Paul Richard Blum

Nicholas of Cusa (1402-1464) explored the boundaries of human reason for the sake of making religious belief believable. Unwillingly, he became a milestone in the process of rationalizing Christian theology. Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) is a proof to this perspective by the way he makes use of Cusanus’s approach. In his ’Spaccio de la bestia trionfante’, Bruno discusses Cusanus’s attempts at the geometrical problem of squaring the circle. Bruno not only promotes his atomistic geometry, he also uses the metaphoric meaning of triangle for Trinity as an occasion to supplant ’faith’ with ’sincerity’. For Bruno faith is not anymore the true belief of religion, but rather ’good faith’ and fidelity, i.e., social and political virtues.

Benedictus Pererius as a 16th-century Jesuit integrated Platonic and Neo-Platonic sources in his philosophical and theological works as long as they were compatible with Catholic theology. His commentary on Genesis and his theological disputations on St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans gave occasions to calibrate philosophy against theology. Pererius judges that pagan thinkers may be laudable for acknowledging the existence of God but cautions Christian readers as to the orthodoxy of such findings. Against the Protestant literalist interpretation of the Bible at the expense of philosophical theory of nature Pererius dealt with the questions of immortality and of the pagan notions of divinity and examined the role of philosophical heroes like Socrates and Hermes. Thus he welcomed philosophy as a potential source of religious thinking.