13. Nicholas of Cusa’s Jesus

Ever since his own time, Nicholas of Cusa has been seen as a thinker caught between medieval and modern. Unsurprisingly, he was also caught between the deep and plain kens, and in Jesus found an escape. The chapter begins with two concrete examples: Cusa's invention of a “new and fun game” of curling based on Jesus's life, which contrasted an irregular ball thrown at concentric perfect circles, and an optical illusion of Jesus which contrasted God's perfect vision with human vision in spacetime. The chapter then follows Cusa into greater abstraction. Jesus embodies plain-ken multiplicity with deep-ken oneness, and becomes himself the limit of the human intellect. Cusa argued for that Jesus-centred oneness while working to unify Christianity internally, as well as with Islam, based on his new reading of the Qur'an, which—for all his skepticism—he believed he understood better than the Muslims.