The Analogical Turn by Hoff Johannes;

Author:Hoff, Johannes;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Published: 2013-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

Cusa’s Inversion of Modern Perspective

“The landscape thinks itself in me . . . and I am its consciousness.”1 This sentence of Paul Cézanne is consistent with Cusa’s ontology of perception. The colors of the landscape have their own intention. We might objectify the “faces” that emerge from the landscape when we ponder what appears to our eyes in a confused way, but the “objects” will still “look back.” However, Cusa does not confine himself to the study of emerging objects; his liturgical ontology implies more: the encounter with embodied faces marks the starting-point of a mystagogical ascent that leads, via the misty space of a conjecturing power that is characterized by liturgical practices of faith and belief, to the contemplation of the invisible source of the visible creation. To quote again one of the key passages of De visione Dei:

In all faces the Face of faces is seen in a veiled and symbolic manner. But it is not seen in an unveiled manner as long as the seeker does not enter, above all faces, into a certain and hidden silence. . . . Therefore, the denser he knows the mist to be, the more truly he touches (attingit), within that mist, unto the invisible light. (c. 6 n. 21; Hp n. 22)

This liturgical orientation of Cusa’s ontology of perception could easily fuel a modern hermeneutics of suspicion against Christian Platonists, namely, the suspicion that Cusa’s thinking was still trapped in an unbiblical “Platonic dualism” (in the sense of the related stereotype of philosophical schoolbooks) that portrayed the visible creation as nothing but a natural means to a supernatural end. However, suspicions like these reveal more about what Hugo Ball called “the melancholia of the modern people, which was bred by machines,”2 than about the age it places under suspicion. While liberal societies tend to perceive the human body as a kind of machine that can be exploited for the purpose of subjectivist practices of “self-fashioning,” they make themselves appear blameless by accusing their ancestors for their lamentable fate. But this accusation is not supported by the philosophical sources that are usually chosen to mount the attack.

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