Masters of Learned Ignorance: Eriugena, Eckhart, Cusanus

by Duclow,Donald F.

• ISBN13: 9780860789956
• ISBN10: 0860789950
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-11-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The medieval Christian West's most radical practitioners of a Neoplatonic, negative theology with a mystical focus are John Scottus Eriugena, Meister Eckhart and Nicholas Cusanus. All three mastered what Cusanus described as docta ignorantia: reflecting on their awareness that they could know neither God nor the human mind, they worked out endlessly varied attempts to express what cannot be known. Following Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, they sought to name God with symbolic expressions whose negation leads into mystical theology. For within their Neoplatonic dialectic, negation moves beyond reason and its finite distinctions to intellect, where opposites coincide and a vision of God's infinite unity becomes possible. In these papers Duclow views these thinkers' efforts through the lens of contemporary philosophical hermeneutics. He highlights the interplay of creativity, symbolic expression and language, interpretation and silence as Eriugena, Eckhart and Cusanus comment on the mind's work in naming God. This work itself becomes mystical theology when negation opens into a silent awareness of God's presence, from which the Word once again 'speaks' within the mind - and renews the process of creating and interpreting symbols. Comparative studies with Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius, Anselm and Hadewijch suggest the book's wider implications for medieval philosophy and theology.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction: Pseudo-Dionysius

John Scottus Eriugena: Divine nothingness and self-creation in John Scotus Eriugena

Nature as speech and book in John Scotus Eriugena

Dialectic and christology in Eriugena's Periphyseon

Isaiah meets the Seraph: breaking ranks in Dionysius and Eriugena?

Denial or promise of the tree of life? - Eriugena, Augustine and Genesis 3:22b

Virgins in paradise: deification and exegesis in Periphyseon V, co-authored with

Hell and damnation in Eriugena, co-authored with

Meister Eckhart: Hermeneutics and Meister Eckhart

Meister Eckhart on the Book of Wisdom

'Whose image is this?' in Eckhart's Sermones

'My suffering is God': Meister Eckhart's Book of Divine Consolation

The hungers of Hadewijch and Eckhart

Nicholas of Cusa: Nicholas of Cusa's 'conjectural' neoplatonism

The dynamics of analogy in Nicholas of Cusa

The analogy of the word: Nicholas of Cusa's Theory of Language

Gregory of Nyssa and Nicholas of Cusa: infinity, anthropology and the Via Negativa

Anselm's Proslogion and Nicholas of Cusa's Wall of Paradise

Nicholas of Cusa in the margins of Meister Eckhart: codex Cusanus 21

Mystical theology and intellect in Nicholas of Cusa

Index

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