The Geometry of Christian Contemplation

Measure without Measure

David Albertson (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

320 Seiten

2025
Oxford University Press (Verlag)
978-0-19-894697-7 (ISBN)

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The writings of ancient and medieval Christian mystics were rediscovered in the twentieth century, and today they are read more widely than ever before. But do modern assumptions about religious experience influence how we hear those premodern voices? Do we do them justice by thinking of mysticism as interior and ineffable? Or can mystical experience intersect with the natural environment, and indeed the cosmos, which science calculates with precise quantities? David Albertson's The Geometry of Christian Contemplation: Measure without Measure suggests a fresh approach to the history of mystical theology that is oriented toward exteriority more than interiority, and toward the measurable world outside more than the invisible world within.

The ancient Greek philosopher Plotinus had taught contemplatives to close their eyes and withdraw into the soul. Most Christians followed his directions, but others dissented. In three critical episodes, an alternative model of Christian contemplation began to emerge: from Dionysius the Areopagite, to the Byzantine monks John of Damascus and Theodore the Studite, to eccentric humanists in medieval Paris. Together these episodes add up to a very different theological aesthetics, one that can enliven the modern study of mysticism and correct some of its imbalances. For in the centuries before the scientific revolution and the secularization of nature, Christians still saw God in the exterior world, not only the interior soul. God was not an ineffable and formless Absolute, immeasurable as the soul, but an infinite Measure who leaves behind geometrical traces in the figures of the world. The God who became a human body in the Incarnation not only entered time and matter, but also spatial extension, and with it the conditions of measure: points, lines, curves, shapes, planes, dimensions, and magnitudes.

Today the wisdom of this counter-tradition can strengthen the study of mysticism, not only by supplementing our contemporary fascination with negative theology by redefining what it means to name God positively, but by suggesting a new connection between Christian mysticism and the hyper-measured, hyper-technologized world that surrounds us.

David Albertson is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he studies medieval Christianity and philosophy of religion and serves as Executive Director of the Nova Forum for Catholic Thought. He is the author of Cusanus Today: Thinking with Nicholas of Cusa Between Philosophy and Theology (CUA, 2024), Mathematical Theologies: Nicholas of Cusa and the Legacy of Thierry of Chartres (Oxford, 2014), and Without Nature? A New Condition for Theology (Fordham, 2009). His research is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Introduction
Part I. An Archaeology of the Formless
Chapter 1: The Silence of the World
Chapter 2: Guarding the One
Chapter 3: The Aneidetic Condition
Part II. A Genealogy of Form
Chapter 4: The Limits of Negation
Chapter 5: The Extension of Desire
Chapter 6: Kenosis into Magnitude
Chapter 7: The Icon as Figure
Chapter 8: Trinity and Form
Chapter 9: The Figure as Icon
Epilogue

Erscheinungsdatum	07.06.2025
Verlagsort	Oxford
Sprache	englisch
Maße	165 x 240 mm
Gewicht	635 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Philosophie des Mittelalters
Themenwelt	Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Kirchengeschichte
ISBN-10	0-19-894697-X / 019894697X
ISBN-13	978-0-19-894697-7 / 9780198946977
Zustand	Neuware