Llull deserves great credit for having composed this dialogue in which all three religions emerge as worthy forms of true devotion to God, to virtues, and to spirituality. There are some differences, and the wise men do not agree on any of those, but the entire framework of their debate is deeply determined by toleration and could serve even us today as a role model of adult, intellectual, rational, and reasonable behavior when people from different faiths come together. Although the wise men do not find a way out of their dilemma, since they continue to live in a world of greed, materialism, aggression, hostility, and fear—to use more modern terms—they have already acquired the necessary standards of behavior, manner, and human values to respect each other and to deny differences in specific points of their faith to stand between them.
Of course, Llull composed this dialogue for his audience and, thus, appealed to them without any doubt to take those three wise men as models for their own approach to religion. Each person, whether Jew, Christian, or Muslim, was thereby strongly encouraged to develop at least toleration in their dealings with the other and to inject primarily rationality in the reflection on the relationship between the individual and God. Llull also highlighted the phenomenon that all three religions basically agreed with each other as to the definition of God and the virtues needed to reach out to Him. Moreover, any good Jew, Christian, or Muslim would know how to approach each other from then on with respect, if not friendship, as long as they all pursued the path toward goodness. It is most likely that Llull himself hoped, of course, that ultimately, the others would convert to Christianity, but the outcome of the Book of the Gentile does not spell this out and does not push that button necessarily since the whole purpose beyond the narrative itself would be, as they all decide together, to meet regularly and probe their issues further. There is no doubt at all that here we face a true and very solid case of toleration, which considerably expands on the premises originally developed by Abelard, and also works in parallel, if not in tandem, with numerous examples in vernacular literature, as the next chapter will illustrate.29 And we find, in Nicholas of Cusa, a very similar voice, also exploring the meaning and workings of toleration in the late Middle Ages.
Nicholas of Cusa
Toleration in the Face of Imminent Threat
This famous bishop was born around 1401 in Kues on the Moselle, today named Bernkastel-Kues, as a well-to-do boat owner and ferryman. Nicholas began to study at the University of Heidelberg in 1416 but soon moved on and turned to Padua, Northern Italy (1417), where he received his doctorate in canon law in 1423. In 1425, he began teaching at the University of Cologne, but he did not stay there for long; instead, he became secretary to Otto of Ziegenhain, the Archbishop of Trier. Otto appointed him canon and dean at the Stift (monastery run by canons) of Saint Florinus in Koblenz. In 1427, he was sent to Rome as an episcopal delegate, and in 1428, he went to Paris, where he studied and copied, above all, the writings by Llull, whose works occupy the largest part in Nicholas’s private library.30 In 1433, he identified the so-called “Donation of Constantine,” which allegedly granted the entire world as a gift to the Church as a fake, which was finally confirmed by Lorenzo Valla a few years later (1439–40), and Nicholas also uncovered the forgery of the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals. Most famously, in theological terms, Nicholas pursued the goal, almost in a mystical way, and certainly in the tradition of Meister Eckhart,31 to gain a better understanding of God in His incomprehensibility, working to build philosophical bridges to the apophatic nature of the divine, such as in his De docta ignorantia (1440), De coniecturis (1442–43), De Deo abscondito (1444), Ididota de mente (1450), De visione Dei (1455), De li non aliud (1461), and De venatione sapientiae (1463).32
In 1432, Nicholas participated in the Council of Basel, defending, on behalf of the Cologne Dean Ulrich von Manderscheid, the right of the canons of a cathedral chapter to be involved in the election of a new bishop—Ulrich had hoped to be appointed Archbishop of Trier himself, but the pope had chosen Raban von Helmstadt. Nicholas did not achieve his goal, but he earned considerable respect for his rhetorical and argumentative skills amongst his colleagues, many of who were highly learned humanists. He also wrote during that time his treatise De concordantia catholica (The Catholic Concordance), outlining how the Church hierarchy ought to collaborate with the secular authorities. In this sense, he became a conciliarist, that is, he favored, like many other theologians at that time, the preeminence of a church council over papal authority, altogether a reflection of the general malaise within the Church during the time of the schism with three popes, which had been solved to some extent by King Sigismund in 1415 at the Council of Constance.
After having switched his position from being a conciliarist (supporting the council) to a papalist (supporting the pope), acknowledging the pope’s supreme position within the Church after all, Nicholas was also diplomatically engaged in bringing the Eastern Church back to the fold of the Western Church when he was sent as a messenger of Pope Eugenius IV to Constantinople in August of 1437 (until 1438) to convince the Byzantine emperor and his representatives to join the papally summoned Council of Florence of 1439. The hopes for such a union was short-lived, however, while Nicholas visited German diets and assemblies at Mainz and at other locations in 1439. Pope Nicholas V appointed Nicholas Cusanus as a cardinal on December 20, 1448. In 1450, he was both named Bishop of Brixen, in Tyrol, and commissioned as a papal legate to the German lands to spread the message of reform, especially in monastic institutions. He worked tirelessly between 1452 and 1458 toward that goal, but he was energetically opposed by the landed gentry and especially Duke Sigismund of Tyrol, who finally had him apprehended at Castle Bruneck near Brixen and imprisoned in 1460, but he escaped and fled to Rome. Pope Pius II excommunicated Sigismund and laid an interdict on his lands, but Nicholas was never able to return to his bishopric. He died at Todi in Umbria on August 11, 1464.33
Nicholas published widely in the fields of theology, philosophy, and the sciences, and after he had departed from the Council of Basel, he began to change his mind regarding the role of the pope within the Church. While before he had strongly defended a more democratic outlook, favoring the council over the pope, now he elevated the pope to the highest authority again, which resulted from the original position held by St. Peter, dismissing the council. Nevertheless, he also held the view that all secular authority derived from the consent of the people whom he described as being free. Nicholas was a strong proponent of reform within the Church, both in terms of the monastic system and in terms of the Church administration (see his Reformatio generalis, 1459, written at the request of Pope Pius II).34
For many years, Nicholas was deeply interested in Islam as a challenge to Christianity and in the question of how to understand the Qu’ran and its followers from a Christian perspective. During the Council of Basel from 1432 to 1437, he became a good friend of Juan de Segovia (1393–1458) who was one of the best Arab speakers of his time in Europe and translated the Qu’ran into Latin and Spanish in 1456.35 Nicholas had acquired a copy of Robert of Ketton’s (ca. 1110–1160) twelfth-century Latin translation of the Qu’ran (rather faulty in many respects) and loaned it to Juan, providing him with a good basis for his studies. This book is the so-called ‘Toledan Collection’, produced in 1143 under the guidance of Peter the Venerable, containing Ketton’s work and several other treatises on Islam.36
Shortly after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, Nicholas composed his famous treatise, De Pace Fidei (On the Peace of Faith), in which he tried to project the concept of how people of different faiths could live together. In 1461, this famous bishop examined the history and value of Islam in light of Christian teachings once again, publishing his Cribratio Alchorani (Sifting the Qu’ran). As the title itself indicates, he hoped to identify, thereby, the Christian elements in the Qu’ran and to reject those that would not fit in with Christianity. Assuming that Islam had been founded under the influence of Nestorians, a Christian s
ect, and that subsequently Jewish ideas had informed Mohammed, Nicholas argued that the prophet was really a deviant Christian who had allowed his own pride and interest get in the way of true Christian teachings. Basically then, Nicholas suggested that Christians needed only some patience and had to exert a little effort to convince the Muslims to return to the fold of the true religion. This idea obviously influenced Pope Pius II to write a letter to Sultan Mehmed II in 1461 or 1462 inviting him to reconsider his position, to abandon his old faith, and to return to Christianity. He would then be appointed as the successor of the Byzantine emperors and the temporal ruler over the Christian Orient.37 Mehmed never even responded, but the letter indicates how much the West was inspired by the hope that they could reach out across the religious divide and achieve harmony and unity once again.38
Scholars in many different disciplines have recognized the great influence that Nicholas exerted on contemporary philosophy, religion, science, and even medicine (he is said to have introduced the method of counting the pulse to determine the status of the heartbeat).39 He excelled both in astronomy and in game theory, as we would call it today (see his De ludo globi, 1463),40 and we can also turn to his writings in the quest for early ideas about toleration.41
Previous research has already paid much attention to Nicholas’s On the Peace of Faith, as documented by editions, translations, and examinations of this famous text.42 Here, the focus will rest on the central issue that occupies us throughout the entire study, that is, to what extent here we might discover early forms of toleration or even tolerance. We can place De Pace fidei within the same context as Abelard’s and Llull’s treatises, each one determined by the dialogic framework, involving representatives of different faiths. However, Nicholas situates his text within the concrete context of the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, which triggered deep thoughts in him concerning the outcome of this major military defeat and, hence, of the entire Eastern Roman Church at the hands of the Muslim forces under Sultan Mehmed II. Obviously imitating the narrative model developed by Llull, Nicholas also projects a kind of dream vision in which the narrator experiences the opportunity to discuss with numerous wise men the nature of the various faiths and to probe with them whether they might find some common ground. Here, however, the debate is brought upon by the request of God Himself who has to face the tragic situation that the people on earth find themselves forced to fight each other in the name of religion, using weapons to compel others to convert to their own religion, which all appears to be contradictory to the principles of the one and all-encompassing faith (232). Of course, Nicholas here implies, as all his predecessors did, that it would take just a little rational argumentation to bring all of humanity into the same fold of Christianity, the only true religion. The main difference between the various religions is identified as the result of splintering “sects” (232), all of which have a guardian in the heavenly council and are, thus, regarded as welcome to God after all. Nicholas probably had the various church councils in mind that he had attended and projected the conflicts debated there onto the world stage, believing that this understanding of differences as resting only in formalities could be easily overcome through a rational exchange.
However, as one of the spirits, or archangel, is saying, people are burdened with their corporeal needs, the heavy duty to carry out their labor, and the obligations to their lords (232). To help them, God had sent various prophets to the people who all instructed them “corresponding to the purpose of their legation in Your name” (232), leading to a fairly wide range of differences in faiths. Religion is, in other words, historicized, and its many manifestations are explained simply in geographic terms since every people develops its own concepts about the divine, spirituality, the afterlife, etc. according to their given conditions. The various prophets tried to make sense out of this rather chaotic situation and set up laws that by default differ from each other, but only in form, yet not in content. Yet, dissension arose in the cause of time because each custom, law, ritual, or institution established a tradition that people adhere to firmly and can no longer deviate from (233). In essence, every individual is striving for truth, for the absolute good, which proves to be tantamount to God, a statement that could have been directly copied from Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae (525). But Nicholas also adds that even though everyone is striving for God, His existence would remain unknown in the ultimate dimension: “since You, as You are, remain unknown and ineffable for all” (233). This leads the speaker to request from God to manifest Himself and, thus, to solve the riddles that all people on earth face everyday, that is, the question of the meaning of all life here on earth and the afterlife. The differences in religions, thus, derive from people’s inability to grasp the holy divinity and to come to terms with the source of all being, meaning that they resort to a worldly projection of the ineffable, contingent on their own perspective and understanding. The difference among religions, hence, derives from human weakness to penetrate the apophatic. Once that barrier between people and God would have broken down, all hatred among people would cease to exist. The fundamental premise, therefore, proves to be the assumption that there is only one god, and when He would show Himself clearly to the people, they all would subscribe to only one religion (233).
But insofar as people tend to be subject to ignorance, God had sent “His Word, through which He has also created time” (234). This would be a clear reference to Christ, but Nicholas does not use that name and instead only talks about ‘Word’ having put on “the mortal man” who gave his blood for the truth (234). This ‘Word’ stands for the truth, but mankind has a hard time understanding this idea and constantly needs new explanations and new trials, which makes it necessary for an assembly at which the representatives of the various religions would come together and explain their own faiths in the hope that all would be able to reunify in one faith under God insofar as there is only one truth that every intellectual individual can understand rationally (235).
In short, here, Nicholas promulgates the ideal of a universal language based on rationality through which it should be possible to reach out to all people on earth and unify them under one God, once the traditional differences have been recognized as mere matters of formality.
The first speaker in the assembly is a wise man from Greece who pronounces that there is only one God and that all people desire to overcome the “diversity of religions” and to establish “one harmonious peace” (236). His respondent, the ‘Word’, alerts him and the rest of the attendees that there is wisdom, all by itself, unified, and that logically there cannot be any plurality but the one unity that arose from one wisdom. As a consequence, there is one simple and undivided wisdom, but there are many different wise men (236). Similarly, as the ‘Word’ then concludes, there can be only one religion despite the many different manifestations, and, in exchange with the Italian, he/it emphasizes that wisdom is “the one, simple and eternal God, the origin of everything” (238).
Thereafter, the Arab chimes in and confirms that all people desire wisdom, which is, according to the ‘Word’, God Himself (239). For all philosophers, there has always been only one god and so also only one origin (240), although the ‘Word’ then admits as well that many people throughout the ages have worshiped all kinds of gods because this service granted them spiritual satisfaction, that is, salvation (240). For the ‘Word’, this would not constitute a difficulty if the people were willing to turn to the one and only God, in the Christian understanding. Nevertheless, both basically agree because they do not enter into any specifics about religion, God, and do not even mention the Holy Trinity.
Just as the Arab, the following speaker, the Indian, also agrees that wise individuals would fully understand the teachings by the ‘Word’, and subscribe to them, but most people tend to be subject to their traditional viewpoints, hence their customs and rituals as they have learned them from their parents and forefathers (241). The “inveterate idol worship” (241) continues to ex
ert a deep influence because of oracles that had been told to them by ancient priests who resorted to ambiguities and vague formulations about God and could, thus, maintain their authority. The Indian injects, however, that at times, also statues have promulgated oracles, but the ‘Word’ dismisses this entirely as the work of the devil, or the evil spirit (241). The Indian agrees, but also raises the specter of the Trinity as a problem that people would not be able to understand properly, regarding it as an admission by the Christians that they worship a plurality of gods (242). The ‘Word’ offers a rather abstract, philosophizing response, referring to eternity as one, and, hence, as unity, which also entails the triune (243), which might be a philosophical position but does not necessarily convince in religious terms. Not by accident, we no longer hear from the Indian, whereas a Chaldean steps in and continues to debate this issue, which invites the ‘Word’ to offer a lengthy dissertation on this, in consequence of which the Chaldean only responds that many would contradict this teaching and insist that the Christians really worship three gods (245). The Jew then enters the debate, acknowledging the existence of the Trinity, but he also remarks that his co-religionists would reject this notion “because in their eyes it signifies plurality” (246). But there is also the option that they might change their mind once they would have learned the full truth about the concept of “fecundity” as the basis of Trinity.
Subsequently, we encounter a long list of wise men from many different religions and cultures, including the Scythian (247–48), the Persian (249–55), the Syrian (255–58), the Turk (258–61), the Tartar (263–68), the Armenian (268), along with some Europeans. Here, disregarding many theological details discussed, such as the sacraments (baptism, matrimony, ordination, confirmation, and extreme unction), the conclusion of the dialogic treatise, maintained by St. Paul, points toward the teaching that all religions would be the same, at least in essence, while they would differ in rituals. That means Christianity would triumph at the end because it represents the one religion closest to truth because of the purity of its approach (271). Paul even goes so far as to welcome cultural differences, as long as the spiritual notion remains the same. Difference, which here would also include the religion practiced by Jews and Arabs, would be only a matter of form and not of substance. Variety in the rituals would even strengthen the Christian faith “by virtue of the diversity” (271).
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