BOETHIUS NOSTER: Thierry of Chartres's ARITHMETICA
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BOETHIUS NOSTER: THIERRY OF CHARtres’s ARITHMETICA COMMENTARY AS A MISSING SOURCE OF NICHOLAS OF Cusa’s DE docta IGNORANTIA David ALBERTSON Abstract Nicholas of Cusa is known to have used several sources stemming from the twelfth-century master Thierry of Chartres in the composition of his treatise De docta ignorantia (1440). To date these works have included Thierry’s famous hexaemeral commentary, his three commentaries on Boethius’s De trinitate, and later anonymous works by Thierry’s readers. Given Irene Caiazzo’s recent discovery of Thierry’s commentary on Boethius’s De arithmetica, we can now evaluate the possibility that this work was another Cusan source before 1440. Numerous parallels in Books I and II of De docta ignorantia suggest that Cus- anus made use of Thierry’s Arithmetica commentary while adapting four Boethian concepts to theological ends: precise equality, primordial number, the quadrivial arts, and folding. This finding raises new questions about the status of the controversial Fundamentum naturae manuscript. After over a century of scholarship on Nicholas of Cusa’s De docta ignorantia, one might expect its fundamental mystery to have been solved. How did a busy lawyer with modest philosophical training compose such an original volume, far from the usual ways of the medieval schools, as Nicholas himself boasted? As Hans Gerhard Sen- ger has observed, “the fact that a 40-year-old suddenly came up with such a well thought-out and substantive philosophy is surprising.”1 1. H. G. SENGER, Die Philosophie des Nikolaus von Kues vor dem Jahre 1440: Unter- suchungen zur Entwicklung einer Philosophie in der Frühzeit des Nikolaus (1430-1440), Münster 1971, p. 7. See also H. G. SENGER, “‚in mari me ex Graecia redeunte, credo superno dono‘ – Vom Wissensfrust zur gelehrten Unwissenheit. Wie platzte 1437/1438 Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie médiévales 83(1), 143-199. doi: 10.2143/RTPM.83.1.3154587 © 2016 by Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie médiévales. All rights reserved. 003_98858_RTPM_2016-1.indb 143 16/06/16 10:34 144 D. ALBERTSON Martin Honecker has shown that the two years preceding the work’s completion in February 1440 were exceptionally busy for Cusanus. Only eight of those twenty-four months would have permitted him sufficient leisure to write.2 In order to explain the novelty of De docta ignorantia – unless we credit Cusanus’s claim of divine illumination – we must consider other sources that might have assisted its author.3 The ideas of Ps.-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart, and Ramon Llull all inform the agenda of De docta ignorantia, but their own words appear infrequently throughout the text. Senger has proposed that perhaps Nicholas’s early interest in calendrical calculations and astronomical instruments might explain his sudden turn to arithmetic and geom- etry in De docta ignorantia.4 Alongside these influences, one should also examine the complex body of source materials stemming from Thierry of Chartres (d. 1157), a well-regarded master in twelfth-century Paris. Thierry’s creative re- reading of the Boethian tradition led him to what we might call a Trinitarian theology of the quadrivium and therefore, if accidentally, to the first substantive Christian engagement with Neopythagoreanism. Unlike his other sources, Nicholas regularly cited these texts connected with Thierry of Chartres word for word. To date there are three catego- ries of such Chartrian sources. (1) As Pierre Duhem and Raymond der Knoten?,” in: A. SPEER – Ph. STEINKRÜGER (eds.), Knotenpunkt Byzanz. Wissensformen und kulturelle Wechselbeziehungen, Berlin 2012, pp. 481-495. 2. See M. HONECKER, “Die Entstehungszeit der ‘Docta ignorantia’ des Nikolaus von Cues,” in: Historisches Jahrbuch 60 (1940), pp. 124-141; and R. KLIbaNSKY, “Zur Geschichte der Überlieferung der Docta ignorantia des Nikolaus von Kues,” in: Nikolaus von Kues: Die belehrte Unwissenheit, Buch III, ed. P. WILPERT – H. G. SENGER, Hamburg 1977, pp. 216-219. 3. NICHOLAS OF CUSA, “Epistola auctoris,” De docta ignorantia, III, 263, in: Nikolaus von Kues. Philosophisch-theologische Werke, Band 1: De docta ignorantia, ed. P. WILPERT – H. G. SENGER, Hamburg 1999, pp. 98-100: “Accipe nunc, pater metuende, quae iam dudum attingere variis doctrinarum viis concupivi, sed prius non potui, quousque in mari me ex Graecia redeunte, credo superno dono a patre luminum a quo omne datum opti- mum, ad hoc ductus sum, ut incomprehensibilia incomprehensibiliter amplecterer in docta ignorantia per transcensum veritatum incorruptibilium humaniter scibilium.” Cf. H. L. BOND, “Nicholas of Cusa from Constantinople to ‘Learned Ignorance’: The Historical Matrix for the Formation of De docta ignorantia,” in: G. CHRISTIANSON – T. M. IZBICKI (eds.), Nicholas of Cusa on Christ and the Church, Leiden 1996, pp. 135- 163; M. O’ROURKE BOYLE, “Cusanus at Sea: The Topicality of Illuminative Discourse,” in: Journal of Religion 71 (1991), pp. 180-191; and H. G. SENGER, “‚in mari me ex Graecia redeunte, credo superno dono‘.” 4. See H. G. SENGER, Die Philosophie des Nikolaus von Kues, pp. 106-129, 153-154. 003_98858_RTPM_2016-1.indb 144 16/06/16 10:34 BOETHIUS NOSTER … 145 Klibansky first discovered, several passages from Thierry’s own com- mentaries are peppered throughout De docta ignorantia as well as later texts like Idiota de mente (1450). Nikolaus Häring’s editions of Thier- ry’s hexaemeral commentary, Tractatus de sex dierum operibus, as well as his three successive commentaries on Boethius’s De trinitate, have allowed for more precise identifications, especially in the first book of De docta ignorantia.5 (2) Nicholas also borrowed from anonymous works by Thierry’s twelfth-century readers, above all, De septem septenis,6 a Hermetic tract long misattributed to John of Salisbury, and the stu- dent notes edited as Commentarius Victorinus.7 (3) Maarten Hoenen has presented compelling evidence that Cusanus drew upon a philo- sophical treatise recently found in the library of a fifteenth-century Dominican in Eichstätt. Hoenen argues that Cusanus inserted long portions of this anonymous work, Fundamentum naturae quod physicos ignorasse videtur, into Book II of De docta ignorantia.8 Thierry’s ideas are prominent in the treatise, but only because the author intends to refute them, a fact that Nicholas may have overlooked.9 That is to say: Nicholas seems to have jumbled together Thierry’s own works with those of his reception history. This medley of sources is fragmentary, sometimes confused, and occasionally contradictory, but the family resemblance is hard to miss. Even when stretched or upended by his medieval readers, Thierry’s signature doctrines remain unmistakeable. Nicholas must have noticed their similar parentage, and appreciated their collective force, for in Apologia doctae ignorantiae 5. See Commentaries on Boethius by Thierry of Chartres and His School, ed. N. M. HÄRING, Toronto 1971. 6. See De septem septenis, PL 199, cols. 945-964; cf. MS London, British Library, Harley 3969, fols. 206v-215v. On the state of the text, see C. NÉMETH, “Fabricating Philosophical Authority in the Twelfth Century: The Liber Egerimion and the De septem septenis,” in: S. KANGAS – M. KORPIOLA – T. AINONEN (eds.), Authorities in the Middle Ages: Influence, Legitimacy and Power in Medieval Society, Berlin 2013, pp. 75-76. 7. MS Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Lat. 14489, fols. 67r-95v; cf. Com- mentarius Victorinus, ed. N. M. HÄRING, pp. 479-528. 8. See M. J. F. M. HOENEN, “‘Ista prius inaudita.’ Eine neuentdeckte Vorlage der De docta ignorantia und ihre Bedeutung für die frühe Philosophie des Nikolaus von Kues,” in: Medioevo: Rivista di storia della filosofia medievale 21 (1995), pp. 375-476. For the text of Fundamentum naturae quod videtur physicos ignorasse, MS Eichstätt Cod. st 687, fols. 4r-10r, see ibid., pp. 447-476. 9. See D. ALBERTSON, “A Late Medieval Reaction to Thierry of Chartres’s (d. 1157) Philosophy: The Anti-Platonist Argument of the Anonymous Fundamentum naturae,” in: Vivarium 50 (2012), pp. 53-84. 003_98858_RTPM_2016-1.indb 145 16/06/16 10:34 146 D. ALBERTSON (1449) he celebrated their common progenitor, an unnamed “Boethian commentator,” as “easily the most brilliant man of all those whom I have read” – and this after acknowledging his debts to Eckhart, Ps.- Dionysius, and Proclus without such hyperbolic praise.10 Cusanus bor- rowed frequently from Thierry’s treasury: the schema of complicatio and explicatio; the mathematical model of the Trinity as unitas, aequal- itas, and conexio; the dialectic of unitas and alteritas; the system of four modes of being spanning from absolute necessity to absolute possibil- ity; and a theology of the divine Mind as the unique equality of beings. Each of these doctrines was once attributed to Cusanus, but in fact first belonged to the Parisian master. On the basis of Häring’s editions we can now understand the dynamic nature of Thierry’s influence. Not only can we detect diachronic change within Thierry’s own theology from the 1130s to 1150s; we can also measure Nicholas’s improving grasp of those ideas over his own writing career from the 1440s to 1460s. As Cusanus acquired increasing access to the full range of Char- trian sources, he had better purchase on how they could be harmonized and applied in his own century.11 A full appraisal of Nicholas of Cusa’s debts to Thierry of Chartres has been an obvious desideratum since the outset of the Heidelberg edition. For several reasons, that task has been deferred for decades. One recent complication has been the reluctance of some scholars to accept Hoenen’s controversial claims regarding the anonymous Fun- damentum naturae treatise. According to Hoenen, Nicholas layered sections of this treatise into Book II of De docta ignorantia and added his own expositions. Hoenen contends that some of Cusanus’s most famous concepts – God as absolute maximum, finitude as contractio – originated from this anonymous source.