De Pace Fidei and religious pluralism (1453, after the fall of Constantinople): universalist, Christian-supersessionist, or proto-tolerance?

Nicholas of Cusa, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Una religio in rituum varietate: one religion in the variety of rites. De Pace Fidei was written immediately after the fall of Constantinople to Mehmed II in May 1453, and its programmatic upshot is that all nations — Greek, Italian, Arab, Hindu, Chaldean, Jew, Scythian, Frank, Persian, Syrian, Turk, Spaniard, Tartar, German, Bohemian, English, Armenian — seek the same God, that the differences of religious practice are historical-cultural accretions over a shared core, and that war over religion is the most lamentable consequence of mistaking the rite for the religion.

The position is genuinely universalist in recognizing that the religious truth at which all the nations are aimed is one truth. It is not, however, the abandonment of Christian particularity. Christ remains the maximum-contracted (DI III), the union of the divine and human natures, and the deepest articulation of the Trinity that structures the Maximum.

The position is therefore universalist with Christian particularity: the universal truth all nations seek is most fully and adequately revealed in the Incarnation and the Trinity, and this Christian doctrine is itself the deepest understanding of what all nations are reaching toward. The Cribratio Alkorani of 1461 develops the engagement with Islam in a more apologetic register — sifting the Koran for the Christian truth it contains and identifying where it falls short — but the framework remains the same: the universal truth that the Koran also partially grasps is most fully articulated in Christ.

The position is not proto-Enlightenment religious tolerance, though Locke and Bayle would later draw on similar resources, because the framework remains theologically committed in a way the Enlightenment position would not be.123

Sources

  1. But the earthly human condition has this characteristic: viz., that longstanding custom, which is regarded as having passed over into nature, is defended as the truth. In this way there arise great quarrels when each community prefers its own faith to another [faith]. "Aid [us], then, 0 You who alone are able to.
    De Pace Fidei, pp. 634–635
  2. Likewise, with regard to the use and the ritual of the sacrament: whatever will seem to the leaders of the church to be the most useful for the circumstances in each given region may admissibly be ordained—provided faith is always maintained—so that by means of a common law peaceful unity of faith may continue, no less intact as a result of the diversity of rites.
    De Pace Fidei, p. 669
  3. For in all the gods, they adore the deity as [one and] the same in [aIl] its participants. For just as there are no white things if whiteness does not exist, so if the deity does not exist, there are no gods.
    De Pace Fidei, p. 641

Where the argument is made

  • De Pace Fidei entire (1453), composed in dialogue form in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Constantinople to Mehmed II on 29 May 1453, with God, Peter, Paul, and representatives of seventeen nations (Greek, Italian, Arab, Hindu, Chaldean, Jew, Scythian, Frank, Persian, Syrian, Turk, Spaniard, Tartar, German, Bohemian, English, Armenian) in conversation about the unity of faith beneath the variety of religious rites
  • the closing formula una religio in rituum varietate — 'one religion in the variety of rites' — that gives the dialogue its programmatic upshot. Cribratio Alkorani I-III (1461), the late 'sifting' of the Koran for Christian truth, completed eight years after De Pace Fidei in a more apologetic register. The De Docta Ignorantia III treatment of Christ as maximum-contracted as the doctrinal ground of Cusan Christology

How the argument was received

The interpretation of De Pace Fidei and the question of Cusa's religious pluralism is one of the most discussed and most contested elements of the Cusa corpus, especially in the contemporary context of interfaith dialogue. The universalist reading is the majority position (McGinn, Bond, Hopkins, Hudson, Casarella, Hollmann) and is what the text most plainly supports. The Christian-supersessionist reading argues that the universalist rhetoric is strategic and that Cribratio Alkorani reveals the underlying apologetic stance. The proto-tolerance reading places me in the lineage that leads to Locke and Bayle on religious freedom; this is anachronistic in its strongest form but captures a real continuity. The Christian-particularity qualifier is essential: the universalism is genuine but it is not the abandonment of the Christological-Trinitarian framework that grounds it.