to “liturgy” or “doxology.” In essence, Nicholas harmonized a grammar of divine praise with a grammar of scientific measurement. If it is doxological speech that finally confronts reason with its limits, then a critical, scientific rationality must retain, out of sheer self-interest, the spiritual wisdom of religious traditions. Like Wittgenstein or Foucault, Cusa's thought constitutively resists totalizing discourses.
The Analogical Turn has three parts. The first briefly introduces the reader to the life and work of Nicholas of Cusa—a useful orientation for beginners. The second part of the book articulates the Cusan (or at least Cusan-inspired) critique of the emerging world picture of early modernity—its interwoven account of empty space, mathematized perspective, and autonomous subjectivity. Hoff aims to update Michel de Certeau's reading of De Visione Dei, and he does so admirably by applying Hans Belting's scholarship on the rise of perspective in Renaissance painting. In the tradition of Karsten Harries’ Infinity and Perspective (2001), Hoff draws a line from Alberti's invocation of Narcissus to the “nihilism” of the Cartesian cogito.
The third part of the book is entitled, in Hoff's provocative anachronism, “Cusa's Alternative Vision of the Age to Come.” Nicholas sustains ontologies of perception and subjectivity that would have prevented a disembodied spectator-ego from ever separating from divine participation. His elevation of possibility over actuality reminds Hoff of the apocalypticism of Walter Benjamin or Jacques Derrida. In the final chapter Hoff outlines a Cusan theology of love, although it is unclear how this moves beyond Augustine. Hoff's interpretations of Cusa sometimes proceed in a series of sideways allusions. After setting forth an important Cusan insight, he might color in the details with references to Augustine or Johann Gottlieb Fichte, if not Jacques Lacan or Emmanuel Levinas. Nicholas is sometimes the last voice heard, brought in to conclude the digression, but therefore not the center of attention.
Hoff reveals in his preface that he conceived this book after embracing the Radical Orthodoxy program of John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock. As many have noted, the movement's foundational certainty about a particular diagnosis of modernity's ills are both its strength and its weakness. This historical narrative is useful for orienting theology in the present, but less instructive for isolating particular achievements of past theologians. Readers unaware of Hoff's Milbankian assumptions may wonder why key slogans (nominalism, liturgy, realism, analogy, and “misty space”) are frequently repeated without being fully defined. Hoff's confidence that liturgy can overcome modern spatiality is clearly indebted to Pickstock; and his notion of Nicholas’ realism refers less to the late medieval schools than to Milbank's hints that Cusan analogy could be the antimodern antidote par excellence. It seems that Hoff strives to realize this intuition in his book, and at moments he succeeds. But even sympathetic readers may wish for a more patient, contextual analysis of the historical specifics that make Nicholas of Cusa so valuable today.
