Nicholas of Cusa and Islam pdf download

Nicholas of Cusa and Islam – Polemic and Dialogue in the Late Middle Ages

Edited by – Ian Christopher Levy – Rita George-Tvrtković – Donald F. Duclow

NICHOLAS OF CUSA AND ISLAM

Book introduction

This volume is the product of papers read at the 2012 conference of the  American Cusanus Society and the International Seminar on Pre-Reformation Theology of Gettysburg Lutheran Seminary.

The conference is held every two years at the Seminary in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Our 2012 theme, “Christian-Muslim Dialogue in the Late Middle Ages,” hearkens back to the very first Gettysburg Conference in 1986.1

At that time, our fledgling society focused on Nicholas of Cusa’s De pace fidei (On the Peace of Faith) in a new translation by H. Lawrence Bond and with a concordance by James Biechler, which was published in 1990.2

Thus began the Society’s publication program. With the 2012 conference and this book, we return once again to De pace fidei, but in new ways. Our focus is narrower and our textual base wider. Our conference theme this time was not world religions in general, but more specifically Christian-Muslim relations of the late medieval period.

Our book’s subtitle sharpens this theme by including the interrelated notions of polemic and dialogue, both of which played a role in medieval interreligious conversations. Finally, the essays in this volume consider not only De pace fidei, but also Cusanus’s Cribratio Alkorani (Sifting the Qurʾan), along with other Muslim and Christian texts, among them the Qurʾan, Ibn alʿArabi’s Jesus Bezel, and the writings of John of Segovia.

Why do we return to Christian-Muslim dialogue now? Two reasons come to mind. The first reflects the American Cusanus Society’s own history. Of the Society’s early members, only James Biechler has worked intensively on Cusanus and Islam.3

 In recent years, however, a vigorous new crop of scholars has emerged and taken the stage in the Society’s sessions at the International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, and in Thomas Izbicki’s panels with the Renaissance Society of America. The scope and quality of these sessions led us to the 2012 Gettysburg conference, and their participants are well