The Analogical Turn: Rethinking Modernity With Nicholas of Cusa

Recovers a 15th-century thinker’s original insights for theology and philosophy today

Societies today, says Johannes Hoff, are characterized by their inability to reconcile seemingly black-and-white scientific rationality with the ambiguity of postmodern pop culture. In the face of this crisis, his book The Analogical Turn recovers the fifteenth-century thinker Nicholas of Cusa’s alternative vision of modernity to develop a fresh perspective on the challenges of our time.

In contrast to his mainstream contemporaries, Cusa’s appreciation of individuality, creativity, and scientific precision was deeply rooted in the analogical rationality of the Middle Ages. He revived and transformed the tradition of scientific realism in a manner that now, retrospectively, offers new insights into the “completely ordinary chaos” of postmodern everyday life.

Hoff’s original study offers a new vision of the history of modernity and the related secularization narrative, a deconstruction of the basic assumptions of postmodernism, and an unfolding of a liturgically grounded concept of common-sense realism.

Johannes Hoff is professor of systematic theology atHeythrop College in the University of London.