Chapter 7 Nicholas of Cusa and Pantheism in Early Modern Catholic Theology
In: Nicholas of Cusa and the Making of the Early Modern World
Author:
Matthew T. Gaetano
Matthew T. Gaetano
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Although Johann Wenck and some nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars associated Nicholas of Cusa with pantheism, major Roman Catholic theologians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries embraced Cusanus’ view of the relation of the world to God. Indeed, Théophile Raynaud, a learned Jesuit theologian, saw his doctrine of God as the complicatio or enfolding of all things as useful for opposing medieval pantheists like David of Dinant and Amalric of Bena. Johann Eck, Théophile Raynaud, and Louis Thomassin drew upon this teaching on God as enfolding all things and other elements of Cusanus’ corpus not to reject but to renew early modern Catholic scholastic theology.