The Analogical Turn: Rethinking Modernity with Nicholas of Cusa
Digital Logos Edition
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Overview
According to Johannes Hoff, societies today are characterized by their inability to reconcile seemingly black-and-white scientific rationality with the ambiguity of postmodern pop culture. In the face of this crisis, The Analogical Turn recovers the fifteenth-century thinker Nicholas of Cusa’s alternative vision of modernity to develop a fresh perspective on the challenges of our time.
In contrast to his mainstream contemporaries, Cusa’s appreciation of individuality, creativity, and scientific precision was deeply rooted in the analogical rationality of the Middle Ages. He revived and transformed the tradition of scientific realism in a manner that now, retrospectively, offers new insights into the “completely ordinary chaos” of postmodern everyday life.
Hoff’s original study offers a new vision of the history of modernity and the related secularization narrative, a deconstruction of the basic assumptions of postmodernism, and an unfolding of a liturgically grounded concept of common-sense realism.
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Key Features
- Examines a fifteenth-century thinker’s original insights for theology and philosophy today
- Develops a fresh perspective on the challenges of our late modern world
- Discusses the pre-modern tradition of Christian learning
Contents
- Part I: Nicholas of Cusa: Pioneer of a Forgotten Path into the Modern Age
- Cusa’s Path to the “Wisdom of Unknowing”
- The Legacy of Dionysius the Areopagite
- Wisdom Shouts Outside in the Alleys and Squares
- The Growing Gap between Science and Liturgy as a Focal Problem
- Part II: Nicholas of Cusa and the Genealogy of Modern Concepts of Space and Autonomy
- Prologue: The Liturgical Staging of Modern Perspective
- The Prehistory of the Modern Concepts of Perspective and Space
- The Formation of the Modern “World Picture” in Renaissance Italy
- Cusa’s Response to the Emergence of the Modern Concept of Space
- Cusa’s Response to the Emergence of the Modern Concept of Autonomy
- Part III: Cusa’s Alternative Vision of the Age to Come
- Cusa’s Resistance to the Hyper-reflexivity of the Narcissistic Age
- Cusa’s Inversion of Modern Perspective
- Cusa’s Holistic Alternative to the Analytic Rationality of Modernity
- Cusa’s Holistic Alternative to Analytic Accounts of Individuality
- Cusa’s Apocalyptic Response to the Liturgical Crisis of His Age
- Cusa’s Ontology of Desire and the Body of Christ
Top Highlights
“The self-enclosed world of modern art images leaves space for the interpersonal skills of a humanist ‘ego’ that has learned to immerse itself temporarily in the narcissistic world of ‘other egos,’ but the possibility of adopting this position still does not create an actual space of face-to-face encounters. In contrast to Cusa’s liturgical common-sense realism, modern art images tend to replace our pre-reflexive experience of the social space by an artificially created ‘egological’ experience of ‘intersubjective’ convertibility. They reduce my ability to perceive embodied individuals as persons to my ability to put myself in the place of their mirror-image—as if a mirror-image were not an image of a real face, but rather a real face were a copy of a mirror-image.” (Page 95)
“Cusa revived and transformed the analogical middle way of the Middle Ages in a manner which now, retrospectively, offers new insights into the ‘completely ordinary chaos’ of post-modern life, and the crisis of a scientific culture which has become blind to its constitutional limitations. He discovered a way to circumvent the foundationalist rationality of later eras, and developed a mystagogical approach to the infinity of God rooted in context-sensitive, spiritual, and liturgical practices. Hence, Cusa offers an alternative modernity that enables us to recover the pre-modern middle path between univocity and equivocity without losing sight of the emancipatory legacy of the modern age.” (Page xv)
“The public recollection of the history of salvation made it speak again in the vagaries of time and enabled the scattered recipients of the apostolic witness to rediscover the invisible presence of the divine word in its visible creation.” (Pages 147–148)
Praise for the Print Edition
The Analogical Turn by Johannes Hoff for the first time locates Nicholas of Cusa without anachronism as a post-nominalist realist, who reworked the inherited analogical vision of Christian theology in a simultaneously late Gothic and Renaissance manner. As Hoff explains, this idiom offers us a new way forward today. . . . Much more than a monograph on a historical figure, this imaginatively crafted and extremely scholarly volume constitutes one of the most significant works of theology in the twenty-first century so far. I believe that it will exert a very considerable influence on future theoretical reflections both within theology and without.
—John Milbank, professor in religion, politics, and ethics, University of Nottingham
In this fascinating book Johannes Hoff shows us how Nicholas of Cusa sought to express the insights of the classical and medieval worldview in the conceptuality of the modern. With enormous learning and great insight, Hoff’s The Analogical Turn illuminates some of the urgent problems of philosophy and theology today.
—Andrew Louth, professor of patristic and Byzantine studies, Durham University
With The Analogical Turn: Rethinking Modernity with Nicholas of Cusa, Johannes Hoff has given us the most challenging and most readable book on the fifteenth-century cardinal to have appeared in English. But, as the title suggests, at issue is much more—the shape and fate of our modern world. Recently there has been much talk about this being a postmodern, postsecular age. Hoff’s book should make such talk more thoughtful.
—Karsten Harries, Howard H. Newman Professor of Philosophy, Yale University
This work by Johannes Hoff crucially enhances our understanding of the origins of modernity in the late Middle Ages. . . . He shows how the fragmented and illusory modern world in which we live was not an inevitable outcome of the cultural and intellectual upheavals of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There is an alternative modernity, centered on a theological symbolic reality, which can be derived chiefly from the work of fifteenth-century theologian, philosopher, and mathematician Nicholas of Cusa. There is a way of radically rethinking our modern cultural and intellectual malaise. This is scholarship of the very highest caliber. Hoff’s book will establish itself as one of the most significant works of Christian theology and philosophy in recent years.
—Simon Oliver, associate professor of philosophical theology, University of Nottingham
Product Details
- Title: The Analogical Turn: Rethinking Modernity with Nicholas of Cusa
- Author: Johannes Hoff
- Series: Interventions
- Publisher: Eerdmans
- Publication Date: 2013
- Pages: 267
About Johannes Hoff
Johannes Hoff is professor of systematic theology at Heythrop College in the University of London. He previously taught at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and received his doctorate from the University of Tübingen. His other works include Kontingenz, Berührung, Überschreitung: Zur philosophischen Propädeutik christlicher Mystik nach Nikolaus von Kues and Spiritualität und Sprachverlust: Theologie nach Foucault und Derrida.