The philosophical-theological method of Nicholas of Cusa in his De Beryllo

The work first examines the status of De Beryllo as a less-studied work from Cusanus’ corpus, with relatively little secondary literature, which is furthermore divided between different traditions and languages (particularly German, French, English and Spanish), and therefore rather fragmented; the only book aimed at an integral interpretation of De Beryllo, Le Traité du Beryl - Tome 2 by Maude Corrieras, remains at the level of a general and schematic interpretation. However, according to the highly influential arguments of Kurt Flasch (particularly in his book Nicolaus Cusanus, an attempt at an introduction to Cusanus’ thought with this work as starting point) De Beryllo has a great importance as a methodological and introductory work, particularly in relation to the Cusanus’ ‘late’ thought. The question of Cusans’ ‘method’ (regarding the existence of which scholars are in fundamental agreement) in this work, under the name (and using the image) of the beryl stone deserves a much more detailed and exhaustive investigation of its characteristics, in an attempt to identify its formal structure as a possible paradigm for interpreting Cusanus’ arguments. Accordingly, the thesis develops a method of interpretation based on the notion of Strukturanalyse (Stadler), already applied to Cusanus with interesting results (by Katrin Platzer). In fundamental connection with the issue of the method, two structural aspects which remain unresolved so far in the literature on De Beryllo are the notion of ontological/metaphysical hierarchy and the ontological-structural role of Christology. Aiming to fruitfully address all these topics and fill these gaps in the literature on De Beryllo, the thesis has two parts. The first part consists of a highly in-depth running analysis of the ‘introductory’ (paragraphs 1-2) and ‘methodological’ (paragraphs 3-8) parts of the text, aimed at examining the nature of the method and its sources, and introducing, for the purpose of a Strukturanalyse, a type of formal notation for recurring patterns of application of the method (the ‘B-notation’), which is based on generating ‘coincidences of opposites’. Then, the thesis analyzes those passages from the ‘applications’ section of the text (paragraphs 9-71) which make use of geometric images, the type of application of the method most used by Cusanus to determine links and ontological characteristics with the help of the beryllus. The second part of the thesis (Chapters 4-5) examine the two theoretical issues of fundamental importance, hierarchy and Christology, on the basis of the interpretation developed in the first part. The final image that emerges is of De Beryllo as not only a highly interesting speculative synthesis, but also an important and welldeveloped theological-Christological work, an interesting aspect neglected in the scholarship so far. [edited by Author]